Modest Expectations – Forgery

Iowa most likely ends the GOP race before it has had a chance to begin. The party will be weaker for it. Instead of subjecting the front-runner to a meaningful test, this odd exercise amounted to a layup. Trump overperforms in rural areas and among White voters. That’s Iowa to a T.

In the state’s empty reaches, he rolled up majorities worthy of a tin-pot dictator. Take a precinct of Kossuth County, north of Algona, near the Minnesota border. All of 38 voters gathered to caucus, and 33 of them went for Trump. Or the precinct of Appanoose County, down in the southeast corner of the state, that mustered all of 69 voters, with 55 of them choosing Trump. 

Huge margins among sparse populations gave Trump an appearance of invulnerability. But the closer the race drew to a population center — someplace big enough to have a Costco or a Chick-fil-A — the weaker he appeared. Haley, the preferred candidate of never-Trump Republicans and independent voters, actually beat the former president in multiple precincts of Des Moines, Iowa City, Ames, Cedar Rapids, Davenport. 

Above is the Hawkeye snowy Capitol in Des Moines. The whole of the USA has been gripped in blizzard conditions with a wind chill plunging the temperature to minus 40º Fahrenheit. It probably affected the turnout for the Republican caucus, which was very low comparatively.

Then there is an excerpt from a perspicacious opinion piece in the wake of the Republican caucus, won by Trump. While many outlets described a landslide victory, The Washington Post was more circumspect, considering the low turnout of voters. Iowa is 90 per cent white and therefore hardly representative of cross-sectional America.

Yet it is the first on the electoral slate. Now that the circus has rolled through, it can be forgotten for the next four years. It only has six electoral college votes. It is not a very populous State, with the capital at Des Moines, which reflects its fur trader history as both the Missouri and Mississippi flow through the State.

In colonial times, the river was the conduit between French Canada and Louisiana. As one writer has succinctly put it: Beginning in 1682, France laid claim to the area of central North America which included the vast Mississippi River drainage basin. French colonists moved to the region near the confluence of the Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio rivers in the latter half of the seventeenth century. French fur traders, trappers, farmers, and Jesuit missionaries came from France, French Canada, and New Orleans to Upper Louisiana (la Haute-Louisiane).

The French had entered the land of the Iowa Tribe in the late seventeenth century; and were followed by a polyglot mixture of French and Spanish.  Iowa was part of Upper Louisiana. It was included in the Louisiana purchase when Jefferson purchased the French Territory for 60m francs in 1803 – the Louisiana Purchase. Des Moines itself means “of the monks” and it is suggested this refers to a colony of Trappist monks that settled in the area in the early eighteenth century.

Iowa is one of the major centres, together with Illinois and Minnesota, where soya beans are grown. As one anonymous commentator has said about these farmers, they are all individualist freedom advocates until it comes to ethanol subsidies for their soya beans and then they all become communists.

I went to Iowa in 2009 hoping to catch up with a guy whom I had met at university in the early sixties when he was on an exchange scholarship – it may have been a Fulbright. He was Malcolm “Mac” Rohrborough, and for a brief time we were friendly, even though he was nine years older than myself. He was an expert in early American history, and subsequently published prolifically about the American West, particularly the Gold Rush. I don’t know how we met, perhaps it was during my period as President of the Student Representative Council, and I do remember him in being at my 21st birthday party.

After he returned to the USA, he took up a post at the Iowa State University in Iowa City, a university town in the eastern part of the State. I said to my wife that we should go to Iowa and try to make contact with Mac after almost fifty years. A vain wish.  He had retired the previous year as “professor emeritus” and replied he had gone east to retire. No invitation to visit, so we took the hint.

Nevertheless, we stayed at the university hotel, more like a university college, a light airy place, comfortable and cheap – some compensation for missing Mac. Iowa City is not a Trump stronghold. It voted 71 per cent for Biden in 2020 election. By contrast, Iowa voted 53 per cent for Trump and 43 per cent for Biden. Iowa’s current congressional delegation consists of its two senators and four representatives, all Republicans.

In a strange footnote to his Iowan activities, former President Donald Trump thanked ex-hitman Salvatore Gravano for speaking highly of him, which has raised eyebrows on social media. Gravano, also known as “Sammy the Bull,” was an underboss for the Gambino crime family in New York City and worked with the United States government as an informant to take down mob boss John Gotti in the early 1990s. Gravano, who confessed to his involvement in 19 murders, was released from prison in 2017 after being sentenced to 20 years for running an ecstasy ring in Arizona.

I’m not sure how that will play out on the Hawkeyes, especially those who do not quite agree with the Proposition that Donald Is God. But he would not care. He can forget about them now.

Australia is a Foreign Land

Tasmania is the largest Australian island that I have visited. It made me think, as I was reading “The Tiwi of North Australia,” a book by Charles Hart and Raymond Pilling published in 1960 but containing observations about Tiwi Islander culture, that Hart experienced living with the Tiwi between 1928 and 1930 and Pilling in 1953 and 1954.

Macassan trepanger

Although I have visited the Abrolhos, Rottnest, Kangaroo, French, Philip, King, Bruny, Cockatoo, Bribie, Brampton, Magnetic, Dunk, Green, Lizard, Thursday and Mornington Islands, I have never visited Melville or Bathurst Islands, which the Tiwi people have inhabited for aeons. To put it in perspective, these islands are eighty kilometres north of Darwin in the Arafura Sea. Melville is the second largest and Bathurst fifth largest after the largest Australian island, Tasmania. They were the first port of call for potential invaders, and well before Cook they had contact with Europeans, as well as the Macassan trepangers.

