April 2024 - The Best Mouse Tap

Modest Expectations – Christos Chelios

Ever since Malthus theorised that growth of population was exponential while the food supply to feed the population was linear, consequent fear of worldwide famine has yet to occur. Malthus was proved wrong, but his concept may yield to a different mathematic equation.

Across the World where there has been continual war, there is famine, as brutality has no boundaries in space and time. Warrior mercenaries with the lethal toys attuned to their primitive minds lay waste to huge swathes of arable land. These actions, often in the name of religion, make a mockery of what Christ said: Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.

At the same time, we look from our comfortable sofas at these children -infants with shrivelled bodies and wide-opened eyes staring blankly into distraught mothers’ faces because she has no food to feed her child. These are the children of marasmus. Just starved to death while the world with its chicken nuggets grazes on. On the other hand, kwashiorkor may not look like malnutrition because it causes swelling and bloating. No balanced diet – a total lack of protein as the child progress to become a fat-stained bag of salt water with articulated bones floating in human soup.

So, what of the future when the modern Vandals have fished out our seas and rivers; and the crustacea from the bleached coral forest? And in this new World has anybody seen any kelp forest lately?

Meat becomes too dear to buy, and some may revert to our hunter-gatherer heritage seeking protein wherever we can get it. No longer truffles under chestnut trees; nor caviar from long gone sturgeon and as for pink champagne, the last bottle has exploded with our ingenuity able to produce drones the size of pinheads but now with capability of blowing up the world.

Then I awake from my reverie and yes, our gourmets are entering the world of reptile consumption. Yep, the taste of crocodile is a bit like rabbit. Python though is now on the menu of that “fine dining restaurant” with a soufflé of Yangtze soft shell turtle eggs.

The photo above shows a normal Asian market unfortunately selling a cheaper more pedestrian snake.

And then delving into the world of insects – what about cockroach crunch and aspic of mosquito and hornet? At least the World has a great deal of protein to consume before reverting to my reverie in black.

Nutrition often seems less the reason for reptile consumption but seeking the perfect aphrodisiac. Pursuing the extinction of the species in search of the perfect orgasm. Is that what those Trump evangelicals call Rapture?

If it Quacks, maybe it is a Nutritionist

Discussing nutrition, there was this “whack job” who called herself a nutritionist, advocating the consumption of carrots to engender a tan. Having seen someone who consumed a bizarre number of carrots in order to get a tan and who found themselves turning orange with the colour concentrated in the skin creases, I find myself bemused. If one wants to look like Donald Trump with his full peau d’orange look – pitted discoloured orange coloured skin – go ahead. If you do, it will be just another form of navel gazing.

Anybody can call themselves a “nutritionist”. There is no regulation unlike for dieticians. All dieticians have graduated with an accredited dietetics degree from an Australian university or studied overseas and are examined. In other words, they are a regulated health profession. The problem with the growth of unregulated quackery, it is aided and abetted by a lack of curiosity by some members of the general public.

It is about time to regulate nutritionists advocating a diet that may be carcinogenic. No brainer, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Brittany

Sitting in a bar in Saint Malo surrounded by the props of Irish culture, its flag, the schooner of Guinness, the voice of Sinead O’Connor. Yet, the bar is full of the French speakers with their red hair and blue eyes; not an Irish brogue between them. This is the bar of the Bretons.

In any event, when I asked whether they had any records of Alain Stivell, the Breton Celtic harpist, the patron shook his head and changed Sinead O’Connor to Clannad.

The wind outside had dragged the September rain into swirling masses. At times the sun glinted through the sheets of water as they twisted in the wind. Still reluctantly, I withdrew back from the rain-stained window and forced myself to order another beer.

The Breton seafood platter was full of shellfish I knew would make good fish bait – I think they were called cockles, whelks as well as small clams. These clams I recognised, plus a couple of unfamiliar oysters and spider crabs which I’ve always thought a waste of time. I left the platter unfinished.

Breton crepes called galettes, on the other hand, were food that I liked, given that it has its relative “wraps” eaten all over the world, like tacos, for instance. Galette crepes are made from buckwheat flour. Ham and cheese crepe is the commonest filling cooked in fluent Breton. But as long as it is savory with a umami flare lighting up my taste buds, then it is my typr of comfort food.

But Brittany is not just an exercise in eating.

Wandering the beach, the clouds sullen overheard indicative of the September rain, and ocean similarly steel blue, the hotels all boarded up for the oncoming winter, at least I had the beach to myself. There is an exhilaration I find in an empty beach, something about being close to nature

Likewise, I am wandering along the pink Granite Coast, where the cliffs were more terracotta than pink in the autumn sun, Again I found I was walking alone, revelling that only I was viewing a scene of a deep blue sea washing against these distinctive cliffs. Being alone means that, for an instant in time, I was unique in my cliff top belvedere. Only I could transfix that moment of solitude.

However, the reality is that my sojourn in Brittany is being in that part of France which owes its genetic pool to that of the Celts. It is too simple to say that the Bretons are Welsh who did not go home. There is no sign of a Breton separatist movement, but why should there be? Not all Celts want a fight.

The fact is that whether driving or going by fast train TGV to the port city of Brest, Brittany flashes by, the industrialised skyline prominent– every town along the railway line may have its scenic collection of houses and its fifteenth century churches but on the outskirts there is the evidence of conventional light industry and urban sprawl.

No longer was Brittany the caricature of little old ladies in Breton lace hats speaking their own Breton language while the menfolk went somewhere out in the Atlantic Ocean fishing for a living.

Still, I came to Brittany for several reasons to complete my tour of the Celtic nations – first, to say that I have been to all Celtic nations, tried the seafood and visited Mont St Michèle (actually in Normandy) and stood in the porch of a Breton Church – the porch so large that all the village could meet within its confines.

Pure curiosity in the end just drove me to visit these remnant Celtic civilisations, one that once dominated large swathes of Europe reaching its peak about 300 B.C. It was my Irish heritage speaking in my subconscious which drove this quest. I can reasonably imitate into an Irish accent; yet I has found learning the language just too daunting – life is too short if you are not likely to live within the Gaeltact which covers Donegal, Mayo, Galway and Kerry. (I remember it being spoken also on the islands of Aran).

Wales, Scotland, and Cornwall are part of the Celtic nation – less known is that there were also Devonian Celts, which included one of my ancestral lines. Since that visit, unbeknown to me at the time; and thinking I knew all the inglenooks of Celtic culture, I discovered I was wrong. I found another Celtic nation. When I visited Santiago de Compostela in Galician Spain , I was coming around a corner when I saw two people – one male, one female playing the gaita – the local version of bagpipes – one of the symbols of Celtic heritage. Galicia is Celtic Iberia.

Still one Celtic area remains unvisited – the Isle of Man where Manx once was spoken. The last native speaker, a fisherman died in 1974. Manx was linked to Gaelic.

It is a long time since I went to Brittany, and much of my touring was wedged between other business I had to do. I did not have the luxury of a “month in Brittany, immersing myself in things Breton”. It’s just an anecdote in my life – just idly reminiscing, prompted by a handwritten scrap, my unfinished note, falling out of a book, where it was serving as a bookmark. It is a recurrent theme, leaving old plane tickets and other pieces of detritus in many of the books I have only partially read. But in this instance, I found what I had written interesting. You may not.

Vengeance

The rule of thumb was that the idiot son in the English aristocratic family was consigned to the Church. I thought of that generalisation when I read another pertinent (or impertinent) comment “In America, intelligent people go to technology, curious people go to science, creative people go to the Arts, greedy people to finance and the idiots go to work for the State Department.”

