Theatre Notes We’ve been planning this for a year. In 2014, for Wagner’s 150th anniversary year, Opera Australia put on a new production of the full Ring cycle. B’s son, J was in it, having been hired for his expertise in adagio, even getting to be on stage for Siegfried’s death scene (so that the lead wouldn’t get hurt while dying). B didn’t get to see more of the show than a dress rehearsal of one of the four, so when I heard they were putting on a revival this year, and having a bit of cash from being made redundant at my last job, I got us tickets to the whole thing. I figure, B’s a classical music fan, I enjoy mythology and theatrical spectacle, what could go wrong? B came down with appendicitis, that’s what could go wrong, so we can’t go. She’s fine, now, or will be soon, but not soon enough to make the trip and sit through 20 hours of opera, fan or not. Meanwhile, Opera Australia very kindly offered no option for off-loading the tickets (no waiting list, no resale capacity), other than a store credit for upcoming productions – good for one year, but including purchases in both the 2017 and 2018 seasons – with the suggestion that maybe we’d like to see “My Fair Lady”. AU$2800 worth of opera tickets to a spectacular classic like the Ring, and they offer “My Fair Lady”? High school amateurs and community theatre troupes put on “My Fair Lady”. The movie plays on television fifteen times a year, and that’s the best they’ve got for two years? #OperaAustraliaFail.

Time for Change Time magazine has continued it’s “person of the year tradition”, a practice that may need review, given the selection this year - yes, an obvious choice, as was their selection in 1938.

Trumped Up It's going to be a long four years, but I don't think it'll be eight. The danger in 2020 is Pence, a man who believes you can "pray away the gay" and has nothing but contempt for women and minorities. Unlike his boss, Pence can give the appearance of being reasonable, and a lot of people will fall for it. We'll face that hurdle when it comes, however, and I hope we'll have a better candidate then. Meanwhile, farewell Obamacare, it was nice for millions while it lasted, but now you're uninsured again. Time to buy stock in health insurance companies, as their revenues will skyrocket on the increased premiums they'll charge. Farewell any chance of a left-leaning Supreme Court. There's one vacancy already, and Kennedy, Bader Ginsburg, and Breyer are over 80 or getting there. That's going to be a problem for equal rights, voting rights, and campaign funding reform. The House and Senate have, effectively, a rubber stamp in the White House, so we can expect them to try on many bad plans, including tax cuts to increase income and wealth disparity, defunding Planned Parenthood, cutting welfare, gutting Social Security and Medicare, and generally driving the economy into the ground. Would we have done better with Sanders? I doubt it. We might have done better at getting out the vote if the Democrats had put up someone other than Clinton, but her candidacy was pretty much inevitable after 2008. Any who stayed home or went third party because Clinton beat Sanders were foolish, and while you can say that Johnson took votes from Trump, that ignores a lot of one of the things wrong with many liberal voters: they think "libertarian" candidates are more liberal than they actually are. Look at the support Rand Paul gets. A competitive third party wouldn't be a bad thing, but they aren't. They siphon votes and voters we need. I won't be putting my American passport into the post to the State Department. I sure as hell will be supporting the Democrats still in Congress and in the mid-terms in 2018. This fight's just getting started.

You May See the Doctor Now And it's totally worth it. Doctor Strange is easily in the top tier of Marvel movies: funny, when it needs to be, with especially fun special effects, and a stellar cast, all performing comic book material with fun and brio. I especially like how it treats magic as the manipulation of physical laws as they exist in one dimension in another. It's the String Theory of magic. But anything with Benedict Cumberbatch was going to be good, wasn't it?

President Ryan I think I know why Paul Ryan won't say Trump's name, even though he'll confirm he will vote for him: He's hoping it goes to a tie, and he gets to be President by default. Say it goes 269-269 Clinton-Trump. Say then it goes to the House for a vote on the candidates. Given that the Republicans control the House, but most of them don't actually want Trump in the White House, regardless of their actual behavior at the polls, which is driven solely by party loyalty), and given that the Freedom Caucus madmen want to control the House agenda regardless of the leadership and in opposition to anything resembling reasonable, it's possible for there to be no decision. Assume Pence is Vice President-elect, by virtue of the Senate being in Republican control and having that decision, instead of sticking with the Oompa-Loompa, he goes for Ryan. Or, if the Senate can't work it out, given the original tie starting point, Ryan just gets the job. Yea! In your face, Mitt Romney!