This experience has given the Tiwi people their distinctive culture with plenty of space in which to roam and develop their cultural identity, which in past twenty years they have successfully commercialised. Yet there is no suggestion that they cultivated “gardens” in the manner of their northern neighbours.

The Tiwi saw the mainland as a foreign land. They were very ferocious in repelling those who dared to land uninvited. They had spears, but not returning boomerangs. The woomera – the spear carrier – did not exist. Nevertheless, they were expert in the use of their spears.

Their culture, as reflected in their artifacts, was highly distinct from other Aboriginal tribes. The Tiwi people are known for their burial poles and their woven baskets.  We have collected a wide range of Tiwi art which is characteristically decorated in cross-hatched, geometrical designs encasing dots – white, black and various shades of deep yellow into brown.  Ochre and charcoal are the basic materials for the colours, and while I have an ironwood bird, most of the modern sculptured birds characteristic of Tiwi art are now made of lightweight wood. The difference between ironwood and any other wood is very clear when trying to lift any sculpture made of ironwood.

Depiction of Ampitji by Jane Margaret Tipuamantumirri

What has bought the Tiwi people into focus was the dismissal in the Federal Court of the claim by three Tiwi who claimed that the proposed Santos gas line would disturb Ampitji, the guardian sea rainbow serpent; and given this serpent would appear not to take kindly to a competing serpent – the Santos gas python – she would inflict cyclones and disease in revenge, a serpentine apocalypse.

 

The idea that a mythical creature could have halted a major project by a major political donor would seem to go counter to all the neoliberal belief systems that have gripped the country with its own mythology – well who would have thought it!  Watch this space to see if there is an appeal to reconcile these myths of sea serpent and neoliberalism.

But then the Tiwi have always learnt a way of accommodating the intruders. As one research paper put it well: The Dutch had come in search of a land which might have possibilities for trade. They found a land which they thought was barren waste, inhabited by people who had no possessions of value for exchange. On Bathurst and Melville islands the Dutch found a people who had a rich and highly developed civilisation, but a civilisation which was so unlike that of the Europeans that the two people were too dissimilar to have anything to offer one another.

The Tiwi also had contact with the Portuguese settlers on Timor, and unlike the Dutch, the Portuguese found the Tiwi made useful slaves, especially when the Tiwi went searching for iron.

Then, before WWII, there was intimate contact with Japanese pearl divers.  The Australian Government attempted to prevent this co-habiting between Tiwi women and the Japanese.  This had occurred because the quantity of pearl shell inter alia in the Arafura Sea attracted a virtual fleet of Japanese luggers which berthed on the islands.  The Japanese provided food in greater and better quality than the Catholic mission – in exchange for young Tiwi women’s sexual favours. This affected the domestic arrangement which the Catholic missionaries, who had come to the Tiwi country prior to WWI, tried to foster among the people.

This situation ended with the outbreak of war with the Japanese in 1941. The islands were bombed, without apparent casualties but in anticipation of invasion by the Japanese military, the Catholic mission encouraged the Tiwi to go bush, very difficult since the Tiwi were now accustomed to being provided with food and tobacco.  The invasion never occurred.

The Tiwi people have thrived; and have produced a fine array of champion Australian Rules footballers, but even with their exposure to multiple incursions by Europeans, Japanese and Macassan, they have maintained a distinct cultural identity, which their island isolation had helped maintain while adapting to the whitefellas, who are constantly bothering them – nowadays for a price of being tourists.

Nevertheless, as I continue to think about the Tiwi islands, because of their sentinel position north of Darwin, what of the comparison of the Torres Strait inhabitants? The Torres Strait islands constitute an area of 48,000 km2 but their total land area is 566 km2. By contrast, Bathurst and Melville Islands (with a number of small uninhabited islands) cover 8,320 km2. The population is around 3,000.

The Torres Strait Islander population is more difficult to determine as there are data which seem to be different measures, but there seem to be about 5,000 living on the Islands. However, the 2022 Census seems to suggest that the total number of Torres Strait Islanders is around 60,000 – 70,000 in Australia, which means that there is a large population living away from the Strait.

The Torres Strait population is a mixture of Polynesian, Melanesian and Aboriginal.  Tiwi is over 90 per cent Aboriginal. How influential the Japanese have been in part of the heredity of both is a matter of conjecture; but I remember Japtown on Thursday Island and being driven around by a taxi driver, who admitted to mixed Japanese heritage. The effect of Japanese pearl divers has been significant, but how significant.

The point is we recognise the separate existence of the Torres Strait islanders. As for the Tiwi, the mainland was a foreign land. The Tiwi guarded their independence.  How many Tiwi live on the mainland? Enough for their independent recognition?

Theresienstadt

My companion and I decided to travel to Terezin in Czechia, along with Prague. It was to be the culmination of a trip to Eastern Europe. First we had a boat trip down the Danube from Romania, down to the Black Sea and back to Budapest, while stopping at ports in Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary. Unfortunately, my companion became ill and although she survived the boat trip, we decided to cancel the Czechia leg and returned home from Budapest, which was just as well. But that is another story.

Theresienstadt (now Terezin)

I wanted to go to Terezin because it was the site of Theresienstadt, a concentration camp built by the Nazis to resemble a normal town. I wondered how they maintained the illusion – the deception. I wanted to see it at first hand.

This concentration camp was cast in the image of a town, with a “beautification program”, including planting 1,200 rose bushes, cleaning the streets and buildings, constructing a “child care pavilion” complete with sandbox, merry-go-round and wading pool. Food rations were doubled. There were concerts, cabaret and theatrical performances and a soccer match – all carefully staged and rehearsed.  This was all done to hoodwink the Red Cross visitors, who were either Swiss or Danish.

