Go Ahead, Be Stupid - It's Your Democratic Right!

CHRIS UHLMANN: On a personal level, were you expecting to see some signs of a turnaround in the polls by now?

TONY ABBOTT: I think it would be fair to say that you always tend to expect that good government will get a political pay-off, and so far that isn't happening. But I remain reasonably optimistic.

I mean obviously Chris, the public have a right to vote for whomsoever they wish, and they have a right - if they wish - to replace a good government with an inept Opposition. I mean, they have that right.

But nevertheless I guess I have always been pretty confident in the basic good sense of the Australian people. So we'll just keep going forward up to the election and hopefully beyond and see what happens.

(AM, 16 July 2007. My emphasis.)

Cross-posted at Larvatus Prodeo

Guns Don't Kill People - Doctors Kill People!

According to a comment at Club Troppo, doctors are a bigger threat to community safety than guns. And this, being the internet, the commenter, Phil, had the links to prove it.

First there was this report in The National Rupert Daily, "Hospital Bungles are Killing Scores":

AUSTRALIA'S first national report into serious mistakes in public hospitals has found at least 130 avoidable instances in which patients died or were put at serious risk.

Operations or investigations on the wrong patient, or the wrong body part, accounted for the biggest share of the mistakes, at 41 per cent of the 130 "sentinel events" recorded in 2004-05.

...

Stephen Bolsin, associate professor of patient safety at Victoria's Geelong Hospital, said there was no evidence hospital safety had improved since a landmark 1995 report showed that up to 8per cent of hospital patients would be the victim of a preventable mistake - and 10 per cent of these would cause permanent disability or death.

"Safety breaches in Australian healthcare are killing more people than breast cancer or road accidents," Associate Professor Bolsin said.

"But it doesn't get anything like the attention ... there's no evidence things have changed over the past 10 years."

I don't know the death rate from breast cancer, but it seems to me that Professor Bolkin is indulging in hyperbole when he says that the Australian healthcare system kills more people than road accidents. A quick check of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau's Road Deaths Australia: 2006 Statistical Summary reveals this fact:

In 2006, there were 1,601 persons killed in 1,456 road crashes. Comparing the number killed with the previous year, this was a 1.6% decrease (1,627 persons killed in 1,472 crashes).

So the comparative scores are: road traffic deaths - 1,601, patients killed or put at serious risk by the health system - 130. If Associate Professor Bolsin's claim is correct we still have around 1,500 iatrogenic deaths to account for.

Phil's other link is to this page at the Sporting Shooters' Association of Australia web-site, titled "Doctors: A Health Issue". Here you'll find plenty of reports and links on the health risks of health care.

There are plenty of adjectives to describe this sort of reporting. "Honest" and "truthful" aren't among them.

(Cross posted at Larvatus Prodeo)

More Discredited Documentary Links than You Can Possibly Stomach

Via the Oz Politics Blog Feed, and other sources, here's a quick round up of the responses from bloggers who're having a bit of trouble with getting their heads around the idea that Martin Durkin's mockumentary The Great Global Warming Swindle was just that - a swindle:

At The Daily Telegraph, Tim Blair reminds us that it's not just cold today in Wagga-Wagga, it's been a cold month across the whole of Australia:

Not that June should be presented as evidence that global warming isn't happening, or that we're causing it. Relying on such a tiny sample would be unscientific and wrong, even if it involves an entire freakin' continent's weather patterns throughout the course of a whole month, for Christ's sake.

No such foolishness will be indulged in here.

Sadly, those who believe in global warming - and who would compel us also to believe - aren't similarly constrained...

The rest of the column, predictably, is exactly the sort of foolishness Tim says he'll avoid.

Pommygranate is incensed that the ABC put so much effort into subverting Durkin's documentary and goes the out-of-context quote to suggest that his displeasure is shared by Carl Wunsch, the scientist who accused Durkin of misrepresenting his opinion:

He was furious with the ABC's decision to run the program, saying

"Anybody who tells you they know what is going to happen 20 years from now, 100 years from now, is not a good scientist. The science can only say, at this stage, that there are certain possibilities that we are aware of."

Well, err, quite, Carl. But isn't this the precise point the program was making?

Here's what Wunsch actually said, according to the ABC:

"Anybody who tells you they know what is going to happen 20 years from now, 100 years from now, is not a good scientist," he said.

"The science can only say, at this stage, that there are certain possibilities that we are aware of."

"They are possibilities that we think society should take very seriously and try and decide how it is going to deal with them if they come out."

Mr Wunsch has also criticised media organisations including the ABC for broadcasting the documentary.

"TV companies around the world are treating it as though it were a science documentary. It's not," he said.

"It's a contentious political propaganda piece, it's not a science film at all, it's a political statement." (emphasis added)

Finally, Steven Lloyd is angry that Tony Jones dared to challenge Durkin's claim that it's the sun stupid:

Tony Jones spent a lot of time hammering the filmmaker over leaving out the last 20 years on what was otherwise a compelling graph correlating global temperatures with solar activity. The 20 years left off of the graph, diverged completely, making it look bad for the filmmaker that he left it off.

The thing is, even with the last 20 years added in, the graph was still compelling. You don’t disregard the first 80% of a graph which correlates to a high percentage, just because the last 20% didn’t. Tony Jones would have us think exactly that.

No, Kevin - in science, when you find new data that doesn't fit your theory (or in this case Dorkin's belief) you don't ignore the new data - you look for a better theory. At least that's the kind of science they were teaching when I went through secondary school and university - if there's another kind of science where you throw away awkward data, I haven't heard of it. Unless it's economics, maybe.

The solar activity theory doesn't fit the new data - it's a dead theory. It is no more. It has ceased to be.

Well, that's enough of that - I've wasted enough time on irrelevancies for today. And in the long run, the opinions of Tim Blair, PommyGranate and Steven Lloyd aren't going to have any influence. The way things are looking they'll all be voting "1 - Loser" at the coming election.

It's about time John Howard read the writing on the wall and made that visit to the Governor-General, don't you think? Sure, he'd go down in history as the Prime Minister who led the Liberal Party into oblivion but, as a Burkean Conservative, you'd expect him to look to the interests of the nation and exercise his sovereign conscience accordingly.

Update: in the most ineffectual response to date, Diogenes Lamp fisks today's Age Letters and reminds us that global warming is also currently occuring on Mars and other planets. This also gives him the opportunity for a completely gratuitous demonstration that he's not afraid to be politically incorrect.

The Picture from Newspoll

There's a lot of controversy in the blogosphere this morning over the latest Newspoll results, and what they mean and alleged attempts by The National Rupert to monster one or two bloggers.

We can expect that part of the debate to get rather heated over the rest of the day, and well into the weekend and this will inevitably distract a lot of people from the poll results themselves and what they actually mean. Still it's possible that there are a few readers out there who are level-headed enough to be interested in taking a look at the actual poll results and the data analysis, before they weigh into the debate.

Figure 1: Newspoll data as presented to Newspoll's haruspicers (source: six-month old goat).

Figure 2: Data analysis. Key:

1. Kevin Rudd's approval rating. Consistent with past Newspoll findings - and the findings of other polling organisations - this appears to be above that of John Howard.


2. John Howard's approval rating. Note that a large portion of John Howard's approval rating is in fact obscured by Kevin Rudd's approval rating.


3. Bob Brown's approval rating. This is clearly much smaller than either John Howard's or Kevin Rudd's.


4. The ALP's current primary vote.


5. The coalition's primary vote. Once again, the ALP's primary vote appears to be above the coalition's primary vote, obscuring the actual size of the latter.


6. Stuff that will have to be dissected away when the next Newspoll is conducted to get a clearer picture of the real situation.

I don't think there's really any more that needs to be said on the subject - now that you've seen the pictures for yourself, the situation ought to be very clear to everyone.

Good News, Bad News

This might be good news:

$3975.00The Cadaver Calculator - Find out how much your body is worth
But with the big global zombie apocalypse scare due before the next federal election, this is seriously bad:

50%

Ands a zombie apocalypse would pretty much wipe out the value of my one significant (but seriously illiquid) asset too. Complete bummer.

