Month: June 2024

 Modest Expectation – John H Lawrenson

Joba spider

People like the sensational and fearful. The Joba spider a big spider, it’s colourful, and it’s venomous. Spiders induce fear and fear is kind of interesting … so this spider kind of fits that and generates some publicity.

My attention was attracted to this very large spider, which is related to the golden orb variety that hangs around our garden and on occasions drapes its web across our pathway, so the spider can end up on clothing. The spider does not worry me so long as it does not negotiate my collar and have a tour of my back. 

The Joba Spider has hitchhiked from South-east Asia to the East Coast of the United States and is threatening to take out the native spiders. It is stated to be venomous which immediately inflames the arachnid phobic brain; but reading further for humans and for that matters animals, its bite is no more venomous than that of a mosquito, its bite causing local redness and itch. In any event, the spiders are shy, and avoid human contact as much as possible. But invaders invoke a sense of dread – and myth!

In our microenvironment, called home, we have learnt to live with spiders of various sizes – not in harmony necessarily, but that is the legacy of living in a semi-tropical environment where corners are left as havens for insects and spiders. There are the St Andrew’s Cross spiders, their spindly configuration suggestive of the crucifixion of the Apostle strung in the centre of their steel grey web. When disturbed, these spiders shake their webs, emitting flashes of yellow or brown depending on the sex of the spider.

Golden orb spider

Then there are those golden orbs waiting to entrap the unwary as they extend their web across the path from one Japanese maple to the other. Their abdomens glistening yellow in the early morning dew – no problem as long as you know where they are and not camouflaged in the foliage. Their spun silk is so strong that the fibre has been woven into a shawl.

However, the ones which evoke horror from persons not used to having them attached to the ceiling are the huge, hairy huntsman spiders which, to the devotees of the horror movie, have tarantula-type proportions. For a time, there was a nest somewhere in our garage behind all the detritus accumulated over thirty years we have lived there.

They appear suddenly, but generally ours prefer the open spaces of the ceilings and walls, bathrooms an area they particularly haunt. The guest bedroom generally helped the level of adrenaline when one huntsman was a silent yet menacing witness to the human life below. When they move, huntsmen spiders move incredibly fast, crabbing their way across the wide-open prairie of the ceiling, pursued when I was capable by myself with a broom. The straw entangled them, and held high, I then marched out into the garden and pitched them away. Once the huntsman vanished over the fence, there was a squeal and I was back inside, sans balai. Huntsmen spiders undisturbed live for two years; they have a nasty bite, but you have to be completely stupid or very unlucky to be bitten.

They are not life threatening unlike the Sydney Funnel Web spiders, which have a neurotoxin which can kill in quick order, unless one is given the antivenene. The last known death from a funnel web spider bite was in 1979, a year before the antivenene came onto the market. Still, since bites are rare and unless you know that a black spider has bitten you, and you don’t apply a pressure bandage and you think one can outlast the increasingly severe symptoms, then there will be an inevitable fatality. As a child coming to Sydney, I knew about funnel web spiders very early on, with their predilection for sandy soils. It made me very wary, even as a young child, of grubbing around in the gardens of Sydney.

The same could be said of red back spiders, the bane of the outside toilet. Always checked the toilet seat and underneath for these spiders, which always have been the stuff of comedy, “biting the bum” jokes. However, before the antivenene became available in 1956, there had been fourteen deaths attributed to the red back spider neurotoxin. None since, except a young fellow died eight years ago from an alleged red back bite. The visible red stripe on their backs provide these small black spiders with the identification characteristic. Always took a torch to the “outside dunny”, which proved, I might say, very useful on a few occasions.

Nevertheless, I am very wary of all black spiders no matter the size because once, when walking through the bush in Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, I brushed against a bush, and received an almightily painful bite from a tiny black spider, which I did not recognise since, having “done its dastardly deed”, it rapidly disappeared into the undergrowth. Boy, did I suffer, despite putting the affected finger in cold water from a convenient nearby stream.

Okay there were always the trapdoor spiders, which we kids loved irritating by disturbing their “trapdoors” with blades of grass, so they would emerge as tiny pugilists; good spider-sadistic fun. But then the gardens became lawn and the trapdoor spiders were buried under horticultural progress.

So there you are, it started with a reflection on the Joba “spider wars”; and ended up in my reminiscing of a time when you could always buy “a spider” at the local milk bar. I used to love them!

Coulrophobia

Bring out the grease paint, the red noses, the baggy pants, the shapeless footwear, the Congress Clowns are back in town. Needless to say, three Democratic Congressmen joined in the merriment. Gerry Connolly of Virginia, Jared Moskowitz of Florida and John Garamendi of California introduced a bill to rename the Miami Federal Correctional Institution to the “Donald J. Trump Federal Correctional Institution”. This resolution was deemed to recognise the 34 convictions that the Felonious Trump had scored and played in New York.

The House GOP has been hard at work for the past couple of weeks. In fact, this is the most legislation they’ve introduced in a while. If they were capable of thinking about anything but the orange convict, we might actually call this past week… productive? But come on, we all know that’s not possible. The very thought of passing something the American people could actually use probably makes members like MTG and Matt Gaetz break out in hives.

So, instead, they went with the usual pointless crap that is both ridiculous and could never pass the House anyways with their razor thin majority that seems to be shrinking by the day. We must say though, this set of bills is the most blatant form of orange-nosing we’ve seen yet. In addition to naming Dulles Airport after the convict, they want to name an area of water surrounding Florida the “Donald John Trump Exclusive Economic Zone of the United States.” And the cherry on top? Not only does the House GOP want to bring back the $500 bill, but they want to put a portrait of Trump on the front of it. Lincoln Project 

On hearing Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings Op11

My time in Vietnam ended in 1971. My memories are sadly as fresh today as they were 53 years ago. Those of us who served in that conflict will never forget what we saw, heard, smelled, tasted, and endured at such an impressionable age in our lives. Weep as I do hearing this musical arrangement, I am moved beyond words by this tribute to all who served and died on both sides of that war. They say that with age comes wisdom and understanding. Now in my seventies, I have gained much wisdom, but to this day I will never understand the need for the horrors inflicted upon the living and dead of that war.

I served in the US Army from 1969 to 1971. The feelings for each person who served in that period can’t be explained to those who never went through it. A number of years later I visited the Viet Nam memorial in Washington DC with full knowledge that I could just as easily have been one of the names carved into the stone wall. I should have felt lucky to still have been alive but all I could feel was sadness about the thousands of dead and shattered lives destroyed by that useless war. All I could do was break into tears. I left, and never went back.

Polish Youth Orchestra

The above two blogs were written apparently in response to hearing this beautiful music which counterpointed the inhumanity portrayed in the film about the Vietnam War – “Platoon”. The Adagio in this instance was played by a Polish youth orchestra. Watching these young violinists, violists, cellists and bass players, I wondered how many of their ancestors had been slaughtered during WWII when six million Poles perished – over 21 per cent of the then population.

A scene from Platoon

War films can be nonsense, as in the John Wayne and Sylvester Stallone representations of the carnage of war. In particular, John Wayne was a grotesque figure in his portrayal of the war hero. I always thought that Wayne never got over being christened “Marion Morrison”. Still, he was revered as the Western hero, the creation of John Ford, in fourteen films spread over 23 years.

WWII was the set of comic book heroes. Nobody in my family was killed; thus I knew no death until my Aunt Mildred passed away just after the War. I was left with some anonymous person while everybody trooped off in black to bury Mildred.

The Korean war was hardly mentioned, but Anzac Day was a different matter. We small boys had to stand while the names of all those from the school who had died in both World Wars were read out. I well remember when the headmaster got to the “Snowball” brothers, the end of the list was nigh, and we could begin shuffling and raising our collective bowed heads.

Cadet service was compulsory, and since I looked intrinsically slovenly, found boot shining tedious and had perpetually unruly gaiters straps, I was not the epitome of the immaculate cadet. Proud never to be promoted.

However, as medical students, we came upon many doctors who taught us and had served as medical officers; many had been prisoners-of-war. They never talked about the war. I remember the story of the returned serviceman, who always dined alone on Christmas Day in memory of a mate who had been killed on that day.

