Jiggity-Jig
Even as we speak, Mom & Dad are waiting in the airport (or possibly even on board the plane at this hour) to return to the U.S., although, due to the effects of time-travel, they are also already back in Los Angeles. Isn’t the International Dateline marvellous?

They’ve had a good trip, even if all they’ve seen has been Sydney and a bit of Canberra, and I think Dad feels a bit better than he may have previously about our move here four years ago, now that he’s seen the place. It is a beautiful country, with a fascinating history (that I’ve been pretty remiss in studying properly, at least its post-Federation story) and inexplicable wildlife. Why did Australia get all the marsupials except the North American possum (and why are our possums so different from the o- variety)? Why did the animals develop here they way they have with the absence of any major predators, the former thylacine notwithstanding? Why did Kerr really sack Whitlam? Some things we may never know.

While it’s my turn for an international jaunt, it will be a while yet before I accomplish it, barring any employment changes that offer me that opportunity, an eventuality now forestalled by six months, as I’ve taken up an extension to my contract here. I’d like to go back at some point, though maybe only once the Democrats are back in power.

Bizarre Food/Bizarre Ban
I’m no fan of Vegemite, but the ban on its importation – even going so far as having Customs agents preventing Australian tourists bringing the stuff in with their luggage – is just weird. Only breads and cereals can contain added folate (folic acid), a B vitamin, so Vegemite, which is mostly all about the B’s and high in folate, is illegal. What will Howard do? Can he get his mate, Bush, to rescind the ban? What will the ex-pat Aussies do? Hollywood better watch out, since they stand to lose a substantial amount of top talent when Russell Crowe, Naomi Watts, Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, et al. all decide they can’t work without their yeast-extract breakfast spread.

Damn Tourists
It all goes well so far, with Mom & Dad safely ensconsed just up the road and having a fine time. We've been walking them off their feet pretty much daily, sometimes letting them have a bus tour to let them rest a little. We hit the foreshore first, of course, and down through the Rocks, and later in the week joined them for a Hunter Valley vineyard trip that really was very good. You never know, but Boutique Wine Tours went to a couple of good wineries, from which I brought home a couple of bottles of chardonney (well, I am a leftie, after all) I'm looking forward to with relish. Today, Dad and I did the Bridge Climb, which, regardless of the price, every tourist to Sydney ought to do, and probably most Sydneysiders, for that matter. We'll send them down to Canberra, soon, on their own, and I know they'll enjoy it, but most importantly, they went to the Blue Mountains yesterday. Now, apparently, Blue Mountains Cultural Tours" are relatively new, but we chose them because Mom made the trip west last year and we thought something different from that tour would be a good idea, and these guys did the Jenolan Caves as well as the usual Three Sisters stuff. But now I can never allow them back in the country. I've been here four years, and they're in the country for four days when they see a platypus. I haven't seen one, and it's been a goal of mine from the day I first heard such creatures existed. It's just not fair. After they've gone, I'm going to have to head up to the Blue Lake and spend as long as it takes. I can't let them get away with it.

Making Water
Are we really on the verge of running out of drinking water? Years of drought and wasteful utilisation practices and other forms of mismanagement suggest it’s true. More dams won’t help, but conservation will. There are studies, there are recommendations, which, if implemented, would improve the situation, if not resolve it. We hear about these things only occasionally, and usually as exceptions, such as this or that farmer who’s managed to defeat soil salinity or the city that’s implemented a wetlands rainwater purification catchment system. There’s plenty more that could be done, products and systems installed to directly conserve water as well as indirectly. Energy production isn’t just a matter of petroleum, you know. Water plays a significant role. Everything every ordinary person can do to reduce energy consumption and water utilisation is worth doing. Year by year, the world goes into “ecological debt” sooner and sooner. I once heard it speculated that the next global conflict would not be over land or oil but water, and even considering the present conflicts in the Middle East, there’s a good deal of truth in it. Who controls the Jordan, who controls the Tigris and Euphrates? Major sources of fresh water in specific regions of desert, and the nations in conflict with one another and themselves. Will Tasmanian exports do the trick?

