Odds
People will bet on anything, including the next pope. Unless I can see ‘em parade through the paddock, though, I’m not sure I’m going to bother with this. Joseph Ratzinger (Germany) is the favorite, and Count Christoph von Schoenborn (Austria) is going off at the longest odds. I like Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga from Honduras, however, because of his point of origin. What with all the interest in a return to the Latin mass . . . oh, right, not that kind of Latin. Never mind.

A Man for All Seasons II
I don’t think Charles and Camilla should have postponed their wedding. Getting around popes is what the whole Church of England set-up was about. He’ll never be defender of the faith this way.

(And I wonder what J2P2 would have thought if he’d known George Bush would attend his funeral. After all, there’s a report he was a little worried for the end times.)

J3Px
Continuing on from the previous post, the question of who will be the next pope presents some intriguing doctrinal questions, particularly in light of the Roman Catholic Church's demographic developments over the last few decades. There is significant notice taken of the long-term drop-off in church attendance in Europe and North America, as well as a concomitant decline in the numbers entering the priesthood, while at the same time numbers in both areas have increased in Africa and Latin America, and, especially in the latter, have been accompanied by a rise in fundamentalist doctrinary teachings and behavior. While J2P2's stacking the college of cardinals with an apparently larger-than-usual number of selectors has suggested he has sought to ensure the apostolic succession achieves the preservation and even advancement of his own agenda, the cardinals themselves have spoken to their independence in such mattters, and one rather hopes to see that exercised, at least because the challenges faced by the Church in the near future will likely see the need not for rigid adherence to holding or deepening a particular adherence to the catechism but the strength of mind to express and inspire the "body of Christ" to accept and support a challenged theology. That is likely to be a dismaying precondition should any of the longer-odds papal candidates, i.e., those of more fundamentalist bent from Africa or to a lesser extent South America, be announced when the white smoke issues forth, so I'm rather hoping for just another boring choice: an Italian, maybe, although it would be interesting if an American was chosen - think of the conspiracy theories from that one. I'd also like to see more imagination in the choice of papal name. "John Paul" wasn't particularly inspired, and John Paul II was positively dull, although the reasons for both were obvious. We haven't had a "Clement" in a while, and maybe that would be a good choice, faced with a tumultuous time to come as the next pope will be.

He'll Always Be J2P2 to Me
I haven't always liked this pope, but just because we don't agree on everything doesn't mean I can't respect him. He's tried very hard to work for peace, and that's a worthy role, so we can leave aside the stuff that I think he's been wrong and even damaging about (and there's plenty). I hope the geezer won't suffer, now that it looks like his time has come; he's had it pretty tough these last years.

Webloviation
If I didn’t have such swell blood pressure, I’d really have to stay away from all those newspaper columnists and web diarists who invariably infuriate me, and pretty soon I’m going to have to really start every comment I leave or letter I write with “I am not a crank,” even though it’s becoming increasingly clear even to me that I am indeed about as cranky as the old man who starts every conversation with “when I was your age.” I am put in mind of all this from walking past the Parramatta River and seeing

the first pelican of autumn, reminding me of the Dixon Lanier Merritt poem:

A wonderful bird is the pelican,
His bill will hold more than his belican. . . .

Why? Well, my convoluted thinking appears to have made an obscure connection, as M. often finds occasion to point out, but when I can no longer stomach what some others have said, my mouth will tend to get me into trouble.

Never mind; it’s just an excuse to put up a photo. Later we can discuss why the pelican is a Christ symbol.

Work, or Be Damned
I tend towards agreement with the proposition that moving welfare recipients into employment is a good idea. The Americans with Disabilities Act had some strange provisions, but overall was positive, not least insofar as it put businesses in the position of having to accommodate individuals who otherwise might end up on the rolls. Work-for-the-dole schemes also have their positive aspects, as do training programs. Discouraging bludging seems to me to be taking responsibility, the kind of custodial relationship I want from government, not only because they’re spending my money for me, but also because I want the best value from that expenditure. Taking responsibility does not, however, mean abusing welfare recipients.

