A handbag?

Senator Bob Brown seems to believe there is such a thing as a handbag-sized nuclear bomb. Gee, Bob, why not an I-pod sized nuclear bomb? Can't the Greens appoint someone with a skerrick of modern scientific literacy, just to vet their public statements for idiocies like this? Still, I'm prepared to admit that Bob is probably an expert when it comes to handbags.

Right wing of Chicken?

Chicken Little has always been a handy touchstone for right wingers (see previous post), as an image of ill-informed, hysterical alarmism on climate change, etc. Looking at the website for Disney's new animated feature Chicken Little, one begins to wonder if some subtle satire - possibly conservative in character - is at work. It's a perfect pastiche of news websites, and bristles with apocalyptic links and sidebars about disasters, conspiracy theories, paranoia, and spreading the word about the end of the world. Of course, this could just be a kind of catch-all pop-culture playfulness, but given the recent attempts by some to claim features like The Incredibles and Finding Nemo as parables of conservative values, I will be even more interested to catch up with Chicken Little.

On a less cheerful note, it appears that some roles in Chicken Little will be re-voiced by Australian actors for the local release. I can't say how disappointing it is, to be treated like some kind of provincial halfwit who will have a brain haemhorrage if he hears an unfamiliar accent. Have Disney been listening to Rachel Griffiths and Toni Collette, maybe?

A lesson to be learned

This morning's Radio National AM featured an interview with Christina Singh, of the Sensis Business Index, which has recently published a report finding that - guess what - not every small business will be overhauling their workplace arrangements after the passage of the new IR legislation. In other words, not every Australian small business will be transformed, overnight, into a Dickensian hellhole where barefoot tubercular 10-year-olds paste labels on blacking bottles and shimmy up chimneys. The interviewer's response?
"Isn't there a lesson in this for John Howard?"

Honestly. These Chicken Littles run around squawking that the sky is falling, and it's all John Howard's fault. When the sky finally refuses to fall, they peep through their fingers, pick themselves up, look at each other and sagely proclaim: "There's a lesson in this for John Howard".

What, no gravy?

Unsettling news from Mark Steyn that the long-awaited DVD releases of classic Warner Brothers cartoons come with an introductory lecture by Whoopi Goldberg, warning us that these cartoons contain 'offensive' racial and gender gags, and that we'd better not even think of laughing at them now, or Whoopi will open up a new can of Whoopi-ass on us. (Apparently you can't skip this track on the DVD.)

I suppose we should be grateful that the denizens of Hollywood didn't simply have a ceremonial bonfire of the original negatives of these masterpieces in the Warner Brothers' lot, and that if a saner day ever dawns, we can repackage these works into a format which is not an insult to our intelligence. I'm not trying to be some kind of post-modern relativist when I assert that the best of these cartoons are comparable in artistic and humane value, to the fables of Aesop, or the tales of Franz Kafka.

No modern existentialist ever penned a darker tale than Chow Hound, in which a gluttonous dog enslaves a cat and a mouse in a series of scams designed to bring him food, or the money with which to buy it. Every successful effort on their part is met only with a blow and the contemptuous rejoinder: "What, no gravy?". Every futile attempt at defiance is brutally punished. Eventually, paralyzed by a "severe case of over-eating", the master is at the mercy of his servants, and the cartoon ends with one of the scariest final lines in any drama, anywhere- live, canned or animated: "This time, we didn't forget the gravy".

Behind the gags and the comic personae of cats, mice, dogs, rabbits and ducks, the best of these cartoons plot, with architectural precision, a web of power relations in which creatures are destroyed by getting the things they want, and enslaved by the roles they adopt. In Awful Orphan, Charley Dog is a sleazy opportunist seeking a home for the winter, and picks on Porky Pig, envisaging a cozy, old-fashioned master-dog relationship that Porky doesn't want. Charley nearly kills Porky in pursuit of this goal, and finally drives him mad: the master-dog relationship then comes about, but not in the way Charley had anticipated. The cartoon ends with Charley, nearly paralyzed with fear, trying unsuccessfully to escape from the 'home' he has made for himself.