This Has Been a Test . . . in the Event of a Real Emergency. . . .
We’ve known that North Korea had nukes for a long time now, so the test they conducted shouldn’t be a surprise, any more so than their previous ballistic missile attempt. Everybody treats North Korea like they’re the village idiots: unpredictable, probably dangerous, but not terribly bright. A recent Robert Kaplan article in the Atlantic Monthly outlines why that kind of thinking is what’s dangerous about North Korea and takes a more forward-looking view of the eventual, inevitable collapse of the Pyongyang regime. Validation of their nuclear capacity does make the situation more immediate to the world, if no more destablising to the region than Pakistan and India trading tests was not so long ago. China does need to take more of a hand than they’ve been seen to do up to now, but in the end, North Korea seems less likely to launch a war than to leverage foreign aid and an increased period for the Kim family to hold power. We should, however, keep our heads as we work out what to do in response to the test. North Korean claims must be assessed with as much accuracy as possible. Already there appear to be reports that seismology reports are conflicting. While that doesn’t make the prospect of their atomic weapons capacity any less, it does raise some interesting questions about their claims in general and in some specifics. Was it a “neutron” device, designed for high radioactivity and a lower blast, for example.

Wringing It
O.k., so, not in the air. It seems somebody gained a day instead of losing one, and that, along with perhaps some additional math problems, have left the parental units still at home, peacefully regarding their impending departure, while I paced the bloody airport wondering what Qantas had done with my parents. No harm done, of course, as luckily the itinerary we'd planned for them had some flex. I guess I might as well go to the office tomorrow and finish one or two things I'd put on hold.

Winging It
Mom and Dad are in the air and on their way to Sydney. For Mom, it's her second trip, but Dad's coming because her first trip sounded good enough to endure the 20+ hours in the arms of Qantas. Plus, he can't let her have done a Bridge Climb and not have done it himself, so I'll be on my third go. It's a lot of fun, and I never remember the answers to any of the quizzes. Is it a million rivets or ten million? (I don't think the Bridge Climb staff really know, either.) There are a few things they have to see and I hope we can make them happen: a platypus (or platypussery, anyway), a kookaburra, and, of course, kangaroos in the wild. You can't come to Australia and settle for zoo 'roos, can you?

Let Loose the Dogs of Culture War
Earlier this week, Prime Minister John Howard gave a little speech commemorating the start-up of Quadrant, a dull, vapid opinion journal dedicated to the proposition that conservative values are only those that serve a reactionary agenda and in full opposition to any suggestion of merit in more inclusive government policies because those are only ever communism and we know about Joseph Stalin, don’t we? Now, while it’s true that from the time of the Soviet revolution and on into the ‘fifties and ‘sixites, many far-left opinions were supportive of a regime that didn’t deserve support, that ignores other, more majority-representative opinions on the left, that the arms race, for example, endangered us all, or that a policy of open engagement rather than punitive sanctions and sphere-of-influence interventionism would better (or at least equally) serve to bring about positive change in Eastern Europe, as Gorbachev’s own policies toward the end of the Cold War proved. But never mind all that, because it’s too late. School funding, Mr. Howard not long ago proposed, should be based on schools having a flagpole and flying the national flag. And teachers are evil ideologues because they oppose Mr. Howard’s policies towards the elimination of the social safety net and the gutting of Medicare. Socialist policies from a previous government driven from office by its inability to get a budget passed to pay for it, and socialism is really just communism that’s been run through the wash. And universities are hotbeds of communism, all those Red professors with tenure left over from that now discredited era still peddling their pernicious ideas like “think for yourself” and equality for women and homosexuals and ethnic minorities. Even worse, some people have the unmitigated gall to suggest that we ought to consider the institutional abuses of the past as wrong, that we should apologize for them – because they didn’t really happen, as has been proven by revisionist historians (on the basis of incorrectly cited footnotes in the work of a few other historians claiming such abuses did indeed happen). So the Minister for Education, Julie Bishop, now proposes that the Federal government should take the responsibility for setting the basic educational curriculum away from the states and territories. Really, it’s all part of Mr. Howard’s strategy to eliminate federalism in Australia, which is a petulant reaction to the fact that the states and territories are governed by the opposition party. That there are – if there are – first-year law students taking remedial English (and if that’s due to some failure from their primary or secondary school years) – is not a result of ideological pedantry “straight from Chairman Mao”, as anyone familiar with the educational system can tell you, but that the system is overwhelmed, insufficiently funded, and as a result allowing kids to slip through. It’s not the curriculum, and it’s not the teachers, it’s the system, as we lefties have often had cause to point out, and unless the system is fixed, it will continue to happen. It doesn’t matter if you teach revisionist history or accurate history, whether you teach British literature or internationally sourced books, or even if same-sex parenting gets a look-in on Playschool: if the system can’t supply sufficient funding so that students get the support they need, kids will continue to progress without learning. Better pay for teachers, and not fatuous merit schemes, and more school funding (so that teachers aren’t paying for supplies from their own pockets, for one thing), would do more to attract better teachers and to keep them in the system, first of all. More and better teachers would allow more and better attention to the children. Let’s stop pretending that the curriculum is controlled by the politics of individual teachers, when what you really object to is the governments running the schools. More dog-whistle politics, whipping up the forces of division.