It was only with the Vietnam War, that I became seriously involved in observing the destructive elements of war. By that time, I had spent two years in the dissecting room and, after graduation, two years undertaking post-mortems as a pathology registrar.

I suppose you get inured to the dead; I remembered being hit by a flying hand tossed across the dissecting room, but only a shrivelled formalinised remnant, not as a byproduct of a soldier – perhaps – a mate blown apart next to me. The only sight I never really liked was the beheaded, but I never took my work home with me. There were no nightmares; just put on a metaphorical mask before you go into the room and taking it off with my leather apron after I had finished the dissections.

I was opposed to the Vietnam war; two of us got massively drunk watching in horror the landslide Coalition victory in the 1966 Federal election. I never marched; I worked for the Army; I examined young men for acceptance into the Vietnam War carnage; I silently protested; one night left on my own when my elderly companion examining doctor was indisposed, I failed everyone. Maybe I saved them from a conscripted life – or death – and the destructive mental aftermath of those soldiers I saw who presented at my regular morning clinic in the Victoria Barracks.

Arrogant? I never regretted that night; still don’t.

We went to a vibrant, unified Vietnam in 2022, which just emphasised what a useless waste of life it had been all round. The Americans just destroyed in the name of their disposable society in the thrall of the Satanic Kissinger.

I hope the blokes I failed have had a good life, whoever and wherever they are now. 

Pomegranate

A garden in closed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.

Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits; camphire, with spikenard,

 Spikenard and saffron; calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense; myrrh and aloes, with all the chief spices:

A fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and streams from Lebanon. – Song of Solomon 4: 12-15

Over the years, I have become obsessed by the pomegranate. To me the pomegranate is associated with the medical profession. Many of the medical colleges, societies and associations have the pomegranate as part of their heraldic symbolism.  Of more recent relevance, the pomegranate was chosen as the logo for the Millennium Festival of Medicine in 2000.

The pomegranate has been ascribed many positive health effects, and if they are believed, a pomegranate a day would keep the doctor at bay, but I want to plant pomegranates in my garden, in honour of one of most loyal, quixotic doctors I have ever met. He was a Pom. He died last year – and I promised his wife I would dedicate a patch in the garden to growing pomegranates in his honour.

Not that we have not tried to grow a couple once, but they were planted next to the Gymea lily, and failed to thrive. The Gymea Lily eventually grew its characteristically long stem topped by the bunched red flowers. It collapsed and now it is about to be removed. These new pomegranates, hopefully a metre in height will thrive, and maybe I’ll see them fruit.

It is a pity that the French word for pomegranate “grenade” has such a destructive connotation in the English language; hardly off set by its juice – grenadine – being provided for cocktails, the tequila sunrise being one – but it is a bit cloying for my taste.

Now I want to see pomegranates planted in my old university college. Maybe they will; maybe they won’t. We lost another doctor colleague, three years older than myself, who I knew from our time at university and afterwards and respected. Never a close friend; I fear that I was too unpredictable for a guy who under his affability had a strict etiquette. Nevertheless, his death was the stimulus for such an idea, where those who had been privileged to be doctors could quietly contemplate.

After all, pomegranates are an ecumenical fruit – their glistening red seeds seen as some elixir. They are revered in many religions, even down to supposed 613 seeds in each fruit, which to Jews symbolises the righteousness of the 613 commandments in the Torah.

For a secular state, it is easy to dismiss such statements, but my wish would be that pomegranates grown in the College be given each year at a Chapel service as an appropriate beneficence. Unfortunately, harvest time for pomegranates in Australia does not coincide with the Feast of St Luke in October – the patron saint who guides the compassionate skilful hand. To which we respond looking into the copse of pomegranate trees.

Almighty God, who calledst Luke the Physician, whose praise is in the Gospel, to be an Evangelist, and Physician of the soul: May it please thee that, by the wholesome medicines of the doctrine delivered by him, all the diseases of our souls may be healed; through the merits of thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

And maybe don’t forget the Tequila Sunrise in yon chalice.

The Dutton Verbal

Gina Rinehart has abandoned Barnaby Joyce; and moved her considerable fortune onto another target, Peter Dutton. Dutton is a Queensland copper through and through, who has himself over the years become independently wealthy. He is just the interim leader of an unstable coalition, but luckily happens to come from a State where the hayseed has invaded his Liberal contraption. He would have no hope of being the leader if he happened to have been hatched in the Southern states.

Dutton stands in the succession at the end of a string of NSW Prime Ministers, each worse than the one before. Shunned, eventually, with the Coalition in opposition he became the leader of an exhausted low-level Party, savaged by the appearance of a group of intelligent women called “teal”, who remained unperturbed by the mud slung by the gang of Murdoch misogynists.

Dutton is verballing Australia with his asinine concepts, and as such because he seems oblivious to ridicule, he keeps in that dark voice monotone, showing no emotion – just repeating simple false assertions.

He knows only too well, that belief in science has been broken – the years of scholarship cast down the drain of superstition. It is a cynical exercise, because I do not see Dutton cloaked in an animal fur gnawing away at the bone marrow of a mammoth cut from the Bowman tundra. Even he accepts the accoutrements of progress.

However, his low affect contrasts with the squeals of an unsettled Prime Minister without the intellect to engage in personally dismantling this erstwhile Brisbane copper. Dutton will keep on verballing, carpeting the countryside with assertions and letting his jester, O’Brien, cop the derision. After all, it takes a certain style to lose your seat to Clive Palmer as O’Brien did in the 2013 Federal elections.

Dutton realises very clearly that to get elected, he must disrupt and incite uncertainty in his calm, lugubrious way, with a claque of Gabriele D’Annunzio aligned Futurists to help him unsettle the Australian political process (I do not necessarily believe that Dutton has ever heard of Futurism but having the instinct to ferret around helps him in a similar dialectic)

Charles the Bald

Dutton knows that Albanese is fatally flawed in his indecisiveness and his tendency to tantrums. It is easy to make Albanese look weak, hence the ad hominem barrage Dutton has recently started to unleash. Just an extreme form of verballing. Whether the appointment of Matthew Kean to head the new Climate Change Authority will change the dynamic is unknown? I doubt it as Dutton now has another target to verbal, Master Kean. I have just been reading about the antics of the French king, Charles the Bald, in the fourteenth century. Dutton would feel at home.

If the Kean appointment stops the Government from wringing its hands, ignore the Rinehart capacity to pay everyone off, and seriously press the case for “renewables”, then I’ll be suitably confounded. Rinehart is only mining what we all own, but such is the political supplication, she survives – well. Too well!

Unless the Government coherently silence the cacophony wrought by Dutton, it will make even the clear definitions of combatting climate change vanish under a layer of Dutton verballing bulldust. This will be heightened once Dutton assembles his set of nucleophilic scientists – after all, if the press labels somebody like Switkowski an expert, then next day the Murdoch press will bestow apostle status on one who has, let’s face it, a rather speckled career.

After all, Australia had to endure Philip Baxter, the British Ex-Pat chemical engineer and first Vice-Chancellor of the University of NSW, who coloured the scene radioactive and, as David Crowe reminded us in an article in the SMH, of promoting the folly to build a nuclear power station at Jervis Bay.  In Dr Strangelove tradition, Baxter wanted to create a nuclear arsenal under cover of the power station. Prime Minister Gorton was keen on the concept, but when he was deposed the project died at the beginning of the 1970s when Prime Minister McMahon baulked at the cost; the idea was finally killed by Whitlam.

But then the Brits have form, using the Pitjantjara lands without Aboriginal permission, to test nuclear devices; and for good measure made uninhabitable the Monte Bello islands off Western Australia. Yes, Australia, the playground for British nuclear scientists.

I’m afraid when all this happened you – Dutton – were locked in a pre-morula suspension, a shining speck in the Galaxy just waiting to emerge to grace our country’s demise.

