Tarte Tatin

I've just taken one out of the oven and turned it onto a plate. It's a real beaut; the apples have cooked to a gorgeous golden brown colour and there are little dribbles of caramelised sugar oozing out around the pastry base onto the serving dish. OK, so the pastry is a fairly straight forward sweet butter shortcrust, instead of the frozen sheet of puff pastry Jenny Sheard went with in last week's Good Weekend and I put the thing together in an ordinary baking dish, instead of building it up in an oven-proof frypan like some bizarre fusion of cookery and ikebana but it looks pretty damn good, smells just as good and Zeppo and I are looking forward to tucking into it for dessert tonight. And, as I'm still thoroughly bored by the political scene (I've tried, but every new controversy that comes up, like the kerfuffling over the Flood report, just strikes me as more of the same old same old. Maybe, as Shaun Carney suggested in Saturday's Age, John Howard's main strategy for winning the next election is to bore us all shitless), I decided I might as well follow on from the veal casserole with a classic dessert.

I think we'll have to go with the step by step description I used for the veal shank casserole thing because, while I tackled cooking the tarte tatin a lot more methodically than I did the veal I did a lousy job of keeping track of quantities, except at a couple of points.

Three Days Before Cooking: pick up two kilos of Granny Smith apples at the Victoria Market for one dollar a kilo. Take home and refrigerate.

One day before cooking: pick up two 250 gram bricks of unsalted butter and a bag of dark brown sugar from the supermarket.

Final Preparation: First make the pastry for the base of the tart. Cut off half of one of the bricks of butter, and cut it into small cubes (roughly 1 cm on a side). Astute mathematicians will realis that this is 125 grams of butter, give or take a gram or two, but it's better to think of it as half a brick. Otherwise you're likely to get upset when I tell you to weigh 5 ounces of flour into a bowl. Add one ounce of granulated sugar, or castor sugar if you're the kind of ponce who keeps castor sugar in the house. Toss in the cubes of butter.

Go and wash your hands. Then wash them again, this time in cold water (seriously: it's uncomfortable, but it's better for the pastry). Rub the butter into the flour and sugar with your fingers, until most of the mixture reaches the consistency of bread crumbs. It's better to underdo this than overdo it; you'll probably find that however hard you try, you'll still end up with a few large flakes of butter that refuse to mix properly with the flour. Deal with it and move on.

Get a cup of very cold water; the precise quantity doesn't matter, you won't be using all of it anyway. Start adding small dribbles of water to the pastry. Really small dribbles. Each time you add water, press the pastry into it with the tips of your fingers. Stop adding water once you have a smooth ball of pastry which you can roll around the sides of the bowl without it sticking (once again, it's better to use too little water than to use too much). Cover the bowl and put the pastry in the refrigerator.

Peel the two kilos of bargain basement Granny Smiths. While you peel them indulge your sensitive, feminine side, by trying to take the peel off in a single continuous strip, which you can toss into the air. According to an article I read in Ma Trotsky's copy of The Australian Women's Weekly many years ago, folklore has it that this will give you the first initial of your destined one true love. Apparently, my destined one true love is an ancient Mayan who died many centuries before syphilis arrived in Europe.

Once you've finished piss-farting around with the apple peel, quarter and core the apples. Ponces who keep castor sugar in the kitchen probably keep an apple corer around the place as well; if so, you can core and quarter the apples instead.

Now check the cupboard for a baking dish; you want something with sloping sides. The one I found was about twelve inches in diameter. Coat the sides of the dish liberally with butter, then put a dessert spoon of brown sugar into one of those flour dredging things that ponces who use castor sugar and apple corers usually have in the kitchen somewhere. Attempt to coat the base and sides of the baking dish evenly with brown sugar, using the dredge.

When you realise that the brown sugar is just getting stuck in the mechanism of the flour dredge, give up, and tip the sugar straight in the baking dish. Rub it over the base and sides of the dish by hand. Repeat with another dessert spoon of brown sugar. If you've been liberal enough with the butter, you should have a dense coating of brown sugar on the inside of the dish.

Now cut some of your quartered apples into thin slices (about 2 to 3 mm) and arrange them in a poncy pattern in the base of the dish. Slice about half the remaining apples however you like; No one's going to see them under the decorative layer anyway.

Melt some butter in a frypan, add a small piece of cinnamon bark*, a quarter teaspoon of cardamom powder and a dessert spoon of brown sugar. Add the chopped apples, stir and saute gently until the apples have started to take on colour from the brown sugar. Leave out the cloves; I've read frequently that cloves complement the flavour of cooked apples but in my view this is like saying that tsunamis enhance the rustic tranquility of Japanese fishing villages. OK, if you really want your cooked apples to smell and taste like a home remedy for toothache, toss some cloves in. See if I care.

Put the cooked apples into the baking dish. Take the pastry out of the fridge and roll it out until you have a circle, or something approximating to a circle, or something which is nothing like a circle, but at least big enough to cover the baking dish and hang over the sides most of the way round, except for that one gap you can plug with a piece trimmed off the other side of the dish. Allow the pastry to rest for a couple of minutes (this will prevent it from shrinking to a small circle the size of a bread and butter plate when it bakes). Place the pastry over the baking dish, trim it and put it into an oven preheated to 175 C**.

Fret over the oven for approximately 20 minutes to half an hour, then check to see if the pastry has cooked; the tarte is cooked when the top is a light brown colour more or less all over. If it hasn't fully cooked, continue fretting for another 10 minutes.

While you're fretting, you can cook up the remaining apples in the butter, brown sugar and spices mix described above. They can be refrigerated until you need them for your next big batch of comfort food.

Once the pastry has cooked, remove the baking dish from the oven and run a table knife gently around the inside edge of the dish. Place a plate on top of the dish, and invert the plate and baking dish together. Lift the baking dish gently and admire your handiwork.

* I know, this sounds like one of those pieces of ginger 5 cm long and 2.5 cm wide, except I haven't even specified the length and thickness have I? Well, it came out of a bag of stuff labelled "Cinammon Bark" and I suppose it was somewhere between 5 cms and 6 cms long. If it really bothers you, you can either leave it out or go with a teaspoon of the powdered stuff. The cardamom isn't essential either, but it's definitely worth adding.

** On balance, I think this temperature was a little too low; the pastry would probably benefit from a few extra degrees on the oven thermostat, so next time I'll be upping the temperature to somewhere between 180 C and 200 C.

Bugger!

After seeing Lateline last night, I thought today might be a good time to attempt a return to form on the political front. I figured there'd be a lot of kerfuffling about the Flood Report and John Howard's classic performance on The 7.30 Report. I thought maybe we could revisit Mr Howard's Address to The Nation. Back then, Mr Howard was pretty clear on his main justification for going to war:

Therefore the possession of chemical, biological, or even worse still, nuclear weapons by a terrorist network would be a direct undeniable and lethal threat to Australia and its people.

That is the reason above all others why I passionately believe that action must be taken to disarm Iraq. Not only will it take dangerous weapons from that country but it will send a clear signal to other rogue states and terrorists groups like Al Qaeda which clearly want such weapons that the world is prepared to take a stand.

Or we might revisit Sixty Minutes interview with Charles Woolley - the one where Woolley lumped opponents of the war into the "mob" and Howard picked up on the usage and ran with it. Howard's line back then was pretty much that if the mob knew what he knew, they'd be a lot happier to go along with him.

But today, I checked out Troppo Armadillo and decided that it would be a waste of time. Because faux-centrist Ken Parish has gotten hold of a rhetorical Ramset gun and nailed it good and proper.

I guess I'm going to be stuck with topics like Tarte Tatin for a while longer. But here's an invitation from the Stainless Steel Weasel I'd urge everyone to take up come October (or November, or whenever that photo of Mark Latham with the gumboots and ewes ever does turn up):

To those in the community who may not agree with me, please vent your anger against me and towards the government.

Ivy & Zeppo & Me

I still haven't shaken the disgust fatigue that brought on the long hiatus. I thought I might be on the road to recovery, but recent events in the news brought on a relapse. It started with Paul McGeogh's report in Saturday's Age of the allegations that the new Iraqi Prime minister had personally topped six prisoners to demonstrate the sort of procedural fairness he expected from the police force in the new Iraq. Then there was the report in Monday's Age of Martha Stepford's little chat with Barbara Walters over the weekend, where Martha had a good whine about the injustice that's been done to her by the American legal system.

The Martha Stepford thing looked promising as blog material, until I mentioned it to Zeppo Bakunin; he was taken by Ms Stepford's remark that "Many good people have gone to prison. Look at Nelson Mandela.". It didn't take him long to develop a completely new theory of why Nelson Mandela got jailed in the first place; it was for insider trading in apartheid futures. Where Mandela went wrong wasn't in opposing the apartheid regime, it was in going short on apartheid on the Johannesburg futures exchange, then setting out to wreck the regime so that he could cash in big-time. And getting caught at it, of course. Had things gone according to plan, Mandela would have been a national hero years earlier and a rich man into the bargain.

That's more or less Zeppo's take on it; personally, I think he got done for growing hydrangeas, rather than an acceptable South African native plant like the Protea. Life in prison for growing hydrangeas does seem a bit harsh; although if he was fart-arsing about treating the soil with lime or potash to manipulate the flower colour, I can understand that being considered an aggravating circumstance warranting a more severe sentence. Particularly if the hydrangeas are in pots, set out in a row of with the pink and blue flowering bushes alternating. Call me soft-hearted, but I wouldn't even call that criminal; more like an unconscious cry for the sort of help that the Backyard Blitz crew inflict on hapless suburbanites at the behest of friends, neighbours or family. The real criminals, here in the Great Southern Land at least, are those stupid bastards who plant ivy in their gardens.