Witness, the USA representative explaining why the USA vetoed a UN motion supporting Statehood for Palestine “Our veto against Palestinian Statehood does not reflect opposition to Palestinian statehood”. One can only parse this as some infantile obfuscation.

Antony Blinken Fast Facts | CNN — Antony Blinken

Thus, if one accepts the premise of the standard of the State Department so clearly demonstrated in this sentence, then the Keeper of the Idiot Key is Antony Blinken. Now discounting that he is Jewish, he nevertheless must have some inner misgivings about the current situation of the World. At least, it is a hope, but let’s review his involvement with Julian Assange.

Despite his sad sack demeanour, behind the scenes he has promoted his views very strongly. One source described him as outspoken during the time he worked with both Obama and Biden in various capacities in the Secretariat of State and the White House.

As reported: He was {considered} highly influential in developing Biden’s approaches to Iraq and Afghanistan — including the post-surge drawdown of troops in Afghanistan — that were adopted by Obama. His frequent travel to Iraq and other geopolitically important areas, and a Rolodex of international contacts he had developed in the Clinton White House and at the Foreign Relations Committee, gave Blinken a firsthand feel for major issues facing the president.

And, while the decision to intervene militarily in Libya was often portrayed as one driven by a set of powerful women — Susan Rice, Samantha Power and Hillary Clinton — Blinken and Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, were among the vocal minority who argued it was in America’s interests to stop Muammar Qadhafi from slaughtering his own people.

Assange mocked Obama from the sanctuary of the Ecuador Embassy for defending free speech in the Arab world in an address to the United Nations, pointing to his own experience as evidence that Obama has “done more to criminalise free speech than any other U.S. President.”

In mocking Obama, Assange was mocking Antony Blinken, the man behind the curtain; a man close to the ear of both Obama and Biden. No wonder he has scaled the heights, a man who I suspect does not have much of a sense of humour and a man of little forgiveness. An Old Testament belief in a vengeful God perhaps?

The background for this imbroglio occurred in 2010 when Chelsea Manning, then Bradley Manning, when as an intelligence analyst in the US military, blew the whistle on Assange and WikiLeaks about US war crimes.

In 2013, Manning was convicted of seventeen serious criminal charges and sentenced to 35 years maximum security imprisonment. During that time in prison, Bradley became Chelsea after gender assignment surgery. Four years later, the Government acknowledged the wrong in imprisoning her and her sentence was commuted by US President Obama and she was released from prison in 2017.

Since 2010 when the US named Assange as effectively an enemy of the state and, in 2019, when charged with multiple breaches of the US Espionage Act which carried a maximum sentence of 175 years in prison, the whole matter seemed excessive. Why ever since evicted from the UK Ecuador Embassy, Assange has been held in solitary detention in a UK maximum security prison, awaiting extradition to the US?

In a matter of Public Importance in the Australian Senate on 2 August last year, Senator Shoebridge asked the question “What was Julian’s crime? Telling the truth and telling this history. He told the truth and the reality about the US-Australia relationship. The real reason Julian Assange is still in jail is that, whether it’s Prime Minister Albanese or Prime Minister Morrison, Australian leaders are willing to trade a citizen’s liberty, their right to speak truth to power, for a close and unquestioning bear hug from a US president. They say truth is the first victim of war and, in the case of Julian Assange, that’s a truth the whole world is seeing… what is happening to Julian Assange is an outrageous attack on journalism and on the truth…. This included thousands of documents that exposed the brutal reality of US led wars. One of those was the deeply distressing video of cold-blooded murder by a US Apache helicopter of Iraqi citizens that included two Reuters journalists.

Days before that speech, in Brisbane, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken launched an attack on Assange. He alleged in Australia that Assange had not only engaged in serious criminal conduct but had risked harm to US national security. All the while, Australia’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Senator Wong, stood by mutely, not defending Assange against Blinken’s diatribe. Obviously, Blinken was testing whether he would generate any backlash from this country. Once it was clear that any response from his Australian counterpart was non-existent, he knew that his intransigency had prevailed.

Blinken probably assessed that in Australia Assange did not much excite the community, despite the Shoebridge speech in the Senate. The perception that Assange was arrogant, a “smart-arse” who thought he could outmanoeuvre the forces of vengeance was the initial view and did not generate much sympathy especially as he seemed to wallow in the notoriety. His judgement was appalling, instead of coming back to Australia, he preferred to play on the international stage. If he had come back to Australia in 2010, Australian nationalism and resentment of American bullying would have kicked in. But he didn’t. Hubris has its problems with such an uncompromising flint as Blinken.

If Australia wants to get Biden to stop fidgeting about Assange, it is important to single Blinken out as the block.

How can one excuse the limp pressure our Government has applied against Assange’s outrageous imprisonment in the United Kingdom for the past five years. Australia is a nation born of unjust British law, and thus it should be natural that this nation unequivocally and vocally call out for Assange’s release, even if it does involve chilling a few cocktail parties in Washington and London. Assange, for all his personality flaws, is a political prisoner, no different from one being a held in Russia or China.

Blinken is no idiot, as the generalisation of the one about recruits into the US State Department above would suggest. Yet remember that all generalisations are untrue, and this is a generalisation.

And one word for Blinken’s ongoing actions in relation to Assange – contempt. Oh, I forgot another word – “alleged”.

Mouse Whisper

I could not miss hearing the President of Columbia University, Minouche Shafik, a very distinguished economist, who has contributed her undoubted expertise to the current stability of the world monetary system and now has found a well-earned sanctuary in that particular New York University where the previous President earned a measly $4.6m annually.

I stood in awe while she robustly criticised the anti-Israel protests within her own University, but then this woman, a Dame or Baroness, whichever prenominal you wish to attach to her, has some reason for her views.

She was born in Alexandria, presumably her family Coptic as it had to flee soon after she was born. The Coptic population in that City is about 500,000, a minority under stress in a Muslim country, no matter how avowedly secular the country overlords may profess to be. She now has two passports, British and American.

As my Uncle Muscarine told me: “Your attitudes, your biases are formed very early in life, when the effects of socialisation are more strongly imbedded than many realise just like ourselves where we had escaped from the Norwegian Rats to our promised land, Chedda.”

Modest Expectations – Deakin

I am indebted to the Washington Post for the above photo. To many of those who experienced it, the eclipse was a spiritual event. In the Indiana town of Bloomington, at 4 minutes past three on the afternoon of April 8 the eclipse lasted for four minutes. Buddhist monks marked it with a puja ceremony, a “ritual honouring and promoting inner and planetary healing,” according to the Tibetan Mongolian Buddhist Cultural Center (sic).

In my blog on New Year’s Eve 2023, I wrote about our experience of the total eclipse in 2002, which was best seen at Ceduna, whither four of us travelled across Australia to view it. In my blog, I mentioned the late Jack Pascachoff who had observed 75 eclipses.

We met some of these eclipse devotees in Ceduna – but do not remember Pascachoff among the crowd. These people travelled from one eclipse site to the next – which at that time was Chile, I heard one of them say. Well, as I said at the time, some people collect teddy bears, and others obsessively try to visit every state in the USA. These people collected their presence at one eclipse after another.