Unlike other concentration camps, Theresienstadt had been a garrison town under the Habsburg Empire with plenty of barracks where you could conveniently house the prisoners – an interim place to send those destined for the gas chambers at Auschwitz, Dachau or Buchenwald. Despite all the show, these barracks were squalid and there was never enough food.

Theresienstadt Barracks

Hans Adler, a Jewish Bohemian author, was sent to Theresienstadt, where he was incarcerated for two years and saw how the camp was structured. It was presented as a self-governing Jewish settlement, with an internal Jewish administration subservient to the SS. The prisoners were guarded by 150 Czech “gendarmes”; there were about 20 SS officers on site and mostly out of sight, yet they controlled Theresienstadt through the Jewish Council of Elders.

These Jewish inmates were granted privileges which the ordinary Jewish prisoners did not have. They lived as family, and they were given orders verbally by the SS. Nothing was written down between the two.

The Council of Elders determined who was to be transported to the gas chambers. Benjamin Murmelstein, a Ukrainian-born rabbi, worked closely with Adolf Eichmann in Vienna as the only surviving rabbi and then as the last chief elder of the Council who collaborated with Eichmann’s Central Office for Jewish Emigration. He has been singled out for universal revulsion by the Holocaust survivors yet after the War lived in Rome never charged with any war crimes.  He lived long enough to see his boss, Adolph Eichmann, executed by the Israeli government. The chain of command descending from Eichmann ended with The Council choosing those to be transported to the gas chambers, according to the categories demanded by their Nazi superiors.

Rabbi Murmelstein was not the only one. There were indeed many members of the Council, a post which provided protection for their families. So, there were many others. In a review of Adler’s book about Theresienstadt between those years 1941 and 1945, the NYRB reviewer, Thomas Nagel, recounts referring to Adler:

The decision to hide the truth strikes me as comprehensible but appalling – though none of us can know what we would have done in the circumstances. Adler, who must have learned about it after the war, seems unable to come to a judgement about the Elders’ decision; he reserves his condemnation for individuals who, knowing the truth, not only tried to spare their friends but used the transports to get rid of people who were giving them trouble. For example, after Vladimir Weiss, a member of the “Detective Department”, sent the Jewish Elder Paul Eppstein a detailed complaint of flagrant corruption in the allocation of food, he and his family disappeared on the next transport. 

Yes, we hear much about the descendants of Holocaust victims but what of those who count this Council’s members as their relatives?

Hans Adler may have survived the War, despite being part of the protected group in Theresienstadt. However, he was eventually sent to Auschwitz near the end of the War. As was his wife, Gertrud, a doctor, deported there.  She refused to leave her mother and went to the gas chamber in late 1944.  Adler did not join her.

In all, Adler lost sixteen members of his family – a survivor to live out his life in a “community of guilt” With how many others?

I am not one to visit former concentration camps, but the whole account intrigued me.  That intrigue about Theresienstadt has not dimmed.

Dutton in January

In the end, the “cost of living” isn’t about the prices on grocery shelves, it’s about the distribution of income. In Australia, income has shifted from wages to profits and from low- and middle-income earners to those in the top 10% of the income scale and, even more, to the handful of “rich listers” whose growing wealth has outstripped that of ordinary Australians many times over. – John Quiggin Guardian Spotlight 19 January 2024.

One of the political axioms, at least when I had a handle on the production of political party policy, was to float ideas in January when political activities were light. I remember for instance that we floated the idea of a deferred interest mortgage to test how acceptable it was to be incorporated into the Liberal Party housing policy.

Other policies were tested at other times; under the influence of John Knight, later a Senator for the ACT, Bill Snedden reversed the China policy of the Liberal Coalition which existed under Prime Minister McMahon. That resulted in Snedden being invited to visit China, which we did in July 1973; so much was positively achieved that whilst we were there a late invitation came for Snedden to meet Chou-en-lai, then having his own difficulties with the Gang of Four who were very much in the saddle then with the blessing of Mao Zedong. Whitlam came to China later that year. So instead of an ongoing pointless ideological conflict, there was agreement on both sides of Australian politics.

Contrast this with the footprints of Dutton. He wheels out the commercial decision not to embroider Australia Day with Jingo Kitsch as a reason to imply that it is a sacred festival. January 26 was a convenient holiday because it signalled the end of summer holidays, when industry had shut down. All January for staff holidays. That it was no more; no less.

Vandalised statue of Captain Cook in St Kilda, January 2024

After all, it is only a celebration of Arthur Philip founding a convict colony which he called New South Wales on that day in 1788. If that is worth celebrating once stripped of its being a convenient marker, then we invite all the mindless controversy that people like Dutton wish to provoke. There are influential people who hanker for an imaginary white picket fence Australia. It never existed, but these people bristle when the monarchy is threatened, alteration of the flag promoted and the sanctity of Australia Day and Anzac Day disputed.

I remember these were issues of the Liberal Party Coalition when they were trudging through the policy desert. Once, when reporters listened to me and asked me what was to be discussed at the upcoming Liberal Party meeting, it was a time when the Parliamentary Party had spent the previous meeting discussing the Flag. I replied it was discussing the party policy on heraldic symbols. This did not make me many friends, but metaphorically that is the territory where Dutton is grubbing around.

John Quiggin has raised a reasonable point, which impinges on policy considerations at a time when the Labor Party until this week continued to commit to make the rich even richer with taxation concessions and when there seems to be idolatry of the petroleum and mining industry while Planet Earth is going down the toilet. It is a time when Dutton has selectively singled out trivia to widen community divisions rather than address community concerns when political collaboration is needed urgently.