The ivy in "our" garden is coming along quite nicely; that cold snap over the weekend did for the stuff clinging to the big date palm in the south-west corner of the yard. The ivy dropped enough leaves that you can see the twelve to sixteen year old vines wrapped around the trunk of the tree and the branches up around the roof-line of the house. You can also see all the dead palm fronds that fell into the ivy and got stuck. It's a very left-wing garden feature; it's been thoroughly undercut up to a little above fence height leaving the bulk of the overgrowth to wither away and die until we can borrow a ladder from somewhere. If we ever do, we can add the ivy from the date palm to our other main garden feature, the big pile of ivy cuttings under the back bedroom window.

I suppose, in our own small way, we've been doing our bit for our land, as featured in the latest series of government advertisements which have nothing at all to do with any upcoming election, in the same way that a big bank of cumulo-nimbus on the western horizon has nothing to do with an impending piss-down of rain. But the work on the ivy had nothing to do with a patriotic attachment to the golden soil of our whale foot oiled land girt by sea, nor was it motivated by a desire to garden - well not in my case anyway. And for Mr Bakunin, clearing up accumulated garden waste doesn't count as gardening; it's what you do so that you can start gardening, in the same way that I regard measuring out ingredients as what you do so that you can start cooking and John Howard regards running a lot of government announcements as what you do before you actually call the election and start the real campaigning (which by my reckoning won't happen until someone comes up with a good photo of Mark Latham wearing gum-boots in the vicinity of a flock of ewes). Our big motivation to get rid of the ivy was to get rid of the bloody wasps that came with it.

Apparently, the little buggers love the stuff - at least that's what this site says. So do several others. I have found nursery sites around the place where ivy is proudly offered for sale, and sites listing ivy as a suitable plant for low-allergy gardens, on the strength that it's not a big pollen producer. I guess it's not very common for people who are allergic to pollen, like some asthmatics, to also be allergic to wasp stings, like some asthmatics. But not necessarily the same asthmatics. So that's alright then.

I was going to segue into the cooking section of the post around about now, with a consideration of Tarte Tatin, the classic French upside down apple tart. I now know at least three versions. Jacques Pepin offers one in La Technique of which he says:

There are many interpretations of [Tarte Tatin] which are quite simple and satisfactory. The one below is a little more involved, but the result is quite distinctive.

Then there's Jenny Sheard's version, featured in last Saturday's Good Weekend, which makes Pepin's version look like a quick roadhouse cafe knock up. And there's the one I might try later this week, which ought to provide a simple and satisfactory test of what the new oven can do. But I think we'll skip the details for now and finish off this week's home hints from Gummo with a couple of tips on surviving a wasp infestation in your backyard:

If you must go out into the backyard for a morning heart-starter cigarette, leave washing your hair until afterwards. Especially if you use a herbal shampoo, like Clairol Herbal Essences for Receding or Thinning Hair.

Never wear a brightly coloured machine fairisle jumper in the backyard during daylight hours.

As Cooks Go ...

I've been hitting the books pretty hard lately. To be precise I've been hitting the recipe books, in particular The Essential Madhur Jaffrey, Italian Food by Elizabeth David (co-author of Mastering the Art of French Cooking) and Zeppo Bakunin's copy of the PWMU Cookey Book. This is what happens when you move in with someone who expects you to be a gourmet cook; you find yourself under pressure to deliver, and you spend a lot of time re-acquainting yourself with basic stuff that you used to take for granted, like how to crack an egg.

I'm not convinced that it's been paying off, particularly when it comes to cookery in the Indian style, which is what I'm looking to Madhur Jaffrey for. I know, this isn't the sort of acerbic comment on political events you came here looking for, nor is it particularly irascible, but give it time; I'm still warming up after a hiatus of more than 40 days, so bear with me. In any event, there's only so many jokes you can make about John Howard's prime ministership before you start repeating yourself and you'd be damn lucky if you end up having to take off at least one sock to count them.

Madhur Jaffrey has been high on the reading list because I've been looking for "interesting things to do with mince". I think you'll admit that this is a challenge; mince is inherently boring in the same way that ivy is inherently garden waste (since moving into our new place, Zeppo Bakunin and I have thrown out 1.25 cubic meters of the stuff; we think it was orginally planted as ground cover, but sometime during the past twelve to fifteen years (I counted the growth rings on one of the stems we cut down) it turned into a rampant fence and generic-shrub-with-orange-berries-that-give-birds-diorrhea cover as well). So far the results I've had following Ms Jaffrey's recipes have been a bit disappointing and I'm beginning to wonder if it's worth the effort. It's a bit like trying to convince yourself that John Howard has the quality of statesmanship, which I suppose makes him the political equivalent of mince and I may have to take that sock off after all.

I used to get perfectly acceptable results by grabbing a jar of Patak's Madras paste at the supermarket and tossing it in a pot with some chopped onions, garlic and tinned tomatoes. Which is a lot easier than the rigmarole of measuring out spices onto a saucer in at least two piles (one to go in with the browning mince, the other to go in when you add the tinned tomatoes), plus the intellectual effort of working out how many teaspoons of crushed garlic out of a jar of the same make up four cloves and how many teaspoons of crushed ginger amount to "1 piece fresh ginger 5 cm (2 inches) long and 2.5 cm (1 inch wide), peeled and coarsely chopped".

I don't think I really have the right attitude to get the best results from Madhur Jaffrey's recipes anyway. Take the recipe for kheema (minced meat) of which Ms Jaffrey says "This is the first Indian dish all Indian students abroad learn to make." It includes the following instruction:

... In about 10 seconds, when the peppers turn dark, add paste from blender, keeping your face averted.

I'd take that as a pretty clear indication that, despite the fact that in some of Ms Jaffrey's recipes various ingredients are identified as "optional" or "if available", when it comes down to putting the whole dish together, you have to approach the task with a proper sense of religious dedication. On that score, I'm afraid I'm an abject failure; I can't see any good reason why I should be restricted to seeing only the nether parts of what I'm cooking. In fact, I'd rather not see the nether parts of what I'm cooking at all, because I find the whole idea of cooking nether parts rather unappetising.

Even if I were inclined to follow a recipe with the sort of religious devotion Ms Jaffrey implicitly demands, I couldn't; I don't have a blender, so there's no way that I can turn two medium sized onions, four cloves of garlic and the aforesaid piece of ginger into a "paste from blender"; the best I can manage is a pile of finely diced onion (see Mastering the Art of French Cooking for the definitive approach to dicing onions; be sure that you use a very sharp knife and well refrigerated onions) topped with similarly diced ginger and garlic. Unless you really want to show off your knife technique, you might as well use the stuff in jars. I really don't have time for quasi-religious culinary rituals that require the use of electricity. Unless it's beating egg whites into stiff peaks; one of those electric beater things will spare you a lot of inflammation of the elbow and shoulder joints.

Elizabeth David's Italian Food got on the reading list because I was looking for good desserty/cakey things that I could whip up that would fit within budget. Mastering the Art of French Cooking has a recipe for a killer chocolate cake but it takes about 800 grams of good quality dark cooking chocolate to do it justice (around 400 for the cake from memory, and another 400 for the ganache, (which you'll find in Jacques Pepin's La Technique - or Larousse, which has specific recipes for the essential stuff, and enough descriptive notes on obscure things like panade that you can figure something out for yourself). When you factor in the eggs and butter (but not the flour, which you should have in the larder already), it costs big time to produce a good quality chocolate cake. And I'd be working with a new, totally unfamiliar, oven, so I'm not going to spend all those ackers until I know how the bastard behaves. Nor until I have some occasion that warrants all the time, effort and money that I'd have to put in.

So I was looking for an alternative to cooking up elaborate and hideously expensive chocolate cakes, and I found a recipe for Torrone Molle, which requires no baking at all. You need 6 ounces each of cocoa, butter, sugar, ground almonds and plain biscuits such as "Petit Buerre or Osborne"; I'm not sure what that translates to in an Australian supermarket, I suppose you could see how you get on with Arnott's Scotch Fingers or Milk Arrowroot. You also need one whole egg and one egg yolk. If you don't know how to acquire an egg yolk, ask your granny; as long as you haven't ignored the proverbial advice, I'm sure you'll find her guidance useful. If you haven't, please don't invite me around to your place for coffee and Torrone Molle; I'm not confident that it will be hygienic. And if your idea of good coffee is that Vietnamese weasel coffee stuff, just forget the whole idea.

Basically, you combine the butter and cocoa into a soft paste, then stir in the ground almonds; melt the sugar in a saucepan with a little water and add it to the cocoa mixture (if you've got a good kitchen reference, like Larousse, check out the section on stock sugar syrups for guidance); stir in the eggs and finally the biscuits and turn the whole mixture into an oiled turban mould and put it in the fridge. I'm not sure waht a turban mould is, but Ms David provides the following informative footnote:

That [the turban mould] is what was used by Lina, the Tuscan cook who introduced me to this delicious recipe, rather different from the one usually known under this name in Italy. The torrone is easier to turn out from a rectangular loaf tin, or a cake tin with a removable base. The oil should be sweet almond oil (to be bought from the chemist) - E.D. 1963

If this all sounds too elaborate, you might prefer a simpler home grown equivalent. Particularly if your granny's advice on the egg yolk has left you with the impression that separating eggs involves considerable discomfort in the nether parts. According to Zeppo Bakunin's copy of the PMWU Cookery Book you'll need 1/2 cup butter, 1/2 cup sugar, 3 tablespoons cocoa, 1 egg and 250 gram biscuits.

