I was recently lunching with a friend, and the conversation turned to matters of the uncanny and inexplicable. I quoted, as I always do in this context, Hamlet's line to Horatio about there being more things in Heaven and Earth than poor Horatio dreams of in his philosophy. My friend then astonished me by giving, as her example of such an inexplicable phenomenon ...spoon-bending.
She's an intelligent person, who works mostly with computers, so you can imagine my perplexity. At that moment I was very glad that one of my youthful hobbies was magic: nothing prepares you better for a lifetime of spotting hokey old tricks dressed up as New Age miracles. Anyone with the slightest practical acquaintance with conjuring would instantly spot spoonbending as a trick - it's one of the purest examples of the most fundamental principle of conjuring, misdirection. When you need to bend the spoon, just create a diversion, and by the time everyone looks back, Hey Presto! If you're doing your job right, everyone there will swear blind that they never took their eyes off the spoon for an instant.
But I think I'm even more shocked by the persistence of something that I would have thought was by now just a 1970s pop-culture tag, an answer to a Trivial Pursuit question. By the way, I see that celebrity spoonbender Uri Geller has bought the family home of Elvis Presley on eBay. It must have been on Platinum Reserve.
At last! A journalist - published in the Age, too - who is finally willing to call the Australia Institute a "left wing think tank"! Unfortunately we don't know the name of this latter-day Luther: it's an unbylined piece from AAP. The boys and girls from AI have apparently been identifying possible sites for nuclear reactors in Victoria. Now, I assume that if they hate 4WDs, which they do with a passion, they're going to hate nuclear reactors, but the piece gives the impression that they are spotting reactor sites in a constructive way. The actual press release, available on their home page (under media releases) is in fact strangely non-committal.
One of the good things about travelling is that it breaks you out of your normal habits of media consumption. This was made vivid to me when I tuned back into good old Radio National this morning. The 6:30 to 7:00 slot consisted of the following three items: someone from Medecins Sans Frontieres complaining about the evil Big Pharma companies not devoting enough research to unprofitable Third World diseases, someone from Amnesty International complaining about evil First World democratic governments and their woeful human rights records, and then just to take us up to the news and weather...an interview with Cindy Sheehan!
The actual 7:00 bulletin was no better. A recap of the latest Amnesty International report, someone from the Law Institute complaining that current reporting of Aboriginal social problems is serving to 'demonize' customary law, but the cake-taker was their item on PM John Howard addressing the Irish Parliament. This was reported solely in terms of the 'boycott' of his address by various Sinn Feiners and Greens. I'd been waiting for something like this, being able to remember how eager our media were to report, when Howard addressed the US Congress in 2002, that various office staffers and gofers were rounded up to fill an otherwise underpopulated chamber. Interestingly, one of the things that the Irish boycott group, which included Sinn Feiners, held against Howard was his contribution to global terror. Boycott is an Irish word, but obviously 'irony' is not. The psychics of the ABC were also able to inform us that Labour party members who did not show up for Howard's address did so due to 'lack of interest'.
As a seasoned RN listener, I seem to detect a small but distinct ratcheting-up here, if it isn't just a statistical blip. If I were really paranoid, I might even wonder whether this is a tree-pissing, territory-marking exercise for the benefit of the new Chair of the ABC, i.e., 'Don't even think of trying to pull us into line'.
These bulletins also suggested a new 'thought experiment', to be used in case I ever find myself in a debate over ABC leftwing bias. Let's just suppose, for the sake of argument, that there is a parallel universe, in which there is the kind of flagrantly leftwing ABC that David Marr thinks is just a figment of the rightwing imagination. OK, now that you're imagining that other ABC, answer one question: how would its programming differ from the kind of bulletin described above?
Just a few things to say about the Michael Leunig interview on Enough Rope last night. Firstly, it's interesting that he home-schools his children. I wonder if he'll cop any criticism for that, given that there's a general suspicion of home-schoolers, who in Australia tend to be mostly 'fundamental' Christians, and in America either fundy or just trying to keep lefty moonbat ranters out of their kids' heads.
Secondly, I was intrigued by the exchange in which Denton confronted Leunig with a quote from the period of the 'Holocaust cartoon competition' episode, "there are people determined to bring Leunig down". Leunig vigorously denied ever saying anything like that, and though I suspect Denton would do his research well, one has to give Leunig the benefit of the doubt, until the quote gets definitely sourced. All kinds of people get misquoted, for all kinds of reasons. But in the very next breath, Leunig himself then goes on to attribute an improbable-sounding quote to "a Melbourne columnist" (let me guess, initials AB?), who supposedly called on his readers to "take Leunig down". This sounds like absolute balderdash, and I won't be surprised to see a rebuttal from, er, AB. (Update: 'AB' has indeed rebutted this absurd claim).
Asked by Denton for an exposition of his notorious Israel=Auschwitz cartoon, Leunig was mealy-mouthed and evasive: "Cartoons are ambiguous, they have many meanings". The closest he came to an explanation was merely fatuous: apparently Israel is like Auschwitz because both are surrounded by barbed wire. A hint to our Living National Treasure: the wire around Auschwitz was to keep people in, the 'wire' around Israel is to keep people out. There's a difference.
I'm sorry Denton passed up the opportunity to ask Leunig the one question I would want to put: given that Bush, Blair and Howard, to say nothing of the evil Zionists, are getting it all horribly wrong, what exactly would Leunig's plan be to deal with militant Islam? Your time starts now, and answers involving hugging or ducks will not be accepted...