You Break It, You Bought It Should the Republican Party stop funding Trump's campaign? Why? They made him, they own him. The Republicans have spent decades on increasing wealth and income disparity, increasing racial tension, and increasing the size and scope of the police militarisation the outcomes of which we see play out nearly daily in our news. They are the party of Trump. Besides, it's not as if they have to spend all that much, as the compliant media give him all the free air he needs to bury himself and his party at the general election, or to gain the White House, for that matter, the latter being an outcome I suspect many in the media would welcome, as it would ensure lots of click-bait and airtime teasers to capture eyeballs.

Their Way Is Only the Highway Traffic in Sydney is bad, and anyone can see it. But Liberal promises to fix it rely on more and bigger highways from the west into the CBD. Problem is, that isn’t the problem. The current project underway, Westconnex, aims to expand and extend the M4 and M5, but in the end dump the increased volume of traffic into the inner west, along already the already highly congested King Street and Parramatta Road. Worse, this project will use “spaghetti junctions” at these interchange points, and the junction at St Peters will take up newly transformed green space, the only parkland of any significant size for kilometres. In addition, many kilometres of tunnels will be required, not a bad thing in themselves, but you have to consider the 35-metre tall exhaust stacks, concentrating particulate pollution and sending it out and across the city. The planning for Westconnex, a pet project of current NSW Premier Mike Baird, but supported by NSW Labor as well as the Federal Liberal and Labor parties, actually shows the project won’t achieve its stated goals. The new roads will reach capacity within eight years and the overall reduction of time spent in traffic will be a grand total of five minutes. The Liberal government in Canberra, under former Prime Minister Tony Abbott, stated that public transport was not an option at all anywhere ever. This policy continues under Malcolm Turnbull. Labor’s official position is also in support of Westconnex, even though they have the example of Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews, who canned the East-West link the previous government had planned, so that better mass transit could be implemented instead, even in the face of the Abbott government withdrawing co-funding. Mass transit won’t be improved by Westconnex. It will be the same limited trains and busses serving the same routes – and at the same volume and level of service. But new rail links, service improvements, better capacity, would improve traffic congestion, and air quality, along with emissions reductions. Bigger transport projects, such as the long-proposed and postponed heavy rail link from Brisbane through Sydney to Melbourne, would do their part, removing freight by trucking. But we get no traction. Urban planning is hard, but there are lots of examples of getting it right, all around the world. A new tram service, currently under construction in Sydney, will link the Eastern Suburbs with the CBD; and the existing lightrail, extended out to Haberfield, has already achieved its utilisation goals, despite naysaying from the state government. London has more bicycle usage, and bike-share projects are popping up all over, opening city centres in ways not seen in decades. We don’t need Robert Moses-style projects, projects designed to destroy neighbourhoods. No Westconnex!

Brisk It's the Brexit, and Britain's out, or as they are supposed to have had it in a headline once: EU Cut Off. Personally, I think it was a foolish thing to do. But I don't live there, so it's not up to me. Still, even with the pound dropping to 1985 levels, I'm sure they'll survive. They're the fifth largest economy globally, after all, which is pretty good for a former world power. Plus, or although, it's going to take two to five years to sort out the exit in full, even if Brussells says o.k., and possibly a decade of QEII announcing new laws on her birthday, as they sort out re-regulating the nation. Or KCIII. Whatever. More importantly, if the anti-immigrant forces and political far-right can be fingered as the drivers of this move, and it has a sufficiently noticable and lasting effect on the US economy, how much can this affect the Presidential race? Will America find itself driven to vote Trump, get a wall along the Atlantic? Will they fear the invading hoards of Scottish refugees? Yeah, actually I don't think it will have much effect, barring a substantial and lasting downward pressure on US markets, which seems unlikely. Meanwhile, Happy Birthday, Your Majesty, QEII, your present is a face-palm moment.

No Shame How Republicans - and some recalcitrant Democrats - can continue their inaction on even minor improvements in gun controls, let alone actively vote them down when they even do have an opportunity to act, defies explanation. Don't give me Second Amendment (or Fourth, for that matter), especially when we're talking about reasonable measures to keep weapons of mass destruction (yes, semi-automatic rifles count, when they can kill dozens in moments) out of the hands of persons who have already been deemed suspicious to law enforcement. And weapons like the AR-15 have no place in any citizens "arsenel": they are not hunting tools, unless you are hunting people. The Democrats sitting on the floor of the House of Representatives are showing up the Republican Congressional leadership for what they are: cowards in the pay of unconscionable weapons manufacturer lobbyists. Every Republican who voted in the Senate against the amendments - their own included - should be voted out of office at the first opportunity, and every member of the House leadership, Paul Ryan in particular, should suffer the same. They have sold out the American public for a few filthy coins towards re-election. Show them what that means.