Exclusive: Government Reveals New Weapon in War on Bad Things

The Government's intervention in Northern Territory indigenous communities took a dramatic new turn today, when the previously secret Special Dominatrix Service (picture) arrived at Mutitjulu.

SDS commander Major Ilsa Vixen explained the Service's role in the intervention to a media conference: "There are some very bad, naughty boys and girls in this community and they deserve to be punished. Mainstream Australia wants to see them punished. We're here to make that happen."

Each member of the SDS will operate in a special, Australian developed, portable dungeon, equipped with an extensive range of whips, chains, paddles, clamps and stuff you really don't want to know about. The dungeons also have several strategically placed web-cams and broadband internet capabilities, via satellite.

For Major Vixen and the other members of the SDS, this is only the start of a long mission. "There are plenty of other people in this country who deserve to feel more pain," she remarked "Well now we're around to inflict that pain."

Decoupage

Societies which seem to us ferocious may turn out, when examined from another point of view, to have their humane and benevolent sides. Take the Plains Insdians of North America: they are doubly significant - first because some of them practised a moderated form of cannibalism, and second because they are one of the few primitive peoples who were endowed with an organized police force. This force, which also had to mete out justice, would never have imagined that the punishments accorded to the guilty could take the form of severing all social links. An Indian who broke the laws of his tribe would be sentenced to the destruction of all his belongings - his tent and his horses. But at the same time the police became indebted to him for the harm he had been made to suffer. This restitution put the criminal, once again, in debt to the group ... Not only are such customs more humane than our own, they are more coherent, even if we are to formulate the problem in terms of modern psychology. It would seem logical that in return for the 'infantilization' of the guilty man that is implied in the notion of punishment, we should acknowledge that he is entitled to gratification of some sort. If this is not done, the initial step loses its effectiveness and may even bring about results directly contrary to those hoped for in the first palce. The summit of absurdity in this context is to do as we do and treat the guilty simultaneously as children, in that they are meet for punishment, and as grown-ups, in that we refuse them all subsequent consolation. It is grotesque to believe that we have made a 'great spiritual advance' simply because, instead of eating our fellow human beings, we prefer to mutilate them, both physically and morally.

Claude Levi-Strauss, "A Little Glass of Rum" (Triste Tropiques, translated as A World on the Wane, 1961).

Now and again, things happen that remind me of that particular passage and I get to thinking about the way individuals and entire sections of the community are treated as children, yet expected to behave as adults. The obvious motivation for this post is the Howard government's current exercise in conspicuous punishment of aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory.

Now go read this post by David Coles at Club Troppo.

(Cross posted at Larvatus Prodeo)

Proctalgia, and Sundry other Pains

aerodontalgia - toothache caused by atmospheric decompression (for example in high altitude flying).
arthralgia - pain in one or more joints.
cardialgia - (1) heartburn; (2) pain in the heart.
causalgia - constant burning pain due to peripheral nerve damage.
cephalalgia - headache.
cephalgia - headache.
coxalgia - pain in the hip.
cranialgia - pain occurring within the skull; headache.
enteralgia - pain in the intestines.
erythromelalgia - hot skin rash with burning pain. Usually in the feet.
fibromyalgia - chronic widespread pain with tenderness and muscle stiffness.
gastralgia - pain in the stomach.
hypalgia - hypalgesia, i.e. diminished sensitivity to pain.
ischalgia - pain in the hip.
mastalgia - mastodynia, i.e. pain in the breast. Not often observed in men.
meralgia - pain in the thigh.
metatarsalgia - burning pain below and between the metatarsals where they join the toe bones.
myalgia - pain in one or more muscles.
nephralgia - pain in a kidney.
neuralgia - acute, paroxysmal pain along one or more undamaged nerves.
nostalgia - homesickness; sentimental yearning for the past.
odontalgia - toothache.
otalgia - earache.
polyarthralgia - pain in two or more joints.
polymyalgia - myalgia affecting several muscle groups.
proctalgia - sharp pain of the kind caused by blog posts like this.
psychalgia - mental distress.
veisalgia - sober medical term for a hangover.

Sources: Merriam-Webster OnLine, MedicineNet.com

Mr Burke's Unpleasant Surprise

Edmund Burke - the senior patron saint of Australian Liberalism (but not liberalism) - was first elected to Parliament as the Member for Wendover in 1765. By modern Australian standards he wouldn't be regarded as a democratically elected Member of Parliament - they did things very differently in 18th Century England. Wendover was the next best thing to a rotten borough - a pocket burrough, in the pocket of one Lord Verney, who condescended to accept Burke as his representative in Parliament.

In 1774 Lord Verney informed Burke that he couldn't stump up the readies to get Burke re-elected (in fact, Verney was so strapped for money that he sold the seat out from under Burke) so Burke quickly took himself off to Bristol where he contested a poll for the very first - and last - time in his parliamentary career. It was after winning this poll that he delivered his highly esteemed Speech to the Electors of Bristol where he thanked the electors for the favour that they had bestowed upon him, then went on to set them straight on the matter of "instructions" from electors to their Parliamentary representative:

Certainly, Gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a Representative, to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion high respect; their business unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and, above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But, his unbiassed opinion, his mature judgement, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you; to any man, or to any sett of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the Law and the Constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your Representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

That settled - to Mr Burke's satisfaction, if not the satisfaction of the electors - he took himself off to London as one of the two elected representatives of the freemen of Bristol. While there, he added several dilatory works to the Burke canon:

• Speech on Moving Resolutions for Conciliation with America, March 22, 1775


• Letter to the Sheriffs Of Bristol, on the Affairs of America, April 3, 1777


• Two Letters To Gentlemen Of Bristol, On The Bills Depending In Parliament Relative To The Trade Of Ireland, April 23 and May 2, 1778


• Speech on Presenting to the House Of Commons a Plan for the Better Security of the Independence of Parliament, and the Economical Reformation of the Civil And other Establishments, February 11, 1780

In September 1780 he returned to Bristol to stand for re-election and delivered two more speeches to the electors. In the first, the Speech at Bristol Previous to the Election, (September 6, 1780) he addressed sundry criticisms, from some of the electors, of his performance as their Representative. In the opening of his speech, Burke made his attitude to these criticisms plain:

If you call upon me, I shall solicit the favor of the city upon manly ground. I come before you with the plain confidence of an honest servant in the equity of a candid and discerning master. I come to claim your approbation, not to amuse you with vain apologies, or with professions still more vain and senseless. I have lived too long to be served by apologies, or to stand in need of them.

Having taken a firm stand on his dignity, Burke then answered his critics, starting with "my neglect of a due attention to my constituents, the not paying more frequent visits here". This charge, he considered quite unreasonable:

... I admit, there is a decorum and propriety in a member of Parliament's paying a respectful court to his constituents. If I were conscious to myself that pleasure, or dissipation, or low, unworthy occupations had detained me from personal attendance on you, I would readily admit my fault, and quietly submit to the penalty. But, Gentlemen, I live at an hundred miles' distance from Bristol; and at the end of a session I come to my own house, fatigued in body and in mind, to a little repose, and to a very little attention to my family and my private concerns. A visit to Bristol is always a sort of canvass, else it will do more harm than good. To pass from the toils of a session to the toils of a canvass is the furthest thing in the world from repose. I could hardly serve you as I have done, and court you too ...

Three days later, Burke delivered the second of his 1780 speeches to the Electors of Bristol - and presumably his last speech to those august gentlement - the Speech at Bristol on Declining the Poll, (September 9, 1780). By then it had become clear to Burke - from his own polling - that he had no chance of winning. Nonetheless he managed to put a brave face on it:

...I have not canvassed the whole of this city in form, but I have taken such a view of it as satisfies my own mind that your choice will not ultimately fall upon me. Your city, Gentlemen, is in a state of miserable distraction, and I am resolved to withdraw whatever share my pretensions may have had in its unhappy divisions...