And remember, Australia, we do not have the water to cool the reactors. One reason for Jervis Bay was that it had abundant water, but that was a long time ago before the tinder dry South Coast burned. So much for an abundance of water, as Baxter had assured us. It would have been a catastrophic disaster had we had a nuclear power station engulfed by the bushfires of five years ago. But then, some people have no sense of history and its importance. They used to be called Futurists.

Mouse Whisper

My boss’s country aunt had an outside toilet. You went out of the kitchen into a narrow pathway lined by a wall, with a path winding up the toilet, the little weatherboard shack on the side of the hill at the back of the main house.

At night, there was no light, so one always had to take a torch. So, the story goes, my boss’s cousin, also John, went up one night in summer with a torch, which did not provide much illumination.

Having completed his business, he went to pull what he thought to be the chain. Unfortunately, in the darkness he pulled the tail of a tiger snake hanging from the cistern, but with enough force to detach it so it fell at his feet. It seemed to be as shocked as Cousin John was, because tiger snakes have a reputation of some hostility when disturbed. Instead of rearing to bite John, it slithered away under the door. John was thus able to pull up his trousers, making sure when fastening the belt that it was leather not tiger snake. Enough to make a poor mouse shiver.

Modest Expectation – Richard Cattell

Dr Claudia Scheinbaum has been elected as President of Mexico, a six year term and the first woman. Despite the glitter of the apparent celebration, Mexico is a mess, instance Mexico City where she was Mayor before being elected President. As The Washington Post reported recently, she had won in a landslide under the umbrella of her mentor, the previous President, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. He was a charismatic dud, despite his popularity.

Mexico is under a great deal of stress; despite that, its lower wage scales have attracted relocation of many American companies. For instance, General Motors produces 800,000 vehicles from four factories located in different parts of the country. Nevetheless, the economy remains sluggish.

Nevertheless, the drug cartels have reached the stage of challenging provincial government authority, and in so doing the concept of Mexico being a democracy. The Americans are consumed by the hypocrisy of being a bottomless pit for Mexican-exported cocaine and its increasing consumption, and putting in draconian border restrictions.

Borders – what borders for drugs? Taken as a percentage of users (latest data 2021), in percentage terms the District of Columbia at 3.8 per cent, closely followed by Vermont and New York, are the highest consumers of cocaine. The lowest is Texas at 1.33 percent but still 337,000 people depend on a loosened border to supply their addiction to cocaine from the Mexico cartels.

I have been to Baja California in happier times, when we lunched in Ensenada, close to where the two young Australian surfers were murdered recently. After all, it is now a centre of the drug trade, and long ago where we lunched overlooking the Sea of Cortez, it was a scene where its serenity was expressed by John Steinbeck in his Log. “Beauty occurs everywhere: sunshine and rock, ripple and shadowed wave. Show your joy as thinly as what you call sorrow.” He and Ed Ricketts, the father of marine biology, had gone on an underwater expedition in March 1940, their base a sardine seiner out of Monterey.

No longer seen as in the Steinbeck vision, it’s now the most dangerous area of Mexico less than 150kms south of the US border. This is just one of the problems, Dr Scheinbaum has inherited, a beautiful coast now polluted by criminal militias. Tourism is worth US$ 3.38 bn (8.5% of GDP) to Mexico. Paradoxically, it is increasing. Oh, what a conundrum, a seductive coastline concealing a hostile interior where the populace is locked into a culture of poverty.

So different from Mexico City. I had been surprised when I received in 1991 notification that I had been elected President-elect of the International Society of Quality in Health Care (ISQA). Who by? I had not even nominated, because my experience of the organisation up to that point was that it was on its last legs, with no money and an organisation with an evangelical tinge of wanting to save the World but no concept of budgeting for such a mission.

Anyway, I accepted the Presidential Chalice but did not drink from it. The upshot was I had to open the ninth ISQA Conference in Mexico City in 1992. When I had visited in the previous December, nothing had been done. Everybody seemed to be on holidays. I went ahead and booked the venue on my credit card.  My President-elect, Enrique Ruelas was nowhere to be seen. Anyway, the Conference went without a hitch the next year. I met a number of Mexican dignitaries, whose names have been lost in the breezes of faded importance.

Enrique Ruelas

Enrique turned out thus to be well connected.  Nevertheless, being only 30 years he was still inexperienced, but affable enough, spoke English moderately well but struck me as pliable and disliking conflict, which suited me, because it enabled me to spread my influence over four years from a standing start after inheriting the Chalice.

Enrique had experienced disaster in a massive proportion, which would have tested anybody’s resilience. In 1985, Enrique was caught in the massive Mexican City earthquake, which demolished his hospital while he was away. Otherwise, he may have been one of the 10,000 people killed on that September day.

Back to 1992, I opened the Conference in Spanish, carefully highlighting the two active volcanoes, Popocatépetl and Iztaccihuatl, to essentially show off my mastery of the language, but in truth unwittingly highlighting the instability of this city of 22.5 million people. These volcanoes are close to Mexico City, and an eruption could create a latter-day Pompeii.

Currently, Mexico City is also subsiding because of overuse of aquifers. Buildings in the centre of the city are sloping and bending, the airport terminal and runways, the aboveground metro and streets are cracking, Repairs are costly. It is projected that the land is going to sink another 100 feet over the next 150 years. Water shortages are running the taps dry, worsened by low rainfall, climate change and poor infrastructure. This situation continues to reinforce reliance on groundwater pumping to meet the city’s water demand. It is a symbol of the competing pressures which Mexico has yet to master.

Dr Scheinbaum, Mexico’s new President-elect, the former Mayor of Mexico City, has pledged to combat the country’s water crisis by cracking down on water-intensive agricultural industries and improving irrigation systems. However, the problems of Mexico are a challenge verging on impossibility.

There is an undercurrent that Dr Sheinbaum will be Obrador’s puppet, more than a tinge of misogyny. For instance, as quoted in the NYT: “She needs him,” said Carlos Heredia, a Mexican political analyst. “She doesn’t have the charisma, she doesn’t have the popularity, she doesn’t have the political stamina of her own, so she needs to borrow that from López Obrador.”

Dr Sheinbaum is a climate scientist having shared in the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), she being a significant contributor. Yet her mentor, Obrador is very close to the fossil fuel industries, but I suppose that is just another conflict that Dr Sheinbaum will have to face. Her responses have not been very encouraging.

Incidentally, my successor, Enrique Ruelas has gone on to have an impressive career as a public health physician, a consummate bureaucrat, racking up a string of accolades. I always knew he would, even though I have not spoken to him for over twenty years when he was still finding his way to the career escalator. Enrique is 71 years and closing on his retirement years, whereas Claudia Scheinbaum is 61 years and on the threshold of her greatest challenge.

An Addendum to My Opening Address

The audience anticipated that after my opening address, which commenced with the salutation “Damas y Caballeros”, I would revert to English, so the Spanish speakers immediately went for their headphones for the translation from the expected English. To my chagrin, as some of my erstwhile friends kept saying, despite my ostensibly speaking in Spanish, the Mexicans kept their headphones on. A bit harsh. I thought my pronunciation passable, struggling with two words only. But the Mexicans appreciated that I honoured them by not speaking in the language of the Gringo.

The Suwalki Corridor

Making comparisons between Hitler and Putin is to make an assumption – that Putin had studied what Hitler did in trying to establish complete suzerainty over Europe – yet ultimately failed.  Putin may think he has learnt from that failure in how to invade the former Soviet dependency, Ukraine, the assumption being that it’s an integral part of Russia, in line with the seeming acceptance by Belarus and its dictatorial President, Alexander Grigoryevich Lukashenko, of its status as a client Russian State.

European countries seek to gain consensus by endless talk-fests, which leads to one word – appeasement. The Soviet Union moved into the vacuum, which democracy seems to create  in Eastern Europe after WWII.

The occupation of Crimea was Putin’s test of Western resolve, in many ways echoing Hitler’s occupation of the Saarland, the industrial portion of Germany ceded provisionally to France at the Treaty of Versailles. A plebiscite about its future was scheduled for fifteen years after the cession to France. Germany, with Goebbels in full flight and with its German population, overwhelmingly voted for its return to Germany. This was Hitler’s first test of European resolve.