In reading his obituary, I loved the anecdote of an eclipse in Manitoba, when Pascachoff was shocked by the drivers who just turned on their headlights and kept moving. As one would say, takes all types…

He enthused his students and “an even better eclipse was forecast for 2024, with totality from Mexico to the Canadian Maritimes. He wanted everyone to observe it. As for him, he was already plotting hotel reservations in Sinaloa, the place with the best view.” Sinaloa, located in northwestern Mexico has a 650 km Pacific coastline, with Culiacán as its capital.

Alas, he died well before that recent eclipse which indeed did what he hoped to see, at least for him not from Earth.

What is weird is the response of some of the Republicans. There is a difference between a personal spiritual response based on emotion and the people who seemed to have rejected the science underlying eclipses, including their location and time, all of which science has enabled us to know precisely when they will occur.

Instead, they seem to have retreated to the superstitions of the mediaeval age, where they related these events to intervention of their God. Yet these people subliminally accept the science, which has predicted when eclipses occur, as demonstrated by scientists such as the late Jack Pascachoff. Otherwise, why would those Buddhist monks pictured have been so prepared with all the modern appurtenances?

Pleading the Belly

In 1588 Pope Sixtus V declared all abortion murder, with excommunication as the punishment. Then, a few years later, Gregory XIV released a papal bull that claimed it was not a sin unless the foetus was animated or moving. The Pope Sixtus V bull that called abortion a sin was overruled by this Gregorian bull. Additionally, Pope Gregory rescinded the legal classification of abortion as homicide. In further explanation, Gregory XIV was the virtual successor of Sixtus V, the intervening Pope, Urban VII, having lived for only 11 days after installation.

It took nearly 300 years before Pius IX again declared all abortion murder in 1869, and this remains the official position of the Church, reaffirmed by the current Pope.

Thus, the Arizona Law of 1864 on abortion was in place even before the Pius IX bull. The Arizona Supreme Court recently upheld this criminal law first enacted in 1864 that allows sending a doctor or other medical provider to state prison for two to five years for performing an abortion that is subsequently not deemed “necessary to save” a woman’s life. There are no time limits—the prohibition begins “the morning after”—and no other exceptions, such as for pregnancies that resulted from rape or incest.

It was re-affirmed when Arizona became a State in 1912.

But that’s not all left on the Arizona books dating back to 1864, as it still has a “pleading the belly” provision, although it is not identified in so many words. “Pleading the belly” is a common law provision, which is first mentioned in Britain in 1375. It means that no woman convicted of a capital crime can be executed if she is pregnant, normally having to be certified by multiple doctors. This meant there was a stay of execution until the child was born. Then, the woman could be executed. This provision was codified into British statute in 1931 when the Sentence of Death (Expectant Mothers) Act, made it illegal to sentence a pregnant woman to death. But not so seemingly in Arizona, where it remains on the books, if ambiguously, to this day.

Wait for the Arizona Supreme Court to have a case before it on the matter.

Remote Working

I was intrigued by a recent Economist article on the growth of remote working. COVID-19 and the development videotelephony software programs stimulated remote working. Yet as the Economist states, that there are some professions where remote working is impractical; although my point of view is now that of a consumer, I also have a view of a profession in which I was once a practising doctor.

One of the banes of my professional life occurred when I was a first-year resident medical officer in an outer suburb hospital where we “first years” had to share the emergency load. Most of the time when on duty the doctor could be up all night. There were times when you were summoned from bed to see someone presenting at the emergency department, but there was one particular colleague who never got out of bed – he issued instructions from the depth of his pillow and left the patients for his colleague to see in the morning. Welcome to the doctor remotely working or more properly described as bludging. I always got out of bed when I was called. Telehealth as a substitute has provided a convenient and acceptable means to the medical profession now loathe to do home visits or work after hours.

Therefore, one of the downsides of remote working is that it may fit the genius working in a garret, but it also suits the bludger, who wants to give the semblance of work, since remoteness enables meeting an illusion that work is being accomplished remotely, This illusion has metastasised to such an extent that none of the workforce becomes available to the general public, since they are in the nirvana of meeting remotely.

Therefore, I start my assessment of remote working sceptically because remote work flexibility has many unexpected undesirable consequences. I once ran a program in a Government department for five years, and it was a time before that alphabet of why a particular bureaucrat can have days off without any planning or goes on some useless training course existed. Then there is the added pernicious action of not allowing the bureaucrat to settle down in one job to ensure that the general public is confronted by both ignorance and lack of corporate knowledge. Thus, if one is intent on making it as difficult as possible for the general public to penetrate the bureaucratic jungle, then confront it with a potpourri of bureaucratic dysfunction working. Remotely.

Remote working is just the icing on this dysfunction: “Hullo, I am ringing to talk to Mr X”, “He’s not here. He is working from home today.” Can you give me his number?”, “No, I’m afraid we can’t give that information.” “When will he be in?” “No idea” “Is there anybody else who can help?” “I’m sorry but I have to go to a meeting to discuss the meeting schedule. You’ll have to excuse me…” and that is the polite version.

Remote working should be banned for those whose main role is to provide a direct customer role. It is difficult enough without having these people not at work in the office. In other words, for government bureaucrats, there should be an assessment carried out by an independent source to see if there is any merit in this cohort of office bureaucrats being allowed to work remotely.

Having taken that position in relation to bureaucrats the industries in which the Economist reported the highest level of remote-work flexibility are coding and technology, architecture, engineering and business jobs. About half of people working in computer or mathematical jobs work remotely full-time. In these cases, ability to communicate is generally not a problem.

The Economist reports that McKinsey have shown that half of women report being unable to work remotely at all, compared with 39 per cent of men. But what does it mean in relation of remote working? It is not an ephemeral gender issue.

I have always lived close to where I have had an office. For a long period, I had offices in both Melbourne and Sydney and had a home within 20 minutes of where I worked, even in peak traffic. My wife worked in the same office, working in different areas, even though our jobs may have intersected at times. My career as a consultant meant considerable travel, but if “remote working” is taken literally, yes, I worked in remote locations. Thus, working with my wife was one of way of avoiding “remote working”, because there was always one of us in the office, if considering the two locations as being one office.

The Economist straying into another area made the following point: Couples compromise in all kinds of ways for their lives to work together. If she is offered a big promotion, conditional on moving to Chicago, she may have to turn it down if his job is tied to New York. The geographical liberation of either partner makes it possible for the other to ascend the corporate ladder.

In other words unless couples are faced with being required to work remote from one another, compromises must be made to keep the couple together. I faced that in my early career, when both of us graduated in medicine and then having children in our early twenties, still pursued separate careers, and both ended up undertaking PhDs in separate institutions.

We found a solution. We set up our own community-based childcare centre able to take a child in its first year to being able to go through the first five years. We had an appropriate mix of staff to cover both care and education. Both our sons are alumni of that childcare centre, which remains in operation 60 years after it was established.

The other was the fact that the maternal grandparents filled in as carers when the boys were not only in the early childhood centre but afterwards when they were in primary school. This, coupled with the proximity of work and both the early childhood centre and school, allowed the two careers to progress, without one parent having to sacrifice their career. Remember that was the sixties, when prejudice against women working was strong, and yet we were able to persuade the Department of Health to change its attitude and contributing funding to the childcare centre, mainly for capital costs to ensure that the building satisfied the extensive departmental regulations.

Thus, how ambiguous is the word “remote” when applied to “work”.