Burke clearly learnt a little about the role of a Parliamentarian as a representative of his constituents from his Bristol experience - when he returned to Parliamentary life, it was as Member for Malton, a pocket borough first of Lord Rockingham's, then of Lord Fitzwilliam's. Presumably their lordships' demands upon Mr Burke's sovereign conscience and his precious leisure time were less onerous than those of the Electors of Bristol.

Toe in the Water

Oh, and the next two hours tripped by on rosy wings. Forget the hashed metaphor. She was ransacking the stores for Jim’s present.

O. Henry "The Gift of the Magi"

Like a tired actor who plays the same role over and over again, hamming it up each time, the leitmotif of the Left lacks a certain sparkle.

J. Albrechtsen "The Left Needs to get Real"

Forget the hashed simile. She was ransacking her brains for something clever to say.

Hiatus Time

A Short Post on Waking with a Hangover and the Sure and Certain Knowledge that You Made a Complete Ass of Yourself Last Night in Divers Ways

It's unpleasant.

"Swindle" - too Little, too Late?

David Tiley at Barista raises an interesting question in a post on The Great Global Warming Swindle:

I’ve been told by loyal ABC staff that “the debate is over” about Holocaust denial and no-one seriously supports it. So how do we decide when the climate debate is over? When I began to suggest that there is no trained consensus against Global Warming any more, I was told the Prime Minister didn’t believe in it.

Hmmm … that reflects his bob-each-way duplicity, in which he is dragged reluctantly to accept it but his government has actively funded anti GW programs for at least five years. He supports a Greenhouse Office, for crying out loud. (my emphasis)

One obvious thought that has a brief moment to cross your mind in the short pause between the two paragraphs is that John Howard is no climate scientist. It's unlikely that he believes that the Earth is flat, but if he did, his opinion wouldn't count for much if you were looking for a trained consensus on the shape of the Earth, its place in the solar system and all that jazz. So why should it matter to the ABC that the Prime Minister doesn't believe in global warming if his opinion is flat-out wrong?

From all the reading I've done on the subject, it appears that the debate over global warming in the scientific community is over - there's just too much evidence that global warming is happening and that the major cause is all the carbon dioxide we've put back into the atmosphere through a couple of centuries of burning fossil fuels while, at the same time, removing large parts of the ecosystem that take the stuff back out of the atmosphere. The existence of an Australian Greenhouse Office, the fact that John Howard finally shifted from "it ain't happening", via "we aren't going to stuff up the economy for a theory" to "clean coal and nuclear energy is the answer" are indications that the debate is over in politics.

The only place the debate does survive is in Newstralia, the parallel world inhabited by the punditariat of News Limited, News Limited bloggers and their fans in the blogosphere What are we hearing from that quarter?

Tim Blair is so burnt out on the subject global warming that he's writing complete nonsense, like this article in the Daily Terror (hat tip to John Surname at Grodscorp and this post, where Tim declares that he prefers the theory that global warming is caused by extra-terrestrials microwaving the Earth to anything Al Gore has to say on American politics. Does Tim actually believe that global warming is caused by a giant space alien who can balance a microwave oven on one hand and the Earth on another? Well, the theory gets us off the hook, so it must be worth taking a look at.

The prolific Andrew Bolt got a column and a later post out of the ABC's decision to screen The Great Global Warming Swindle before he got swept up by the deluge of bile that News pumped out on Therese Rein. His last post on Global Warming for the weekend was this weak effort - no new facts, no argument, just a quick snark at Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the US Congress for flying to Europe to discuss, among other things, global warming.

Some debate, eh? Seems to me that it really is over and science won. It's not exactly a victory for the Left though - there are still a few Leftists around who think global warming is a vast, global conspiracy against the working class. Even Tim and Andrew will recognise that for a delusion - how can an anti-capitalist conspiracy be a conspiracy atgainst the working class at the same time.

Whoops - maybe I shouldn't have said that. The buggers might get together and come to some bi-partisan agreement on the subject. That could be a real bugger to deal with.

Qu(ot)e?

Feminist women sometimes take the attitude that men just can't take being intellectually inferior to themselves.

Mark at OzConservative.

I know exactly what he means - I've been feeling intellectually inferior to myself all morning and it's not much fun at all. The only good part is that once in a while I get to feel intellectually superior to myself.

There is no evidence that Hicks committed an act of terrorism, though he received more terrorist training than almost any other white man.

Paul Kelly in The Oz.

Well, obviously he didn't mean it that way.

BALCAP!

Bullshit and Lies Create Awesome Possibilities

Here's a story you're not seeing at News Limited for some reason, although it's getting a big run at The Age, The SMH and The Brisbane Times. Plus The ABC.

The Industrial Relations Commission in Canberra is currently hearing a claim of unfair dismissal against the Federal Government. The claimant is Trent Smith - I first learnt of the case through the Hansard for the Senate Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade (parlinfo web permalink). I've been waiting since for the proverbial brown stuff to hit the proverbial rotating thing.

And now it has. You can find all the news that's fit to Google here. Enjoy.

(Cross-posted at Larvatus Prodeo).

Liberal Party Values

Big Kev says so.

(Cross posted at Larvatus Prodeo with bonus animation)

Cutting Edge Medical Research

Phenotypic differences between male physicians, surgeons, and film stars: comparative study

Debian Daze

I spent a lot of time - some might say far too much - over the weekend setting up Debian on my Linux Box. On the whole it was worth it, give or take one or two unwanted learning experiences. Thanks to one of those, I now know the definitive solution to the problem of getting the ESS AudioDrive 1868 sound card working first time, every time under Debian 4.0r - you add the following line to your /etc/modules file:

snd-es18xx

Do that, and the sound driver loads at boot time, no questions asked. Simple really. I found that solution on a Ubuntu bulletin board, naturally enough.

So here I sit, with everything more or less hunky-dory, thinking what do I want to do today? What shall I write about? Buggered if I know. I expect to get over that eventually - one of those handwritten to-do lists will probably help. Once you get them up to about twenty items, the impulse to put it all off until tomorrow and write a post instead becomes irresistible. The other alternative is to dive back in,put myself through another learning experience and find a way to sort out this mess:



Update: I've just taken a look at the Free Desktop Menu Standard and the Free Desktop Entry Specification and cleaning up the menu looks a bit much, for today at least. Maybe I'll just join one of the on-line Linux forums and make a pest of myself until someone else comes up with a solution.

Word of the Day: Emerods

It's King Jameslish for "haemorrhoids". They're mentioned in the Old Testament three times.

The first mention of emerods is in Deuteronomy 28, where Moses spells out the dire consequences that will befall the Israelites if they did not keep The Lord's commandments:

15 But it shall come to pass, if thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of the LORD thy God, to observe to do all his commandments and his statutes which I command thee this day; that all these curses shall come upon thee, and overtake thee:
16 Cursed shalt thou be in the city, and cursed shalt thou be in the field.
...
27 The LORD will smite thee with the botch of Egypt, and with the emerods, and with the scab, and with the itch, whereof thou canst not be healed.

There's an impressive list of other curses between verses 16 and 27 - and an equally impressive list of curses to follow, starting with "madness, and blindness, and astonishment of heart". Madness and blindness are pretty serious shit, so it seems reasonable to infer that emerods, and the other curses listed in verse 27 are fairly dire divine punishments - more so than the pestilence which heads up the list (at verse 21 - verses 17 to 20 specify where and when the curses will apply).

Emerods are next mentioned - twice - in the first book of Samuel. Chapter 5 describes how the Philistines captured the Ark of the Covenant and placed it in the temple of their god, Dagon in Ashdod. This brought upon the inhabitants of Ashdod the wrath of the lord:

6 But the hand of the LORD was heavy upon them of Ashdod, and he destroyed them, and smote them with emerods, even Ashdod and the coasts thereof.
7 And when the men of Ashdod saw that it was so, they said, The ark of the God of Israel shall not abide with us: for his hand is sore upon us, and upon Dagon our god.

The Ark was transferred to Gath where:

... the hand of the LORD was against the city with a very great destruction: and he smote the men of the city, both small and great, and they had emerods in their secret parts.