The Putin playbook was to test the Allied resolve by invading Crimea in early 2014. Crimea was predominantly Russian and had been ceded to Ukraine in a fit of pique by Khruschev. To Putin it was a lay down misère to reclaim.

Obama for all his flowery rhetoric was an indecisive appeaser, a man who took the path of least resistance in economic and foreign policy. However, Ukraine elected a new leader out of the chaos and corruption of Ukraine politics egged on by Putin.  Volodymyr Zelensky changed the whole dynamic.

Now Putin’s demand to end the War, unlike Hitler’s demands from a position of power, are nevertheless repeating some of the Nazi playbook. First, the West must accept the de facto partitioning of the Ukraine which has been gnawed away by the “Russian Rodent”, and now has a buffer zone which is better able to resist the superior Allied weaponry. Second his demand that the Russian funds held in Europe and the USA be released back to Russia. Here he depends on the accession of Trump, and third, neutralising any Ukrainian bid to join NATO. Partitioning is vital because if that demand was agreed, it would be anticipated by Putin that he could eventually take over the dismembered country as Hitler did to Czechoslovakia.

The Treaty of Versailles, by its redrawing of European borders, provided fuel for future conflict. One such was the Polish Corridor, where Poland was provided access to the Baltic Sea, this separating Germany from East Prussia, with an appendage Freeport called Danzig, of which I have written before, a curiosity in Eastern Europe where the British were supposed to be responsible for its external relationships. Having dismembered Czechoslovakia, Hitler turned his attention to the Polish Corridor. The Nazis seized Danzig in 1939, and the stage was set for the conflict with Poland, ostensibly to regain the Polish Corridor territory in order to unify Germany. Hitler took out insurance by entering into the Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty with Russia at the same time.

Thus, in early September 1939 when this threat to Poland turned into a full-blown German invasion, WWII was precipitated. Poland was quickly conquered, and the spoils were shared between Germany and Russia – an unholy alliance which came apart two years later.  Ultimately Poland regained the territory at the end of WWII, albeit as a client Soviet satrap. Ironically Danzig, renamed Gdansk, was the base for the uprising led by Lech Walesa, which assisted in the destruction of Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe in the late 1980’s. This hegemony is what Putin wishes to restore.

Land corridors are thus a source of instability, which brings me to the existence of the Suwalki Corridor. The Suwalki Corridor runs between Belarus and Kaliningrad, along the border between Poland and Lithuania. Kaliningrad, an exclave of Russia, provides a haven for the Russian Baltic fleet, also crammed full of military surveillance and cybersecurity equipment of which the Americans would be very well aware. Exclaves are basically unstable and linking it back to Russia via a surrogate Belarus  provides an excuse for Putin to invade the Baltic countries.

Maybe the time has passed because of the unexpected resistance of Ukraine, which is draining Russian resources, even though Russia seems to be surviving by the sales of fossil fuels, to countries like India which play both sides of the street and China which is more circumspect but necessary for Putin’s illusion of restoring Imperial Russia – more Peter the Great than Stalin.

His hope is that the increasingly demented Trump is returned to the White House with an unknown number of traitors embedded in his MAGA outfit. America reverts to isolationism.

Then the Suwalki Corridor may emerge as the manufactured reason for an invasion of the Baltic countries and then Poland perhaps. Meanwhile, the Russian occupation of Georgia and Moldova will occur and Putin is on his way towards a Golden demented American sunset.

What is the Suwalki Corridor?

A Polish border sign in the Suwałki Gap

It is now more recently named The Suwalki Gap by the then US-educated Estonian President, Toomas Hendrik in a meeting with Ursula von de Leyen in 2015, the name change to Sulwalki Gap highlighted the vulnerability of that border area. Suwalki is a city in NE Poland, which once was thirty-four percent Jewish, and was at one point Lithuanian before being taken by Poland in the interwar period between WWI and WWII. Such is Baltic stability!

Persimmon 

I had the perfect persimmon for lunch. Our introduction to the persimmon was inauspicious. Our hostess then, those years ago, had thought she would surprise us with a piece of exotica. But the persimmons were the type which unless they are completely ripe, are so astringent, that as I said at the time, it felt as though the floor of my mouth resembled being carpeted by Axminster.

But not this time. Although persimmons have been bred to diminish the astringency element, this was one of the original type. And here I was presented with the fruit, the top sliced off. Then spoon in hand I delved into the interior. There was no resistance unlike some I’ve eaten, with the fascial pith stopping easy spooning and where the ripe skin comes away with the pulp.

This did not happen here, and the consistency and colour reminded me of runny apricot jam. But it was exquisite. And the taste. Well, persimmon of course.

Once Upon a Time in Broome

It was November 1987. I wrote this up in one of my regular articles in the MJA in 1988 almost a year after a day spent in a hot stuffy courthouse, but on looking back I would never regret being an onlooker on that day. I am placing this in my blog, given the current problems, the Border Forces having been reported as having fires on their craft, which in any event seem not to be doing the job for which they were bought. This embarrassment has been coupled with the normal second-rate company supposed to be responsible for maintaining their seaworthiness which has meant a significant number of boats out of service at any one time. This draws attention to the tender process, with its “who-knows-who” selection process rather than any need for demonstrated competence.

It was a different time when Hawke was Prime Minister and most of his Ministers were people of quality not afraid of making decisions.

Thus, I have reproduced what I jotted down so long ago in Broome.

“I am spending a November Wednesday at Broome’s Court of Petty Sessions. I came here initially because the crew of an Indonesian fishing boat was arrested. Yesterday, when I saw the boat riding at anchor in the Port of Broome, it looked like one of those small inter-island ferries which ply their trade in the Southern Moluccas and around Sulawesi. There had been 23 persons on board this boat, which looked as though it could accommodate only half that number, and as it lurched in the swell it barely appeared seaworthy enough to cross Sydney Harbour, let alone the Timor Sea.

The fishing boat had been intercepted near Adele Island to the north by the patrol boat, HMAS Geraldton. The ostensible reason for the Indonesian expedition was to poach trochus shell from the reef around the island. The Geraldton was tied up at the dock when I arrived. The petty officer was friendly but said that he could not disclose the exact maximum speed of the ship – except to say that it was in excess of 30 knots. There was no doubt that the Geraldton was a high-class, sleek piece of machinery; with its guns mounted fore and aft it would not have been the most welcome sight for the Indonesian fishermen – if that was what they were.

In fact, aircraft had spotted three seacraft off a portion of the coast named Cape Leveque. The coastal waters were becoming busy with boats, presumably illegally in these waters, since the patrol boat intercepted two totally different boats from those that were spotted by the aircraft.

The complaint against the 25-year-old captain of the Indonesian boat is a charade. It is a necessary charade in terms of breaches of the Crimes Act, but one for which the slightly-built islander from south of Sulawesi – married with no money – has only to stand up when asked and otherwise be polite. A conviction is entered. If within five years he comes into Australian territorial waters, he will have to pay the $1500 fine that has been imposed. Importantly, he will be set free with his livelihood – his boat.

Broome Courthouse

The magistrate refers to the breaches in quarantine – both animal and human – but as nobody had actually landed on Australian soil nor harvested trochus shell at the time of interception, the boat can neither be seized by the Australian Customs Service nor by the WA Fisheries Department. There were no illicit drugs on board, although the magistrate makes reference to the curious fact of the several suitcases full of new clothes and the relative paucity of fishing gear.

One of the Fisheries officers is most unconvinced by the trochus shell story, and he believes that there are many illegal immigrant routes into Australia from the Indonesian archipelago. In a “kerbside” conversation in a court room such conversations must remain hearsay. However, the magistrate accepts the trochus shell story. The captain will be released with his 22 compatriots – to be escorted out beyond the old 12-mile limit and sent on his way.

It is ironic on this day of Australian leniency and compassion that a Taiwanese fishing boat, under contract with a Perth company and apparently fishing legally under licence in Indonesian waters, limped into Darwin. The boat had been blasted by an Indonesian gunboat south of the Aru Islands, with the loss of life of three Taiwanese fishermen. An Indonesian diplomatic spokesman, when asked in Canberra what were the circumstances of the attack, accepted no blame.”