Spinal Surgery

I thought I would explain the reasons for deferring my operation. I am sure you respect that the choice I have made has not been undertaken without much deep consideration of balancing the risks and benefits. My response was largely generated from our last consultation and your subsequent letter to {orthopaedic surgeon} – Letter to Spinal Surgeon

The furore of the level of spinal surgery disclosed by the ABC program Four Corners seemed to centre on one neurosurgeon who was already deemed incompetent, having had limitations placed on his practice. However, “surgical cowboys” exist and when you need to decide to give consent or not, you need to know the ones with a lasso. The average person, often anxious or fearful, must make a choice based on asymmetric information. Asymmetric information since the doctor has the information, and anyway he or she is obviously not going to say that the procedure he or she will use is “crap” and has been shown not to work.

I was faced with this question of spinal surgery eight years ago. I had a major car accident in 1981 and was left with the underlying damage where osteoarthritis would be a long term result. The orthopaedic surgeon initially did not undertake arthroscopy on the grounds that if he did it, knee replacement would be inevitable. This decision gave me ten years of relative mobility – able to undertake up to an hour walks.

That was until late 2013 when I developed polymyalgia rheumatica, that the whole downward spiral in my mobility commenced. Gradually with cortisone, the pain associated with the PMR eased. Nonetheless I was faced with using one and then two sticks, and eventually using a wheelchair for distances such as airline concourses, for instance.

I was then further faced with having my knees replaced by prostheses. However, since I had symptoms related to the arthritis of my spine in both cervical and lumbar region, I was referred to a spinal surgeon. The orthopaedic surgeon was loathe to operate on my knees without a spinal assessment to see if I needed surgery. I first found the spinal surgeon’s attitude unusual from the start in that he left the consultation to somebody I presumed was a doctor or nurse, barely competent in taking a clinical history, which resulted in my clinical notes stating I was a heavy smoker whereas I had not smoked for 36 years.

For a time, despite my misgivings, I accepted the need for operations, with the surgeon saying he would have to take bone from my left iliac crest for my cervical surgery and then, with little intervening time, undertake a laminectomy on my lumbar spine, as if his skill was the only consideration.

In retrospect I should have terminated this nonsense, especial as he intended to do an MRI on the morning of the operation to “check all this”. I have had many MRIs, which all showed spinal pathology, but what he seemed to ignore was that the spinal cord was not impinging on the spine. Sure, I had intermittent tingling in my fingers, but this was only minor. Sure, I had pain in my back, but it was not incapacitating.

I had been undertaking hydrotherapy for several years, The neurologist confirmed, looking at the same MRI as the surgeon, that it clearly showed space between spinal cord and spine.

I then made the decision to defer the operation and sent a letter to the spinal surgeon, rather than meeting face-to-face which may not have been guaranteed before he had launched into using his operative skills on me.

Frankly I was worried by his arrogance and yet saying I could die under the knife. He seemed to ignore my myriad co-morbidities nonetheless.

He never replied to my letter seeking justification.

My putative operation remains on hold, as they say, “sine die.”

It is eight years later, and my spinal symptomatology remains much the same, although I have other co-morbidities, which render anything he proposed at that time a sure-fire death sentence now.

I believe that there is a role for a medical qualified health broker, who can provide independent advice backed by best evidence available for those less informed than myself to help redress the information gap.

Some of the medical commentators would better be suited as health brokers instead of being interviewed on TV, where words are more ephemeral and generally after the fact. This episode of Four Corners seems not to have generated media comment, despite the descriptions of questionable practice, where these expert independent voices condemned the actions of this particular surgeon. If these voices had been co-ordinated and presented to the patient as the voice of a health broker, then the outcomes as depicted may well have been different.

Iris Sargeant

Iris was the goddess of rainbows. Rainbows were her connection between heaven and earth.

Iris was my mother-in-law. She died on Wednesday evening. She was 98. She was a great lady, who was born into the Lutheran diaspora, her ancestors having fled religious persecution in Prussia. Her family came from Katowice, which is now in Poland. Her family initially settled in South Australia, and some of the families then settled in rural Victoria and others in southern New South Wales, with Iris being born in Walla Walla north of Albury, in 1926.

Iris very much embodied the rural woman, growing up with four brothers and a sister. Her father was Theodore Gustav Hoffmann and her mother Alma, born Schroeter. Growing up in a time when having a German name had its difficulty, especially during WWII. Iris was tolerant, forgiving, a highly intelligent person at a time where women were confined to domesticity and not encouraged to go much further than early primary school. With her love of books she had always wanted to be a librarian and she enjoyed painting and colouring.

Iris had two other qualities that set certain people apart. She had grace and concern for others, even when she was clearly dying and hearing that I had had a relapse, she said “Is there anything I can do to help?”

Says it all. Now she is moving up her rainbow in a cascade of colours. Iris, the artist has left a legacy to be celebrated – herself painted large.

That soft gentle voice saying “Time for me to go now. I won’t say goodbye. Just look for me in the rainbows after the rain.”

Mouse Whisper

Two mice walked into a tavern in Cincinnati. They ordered to two thimbles of Mouscadet.

As they perched on the counter, they noticed the name of tavern to be Blind Tiger.

Why, they squeaked to the owner who, elbows on the counter, answered them by way of explanation.

“In prohibition days, when anybody was looking for a drink, they would look out for the Blind Tiger where you paid money to go into the speakeasy to see the Blind Tiger and would get a drink, free or if money needed to handed over, the bartender was concealed by a blind so that there was nobody visible to provide the drink, while money was passed through a slot to a tray behind the blind.”

It did not take long for the customer to become blind and tigerish.

Another, thimble, my good mice.

Modest Expectations – A Player at Kooyonga

I am from Baltimore, born and bred. Grew up at the inner harbor, Patapsco River…oh yeah Hon, ain’t the beer cold and let’s get some Natty Bohs and jumbos! I now live in Southern California. I was in the desert two days ago and a young woman, who happens to be a car salesperson (I was shopping for cars) got to talking to me about the bridge collapse. Lawd have mercy…may I repeat, she’s a car salesperson…she starts in with how the Bay Pilot did it on purpose. Steered directly for the main support pillars and took out the FSK Bridge. I said, but the freighter lost power and is more or less the size of Nimitz Aircraft Carrier going eight knots and you think he can just turn it on a dime…? Her eyes glazed over…Social media has done far more harm than good is all I’m saying. You should watch this guy on YouTube. He debunks conspiracy theories-this one pertaining to FSK Bridge. – A person responding in Boston Globe.

The above comment is from a despairing person with real knowledge, epitomised in his response to a “no nothing” conditioned by social media conspiracy misinformation, rather than looking around how much the World and seeing how vulnerable the infrastructure of the United States, both urban and rural, is at present. It is in desperate need of renewal. Above is the Tobin Bridge, the largest in New England, spanning the Mystic River connecting Boston with Chelsea, 3.2 km in length. It is a cantilever truss bridge and its structure is such that it has been considered likely to survive a hit by a 95,000 tonne container ship, unlike the FSK bridge. Yet a heavy gravel truck hit one of the pylons on the bridge in 1973 collapsing the upper deck and killing the driver of the truck. Bridges are vulnerable, especially as many are old and need updated defence mechanisms.

The collapse of the FSK Bridge is not first incident due to a ship losing power. For instance, the NYT reminded us that in 2015, a 600-foot freighter lost propulsion as it travelled along the Delaware River between New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Seconds before the vessel reached the Burlington-Bristol Bridge, it crashed into the bank of the river instead, averting disaster.

As the NYT reported this week “In the days after last month’s disaster in Baltimore, officials in Massachusetts began taking a fresh look at Boston’s Tobin Bridge, a truss span that carries more than 40,000 vehicles each day across the Mystic River but does not have a protection system for its piers.”