But I'll give the last word to Chicago writer Michael Gebert, who posted a terrific review of the Looney Tunes DVDs on Amazon:

It is infinitely more irritating to have some Hollywood star (who has embarassed herself publicly on at least one famous occasion with incorrect material in a political setting) lecture us about how bad these cartoons are-- and then be FORCED to watch this asinine bit of corporate CYA before EACH disc, EVERY time. (It's not even like, after that, we're allowed to see the most outrageous material-- you can bet that Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs will never make it to one of these sets. Just imagine what they'll put before Song of the South when it finally comes out-- probably we'll have to sit through all of Roots before being allowed to watch it.)

AOL Time Warner, you are not my MOMMY, you are merely the corporate drones who happen today to own material made by far greater artists than you could ever dream of being. Leave it and me alone and let me watch it without your mealymouthed scolding. I will refuse to buy any more of these sets until the moral guardians of today's Hollywood agree to shut up and leave these great cartoons in peace.

What she said...

Kim Beazley was looking rather depressed yesterday, on ABC news, when he was filmed 'urging' the Prime Minister to follow the example of New Zealand's PM Helen Clark, in issuing a strong challenge to the government of Singapore over the imminent execution of Nguyen Tuong Van. Who can blame him for feeling miserable? How low must you have sunk, as Leader of the Opposition, to be urging the PM to follow the lead of...Helen Clark? It's not even a case of 'Do what I say', but 'Do what she does'. Clark, of course, as the nominal leader of a country of no geopolitical significance, is free to make bold gestures such as this. It's the same freedom that was enjoyed, in the ancient courts of Europe, by the Licensed Jester, who was at liberty to make impertinent and provocative comments in a way that more powerful, responsible individuals were not.

However, Kim looked much more cheerful addressing the State ALP conference in Western Australia. He was shown on ABC delivering one of the most bewilderingly awful attempts at political humour I've ever witnessed. It was like 'open mike' night at the comedy club from Hell. Kim was, at times, so breathless with nervous laughter that he could barely get out his carefully scripted one-liners, to be met by only the chirruping of a distant cricket. Some samples:

"We've got here Treasurer Costello, Australia's most arrogant bridesmaid,"

"Kevin Andrews, he's like Mr Bean only he's accident prone.

"Then you've got Brendan Nelson, an animated raccoon on nasty pills."

Even the ABC could smell blood: they were careful to end this segment with a shot from the back of the hall, showing an apparent sea of empty seats.

Sauce for Uganda...

SBS news made a fine show of confected outrage last night (no transcript, so no link) over the matter of hosting the next CHOGM, due to be held in Uganda, where the leader of the Opposition, Kizza Besigye, has appeared before a military tribunal on charges of terrorism and treason. SBS argues that CHOGM should be using its leverage to pressure Uganda away from politically-motivated trials such as Besigye's. In principle, I can only agree, but I can't help noticing how silent SBS has been over the years in the matter of another trans-national body - the United Nations - not only failing to use its leverage to discipline wayward members, but indeed extending its privileges of office and stewardship to the worst tin-pot thugs and dictators amongst its members.

Heads at SBS must have been spinning, too, over the matter of one of their whipping boys of the recent past - Douglas Wood - coming out as a critic of the death sentence for Nguyen Tuong Van. Wood, of course, was the Australian contractor, sorry, war profiteer, who had not only the temerity to be rescued from Iraqi kidnappers, but the sheer bloody bad manners to call his captors 'arseholes' once he was back in the safety of Crusaderland. Still, the enemy of the enemy of my friend's friend is, er....

