Resign or Be Prosecuted: How Quaint
Never forget that Alberto Gonzales is the man who drafted the legal opinion that authorized torture. He should never have been allowed to resign. He should have been impeached. I hope, however, that he managed to put some money aside for retirement: anyone who hires him will be revealing their own moral deficiencies in doing so.

Who Wrote These Questions?
In the sample 20 (of 200 possible) questions for prospective citizens, I’d do pretty well, but I truly wonder about the phrasing. Look at question 5, for example, “What is the floral emblem of Australia?” Floral emblem? You mean “national flower,” maybe? Who talks like that? Question 7 reads “In what city is the Parliament House of the Commonwealth Parliament located?” What pedant wrote that? Q17: “In Autralia, everyone is free to practice the religion of their choice, or practice no religion: true or false?” How does one practice no religion, watching football on t.v. instead of going to church? Maybe being able to parse the questions is part of the test.

Whose Sky Is It?
Sydney residents will be issued black-out glasses during APEC to ensure they cannot watch the fireworks display, exclusive to attending delegates.

Hosed
During APEC, in addition to a fence, nearly 3 meters high, surrounding parts of the CBD (and including some of the major tourist attractions of the city), police will be equipped with a water cannon and busses converted to serve as mobile detention centers. Security is a concern, naturally enough, and it’s important for the police to be prepared. It’s a little suspect, civil liberties-wise, that 200 beds are to be freed up in local jails by allowing some criminals home detention. This suggests the expectation of mass arrests beyond mere readiness, and the arguments in favor currently popping up on blogs always hark back to previous protests where “black hat” activists have turned up to derail otherwise peaceful protests. The presence of George Bush and the “globalization” agenda of the conference are nearly certain to ensure some disruption.

Those justifying such police-state interventions, however, are often the same self-styled libertarians decrying the “nanny state.” Of course, what they mean is only that they object to being taxed and seeing that money spent on poverty relief. The diminishment of civil rights is far more concerning to those less selfish.

Over the decades of my life, there has been an eruption of personal freedom, but also a concerted effort by reactionaries and power-seekers to reverse the trend. At the Munich Olympics, in 1972, global terrorism made itself most pointedly felt, and for some years, planes seemed to be hijacked quite regularly, yet we were never made to feel such fear so thoroughly as we are now being bullhorned into. Such measures as are being enacted in NSW serve to add to irrational anxiety, as well as to add one more and one more and one more cut to the thousand-cuts death democratic societies the world over seem to be suffering.

Christopher Hitchens had a piece in Slate not long ago, talking about “Rage Boy,” the iconic face of Islamic anti-Western protest. He makes a good point. “Rage Boy” doesn’t scare me, but he does scare others, a lot of others, and it’s become typical to respond to that fear by figuratively locking up the women and children and valuables, i.e., giving the police the power of indefinite detention, reducing the right of suspects to legal representation, authorise warrantless wiretapping without judicial review, and, as in Sydney, for September 7-10, removing the presumption of bail for anyone arrested in any police action around APEC.

This latter is not unlike what Bloomberg accomplished during the last Republican National Convention, and those cases are still clogging up the courts, as is likely to happen for any similar arrests here, two weeks from now.

It’s wrong to commit vandalism, and violence begets violence. McDonalds may be a symbol for some people of what’s wrong with capitalism, globalization, or the World Bank, if you can manage to stretch that far, but throwing a brick through the window of a franchise isn’t going to help you get your point across. Arresting 200 (or more) protestors, well, that does send a message: we’re in power; you’re not. Shouldn’t we be spreading freedom, instead of constantly trying to bury it? No wonder some many people in the Third World don’t trust our motives. We’re constantly betraying them.

Making Housing Affordable
The proposal to provide a tax deduction on first-home purchases isn’t bad, although Peter Costello thinks so. The problem with the Treasurer’s objection, however, is its short-sightedness. He claims that sales would be subject to capital gains as a result, but that isn’t necessarily so, since it’s entirely reasonable to impose a turnover time limit, whereby only sales occurring within the precluded period would be subject to taxation, and, like the tax deduction itself, apply the rule only to the primary residence.

I think there’s a lot more involved than tax deductions, but I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the idea.

Policing the Bardo
No reincarnation without authorisation. Or maybe China’s just worried you don’t need a passport to move the next Dalai Lama into the U.S.