Naturally, the citizens of Gath decided that they didn't want the Ark in their city, so it was sent on to Ekron, where:

... there was a deadly destruction throughout all the city; the hand of God was very heavy there.
12 And the men that died not were smitten with the emerods: and the cry of the city went up to heaven.

In Chapter 6, the Philistines decide to rid themselves of the Ark, in the hope that The Lord will stop piling on the punishments. However the return of the Ark, in itself, was judged insufficient:

2 And the Philistines called for the priests and the diviners, saying, What shall we do to the ark of the LORD? tell us wherewith we shall send it to his place.
3 And they said, If ye send away the ark of the God of Israel, send it not empty; but in any wise return him a trespass offering: then ye shall be healed, and it shall be known to you why his hand is not removed from you.
4 Then said they, What shall be the trespass offering which we shall return to him? They answered, Five golden emerods, and five golden mice, according to the number of the lords of the Philistines: for one plague was on you all, and on your lords.
5 Wherefore ye shall make images of your emerods, and images of your mice that mar the land; and ye shall give glory unto the God of Israel: peradventure he will lighten his hand from off you, and from off your gods, and from off your land.

Once the images of the emerods and mice were made they were to be placed in a coffer and taken, with the Ark, on a cart drawn by two milk cows to Beth-Shemesh. This suggests that the images of the emerods, at least, were not life size (if they were they would hardly have made much of an offering) but scaled up to some degree. And likewise, no doubt the mice.

In the New Testament there are several accounts of Jesus performing remarkable cures - on a dead man, a lunatic and sundry lepers. I can't recall ever hearing, or reading, that he ever cured a man stricken with the emerods. If I were a Bible-believing Christian, with emerods, I'd be a little concerned about that.

Hat tip to Voltaire, for the story of the golden images.

Not Suitable For Royalists

AN American photographer famed for showing celebrities naked or bathing in asses' milk chose a more traditional pose for Britain's Queen Elizabeth, but Annie Leibovitz's new work sharply divided critics today...

Washington Post culture critic Henry Allen was not amused, complaining that the portrait of the monarch sitting in the White Drawing Room at Buckingham Palace had "all the personality of a marble bust of George Washington." (News Limited)

Others were quite happy with the portrait's traditionalism. Not me - I agree with Henry Allen - we're entitled to expect something a little more exciting from Leibovitz. Something like this, maybe:

Denial of Service

According to the ABC:

Internet registration for the Do Not Call Register starts today, with companies banned from phoning people on the list from the end of the month.

...

Communications Minister Helen Coonan expects Australians will want to register up to 1 million phone numbers in the first week.

I had a quick word with Zeppo Bakunin about registering our phone number with the register - he told me that he'd already registered his parents' phone - on-line - a couple of months ago. But he'd forgotten whether our number was registered.

So I decided to check. Here's a screen shot of my browser, connected to the Do Not Call register home page. It was taken at 9:54am today.

That's one hell of an achievement for Helen Coonan - she's probably the first Communications Minister, anywhere in the world, to organise - however inadvertently - a denial of service attack on one of her government's own web-sites.

Cross posted at Larvatus Prodeo.

Starry, starry, sleepless night

Values

Sledgebot

Too Lazy to Cross-Post...

...this piece on Voltaire at Larvatus Prodeo.

Mr Burke's Acclaimed Cherry

We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.

(Edmund Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution)

If you do a quick Google Search for “Edmund-Burke +own-private-stock-of-reason”, you'll find plenty of web pages where that comment on the English attitude to reason is quoted. A few bloggers seem taken with it too. And why not? It's such a fine, juicy looking cherry and always looks ripe for the picking. It has a certain plausibility too, once you get past the distracting metaphor. No wonder that it's considered a good decoration for conservative confections.

What Burke appears to be saying is that no individual is a perfect reasoner – a reasonable enough proposition – and therefore, in making political decisions, we ought to have regard to past practice – tradition – which represents the accumulated wisdom of centuries. That's how Australia's own Owen Harries, presents Burke's remark in a 2003 article published at The American Conservative:

If the complexity of society and the political order was one reason Burke feared radical and rapid change, a second and just as powerful reason was his reservation about the proposed engine of change: the role of reason in human affairs. Burke rejected the Enlightenment view of man as a predominantly rational, calculating, logical being. His rational side exists, but it is a small part of his total make-up. “We are afraid,” said Burke, “to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small” Habit, instinct, custom, faith, reverence, prejudice—the accumulated practical knowledge acquired through experience, all this was more important than abstract reasoning. Collectively, and for better or worse, it constituted man’s nature. (my emphasis)

Kudos to Harries for at least mentioning prejudice in that emphasised sentence, although it does occupy last place in a list of its more respectable relatives. What Harries glosses over here is Burke's very explicit preference for prejudice over reason (others don't gloss over this and even more kudos to them). This isn't an isolated example, but it shouldn't be taken as typical of Harries, or Burkean conservatives in general.

We'll come back to that point later. First, let's take a look at the rest of the bunch that Burke's much prized cherry came from:

You see, Sir, that in this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess, that we are generally men of untaught feelings; that instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted, and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages. Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them. If they find what they seek, and they seldom fail, they think it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice, and to leave nothing but the naked reason; because prejudice, with its reason, has a motive to give action to that reason, and an affection which will give it permanence. Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, sceptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man’s virtue his habit; and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature.

Your literary men, and your politicians, and so do the whole clan of the enlightened among us, essentially differ in these points. They have no respect for the wisdom of others; but they pay it off by a very full measure of confidence in their own... (my emphases)

I'm particularly taken with this bit of the passage:

Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them. If they find what they seek, and they seldom fail...

At first, I thought that last remark – the declaration that England's men of speculation seldom failed when they went looking for the latent wisdom in general prejudices – might have satiric intent. It does sound a bit sardonic, but Burke is absolutely in earnest. He really does prefer prejudice over reason, to the extent that his “Reflections” are more of a long rant, worthy of any modern day RWDB. In the course of this rant, Burke vents quite a few general prejudices that he cherishes to a considerable degree – such as in this striking passage, where he bemoans the fact that they just don't make revolutionaries like they used to:

Other revolutions have been conducted by persons, who, whilst they attempted or affected changes in the commonwealth, sanctified their ambition by advancing the dignity of the people whose peace they troubled. They had long views. They aimed at the rule, not at the destruction, of their country. They were men of GREAT civil, and GREAT military talents, and if the terror, the ornament of their age. They were NOT like JEW BROKERS, contending with each other who could best remedy with FRAUDULENT circulation and depreciated paper the WRETCHEDNESS and RUIN brought on their country by their DEGENERATE councils.

These disturbers were not so much like men usurping power, as asserting their NATURAL PLACE in society. Their rising was to illuminate and beautify the world. Their conquest over their competitors was by outshining them... I do not say, that the virtues of such men were to be taken as a balance to their crimes; but they were some corrective to their effects... Such were your whole race of Guises, Condes, and Colignis. Such the Richelieus, who in more quiet times acted in the spirit of a civil war... your present confusion, like a palsy, has attacked the FOUNTAIN OF LIFE ITSELF. Every person in your country, in a situation to be actuated by a principle of honour, is disgraced and degraded... But this generation will quickly pass away. The next generation of the “nobility” will resemble the ARTIFICERS and CLOWNS, and MONEY-JOBBERS, USERERS, and JEWS, who will be always their fellows, sometimes their masters. (my shouting and scare quotes)

According to Burke, and his modern disciples, every one of the prejudices he displays here has, at its core, a “latent wisdom” that might be laid bare by a “man of speculation”. Burke's aversion to “money-jobbers, userers, and Jews” must be considered, from a Burkean viewpoint, as the sort of general prejudice that is beneficial to man and society. There are good grounds for supposing that it was, in Burke's time, a general prejudice – either that or Burke seriously misunderstood his readership and he was, by the standard of his own times as well as ours, a stupid bigot. But no-one wants to go there, surely?

Let's put that aside and, on Burke's behalf, state the question we would want a man of speculation to answer:

Why is it a good thing for decent Christian gentlemen to hold and even cherish a deep aversion to money-jobbers, userers, and Jews?