The authorities have relied on navigation protocols including twinning of pilot vessels to take the ships down the Mystic River, but in the light of the FSK bridge disaster, everything is up for evaluation. The problem is that there is a need to renovate America and Trump controls sufficient politicians in Congress to stop anything worthwhile occurring all in the name of his narcissistic misanthropy. He wants to block everything if it enables him to become President and then he can blame Biden for not doing anything. That may give him undue credit.

Behind Trump lurks Steve Bannon. Trump was never very intelligent even before the dementia settled in, had no sense of morality and lived in a cocoon of deceit governed by infant tantrums. Nevertheless, he was enabled to become President of the United States, by unexpectedly beating an overconfident, unloved candidate.

Underlying much of the current community angst, alienation and ethnic hatred triptych was the perceived government complacency which enabled the 9/11 attack by “vile foreign immigrants” to occur. This tragedy has had this deep psychological effect on America which has never been healed, unlike Pearl Harbour which was avenged not only by Japanese surrender but also by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Bannon is the person to rip open the unhealed scar. He is a nihilist – somebody who would create a Killing Fields in America under the mantra of MAGA inciting the destruction of all that he hates. By November, unless he is stopped, even Murdoch should be afraid if a demented Trump is re-elected as President. And just to remind those who are supporting Biden, Hindenburg was 85 years old, feeble but still able to pass Germany over Herr Hitler, then 43 years. Bannon is 70 – “the new 50”.

Revenge is the most primitive response of the person slighted. In contrast, take South Africa, where the atrocities of the white regime were forgiven by Nelson Mandela, reinforced by his reconciliation commission led by Archbishop Tutu. Enough was then done to sustain the integrity of the country, despite having to live with people like Zuma, a kleptomaniac as President.

Thus, a major bridge collapse is a metaphor for America. A rogue uncontrolled destructive event. Bridge protection has relied on timber palisades which have rotted and were never built to withstand being hit by the modern colossal container ship or cruise boats. Nationwide, little has been done to address the problem, although the technology exists with the pylons able to be protected.

Those structures — known as dolphins — are circular concrete constructions located near a bridge’s central supports. Vessels are meant to crash into them if they veer off track in the shipping channel, diverting them from collision with the bridge. In fact, in 1980 a cargo ship crashed into one of the dolphins protecting the FSK bridge, demolishing the dolphin but sparing the bridge. Bridges need to be more strongly protected. Dolphins, if they are the solution, need to be appropriately strengthened. Apparently, the container ship which demolished the FSK Bridge avoided striking any of the dolphins already in place. The challenge that remains is to protect these essential structures, which carry a huge amount of traffic each day remain, as does my metaphor.

The latter-day conspiratorial theorists also remain.

Brain Fog

One of my co-morbidities is characterised by blood hyperviscosity. In other words, the blood flow is sluggish, and therefore the brain gets its nutrients just as sluggishly. Well, that is the theory. In any event, the cause was the level of my macroglobulins which had risen to the edge of the precipice of no return, despite me being regularly reviewed by a consultant physician. The highest level my replacement consultant specialist, an oncologist, had ever seen in a patient not hospitalised. I received an urgent call when he reviewed my blood biochemistry informing me to be emergency admitted to hospital. However, to me, his preferred destination, the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital is not somewhere I wish to go.

I successfully argued against hospitalisation and fortunately, demonstrated that as I was still writing my blog, which an independent source said made sense, I sustained my contention that I did not have brain fog. Nobody had bothered to define brain fog, and if you read the narrative about the condition, you realise after the fact how unhelpful the description is. The sensation is unlike fog over the Canberra airport, the brain circling waiting the fog to clear. There the simile ends because the cerebral affliction is not fog in the meteorological sense.

I must confess I had one small episode. I looked at my watch, and I could not connect with it telling the time. I do not know how long this episode lasted, but it was so strange, and I did not realise what it was until it cleared. It was a very strange sensation – not fog – just non-recognition of what I started out to do, read the time.

There was another sensation, which I did not immediately equate to so-called “brain fog”. When I woke up in the morning, it was as though the dream had not ended even though I felt I was awake. I am a very visual person, invoking my knowledge of neurolinguistics, which explains that I need visual clues as entry to my sense of touch and all actions derived from this sense. In other words, I am very much guided by what I see before what I do; but in this case because the visual effects were so incongruous, I moved invoking the sense of touch without reference to the visual distortion. By moving, it broke me away from that bizarre visual sensation, which I have described below. It recurred every morning, until one morning it was no longer there, presumably because the therapy started to work.

Anyway, I had this vision of a wall, always red and composed of jigsaw pieces – shapes without any order – scattered across my visual fields. Then as I moved to get up out of bed, it vanished. I tended not to think further, but then after it cleared, I wondered whether this was so-called “brain fog”.

I hope theses observations may be useful in clearing any haziness that may exist surrounding the definition of “brain fog”.

Searching for Mr Lehrmann

It was on March 2, 1836, that a delegation of 59 men gathered at Washington on the Brazos River to draft a Declaration of Independence and establish a constitution for a new nation. They declared Texas a “free, sovereign and independent republic.” Washington County, the “Birthplace of Texas,” is etched in the history books forever.

Brenham is the county seat for this historic and scenic region.

Brenham is 113km northwest of Houston and 145 km southeast of the State Capital Austin. Brenham is where Kirby Lehrmann was born in 1927. During his long life he became a successful cotton farmer in the area and a well-respected member of that Texan community. His 2020 obituary mentions as a grandson “Bruce Lehrmann of Australia”. His wife died two years before, and her obituary mentions both grandchildren “Bruce and Bobby Jane Lehrmann of Australia”.

Bruce Lehrmann was born in 1995 in Texas. His father Robert Wayne “Bob” Lehrmann was born in 1949 and married Annie Laurie Lusk (possibly cousins) in 1970. His father in 1990 subsequently married Lynden Jane Tapscott from the NSW town of Moree. He died of a heart attack in 1997, two years after Bruce had been born in the city of College Station. The Tapscotts are a well-established family in Moree; there is even a road named after the family.

While it is not clear when it occurred, after their father’s death Bruce and his sister went back to Australia with their mother.

Bobby Jane went to the Glennie school in Toowoomba, then between 2016 and 2018 attended both Queensland University of Technology (Bachelor of Journalism) and Griffith University (Diploma of Italian Language and Literature). She then had short-term jobs, before returning to Texas in 2019.

Currently she is Assistant Director of Communication for the City of College Station in Texas, incidentally the city where her brother was born. If you look at her curriculum vitae from 2016 to 2018, she was a busy person as the Bachelor degree was three years full-time and the Diploma two years part-time; but at the same time she had a number of jobs. She left Australia in 2019 and has been employed in a variety of positions in Texas since.

Her brother’s early life is more opaque than that of his sister. He attended Toowoomba Grammar School and he lived with his mother in an exclusive suburb in Toowoomba with a guy, who apparently won The Golden Casket and turned the lottery winnings into being a successful property developer in and around Toowoomba. Bruce after he left school moved to Canberra and commenced an Arts degree at the ANU.

Once you lay out the known circumstances, how can the trajectory of Bruce Lehrmann through the lounge suites of Liberal ministers be explained? Without any apparent expertise, an 18-year-old has ended up as a close adviser to the Minister of Defence. However, his private life is speckled and his fateful encounter with Miss Higgins after an alcohol-fuelled night in Canberra in 2019 tossed him into the spotlight.