Forget his divisive utterances, which only emphasise unnecessary cracks in the polity and which we could do without; and go about devising a policy which adopts the Quiggin analysis as a starting point.

At least, the Labor government have caucused this week, to ratify the Albanese Cabinet decision to make the taxation changes more equitable, rather than giving the wealthy an additional polo pony.  Predictably, the bleat of broken election promises goes up from Dutton and his cronies, fresh from return from being “duchessed” by Gina Rinehart.

Dutton, you should grow up, and address measured analyses such as that projected by John Quiggin as the Government seems to have done; instead of roaming around devising the heraldic symbols on the Dutton shield. A pineapple rampant?

Mouse Whisper

 I owe this one to the Boss. There is this Virgin Airline advertisement with this vivacious flight attendant being wheeled across of the tarmac aboard a gangway with a horde of people in pursuit. Not a plane in sight. What a metaphor!  A virgin airline is one never to be violated by an airplane?

Modest Expectations – Quarter

Remembering Guernica. A Palestinian, Mohammed Saabinah updates Guernica; courtesy Washington Post.

The First Time Magazine was Published in 1923 also.

The New England Journal of Medicine has celebrated its Centennial Year in 2023.

As reported in the Boston Globe, among the strangest case studies (this one published in 2020) was the man who died from eating too much liquorice. The 54-year-old had a poor diet, ate mostly lollies, and had recently switched to consuming two to three bags of black liquorice a day. But the case pointed to the hazards of glycyrrhizic acid, a plant extract found in liquorice. If taken in large quantities, the substance can cause potassium levels to plummet, which in this case prompted a cardiac arrest.

Batemans Bay

My father and mother loved Batemans Bay, located as it is on the Clyde River on the South Coast of New South Wales. At that time there was no bridge across the Clyde River, and one was not constructed until 1956. Crossings thus were dependent on the car ferry and gave a sense of detachment from the settlements further north along the coast.

Batemans Bay 1940s

My parents discovered the town after the War, when they used to drive to Sydney at Christmas or during school holidays. They enjoyed being able to go to the Government wall there, with their special short blade knife, a pepper shaker and a lemon or two and feast on the rock oysters clinging to the wall. I watched, wondering why my parents wanted to eat these revolting looking slime in a shell. They looked resignedly at my screwed-up face, and I remember my father saying to my mother, “He’ll learn.” No truer word said as now I’ve been known to wolf down a dozen rock oysters barely taking breath.

My father and mother loved the views over the Pacific Ocean past the Toll Gates, the twin islands which were so much a marker of the Batemans Bay identity. Here among the gum trees, they would go for walks thinking about where they would buy a plot of land. It never eventuated, because first my mother had a duodenal ulcer and then breast cancer. Thus, retirement to the coast faded as an option; and my father would not chance his arm at rural practice, even though his medical practice in the outer suburbs of Melbourne had its moments -never boring.

What intrigued me was the string of black and white framed photographs which lined the corridor of the hotel, which were a testament to Zane Grey’s deep sea fishing exploits. Zane Grey was a very successful American author of Westerns, who also became a renowned deep-sea angler around the world. He had sufficient money to afford a camera boat in addition to the boat, Avalon, from which he did his fishing. The camera crew were also expert deep-sea anglers as well his photographer.

He wrote a book about his exploits in Australia in 1936, titled An American Angler in Australia, first published in 1937.

I know virtually nothing about this sport, but Zane Grey who has a deep love affair with Australia, describes his exploits off Bermagui and Batemans Bay. He is a very passionate adversary, but looked askance at the New Zealand habit of harpooning the deep-sea monsters and the Australian practice of shooting when the fish was hooked. He insisted on each catch being gaffed and the tail secured – no mean feat.

Grey had been fishing off New Zealand in the 1920s, and later “discovered”- Australia of which he wrote in An American Angler in Australia:

I was hardly prepared for this land of staggering contrasts, of unbelievable beasts, of the loveliest and strangest birds, of great modern English cities, of vast ranges that rivalled my beloved Arizona, and of endless forestland, or bus, as they call it, never yet adequately described, no doubt because of beauty and wildness beyond the power of any pen to delineate.

Many of the deep-sea fish, the sharks, that he caught are now protected, and the number of these creatures that he hooked would make any modern conservationist shudder, but he was very much of his time, where hooking a shark was to lessen the threat for surfers.

To quote him directly “Well, Mr Man-eater, you will never kill any boy or girl.”

The most memorable description is of his tussle with a huge tiger shark off Sydney Heads, with steamships emerging from the Heads avoiding him and the shark. Eventually he won the battle with the tiger shark, and with difficulty beached it at Watson’s Bay in front of a large crowd. It took twenty men to drag it on shore, avoiding the flailing tail and the jaws. Several of the men were knocked over by the tail, but the jaws claimed nobody. Eventually, the shark was secured. It was measured at thirteen feet ten inches; weight one thousand and thirty-six pounds.

Zane Grey and catch

Zane Grey died two years after this book was published in Catalina, at the age of 77. To think he was an old man fighting sea monsters long before Hemingway was to write of a gentler Cuban fisherman, his Old Man of the Sea, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize. I wonder how many people remember Zane Grey and his exploits. I would not have, had it not been my parents’ love for Batemans Bay.

Reflections on Violence

Firstly, [attitudes] are influenced partly by the fact that growing ethnocentrism and increasing anomie and alienation are common among elderly and poorly-educated people. The second mechanism consist of finding that people who experience feelings of socio-political senselessness and helplessness have a tendency to look for compensation in authoritarian-paranoid world views. It would seem that authoritarian-paranoid beliefs can be seen as being a mediator between social anomie and political alienation, on the one hand, and ethnocentric attitudes on the other. Radkiewicz, P. (2007) Polish Psychological Bulletin, 38(1), 5–14.