So why are single mothers being singled out? I wasn’t raised in a single-parent family, and, for that matter, my mom worked, so I’m probably not as qualified as some to comment on this issue. While it appears reasonable for single parents to take on part-time work once their kiddies are in school, there’s a lot more at issue than just school hours being suddenly “free” time. In fact, there’s all the appearance of taking advantage of the vulnerability of particular categories: unmarried mothers and the disabled. In regard to single mothers, leaving aside the issue of whether there is sufficient support in place for them to take jobs, is it just wild conspiracy theorizing to suggest that their status is somehow repugnant to legislators like Treasurer Peter Costello, that single women with children somehow represent to them all that’s wrong with society? I really do get the impression that John Howard’s government wants to take Australia back in time, with Tony Abbott looking for backhanded methods of returning to back alley abortion days, and the more general push to, on one hand, remove women from the workforce, unless, now on the other hand, their single mothers, in which case they’d better get jobs sooner rather than later. Maybe they can just strap the ol’ papoose on their backs and go pick some cotton, huh?

This is the point where you’ll start hearing the government (or at least its supporters) say, well of course we’ll have the support systems in place, but unless it’s already there or you actually specify what you’re going to do, it’s like the Bush proposals for Social Security, where unless they’re speaking at dog-whistle pitch, there’s nothing but the sound of the wind.

More Signs of the Apocalypse
Albany passes the budget on time. First the Red Sox won the World Series, now this. Perhaps it’s a parting gift to Pataki? (Not if he won’t leave.)

Real Estate
I want one with a clock. When I read the headline, I immediately thought of the former PanAm building above Grand Central. Now that would be a condo and a half, wouldn’t it? (It’d certainly cut down on commuting time.)

Foreign & Domestic
He was a lobbyist for Lockheed Martin, and now Dick Cheney’s son-in-law will be general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security. Has George Bush never heard of conflict of interest?

A Mind Is a Terrible Think
Before we get too, well, radical, and do something we might regret later, like, for example, allowing students to sue their college professors if they disagree with what’s being taught, maybe we should take a moment to think about what we really want: shutting down northeastern liberal campuses, like, for example, Harvard, who sometimes beat Yale in sporting events and are located in states where Ted Kennedy is from. (Does Florida State Representative Dennis Baxley really want to try to create a theocracy? It’s worked so well for Iran. Unfortunately, we’re talking about Florida, so it’s actually possible for this to make it all the way to Jeb.) I’m going to disagree with the Medium Lobster on this one.

Introducing the Pot & the Kettle (with a Smack in the Face from the Frying Pan)
James Morrow is wrong. The UN is troubled, but in Morrow’s editorial, he puts a lot of the blame elsewhere than where it belongs. He does this because he has an agenda: the dissolution of the United Nations.

First, Morrow refers to UN peacekeepers as being under the direction of the Secretary General. That’s not accurate. UN peacekeepers are troops supplied by member nations. If those troops act criminally, that isn’t the fault of the UN’s oversight, but of the countries supplying troops without a command structure in place to regulate their behavior. They go in and join in. When Australian troops went to Timor, did any of them commit crimes? No, yet they were there under the auspices of the UN.

The oil-for-food scandal does present a problem for Kofi Annan, but the UN’s examination of the actions of his son have cleared the Secretary General of any wrongdoing. Morrow ignores this, although the argument he’d make is obvious.

So what’s Morrow’s real problem with the UN? It’s the report from the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Once again, as in 2000, the UN has come to the conclusion that Australia has a problem in how it treats ethnic minorities, including its indigenous population. Typically of his kind of anti-intellectual, Morrow concludes that there is nothing to learn from the UN’s report, that it is unwarranted interference in Australia’s governance, and that the UN has been deluded by lobbyists or is simply acting out against Australia because of its participation in Gulf War II.