The Big Issue

No-one would question the good work done by the magazine The Big Issue. To take the example of Paul, my regular vendor, it’s clear that as a result of selling the magazine, he has greatly enlarged the number of people who know his name, who greet him, who are pleased to see him and exchange a few friendly words. So I’m happy to buy the magazine…and bin it as soon as I’m out of sight. As anyone who has looked inside a copy knows, TBI, despite its professional layout, is on the intellectual level of the dumbest student newspaper you ever read. The smarmy, puerile, undergraduate tone is relentless, and its entire political insight can be summed up in one phrase – ‘Howard Bad Man’.

Here are a few samples from the current issue. A set of 'humorous' dictionary definitions offers:

Australia: a large land mass to the left of the United States. But only just.

It's hard to know which is worse: the pain as my sides split with laughing, or the trauma as my geopolitical worldview explodes at this epiphany. Or a feature which invites readers to contribute 'funny' overheard comments, such as:

Young teenager: Why don't people like John Howard?
Dad: It's his politics, darling. They don't like his politics.
Say no more. Overheard in a Melbourne bookshop.

(Not 'Readings', surely? And one hopes the 'teenager' is his daughter: The Big Issue is far too cool to stereotype a 'teenager' by anything as naff as gender.) Somehow I think if I overheard someone say 'Peter Garrett is a hypocrite and a wanker', this wouldn't make it into their funny pages.

So now to my Charles Foster Kane fantasy scenario. Too bad there isn't a rightside media mogul willing to fund a conservative Big Issue. He could approach the BI people with the following deal: let your vendors carry my conservative magazine, as well as yours, from which they will get $3 for every copy sold (they get $2 per copy from TBI). Let charity, and competition, decide.

Man of irony

I have a sneaking fondness for ABC Radio National presenter Stephen Crittenden, currently sitting in for regular Fran Kelly. Stephen's trademark is the 'ironic' insight: "Isn't it ironic?...." is usually his lead in to some observation on an apparent contradiction, which only ever turns out to be a contradiction to those trapped in the ABC-bubble mindset. Discussing the recent polls with Michelle Grattan this morning, he compared the various areas of approval and disapproval of Howard and Beazley, which fall along predictable lines: Coalition strong on economic management, etc. Confronted with the disapproval for Beazley on defence and national security, Stephen was moved to observe "Isn't it ironic...that Beazley rates poorly in this area, given his interest in defence issues, etc."

While acknowledging the Bomber's general common sense regarding national security and defence, reading lots of books about the American Civil War and getting your photo taken sitting in a tank doesn't necessarily translate into an ability to make the right decisions, especially if they happen to be unpopular, when those decisions have to be made - for real. Even the respondents to opinion polls seem to grasp this distinction without difficulty.

If wishes were votes

I've grown invulnerable to most of the mendacious memes of the mainstream media, but one that still gets under my skin is the old "Polls just released show that if an election had been held last weekend, the ALP would have have been swept to power in a landslide, etc", which has been getting quite an outing since the recent AgePoll.

Please. This is like saying, if the Olympics had been held last weekend, and sack racing had been an official event, and nobody else turned up, my mate Dazza would have have won the gold. Federal elections, like the Olympics, are never held 'last weekend'. They're held at the end of a long, long campaign, in which people get to make considered decisions, are deluged with the kind of information and persuasion that form no part of the opinion-polling process, and, ultimately, in which the choice is not some schoolyard hypothetical, but the real thing.

Not a sparrow falls...

Sad news that a world record domino-toppling event in the Netherlands was marred by tragedy. The BBC reports that a sparrow which found its way into the event hall, and had already accidentally toppled some 23, 000 dominoes, was shot by an exterminator. Event staff have received threats, and a tribute website - to the sparrow - was set up.

The TV show's creator, Robin Paul Weijers, said there were "mixed emotions" over the new record. "We all feel terrible about what happened," he said.

We can only wish that the domino toppling space had instead been invaded by something which it is actually legal to kill in the Netherlands: a foetus, an elderly person, or someone suffering from an illness.

Dive bomber?

While not wishing to make light of a serious medical problem, the profile of Kim Beazley in today's Weekend Australian Magazine conjures up a bewildering image. Discussing his bout of Schaltenbrand's syndrome in 2004, it helpfully points out that it is "usually brought on by a sudden jolt, such as bungee jumping". Well, there's one cause that the doctors can rule out.