Fallacy twitchers will notice that a couple of prior question has been left begging in phrasing this question:

Is it a good thing for decent Christian gentlemen to hold and even cherish a deep aversion to money-jobbers, userers, and Jews? If so, for whom?

I propose to leave those two questions – important as you might think them – to their own devices and focus on the original question. If it's good enough for the acknowledged progenitor of modern conservatism, it's good enough for me.

A short answer to the Burke worthy question – one that avoids delving into the troublesome history of the Jews' position in English society – is that the commercial activities favoured by Jews – money jobbing and usury – are of a kind, that if unchecked, lead to a disorderly state of society. That's really all we need, but if we cared to press our hypothetical man of speculation, we might obtain a more detailed account of the kinds of disorder that money-jobbing and usury lead to. Personally, I wouldn't care to press that question.

Some might think this answer lacks a little depth but our task, as men of speculation is not to indulge ourselves – particularly not if we are inclined to the sort of dangerous curiosity that might lead to such inquiries as might explode the general prejudice against Jews – but to indulge Mr Burke. The truth (or truths) we might seek – perhaps through a study of the history of relations between Jewish money-jobbers and usurers, on the one hand, and Christian gentlemen on the other – are not what Mr Burke wants. Especially if our inquiries should lead us to conclude that, however conducive it may be to maintaining a particular social order (one, for example where low-born merchants know their place and don't amass fortunes greater than those of their social betters – the landed gentry and the clergy), it might be a little harsh on the Jews. Or, worse yet, that the social order that was served by this prejudice was a pretty rotten one. Would it be wise to impart such findings to Mr Burke and his fellow Christian gentlemen?

I think not – Mr Burke might take us for that most despicable of creatures, a man of enlightenment and respond accordingly. Worse, we place ourselves at risk of succumbing to a belief in democracy, a state of civil society that is not just disorderly, but downright unseemly:

A government of five hundred country attornies and obscure curates is not good for twenty-four millions of men, though it were chosen by eight and forty millions; nor is it the better for being guided by a dozen of persons of quality, who have betrayed their trust in order to obtain that power. At present, you seem in everything to have strayed out of the high road of nature. The property of France does not govern it.

(Cross posted at Larvatus Prodeo)

And One More Makes Ten

John Roskam, executive director of the Institue of Public Affairs, has produced an article about the ABC which appears in today's Age. It begins:

The Federal Government's new media laws came into effect last week - and the sky didn't fall in. Australians haven't been reduced to having only one newspaper to buy, and one television station to watch. In all likelihood, the practical changes produced by the laws will be minimal.

Did I read the rest? Yes I did, though I was strongly disinclined to. Roskam makes his own bias and his opinion of those who disagree with him - those who might answer "Not yet John, but give it time mate, give it time" - blatantly obvious. It's a good predictor of what he has to say about the ABC and the media in general and he doesn't disappoint.

It's not Roskam, or the IPA specifically, I've decided not to be buggered with - it's any writer (blogger or columnist) who opens a post or an article that way. It's boring. You want to convince me you've got something interesting to say? Don't start out by telling me my opinions are idiotic.

Ten, Sorry, Nine Things I Just Can't Be Buggered Posting About Right Now

1. Anything that Mirko "no punishment is enough for the violence perpetrated to the laws of logic by civil libertarians and lawyer groups who campaigned for [David Hicks] release" Bagaric gets published in the fish-wrappers. In matters of moral philosophy, this bloke isn't even a dilettante's bootstrap.


2. The sad fact that all the major dailies in Australia now fall into two categories - the sewer press and the "perched precariously on the edge of the kerb sliding towards the gutter" press. Stuff it.


3. The crap state of free-to-air television these days.


4. Anything published by that Peter Saunders bloke who works for the CIS.


5. Anything written by Keith Windschuttle. Like his latest article in Quadrant, where once again, he gets stuck into the shortcomings of academic historians. It reminds me of Orwell's remarks, in The Road to Wigan Pier on the "mistaken Communist tactic of sabotaging democracy, i.e. sawing off the branch you are sitting on..."
   
   I suppose it's possible that PP McGuiness' editorship of Quadrant is really the last step of "the Left's long march through the institutions" and that PeePee and Keith are part of some secret cabal using Quadrant as a vehicle to recruit "useful idiots". If that's their cunning little plan, I'd have to say they've well and truly screwed the pooch, run through the entire Karma Sutra with the family cat and it's time for the budgie and the kid's hamster to get nervous.


6. Anything else that gets published in Quadrant.


7. Anything Julie Bishop has to say on the subject of teachers.


8. Anything Kevin Donnelly has to say on the subject of education.
   
   When it comes to the "Education Wars" I'm going over the hill and I won't be back until I've caught up on Ivan Illich and that Summerhill bloke.


9. Bloody conservative bloggers and columnists. Zeppo Bakunin keeps telling me off for wasting my time with them - he reckons it's a complete waste of brainpower. When we have these discussions, I usually stump him by asking who, on the conservative side of commentary, he'd consider worthy of my attention.
   
   But he's right, damn it. John Ray (JR at a Western Heart) is so hard up for ideas these days that he's moved on from habitual self-plagiarism to plagiarising the words of other conservatives and using their ideas as a soapbox from which he can proclaim his own superior understanding of the Left. And the one or two conservative bloggers I have kept a casual eye on over the past year are on track to the same kind of self-caricature.

How long I'll feel this way tomorrow is anyone's guess. You could always run a sweepstakes on it, if you're so inclined.

Alternatively, someone might like to sponsor me to refrain from writing about these things at a dollar a day, with proceeds going to my favourite charity Medicins Sans Frontiers.

As an alternative to that, I'm prepared to consider the odd blogging challenge, assuming that we can come to some suitable financial arrangement that involves some, or all, of the readies going to the aforesaid organisation*. Now that's blogwhoring.

By the way, commenting is another matter entirely. Just thought it a good idea to make that quite clear.

* MSF's cut of any commission fee will be a minimum of $AUD 50. My cut will be a minimum of $AUD 0 and a maximum of $AUD 100 (in the unlikely event that the fee gets up around four figures - $100 being 10% of $1,000). I still have a few details to nut out. So hold your horses for a couple of days (that goes for the sponsored non-bloggingthing too).

Easter Wrap-Up, Like

So, 'ow were your Easter? Happily unproductive, I 'ope - gets a bit of a grind otherwise, d'n't it? All them responsibilities to't nation's economy an't state and national Ruperts goin' on at y'r about what y'r s'posed to think all't time.

I 'a'n't 'ad a bad weekend me sen. Got a new toy Thursd'y. 'T were hand-me-down Windows box. Managed to buy cheap, end-o'-line ADSL modem off web too. Wi' luck, that'll be delivered later in't week.

Meanwhile, I've divided me time, in roughly equal measure, between hookin' grunty new Windows box on't floor by' t desk to't grunty owd Linux box on't floor by't desk an' settin' round bein' an owd grumpy drawers. Give or take a couple o' times when I were a bit of a mardy pants about one o't' cock-ups that 'appened while I were workin' on't PCs like. Oh, an' I've wasted a bit o't time on th'Internet an' all, puttin' up blog posts.

Well, that's enough o' th'owd d'motic. I'll bet y'r reet sick of it be now.

There are no ratings over Easter - apparently - which means the free-to-air stations fill their schedules with repeats of old crap, rather than this year's brand new crap. So we had a chance to catch up on spooks and I got a chance - while comrade Bakunin was out of the house - to take a look at one of the two DVDs I was lent recently. If I can find a way to do some frame capture, there's at least one photoblog in the first DVD. If not, I'll have to tackle the subject another way.

As for old grumpy drawers, here - well, besides the crap TV situation, he had no shortage of things to moan about. You should hear him go on about "bloody Phillips head screws" and the crap design of PCs. From the outside they look boring - which is fine, there's nothing wrong with a plain looking, utilitarian machine. It's when you open the buggers up that you see the problem; on the inside, they're a lot like the steam traction engines of the nineteenth century. The latter were the topic of that second DVD. It's narrated by a steam traction engine buff. It was his comments on the way they were developed and improved that suggested the bizarre analogy.