You put the butter, sugar and cocoa in a saucepan over low heat and dissolve the sugar. Once it's dissolved, take it off the heat and add the egg. Then combine it with the crushed biscuits. If you have a turban mould coated with sweet almond oil from the chemist, you could toss the mixture in that and pass it off as Torrone Molle as found on page 277 of the Penguin edition of Italian Food by Elizabeth David. If, like the rest of us mere mortals, you don't, you'll just have to settle for pressing it into a flat tin, putting chocolate icing over it, cutting it into squares and calling it "Hedgehog". I think that it will probably taste more or less the same.

24 - The Final Season

I think I'm probably the only person I know who's still watching 24 on Monday nights; the sensible thing woould be to check out the episode guide, find out the ending (which has something to do with the world being kept a safe place for democracy) and have done with it. Looking back on the previous 21 episodes (or at least those of them I didn't miss), the whole series has been one big shark steeple chase.

For those who came in really late, or had the good sense to skip it entirely, the series kicked off with the discovery of the corpse of someone who had died from a deadly haemorrhagic virus which had somehow got into the hands of Latin American drug-lord, Hector Salazar. Hector's brother Ramon, a psychopath whose lawyer should really have insisted on hazard pay, was in a Los Angeles prison and Hector wanted him released. Hector more or less got what he wanted, thanks to CTU agent Jack Bauer who, in pursuit of his sworn duty to keep the US safe from the threat of all forms of terrorism, engineers a prison riot to cover his escape with Ramon (this happens at around 4:56 pm).

Over the next couple of hours, Jack flees Los Angeles with Ramon, arrives in central America where he appears to be working with Hector and Ramon to obtain the virus that they used in their attempt to blackmail the US Government to obtain the release of Ramon. I can't remember the rationale, but a lot of money was involved; I think the idea was to buy up the entire world supply of the thing, then sell it on to someone else at a profit. If that makes any sense at all to you, I can put you in touch with someone who owns the exclusive world commercial rights to the bubonic plague.

Later that night (or perhaps some time in the wee small hours of the morning) we learn that, contrary to appearances, Jack hasn't decided to take early retirement from the bureaucratic drudgery of defending whatever it is he defends, in fact the whole engineer a prison riot, get a few guards killed, run away in a hijacked helicopter business was an elaborate sting operation, which was intended to get the virus out of the hands of the terrorists (who can't be trusted) and into the hands of the Counter-Terrorist Unit (who can be trusted, but only by definition).

By the next morning the sting operation has gone completely wrong, the virus is back in the hands of another terrorist, who enhances and weaponises it, releases it into the air-conditioning of a Los Angeles hotel and sends the US President a special cell-phone so that he can make his demands without his calls being traced; presumably he was able to pick up what's left of the Iridium satellite telophone network at E-Bay, or wherever it is that international terrorists get their stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if were E-Bay; the terrorists on 24 are very web-savvy; they even run to creating their own "hostage-cam" sites when they want to need to do a spot of personal extortion.

I'm not sure if there's going to be a fourth series of 24; if there is, I won't be watching it. Unless they shift the action from Los Angeles to Washington, and the first episode starts out something like this:

Wide Angle view of committee hearing room in congress. Senator John Keeler is centre screen, flanked by several other senators, obviously committe members. The room is crowded with journalists and onlookers. Senator Keeler raps the table with his gavel.

SENATOR KEELER: This hearing is now in session. We will continue with the testimony of CTU agent Jack Bauer. As Agent Bauer is already under oath, I propose to proceed directly to my next set of questions.

Agent Bauer, is it correct that last year you were involved in a CTU sting operation and that during that operation you held prison guards at the Downey federal holding facility and demanded they release all prisoners from their cells?

Cut to: Jack Bauer at the witness table. He takes a sip of water from the standard senate committee tumbler, next to the standard senate committee water jug and mutters something to the woman sitting beside him, who is obviously his lawyer.

JACK: Under legal advice I wish to assert my fifth amendment rights in answer to that question Mr Chairman.

Cut to:

SENATOR KEELER: So far agent Bauer, this committee has put 168 questions to you and you have answered every one by asserting your fifth amendment rights. At any time in your career with CTU did you ever do anything you can tell us about without risking self-incriminination?

Cut to: Jack, in sotto voce discussion with his lawyer again.

JACK: ...no, it's OK, I can answer this one. On my first day at CTU, I had to go out for the office lunches. They always make the newbies do that (his lawyer interrupts - they mutter some more) ... under legal advice I must assert my fifth amendment rights in relation to any further questions on CTU lunch procurement.

Vince Gair and the Sioux Nation

Yes, it's true, I did see Boynton last wednesday night night and we did exchange a few messages by semaphore and she has been trying to persuade me to get back to blogging and I guess she finally succeeded. I thought I'd start with some long overdue words of explanation for my absence form the blogosphere. There's a piece on a hard disc somewhere called Long OVerdue Words of Explanation but the title doesn't work for me. Every time I see it I get depressed and a little guilt stricken and decide to do something else while the piece writes itself in the back of my head. As if.

The something else is playing FreeCiv, which is installed on my new Linux box. It's not really new - it used to be a Windows box at a Roman Catholic secondary school somewhere. Shortly after Zeppo Bakunin andI moved in together, we decided to replace our dud PCs and paid thirty sevendollars each for a couple of Acer boxes through an on-line auction place. Iturned mine into a Linux box by getting rid of the old hard-drive and whackingin the Quantum Fireball hard-drive from my old PC with the dead motherboard.That was pretty much it, apart from flashing a new BIOS to get rid of thepassword protection on the old BIOS so that I could add a CD and a Floppy discdrive. Two days after Zeppo brough the boxes home, I had a functioning Linux PC.

Complete with FreeCiv 1.12 which I find perversely fascinating; perhaps I enjoy being irritated by obvious absurdity.

Getting a game started is one of those slightly roundabout nerdy Linux tasks; suffice it to say you first start the game server which actually runs the game, then you start the game client which actually allows you to play it. Thisisn't absurd; it's designed to be played as a multi-player game over theinternet, so a client/server setup makes sense. Once the game's started you chooseyour nation from a list of about fifty. I usually take the Australians, ruled by Vince Gair. I tried out a few other names for rulers (in preference to the default Robert Menzies) like Alan Cadman, Rex Connor and Joh-Bjelke Peterson but the game seems to go best with Vince.

The object of the game is to conquer the world, or something like that. You begin by building a couple of cities, explore your local neighbourhood, do the scientific research which will eventually enable you to become a world-dominating superpower. If you're lucky, you'll make it; but what usually happens is that around 50 BC, when the Australians, under Vince's benevolent despotism, have just mastered the wheel so they can build chariots and finally knock off the bloody Welsh (or the Incas, Welsh, Cornish, Mordors or Dunedan depending what nations the server picks for the AI players) the bloody Irish (or the Russians, Arabs, Israelis, Canadians, French or Lithuanians) turn up with steam-powered warships and level Canberra.

The trick, I've found, is to survive long enough to research two key "technologies" - communism and powered flight. It's remarkable how easily you can take over a coastal city with a galleon stuffed with knights in armour, as long as you have air support. Imagine what Henry the Fifth could have done at Agincourt if he'd had a couple of Sopwith Camels on his side; history would have turned out pretty much the same.

The idea of knights conquering cities with the assistance of fighter aircraft, bombers and helicopters doesn't irritate me; it's actually quite amusing. It's the designers' ideas on the nature of government, and the way those ideas are reflected in the game that gets my goat.

There are five forms of governemt available; despotism, monarchy, republicanism, democracy and communism. Here's how they're described in the game's help system:

Under Despotism you are the absolute ruler of your people. Your control over your citizens is mainitained largely by martial law. Despotism suffers the highest level of corruption of all forms of government.

Under Monarchy, a king or queen serves as the hereditary figurehead for your government. Monarchy suffers the same amount of corruption that the Republic does.

Under a Republican government, citizens elect a representative who will govern them. Since elected leaders must remain popular to remain in control, citizens are given a greater degree of freedom. Citizens under a republic become unhappy easily but the self-sufficiency of your citizens allows high levels of trade.

Under Democracy, citizens govern directly by voting on issues. Democracy offers the highest levels of trade, but also offers to most potential for unhappiness. There is no corruption during Democracy, but citizens become very upset during wars.

What all this boils down to when you play the game is very little: the whole thing runs on a soviet-style command economy anyway. It's just that if you choose one of the openly authoritarian or repressive forms of government, the bitizens will indulge in some pointless electronic pilferage which cuts into your ability to raise funds, research your next major scientific advance (such as Literacy) or distribute "luxuries" (the digital equivalent of baby-bonuses) to keep the population docile.