When I was undertaking the course work on my way to a Master of Arts degree, I had one lecturer who was obsessed with the Triptych (anomie, alienation, ethnocentricity).

The text which the class was to study in conjunction with the lecture notes was Reflection on Violence. Georges Sorel was French polemicist, whose view of progress was linked to conflict, almost Trotskyist in the concept of permanent revolution. He recognised the importance of triptych in fulfilling his belief.

In fact, a clue to what Sorel basically argued was that he drew praise from both Lenin and Mussolini.

Georges Sorel

I was prompted to write about this academic term of my life with Georges Sorel when I read an opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald that tried to describe why some people who, in their early career, were labelled “Leftie” and then moved across the political spectrum to become warriors of the right.

The person to me who personified this shift was the journalist, the late Paddy McGuinness, who started off well to the Left, his black garb being recognition of an anarchic streak residing in his persona; and then later in life he became a champion of the right, where his constituency was the far right of political thought. I first met him in his leftist phase when he worked for Bill Hayden in the early 70s.

He was the classic authoritarian, humourless personality, and such people find there is little difference if they are speaking from either of the extremities of the political spectrum. They cannot be wrong; and thus truth is what they say it is to them; democracy nestling the so-called political centre was a symbol of spinelessness, with a haughty dismissal of the diversity of opinion as showing a lack of discipline and a refusal to accept without demur the primacy of the authoritarian belief.  Evidence is thus what one believes, and that’s it. You just had to converse with Paddy to recognise the rigidity of his thought process.  He was never wrong.

The article in the SMH by Michelle Goldberg, an American journalist who, six years ago as set out in her Wikipedia bio, was forced into retraction of a comment she made in reviewing a book, study of college rape, by another New York journalist, Vanessa Grigoriadis. Her retraction was described by Vanity Fair as a humiliating retreat.

In this recent article reprinted in SMH, she sets up the question of what’s driving lefties to the right? She mentions the “horseshoe theory” as though conversion is a parabola.  In fact, the authoritarian personality can exist equally on the left and the right. It is about power without dissent. Democracy is too difficult – having to resolve problems, not assuming one is automatically right without any evidence.

The problem which Goldberg barely touched in the triptych is her tangential comment that “the right has the advantage in appealing to dislocated and atomised people.” In the case of Trump, it is probably due to his opportunism that he has positioned his authoritarianism on the right; but in other situations, where the proletariat was seen to hold the power, then Trump could well have positioned himself there.

However, America has no history of a socialist government.  The American characteristic of espousing of the freedom of the individual to do anything he wants in the name of individualism is a cruel trick, where the product of the triptych is unmitigated tyranny in all its forms. Left and right become catchcries, but in the end meaningless. It is the preservation of democracy which is meaningful.

Is Anybody Listening?

I found the following book review of “Review of Family Violence in Australia”; Carol O’Donnell and Jan Craney were joint editors. The author of this book review was Dimity Reed, whom I knew in our teenage years; she later had become a distinguished architect. The year this review was written was 1982, in a then new magazine Australian Society.

The review began (sic):

Fool that I am, I recently flicked on the last two minutes of a TV talent quest. A man waltzed around the studio, clutching to his breast a partner, presumably a fellow seeker after fame.

Suddenly he knocked her to the ground and started kicking her and beating her with his fists. Then he picked her up and tossed her on to the judges’ table, where three respected leaders of showbiz sat laughing.

Not content with the beating given his partner on the dance floor, our ambitious hero threw himself upon her on the table and pummelled her into a heap. Not until he was totally exhausted and sure of some sort of victory did the man desist.

It was at that point that I realized that the man’s partner was a life-size doll.

That programme went to air in Melbourne a week after an intense public awareness campaign about violence between men and women inside families. The compere had done numerous radio interviews to promote the campaign and the TV station has been generous in their support.

What does this indicate? That comperes have short memories? That violence within families had been simply seen as good news items? Or, more ominous, that the right of men to beat women severely and remain unpunished is both the norm and a source of humour?

So long ago; yet so near. I too remember these antics, because much of the humour descended from vaudeville, its humour based on denigration of women.

My wife reminded me of the “wife beater” term. This was the Chesty Bond singlet, which apparently had been worn when a Detroit man in 1947 was arrested for beating his wife to death and was shown wearing a stained singlet.

… and still available today, the “wife beater” by the half dozen

I am no saint, but I’ve never hit my wife. Convenient objects have been thrown at me on a very few occasions, but in this short review by Dimity, blame for the marital disputes is considered a domestic dispute, unless there is murder.  It thus must be that extreme for police involvement. One set of data suggests that, on average, one woman every nine days and one man every month is killed by a current or former partner.

Yet that conceals widespread conflict and violence in the community; and I, like most people, am reluctant to intervene, especially when fists are flying, and knives are flashing. Let’s be frank, nobody is properly trained to intervene. The socially concerned may preach to audiences, often inappropriate because the audience have the skills to deal with conflict or well-honed sophistry of denial of such involvement. In other words, the members of these audiences nod their heads sagely and issue “the tut -tut” of the judgemental. Therefore, mostly conflict is allowed for the parties to resolve themselves. This leaves a considerable body of people who do not have the skills to handle conflict.

And even if the wife beaters were listening, they probably would not know what the jargon meant. The gap is just too great.