I'm pleased to see the Federal Government doing what wise men have always done, i.e., following the example of the ancient Romans. I refer to the new plan to extend a (modest) aid benefit to families of three or more children, which are now officially considered 'large' families. Knowing full well the benefits of a growing population, Augustus instituted the ius trium liberorum ('right of three children'), a parcel of benefits granted to the parents of three or more children. Among these benefits was the all-important one of precedence in public office. Just imagine if today's public service had accelerated promotion for parents of 'large' families. Like many such benefits, the ius became just another in the Emperor's rich store of bribes and carrots, and was granted to such people as the historian Suetonius, the poet Martial, and the administrator and lettrist Pliny the Younger, even though none of these had any children at all.
In a bit of spin worthy of the former Pravda, SBS has reported that the new far-left President of Bolivia, Evo Morales, has sent in troops to "guard" privately-owned resource companies which he intends to confiscate. Just like Russia sent in tanks to "guard" Czechoslovakia from counter-revolutionaries in 1968.
One of the funnier things I've heard on Radio National recently was the interview with Colonel Mike Bumgarner (interesting name: presumably a version of 'Baumgartner'), about the recent behaviour of David Hicks in Guantanamo Bay. To retaliate for not being given an extra towel (the standard issue is one per prisoner), Hicks has gone on a laundry strike, refusing to change his clothes (Oh the humanity!). The RN interviewer then asked, in the kind of sepulchral tones that might normally be used by counsel for the accused in a capital crime: "Why did David Hicks ask for a second towel?"
Who gives a crap why Hicks wanted a second towel? Well, the Melbourne Age, for one. Their 'diplomatic editor' Mark Baker will probably need more than one towel to mop up the tears he has spilt for the wannabe jihadi. According to Baker, Hicks, who had travelled around the world to join the Taliban in Afghanistan, was a "wide eyed" innocent, who was "appalled" by the September 11 attacks. Yes, all Hicksy wanted was to lop off the odd hand, shoot an 'adulteress' in a soccer stadium every so often: who could have guessed such simple desires would all go so horribly wrong? Baker is worth a long quote:
"If the worst Hicks did was to hang out with the Taliban at the time they were in the thrall of Osama bin Laden, he is more deserving of pity than punishment. While the Taliban invited overthrow by their excesses of medieval zealotry and their culpability in giving sanctuary to bin Laden and his cohorts, at the time the wide-eyed Muslim convert David Hicks went to Afghanistan they were an internationally recognised government in control of a sovereign state."
Why do I think that Baker is one of those people who would only describe the Bush administration as an "internationally recognised government in control of a sovereign state" through gritted teeth, if he could bear to at all? Even the UN, at their most supine and craven, did not recognize the Taliban as a government. A grand total of three nations did so: the UAE, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. And someone should tell Baker that 'hanging out' is what teenagers do down at the mall, not what Hicks was doing in Afghanistan. Maybe one of Hicks' duties with the Taliban was handing out second towels to prisoners.
In a piece on the late J. K. Galbraith, Radio National this morning ran a rather interesting soundbite to summarize his astonishingly long career. To paraphrase, it was JKG saying that money, and economies, aren't everything: Shakespeare, after all, was the product of a country with a very low GDP.
Hmm, up to a point, Lord Copper. I certainly agree with JKG that a flourishing economy doesn't guarantee artistic creativity, but it's also clear that an unhealthy, declining economy pretty much guarantees a heavy brake on the creative impulse. People with less disposable income are less likely to go to plays, or to commission playwrights, to take the Shakespearean example.
Of course, one wonders whether Galbraith meant that the GDP of Elizabethan England was low in absolute terms - say, compared to 20th century America - or in relative terms, compared to the earlier Tudor, or later Stuart periods. My history's a little rusty, but I'd bet two angels and a hogshead of sack that the Elizabethan Renaissance coincided with a booming economy, as renaissances tend to do. In short, despite what Galbraith and the ABC would like to believe, even with Shakespeare it really is the economy, stupid.
A follow-up to my previous post, which won't be of interest to anyone, but which I need to put up in the interests of accountability (mine). I contacted the very helpful Andrea Harris, webmistress of Tim Blair's site, to check the HTML of my comment post there, and she assures me that the two URLs I posted - under the impression they were to two different articles - were identical. So there is no evidence that I ever saw what I thought I saw, and you should disregard everything of a supposedly factual nature that I ever publish again. Even though there is that pesky link on the Australian's website to a article titled Body mix-up: PM accepts 'full responsibility', which just takes you back to the article you're already on, which does not have that title.
In any case, my underlying points about journalistic practice seem unaffected: (1) journalists are dishing up massaged paraphrase-quotes without supplying the raw audio/video backup, or (2) with the bare underlying direct quote, stripped of context which might inconveniently conflict with their constructed meaning. I'm still trying to find a transcript of the original radio interview.
On the underlying question of responsibility, of course Howard is right to claim responsibility for what happens to soldiers in armed conflicts to which he has committed them. But if it turns out that Private Kovco died as a result of an accident, which happens to soldiers back here on their bases in peacetime, does that mean Howard is responsible for those deaths too? Was he responsible for the deaths of those personnel in the Sea King helicopter crash in 2005?