Abuse
Mark Foley has plenty to be ashamed of, apparently, including his lawyer, who is now offering his client’s own history of childhood abuse and sexual orientation as something like an excuse. Frankly, the latter is largely irrelevant, except in which pages would have been subjected to harassment, and the latter is only relevant insofar as it underscores why such abuse is so serious. It seems, however, that Rep. Foley wasn’t so much a perpetrator of abuse as just a creep, although that doesn’t make his actions any less improper or potentially harassing. And there’s the real issue to be addressed.

Guidelines for addressing sexual harassment are well-established in the States at this point. Most large businesses (and many small ones) have set forth policies and procedures for handling complaints, and they’re based on laws and regulations and court case precedents and EEOC-issued policy papers. For any Federal government body to fail in its duty is indicative of a serious failure of oversight. It was bad enough that we had the embarrassing admissions of the Lewinsky affair, but there’s considerable room in that incident for it to have been a matter of censure rather than a full-blown case of workplace harassment. No such leeway is evident here, particularly in the actions of the Speaker of the House.

If it’s true that he knew of Foley’s actions in 2005 and did nothing, then he would be at fault, just as liable to redress as Foley himself. Although Congresspersons are essentially independent contractors, that they identify with a party and work therein according to party directives and discipline under the supervision of the Speaker makes them functionally employees, and their employers have a responsibility hierarchically to ensure they act according to ethical standards.

Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert will have violated those ethics by failing to take the matter with due seriousness to the same degree and in the same kind as Foley’s actions have done. He should step down immediately pending the outcome of a properly conducted DOJ investigation.

Colossus
Independent bookstores struggle, and it’s no surprise. But for all the convenience of and discounts from the on-line retailers, sometimes a bookstore is the only way to get what you want, especially if what you want is the experience of searching for an unspecified something to read, or, as the soon-to-close Coliseum Books did for me, when you need something that only an overstuffed store will allow to stay on its shelf. That’s how I ended up with a complete set of the Martin Beck mysteries years after I’d first encountered >The Laughing Policeman. It was also my bookstore, while the rest of my NYC family had Scribners or Brentano’s or (before it was a chain) Barnes & Noble. My first job in the city was just a couple of blocks away, so I spent many more lunch hours there than was good for my take-home pay. I’m sorry their shutting up, and I’m sure there will be others who are, too.

Despicable
The new torture laws passed by the Senate will surely go down in history as one of the most heinous acts of legislation ever perpetrated by the United States. The 12 Democrats who voted in favor of the new law are bedwetters and don’t deserve their seats.

Carper – Delaware
Liberman (of course) – Connecticut
Lautenberg – New Jersey
Landrieu – Louisiana
Johnson – South Dakota
Menendez - New Jersey
Nelson – Florida
Nelson – Nebraska
Pryor – Arkansas
Rockefeller – West Virginia
Salazar – Colorado
Stabenow – Michigan

I’d vote for a Republican before I’d vote for any of these fools, but only Lieberman, Carper, Menendez, the Nelsons, and Stabenow are up for re-election in the mid-terms. Now that Lieberman’s running as an Independent, Connecticut has the chance to vote Democratic anyway, but it’d be a shame to lose the other four seats, when we need to gain six to re-take the Senate. Nevertheless, if you’re in favor of torture, you’re no friend to America.