ALP victory plan proceeding on schedule

At least, it is if you subscribe to the cunning plan outlined by master electoral strategist Professor Robert Manne (see previous post), who bids fair to be for Beazley what Karl Rove is for George W. Bush.

As you'll recall, the Prof has explained that all Kim needs to do to win the next election is to make a 'non-revocable' promise to tear up Howard's IR laws, and sure enough, Kim did just that, during yesterday's day of protest:

My first act as Prime Minister of this nation will be to stand on the steps of Parliament and rip these laws up - these extreme laws are headed straight for the bin, which is where they belong.

Doesn't get much more 'non-revocable' than that. And by the way, if I'm not mistaken, new Parliament House doesn't have any steps that would be suitable for such a dramatic piece of political theatre. Probably Kim has been watching all that archival Whitlam dismissal footage that's been playing non-stop over the last week, in which the steps of Old Parliament House feature so prominently.

Steps, schmeps; the main thing is, Kim has taken the Professor's fail-safe plan on board. Somewhere deep in the politics department at La Trobe University, Professor Manne is in his hushed study - he sits deep in a wingbacked armchair, absently touching his splayed fingertips together, as he gazes, abstracted but with a deeper purpose, into the slumbering embers on the hearth. A single soliloquial murmur breaks the silence: "Exxxxcellent..."

The nutty professor

Spare a thought for Kim Beazley. For all his faults, he at least has some notion of the practical realities of politics. How galling it must be, then, to be lectured on how to win elections by armchair tactician Professor Robert Manne, as he is in today's Age.

The Prof has a simple, one-step formula for ALP victory in the next election, so simple that Kim must be slapping his own forehead with astonishment at his blindness. Apparently, in order to ensure a landslide triumph for the ALP at the next federal election, all Kim needs to do is make a 'non-revocable promise' to roll back Howard's IR laws. Unfortunately, the Prof has no suggestions as to how you produce a convincingly 'non-revocable' promise in the context of real-life election campaigning, something that no other politician has ever succeeded in doing. To say nothing of the possibility that the Prof might be underestimating electoral support for Howard's reforms. But I suppose everybody Prof Manne meets in the faculty lounge at La Trobe agrees with him on this, so who could possibly be voting for Howard?

Readers might recall that Beazley ran on a comparable non-revocable promise to roll back the dreaded GST in 2001 and got slaughtered at the polls. Does this invalidate the Prof's argument? Apparently not (see if you can follow this logic): despite being defeated on GST rollback - and Manne blankly refuses to engage with this as a refutation to his new election strategy - Beazley's real mistake was to abandon his opposition to the GST after that defeat. Got that? Run on a promise to roll back an existing legislation. Get thrashed. Keep up the same promise in opposition, after having been beaten on it, so that you can do it - or something else very like it - again next election. I hope the ALP caucus is taking notes.

The harvest is great, the labourers few

As the workers, united and soon-to-be-defeated, mass under my windows, it seems opportune to recall a sermon I heard preached a few weeks ago. The text was that wonderful parable of the labourers in the vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16). As you will recall, the owner of a vineyard goes to the marketplace early in the morning to hire some workers, at an agreed wage of one denarius for the day. As the day wears on, and it becomes plain that he needs more workers, he returns to the marketplace periodically. At day's end, he pays up, giving one denarius to each worker, whether they had worked the whole day, or just a few hours. The first hired men protest, but the owner replies: "We made a deal, and you were happy with it. This is my money, and I can spend it how I please".

Now, this is fairly clearly one of those parables which Jesus preaches to answer the complaints of those among his followers who protested that they, as Jews who had waited so long for the Messiah and the Kingdom of Heaven, should not have to share it with Gentiles who had put in no effort of waiting at all.