Sound familiar! Seems to have been imported to Canberra – a form of foot in mouth disease? Should we have had better biosecurity against this chronic infestation?

Mouse Whisper

You know we have a Ganesha in house. It about eight centimetres in height, made of bone, seemingly old, beautifully and intricately carved, bought in India over forty years ago. Never know about its age, some of the Indians have a tricky capacity to artificially age their gewgaws.

Not that Lord Ganesha is a trifle. Already, he is glaring at me.

As the Boss said, all households should have one. Lord Ganesha is meant to bring good luck.

As the story goes, Parvati, the Hindu mother goddess being the Divine who mediates wife-husband relationships formed Ganesha from the rubbings of her body so that he might stand guard at the door while she bathed. When Shiva approached, unaware this was his son, he was enraged at being kept away from his wife and proceeded to lop off Ganesha’s head.

To ease Parvati’s grief, Shiva promised to cut off the head of the first living thing he saw and attach it to the body. That creature was an elephant. Ganesha was thus restored to life and rewarded for his courage by being made Lord of new beginnings and guardian of entrances. Praying to Lord Ganesha is invariably accompanied by smashing a coconut, symbolic of smashing the undesirable forces inherent in oneself.

Mice, it is said, destroy a lot of foodgrains. Lord Ganesha as the remover of obstacles to obtaining prosperity, has the duty to go after the destroyers, all rodents. The mouse being a small animal can get into all sorts of corners using its smartness and thus Lord Ganesha rides the mouse to illustrate his dominance over us.

I take a wide berth around that darkened bone smiling figure.

Modest Expectations – Once upon a Time from Drummoyne

On June 19th, 1865, African Americans slaves in Texas were told they were free. Juneteenth, 19th June, has been a Federal Holiday since 2021 when President Biden gazetted this day as one to celebrate the emancipation of black slaves, and one step towards the “freedom” upon which Americans pride themselves. This recognition was a response to several high profile murders, notably that of George Floyd.

Above is a scene from a recent play, Toni Stone, written by the playwright Lydia Diamond, (a drama structured about the first woman to play baseball for the Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro Leagues). As Stone, the actress Jennifer Mogbock’s characterisation is that of a determined woman with the prowess to smack the ball and play hard. The scene depicts stylised “game time moments” when the team performs vaudeville acts with a tincture of the minstrel. It is playing in Boston as part of extensive Juneteenth celebrations and illustrates one example of how important the celebration of this day is regarded, despite its being so recently recognised.

It made me think about the modern meaning of holidays, originally “holy days”. That meaning has been well and truly lost, but American holidays are generally about veneration of the past, with both its upsides and downsides. Apart from New Year’s Day, holidays in the USA celebrate the past – the heritage as etched into the mythology of the United States as a Christian country.

I have celebrated Thanksgiving in Chicago with an American family which was a memorable experience as I was an “intruder”. I barely knew the family and was touched by their generosity and felt honoured by them asking me.

One year, we marched to the Tenderloin District of San Francisco in celebration of Martin Luther Day, January 15th. It was the first time I had walked with black people, not just Afro-Americans. Again, I felt like an intruder, but we walked on the outside of the march as a symbol of solidarity but outsiders.

In Australia, I am not an outsider and in my own way, I acknowledge Anzac Day. It is not sacred to me; but it is a day where mostly young men were sacrificed to combat unhinged narcissistic villainy. Akin to the American Memorial Day, which falls on the last Monday in May, on which that Nation honours the men and women who died while serving in the military, whereas its Veterans Day, observed every November 11th, recognises all who have served in the Armed Forces (and is not a Federal holiday).

In contrast, some of our national holidays may celebrate our past, although the actual reason often belies the name. Australia Day is really the end of summer holidays, and the King’s Birthday, the opening of the ski season aka the recognition of the start of winter. Australia Day is a misnomer; January 1st should be the National day if it was the intention to recognise the date of the birth of Australia. Clearly this would cause a commotion because it would mean the loss of one holiday, apart from which, there is not the fervour of honouring a group of colony politicians bickering for over a decade whether they should come together as a nation – unlike the 4th of July when the Americans unequivocally come together to celebrate their independence as a nation.

January 26th is really when NSW people can celebrate the shiploads of convicts and British military low life that were dumped on our shores, to the annoyance of the local Aboriginal people. Nevertheless, it has that element of the Australian cultural personality – always looking for a fight.

As for the King’s Birthday, it celebrates the entrails of the British monarchy, not the actual birthday of Charles III, which is November 14th. God knows why we are celebrating the Restoration of the British monarchy following the Cromwellian regime, sometime in the 17th century. Really worth celebrating!

At least Australia celebrates Labour Day, even if on four different days, in March (three states), May (two states), October (three states). There are two different dates in March – an earlier one for Western Australia and later two for Victoria and Tasmania. However, none of the dates coincides with the actual date when the Eight-Hour Day was inaugurated on April 21st, 1856.

University of Melbourne Law School

This was the outcome triggered by stonemasons working on the building of the University of Melbourne Law School who struck for better working conditions. May 1st being International Workers Day, the two were conveniently placed close together for a celebration of “the Worker”. In 1889 an international federation of socialist groups and trade unions designated May 1st as a day in support of workers, a day chosen because it coincided with the violent Haymarket Riot in Chicago three years earlier. However, the two dates above were inconveniently juxtaposed for Australia with the date of Anzac Day.

Anzac Day is probably the only holiday, apart from Christmas and Easter, which is celebrated across all Australia on the same day, where the holidays have significance. One celebrates those who lost their lives in War, picking a day which commemorated a disaster engineered by British military incompetence. Probably if we want to celebrate our miliary heritage, we should celebrate Monash Day, for the architect in bringing WWI to a close, despite the enduring incompetence of the British.

Monash being knighted on the battlefield by King George V, France, 12 August 1918

Discounting the universality of Christmas and Easter in Christian countries, which are still celebrated as holy days by an albeit diminishing number, these holidays have become more and more secular recreation. In Australia, mimicking the role of Thanksgiving in the USA, Christmas is our family holiday.

Our other holidays celebrate a horse race, various sporting events, and a variety of Show Days, which is urban Australia’s acknowledgement of its agricultural legacy. That is Australia! We even have a public holiday to celebrate a Sherrin of footballers being driven down the streets of Melbourne.

Now where is our Juneteenth? Maybe emancipation of Aborigines has yet to be fully realised to be able to celebrate. There is the ending of the White Australia, which we should celebrate, but don’t.  There is no specific date, but 1973 is the year generally accepted, although an increase in the number and percentage of migrants from non-European countries did not take place until after the Fraser government came into office. Sorry, any date would need to be pinpointed and given the way we make decisions in Australia, it would be anybody’s guess.

Perhaps we should also celebrate the day the first Jew was allowed to join the Melbourne Club. Maybe not a public holiday but probably more worthy than a football final holiday.

But then Laura, really Australia is not a racist country, with its pavlova coating of multi-culturalism. How dare you, Laura for telling the truth.

The National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS)

What a cockup. But predictable. Albanese handed Shorten the consumption of The NDIS Sandwich and he is trying to not display his “inchurnment”.

In Australia there are many ways of wrangling money from the government, although the NDIS seems to have required minimal wrangling from applicants. Shonks and criminals, please line up here!

Nepotism

In my experience, not common in Australia, but for expertise in this matter ask Bob Katter.

The Mates Culture

Just give the grant out without any interference, meaning – stay within the amount for which the person making the grant has authority, having the sole delegation.

Have panels of mates who allocate the grant money under the laughable rubric of “peer review” – the majority of research grants are determined this way. The caveat – make sure they are mates. Stifles the outsider – ask Marshall and Warren, Nobel Laureates who were refused research grants by the research establishment.

The revolving door between the public service and consultancy firms whither ex-public servants work at higher rates of pay, doing the same job that they should have done while employed by the government.

Greedy ex-politicians in the Golden Trough together, “the Captain’s Club” mentality.