The end result is, that if you have the sentimental idea that freedom is a good thing and you want all your bitizens to enjoy a representative form of government, you're stuffed. The most practicable forms of government are despotism, monarchy and communism; you can keep the populace under control with martial law, you don't pay heavy penalties to maintain your knights, galleons, fighter aircraft and attack helicopters and it's cheaper to maintain the work-crews which build your infrastructure (like roads). On a good day, I can have King Vince of Australia turned into Chairman Vince of the Australian Union of Soviet Republics by around 1650 AD. Then it's time to start creating lots of spies to run around nicking the really advanced technologies (like Gunpowder and steam engines) off everyone else.

I reckon I'll probably give up on it in a couple of days or so; but first I want to find out how the Sioux nation will stand up to a mass invasion of charioteers. After the shock and awe bombardment with cruise missiles it ought to be a walkover.

Tram Rage

I had to wait fifteen minutes for tram number 109 at Port Melbourne. Next time, I'll check the time before I leave the pub. We came second in the trivia quiz; it was the questions on AFL team corporate sponsors that did us in. Still, we got two bottles of wine out of it; one of them because I was finally able to dredge up the title of one of Roger Moore's James Bond films from the back reaches of memory.

When the tram arrived, I took a seat three rows back from the driver, facing forward. I took the window seat, with my bag on the aisle seat; there were two empty seats facing me. At that time of night I expected to have the four seat bay to myself all the way to the city. I took my book - the last volume of one of those interminable science fantasy epics - out of my bag. I'd read it several times before but it was a way to pass the time.

I had a pleasant journey until you got on at Crown Casino. You with your maroon vee-neck pullover and your perfectly pressed schoolboy grey flannels and your seven decades of aging and your short back and sides haircut. I should have known you were going to be trouble - I did sense that you were going to be trouble - when you stood beside the aisle seat where I'd parked my bag and demanded that I move over. Like a damned fool I picked up my bag and dropped it my lap and went back to my book.

But that wasn't good enough for you. When we got to Flinders Street you tried to poke your elbow in my ribs - you got my elbow instead - and demanded "Get out of my seat." I looked at you. You said: "I want my own seat. If I don't get it, I'll job you."

I felt like telling you what was what; I had three decades on you at least and if you tried to job me you'd end up on the tram floor. But I didn't want to provoke you to violence - however superannuated and ineffectual - with that kind of a challenge. I didn't want to end up in front of the beak explaining why I'd jobbed a vulnerable senior citizen. So, instead, I told you, "Look, I'm not in your seat, I'm in mine. You're the one getting aggressive. If you're not happy, go find somewhere else to sit."

You weren't having any of that. You replied: "All I want is my own seat." (I looked across at the two empty, backward facing, seats which you could have taken instead of the one next to me), "And if I don't get it I'll job you."

I felt like telling you that you were crazy; like the bloke I saw once at the Elizabeth Street terminus, who waved the business end of his umbrella at the crowd waiting to get on the tram as he got off. I thought, give it thirty years and this might be me and maybe I should cut the old bugger some slack. I tried to carry on reading my book.

But you'd spoiled it; I couldn't help wondering why you were so pissed off that you had to take things out on me. Had you blown your last pension cheque two cents at a time on the Crown pokies? Were you just some old bloke who'd been an arsehole all his life and now didn't know any better? Or had you copped the gold watch and an inadequate super payout at 65 and decided that's it, no more Mr Nice Guy? Maybe you were pissed off because you couldn't march on Anzac Day or join the RSL because you'd never been in a proper war.

In the end, I decided I didn't give a rat's arse why you were an obnoxious old bastard. So, when I got up at William Street to change trams, I said "Good Night yersenileoldgit." I took a look at you as I went out the front door of the tram; you were sitting there gaping and slack jawed. A thin dribble of saliva hanging off your lower would have made my satsifaction complete, but you can't have everything.

Sweated German Violinists Demand Piece Rates

BERLIN - Violinists at a German orchestra are suing for a pay raise on the grounds that they play many more notes per concert than their colleagues do - litigation that the orchestra's director on Tuesday called "absurd."

azcentral.com

Link via Miss Boynton in the comments here.

So much for taking the week off.

Home Town Boy

I cam across this site on James Prescott Joule while I was Googling up biographical information on famous scientists of the past who were foolish enough to think that measures of temperature were in any way meaningful or useful.

Remedial Mathematics for Education Ministers

I heard Brendan Nelson on AM today, being very huffy about the peace deal between the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission and the Sydney Catholic Education Office which allows the Catholic Education Office to offer twelve male only teaching scholarships as long as it also offers twelve female only teaching scholarships. Doctor Nelson demanded to know how this measure could possibly increase the percentage of male primary teachers:

[It's been told that in order to attract more men into teaching, it has to attract more women into teaching as well, and if you offer in this case, 12 male and 12 female scholarships, how on earth does that change the percentage of primary school teachers who are men?]

Here's a simple answer.

Imagine you have 76 primary school teachers (who all play trombone in their spare time), all of whom are female. The percentage of male teachers is, therefore, zero. Now add 24 new teachers, 12 male and twelve female. You now have 100 primary school teachers 12% of whom are male and 88% female. The percentage of trombone players is at least 76% but we can't say any more than that without knowing if any new trombone players were added.

Update: Now that today's AM is finally on-line, I've been able to add the relevant excerpt from the transcript to this post. Of course, Dr Nelson sounds much better in audio.

Qu(ot)e?

Climate variables are described by non-linear stochastic relations, which in simple language means that they cannot be used to project or forecast anything. However, like econometricians, many climate scientists are in awe of the processing power of computers, but utterly unaware that garbage-in = garbage-out. This is a continuing problem with the social sciences - using techniques of the physical sciences without understanding the limitations of those techniques.

Post Modernists would, however, disagree with this statement. As they would.

Louis at Bizarre Science

Well, that explains why the Bureau of Meteorlogy has such a hard time predicting Melbourne's weather; basically they're a bunch of jumped up sociologists. Maybe it's about time they employed some real scientists.

Commenters are cordially invited to speculate on possible post-modernist approaches to meteorology or to compose short excerpts from academic papers by deconstructionist climate physicists etc.

Update: there's also a chuckle or two to be had from the comments thread, where Louis questions the statistical validity of atmospheric temperature measurements:

It is not too difficult to show that measurements of temperatures, as published, are statistically unsound. The science of statistics was initially conceived to deal with measureable attributes of discrete objects, be they humans, cannon balls, marbles, tennis balls, etc. When restricted to these categories, statistical analysis is sound.

However when extended to mining and other phsyical objects, statistics hit a conceptual wall. When one measures the temperature of the air at a particular place, say in Australia, what is one measuring?

Is one measuring the attribute of some physical object? If so, what is that object.

In the absence of an objective basis, measurements of "un-objects", while measuring something, cannot be amenable to statistical analysis, since the measurements do not have, in the statistical sense, uniform "support".

What was that about post-modernists again?

Enough Already

I'm getting thoroughly sick and tired of all the witless Lerner and Loewe jokes I keep coming across in blog posts and opinion pieces about Spain. There's only one of them that's any damn good - you'll find it if you scroll down the page a little. As for the rest, the headline of Ann Coulter's bilious offering at Yahoo is pretty typical. It's another one of those "the Spanish have no cojones" pieces. At least Coulter has the good sense to recognise the lameness of the joke in her headline; by the end of her piece she's abandoned Lerner and Loewe in favour of a humorous riff on a theme from Rogers and Hammerstein:

No matter how many of our European allies may surrender to the terrorists, America will never be alone. This is a country founded in a covenant with God by people who had to flee Europe to do it.

Sailing to the New World in 1630 on the ship Arabella, the Puritans' leader and governor, John Winthrop, said Americans were entering into a covenant with God to create a "city upon a hill." We would be judged by all the world if we ever broke that covenant. But if we walked with God, "We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when 10 of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies." He has intervened in our affairs before, such as in 1776, 1861 and 1980.

With the Spanish election, we are witnessing a capitulation to savagery that makes full-scale war inevitable. The Democratic candidate wants to represent godless Europeans. The Republican candidate wants to represent Americans. As Winthrop said: "The eyes of all people are upon us."

I had to check out the dates to work out which historical events Coulter believes show divine intervention in American affairs. 1776 was, as I vaguely remember from high school history, the year of the Declaration of Independence. 1861 was the year the American Civil War started and in 1980 Ronald Reagan succeeded Jimmy Carter as President. God truly does work in mysterious ways his wonders to perform.

The Condensed Andrew Bolt

(We misread and misrepresent Andrew Bolt so that you don't have to)

Today, Andrew takes up more or less where Mark Steyn left off, and draws out the local implications of Al-Quaeda's recent victory in the Spanish elections. He remarks that:

... journalists everywhere are insisting the Howard Government tell them a reassuring falsehood -- that, like Spain, what makes us a big target is that we went to war in Iraq.

How this is meant to be reassuring I'm not sure. It's not as if we can turn back the clock on the war in Iraq; it's a done deed. I'd be more reassured if the Government told me that Australia is a terrorist target because too many Australians still practice the religion of Pope Urban II: that's something you could actually do something about, if you were of a mind to appease terrorists. Not that any government would, unless they were determined to commit electoral suicide. Back to Andrew:

It is now said again and again that these bombings are the price Spain paid for being a "strong ally of the US" in Iraq. And that Australia is therefore in greater danger now, too. Both claims are false, or desperately misleading.

"Said by whom?" you may ask. Andrew doesn't say, so your guess is as good as mine on that topic.