Not much of a surprise that the priest made no mention of this, and preached instead as though Jesus had specifically had John Howard's IR legislation in mind. Apparently it's a parable of the minimum wage - workers should get a certain minimum, no matter how much or how little they do. Unfortunately for this interpretation, Jesus said nothing about those men still at the marketplace, who hadn't been hired at all. And come to think of it, Jesus is troublingly silent on the matter of global warming.

Somewhere over the rainbow

When I see a headline in the Age today saying "Vatican intensifies stand against gays", I have a fair idea of what's coming: Vatican, er, confirms traditional Church teaching on gays. The Age's habit of quoting the most ludicrous assertions without a skerrick of editorial distance, as long as those assertions agree with their own mindset, is in force. They quote a 'gay catholic writer' Michael Kelly asserting that "it was widely accepted now that half the Catholic clergy were gay, and up to 70 percent in some areas". Don't you love that 'widely accepted' and the very scientific-sounding '70 percent'. You might almost think this was based on some kind of research. Here's the result of my own years of research as a participant in the Catholic Church: number of Catholic priests personally encountered, who were gay - zero. Perhaps if I express that as a percentage, it will sound more convincing. Of course, in Australia there was, a few years ago, a certain notorious case of a high-profile gay Catholic priest, but as he is now behind bars for embezzlement, I'm disinclined to think of him as representative of the priestly order.

Department of Dumbing Down

Australian songster Paul Kelly is interviewed in today's Age on the announcement that a volume of his collected lyrics will be a text on the VCE English syllabus. He makes a gracious and modest reply:

"I hope they fall in love with the sound of words the way I did at school with Shakespeare and Gerard Manley Hopkins".

Somehow his comment seems to undercut the whole point of the exercise.

Calling Dr. Jones

Just when you thought you'd seen every possible documentary they could make about the Third Reich, along comes something that still surprises you. Watching The Nazi Expeditions on SBS's 'As It Happened' series, I realize how well Steven Spielberg did his research for Raiders of the Lost Ark. You remember all that stuff about Nazis running around Tibet - it really happened! In 1938, a team of scientists under the direction of the SS went to Tibet to look for evidence of an original 'aryan' race. They even investigated the Yeti. Nazis versus the Abominable Snowman: now there's a storyline Roger Corman would have given his right hand for.

The Nazi interest in the supernatural, the occult, and pseudo-science is a great subject for a film, and it will probably never be better done than Raiders (though I haven't seen the much-praised Hellboy, which also uses this subject). How much of Raiders is Spielberg's love of a good 'trashy' plot, and how much is his desire to make a film about the Third Reich? I've sometimes thought you could see prefigurings of Spielberg's interest in the Holocaust in Close Encounters. The scenes where civilians are being herded onto freight cars to evacuate the anticipated landing site seem like this, but maybe I'm over-interpreting, because what then do we make of the scene where Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) meets the smiling little ET who looks like Jean Renoir, and who extends a stiff-armed, flat-palmed salute in greeting?

Blanchette

When I was a child at primary school, we had a set of standard readers, compiled by the Victorian Education Department. Whereas today they would probably be called something like 'The magic of reading', or 'Rainbow Serpent Reader', back then they were just called 'First Book', 'Second Book', and so on. Needless to say, these have been long since superseded, and have actually become quite collectible. They were even issued in a facsimile set for the nostalgia market in the mid-1980s.

I picked out the Sixth Book recently, to revisit a story that I have never forgotten since I first read it, back in the sixth year of primary school, at the age of 12. Looking through this book, two things strike you immediately. One is that almost every extract, in prose and verse, is something that was not originally written for children, but for an adult readership. The second is that there is no way in the world that any teacher today, at least in a government school, would dream of putting a book like this into a child's hands.