Standardized Cool
School children across the country, both public and private, already wear uniforms, including hats, so why not sunglasses? Will the kids be able to pick out the style they want, with frames in the school colors, or will they be standard-issue models? Even then, uniforms vary in style from school-to-school, with the ritzier private schools kitting out the kiddies in straw boaters on the North Shore versus public school tykes in foreign-legion style headgear out west. Will the Wollstonecraft boys and girls get mirrored shades while the Windsor kids rely on non-polarised plastic from the chemist? I shouldn’t make fun; it’s a sensible thing to do. Most of us, by the time we’re adults, have already suffered some eye damage.

Dead Pool
First Tammy Faye Baker, now Leona Helmsley. Didn’t they cell together? Maybe Martha Stewart should be careful crossing streets for the next little while.

Own Goal
You might get away with it if you’re just a State pollie, or a Council member, and even then only if the press doesn’t have an issue with your performance, or your party’s for that matter, but once you’re in Canberra, I’d suggest not hitting the piss too hard when you’re on a junket, and especially, I’d recommend not going to any bar called ”Scores.” I suppose it’d be a simple enough error in judgment that would let you think it’s a sports bar, but that’s the same error that sees you going into a bar advertising “dancing” because you thought it might be a disco, instead of a topless dive. And offering “I’d had a lot to drink” as an excuse probably isn’t going to help you any more than “I called my wife as soon as I got back to the hotel.” Peter Costello’s assessment that his program would have been too full to have time to go out to ogle the girlies is fatuous wowserism, but I’m not at all surprised that the NY Post reporter, Col Allen, who warmed to Rudd so well, didn’t invite Pete for a similar excursion. Petey’s a dullard.

No Guests
Security is a natural enough concern, with so many international politicians coming to town, so I guess having the police check out your balcony for assassination sight-lines makes a little sense (but very little; common sense arguments abound). Still, can they really outlaw guests? Maybe I’ve been planning a big dinner party for the September 8-9 weekend, all my friends and relatives on their way, invitations sent, RSVP’s received, wine chilling in the fridge, deposit down with the caterer. . . . You’re really going to cancel my party? Are you worried a guest might bring an RPG? Play at Lee Harvey Oswald?

Inserting APEC into my living room is pushing the friendship.

(When Al Gore was visiting the 92nd Street Y, I had a phalanx of motorcycle cops sitting under my window for about two hours, running their engines, until the fumes were more than even I could stand - and I was a smoker back then. When I went out to complain, I was subsequently prevented from re-entering my building until Al had moved on. I got a very polite apology from the Secret Service in the end. And probably a case file.)

Graduation
Christopher Hitchens is right about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, but, as he also is, with tedious frequency, he’s wrong, although it’s largely a matter of his inability to simply enjoy something without reference to himself. I’ll give him make-up points, though, for not introducing any major spoilers.

The final volume was a lot of fun, although the camping did get dull. J. K. Rowling has considerable skill in weaving a compelling plot across 759 pages. I was up until 2 a.m. finishing the book, simply because, having reached a point where I felt I might put the book down, there was enough impetus to read on that I gave in at every turn.

Yes, much of the resolutions to difficult problems did end up being a little too Star Wars, Return of the Jedi for me, and I never did think much of Harry as a wizard per se, and Ron and Hermione are never much more than secondary characters at best, but none of it matters. The books did, in the end, what they always promised to do. It would have been easy enough for Rowling to have wrapped the whole thing up in one book, to move on to other literary efforts, but the conception of the 7-book series, to see HP through High School, essentially, puts a close to the adventures no other method could have achieved. Harry would not stand up in adult fiction, and we’ve seen every inch of his maturation. These may not be books I’ll ever go back to, but they’re vivid enough in detail to stick around anyway.

Records
Barry Bonds is the new king of baseball, home runs, anyway, but will his record come with an asterisk? When Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s record, for years all you heard was the dead ball/live ball debate. And when Roger Maris hit his 61-in-a-season, he really did end up with a footnote, because the season was longer in his day than it had been in Ruth’s day. What do we make of baseball’s pumped-up players, then? This year’s Tour de France saw drug scandals galore, toppling the leader just days before the end of the race, after all. Next year’s Beijing Olympics will surely raise the issue of China’s team-building practices again, although, admittedly, the focus there will be on what might be called “athlete farms.” The time will surely come when drug use and other, more or less risky practices come to be the norm. Already, professional-level sport performance is out of the question for the vast majority of us, so maybe it could be an equalizer. Just think of what some high-plateau training could do for your initial marathon entry, let alone a little blood-doping. Drugs and medical intervention techniques are extending our healthy lives well beyond what we might once expect, so it wouldn’t be anything really new, would it, if some 80-year-old grandpa took gold in the not-so-distant future.