Inadequate supervision

Non-criminal – just use fraudulent qualifications/experience – the pink bats disaster is one recent example of this

The entry of organised crime, which seems to be the NDIS unfortunate situation, where the vulnerable – and ultimately the taxpayers who fund the NDIS – are exploited and successive government fails to act.

Why does it occur?

First, there is this urgency of Federal bureaucrats shovelling out the money willy-nilly. This removes any responsibility from the Department and the individual particularly.

Then there’s the custom of moving bureaucrats around so that there is no corporate memory and responsibility is diffused so it is nigh impossible to determine the actual person responsible. This enables organised crime to infiltrate the Department – the criminal insider. The Government is geared to destroy the whistleblower but not this criminal insider?

Now it’s the media (not the public service itself) which has shown up the problem because of some of the providers displaying the wealth garnered from this corrupted scheme.

The normal government response is to “take it seriously”; then do nothing. Shorten always affects small man aggression, but if he wanted to be effective, he would institute a group of “incorruptibles”, (not relying on the Federal Police solely) and examine the Department staff systematically. Criminals may be smart, but not that smart. The trail starts with the providers with signs of affluence and the people they are charged to protect. Treat them as though they are importing illegal drugs with the same vigour and publicity. The Nation cannot sustain organised criminals taking over social welfare – the NDIS, aged care and childcare – given the amount of money involved.

Get off your backside, Shorten, stop the smart comments and channel that aggression into effective ministerial action. First of all, I would do police checks on all those involved in shovelling out the money, including their family connections. Then it can all unravel, and undoubtedly Shorten, you have tools to assist that process. I have no up-to-date knowledge of these tools, but they are only adjuncts to a determination to get it corrected without resorting to an interminable Committee of Inquiry – or save me, yet another Royal Commission!

Remember the adage, Elliot Ness or Pointless Ness.

Thus Spake Mitchell McConnell

Below is an opinion piece from the Republican Minority Leader in the Senate, appearing in the NYT of June 6th. This is a damning criticism of those on the far-right fringe of his Party, which is destroying the traditional Republican Party with its malignancy that is Trump. Mitchell McConnell has been one of the Senators from Kentucky since 1985. He was two years old when D-Day occurred. He has taken this time, on the 80th anniversary of the Allied invasion of Normandy, to rebuke his own Party for repeating the isolationism advocated by his Party not to enter WWII, until after the attack on Pearl Harbour on December 7th, 1941 (more than two years after the outbreak of the war on September 4th, 1939) changed the American perception.

God knows what would have happened to Europe if Germany had not declared War on America and left the Americans only with the Pacific War theatre. But the Germans did not think it through. Nevertheless, the isolationists, with figures like Charles Lindbergh, the populist Roman Catholic priest, Father Coughlin and the Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg from Michigan, were a formidable force until that date. After Pearl Harbour, their advocacy was vanquished. Vandenberg later came round to support the American intervention.

Even in this opinion piece confronting the Trumpians, McConnell can’t shed all his partisan biases, (after all, it was Roosevelt, a Democratic President who steered the USA through WWII). Nevertheless, despite his faults, he has claims to be considered a true Republican with a legitimate lineage back to Abraham Lincoln.

But this, almost his last hurrah, the old man suffering from petit mal epilepsy, who in retirement wishes to remain on the right side of history, in more ways than one. Thus, I believe it’s worth noting.

On this day in 1944, the liberation of Western Europe began with immense sacrifice. In a tribute delivered 40 years later from a Normandy cliff, President Ronald Reagan reminded us that “the boys of Pointe du Hoc” were “heroes who helped end a war.” That last detail is worth some reflection because we are in danger of forgetting why it matters.

American soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines joined allies and took the fight to the Axis powers not as a first instinct, but as a last resort. They ended a war that the free world’s inaction had left them no choice but to fight.

Generations have taken pride in the triumph of the West’s wartime bravery and ingenuity, from the assembly lines to the front lines. We reflect less often on the fact that the world was plunged into war, and millions of innocents died because European powers and the United States met the rise of a militant authoritarian with appeasement or naïve neglect in the first place.

We forget how influential isolationists persuaded millions of Americans that the fate of allies and partners mattered little to our own security and prosperity. We gloss over the powerful political forces that downplayed growing danger, resisted providing assistance to allies and partners, and tried to limit America’s ability to defend its national interests.

Of course, Americans heard much less from our disgraced isolationists after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Today, America and our allies face some of the gravest threats to our security since Axis forces marched across Europe and the Pacific. And as these threats grow, some of the same forces that hampered our response in the 1930s have re-emerged.

Germany is now a close ally and trading partner. But it was caught flat-footed by the rise of a new axis of authoritarians made up of Russia, China, North Korea and Iran. So, too, were the advanced European powers who once united to defeat the Nazis.

Like the United States, they responded to Russia’s aggression in Ukraine in 2014 with wishful thinking. The disrepair of their militaries and defence industrial bases, and their overreliance on foreign energy and technology, were further exposed by Russia’s dramatic escalation in 2022.

By contrast, Japan needed fewer reminders about threats from aggressive neighbours or about the growing links between Russia and China. Increasingly, America’s allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific are taking seriously the urgent requirements of self-defence. Fortunately, in the past two years, some of our European allies have taken overdue steps in the same direction. 

Here at home, we face problems of our own. Some vocal corners of the American right are trying to resurrect the discredited brand of prewar isolationism and deny the basic value of the alliance system that has kept the postwar peace. This dangerous proposition rivals the American left’s longstanding allergy to military spending in its potential to make America less safe.

It should not take another catastrophic attack like Pearl Harbor to wake today’s isolationists from the delusion that regional conflicts have no consequences for the world’s most powerful and prosperous nation. With global power comes global interests and global responsibilities.

Nor should President Biden or congressional Democrats require another major conflict to start investing seriously in American hard power.

The President began this year’s State of the Union with a reference to President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1941 effort to prepare the nation to meet the Axis threat. But until the commander in chief is willing to meaningfully invest in America’s deterrent power, this talk carries little weight.

In 1941, President Roosevelt justified a belated increase in military spending to 5.5 percent of gross domestic product. On the road to victory, that figure would reach 37 percent. Deterring conflict today costs less than fighting it tomorrow.

I was encouraged by the plan laid out last week by my friend, the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi) which detailed specific actions the president and colleagues in Congress should take to prepare America for long-term strategic competition.

I hope my colleague’s work prompts overdue action to address shortcomings in shipbuilding and the production of long-range munitions and missile defences. Rebuilding the arsenal of democracy would demonstrate to America’s allies and adversaries alike that our commitment to the stable order of international peace and prosperity is rock-solid.

Nothing else will suffice. Not a desperate pursuit of nuclear diplomacy with Iran, the world’s most active state sponsor of terrorism. Not cabinet junkets to Beijing in pursuit of common ground on climate policy. The way to prove that America means what it says is to show what we’re willing to fight for.

Eighty years ago, America and our allies fought because we had to. The forces assembled on the English Channel on June 6, 1944, represented the fruits of many months of feverish planning. And once victory was secure, the United States led the formation of the alliances that have underpinned Western peace and security ever since.

Today, the better part of valour is to build credible defences before they are necessary and demonstrate American leadership before it is doubted any further.

True in the First Part

The little girl was standing on a street in a village in Yugoslavia. The American plane came in on a strafing run towards her. The little girl caught a glimpse of the pilot. He was an Afro-American. The pilot did not fire and aborted the strafing run.

Eighty years later, a little girl stood on a street in Gaza. The Israeli plane came on a strafing run towards her …

The first is a true story.

Which brings me to David Crowe

In an opinion piece last Friday in the SMH, David Crowe described how two men in balaclavas defaced the office of a Labor MP and they left the Hamas “calling card”. They and the confederate who filmed the incident and loaded it onto social media were “vandals in the night using the same claims that the Greens made during the day”.