Whitewash is a Woman on the Green

In the SMH of Tuesday 20 October 2020, Cathy Wilcox drew a cartoon depicting two women sitting on a park bench. One was saying to the other:

Gladys is not to blame for Daryl Maguire’s dodgy dealings – she just fell for a dud boyfriend … “

The other responded:  “Judging by her record on stadiums, the Powerhouse, Crown Casino, heritage destruction, land clearing, loss of koala habitat and now council grants, she must’ve had a string of dud boyfriends …”

Sometime the cartoonist’s observation is too true to be funny. In this case Cathy Wilcox exhibits in her unerring drawing that mixture of anger and disdain for Gladys with the “Poor Me” look. To Gladys’ bill of stuff-ups can be added her involvement in cooking up the Rozelle Road Pasta.

The Commission (ICAC) reported on the relationship, nearly three years after the Wilcox cartoon of 40 words was published; and two years after the hearings completed, written up in a 700-page report.

However, the following embodies the findings against Gladys Berejiklian, once the Premier of NSW.

The Commission finds that Ms Berejiklian engaged in serious corrupt conduct by breaching public trust in 2016 and 2017 through exercising her official functions in relation to funding promised and/or awarded to ACTA, without disclosing her close personal relationship with Mr Maguire, when she was in a position of a conflict of interest between her public duty and her private interest, which could objectively have the potential to influence the performance of her public duty. The Commission also finds that in the same period, Ms Berejiklian partially exercised her official functions, in connection with funding promised to ACTA, influenced by the existence of her close personal relationship with Mr Maguire.

On the surface, she is in disgrace, but somehow with her “Miss Goodie-Two-Shoes” image and the Australian Financial Review’s eulogy of her dressed in vestal virginal white, admittedly with the “furred up” look of a good-time girl seems to have protected her from what should have been community contumely. Then she has the gall to appeal the ICAC findings, for what? Her right to do so?

The Conversation wondered about the secret life of this 50-year-old woman, who retains the air of the captain that she was at high school in North Ryde. She told no one about this relationship with Maguire, not even her own, very close family.

This is a litany of a clearly dysfunctional person. Instead of her history being treated with understandable caution given that she was hardly in need of money, Berejiklian was hired by Optus and made managing director of Optus’s business division, a position she has held since last year. She was close to the action thus when the disastrous outage occurred which cost an insensitive CEO her job, this ex-school captain survived. Given her form, why would we be surprised! Are there any missteps in store for us involving her involvement in anything.

But Berejiklian is only symptomatic of the malaise which has been inflicted upon Australia. Setting up Inquiries, culminating in the “majesty” of a Royal Commission was a serious endeavour to find the truth of the situation – not to be taken lightly. But now they are increasingly irrelevant for politicians and police, who just ignore the findings while mouthing the mantra “that they will take the matter seriously”. These inquiries have become a smokescreen designed to lengthen the process, so why it is being set up is lost in the voracious news cycle. Australia gives the impression of being governed by the public relations crew, who homogenise policy into trivial blah.

A bleak NSW Parliament House

Gladys Berejiklian had not been on her own, even if ever wronged in her own eyes, she exists in her version of “Bleak House”, even if she believes herself to be Esther Summerson.

The problem in writing about this Australian political cancer is that it is metastasising out of control because the therapeutic agents are not sufficient to contain it. These therapeutic processes are of another age, when the cancer was not as virulent and the processes were sufficient to contain and even heal. But no longer, and with climate changing, how many years will it be before this cachexia of misrule and greed kills the country fabric. Once malignant cachexia kicks in, it’s irreversible, just as it is with climate change.

Not an Afterthought

I have met some remarkable women in my life, but as I am getting towards the tail of my life, I thought I would list the six women I would have wished to have met, but for various reasons (mainly because they existed in another generation) I have not been able to do so.

Grace Cossington Smith’s “The Bridge in curve”
  • Vanessa Redgrave – UK actor
  • Katherine Mansfield – NZ-born author
  • Lena Horne – US singer
  • Rosa Luxemburg – Polish-born activist
  • Leni Riefenstahl – German filmmaker & photographer
  • Grace Cossington Smith – Australian painter

Mouse Whisper

I’m not sure this says much about anything including national characteristics.

A Swede and a Finn went into a bar. The Swede ordered a vodka, said “Skål” and downed the vodka. The Finn said nothing and also downed the vodka. The Swede repeated the toast three time and still the Finn said nothing although the Swede every time said “Skål” and downed the vodka. The Finn downed his vodka and continued to say nothing. On the fourth time, the Swede raised his glass and said “Skål”.

This apparently was too much for the Finn, because he burst out “Se on teidän ruotsalaisten ongelma, te puhutte liikaa.”

or in English parlance: “That’s the trouble with you Swedes, you talk too much.”

Eight or ten words! Take your pick.

Modest Expectations – Sestini & Ditta

The Budget has come and what has been delivered into the health budget reflects some of the long-held saws that political parties remember in the fog of their prejudices. Take the Pharmacy Guild and the pharmacy profession in general. There is a group of pharmacists who are academics and, by extension, work in hospitals far away from Mammon. But they are not the Pharmacy Guild.

The Pharmacy Guild represents the community pharmacists and in turn the maintenance of their extensive privileges. One of the interesting occurrences in my lifetime has been the evolution of pharmacy from its apothecary status – shop keepers on the high street, an apprentice system, changed to university-based pharmacy courses, with an academic program far more than what is still needed as being the community “purveyors of medicines … and much more”.

The Pharmacy Guild has been very successful over the years in getting what it wants in terms of remuneration for the provision of drugs under the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. The Labor Party operatives could be forgiven for believing that each community pharmacy is a small business, the number and the wealth of same providing a base for Coalition support. The Pharmacy Guild Dinner in Canberra has been the public indicator of the power of the Guild to attract the influential. When the big retailers tried to break into the monopoly of the community pharmacist by attempting to place pharmacies in their supermarkets they failed, despite enlisting a pharmacist-turned-politician to lobby their cause.