The particular story I recalled is a good example of this. It's a translation of a short tale by the nineteenth-century writer Alphonse Daudet, called 'The White Goat'. It tells the story of a young female goat, in a very anthropomorphized fashion: the goat has a name - Blanchette - and her thoughts and emotions are entirely human. She wanders away from her home farm, to explore the higher mountain pasture, and at first, she finds the freedom and the exotic herbage intoxicating, but as night falls, she decides to return to the farm. On the return track, she is met by a wolf. It's clear that she doesn't stand a chance, but she decides to try to hold out until the following dawn, and through the night, she manages to fight off the wolf, snatching a mouthful of the sweet mountain grass every time there is a pause. Eventually dawn breaks, and she stops resisting - she is immediately torn to pieces by the wolf.

The reasons why no modern teacher would give this story to a twelve-year-old are almost beyond counting. Firstly, it's an old story. Secondly, it has an unhappy ending. Thirdly, it depicts animals killing each other, and we all know that nature is harmony, and only meat-eating humans kill animals. The wolf is presumably male, and the goat is female, so it would also be seen as a story of violence against 'women'.

But above all, I can imagine modern teachers being suspicious of this story because of the complex psychology of Blanchette. I can still remember the strange feeling this story gave me when I read it as a child - strange because I couldn't describe or explain it. The goat accepts that she is going to die - a staggering idea for a child - but she insists on setting at least one condition of her death: to see the dawn one last time. I think part of that strange confused feeling I got was also because of the way this story equates dawn - normally a signal of hope - with death. As she fights the wolf, she keeps feeding on the mountain grass whenever she can. Why does she do this, when she will never even live to digest it? It's a gesture of defiance: the wolf can kill Blanchette, but he cannot make her change the way she chooses to live.

I might be over-remembering this experience, but I feel that this story was one of those literary signposts (as Di Lampedusa's The Leopard was in my teen years) which gives the young reader an early hint - both exciting and frightening - of just how compex adult life is going to be.

Three-dollar bill

As one of our finest young writers, Elliot Perlman knows how to spin a tale. Professor Bunyip has already fisked Elliot's heart-rending account of the young woman summarily dismissed from her administrative post at one of Manhattan's 'most prestigious' universities, as a warning of what we can all expect under Simon Howard Legree's new IR legislation. Which sent me back to another of Elliot's hard-times tales - his own. While publicizing his novel Three Dollars - about an imaginary parallel Australia, in which academics and public servants are retrenched one day and burrowing through restaurant dumpsters the next - Elliot frequently told the tale which served as his inspiration.

The gist is as follows: Elliot is standing in the checkout queue at his supermarket, when he notices a beautiful, affluent-looking woman who might or might not be a childhood acquaintance of his. As he gets to the checkout (buying, according to one account, Coco Pops and celery), his attempt to pay by Eftpos fails for want of sufficient funds. Casting aside his Coco Pops and celery, he flees the supermarket, under the withering gaze of the assembled shoppers, not least the well-heeled mystery woman. At the nearest automatic teller, he establishes that his bank account contains exactly...three dollars.

This has always seemed a puzzling story. Are we meant to assume that Perlman was unemployed at the time? All the interviews tell us that he was a barrister before turning to literature: they do not mention a period of unemployment, and one would expect Perlman to spotlight a spell on the dole, if he had ever had one. So are we to assume that he was a working barrister at the time of the supermarket incident? Further, he says nothing about any dependants: is he raising a family of six on celery and Coco Pops? One might also draw conclusions about the spending habits of people who pay for even the smallest purchases on Eftpos. A nasty suspicion dawns: is the notorious three dollars incident less to do with Howard's heartless Australia and more to do with poor cashflow management on the part of the individual?

Backlash flashback

September 2001 - Attack on the World Trade Center
SBS warns of a 'backlash' against the Muslim community in Australia

October 2002 - Bombing of tourist bar in Bali
SBS warns of a 'backlash' against the Muslim community in Australia

July 2005 - Terror bombings on public transport in London
SBS warns of a 'backlash' against the Muslim community in Australia

November 2005 - Bombing plots foiled in Melbourne and Sydney
SBS warns of a 'backlash' against the Muslim community in Australia

Apparently we must beware of this backlash even in cases where planned attacks are prevented. After its fourth major unsuccessful outing, shouldn't SBS abandon this particular meme? The backlash has never eventuated, and is looking very much like the long-promised Iraqi civil war.