Mouth Agape So it’s Trump. Wow. Just how batshit crazy are the Republicans? Well, their 17 candidates were a pretty crazy slate to begin with. Another Bush? Sure, why not. Just because the first one was a nonentity voted out after one term and the next was a disaster of economic destruction and illegal war, that doesn’t mean the next one won’t be the good one. “Oops” Perry, “Can’t-Google-Him” Santorum, “Pyramids” Carson, “College-Boy-Ignorance” Paul, “Lucifer” Cruz . . . name one of the candidates for the Republican nomination that wasn’t, at best, a hold-your-nose-and-choose choice. I never thought he’d last past the initial paperwork filing, let alone go the distance. Even though, as of today, it’s still possible the convention could be contested, it’s increasingly unlikely. At this point, all the candidates who haven’t actually withdrawn can still keep garnering delegates and deny Trump the outright majority he needs, but it’s more likely that GOP voters will shrug and pull the lever for The Donald, and he’ll roll into Cleveland unopposed. I never thought enough people could be that stupid, but forgot just how easy it can be for hucksters – political or not – to run their cons. And regardless of how serious Trump takes himself and how gullibly the public takes up his policy proposals, they are cons. Mexico isn’t going to pay for Trump’s wall and he isn’t going to build one. A Republican majority in the House and Senate will present a bill to repeal Obamacare and he will sign it, but the disaster of health care that will precipitate will quickly cause such damage to the economy that the US has only the comfort of knowing Trump’s Presidency will be one-term-only. I certainly thought the Republican Party would pull out all the stops to put an end to his candidacy, but that presumed that they hadn’t created this golum to begin with, which they did, pandering to all the worst impulses of their base. There is some media complicity in Trump’s success. They gave him a lot of free air time. Why not? It was considered endlessly entertaining for such a buffoon to be showing up the mainstream candidates, let alone the behaviour of the buffoons among his supporters (is that all of them? Or only most?). So the only question left is: Does Trump stand a chance against the Democrats in the general election? Everybody said he didn’t stand a chance to go this far, at every stage of the campaign. Everybody says he’ll lose to Clinton or to Sanders in November, and they’ve been saying it, louder and louder, at every stage of the campaign. They say the Electoral College math won’t add up his way, but that’s on the basis that everything’s pretty much the same as it’s been these last few Presidential elections. Trump’s success suggests it may not be so simple anymore. We have to hope the people Trump has marginalised come out strong and the people he frightens – Republicans as well as Democrats and independents or swing voters – do, too, along with the committed Democrats, or we’ll see what happens when America is forced to accept the Trump branding. It won’t be pretty.

Partnerships It's probably smart for Cruz to go early, announcing Fiorina as his VP, because it solidifies his candidacy as a ticket, cuts out anyone else (cough, Kasich, cough) from making that choice, and puts up a more viable woman VP than Trump would have with Palin (which is an unlikely selection - he might put her in the cabinet somewhere, but that's about it). It also iproves his standing against Clinton: see? no woman problem here. Except that Fiorina is as extremely anti-woman as Cruz himself. You'd think intelligent women wouldn't have that problem, but they do. Privilege does weird things to your head, sometimes. Too bad it won't really help him, in the end, with the delegate count.

Pain So Neurofen has been found guilty of deceptive practices, marketing its product with different packaging, different names, different prices, and different claims, all when it was the same stuff all along. Now they'll be liable to anyone who can prove they bought into the marketing, which won't come to much. But what's especially funny? I was in a shop just last week and saw all these products still on the shelves and still priced differently - albeit on sale, presumably to clear them from the store in advance of the judgment. But will there be any liability on retailers for continuing the deception?

Form Bad to Wurst The last thing the Sydney Morning Herald needs is cuts to editorial positions. Some of the worst typos, twisted syntax, and just bad writing you'll ever see in a major metropolitan newspaper, and that's leaving aside the extraordinary focus on misleading click-bait headlines, cutting editorial staff can only make things worse. At this rate I'll have to go to Murdoch's Newscorp (which will surely give me apoplexy). I've said it for years: the Herald's new stories read like bad sports writing, and their sports writing is nearly unintelligible. If anything they need more editorial staff, not fewer. The death of print media continues apace.