Turd Way Watch

WHAT do you give someone who’s been proved innocent after spending the best part of their life behind bars, wrongfully convicted of a crime they didn’t commit?

An apology, maybe? Counselling? Champagne? Compensation? Well, if you’re David Blunkett, the Labour Home Secretary, the choice is simple: you give them a big, fat bill for the cost of board and lodgings for the time they spent freeloading at Her Majesty’s Pleasure in British prisons.

Sunday Herald On-Line (via Crooked Timber)

Paddy Hill figured spending 16 years behind bars for a crime he didn't commit was bad enough, but now, to add insult to injury, the Scotland resident is being charged by the British government more than £3,000 for each year he was incarcerated to cover the cost of his housing and food.

And Hill is not alone. Many others wrongly convicted are receiving similar demands from London.

Britain's David Blunkett, the Labour home secretary, sees nothing wrong with charging an innocent man for what he cost the government in upkeep, reported Scotland's Sunday Herald.

In fact, Blunkett is scheduled to fight in court tomorrow for the right to charge victims of wrongful convictions.

World Net Daily

This has to be one of those urban legends, doesn't it? Perhaps not:

A judge’s ruling which increased compensation to two men wrongly convicted for the murder of paperboy Carl Bridgewater was being challenged in the Court of Appeal today.

The independent assessor asked by the Home Office to work out the scale of compensation is appealing against parts of the High Court judgment which includes the quashing of his 25% deduction for “board and lodgings” while in jail.

scotsman.com ( via morons.org)

Losing the Plot (II)

Australian interests overseas and foreign interests here were at increased risk of a terrorist attack because of the Iraq war, the nation's top spy said today.

Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) director-general Dennis Richardson said the close alliance with the United States and participation in the war on terror contributed to Australia being a terrorist target.

"Threat levels in respect of some specific foreign interests in Australia however were raised because of the war in Iraq," Mr Richardson said.

The Age

Appeasement, Spanish Style

WASHINGTON, March 15 (Xinhuanet) -- The United States said Monday that it is possible to consider the adoption of a new United Nations Security Council resolution to accommodate request by Spain for a UN mandate to maintain its troops in Iraq although such mandate is already available.

"It has been said that there needs to be a UN mandate for those troops. We believe there is such a mandate in (UN Security Council resolution) 1511," State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said at anews briefing.

"At same time, we've also said that in the context of a transfer of sovereignty (to Iraqis) on June 30, a new resolution is possible," he said.

Ereli made the remarks after Rodriguez Zapatero, prime minister-elect of Spain, vowed earlier Monday to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq by June 30.

But Zapatero also indicated that Spain could maintain its troops in Iraq if there is a UN mandate after June 30, when the US-led coalition occupation authority returns sovereignty to Iraqis.

China View(link via a comment from vaara at Kick & Scream)

PSOE leader and prime minister-elect José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, former European Union special envoy to the Near East and probable future foreign minister Miguel Angel Moratinos, and Socialist EU Deputy Francisca Sauquillo outlined the central points of the future government's foreign policy.

"My government will be deeply pro-European. We will recover our traditional strong ties with Europe, Latin America and the Mediterranean region," Rodríguez Zapatero told a news briefing Monday.

Referring to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, he said George W. "Bush and (Tony) Blair should engage in self-criticism because you can't bomb a country 'just in case'."

He also confirmed that "unless the UN takes over in Iraq, I will withdraw Spain's troops before Jun. 30," the deadline set for the transfer of power from the occupation forces to Iraqi authorities

Inter Press News

After many years of being tormented by ETA terrorist tactics, the Spanish have come to abhor terrorism more strongly than anybody else. Their rage was vigorously expressed in the anti-terrorism demonstrations that brought more than 10 million people into the streets after the bombings. The incoming prime minister, Socialist leader Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, echoed the public sentiment by declaring his immediate and absolute priority would be to combat terrorism.

The fact that Spanish voters have given the reins of power back to the Socialists, who opposed the war against Iraq, clearly reflects their decision that cooperation with the U.S.-led war has been neither an appropriate nor effective response to the challenge of eliminating terrorism.

The election result undoubtedly is a major blow to the Bush administration, which will lose one of its key European allies in the war. Zapatero said both Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair ``will have to reflect and engage in some self-criticism'' about their actions concerning the war.

It remains unclear whether the new Socialist government will immediately withdraw its troops from Iraq. Zapatero has vowed to bring Spanish soldiers home if no new development emerges by the end of June, when the United States has promised to hand power to a provisional Iraqi government. He also was keen to see what role the United Nations would be allowed to play in the process. He will make the decision after watching developments of the power transfer and the U.N. involvement in the process. His position that ending the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq quickly is the best way to fix the frayed international coalition against terrorism seems to be similar to the posture of France and Germany.

Asahi Shimbun

Cheap Shot

So, you reckon that the defeat of Spain's Popular Party shows that the Spanish people have lost their cojones. That the election result was a victory for cowardice and appeasement. When can we expect you to admit that the result of the 2001 Australian election was a victory for racism?

Postscript: I doubt that I shall get away with saying that the question is entirely rhetorical and doesn't represent my somewhat more nuanced opinion of the Tampa incident and the Children Overboard affair. But it's worth a try anyway.

Not About Madrid

Last week I hinted that I might give the Committee Hansard of Federal Parliament's Joint Standing Committee on Treaties a bit of a going over for more gems from Senator Santo Santoro. The committee was discussing a proposal that Australia withdraw from the UN's International Fund for Agricultural Development. Our reason for doing so is, in brief:

Australia supports relevant and effective multilateral agencies that deliver cost-effective and tangible results in South-East Asia and the Pacific region. We do not believe that IFAD adequately satisfies this criterion.

Mr Charles Tapp, Deputy Director-General, Papua New Guinea, Pacific and Global
Programs, Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID)

Mr Tapp gave the committee extensive testimony on the background to the decision, including the numerous problems AusAID has had with IFAD's disinclination to engage with Australia on AID isssues which fall within IFAD's purview. In May 2002, Mr Tapp wrote to IFAD's President, Lennart Båge, expressing Australia's frustrations with IFAD in the strongest terms possible:

... I think it appropriate to advise you that AusAID in the course of its ongoing multilateral assessment process has developed significant concerns about the continuing relevance of IFAD’s operations to Australia’s development cooperation objectives and priority countries. As you are aware, only a small proportion of IFAD supported programs are allocated in the main focal regions of Australia’s aid program, South-East Asia and the Pacific. As a result, opportunities for operational interaction between AusAID and IFAD have been extremely limited. Where such interaction has occurred it has been characterised by communication difficulties related to IFAD’s proxy management arrangements and limited headquarters engagement. In these circumstances it has been difficult to achieve the kind of bilateral-multilateral synergies for which we increasingly strive. Australia will therefore be assessing the level of its participation and seeks replenishment from first principles.

Senator Santoro was naturally curious about how President Båge (Boge in the transcript), responded to this letter:

Senator SANTORO — What was the response to that letter?

Mr Tapp — None. Very shortly thereafter the Director-General of AusAID had a meeting with the President of IFAD. There was no response provided to that letter whatsoever.

Senator SANTORO — At that meeting?

Mr Tapp — At that meeting—none at all.

Senator SANTORO — What is it? Is it rudeness, lack of knowledge of diplomatic protocol, personality clashes—or they just don’t give a stuff?

I think Senator Santoro is being a little unfair to Mr Båge. I know that if I had received such an openly vitriolic communique, whether via E-Mail or old-fashioned snail-mail, I'd need to lie in a darkened room for several days until I got over feeling that nobody loved me any more. Mr Båge is Swedish, and we all know, from the films of Ingmar Bergman, that they're inclined to be very gloomy people. It's quite likely that it's taken Båge till now to recover sufficiently to deal with the AusAID letter.

Political leaders and pro-war commentators may not know what they are for or where they are heading or where they stand in the Culture Wars or what ever happened to tradition and morality or why every domestic initiative ends in crisis or why major institutions are always beset by scandal....but they do know one thing for certain. They Are Against Terrorism. They are opposed to mass murder, to nihilistic bombings, to the killing of 200 innocents as they travelled to work on a Thursday morning. This is the morality of the lowest common denominator, an empty political vision defined in response to empty terrorist acts. To paraphrase Tony Blair: 'It is as pathetic as the terrorists are opportunistic.'

And where does defining your worldview through terrorism get you? It gets you to a place where, although you don't like to admit it out loud, you secretly, guiltily welcome massacres like that in Madrid, as an opportunity to berate your opponents and as a reminder of your own moral indefatigability. Nice.

Brendan O'Neill of Spiked (link via "Australia's most respected blogger")

Steyn on Spain is Really Quite Inane

To be sure, there are all kinds of John Kerry-esque footnoted nuances to Sunday's stark numbers. One sympathises with those electors reported to be angry at the government's pathetic insistence, in the face of the emerging evidence, that Thursday's attack was the work of Eta, when it was obviously the jihad boys. One's sympathy, however, disappears with their decision to vote for a party committed to disengaging from the war against the jihadi. As Margaret Thatcher would have said: "This is no time to go wobbly, Manuel." But they did. And no one will remember the footnotes, the qualifications, the background - just the final score: terrorists toppled a European government.

Daily Telegraph

It just goes to show you how a country and a people can totally lose their moral fibre in the space of four decades; it's utterly inconceivable that, in 1964, a terrorist attack in Madrid could influence the outcome of a Spanish election. General Franco would have seen to that.