This minor reduction in their privileged status – that of providing two months’ supply of drugs instead of one – saw the Pharmacy Guild President in tears being completely “over the top”; but then I remembered he lives close to where crocodiles are prevalent. The whole charade has been too much for Lloyd Sansom, a distinguished Adelaide pharmacy academic who was chair of the Australian Pharmaceutical Advisory Council from 1991 until 2000, and chair of the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee from 2001 until 2012. This week he rebuked the Pharmacy Guild for its behaviour. Lloyd Sansom is not one for chasing publicity and, as I have found in my dealings with him, he is completely ethical.

I worked with the Pharmacy Guild for a period when it was trying to burnish its image. At that time there were still pharmacies that sold cigarettes; and the aim was to emphasise that the community pharmacist was a health professional and not a shopkeeper who had an incidental function to dispense medicines with profits underwritten by Government.  Some were saying “Why set up the University courses when the major function of the community pharmacist is to sell cosmetics and soft toys?”

The proponents of an academic course had a basis in all the elements of pharmacology, which had also been added to the medical course curriculum in the early 1960s replacing materia medica teaching. After all, the traditional role of the pharmacist making ointments and creams, tablets and capsules was being replaced by pre-packaged medicines, so these traditional skills were rapidly becoming obsolete – hence pharmacy at the time was facing a crisis in its profile.

While there were colleges of pharmacy, they were outside the universities. In 1960, the University of Sydney instituted an undergraduate degree, but it was not until the late 80s that the movement to set up another university course in association with the Victorian College of Pharmacy set the scene for academic pharmacy.

Initially the plan was for the degree course to be set up under the auspice of the University of Melbourne since it was nearby the existing College of Pharmacy. The University of Melbourne, perhaps under the influence of the then Vice Chancellor, aborted the agreement which was then picked up by Monash University. This action by the University of Melbourne reflected the belief held by some members of academia who viewed the pharmacist as being little more than a technician. To counter this view, the establishment of the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia in 1976 had followed their acceptance by the Australian Society of Professions (the Pharmacy Guild had been formed in 1927 and the Hospital Pharmacists had formed a society in 1941); the Society promoted the idea that pharmacy should be rated a legitimate profession alongside medicine.

Since the Victorian College of Pharmacy transition, there are 18 universities offering at least one course in pharmacy, which in itself has gone a long way towards enhancing pharmacy’s professional status and that of the Pharmacy Guild. John Menadue, writing after the 2019 Federal Budget, bemoans the fact that a minor change like the one which was included in the current Budget was blocked, because the then Coalition Minister Hunt reneged on the minor alteration under pressure from the Pharmacy Guild. Menadue, in his article which clearly sets up the privileged position of the Pharmacy Guild members, relates the incident of when, having been invited to speak to pharmacists in Brisbane, found the invitation was withdrawn because of pressure from the Pharmacy Guild.

Two areas which have emerged over the past 20 years or so which I find disturbing are:

  • the promotion of medicines with little proven value or promotion of medicines which do not need to be prescribed to the normal persons and even turning medicines into confectionery; and
  • the growth of the Pharmacy entrepôts.

The community is constantly being assailed by medicines that just do not have any effect on the normal person. The images in so many advertisements is of young healthy people, seemingly without a care in the world, carrying shopping baskets full of “stuff”. Particularly objectionable are the advertisements which seem to promote medicine as confectionery – for instance “gummies” which just look like sweets. At least the makers of “Smarties” have had the good sense not to make white Smarties, which would undoubtedly lead to more overdoses. I am not sure that I approve of pharmacies selling confectionery in the manner that the retail stores do to pander to impulse purchase by placing these near the checkout.

It is particularly worrisome that a pharmacy curriculum, where scientific evidence is a central point of the training, is essentially linked to these community pharmacists in practice who surround themselves with an array of “medicines” which have no therapeutic effects or are vastly over-rated. The apothecary of yesteryear selling the placebo indicates a reversion of community pharmacy to the apothecary rather than maintaining the image of a profession seeking evidence of the medicines it dispenses.

Nevertheless, we have seen the growth of the business model whereby the warehouse doors open onto a population inundated with advertisements which a vigilant government authority should have long since curbed. But there is gold in them thar walls of the pharmacy shelf – and consequently in what some purveyors call herbal or natural or homeopathic medicines – or just plain old quackery. This is the business model that the government is sustaining; and drowning out the advantages of the community’s access to the knowledgeable pharmacist, whose business model is aimed at ripping off the gullible for the benefit of some distant hedge fund in Singapore or New York, part of the industry of exporting the Australian health dollar overseas.

Therefore, there is a way to go yet for the government to prune the privileges exacted by the Pharmacy Guild. A cautious start has been started, but it will be highly dependent as he progresses along his portfolio, on what the Butler saw.

There is finally a postscript, called personal experience. It involves the ethical community pharmacist, as I have, who is in danger of being lost in this political scrum.  After all, our family has been spending more than $200 a month on medications, and the most valued attribute after the friendly atmosphere is the accessibility and continuity of this pharmacy practice.

One anecdote is worth repeating – I needed an influenza jab. I booked into a general practitioner, was given an appointment time at which time I presented and after over one hour without any communication from the general practitioner, other than the information that there were still nine people ahead of us, we left. This occurred in rural Tasmania with a locum general practitioner. Contrast this with the appointment I made subsequently with my family pharmacist to give me the jab. I presented myself at the right time. No problem. No delay.