He was subsequently employed by British Tobacco, who sacked him when the Higgins allegation came to light.

Having survived his 2022 ACT trial for allegedly raping Miss Higgins in 2019, Lehrmann must now face charges of rape committed allegedly in 2021. Lehrmann was first charged with rape in Toowoomba in January 2023. The matter has been the subject of numerous hearings due to prosecutors challenging the scope of medical and phone data evidence requested by his defence team. He faces court in June this year – a drawn out process.

For Lehrmann, with so many issues that must involve inter alia engagement of lawyers, here is a man who in the cold light of asking why this outsider had suddenly become a person whom the Liberal Party – backed by the right-wing media (and, as it turns out, allegedly with some of his bills being paid by Channel 7) – seems able to afford the type of legal representation that would bankrupt most people.

However, the more important question is why was this Texan-born, undistinguished man, while still a teenager, become the centrepiece of the conservative side of politics. What don’t we know?

The overlying question is why is there so much protection being afforded to Bruce Lehrmann. There is nothing in his early life to suggest anything out of the ordinary.

I wondered initially whether he was indeed Bruce Lehrman, but someone else had assumed that identity. However, I have followed the family connection, (which incidentally has just taken time but on the face of it was not particularly difficult – it is all on the public record). Thus, it would be a very elaborate stratagem to seed all the clues in order to convince us to believe that there is this different man masquerading as Bruce Lehrmann.

Nevertheless, the unexplained is the most intriguing. Why was this young American catapulted into the Ministerial suite, with access apparently to sensitive documentation, including the French proposal to build nuclear submarines, later aborted.

I presume he has dual nationality, and although he would qualify for employment by the CIA for instance, it would be highly unusual. But there is a kernel of an idea, especially if this innocuous character had access to the French nuclear submarine arrangements. In other words what vital information does Mr Lehrmann have to merit such almost hysterical protection.

Obviously the attention he has attracted has not been helpful to whoever is his boss, he conforming to the adage of independence of action being inversely proportional to the controversy generated. The play acting around all of Mr Lehrmann’s behaviour may be a smokescreen, drawing attention away from the real reason for Mr Lehrmann being here and not decamping back to Texas as his sister has done.

I must not be on my Pat Malone in these thoughts. There must have been some investigative journalists who have been trawling through the real reason for Mr Lehrmann being able to afford an opulent lifestyle, and whether money is being funnelled from American sources to sustain him. But then that would implicate too many people to sustain the secrecy, or would it?

The Head Tradie

Crikey’s Bernard Keane epitomises what has been lost in the modern journalists – an intelligent perspicacious grasp of what a journalist needs to do beyond vomiting up public relations written media releases.

Keane alluded to Dutton’s alleged strategy of trying to credibly claim to be “a party of the worker” while not being in favour of actual workers. In favour of workers, as Keane writes, means supporting an industrial relations system that delivers pay rises, rather than wage stagnation; one that enables workers to share the benefits of productivity growth and shifts some of the profit share of national income back to workers, reversing the trend of most of the past decade.

All of this goes against the traditional conservative constituency of the Liberal Party, the employers whether as described as “big business” or the small business employers, the shop keepers and other modest employers, people who nevertheless are employers of labour. Once, the Liberal Party could rely on the professions as part of its constituency, but not anymore.

Thus Dutton, in the end, cannot carry out his slogan if he were serious without alienating his traditional base. He may do so by using the Trump playbook of stimulating community anxiety and alienation coupled with demonising immigrants. I suspect that may get some purchase in this country, especially with right wing media backing. This is unlikely in the general population, but Albanese has such a “tin ear” that anything could happen by the next election.

The opportunity for Dutton to modify his slogan is glaringly obvious. His constituency is among the “tradies”. These are a growing important constituency of wealthy small business owners, who control much of the nation’s economy by providing vital services. This constituency does not arise from the leafy middle class but from the traditional working class. These mostly men are the electricians, the plumbers, the painters, the carpenters, the earth movers, the gas fitters, the builders. All these tradies I have used – notice how much they cost and yet how essential they are in a society where the provision of housing is approaching crisis point and where there is a scarcity of these skilled tradies.

This is a constituency that can afford large petrol or diesel powered vehicles, enjoy hunting and fishing, can afford to take the family on holidays inter alia to Queensland, and in the main live in a male world, in the traditional heterosexual society which does not write the opinion pieces of tomorrow’s sublimation in the media ether.

Yes, I know this is a generalisation, but analysis of the recent Dunkley election would give my hypothesis credence. Therefore, Dutton need not announce that he leads “a Party of the worker”, when tradies have separated themselves from a Labor party whose policies are now being fashioned by the cognoscenti of the inner suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne. See Sam Mostyn, yon Dutton, and see hope of your resurrection – if that is the word for a man with the mien of an undertaker if not his more aspirational worker, the grave digger.

I would be interested in Bernard Keane’s views.

Remembrance Day

Just a reminder of what I wrote on the eve of Remembrance Day last year. I think the Australian Government should be ashamed, especially those former Prime Ministers who signed that disgraceful grovelling letter – in flowing serif, of course.

Wong, who affects this air of concern, and Albanese who is increasingly becoming a hapless jester performing in the “Opening of an Envelope” should think deeply about whether they should resign. But needless to say, they won’t. After all, Wong was the first to achieve a life-time Platinum membership of the Captains Club, a place where concern for the masses is well tranquillised.

Netanyahu seems to be emulating a version of what the Romans did to Carthage, sowing the land with salt; Netanyahu is creating mountains of rubble. How is Netanyahu going to delight his far-right constituency enshrouded in black and hatred as they do their ritual prancing. I for one was not particularly enchanted by the sight of these people spitting at Christians. What a good idea, kill every Palestinian Christian as well.

I do not condone war. I do not condone brutality. I do not condone torture. I am ashamed of former Australian Prime Ministers being seduced by the Zionists to sign a Netanyahu panegyric. At least Gillard should have known better. Paul Keating to his credit refused.

In many ways the USA has led the modern world, including Australia into a morass where any moral compass has been lost. In any comments, nobody would condone what Hamas did, any more than actions depicted in those confronting images provided by ISIS showing what they did to their prisoners during the Iraq conflict would be condoned.

Much of this criminal behaviour is done in the name of religion. My fellow Australians condone what is happening in Gaza by a group of adherents who constitute 0.4 per cent of our population, who seem collectively to be cheering one of the monstrous perpetrators in this morass, Bibi Netanyahu. We with connivance of the media have allowed a range of stunted sociopaths to glimmer in this morass trickling towards Armageddon.

Mouse Whisper

As they were driving up the ramp off the freeway, they saw a Bonza 737-MAX coming in to land at Albury airport.

She commented on its purple livery, with BONZA prominently displayed on the sides of the plane.

He said: “Like seeing a night parrot.”

For those who need an explanation, the night parrot was thought to be extinct, but rediscovered, but remains highly endangered. Mouse Esq.

Modest Expectations 263 – A Frank Commentary

An Easter Poem

Albino afro

            He sit in clink

His eyes a salmon pink

 


Pigmented Southern gent

            He sit in cell

With TB racked adrenal




Jaundiced fundamentalist

            He sit in gaol

His shrivelled liver up for sale




The custodian on his plinth

            He who cry perfection

I am up for re-election




And who am I to release unto you

            And they as one cried

He who washes white




Release him, the white

            Because white is safer

Just as the Communion wafer




The three men

            There chained are led out

The restless mass as one do shout    




No that is not what we mean

             His colour out of whack

                        You take him back

and tar him pitch black.