And that's it for the enigmatic moustache twirling. I'll bugger off again now.

Among My Souvenirs

One of the things that Helga and I found while we were going through those boxes of old unwanted papers, was an old Herald banner that caught my eye one winter evening when I was walking to Flinders Street Station to catch the train home from work. The next day, on my morning break, I walked round to the newsagency where I'd seen it displayed, and asked if I could have it. The newsagent thought that was a bit of an odd request, but he was happy to hand it over.

I've just done a hunt around the house, to see if I brought it home with me - no luck, so it probably went into the recycle bin. A pity, that, because it's just occurred to me that it was quite a valuable bit of ephemera and might have brought a few readies in if I sold it on E-Bay. Here's a quick mock-up:

THE HERALD

HOW I ATE
MY FRIENDS!
VIETNAM
REFUGEE
TELLS

Thinking about it today, I got to wondering whether Muslims would be considered halal, or haram - and what about infidels?

Ten Things That Just Ain't Worth Reading About

1. What the typical man tells you the typical woman wants.
2. What the typical man tells you the typical woman should want.
3. What any individual man tells you the typical woman wants.
4. What any individual man tells you the typical woman should want.
5. What the typical woman tells you the typical woman wants.
6. What any individual woman tells you women should want.
7. What really inept sociological research tells you the typical woman wants.
8. What really inept sociological research tells you the typical woman should want.
9. What any credulously uncritical reader of inept sociological research tells you about what the typical woman wants.
10. What any credulously uncritical reader of inept sociological research tells you about what the typical woman should want.

The Great International Children's Cyber-Crusade for Better Ejukashun

On March 19, The Age reported on a campaign of "cyber-bullying" which drove the principal of Essex Heights Primary School in Melbourne's East out of her job. The campaign was conducted by a group of concerned parents on a now defunct web-site.

Expect more of this kind of shit. Thanks to a link at Harry Clarke's blog, I've just learnt of a web-site - operated out of the United States - that specialises in catering to students and parents who might feel the occasional urge to vent on their students. It's called "Rate My Teachers" and I'll be buggered if I'm going to link to it.

Harry notes the predictable opposition "of the dinosaurs in The Australian Education Union, such as Mary Bluett" to such on-line evaluations and an obvious flaw in the evaluation technique used on the site:

The comments ... are entirely unrepresentative - the 'squeaky wheels' are most likely to offer a view and indeed perhaps to repeat views by 'sock puppeting'.

Nonetheless he retains "some sympathy for this flawed evaluation technique":

I know from experience that incompetent teachers do maintain teaching positions for long periods in both schools and universities despite various internal, private evaluation procedures.

Reforms that retrain or replace incompetent teachers are overdue and would do away entirely with parents needing to rely on biased public websites to get information. (original emphasis)

When I try to extract the underlying logic of Harry's position, it looks something like this:

Reforms to education are badly needed and anything that pushes progress on such reform is OK by me;

This site will push progress on reforms to education ergo

This site is OK by me.

Here's where Harry and I part company - the site's not OK by me. Actually we parted company on this point back in my first paragraph; I'm just making a mealy-mouthed attempt to butter him up so that he might be persuaded by what I have to say in the rest of the post.

Reading the anonymous site operator's mission statement (on the site's About page) made it obvious that the problem of teacher incompetence is not exactly a new one - at least in Kern County, California, where any claims against the site must be filed. It's clear that whoever taught the author of the page English failed to impart a few essential writing skills, such as the basic art of paragraphing. The page opens with this disclaimer:

As the owners/operators of a website that allows the anonymous rating of teachers, we are frequently asked, "Why do you do this? Aren't you doing a disservice to teachers?" Our answer is a resounding NO...

Now that's where the first paragraph ought to end, according to what I learnt in high school English but it rambles on:

In the public discourse on improving education, we believe the most important voices are often ignored. For the first time in the history of public schools, the student is being heard, and parents can share their experiences in an open forum...

And on. You'll notice that the author isn't exactly a master of the art of making clear, succinct statements either - especially in the section of the page dealing with the site's purposes (the paragraph breaks in the next excerpt are mine):

RateMyTeachers started much like other new websites - by ordinary people with a vision for a better way of doing something. Thousands of student volunteers help keep the site going on a day by day basis.

The purpose of the site is threefold. First, it is to help facilitate a positive change in the way parents, students, and teachers alike look at the education system and therefore to encourage structural changes with regards to school and teacher choice.

Secondly, it is a place for students and parents to have their opinions validated. We all like to be heard, especially when it comes to life issues such as education... (my emphasis)

The first stated objective is just the sort of waffle you'd hear in a bullshit bingo session. That second is a doozy - the site is a place for students and parents to get their opinions validated? You can't see anything wrong with that - well neither did those parents with kids at Essex Heights Primary see anything wrong with setting up a web-site where they could all get together and validate their various low opinions of the new principal.

And the site's third purpose? It's to help the teachers, of course:

Lastly, RateMyTeachers is a useful resource to the teachers who are open and self-assured enough to face the opinions of their customers, i.e. students and parents.

And here's another failure in this wingnut's education: no-one ever told him what a mealy-mouthed little git he was. And so he remains today. The last paragraph of the "About" page has this helpful information for any teacher offended by what the site tells them about themselves:

Any disputes or claims must be filed in the State of California, County of Kern.

Rate My Teachers Australia - like Rate My Teachers Canada, Rate My Teachers Great Britain, Rate My Teachers New Zealand and Rate My Teachers India - is a subsidiary domain of Rate My Teachers US, where you'll also find an interesting "Legal" page and an FAQ page. The "Legal" page begins:

IF YOU ARE CONSIDERING A LAW SUIT, YOU REALLY SHOULD READ THIS PAGE!
Our users are anonymous. The Supreme Court of the United States has held that anonymity of speech is protected under the First Amendment to the Constitution (see McIntyre v. Ohio, 514 U.S. at 337; Talley v. State of California, 362 U.S. 60). United States courts also recognize the right to speak anonymously - AND have held that the right extends to speech on the Internet. When courts have ordered disclosure of the name of an anonymous user, a litigant must show that its need for identifying information outweighs the user's constitutional right. RateMyTeachers.com recognizes this right to anonymity.

That is, don't even bother filing any claims in the State of California, County of Kern - you won't win.

So, what's the site really about? Here's one clue - each page is chocka with advertising. Here's another - the domain has a named advertisement server. And here's another from the FAQ:

I know a business that I think would like to advertise on the site. Are you interested?
Of course!!! Contact us and we will discuss our rates for banner ads and sponsorship opportunities.

And here's a FAQ that tells you just how serious the site operators are about those three lofty purposes they listed on the "About" page:

Who can rate? Is it limited to students?
We prefer you only rate teachers of whom you have first-hand knowledge. It is not possible to verify that a rater had a particular teacher, so use caution in making decisions based on isolated ratings. Anyone can rate - students, the teacher, other teachers, parents, dogs, cats, etc.

In plain simple English, Rate My Teachers is a scam - and a very sleazy one.

Any disputes or claims arising out of this post must be filed in the Supreme Court of Victoria, in The Land Down Under.

Old Book Corner

Twilight Women Around the World; International Picture of the Other Love ILLUSTRATED, R Leighton Hasselrodt MA, Luxor Press London (12s/6d) 1965

I recovered this little beauty while Helga and I were sorting through all our old books, getting them ready for sale. My best guess at its provenance is that it came from the deceased estate of a former teacher who had acquired it through the widespread practice, in secondary schools of the 1960s, of confiscating books that were deemed unfit reading for their young charges.