Webtools
Every now and then something comes up on the internet that makes me think: Wow. Map My Run may not be flying car-cool, but it is a terrific tool. I’ve just had a go at mapping a couple of areas here in Sydney, one being the Parramatta Park Runners Club route, and I’m so impressed that I may spend altogether too much time planning out training runs. (If any of my job prospects come through – and they’d better do it soon – this could be a great resource for working out distances for lunch hour programs.) But the coolest feature of all is the Play feature, using Google Earth (which, if you haven’t downloaded it yet, you should), which tilts the map about a third or so and navigates along your plotted course, beginning to end, displaying the satellite images along the way. Genius.

Thirty Years Gone
Back at the Bicentennial I left behind that supposedly experientially iconic condition: High School. “Supposedly,” because it’s really only in certain boys’ lit and Hollywood output that it marks some magical coming-of-age transition, whereas real life isn’t often like that at all. Sure, some – and no small number – have high school as the end of schooling and thus their entry into adult life, but it’s reasonable to say that their passage will be more often fraught than not and of no less duration than for those going on to university and then moving into family and jobs and all such responsibility therein entailed. What’s still remarkable to me, however, is that anyone would bother me with an invitation to attend a reunion. The fact that I live now in Australia has nothing to do with my surprise, but that I had only a few friends, none of whom appear on the reunion committee list, and, if generally regarded at all, was probably generally regarded as a social waste of time, much as I saw my classmates, for that matter. Sure, they’re all “different” now, as am I, as the Counsellor pointed out in our email correspondence on the matter, but I’d contend that we’re also still likely to be very much the same people, carrying some of the same attitudes and behaviors we were forming then. High school was a trial, mostly, a torturous endurance test with just enough educational benefit to keep me from losing interest altogether. Once I left, I pretty much never saw or heard from any of the other 400+ classmates again, and have only ever occasionally wondered as to the fate of any of them. I’m certainly even less interested now. I have nothing in particular against the school I attended, the students, or even any of the teachers, or at least not much in that last category –some of them were at least trying to keep me and everyone else interested and were themselves fairly passionate about what they were teaching. Yes, there were some I’d rather not have had to contend with, but that’s true of people in my adult life since, so maybe it was good training. If nothing else, none of them left any scars as such, and the others left some worthwhile datum or another. And although I was graduated from one high school, my secondary education started at another institution, a boarding school I was asked to leave after one year, and they’re the ones with whom I credit the skills that carried me through a post-graduate tertiary degree. The study habits inculcated in me there, whether in rote-learning exercises or for more analytical applications, were trialled through more intensive testing than I’d spend the next three years having to contend with, and both the habits and the test-taking skills have proven their worth ever since. And while I never later met or even much thought of any of those classmates either, it’s less of a surprise, since they were drawn from a much broader geographic area than my graduating high school class, and if any of them successfully made it through the four years and the intended tertiary program thereafter, would have likely been spread even further yet (although not as far as this end of the earth). Few of them would have, and many would not be looking back there now, but whether the one school or the other, they can keep it.

Ministerial Mysteries
Does John Howard want to create a Ministry for Water? Maybe not yet; after all, while years of drought may mean we have a problem getting enough fresh water, there isn’t any problem with global warming, so the problem is sure to fix itself eventually.

But why be so cagey? Why is this such a bad idea? Water is a big issue here, and we’re likely to have to do something about it sooner rather than later. A ministry to see to the development of conservation and management on a federal level sounds like the kind of planning that would be worthwhile. Or should we wait until it’s time for a War on Water?

(Meanwhile, there had been some news reports that Bush was planning an announcement of a major turnaround on global warming policy, with speculation it was being done to disrupt a potential Gore candidacy in 2008. So what happened, did somebody convince him it would disrupt oil sales?)

Season Well
Maybe it’s one of those cases where I just don’t remember from year to year, but this seems to be the earliest bush fire season start since I got to this country, and it’s certainly been one hot, dry Spring. Yesterday, out on the awning cleaning the front windows, there was a distinct scent of fire in the air, and not that barbeque cooking smell or the pleasant odor of a woodfire in winter. With a fresh El Niño forming in the Pacific, this could be a very difficult summer. And still everybody mocks Al Gore.

What’s that Smell?
Let’s see: Bush makes a speech at the UN. Chavez follows with a speech where he calls Bush the devil and says the podium smells like sulphur. Customs detains Venezuela’s foreign minister at JFK on his way out of town but doesn’t have an explanation. Cause and effect? You decide.