In his final paragraph, however, Morrow proceeds to make the UN’s point for it:

"These days, the UN has got a lot more than a bloody nose - it is also facing a crisis of legitimacy that has been coming for years. From the start, its biggest problem has been that, to paraphrase the old joke about the Holy Roman Empire, it is neither united nor comprised of nations. Far too many of the member-states did not earn their nationhood in any sort of real way (by, say, populating and cultivating territory or fighting a war of independence) but because someone a long time ago drew some lines on a map. And as modern history has proven, the resulting governments treat their citizens with about as much respect. For the UN to call Australia out for racism and human rights violations would be a joke if it weren't so serious."

What he fails to note is that the “someone[s]” who “drew some lines on a map” were largely the members of the Security Council: Britain, France, the U.S., et al., but he treats these nations as if they were squabbling children who’d scribbled out their boundaries themselves, and are undeserving of nationhood. In fact, many of those nations did indeed fight for their independence, countries like Kenya, India, Iraq, Iran . . . and they fought against the imperialism Morrow apparently misses in the world today.

The UN’s report is indeed serious, and Australia wouldn’t go wrong in a sober assessment of its contents. Having another round of Alexander Downer spitting the dummy shows just how ingrained intolerance is, as is Morrow’s tantrum.

My Brilliant Career
M. has a theory that everyone has a “best decade” or even “best year,” this being the time when everything about you was at its peak: physically, in your strength and health and in your appearance; mentally, in the clarity of your thought, or at any rate how you perceived it, and in the scope of your knowledge (although that, too, is equally and for the same reasons fallacious); and so on, through all the aspects and permutations of what makes up our lives from day to day and decade to decade. There’s a photo of M.’s dad from the 1970’s, and he’s handsome, debonair, clearly satisfied with every element of his life, however much that may not even have been remotely true.

The theory doesn’t play out too well when you look at it in detail, but it’s a pleasant enough exercise. In a similar meme, The Counsellor is looking back at 1978, musically, anyway, and promises a report. That’s a pretty good year to pick, but I’d say 1980, myself. That was the year I was far enough away from everything that had shaped me previously to break out from my influences into areas that at least felt more personally definitional. Musically, that was discovering X (the L.A. version, and the other L.A. punk bands, as different from NYC as from London, that difference, and each scene’s distinctions being revelatory themselves), the Gang of Four (who never surpassed their first two-and-a-half albums), the Psychedelic Furs (who only had the one good record, and it was really just versions of the same three songs, a clear example of getting a recording contract a little too soon, which was happening to a lot of bands then), and (God help me) U2 (I mean, “The Edge”; c’mon, really). I listened to Jim Carroll’s “Catholic Boy” and developed my Robert Fripp appreciation, and I found Fela Kuti’s afrobeat. Over about the next ten years or so, I got so eclectic, nobody could talk to me about anything, and it took at least that much time before I could get out from under the weight of all that Husker Du and Mission of Burma and start moving into more than pop music inventiveness.

By 1990-1995, I’d been a long time growing up, and there was more to come, as there is yet, but there’s more to life than music, even if it wouldn’t be nearly so much fun or so interesting without it, so I have to abandon the idea of the “perfect year,” once or future, hoping instead to manage to stay ahead of intellectual entropy, if only just.

Easter
There were four days off and only the one chocolate rabbit (but it was delicious). And then there was the second tsunami. At least this time, the 3-meter waves weren’t the source of death and destruction, area residents and government services having been sufficiently alert following on from Christmas. If you didn’t think the first one was a message from God, wouldn’t you think this one was? First Boxing Day, then Easter Monday. If we didn’t have the Biblical promise to Noah, you’d start to get all apocalyptic, too, I suppose. 2,000 more dead now, though, as if the situation didn’t remain difficult enough, despite Aceh moving from relief to reconstruction.