When I was a small boy, I remember my mother had a beautiful amber necklace, the colour of which was not too dissimilar from that of the Roman perfume pot (pictured above) in the British Museum, except that the necklace was more translucent. When she rubbed it with a piece of fur, she demonstrated how the amber attracted a small flake of paper. To a small boy who had never heard of an electrostatic charge, it was magical. I was just observing what the Greek philosopher, Thales of Miletus had first observed around 600BC.

Amber has always been a favourite gem of mine. As I reported in an earlier blog, the Amber Room in the Catherine Palace in St Petersburg, 30 kilometres south of the city, is a dazzling exercise in butterscotch amber although it is a reconstruction (the Nazis having removed the original room which was never found).

Amber, the resultant of the fossilisation of pine resin millions of years ago, is found on the Baltic Coast. (It is also mined in the Dominican Republic, the source of blue amber and in Myanmar). Visiting Latvia even today, the amount of amber fashioned into cheap jewellery and trinkets is everywhere. The Latvian amber is opaque and what I would call custard yellow. I don’t find it appealing, but perhaps I was just exposed to touristy dross.

Based on the age of the amber bead, the researchers speculate that it may have reached Spain via the ancient trade networks of the Sepulcros de Fosa culture, which arose in Catalonia during the Middle Neolithic period before disappearing between 4,000 and 5,000 years ago.

To the archaeological experts of that period, it has just expanded knowledge of the range of European trade in the Neolithic period. One can still see evidence of this neolithic Catalonian culture in the funerary objects and the evidence of cave habitation. It should be realised that when our forbears linked the Aboriginal people to the Stone Age, they undervalued the level and sophistication of communication between these people, already culturally different, where language was one point of this differentiation. However, trade was one means that the various groups began to accommodate to this cultural diversity.

There are currently about 7000 languages spoken around the world, but this number is probably down from the peak of human linguistic diversity which occurred around 10,000 years ago, just before the agricultural revolution. Before that time, all human groups had been hunter-gatherers, living in small mobile tribal societies. Farming societies were demographically more prosperous and group sizes were larger than among hunter-gatherers, so the expansion of agriculturalist settlement likely replaced many smaller linguistic groups.

Today, there are few hunter-gatherer societies left and so our linguistic diversity reflects this European agricultural past. The Australian continent was the end of the line, and when an Aboriginal person boasts that his people are the oldest civilisation, he or she is saying that the civilisation is the oldest, unchanged. There are 250 Aboriginal languages for about one million people, which tends to agree with generalisation above about hunter-gatherers (145 of these languages are still spoken).

The amber traders five millennia ago were part of a civilisation that vanished in what we call progress, but others may not. It serves to illustrate that the Aboriginal people did not conform to the whitefella progress to what is termed “civilisation”.

They developed a complex society based on being hunter-gatherers; so much so, for instance, that there was no drive to invent bows and arrows (one of the few peoples living on a land which was both tropical and temperate, coastal and desert – and where winter was comparatively mild.) White Australia failed to recognise this complexity and stigmatised them as “Stone Age” people.

This plaintive cry that the Aboriginal people did develop a post-agricultural revolution culture seems akin to the cultural cringe, which inflict some of our Australian whitefellas of Anglo-Celtic stock who have longed for the climate and mores of ‘The Old Country”.

You know being able to grow root crops was somewhat an advance on felling a wallaby at fifteen metres with a boomerang, where we whitefellas could not even see the animal. But we whitefella post-agriculturalists could plant root crops; obviously making us so less primitive. Really?

As for the Dark Emu, “Bruce, pull the other tuber – and by the way would you like a bush tomato, you know, the amber-coloured one. No need to have a sabbatical on banks of the Tigris now.”

The Most Over-Governed Parish in The World?

There he was – a man who plays the screen villain so well with a voice as beautifully modulated as that of Peter Lorre or Alan Rickman. I had sometimes wondered “Where was Eric?”

But no, on election night, we were witnessing the revenant, Eric. He was there in all his distinct personae, carefully reinterpreting fact persuasively to his extreme positions. He was this “partial” commentator, being broadcast nationally on “impartial” ABC television.

But then Eric is from “aways”, like we are. All Tasmanian invaders. Eric was more exotic, born in Stuttgart. His German lineage is what may be conservatively described as “right wing”. For example, quoting Wikipedia, Eric’s great uncle, Otto Abetz, was a Nazi SS officer, German ambassador to Vichy France, and a convicted war criminal. Eric’s grandfather was Karl Abetz, a professor of forestry science, who joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and became general consultant to the Reich Forestry Office in 1942.

But back to the main narrative. I advised Bill Snedden to develop a Tasmanian strategy after the 1974 election. I had noted there had been large swings in three of the electorates. Under the Australian Constitution each of the founding States was guaranteed at least five electorates. This led over time to the number of voters in each of the five Tasman electorates being far fewer than those of any electorate on the mainland. While other electorates could be created, modified or deleted, those in Tasmania remained much the same.

At that time in 1974 Tasmania was blessed with 79 local government areas, but Snedden wrote to each, specifying that “we were here to help”. He appointed one senior opposition politician to be in charge of the portfolio, Bob Ellicot. Labor held all five seats then, and it seemed to be a rational policy to entice Tasmanians to vote for the Coalition. Given how close the numbers in the House of Representatives were, call it “cynical” or “bribery”, it worked when the Bass by-election was called the next year with the retirement of Lance Barnard. Subsequently at the 1975 Federal election, all the seats became Liberal.

The fact that a military equivalent of a drover’s dog from aways won the Bass by-election reflected the neglect the Whitlam administration (he had excluded Barnard from discussions on the proposed 25 per cent tariff cut because it affected garment workers in Launceston) for Tasmania. The landslide victory in Bass was several months too late for Snedden’s survival.

But back to the main narrative. As one perspicacious commentator has said: “minority government is one that the majority of voters do not want.” I suspect it was Bob Brown, who consolidated this thread in Tasmanian politics by his fierce independence.

Tasmania has been lampooned as the place where if there was a tree, cut it down, especially native tree; if it was a river, dam it, and if it was a native animal, kill it. I remember when the sawmillers and the Hydroelectric Commission (HEC) ruled the State. Then there was the Mount Lyell mine, which turned Queenstown into a moonscape and the minerals used in the extraction of the copper and silver polluted the King River and Macquarie Harbour to such an extent that it was estimated that would take 200 years to clear up the pollution.

Then there was the annual Avoca wallaby shoot, counterpointed by the guilt realised of having rendered the Tasmanian tiger extinct by 1936. For years the Tasmanian press was full of reports about the sighting of this extraordinary marsupial. But these have gone more or less quiet. All that is left is the unwritten requiem.

But back to the main narrative of the recent election. Here there were two leaders. One, the Labor leader Rebecca White who has never had a real job; the Coalition Premier, Jeremy Rockliff, a farmer on a family property in northern Tasmania. Jeremy had alerted the wider global audience to spending $12m on a chocolate fountain, the enchantment of a Cadbury monument to dairy chocolate in the lead up to the election.

That aspiration was coupled with a proposal to build a huge stadium to be used a few times a year in a prime Hobart location – for an Australian Football League based in Jolimont Melbourne Victoria. This AFL office is in a choice location, so why should not a putative stadium for the Tasmanian Tigers be equally well located?