Our Duty
Of course a deal was made, look at the participants. On one side, President Torqumada , and on the other Senators Warner, Graham, and – of course – McCain. “We did our duty,” says Warner, but their duty consists of backing down to Bush. It’s McCain, in the end, who most infuriates me. Here’s a man who knows what being a POW is about and what can happen if your captors are not bound by quaint treaties, like the Geneva Conventions. And yet he’s happy – again – to sign off on allowing secret overseas prisons and the use of abusive interrogation techniques – torture, in fact. McCain signed off because the legislation, as he previously waffled over, turns the responsibility onto the CIA, keeping the military out of it. That doesn’t really cut it, John. Do you think anyone on the other side cares if their people are being tortured by spies versus soldiers, or that having a soldier in their care they would act differently than if they captured a CIA agent? I think we already know the answer to that. To say that secret detention and torture are less reprehensible when conducted by or under the aegis of the CIA makes the agency separate from the rest of the government, leaves them out from under the cover and the legal requirements of the Constitution, and puts every American at risk, as if things weren’t bad enough already. Either the CIA is part of the federal government or it isn’t. McCain is serving a very narrow class of American by caving in on Bush’s legislation and dog-whistling to the Bush constituency. It’s craven, immoderate, self-serving politics, and it’s no surprise at all.

Inexpert Opinion
Judge Richard Posner of the 11th Circuit, is a well-respected jurist and well-received public commentator on matters of law, and has now weighed in on the limits of power under the Constitution in the so-called War on Terror™ in his book, >Not a Suicide Pact. But the latest review of his position suggests he’d have been better sticking to matters of administrative law or the economic analysis of law, his area of expertise, and given the outline of his arguments, I’d have to agree. Somehow I always expect senior jurists to come down in favor of a robust support for civil liberties, despite Scalia et al., but I guess that’s unrealistic. Is it Nixon’s fate that so weighs on the judge that he can’t see the validity of limits on Executive power? I wouldn’t have pegged him for a bedwetter, but if he’s that scared, maybe he should retire so he can stay home.

Another Velvet Morning
The Velvet Underground are often touted as both the best and the worst thing to ever happen to rock ‘n’ roll. (It’s also frequently said that everyone who ever heard the Velvets immediately went on to start a band of their own, part of “best thing,” maybe.) They’re not included in this list, although some far better examples of “worst things” are. I have to agree with number 25: tribute albums, in particular, with the possible exception of I’m Your Fan, the Leonard Cohen tribute, that has the best version of “Hallelujah” you’ll ever hear (in your face, Rufus Wainwright). O.k., M., yes, the >Jeff Buckley version is very good. The rock poet entry will be somewhat controversial at home, too.

Apologies & Retractions
So the pope makes a speech in which he makes some fairly insulting comments about Islam in the course of quoting some medieval bigot and has to apologize for causing offense. It takes him awhile to do it, too, initially relying on spokesmen and then having to come out himself and say he’s sorry. It wasn’t much of an apology, and it didn’t do a lot to calm anyone down, but the Muslims burning him in effigy and issuing fatwas and the like are a minority and should really consider whether they care so very much about what the leader of somebody else’s religion has to say about theirs. Whether or not the pope was really trying to make a point about an open dialogue between Roman Catholic Christianity and Islam – and it sounds like a stretch to me – or was name-calling or whatever, God or Allah or whatever deity you worship doesn’t need nuns murdered or street marches or anything else to defend it. However, Cardinal Pell doesn’t have to make things worse for his boss by essentially retracting the apology. There is a modern history of mass violence among Muslims that isn’t paralleled in the global Christian community and that ought to be addressed. Islam, doesn’t have the structures in place to achieve a Reformation or to broadly adjust matters of doctrine, but that doesn’t make it less necessary to do so. The fact that this religion is such an integral part of the identities of its adherents culturally, the single defining element of the lives of millions upon millions who are otherwise entirely distinct from one another, and that Islam has essentially mired itself into a nearly unreformable static condition, in no small part by making Arabic the language of God, also seems to make Muslims rather sensitive to the interpretations of others, and those others might want to take that into account in making public pronouncements. We would all, indeed, do better with an open dialogue between the factions, but that doesn’t preclude being polite.