Security to aisle seven...

I normally don't read the letters page in the Melbourne Age: that way madness lies. But I strayed today, seeing that for once, the headline letter was not by Joseph Toscano, of the 'Anarchist Media Institute'. Instead, it's by an O. Ibrahim, who is actually writing to express his shame, as a muslim, at the existence of jihad-intent co-religionists in Australia. So far, so good. But Mr. Ibrahim still wants us to know that being a muslim in Australia is not all, er, beer and skittles. Prejudice abounds at his obviously muslim appearance: he has a beard, apparently.
"I enter any decent store and the public address system asks for security to be sent to my area."

Perceptions of prejudice are often deeply subjective, but really, when is the last time you were in a big store of any kind, and heard security being summoned on the public address system?

Mash note

Greetings to anyone finding me from Tim Blair's blogroll, a band of brothers and sisters I feel very honoured to be numbered amongst. I first found the right-side blogosphere through Professor Bunyip and subsequently Tim Blair. Since then, they have both been my daily must-reads, frustrated only by the Professor's occasional lapses from regular posting. At a time when I felt trapped inside a moonbat echo chamber, they saved my sanity.

Cocktails Molotov

An unexpected delight this morning was to encounter M. Jacques Mayard, a French MP who had been invited onto Radio National's 'Breakfast' to give information about the current riots. The word 'ebullient' might have been coined to describe M. Mayard, who comes over as a cross between Pepe Le Pew and Foghorn Leghorn. I often wonder how the RN people come up with their various guests: I imagine they had a contact with M. Mayard, and thought "He kind of speaks English, and he's a member of Chirac's party, and Chirac opposes Bush, so he should be pretty sound".

If this was indeed their reasoning, they had cause to regret it, and I doubt we'll be hearing from M. Mayard again soon on 'Breakfast'. As the interview progressed, it became clear that he has some rather old-fashioned ideas. Apart from some charming turns of phrase - the need to declare a state of 'urgency', and the search for 'cocktails molotov' - he was obviously keen on a force de frappe response to the current problems, and was emphatic about the need for immigrants to be 'integrated' with their host society. When Fran asked whether he thought the rioters were Islamist jihadis, or just 'disaffected youth', he suspected the latter, and gave, as the underlying cause, the 'breakdown of authority'. He emphasized this breakdown in the family, and - with an apology to Fran - in schools, as a result of 'too many female teachers', who were incapable of disciplining teenage boys. You could almost see Fran reaching for the cutoff button.

Aux barricades?

My own feeling is that the Paris riots are less of a Eurabian 'intifada' than some commentators would like to think. Here in Australia, we recently saw a miniature of these riots under almost identical conditions. In Redfern, which is a government-mandated slum for aboriginal people in the heart of Sydney, with exactly the kinds of problems of its counterparts around the world, a teenage boy who decided to flee at the sight of a police car which wasn't even pursuing him, rode his bicycle in such a manner as to suffer a fatal accident. Of course, every claim that the police were somehow telekinetically responsible for his death was given breathless coverage in the media. A few nights of gang vandalism and arson ensued, and then the 'outrage' dissipated.

If, instead of just one Redfern, Sydney were ringed with a dozen of them, we might well have seen there what we're seeing in Paris and les banlieux. At least the media have finally stopped referring to a torched Renault as a 'protest'. One BBC report had a fairly standard piece of stupidity, quoting a commentator for whom the 'real' problem of these riots was that they would give electoral oxygen to the Right within France. They also quoted a helpful poll indicating that 63% of respondents disapproved of Sarkozy's use of the term 'racaille' (rabble) to describe the rioters. Renaults are blazing, and somebody has the time to poll about 'inapproprate language'. Oh, I forgot: France has journalists too. Mark Steyn has written with his usual insight on those for whom no event or issue has any underlying reality, only a strategic consequence in the battle with one's political opponents.