Losing the Plot

THE nation's police chief, Mick Keelty, has been personally chastised by a senior member of John Howard's staff after contradicting a key government claim - that the war on Iraq has not increased the terrorist threat to Australia.

The Oz

The Duck of Steel might need to get onto his mate George and ask him to pull the FBI into line too:

A terrorist attack on Australia was inevitable, and the nation was clearly more of a target because of its alliance to the United States, a senior FBI counter-terrorism expert said today.

The Age

The Mathematics of Sympathy

Although many commentators have excoriated the Spanish electorate for its capitulation to terror, we must never forget that the slightly smaller half decisively rejected it. These we honor and the rest we pity.

Some Idiot

The [Spanish] Government's defeat also reflected public anger with the decision to back the United States in the invasion of Iraq, a policy initially opposed by 90 per cent of the Spanish public.

AM

If we're going to distribute honor and pity among the Spanish population according to how they voted in the recent elections, it seems only reasonable that we apply a similar rule to those who died in the Madrid bomb attacks. Those who supported the Popular Party's decision to back the United States are worthy of being mourned as martyrs to the cause of freedom and democracy; that's 20 people. The other 180 we can write off as a bunch of paella munching appeasement monkeys who paid the ultimate penalty for their refusal to recognise the harsh realities of the world we find ourselves in.

The calculation assumes that those killed in the Madrid bombings were a representative sample of the Spanish population. This is a questionable assumption; there's little reason to believe that the terrorists were looking to perform a statistically reliable massacre. But it's reasonable to conclude that the majority of the Madrid victims had probably opposed Spain's involvement in the war in Iraq.

Which all makes me wonder why any of the various bloggers and commentators who have depicted the Spanish election result as a clear case of caving in to Al-Qaeda are wasting any sympathy on the Madrid victims, when what the Spanish people really deserve right now is a bloody big "I told you so!"

AFP Commissioner Soft on Terror?

That seems to be Mark Steyn's message in this opinion piece in today's Oz:

"THE bombs dropped on Baghdad exploded in Madrid!" declared one "peace" protester in Spain. Or as Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty put it, somewhat less vividly: "If this turns out to be Islamic extremists . . . it is more likely to be linked to the position that Spain and other allies took on issues such as Iraq."

By "other allies", he means you – yes, you, reading this on the bus to work in Australia. You may not have supported the war, or ever voted for John Howard, but you're now a target. In other words, this is "blowback". This is what you get when you side with the swaggering Texas gunslinger and his neocon Zionist sidekicks.

It's a worry isn't it; there you are reading the Oz on your daily commute from Belgrave to Flinders St and, on the opinion pages of the jewel in the crown of Australian journalism, you discover that one of the nation's key police agencies is being run by some soft-headed loon who's prepared to go on national television and run that crazy "Islamic terrorism is all our fault" line. Well, it might be, if Steyn wasn't such a lazy bastard (sometimes, I'm a lazy bastard too, that's what makes it easy for me to recognise Steyn's lazy bastardry).

If Steyn had bothered to do a little more research - if for example, he'd obtained a video or transcript of Keelty's interview with Jana Wendt on the Sunday program - he might have spared himself the embarassment of trying to score points off Keelty. Early in the interview, Keelty spells out the police approach to the problem of terrorism:

JANA WENDT: So what conclusions are you drawing from what we now know about this attack?

MICK KEELTY: Well, I think the arrests early this morning indicate that some of the early predictions about who might have been involved are starting to shore up now in terms of Islamic extremism. But we have to let the investigation run its course, like we did in Bali. We have to let the evidence emerge from the investigation, and then make our determinations from there.

Because unlike, for example, intelligence agencies and others who quite properly make statements and make predictions about many of these things, the law enforcement role is to provide the evidence and use that evidence as fact.

I suppose Steyn might be counted here as one of those "others" and, unlike Steyn, for whom it might be quite proper to "make statements and make predictions", the AFP are constrained by the need to actually gather evidence before they go pointing the finger of blame or, as Steyn does in his article, speculating on the complete lack of intelligible motivation on the part of terrorists.

Keelty's "it's all our fault" statement comes later; here it is in full:

JANA WENDT: Well, Commissioner, that brings me to the question that most Australians are asking themselves. Could this happen here?

MICK KEELTY: Well, I think we've said all along this is an uphill battle. This is a marathon, not a sprint. The reality is, if this turns out to be Islamic extremists responsible for this bombing in Spain, it's more likely to be linked to the position that Spain and other allies took on issues such as Iraq. And I don't think anyone's been hiding the fact that we do believe that ultimately one day, whether it be in one month's time, one year's time, or ten years' time, something will happen.

And no one can guarantee it won't. And I think there's a level of honesty that has to exist here in terms of what the problems are here, not only in Australia but in our region.

But on the threat level, the threat level here in Australia hasn't changed. It still remains at medium. It has been at medium for some time for an attack on Australians in Australia.

Beyond the suggestion that the bombing in Madrid was linked to Spain's position on Iraq, what precisely is wrong with what Keelty has said? it strikes me as a reasoned and honest assessment of the situation; certainly more reasoned that Steyn's third riposte:

Commissioner Keelty is confusing old-school terrorism – blowing the legs off grannies as a means to an end – with the new: blowing the legs off grannies is the end.

Nothing Keelty has said, incidentally, is inconsistent with Steyn's belief on this score; it's quite possible that Keelty would agree with Steyn on this score - he might see the Iraq rationale as merely a convenient excuse for terrorists to blow the legs off grannies. This still leaves the possibility that terrorists are more likely to blow the legs off Australian grannies than, say, Venezualan grannies because in the latter case they would have to strain their intellects to come up with new excuses.

Steyn finishes with a lesson from history:

So the choice for pluralist democracies is simple: You can join Bush in taking the war to the terrorists, to their redoubts and sponsoring regimes. Despite the sneers that terrorism is a phenomenon and you can't wage war against a phenomenon, in fact you can – as the Royal Navy did very successfully against the malign phenomena of an earlier age, piracy and slavery.

Personally, I'd find the lesson a little more salutory if it weren't for the fact that both malign phenomena were fostered by the English in the first place; the first through privateering the second through various slaving companies set up under Royal charter. In both cases it took them a century or two to clean up their act.

Afterword: Bizarrely, Phil Ruddock was on AM this morning, arguing, like Steyn, that Keelty was wrong to link the Madrid bombing to Spain's involvement in Iraq. He even used one or two of Steyn's examples. Unlike Steyn, he was trying to hose down the threat.

To Err Is Human

I wasn't entirely comfortable with Professor Bunyip's description of me as "gentlemanly" last week - it makes me feel like I should have a couple of "seconds" for other gentlemen affronted by this blog to call upon, to make the traditional arrangements for a meeting at dawn. I really wouldn't want to get into that sort of gentlemanly behaviour, unless I could be absolutely certain that I could manage things so that I had choice of weapons whenever I found myself faced with a demand for satisfaction.

Still, I'm sure that the appellation was intended as a compliment, which I'm pleased to be able to return - so all credit to the gracious and gentlemanly Gudgeon, S.

Studiously Ignoring Madrid

Just up on the ABC web-site this World Today report covers the three competing theories on who was responsible for the Madrid bombings:

Three theories are emerging. The first, favoured by the Spanish Government is that this was the work of the Basque separatist group, ETA.

The bombs are said to have been made with the same type of explosive used in the past by ETA terrorists, though the leader of a Basque political party linked to ETA has denied it was involved.

The second theory is that Muslim extremists possibly linked to al-Qaeda were behind the bombings.

This has been given substance by the discovery of a stolen van containing detonators and a cassette tape of Koranic teachings, and the delivery of a letter to a London Arabic language newspaper purporting to claim responsibility for the attack on behalf of al-Qaeda.

And the final theory is the chilling possibility that this is the work of two terror organisations, which have put aside their ideological differences in order to target a common enemy.

I don't think it's worth adding anything to that. Not even the instructions on how to make "pump canals" for which, according to the Google Translator you need "5 ... spoonfuls" of ETA's favourite explosive.

Qu(ot)e?

While I was Googling up references for another post, which has so far been about two weeks in the making and probably won't ever appear here anyway, I found this interesting tidbit from a famous historical document:

10. If anyone who has borrowed a sum of money from Jews dies before the debt has been repaid, his heir shall pay no interest on the debt for so long as he remains under age, irrespective of whom he holds his lands. If such a debt falls into the hands of the Crown, it will take nothing except the principal sum specified in the bond.

11. If a man dies owing money to Jews, his wife may have her dower and pay nothing towards the debt from it. If he leaves children that are under age, their needs may also be provided for on a scale appropriate to the size of his holding of lands. The debt is to be paid out of the residue, reserving the service due to his feudal lords. Debts owed to persons other than Jews are to be dealt with similarly.

I'll leave it to you to track down the document in question; it should be simple enough for proficient Googlers. I think you'll be surprised when you find it.

Bits

Fancy yourself as Maxwell's Demon? (link via boynton).

And here's the latest news on the Florida end of Collins Street.

Finally, a slightly overdue hello, to new readers who found this blog through Tim Dunlop's Blogjam at Web Diary. I would have posted this yesterday, but I was too busy trying to come up with something that dealt with the events of the day in a quirky way. It ain't all beer and skittles being one of the blogosphere's real discoveries.