Crowe jumped to a conclusion, gratuitously besmirching Adam Bandt in the process, but he does not explicitly name the men in the balaclavas. Nevertheless, his assumption is plain.  Crowe may be right. However …

His piece was on page 28. In a spread on pages 24 and 25 of the same issue of the SMH there is an article on “Israeli War of Influence”. It details how deeply the Israeli government is into misinformation dissemination. So, be careful, Mr Crowe, of your assumptions unless you have removed the balaclavas and actually identified the vandals in person.

Judging from the conflict in the university campuses, thuggery is not confined to one side.

Perhaps you, Mr Crowe, have not met any of the Mossad agents in this country. I have – somewhat accidentally, as I have written in a previous blog.

It was not an easily forgotten experience.

Mouse Whisper

A person good at computers. A person skilled in doing anything quickly and comfortably on a computer, laptop, tablet or smart phone, usually using a mouse or not.

As one instance, my extremely competent wife got on the computer and fixed a payment issue with the bank in 10 minutes with just some clicks of the mouse. She’s a mouse whisperer.

There you are. Immortality in my 273rd whisper.

Modest Expectations 272 – Only 35.36 Parsecs Away

Last week, we received a circular from our local Council congratulating us on our performance in putting all our organic waste into the green bins provided. As a reward the Council delivered each household 75 compostable kitchen caddy liners free and told us that the emissions saved by our collective efforts were equivalent of taking 9,000 cars off the road for a year. The waste is commercially composted and not dumped in landfill, where it’s liable to emit methane and, according to the circular, methane is 28 times more potent than carbon dioxide. The compost produced is sent to “Aussie farmers” apparently.

It is ironic that this is occurring in the electorate of a Prime Minister who is providing a huge subsidy to the fossil fuel industry so they can export all our national resources, under the American flag, predominantly to Japan and in so doing pouring carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It would be ironic for him to save Western Australian seats only to lose his own to the Greens. Fanciful, but some must be thinking about it given his flagging popularity and the raw deal NSW is getting with the GST carve-up.

The prospect of climate change at times excites people and the accompanying evangelism for reducing the emissions rises in the community.  As reported above, the activism continues at the community level, but in the various Parliaments the well-moneyed lobbyists are constantly interfering in the process of Planet survival.

Even though the images of climate excesses are thrust in front of our eyes, replete with data the community, unless prompted by exercises as described above, seems to accept increased global warming, its causes and solution are too complicated to contemplate. As a result, the populace stops listening to the bombardment of doomsday data.

Nevertheless, there will be a tipping point. The actual point is a matter for speculation. Western eyes tend to discount the extreme consequences occurring in areas of the Planet where the skin of the people is not predominantly white.

Yet one consequence of climate change is rising sea levels and storms of greater intensity, so that previously valuable real estate is being eroded, as shown in the image above where houses are being washed away along the New England Coast into the Atlantic Ocean. The number of trophy houses built with ocean views that now lie as flotsam and jetsam is increasing. Whether the receding beachlines will galvanise the wealthy influential is doubtful, hoping that short term solutions of setting up rock or cement walls are built to delay the inevitable. More likely, those who want water views will seek sites which are the most resistant to the changes in the ocean storm intensity, and high enough to be above water levels to survive if the Antarctic totally melts away. Whaddya talking about, you climatic change Jeremiah?

We humans contribute to all this disaster by draining wetlands, building on floodplains, destroying mangroves and coral reefs and imposing ineffective solutions. Yet some defences have been effective if monitored closely.. Well before climate change was on the agenda, the Netherlands was considered vulnerable as much of the country is below sea level. After the disastrous flood in 1953, the Netherlands government built a highly sophisticated system of dykes to protect this seafaring nation constructed on the sandy knolls of the Rhine delta.

As one commentator has written: “Many point to the Dutch as an example of how cities can survive well below sea level and this would work with New Orleans except they suffer from large hurricanes while the Netherlands does not. With hurricane intensity increasing due to climate change and the natural swamp barrier eroding away, New Orleans will eventually have no protection outside the levees.  That comment will hold for all the settlements along the Gulf of Mexico coast. Once, there was a “highway” on which we travelled between the township of Sabine Pass and Galveston in the early 1990s. This road now no longer exists, having been washed away years ago.

To me the problem is very clear, the Planet is warming with a rise in the level of oceans inevitable but unpredictable given the increased prevalence of extreme weather. Flood, fire, pestilence and drought are all companions to the destruction of us humans, who will increasingly huddle in a World which we can no longer afford to repair – at least without any sense of equity. It will be impossible to insure properties – and not just those in the immediate path of the impact of climate change, but all properties will see massive increases in insurance cost as reinsurers spread the pain. This may become one driver in this increasingly dystopian world to do something. Maybe though, in this new reality we will just retreat into isolated fortified communities, an ultimate resultant of Trump’s mantra of “Make America Great.”

The problem is that denial still rages through certain sections of society. There is the semantic difference of whether climate change has been caused by humans or whether it is normal part of an intrinsic weather cycle of a planet naturally warming and cooling. Whatever the cause, our Planet is warming, and I prefer that the explanation is our fault and therefore potentially correctable by a collective change in human behaviour.

Therein lies the problem. Humans are divided into tribes, and it seems that the closer the tribes are, the more they tend to end up in conflict. One of the ways civilisation provides the chimera of change is to have forums – talk-fests every few years – where promises are cheap and the problem is just rolled down the road.

Now the world is in conflict in Ukraine, Israel and the Sudan as major focal points, these are inimitable to a response which requires a global co-ordinated effort. Conflict waged by old men who will never see the results of their handiwork makes it impossible. Added to that is we live in a world seduced by the quick solutions with the least interruption to our lifestyle. All renewable energy sources, once widely praised, are now being sowed with seeds of discontent as proponents of fossil fuel, led by the natural gas industry which seek to maintain their position. When the debate just becomes noise, then confusion reigns at home.

We maintain the status quo. It is not just inertia; it is the sense of knowing what you have been accustomed to in keeping warm, keeping cool, being able to determine how you travel, what food to consume – all defining comfort and shutting out uncertainty, which is really the definition of the future.

I grew up with wood fires, gas cooking and inefficient electrical appliances. We had fires in winter, because we still had fireplaces, but our chimney has been capped, and we have not had an open fire for over 20 years. We toyed with replacing that with gas heating, which we never did, but now we are about to install air conditioning.  We still cook with gas, as we cooked with when I was a child. What is the incentive to change, given that a switch will entail a significant cost in installing the required connection in an old terrace house. We have not placed solar panels on our roof, even though we have discussed doing it. It is not only cost but also priority.

Without government wholehearted intervention, it rests solely with the household, and in the case mentioned above local council support for positive change.  However, at the same time, being in a heritage area limits the utility of solar panel output. But what then when electoral survival is more important than planetary survival? Yes, it a matter of priorities. In the end to the detriment of The Planet, we have suffered from a malignant form of inertia, which we should correct before it will not matter – our house having been consumed by some unusual weather event.

As an epilogue to what I have written above, I must acknowledge after I had completed this blog item, a speech by the UN Secretary General, António Guterres. In his speech in New York he added his dire foreboding in the face of May 2024 being the hottest on record for that month plus other data forecasting of the future destination of Earth. He urged that there be a global ban on fossil fuel advertising. He did not completely abandon that the rise in the planetary temperature by 1.5oc can be met.

In response, a representative of the fossil fuel industry said blandly, “Our industry is focused on continuing to produce affordable, reliable energy while tackling the climate challenge, and any allegations to the contrary are false.”

There you are. Nothing to see here. Now what is that wall of water coming towards my plush office across the New York skyline. As you said, nothing to see.

A Powerhouse Food

I like tapioca. I remember it was called “frogs eggs” when I was a kid and also remember that it was not the most popular dessert.

However, reading the Washington Post, I came across a fascinating backstory of the plant from which tapioca was one product. Australians never think about cassava (also known as manioc or yuca); most Australians have never heard of it, but the article in the Washington Post is worth airing across the widest audience possible.

From Amazonia came cassava at the time when the hunter gatherer society was giving way to the agricultural revolution – as paraphrased from the Washington Post.  (It was a) trade off between calories used up for hunting against staying at home and growing edible products, gradually improving the productivity of them.  