Does Miranda Devine really believe her own revisionism? So it was the conservatives who wanted to free the refugees all along after all? And everyone else were just opportunistic members of “socialist, atheist and green groups”, bent on fomenting hatred? What idiots she must think we are. Based on the rest of her rewritten history, it’s pretty clear that Ms. Devine has only come to this conclusion now that there are new Christian converts behind the wire. Madam, you are welcome to join the compassionate side of the argument, but we’d all be grateful if you could be honest about it. Just for once.

Passive Capacitance
7,551 kilowatt hours annually doesn’t sound like a lot (20.69 kwh per day, which is actually more than you’d think), but a good idea is a good idea. I’d be interested in knowing how much electrical capacity the mall’s system ends up replacing. (via Rebecca’s pocket.)

Covering Costs
When I first started working, one of the benefits my employer offered was life insurance. As I moved from one company to another, seeking a career, workplace benefits increased in number so that I soon had medical insurance, too, fully paid for by my employer. Within a short period of time, I was paying a portion of that cost, and every year thereafter, my percentage of the premium rose right along with the annual rate increases imposed by the insurers. My second job post-graduate school was in a small employee-benefits consulting outfit, where we sold mid-size companies restructuring plans to save money on benefits offerings even as they increased what they made available to their employees. “Cafeteria”-style programs, where the “value” of a group life plan was sold as part of a total compensation package, and HMO’s, PPO’s, and conventional hospital coverage presented different advantages and costs to be borne by employees along with their employers (the 401(k), relatively new at the time, and because it was little understood, became the hook on which the sale of our services depended) . . . all these now familiar offerings are a seemingly inextricable part of operating a business today. The employer subsidization of these offerings was translated by Human Resources departments into alternative compensation. You don’t just get a salary, you get all these things, too. As this became more common, more expected, the salary savings never materialized. Maybe because the cost of the insurance kept growing, even for the employee, as did the cost of accessing the care provided for in the insurance package, with co-pays and out-of-pocket minimums and deductible thresholds, all of which also grew, year-by-year. Employers have become increasingly disgruntled over providing insurance, giving rise to contract hires and the use of temporaries, all to avoid giving out benefits the value of which have increased right along with the price tag, despite group experience ratings (or because of them). It’s a Catch-22 situation, increasingly, in the States: you need a large enough group to get the lowest possible rate, but utilization of plan benefits increases the experience rating, raising premiums. It’s a system that’s breaking down, and Australia’s buying into it even as it starts to collapse in America. There are many opponents, but socialized medicine seems a better alternative (even while it’s under attack here) than allowing the present situation to continue through to its apparently inevitable failure, where only a few can afford insurance and health care itself grows further out of reach for the rest of us.

Poor Terry Schiavo: is life so limited a concept now that it cannot encompass death? Alas, her parents have lost their daughter, but refuse to let her go. Alas, her husband has lost his life companion and cannot be allowed to let her go. Alas, Congress is now dominated by ideologues so intent upon legislating morality from the cradle to the grave that they now intervene with all their powers, corrupting their sphere to do so. Some heartless demagogues have opined that there’s nothing wrong with Terry Schiavo except that she cannot eat, but that belies her diagnosed persistent vegetative state. Poor Terry Schiavo is not a machine, but she is being treated as one, not by those who would allow her to die, but by those who believe her life must be maintained at all costs, even the costs to her. This is not life, it is torture, prolonged and just as meaningless. She has no thought, no consciousness, nothing more than autonomic processes. It is only different from being killed outright in a violent accident or from some other catastrophic bodily failure other than that her death has not yet been accomplished in the event. These medical events happen frequently, from one cause or another, much more frequently than Congress could reasonably act, unless they do so for all of us, requiring for the future that every instance of such total incapacitation be met with an on-going maintenance response, that we all be fitted with feeding tubes, or breathing apparatus, heart-lung machines, and so forth, until such time as even machinery fails, our bodies rot away beneath the cold steel and plastic. If Congress had to insist on intervening in this case, perhaps they might have done so to provide the funding, the equipment, the personnel necessary to keep this woman’s body alive. I’m sorry for her parents, whose grief is so great they cannot act with compassion; for her husband, whose grief is perpetuated in the highest reaches of government; for Terry Schiavo herself, who luckily is well beyond the debate; for all of us, because we contribute to the pain of all if we will not contribute to its surcease.