Another Di[s]appointing Homonym

Victoria's Chief Police Commissioner, Christine Nixon, was on the radio this morning, talking to Jon Faine. One of the subjects they discussed was the fact that the Australian Crime Commission will be assisting the Victoria Police with their inquiries in the Piranha investigation. Well that's what I thought she said. Twice. On checking the printed media, it turns out that the investigation, into Melbourne's recent spate of gangland killings, is called Operation Purana.

It had me going for a moment there; I was looking forward to reports that the case had been cracked by an undercover policeman who had adopted the persona of Sancho Panza from Man of La Mancha, complete with outrageous Welsh accent, to penetrate Victoria's underworld and find the guilty parties.

The Talented Mr Copperfield

I've been reading bloody Charles Dickens again. The last time I was in my local library, looking for something by Phillip K Dick, there wasn't anything there I hadn't re-read at least once in the last two years, so I succumbed to the temptation to look a couple of shelves lower and came away with a copy of David Copperfield. It's the 1996 Penguin Classics edition with a post-structuralist introduction by Jeremy Tambling; Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze all score a mention in the first paragraph.

Now, we all know that life was tough in Dickensian England - that's why we call it Dickensian after all. The poor lived out their lives in squalid, drastically underlit hovels walled only by cheap painted canvas flats, while the more affluent middle class could afford more robust constructions of wallpapered plywood, with a birdsong atmosphere track and a yellow flood outside the cellophane window to simulate the afternoon sun. The affluent and the poor alike were all pretty shabby people, dressed in re-tailored cast-offs from last year's serialisation of Pride and Prejudice. It's hardly surprising that people living in such deprived circumstances would have such a high mortality rate.

But the body count in David Copperfield is pretty high even by Dickens' standards. In Chapter IX, David has a memorable birthday; he is told by Mrs Creakle, the wife of his school headmaster, that his mother has died of Supernumary Character's Disease (SCD). By the time he arrives home for the funeral, he learns that it was, in fact, a highly contagious form of SCD which has carried off his step-brother as well.

In chapter XXX, Barkis, the carrier who has married Peggotty his childhood nurse also succumbs to SCD. In the following chapter, Little Emily, his childhood friend, abandons home and fiancee to become a fallen woman - in due course she will suffer a Fate Worse than Death (FWD) and achieve eventual redemption in chapter L. Chapter XXXVIII brings the Mysterious Sudden Death (MSD) of David's employer Mr Spenlow who is also the father of David's intended Dora. By chapter XLVIII Dora, now married to David, is showing the first symptoms of an obviously terminal case of SCD herself. In chapter LIII ( a good 57 pages later), she too dies, but not before infecting her dog Jip.

In between the deaths of Mr Spenlow and Dora, David and his friend Mr Peggotty (brother of his childhood nurse) prevent the suicide of another fallen woman Martha. Finally, at the end of chapter LV we learn of the death of the estranged husband of David's aunt Miss Trotwood; a death which releases the last slender hold the obsequious Uriah Heep might have over her.

At least three of these deaths - the deaths of Mr Spenlow, Dora and the dog Jip - occur in circumstances which suggest that there might be darker forces at work than the ordinary risks of being a minor character in a Dickens novel.

Spenlow is found lying by the road a mile from his home, after his horses and carriage arrive there without him. His death occurs the very night after he has confronted David with the love letters that David has sent to his daughter Dora without Spenlow's knowledge. Their confrontation includes the following revealing exchange:

'... you can hardly think,' said Mr Spenlow, 'having experience of what we see, in the Commons here, every day, of the various unaccountable and negligent proceedings of men, in respect of their testamentary arrangements [i.e. making their wills] - of all subjects, the one on which perhaps the strangest revelations of human inconsistency are to be met with - but that mine is made?'

I inclined my head in acquiescence.

'I should not allow,' said Mr Spenlow ... 'my suitable provision for my child to be influenced by a piece of youthful folly like the present. It is mere folly ... But I might - I might ... be induced in some anxious moment to guard her from, and surround her with protections against the consequences of, any foolish step in the way of marriage. Now, Mr Copperfield, I hope that you will not render it necessary for me to open, even for a quarter of an hour, that closed page in the book of life, and unsettle ... grave affairs long since composed." [My emphasis]

Later, after giving an account of the rest of his day, and how he spent the evening, David describes how he arrives at work the following day to learn that Mr Spenlow is dead, and includes this hearsay description of Mr Spenlow's corpse:

"[he was] more than a mile off [from home] ... lying partly on the roadside, and partly on the path, upon his face. Whether he fell out in a fit, or got out, feeling ill before the fit came - or even whether he was quite dead then, though there is no doubt he was quite insensible - no one appears to know. If he breathed certainly he never spoke. Medical assistance was got as soon as possible, but it was quite useless."

Very strange; was Spenlow's death the result of a desperate author realising that he has painted himself into a corner plot-wise, or did a certain protagonist decide that he would actively prevent the father of his beloved from opening "even for a quarter of an hour, that closed page in the book of life"?

The case of Dora and her dog Jip is even more troubling. The basic facts are these; by chapter LIII, Dora's Supernumary Character's Disease has progressed to the point where she is bedridden and, as is typical of these cases, aware that she only has another dozen pages, tops, before she's out of the story. The dog Jip, has also aged rather rapidly ovee the course of fifty or so pages and is now quite decrepit. Dora has also developed the remarkable insight into her own situation and the motivations of other characters that is often seen in patients in the late stages of Supernumary Character's Disease:

"I am going to speak to you Doady [David]. I am going to say something I have often thought of saying lately. You won't mind?" [Dora said] with a gentle look.

"Mind my darling?"

"Because I don't know what you will think, or what you may have thought sometimes. Perhaps you have often thought the same. Doady, dear, I am afraid I was too young."

...

"I am afraid, dear, I was too young. I don't mean in years only, but in experience, and thoughts, and everything. I was such a silly little creature! I am afraid it would have been better, if we had only loved each other as a boy and girl, and forgotten it. I have begun to think I was not fit to be a wife."

Dora's thoughts on her marriage to David aren't far from thoughts of his own that David has revealed to us. But the most remarkable part of this episode is yet to come.

David's real love Agnes is also present in the house (at Dora's request). After this last conversation with David, Dora tells him that she wants to speak with Agnes in private. So David returns to the parlour, where he is alone with the dog, while Agnes is upstairs alone with Dora. Here is how the chapter ends:

He [Jip] comes very slowly to me, licks my hand, and lifts his dim eyes to my face.

"O, Jip! It may be, never again!"

He lies down at my feet, stretches himself out as if to sleep, and with a plaintive cry, is dead.

"O Agnes! Look, look, here!"

- That face, so full of pity and grief, that rain of tears, that awful mute appeal to me, that solemn hand upraised toward Heaven!

"Agnes?"

It is over. Darkness comes before my eyes; and, for a time, all things are blotted out of my remembrance.

The coincidence of the dog dying immediately before David learns of Dora's death is striking; but we can't help wondering what Agnes got up to while she was alone upstairs with Dora. Did she rearrange the pillows with extreme prejudice while David was downstairs seeing off the dog? Was it just Dickens, glossing over the detail to get Dora out of the way so he could move onto more interesting* things, or did something darker happen here?

* "more interesting" in the same way that you might consider scratching your balls more interesting than scratching your arse. Or vice versa; your scratching preferences are your business. Let's keep it that way.

Santoro Watch

I learnt a new word today: winegate. It's a Queensland word for "storm in a teacup". Star Coalition bench-warmer, Senator Santo Santoro used the Adjournment debate yesterday to give the Beattie government a good hiding over the fact that "an illicit $10 bottle of cab sav" found its way into a dry Aboriginal community on a government jet carrying Queensland Indigenous Affairs Minister, Liddy Clark.

Senator Santoro began by making it quite clear that he had no personal axe to grind with Ms Clark:

Tonight I want to speak about the disgraceful behaviour of the Queensland Premier in relation to what has become known as the winegate affair. At the outset, I want to say to honourable senators that I have thought very deeply about all this before deciding to speak out publicly. I did so because the Queensland minister who managed to enmesh herself in this unseemly display is Liddy Clark, the person who defeated me in my state seat of Clayfield in 2001. For three years I have purposely not made any critical public comment on her so that no-one on the Labor side of politics or indeed anywhere else would be able to claim that it was sour grapes on my part. But tonight I am duty bound to comment on the moral bankruptcy of the Premier of Queensland and the government that he leads—the government that he leads from well behind the action if we are to believe what he has a track record of claiming when in difficulty that he did not know.

No, it is Senator Santoro's painful duty to tell it like it is; to call a spade a spade and an incompetent an incompetent:

It is inevitable that my comments tonight will necessarily go to questions of Ms Clark's behaviour as a minister. The shameful farce that she and the Premier have visited on my state for the past week as they try to evade what otherwise would be the inevitable penalty for their stupidity is a disgrace to public administration and to the government of Queensland. It is hardly possible to credit that an illicit $10 bottle of cab sav somehow flew all the way from Brisbane to Lockhart River in the far north of Cape York Peninsula in the government jet with the Minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Policy aboard, via an overnight stop at Weipa, and failed to come to her attention. My comments will inevitably raise questions about Ms Clark's suitability for ministerial office after one term in parliament as a backbencher in which the closest she came to setting the world on fire was to sing a song in parliament and stage a smoking ceremony to chase away the spirits when she took over the electorate office I had just vacated.