But then the AFL handed its clubs a total of $393m in funding for the 2023 season, and still made a profit of $27m. What about the foetal Tasmanian Tigers? The AFL could fund the stadium in say, Glenorchy, on cheaper land. The Premier before the election was acting like one of the “joy boys” – the cheerleaders for the Jolimont jock-strappers. There is a pathetic aspiration of wanting to be loved by the players, to rub shoulders with the liniment of champions. Will a billion dollars do?

Well, Jeremy did lose the election with a swing against his Willie Wonka aspirations – only lost 12 per cent. But he retained government.

The method of voting, the Hare-Clark system, used to elect seven members for each of the electorates based on their Federal counterparts leaves the eventual election result taking several weeks to emerge. Eighteen is the magic number for election; it was clear early in the count that no Party would reach that figure.

Labor did miserably, but the Greens picked up five seats. In other words, these two parties which have been in an uneasy alliance before totalled fifteen seats between them. As with most matters in Tasmania there are a couple of maverick independents. But then there is the charismatic populist. Jacqui Lambie is the classic authoritarian personality, who in the end will “piss” her erstwhile followers off by her actions.

Not that she isn’t smart, but one witnessed her having three of her acolytes elected in the Tasmanian election, while at the same time breaking up with her colleague in the Senate. She publicly boasts that her Jacqui Lambie Network has no policies. It exists because “La Duchessa’ is just her – a media apparition with a distinct personality and a voice which epitomises the knockabout Australian larrikin.

Yes, I do love Tasmania. It gives you everything, good and not so good, as long as you stay for enough time.

I Will Not Fly Qantas, Until They Boot Out the Joyce Clones

I remember the worst flight I ever experienced was between Townsville and Cairns in November 1956. I have written about it elsewhere, but in short, I was a passenger on TAA DC4-Skymaster, which ran into an electrical storm. Being unpressurised, the plane could not ascend above it; nor for that matter fly under it. It was dark, but I remember still clearly the beautiful sunset at the Townsville airport before embarkation. There was no hint of what was to come.

In that year, over 400 people died in commercial flight accidents, the largest loss of life being over the Grand Canyon when two commercial airliners collided with 128 people killed. There was one fatal accident in Australia when a Royal Flying Doctor plane crashed with five on board near Derby. All died.

It was a time when flying was not as safe as it has been up until now, even though the number of flights was far less.

I used to travel over 50,000 airmiles a year, even after I retired before Covid intervened. I was a Qantas Platinum frequent flyer with a substantial cache of frequent flyer points. I never had any doubts about the safety of the airline, although I noticed that the standards in the cabin had begun to slip; damaged seats not fixed, inflight screens that did not work. The meals were increasingly frugal, and the leg room increasingly modelled on that provided for Irish leprechauns. The number of staff to assist seemed to melt away. Delay between anything happening increased.

It was about this time that I needed assistance, and as much as the ground staff tried, often I wondered whether I had been forgotten. My plight symbolised the Joycean fanatical cost cutting affecting customer service. The further one got away from this person, the service often seemed better. For instance, I flew Qantas Air Link frequently, and could not fault the service, even though the planes were increasingly shabby.

My loyalty to Qantas remained.

But not now. The constant news about the airline fills me with foreboding. Overall, the sacrifice of safety to boost the payout to Joyce will come back to haunt the Government. Joyce played the politicians with blarney and the mirror of exclusivity.

In return, I read Qantas has an ageing fleet of planes, not to be replaced because Boeing, the major supplier has also borrowed from the Joyce playbook, sacrificing safety for profits, epitomised by bits of their planes falling off or the controls being ungovernable.

Then get rid of your experienced, highly competent workforce as though there were no tomorrow. Nothing like having a disgruntled workforce or outsourcing critical areas where who knows the level of quality control. Then make sure you have no way of training and hiring a highly trained workforce – no succession planning except the top job.

The policy at present seems directed to induce artificial shortages; abandon air routes that are “not commercial”; increase the price of flying; maintain the monopoly by unfair if not illegal actions.

The resultant is a feeling of uncertainty. Yet there were no commercial airline crashes in 2023. One flight, Yeti Airlines 691, a turboprop ATR 72-500 stalled and crashed while landing at Pokhara in Nepal. All 72 people on board were killed. For some reason, it was not considered a commercial flight. ATR is a Franco-Italian aircraft manufacturer headquartered in Toulouse.

An air crash by a Qantas or Virgin flight where all are killed fortunately may be very unlikely – but is the government doing anything about confronting and minimising the rising risks, the result of compromising safety for assuring shareholder and Master Joyce’s profit?

The consequence of one disaster would be accompanied by public lamentations, pestering the relatives about the dead always portrayed as angels without fault, the repulsive sentence “we are taking the matter very seriously”, and politicians wedged in the exit doorway of the Chairman’s Lounges headed by the Prime Minister pushing son Nathan in his metaphorical pram of privilege. Then there are the endless Royal Commissions enriching lawyers and finally coming up with 500 recommendations, most of which will be ignored.

Plenty to do now I would have thought. Much cheaper and will assure safety before the fact.

Can Prostitution be Treason? Is it just a Reversible Equation?

A 2008 quote from President Donald Trump’s eldest son about his family’s assets.

“In terms of high-end product influx into the US, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Donald Trump Jr. said at a New York real-estate conference that year. “Say, in Dubai, and certainly with our project in SoHo, and anywhere in New York, we see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

Trump Jr.’s comment has taken on new meaning amid the investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 US election and whether the Trump campaign colluded with Moscow.

America executed Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953 for less. The Financial Times summarised the background in an article three years ago (sic). “There is now no doubt that Julius recruited Communist agents and passed information to the Russians, but recent evidence has proved that the always flimsy case against Ethel was based on nothing more substantial than personal prejudice, anti-Communist paranoia, and outright lies. On trial, essentially, were not her actions, but her political beliefs and reputation.

Ethel was pursued by the odious Ray Cohn, the aide to Senator McCarthy. Cohn later became a mentor to Trump. Cohn seemed to have sexual fantasies about Ethel Rosenberg, who at 35 years with two young boys, was executed on the order of President, Dwight D. Eisenhower for doing nothing more than being loyal to her husband, Julius, whose espionage amounted in the end to less than a row of proverbial beans. Certainly not enough to be put to death.

After all, parenthetically, is this the same America who want to put Julian Assange away for up to 175 years for telling the truth or if they could, judicially murder him; whilst letting that grub, Sam Bankman-Fried get only 25 years for stealing $8 billion from customers?

It seems so. A substantial number of Americans nod benignly towards Trump and his relationship with Putin, but then the Rosenbergs, whatever they were, did not deserve to die. I don’t think the Rosenbergs thumbed their noses at the American community as Trump has done, fomented by that metastatic Australian malignancy.

Mouse Whisper

Talking of the Orange, Trump won a couple of trophies at his own golf club this past fortnight. Rick Reilly, a golf journalist, in 2019 wrote a book about Trump’s golfing prowess entitled “Commander in Cheat”.

“Trump doesn’t just cheat at golf,” Reilly wrote. “He throws it, boots it, and moves it. He lies about his lies. He fudges and foozles and fluffs. At Winged Foot, where Trump is a member, the caddies got so used to seeing him kick his ball back onto the fairway they came up with a nickname for him: ‘Pele’.”

Surprise, surprise. He is a no-show at projected pro-am tournament, where his booting skills would be very difficult to justify-unless he was classified as four-legged and had the stick in his mouth and named Niblick. Yuk!