The book deals with the love that dared not speak its name, lest it be whispered about behind the shelter sheds, or written about on toilet walls. As the title suggests it's an anthropological and historical survey of lesbianism around the world, starting with the US. Here's a chapter listing:

1. The four F's of Homosexuality: Fable, Fiction, Fancy - and Fact


2. The Neglected Lesbians


3. The Loneliest People


4. You Can't Keep Them Down on the Farm


5. Split-level Sapphists


6. The Village Deviate


7. The In-Between In-Betweens: Girls Attending Boarding Schools, Women in the Armed Forces, Call Girls and Prostitutes, Women in Correctional Institutions


8. Canadian Capers


9. Down Mexico Way


10. The Torrid Tropics


11. Carnality in the Carribean


12. Down South America Way


13. East Side Story


14. The British Lesbian


15. Liberte, Egalite - et Homosexualite


16. Bi-Sex in Benelux


17. Sapphist Smorgasbord


18. Deutschland Uber Sexualis


19. Inversion alla Italiana


20. Behind the Ironical Curtain


21. Sapphism in the Satellites


22. The Home of Homosexuality


23. The Aberrant Arabs


24. The Dark Continent


25. Primitive Paraphiliacs


26. Sapphism 'Neath the Southern Cross


27. The Sexual Mysteries of India


28. The Lesbians of Chung-Hua Jen-Min Kung-Ho Kuo


29. Lsebos of the Orient


30. The Globe Girdled

I'll bet that "Sapphism 'Neath the Southern Cross" title caught your eye - it did mine. We'll get to that in due course. First let's lift the "Ironical Curtain" and take a peek at sapphism, Soviet style at the height of the Cold War.

R Leighton Hasselrodt MA begins this chapter by debunking a common misconception:

Anyone having seen photographs of rough-hewn, muscular Russian women toiling as bricklayers or steelworkers might be reasonably expected to suspect that there was an underlying streak of homosexuality beneath the surface manifestations of "mannishness".

Actually, the percentage of female homosexuals in the Soviet Union is very high, though not necessarily among the women who perform such heavy "man's work." These are often merely rugged women of peasant stock, long accustomed to hard physical labour and, despite their appearance, entirely heterosexual with strong, even voracious, heterosexual appetites...

Evidence on Lesbianism in Russia was a bit thin on the ground, because:

As in all matters which might conceivably make the Soviet Union look like anything short of a Utopia, information about the problems of sexual deviation inside the Iron Curtain is seldom released by the authorities...

Nonetheless, with the help of such limited information as was available, R Leighton Hasselrodt MA manages to provide a historical and cultural analysis of Lesbianism in Soviet Russia, before moming in on the salacious details, such as:

Dildoes and other penis-simulating devices are to be found only in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev and Novosibirsk. They are virtually unknown outside these cities.

...Lesbians in Kiev seem to derive particular pleasure from homosexual activity with pregnant women or recently delivered mothers ...

Sadly:

Despite the much-publicized achievements of Soviet medical science, the Soviet Union lags far behind the West in psychiatric knowledge and techniques. There is little psychotherapy available for homosexual women who desire such help in changing their behaviour patterns to heterosexual ones...

When I turned to "Sapphism 'Neath the Southern Cross" to see what R Leighton Hasselrodt MA had to say about Aussie Lezzoes, what did I find? In a word - nothing. There was plenty of salacious stuff about various South Pacific cultures, but Australia didn't score a mention - the closest R Leighton Hasselrodt MA's global survey got to Godzone country was Papua with its "famous" Orakaiva cult:

... also known as the "Taro Cult". Members hold frequent ritual orgies. These begin with the chewing of betel nut and the eating or drinking of aphrodisaical and hallucination-inducing drugs. Wild and unrestrained dancing - called "kassamba" by the natives - follows. The members of the cult work themselves into an insane sexual frenzy which culminates in a feverish orgy of homosexual, bisexual and pluralistic sexual activity. The homosexual activity among the women generally manifests itself in mutual cunnilingus and frenzied tribadism.

Well, you can see why a school teacher might confiscate such a book, can't you? Reading passages like this might lead to some embarrassing scenes in the classroom:

"Sir, please sir?"

"Yes, what is it Trotsky?"

"Sir, what's tribadism, sir?"

"Trotsky, what have you been reading this time?"

"Just a book sir."

"Look it up in your dictionary boy."

"Have sir - it's not there."

"Then ask Miss Prunesquallor - she's your English teacher, isn't she? She ought to know. Now open your desk, so I can see this book."

Cross-posted at Larvatus Prodeo.

The Highlights and Other Psychological Horrors

Today hasn't start too well - thanks to an accidental viewing of the synchronised swimming on Saturday night I woke up with an attack of the highlights. Bloody Russians!

OK, so it's partly my fault - I didn't have to stick around and actually watch the Russian team swancing - or is it dwimming - around to the strains of Rimsky-Korsakov's Psychosis Scheherezade - I could have moved to another room and found something else to do. And at least the musical interludes in my head weren't accompanied by visions of legs scissoring above the blue surface of a swimming pool, or a team of eight swimmers making a star figure with their bums up at the center and their splayed legs forming the outline. Well, not until I started writing, anyway.

Right now, all the orchestral bombast of that over-orchestrated little air with variations is blasting out of the stereo speakers - it's into the second part, where you get all those totally unnecessary grace notes from the harp at the beginning. All I have to do is get through the next twenty minutes without thinking too much about Tchaikovsky's Cappriccio Italien, or worse yet, the 1812 overture. They're both on the CD with the Rimsky-Korsakov - as filler essentially. Bloody Deutsche Grammophon!

Postscript: now that I've listened to the whole cloying piece I have to admit that, like Ketelbey and the Mighty Wurlitzer, Rimsky-Korsakov and synchronised swimming were made for each other.

Lit-Crit Gems

(All from the latest Saturday Age)

... the book doesn't only chart the emergence of a department, but of a discipline. Clark, Blainey, Serle & Co didn't just teach Australian history - in many respects they invented it.

Her novel is exceptionally readable, stylish and well-paced. It's not without its moments of wry humour and the plot unravels with rare confidence.

Ramsey and Lawrence do not prove sexually fungible (interchageable). Shriver has perhaps stacked the odds here by making the snooker player an intense and experimental lover, and giving him love scenes that will make the book clubs swoon. They may even develop an interest in snooker, although a glance at the real-life characters on the circuit should douse those dreams.

There has been the usual hype about Davis being a writer we should all be watching. But I'm afraid that deep down her work is shallow.

Suffice it to say that [this book] rekindled the fires that burned all those years ago when a just-pubescent youngster discovered that not only was cricket the greatest game of all, it was - in the right hands - written about in a way far superior to any other sport.

Leftist Subversive Mah-Jongg Circle

In all that book-sorting I've been doing over the past week or two, one very valuable little volume finally turned up - the little plain English "how to play Mah-Jongg" book.

So, given a week or so to get the house cleaned up and the dining room table cleared, it should be possible - at last - to get a social game or two happening here. It's a fairly convenient cover for our real agenda of plotting the overthrow of bourgeois democracy. Expressions of interest are cordially invited.

And if it happens to turn out from time to time that we have a few players over the four, there's a Boules set sitting around - weather permitting, surplus players can put in an end or two of Crazy Boules. That's the Aussie suburban version, where there's a bloody big clothes hoist between scratch and the jack.

The Slow Swell of Coming Recrimination

The only thing I've read about yesterday's Burnley Tunnel pile-up is this post at The Dog's Bollocks. The Age has a two page spread about it, but I haven't yet managed to get past the second paragraph of Karen Kissane's article. Some subjects should be addressed simply and directly, with a minimum of literary flourish.

There's also one letter to the editor, describing the pile-up as "a disaster waiting to happen". Some people are quick off the mark, aren't they?

And that's all I wish to say on the subject for today.

Look Back in Retrospect

Thanks to the Ozpolitics blog-feed I've become very familiar with the fact that the Reverend Gordon Moyes' life has fallen into a number of phases and even what a couple of those phases are. I can't be bothered cataloguing the phases of my own life for ready reference - well not right now anyway - but yesterday afternoon I had one of those moments when you realise that one phase of your life is coming to a close, and on the whole, it's no big deal.

Over the past week, the ex and I have worked through all the boxes of books in the back shed at her place, sorting out the books for sale. Yesterday, we were finally down to the last box of personal papers. The big one. So we spent the afternoon sorting through those, while we waited for the cool change to arrive. We had the radio on too, so we could keep up with the progress reports on the pile-up in the Burnley tunnel. But I don't propose to write about that now - 't'ain't fittin'.