Senator Santoro then turns his forensic intellect to an analysis of Peter Beattie's nefarious involvement in "winegate":

...

In relation to the so-called winegate affair, there is very strong evidence of ministerial impropriety by Mr Beattie, among others. At the height of the Netbet affair Mr Beattie finally stood aside his then Treasurer, David Hamill. On the face of it, the winegate affair is less serious. In fact, it is a farce. But, politically, it is a bottler. The conflagration that Mr Beattie is now battling is one he started himself. The Premier's conduct in all of this has been completely inappropriate. The conduct of his office also demands close scrutiny ...

and finishes with a timely warning that "winegate" is no laughing matter:

... The people of Queensland, and doubtless others in other places, are having a rare old laugh. As Peninsula Regional Council chairman, Eddie Woodley, and Cairns Regional Council chairman, Terry O'Shane, said in a statement they released yesterday, the attention being given to `a single bottle of unopened plonk' is just unbelievable. And that is it in a nutshell. The Premier has brought this crisis on himself. He is in grave danger of making himself a laughing stock. That would be tragic because he does not deserve that. He deserves to be seen as an antidemocratic wrecker of the process of government and of the lives of people who get between him and his image ...

Postscript: Senator Santoro was also busy on Monday, when the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties considered a proposal that Australia withdraw from the International Fund for Agricultural Development. As Senator Santoro is at his best as a committee performer, I might give that the once over later this week.

Pop Culture Gender Bender

A friend has passed on a marketing E-Mail about "VC Andrews" latest posthumous novel Celeste:

Cleo Virginia Andrews was born in Portsmouth, Virginia, and initially made her living as a fashion illustrator and ad designer. She published her first novel, Flowers in the Attic, in 1979. More than 40 novels later, there are over 90 million copies of her works in print. Following her death, the Andrews family worked with a carefully selected writer to organize and complete Virginia Andrews' stories and to create additional novels inspired by her storytelling genius.

In Celeste, the first book in the new Gemini series, Celeste and her identical twin brother, Noble, are as close as can be -- until a tragic accident takes Noble's life. It's a loss that pushes their mother, a woman obsessed with New Age superstitions, over the edge.... Desperate to keep her son "alive," Celeste's mother forces her to cut her hair, wear boys' clothes, and take on Noble's identity. [my emphasis]

At Amazon.com, Flowers in the Attic is described as a "dark, terrifying tale of passion and peril in the lives of four innoocent children". Celeste just strikes me as dim.

It's a Man's Game

A LAWN bowls fracas left a man in hospital after violence erupted during a quiet Sunday match at a suburban club.

The Hun

All Our Trade Will Be Free but Some Will be More Free than The Rest

[Labor trade spokesman Stephen Conroy] said the [Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement] also appeared worse for Australian farmers than first anticipated, with fine-print clauses giving America the ability to reimpose tariffs on Australian beef and some horticultural products if US prices dip significantly below average levels.

The Age

Well, he would say that, wouldn't he? Here's what the agreement actually says, in Chapter 3: Agriculture. First there's this interesting article:

ARTICLE 3.4 : AGRICULTURAL SAFEGUARD MEASURES
1. Notwithstanding Article 2.3 (Elimination of Duties), a Party may impose a measure in the form of an additional duty on an originating agricultural good as provided in that Party’s section of Annex 3-A (Agricultural Safeguard Measures), provided that the conditions in paragraphs 2 through 6 are met. The sum of any such additional duty and any other customs duty on such good shall not exceed the lesser of:

(a) the prevailing most-favoured-nation (“MFN”) applied rate of duty; or
(b) the MFN applied rate of duty in effect on the day immediately preceding the date of entry into force of this Agreement.

2. The additional duty under paragraph 1 shall be set according to each Party’s Schedule to Annex 3-A.

In other words, although both parties have agreed to eliminate duties, either party will be able to impose dutiers on agricultural goods, as long as the duty has been set out in the agreement and a few other conditions are met.

Here's Australia's list of agriculutural goods which might in future be subject to Agricultural Safeguard Measures:



And here's a summary of the US' list:

Onion Powder, Dried Onions, Garlic Powder, Dried Garlic, Packaged Whole Tomatoes, Tomato Paste, Tomato Puree, Asparagus, Pears, Apricots, Peaches, Canned Fruit Mixtures containing Pears and Peaches, Canned Fruit Mixtures containing Oranges or Grapefruit, Frozen Orange Juice, Unfermented Grape Juice and Must and Tomato Sauces.

It's quite a revealing list, when you consider that the Agreement has to be ratified by the US Congress. Until I saw it I had no idea that the US' onion and garlic lobby was so influential.

Afterword: there's more on this topic from Josh Gordon in The Age.

Islamic Paintball Jihad

Three American Muslims accused of training for holy war against the United States by waging paintball battles in the Virginia woods have been convicted of conspiring to support terrorism.

The Age

The Spammegorical Imperative

Proof positive that at least one spammer has never read Immanuel Kant:



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Tractatus Theologico-Geopoliticus

Axioms:

1. Anyone who criticises the current US President is anti-American.
2. The USA is the most Christian nation on Earth.
3. The current US President is the most Christian US President in world history.
4. Anyone who is anti-American hates Christianity.
5. Anyone who hates Christianity hates civilisation as we know it.

Conclusion:

C1: Anyone who criticises George W Bush hates civilisation as we know it.

This follows from Axioms 1, 2, 4 and 5 (whose truth has been established by frequent repetition elsewhere): to criticise George Bush is anti-American and because the USA is the world's most Christian nation it is therefore anti-Christian and hence (Axiom 5) demonstrates a hatred of civilisation. Additional weight is given to this conclusion by the fact that Bush is an openly Christian President (Axiom 3), so C1 also follows from Axioms 1, 3 and 5.

Infamous Plays

I've just been reading over the last scene of Nahum Tate's revised version of Shakespeare's King Lear. I couldn't help myself; I had to find out how Tate contrives to leave Lear alive and Cordelia married to Edgar.

The scene starts with Lear and Cordelia in prison. Lear is asleep. Cordelia makes a moving speech - it's best not to dwell on what, precisely, gets moved by Cordelia's impassioned words. As soon as she finishes speaking, a "Captain and Officers" enter with Cords. The Captain gives his officers these sinister instructions:

Now, Sirs, dispatch, already you are paid
In part, the best of your Reward's to come.

After a short verbal and physical fracas, Lear shows that he is still sprightly for his age; he

Snatches a Partizan, and strikes down two of them; the rest quit Cordelia, and turn upon him. Enter Edgar and Albany.

(A partizan is a medieval weapon similar to a halberd - I think).

With two of the murderous officers out for the count, Edgar reveals that the Duke of Albany is now in charge. An anonymous gentleman helpfully informs the audience of the fate of the two "officers" struck down by Lear's partizan:

Look here, my Lord, see where the generous King
Has slain Two of 'em.

Albany still has some important business of state to conduct, for which he requires witnesses. So he gives the following orders:

Bring in old Kent, and, Edgar, guide you hither
Your Father, whom you said was near,
He may be an Ear-witness at the least
Of our Proceedings.

Once the witnesses are assembled, Albany gives Lear back his kingdom. Well, most of it anyway:

For to your Majesty we do Resign
Your Kingdom, save what Part your Self conferr'd
On Us in Marriage.

Edgar reveals that Goneril and Regan are both dead:

Gonerill and haughty Regan, both are Dead, [420]
Each by the other poison'd at a Banquet;
This, Dying, they confest.

And yes, Edgar does get the girl (Cordelia), with her father's blessing:

... Edgar, I defer thy Joys too long:
Thou serv'dst distrest Cordelia; take her Crown'd:
Th' imperial Grace fresh Blooming on her Brow;

I just love a happy ending, don't you?

Remember When?

... recently ... I received an e-mail entitled "If you are over 35, you should be dead." As I am in fact over 35, I decided to read it to clear up the mystery of why I was not dead. On opening the message, I thought (an act that provided axiomatic evidence of my being) that I recognized the contents as an antiregulatory diatribe I had already received a few times. And if I've gotten this note a few times, perhaps some Scientific American readers have received it as well. Therefore, I decided to respond here, because I don't have all your e-mail addresses.

First, some highlights of the e-mail: "According to today's regulators and bureaucrats, those of us who were kids in the 40's, 50's, 60's, or even maybe the early 70's probably shouldn't have survived. Our baby cribs were covered with bright colored lead-based paint. When we rode our bikes, we had no helmets. As children, we would ride in cars with no seatbelts or air bags. We fell out of trees, got cut and broke bones and teeth, and there were no lawsuits from these accidents. Please pass this on to others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before lawyers and government regulated our lives, for our own good! People under 30 are WIMPS!"

I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that the target audience for this message is people who are alive. In data analysis, this is what's known as selection bias. Indeed, many kids didn't wear seat belts way back when. Some of them are now, in technical medical terminology, dead. The dead ones don't write such rants. Kids brain-damaged by lead or preventable blunt trauma may write, but they are probably not responsible for the above e-mail. Probably.

Still, life unfettered by bureaucratic interference remains tempting. And so I find myself musing on the good old days. I mean the really old days--30,000 years ago. Bureaucrats and lawyers didn't even exist yet. We were on our own and took responsibility for our actions ...

Steve Mirsky in Scientific American