Sometimes the most obvious truism has missed me. Once humans were able to form settlements, then that was beginning of having periods of rest instead of all the waking hours being spent hunting for food. Once humans started growing crops then the quality and quantity of edible plants improved as well as enhancing the concept of us humans working but also having downtime together.

Cassava was one such plant which spread from Amazonia to as far away as Panama within a few thousand years. It reduced the load of searching the forests in search of food. Today it is the staple diet of 600 million people, but what happens when it’s eaten raw?

Even though it became a staple food, when raw, it is toxic. This toxicity gave the plant pest resistance and herbivorous animals shied away from eating it. In technical terms, when cassava’s cells are damaged, by chewing or crushing, for instance, the linamarin and linamarase react, releasing a burst of noxious chemicals. One of them is cyanide gas. The burst contains other nasty substances as well, including nitriles and cyanohydrins. Large doses of them are lethal. 

There are also two longer term diseases. One is konzo, first described in the Congo in 1938, which affects  motor neurons, and leads to abrupt onset over hours or days of permanent but non-progressive spastic paralysis of the legs.

The second, tropical ataxic neuropathy, first described in Jamaica in 1897 is a syndrome of bilateral optic atrophy, bilateral sensory neural deafness, predominant posterior column involvement and pyramidal tract myelopathy, with ataxic polyneuropathy. It is cassava-associated through its toxic nitrile component.

Undoubtedly, these diseases were there when cassava was first grown, harvested and eaten. It was human endeavour, which resulted in a toxic plant being converted into a staple of the Amazonian diet. This would have been done by trial and error and is part of the capacity that we, as homo sapiens, have in being able to experiment and come to an understanding about how to use a plant so that the cropping, in this instance, was not abandoned.

Today, almost every rural family across the Amazon has a garden where one will find cassava roasting on the fire, being toasted into a flatbread called casabe, fermenting into the beer called masato, and made into soups and stews.

The ancient Amazonians devised a complex, multistep process of detoxification that transforms cassava from inedible to edible.

The process begins with grinding cassava’s starchy roots and shredding so that the toxic cyanide gases drift into the air, not into the lungs and stomach if they are eaten.

Next, the shredded cassava is rinsed, squeezed by hand and drained repeatedly, the action of the water releases more cyanide, nitriles and cyanohydrins, and the squeezing rinses them away.

Finally, the detoxification is completed with the resulting pulp being dried or cooked. These steps are so effective that they are still used throughout the Amazon today.

The Amazonians pushed their efforts even further, inventing new methods for processing cassava, keeping track and selectively growing varieties with desirable characteristics, gradually producing a constellation of types used for different purposes.

When this process is not followed as has occurred elsewhere over the thousands of years it has spread to the Caribbean, Asia and Africa, where the pathology has been described and the association made with cassava toxins.

Nevertheless, The Washington Post article reminded me that there are crops below my Western horizon, which should be promoted given that the climate is changing and the more resistant the plant is to the vagaries of such changes the better. The only caveat is when uninformed farmers try to avoid the purification, the consequences as outlined occur to their families. The challenge is clear, to provide worldwide the crop where the toxins have been bred out, leaving a crop to counter starvation in an unstable planet.

Shut the Gait

Jean-Martin Charcot

It’s all in the gait. Biden because of his apparent incipient Parkinsonism walks with that cog wheel rigidity. If the Democrats had consulted any neurologists, I’m sure that many of them would say he has next to no chance of lasting another four years. It is just ludicrous. The reason for his gait is attributed to peripheral neuritis. I have severe peripheral neuritis and he does not conform to my gait or that described by the French neurologist and ‘father’ of neurology, Charcot, when he was disturbed stamping feet of the patients in the ward above his office. That was the gait of the syphilitic tabetic where peripheral neuritis was a major symptom (which incidentally is not my cause).

Whereas Trump has a seemingly more normal gait, in that he does not shuffle, but it’s slower than it was. His problem is his fronto-temporal dementia, and the key word is “dementia”. At his age, the aggression caused by the dementia is misinterpreted by his supporters as hilarious and a sign that The Icon is still in full control. Forget the slurred jumbled syntax and the periods where he does not speak while the brain tries to get back in gear. As I have mentioned before, much would be resolved if they would both take independently and publicly a test of their cognitive ability. Except, Trump would inevitably bleat that it was “rigged”.

The Presidential race

These are old men, and while Trump is two years short of 80, he acts as one. One only has to look at him in 2016 and now to see the decay. The peau d’orange skin is far more pitted with age. It is easy to say that neither will go the distance for another four years, but neither side is willing to say this.

There is the Ratzinger solution – that is, to prop up a clearly vegetative person in all the robes of office and wheel him around denying what’s obvious. This Cardinal Ratzinger, his eventual successor, did propping Pope John Paul II up and making all the decisions until the Pope’s demise in 2005 at the age 84. Then he had the votes and became the next Pope, Benedict XVI. He was then 78 years old, Trump’s age now, but in a far better scheming mental condition.

This lesson has obviously not been lost on a group of Trump’s consigliere, but the consequences of his conviction for a felony in New York has yet to be played out. However, his only response has been his perpetual ranting against the rule of law and some delusion of himself as a dictator ensconced in his cocoon of irrationality, with images of Putin drifting through his cerebral decay.

But like all old men where illusion and delusion collide, Trump strides ponderously, a golden mane of baldness, a well-tailored corpulence and built-up shoes. After all, it is all in the gait.

A further thought bubble

As a footnote to the above, with two old men lurching towards their final curtain, the choice of Vice-President becomes crucial. Biden, like one of his predecessors, Lyndon Johnson, is a creature of the US Senate, deal makers where consensus and compromise was the “bread and butter” but two men unused to conflict where leadership is paramount. Winston Churchill was a failure in the polite gentlemanly etiquette in the world of consensus, but he perceived the retention of democracy under extreme threat against unbridled dictatorship and this was the essence of his great leadership. Churchill needed a Hitler to demonstrate his greatness. Biden by contrast seems wanting in the face of Trump, but here’s hoping.

Biden has Trump, a dictator in the wings who has revealed what he wants to do by his January 6 attempted “putsch”. The trouble that Trump projects is that of inchoate civil disorder to propel him into being President. Yet he has no planning skills, only the skills of a small town grifter cushioned by the original substantial inheritance from “daddy” to hide his deficiencies.

Ernst Röhm

Hitler had Ernst Röhm, who organised the Sturmabteilung (SA), the Nazi Party’s original paramilitary strike force, to spread fear and brutality with persecution of selected minorities, Jews, Romany, homosexuals and the disabled. Hitler, after falling out with Röhm, called him back from his advisor role to the Bolivian Army. Later Hitler had him executed in the Night of the Long Knives.

Sounds familiar (perhaps except for the last sentence) in  the context of the Trump choice for Vice-President. The Trump dilemma is to choose a Vice-Presidential running mate with a clear differentiation from Trump, a person who will not frighten the electorate and yet a person to organise his militia (an essential ingredient for the dictatorship which he craves).

Vice-President Kamala Harris

Biden has as his Vice-President, Kamala Harris, a woman of colour, who had a distinguished legal career and then was US Senator for California. She has been significantly underwhelming as Vice-President, having a very low rating with the electorate. The reasons for this are attributed to a misogynistic electorate and the fact that she is a woman – and of colour.

Nevertheless, reading the comments, she has a personality which in Australian terms is that of a “bucket of gravel”; and whether Biden’s level of popularity has dragged her down or vice versa is a moot point. The cruellest point made against her is that she is more show pony rather than work horse. She would not be the first to be called that – and that is true irrespective of gender.

Still, she is next in line as Vice-President in the event of Biden being re-elected and then not lasting the four years. She has already served as Acting President for an hour while the President was having a colonoscopy.

Mouse Whisper

She was reflecting looking out on a rainy day. “You know”, she said “AI could never have written the Gettysburg address.” Just as succinct to show brevity has a certain force, whereas AI would reflect the loquacious, bland self-importance so prevalent in our Society. But if AI advances, perhaps as a positive response, the public relations industry will gradually fade away. We mice can only hope.