Memo to Mitch Obama has nominated his replacement for the execreable Scalia, and, if nothing else, Merrick Garland has a classic Supreme Court name, right? Also, it isn't possible to "politicise" a process that someone else has already decided to play partisan politics with, in total abrogation of their duties. I'm looking at you, Mr. Turtle. (What is it with this generation of Republicans? Are they so embarrassed by W. that they have to go to extreme lengths to prove they aren't? Are they flat-out racists that cannot abide an African American President? It's too late to fulfill the promise to make Obama a one-term President, by about four years, so well-past time to get over it. Whatever, this is the reason we have Trump. Thanks.)

Trump Trump The BBC has an outline of how Trump can still be beaten, mainly by the other remaining candidates suddenly performing better. My favourite? ”Some Democrats appear to be openly cheering for Trump to burn the Republican Party to the ground, figuring he will be easily defeated in the general election. Besides, the Bernie Sanders v Hillary Clinton battle is still going strong, and they might be more concerned with actually picking their party's nominee.” One option they don’t reckon on is that Trump, having secured the required delegates, at the convention announces he’s a Democrat, Bwa-ha-ha, and announces he’s open to being nominated by both parties. Everyone wakes up to the incredible stupidity chosing him as their candidate has been and the crowds quietly leave the convention hall, head to the airport and expect to vote Democratic come November. Why it doesn’t happen? Even Trump isn’t that much of an ego maniac. Although it’s a close call.

1-2-3 Big Bad Trump has his hat handed to him by Cruz, but the bigger story is that tyro Rubio managed to pull into third place, with a credible percentage well beyond what the rest of the remaining contenders could manage. Cruz, an “establishment candidate”, insofar as he has a seat in the Senate, where everybody hates him like the poison he is, is only a couple of points ahead of Trump, leaving the man wearing a fake-tan marmoset on his head as still viable in New Hampshire, managed to get enough Republicans to hold their noses long enough to make him the front runner, for now. He had been leading in Iowa polls a bit ahead of the caucuses, but Trump looked to be the lead contender in the more recent polls, so it’s a bit of an upset. I’m sure it is from Trump’s perspective, as “nobody remembers who came in second”. It’s more upsetting to those of us who think that Cruz the Destroyer would be a bad choice for the US in general, since anything that makes such an ass a leader in the race is just embarrassing. Better than Cruz? Not Rubio, who hasn’t even managed to do his job as a Senator for more than a few days at a time before deciding to become the next one-term Senator to attain the Presidency, the GOP answer to Obama, with maybe a bit more State House experience, but no clue and no capacity for actual leadership. Trump makes Rubio look like a schoolboy, even taking into account the fascist bullying and childish Twitter taunts that characterize The Donald’s campaign (and adult life in general). Trust the media pundits to continue their dismissals and denigrations of Trump, pushing Cruz or Rubio, but don’t “misunderestimate” the American people’s capacity to nominate a demagogue or a buffoon. Reagan and G W Bush both served two terms. Clinton and Sanders remain neck-and-neck, and that’s all to the good for the Democrats, as it keeps Clinton honest, and a bit more left than we might have otherwise been able to hope for. New Hampshire ain’t nothin’, but it will be the March primaries that turn the tide.

Criminal Anyone who goes into Malheur National Wildlife Refugee and provides supplies of any kind to the Y'all Qaeda terrorists is an accessory and should be arrested. Just because the terrorists of Vanilla ISIS are old white men doesn't mean they're patriots. They're criminals. Aiding and abetting is also criminal. Why are is Federal law enforcement treating them any differently than they do other armed and dangerous criminals?

Theatre Weekend For the Sydney Festival and our month-without-a-free-weekend, we started at Carriageworks, to see the production of Woyzeck, based on a Robert Wilson collaboration with Tom Waits. For German Expressionism, Waits made a great fit, but how much of the original 1823 play remains is highly questionable, aside from the plot overall. Nevertheless, it made a very enjoyable piece of theatre, especially the set, which consisted mainly of a stage-sized grid of net, raised and lowered at various angles, and through which the cast played their scenes. We followed this on Sunday with a revival of Fase, a set of four dances to Steve Reich's music, by Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, which she performed herself, with Tale Dolven. Reich's music might be described as mathematical, in its cycling through repetitions, with different streams eventually coallesceing, and de Keermaeker's coreography matching it, without describing it. The interplay of the dancers and their shadows added an element of complexity to help in matching the music and movement. We've got Festival performances - one of music by Bach and one of Beethoven - plus a music festival at St John's College, "So Frenchy So Chic", and an Open Air Cinema screening of Youth, by the director of one of my recent favorite films (The Great Beauty). This will leave us with very little time to get any substantial bushwalking done prior to our NZ trip in February, but it will all be worth it.

Happy New Year (Eve, technically, as this is from the 9pm show.)