All Publicity Is Good Publicity (Especially When It's Good)
"What do Matt Damon and Ben Affleck have to do with the Australian music scene in the 1980s?" Christine Sams writes in today's edition of the entertainment section of the Sun Herald, and goes on to answer: "The A-list Hollywood actors have shortlisted a script written by [M.] about the Australian rock music scene in the 1980s as part of their Project Greenlight search, which invites script writers from around the world to submit previously undiscovered work. [M.], who worked as a songwriter in Sydney in the 1980s before moving to the US, is among the final 50 entrants in the Project greenlight competition, which attracted thousand of entries."

I've always been a fan of a bit of goss, and never more so than today. The facts may be a little off, but that's alright.

When I heard that my Uncle John had died, my initial feeling was simply frustration that I would be unable to perform the (usually) simple act of attending his funeral, being present to offer Mom, my aunts and cousins, that small sympathy. We’ve had a fair few funerals here in the antipodes, and I already knew, even without those episodes for evidence, that being in company during such times is the best comfort we can have or give. Uncle John was an intimidating figure for me as a child, not least because my most significant memories of him center around his service in Vietnam, making him that much more remote, but also that much more awesome. He was a voice on a transistor radio-sized reel-to-reel tape deck, a system used for letters home. He would tape his letters to his wife and sisters and brother, and they would re-record over them their own communications. I have one of those tapes here, but nothing to play it on (and I think it’s actually a tape of the audio portion of the television broadcast of the moon landing anyway). Uncle John would appear periodically over the course of my childhood and early adolescence, and his strength and bearing (and periodicity) made him not to be trifled with, even as his status as a Floridian made him (and his children) exotic, requiring of scrutiny. As an adult, I only met him again a very few times, but by then I was able to at least experience him as having a sense of fun and adventure. Following his military career, he took a law degree and worked diligently as a public defender and later as a public prosecutor, both roles born from his desire to engage with his community and spend his life’s energies well. I was sorry to hear of his cancer, but heartened, to the degree possible, by the frequent emails from his wife keeping all of us up-to-date with his struggle against the inevitable outcome. As always, he did all the right things, including, in the end, making peace with death and helping his family to do the same. Bill’s got a better eulogy at his ‘blog than I’ve managed, but we all do the best we can under these circumstances.

Wolves Among the Sheep
So Paul Wolfowitz is to be rewarded with becoming president of the World Bank. And there’s any question that his ideology would influence development aid decisions? I’m sure he’s technically qualified, but I don’t think this is going to go any great distance in making the U.S. appear any less imperialistic.

Meanwhile, in the same press conference where he announced the Wolfowitz nomination, Bush claimed to use rendition to send terror suspects “back to their country of origin with the promise that they won’t be tortured.” This is a blatant lie. Otherwise, why would Mamdouh Habib have been sent to Egypt? His “country of origin” for the twenty years prior to his capture was Australia (who don’t ever torture anyone). And Maher Arar, a Canadian who was sent to Syria? Oh, right, Canada doesn’t use torture either. The extraordinary rendition system was established to put terror suspects into the hands of torturers. We’ve known that all along. That the Bush Administration has increased the use of rendition is something we’ve also known. He promised to do it following September 11, and he did. It’s the shame of the nation, or it would be if George Bush had any shame.

And in the Senate, the oil companies have been set loose upon the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, 51-49, all because oil prices have gone up significantly since the beginning of Gulf War II. Another vote on a different measure has to pass before the ANWR is actually open for drilling, and then the House votes (and they’ve already shown which way they’ll go), but this isn’t looking good for pristine wilderness anywhere, let alone Alaska.