The Mob I enjoy science fiction. Sure, a lot of it is polemical, or, worse, just fantasy, but some of it really has some science in it, and that can be really fun, especially going back and seeing the stuff that's already come true. Like John Brunner's "The Shockwave Rider." Interestingly, this is a response to Alvin Toffler's "Future Shock." What it does with that, however, is remarkable, especially, perhaps, in retrospect. The book predicts the internet, and very well, including smartphones, to an extent. The computer viruses and so forth are believable and a good prediction of what such interconnectivity would bring. ave The society in Brunner's novel may not be quite what 1975 thought 2013 would be, but it's not all that far off, in the bigger picture, if not the particulars. But one thing has always stood out to me since I first read it. Governments rely on threat and trauma to survive. The easiest populace to rule is weak, poor, superstitious, preferable terrified of what tomorrow may bring, and constantly being reminded that the man in the street must step into the gutter when his superiors deign to pass him by. What's being described here is the resemblance of government to organized crime. Government is the mafia, more so than the mafia has been for a very long time. There are those who will say, in Australia, that's Labor, because of its union origins. False. Or false in any modern sense. The unions have been long ago relegated to irrelevance by the Liberals, who operate more in line with what we know of as the Mafia. The Liberals legitimize their . . . business, just like the Mafia families were just "olive oil importers" or whatever. We can't see the true power brokers, and that's the point. Is it any different in the US? The GOP is run by business interests. How unlike the mafia are the Koch brothers, for example, buying politicians to deny climate change and preference petrochemical businesses over its alternatives? We need to wake up to the lies. The data is at our fingertips. And the power of our votes and our dollars can have an effect. But more importantly, we must all speak out at every opportunity. Object to the lies. Tear off our own blinders and let anyone who hasn't done the same know that it only hurts for a little while, and then feels a whole lot better.

Bridge Run The Sydney Running Festival includes a marathon, half-marathon, 3.5k Family Fun Run (walk across the bridge with a pram), and the 9k Bridge Run, which has been my elected option the last three years. This year saw nearly a four-minute improvement over 2012, and just a little slower than 2011. I credit work for particpating in the Global Corporate Challenge, a fitness-promoting program that encourages you to walk "10,000 steps" or more per day, which ran over the last four months. I included training runs in that program, but breaking training was compensated for, it seems. It's tremendous fun running across the Harbour Bridge, somewhat less so through the Domain, when the streets narrow and the course loops back on itself, so your pace, for those of us not destined to actually compete, can be forced to a shuffle as you look for a gap through the walkers and (even) slower participants. The reasonable starting hour makes it a good choice, although by 9 a.m. at this time of year it's getting warm: 20 degrees by the time I got to the finish. I'd go for another half if it didn't start at 6:15. There's still the Sydney Morning Herald Half, in May, or maybe the new one out at Olympic Park at the end of October (not this year, though, which I'll miss even the 10k event, due to only just having completed a long overseas trip).

The Poor You Will Have with You Always Tony Abbott's Liberals have won the 2013 federal election. What a shame for the country. Abbott ran on Labor's budget deficit and the large number of illegal entries by asylum-seekers by boat. The "budget emergency" was a furphy: the LNP's proposed budget needs only $0.6 billion to return the country to surplus in the same period of time Labor would have re-attempted. But Labor made too many promises over too many of each of the last three years that we'd be back in the black "next year". And large numbers of fools believed that deficits are inherently and always bad, even when we can see how Britain and other European countries are struggling with austerity economies, how the US struggles to keep on track (blaming Obama all the way, despite the Bush tax cuts and two endless wars he started). And fear of Muslims, a nice dog-whistle issue since the days of John Howard, make all refugees arriving by boat a deadly threat to the nation. We'll all be wearing burkas next! Labor's lurch to the right on that issue also had large numbers swinging against them. Without being a viable third party in their own right, Greens preferences helped staunch the damage, but xenophobic mainstay Pauline Hanson got into the Senate. We can only hope that she will challenge Tony Abbott's agenda just on principle, if she actually has any, for his attempt to have her imprisoned back when she was first standing for a federal seat. But too much of her agenda coincides with his to be truly hopeful on that point. Bye-bye carbon tax/emissions-trading scheme and hello warmer planet. I may have a coastal property sooner than I'd like, as in at all, under the circumstances, but I can't say I won't be paying for it, as Tony's plans for the country mean people like me will carry the weight for the wealthy. The acceptance speech Abbott gave started out ungraciously and ended up with a promise that Australia is "open for business". That is not a promise I am anxious to see how it plays out. I can't believe the country voted for this guy.