More Money
Interest rates are up again, and everybody’s got something to say about it. Opposition leader, Kevin Rudd, Prime Ministerial hopeful, says PM Howard’s bluster over past high interest under Labor show’s he’s out of touch, unconcerned with the reality of the effects. But the PM, recently shown poll results characterizing him as dishonest and arrogant, rejects such criticism, as he does any criticism, for that matter. (Arrogant, moi? I reject that.)

Mortgages will be well up over 8% now, and likely to rise further still, perhaps even before the next election. Keep in mind, only the PM knows when that will be, but most people are tipping November. That’s about when the rates would be likely to rise, too, just in time for Labor to take over the government. If we’re headed for an economic downturn of any duration, let alone – and God forbid – a recession, the rates will go up even more under the next government, regardless of who’s in the Lodge.

If it’s Labor, it will cement their reputation for economic mismanagement and we can look forward to a swift return of the Liberals, and by that time, much of the present crop will have retired or at least been relegated to the back bench. While that itself might seem a good result, keep in mind that Mr. Howard has empowered the far right wing of his party, much as Reagan did in the States, so we’d be looking at a George W-style leadership coming to power.

Labor’s best hope to manage the economy is to act in consultation with the civil service, a practice Howard decided to abandon, in favor of his own brilliance. That’s why I feel a little leery over this latest 2.0 promotional effort from Rudd: Kevin 07. It’s a little “presidential,” don’t you think?

2.0
Yeah, yeah, I’ve got a Flickr account, and Googlepages, and a blog, and a Twitter profile, and, now, a Facebook entry, but to be honest, most of this stuff is just junk, a waste of ones and zeroes. Fickr’s o.k., if you want to sign up for a “professional” account and store all your photos online, but I hit the limit and haven’t had much cause to upgrade; I get more value out of Moo calling cards, but don’t want any calendars, stickers, or prints, and have no use for U.S. postage made from my photos. Twitter was fun for all of five minutes, but frankly, I’m not that busy, or too busy to be sending up 140-character updates with any frequency. And Googlepages offers little more than the kind of static “homepage” people were playing with back in the 1980’s, although I can see some measure of utility in setting up a “portal” to my various other Web 2.0 efforts.

There was so much fuss over Facebook lately, however, that I had to have a go, and now that I have, I can see it affords a level of interactivity that other applications don’t, but it’s all self-promotion, really, like piling up “adds” on MySpace. And the applications don’t work nearly as well as would make them of any substantial utility. I thought, for example, that the Visual Bookshelf feature would allow me to catalog my books, but there’s no organizational capability, and the “recommendations” feature keeps offering me books I’ve already added. Amazon must have that technology locked up.

I’ve heard that Facebook is being used or developed towards a more professional networking site, but the limits imposed so far prevent anything substantial being done. You’ve got to be a member of a group in order to join a group, unless it’s an open group, like “Australia”. Great. That’s helping.

Still, it’s keep up or fade into the Luddite past. Maybe I ought to get an iPhone. When they reach Australia next year.

Darfur Force
I can’t believe this didn’t make the front page of any of the on-line newspapers I read, but the UN is sending 26,000 troops to Sudan, at last. Everybody else is more concerned with Murdoch’s take-over of the Wall Street Journal. Now, China’s still managed to impose some use-of-force caveats, and the troops will only move if Sudan holds up on their end, and there’s still the composition of the forces to be managed, itself, I’m sure, a logistical nightmare, all the more so because the U.S. can’t be in much of a position to help out. But good on Gordon Brown for getting this started.

So Much for Happy Hour
I suppose there will be those who cry into their beer tomorrow. Perhaps I’ll stop for a schooner on the way home tonight.

A Win
Maybe George Bush should be put in charge of soccer in the U.S. – look what he did for Iraq. Or not.

No Cats on the Bed
So what does it mean if the cats want to curl up with you? It may not be a good sign. I’d figure there’s an element of learned behavior involved, as well as the more easily concluded sensory explanation. I can also imagine that some of the nursing home residents would be a little leery of sharing their bed with this cat.

Look, Up in the Sky
It’s a bird!
It’s a plane!
It’s a frog!

Not bird, nor plane, or even frog, it’s just little old me: Underdog.

I may wait for the DVD.

Debt Relief
Although personal debt is at all-time highs in Australia, and continuing to grow, the government sees the bright side: There’s $5 in assets for every $1 in debt, according to our PM (recently reckoned a very poor Treasurer, when he held the post, by his own Treasurer, Peter Costello; now we can see why). I’m sure it’s true, but I’m also sure that those assets consist largely of the home people are living in, the car they drive, and so forth. My net worth, on paper, has always exceeded my debt. That never meant that I didn’t struggle over bills.