I wasn't up to much cognitively, so I confined my work to the heavy lifting and the paper shredding, while Helga did the sorting. As I sat beside the shredder, feeding in the old bank statements, tax returns before the year 2000 and other accumulated personal records, I realised that what I was shredding was the entire official record of my life with Helga. And it didn't bother me one bit.

Statements from our long closed joint bank account? Into the shredder - zip. Mortgage statements from the time we were paying off the matrimonial home - zip. Old pay-slips from my time in the public service - zip. All those adverse performance reports - zip. Timesheets and invoices from my IT contracting days - zip. Useless, bureaucratic detritus, the lot of it.

All that survived were the personal papers - old aborted diaries, old aborted short stories and notebooks which I'll now have to go through. Because there's some good stuff in there, and with all the notepaper that's been turned up, and that fountain pen I've recovered (and a new bottle of Quink), I reckon it's worth taking another crack at the creative stuff. Certainly, this opening paragraph deserves another workout:

Mum once told Dad that she was going to kill him. It was in the middle of one of their arguments. I didn't hear it at first, because she said it real quiet, but then Dad said "What did you say?" It was loud and threatening, and I could imagine him leaning into her face as he said it, like you do when the little kids tell you you're a bastard, but really quiet, because they don't really want you to hear. So you ask them what they f**king said, and they yell it at you, and you have to hit them again, to put them in their place...

There's more, but it gets pretty ugly. Later today, I might just sit down and start the whole thing again in longhand, to see if I can feel my way back into the mood of the piece, and all that writerin' stuff. Something good might be happening today, because there's another little idea nudging at the back of my brain saying "write me, come on, write me".

At the end of the afternoon, we sat back with a cup of coffee each and I had a quick look through one of the aborted diaries and read a couple of excerpts to Helga, over the radio reports. They were fairly typical diary crap:

Saturday, 25/8/90
I've just seen an advertisement on the TV for a recording of Vivaldi's Four Seasons performed by I Musici: "Available for the first time from Polygram." What do they mean by this?
Helga (after watching an advertisement for "Huggies" disposable nappies): What's wrong with flannel? We're going to have flannel aren't we ...
Me: Yes.
Helga: ... when we're old and incontinent.

In one of his Seymour stories, Salinger quotes Seymour as saying "Life is a journey from one sacred place to another." It's incomplete - I'd add then another, and another and so on. Right now, I'm between sacred places.

That's just typical blogging crap.

Livres

- a fun game of biblioclasm for two or more players.

Playing equipment
One political pamphlet, government form or similar document. Two books per player. The books of all players should be of approximately equal size and weight.

To start play
One player screws up the pamphlet (or other document) in a tight ball and throws it across the room or other playing space. This is the jack.

The Play
Each player in turn reads a particularly egregious passage from one of his/her books, then hurls it at the jack using the hurling action described below. The game ends when all players have hurled both their books at the jack.

The hurling action
The book is held in either hand, open at the central page (or thereabouts), with the thumb resting between the pages and the index and middle fingers touching the front and back cover. Either hand may be used.

The hand is raised to the shoulder, then the book is hurled with a backhand motion, releasing the grip at the end of the arc.

Other methods of throwing the book are not permitted. A player who throws the book with any other action than the proper hurling action is disqualified from the game.

Scoring
The winner is the player whose books land closest to the jack. Scoring is as in boules or lawn bowls.

Erly Works

I was round at the ex’s this afternoon, helping her sort through some boxes of books and other stuff. Some of the boxes dated back to the time we took out a mortgage together and quit the rental market. So I’ve taken back a few books that I knew I had somewhere – to wit, packed up in a cardboard box in the garden shed that used to be half mine. Sterne’s Tristram Shandy for one, the complete ghost stories of M R James for another.

I came away with a few other bits and pieces too – the fountain pen that I thought I’d lost at Johnny’s Green Room during a hotly contested evening of Nine Ball, and a couple of really old school exercise books. With some of my very earliest writing. Here are three selected pieces.

Untiteld, August 1960

once there were three chilldren a girl two boys and a dog there names were Johnny Tommy Polly the dog was called rex , and a sea-gull dived and caut a fish then Johnny throuh some bread. to it it eaten it then the fish and it was lovely there was some flowers Polly was Picking flowers and when she a big bunch they went and cerleckted shells one found some golden ones. ode found a winkle it was a white one one found 62 shells on the way home. they went round the rocks and they were home. and they had there tea and went to bed and went to sleep.

The Grate full Duck

The Ducklings were learning to swim. All exept one who was afraid of water and the clumsy Duckling was more clumsy at flying than swimming and one day the ducks were going to their winter quarters but the clumsy duckling fell in an hole a it was so small that it could not quack and the mother duck stare-d and then she remembered a man and he was a St called St Batholomew and he was saying his prayer so she drage dragged him to the small hole where the ducklings were waiting and the saint saw the young duckling in the hole and called him Benjamin and when he was out of the hole he col could fly steadily and could fly stedier than his mummy.

Obsurvashuns on Animal Husbundry

Last night my daddy went for some chickens and he could not get any he said poultry and some of our hens are greedy and they eat there eggs and I think they eat the shells of them we have a broody hen and it turns the eggs over and when the chickens hatch the mother hen keeps them warm and they grow up into adult frogs and they should not remain chickens still and if they did we would not get plenty hens and enough eggs for we sell a dozen eggs each day

How to Blackmail the Queen

The first thing you will need, if you plan to blackmail the Queen, is some footage or photographs of Her Majesty or HRH, Phil the Greek in an embarrassing moment. Once you have obtained your salacious material you will need to inform Her Maj that you have it, and of the terms on which you are prepared to suppress publication in the tabloids.

Unless you are a personal friend of the Queen’s, you must not write to the Queen direct. Your blackmail note should be addressed to “The Private Secretary to Her Majesty the Queen”. Personal friends of the Queen would also be well advised to follow this procedure if they wish to protect their identities from later disclosure.

Wherever the word “she” or “her” would appear in ordinary correspondence, the phrase “Her Majesty” should be substituted. For example:

To: The Private Secretary to Her Majesty the Queen

Dear Sir,

Could you please direct Her Majesty’s attention to the enclosed photographs. They comprise a selection of stills from a video recording of Her Majesty in a situation that could cause Her Majesty great public embarassment if published in The Sun or The Daily Mirror.

I have already received expressions of interest from the editors of both publications, however as a loyal subject of Her Majesty, I feel that it is only proper that I give Her Majesty first refusal on this material.

Also enclosed in this envelope you will find a key for a public locker at Euston Station. If Her Majesty arranges for one of Her Majesty’s staff to place a plain black canvas carryall, containing 200,000 euros in used, non-sequential notes, the original videotape will be forwarded to Her Majesty by following mail.

Please inform Her Majesty that Her Majesty has one week from the posting of this letter before I accept the best offer I can get from Fleet Street.

I remain her Majesty’s most Obedient Servant,
Mr X

Similarly, when blackmailing other members of the Royal Family, one does not write to the Prince, Princess or Duke direct – one writes to the Equerry, Private Secretary or Lady in Waiting of the particular member of the Royal Family. If you are not sure which of these alternatives is applicable, a letter addressed, for example, to “The Private Secretary to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales” is most appropriate.

If your demands for money are not met, you will have little choice but to sell on the embarrassing material to the tabloid press for whatever you can get. However, all is not lost – an opportunity to make a little more on top of that still exists. We’ll cover that in “How to Blackmail the Private Secretary to Her Majesty the Queen”.

One Friday Night …

… that is last night, I got up and went to the lounge, where I picked up the TV guide, looking for something that would while away a couple of hours of insomnia. There wasn’t much on offer, as usual, so I went back to bed and a couple more chapters of Titus Groan. Before I did, I noticed that I’d missed this program on the ABC at 11:30:

The Band Aid Story. Music documentary. The untold story of how a bunch of musicians forced u-turns in government policy, propelled Ethiopia into the nation’s psyche and made the whole of Britain, and the world, put its hand in its pocket.

It was a repeat.