Curse of the Cuckoo

I've always regarded myself as one of those people who gets on board something just before it peaks and crashes. Just a knack I have. So I was dismayed to see the Age's Sunday lifestyle supplement - the week's quintessence of fatuousness - with an article about blogging. I only started this blog a few weeks ago, and now a readership which usually worries about where to source their Persian fairy floss, or their four different types of soy sauce, or their balsamic pomegranate condiment, is being encouraged to blog. If the blogosphere goes belly up in the next few weeks, you'll know who to blame.

Balanced reporting

Let no-one ever accuse the ABC of not seeking 'balance' in its reporting. On last night's bulletin, after an initial relatively straight report of the progress of Howard's anti-terror bill so far, we were then presented with balancing comment, from:
1. The ALP
2. Bob Brown (Greens)
3. Lynette Allison (Democrats)
4. Spokesperson for 'Federal Muslim Council' (whatever)
5. Terry O'Gorman (Australian Council for Civil Liberties)

Unfortunately, Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, and that guy in the koala suit with the collecting bucket could not be reached for comment.

Logical as ABC

I don't want to seem too hard on Fran Kelly. She's a good journo, who can give an equally hard time to the Left as to the Right. But this morning I had to wonder. She had Philip Ruddock on, and for ten solid minutes, she pointlessly pressured him to reveal details of the terrorist threat that PM Howard had announced. In other words, she was doing her best to get Ruddock to compromise an action against a terrorist threat. When he resolutely refused to do so, she turned around and acccused the Government of...compromising the action against a terrorist threat by Howard's announcement.

Hail, egregious Negus!

George Negus, who has long since descended into Ron Burgundyesque self-parody, promises, in the promo for tonight's Dateline, to pillory the senior White House figure "indicted for blowing the cover of a CIA agent".

Er, no, George, Lewis Libby has been indicted for perjury. A serious charge, to be sure, but do try to keep up. And as a sad old lefty journo to whom CIA agents would normally be the imps of Satan, your concern for their cover seems a little unconvincing.

Turing test for the ABC

Say a prayer for Queensland Liberal senator Santo Santoro (and try saying 'Senator Santo Santoro' three times really quickly, especially if you've been drinking). He wants to try to prove that the ABC is 'riddled with bias'. This is like trying to prove that water is wet: as long as you've got someone like David Marr standing opposite you, insisting that, no, water is dry, you'll never get anywhere.

Richard Alston tried to do this, some time ago, armed with a stopwatch as Don Quixote had a lance, and got exactly nowhere. Bias is not a matter of quantity, it's a matter of perception. The real test for ABC bias would have to be something like the famous 'Turing Test'. Genius mathematician and codebreaker Alan Turing proposed a simple elegant test for establishing whether a hypothetical computer could think: have a conversation with it, via some means that would screen its non-human nature (he suggested a kind of telex keyboard - the Internet is of course the perfect solution). If the person communicating with the computer could not tell, after a certain time, whether they were talking to a human or a machine, then you would have to accept that the computer was 'thinking'.

Similarly, pretend that everything you hear on ABC tv and radio is written by one person. Listen and watch for a few days. Then make a judgement about that politics of that hypothetical person: it's not hard to do, we all make judgements like this everyday. If you judge that ABC person to be a leftwinger, then, yes, the ABC is biased.

Eternal sunshine of the pointless mind

The ABC was boo-hooing last night about how concerned we all should be for the 'balance' of David Hicks' mind, and how this is suffering due to his detention. On the contrary, I worry that his most recent statements sound increasingly sane. He's now clever enough to start laying the groundwork that he didn't really do anything with Al-Qaeda, and that he was "appalled" by the 9/11 attacks. "It's not Islam", he is supposed to have said. No? But publicly executing women in a football stadium, by shooting them in the head point blank, for purely imaginary 'moral crimes'? Since that is the system Hicks travelled to Afghanistan to defend, presumably he considers that to be 'Islam'.