As I said above, it is important how broadly the Butler sees. Something about bath water.

Anita Hill

The 1991 Senate Judiciary Committee (chaired by Joe Biden) ducked its responsibility to the public by reverting to theories spun out of nothing… woman accusers were cast as spurned, prigs with vendettas, incompetent dupes manipulated by others, martyrs for some political cause, or gold diggers seeking attention. (p43)

“Given his condescending tone, Specter (then Republican Senator for Pennsylvania) was also mansplaining – trying to convince us all that he knows better than me how a woman experiences sexual harassment. Mansplaining was the technique, and gaslighting was the goal. Both are forms of denial employed to discount claims of abuse, and they deserve to be called out because they prevent women from being heard and believed when they testify about abuse. Both tactics foster self-doubt, coaxing victims into thinking that coming forward is pointless, that no one will care.” (p39)

Anita Hill at Senate hearings

I prepared myself to purchase and then read Anita Hill’s recent Book entitled “Believing”, an excerpt from which appears above. This woman was disgustingly treated in the 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas, whom she accused of sexual harassment, by a gang of legislators led by the then Senator from Delaware, Joseph Robinette Biden.

Thomas had engaged in discussing explicit pornography with Hill as she responded to questioning from Biden.

I told him that what was most embarrassing was Thomas’s discussion of pornography involving “women with large breasts and engaged in a variety of sex with different people, or animals.” But in truth, I had no real idea how to determine what was the most embarrassing of the crude and obscene comments I had to put up with. Nor did I fully realize how my answer would be used against me. (p35)

She could not be much clearer than that.

Dr Christine Blasey Ford

Little did she realise that her complaint would be used against her; the premise by the Committee members was such that his action was just normal behaviour. She comments on the parallel hostile questioning of Dr Christine Blasey Ford during the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh in 2018 as Supreme Court Justice. His proclivity towards extreme sexual harassment of Ford was the issue; the response of the senators during the confirmation hearing was no different from 1991, despite 27 years having elapsed.

Anita Hill’s book is depressing in one way, in terms of the ability of her countrymen, in particular, to look away or fumble when presented with the prevalence of gender violence. Hers is a book of examples – of clinical dissection. As a male who has lived in this era of male dominance, I feel uncomfortable. The fact that even if most of us were not participants, we as men through the various stages of our lives have been bystanders.

We have tolerated the hypocrisy of people like Bill Clinton, who publicly advocated protective legislation but in private was a sexual harasser using the power of his office to dazzle and distract. In the end, Hillary Clinton, if not a partner in crime, certainly tolerated it. As Hill says, she had a conflicted role, on one hand declaiming at 1995 Conference in Beijing “Women’s rights are Human rights”, while failing “to step up and denounce Bill’s behaviour.”

When Trump announced his proclivity to grab women’s genitals, the Democrats’ response was strangely muted. Hill barely mentions Obama, but goes into some detail about Biden, who had himself been accused of sexual misbehaviour by one Tara Reade. Biden’s response is not recorded.

Eventually Biden apologised in 2019 to Hill after making a comment to a journalist two years before that he would apologise to Hill. As Hill disclosed, the rapprochement was in a 30-minute phone call from Biden, who mostly spoke “His words were carefully couched, though seemingly sincere.” He recounted his massive success in the passage of the Violence Against Woman Act, knowing that the Supreme Court had effectively gutted it subsequently. Yet Biden has continued to do penance by trying to provide legislative protection to women where Federal laws apply.

The whole theme throughout Anita Hill’s book is how endemic gender violence is in America, and the four years of the Trump presidency was an obstruction as Trump attempted to remove all protections against such violence. As Hill says when Kamala Harris was announced as the running mate for Biden, Trump’s son, Eric, called her “a whorendous pick”. Such crudity is repeated by other men who, if not role models, exert considerable influence.

Despite her book having the capacity to make the reader squirm, to be outraged, Hill does not come up with any real solutions. Her predator still sits, amid allegations of corruption, on the Supreme Court. The Senate Judiciary Committee is still racked with misogyny even if apologists try to reframe it as “just old-fashioned ideas”. Anita Hill’s book provides the information, but the provision of information does not alter attitudes, without behavioural changes in the community to make gender violence totally taboo. Anita Hill entitles her book “Believing”. After what she has experienced, the title is succinct testimony to an eventual optimistic outcome. Yet her book suggests unfortunately there is a long way to go, but it should be required reading for those who – like former Supreme Clark, Arthur Kennedy, who employed Kavanaugh as a law clerk – is reported as saying “boys will be boys.”

Trumptown

Tonight, CNN gave a massive platform to a man who incited an insurrection on the Capitol, attempted a coup on American democracy, and was just found by a civil court to have committed sexual assault. Make no mistake: this wasn’t a town hall. It was a campaign kickoff celebration, and Chris Licht sold out CNN — and our democracy — to chase Tucker Carlson’s viewers.

All you really need to know about the event is that CNN’s hand-picked audience laughed at Trump’s depiction of his sexual assault case (which he lost)!

We cannot normalize Donald Trump by giving him 90 minutes of uninterrupted airtime to rewrite history. Tonight is a firm reminder about the fight we are in: If our democracy is to survive, then we can’t allow CNN and the media to follow Trump down his rabbit hole for ratings.

The media is making the same mistakes as they did in 2016 and 2020. They’re legitimizing Trump in the eyes of the voters instead of calling him out for the lawless serial liar that he is. As he storms his way to the nomination, it’s only going to get worse. He’ll get more air time and more credibility as he continues to spew the same dangerous nonsense he did tonight. 

CNN’s malpractice gave the most anti-democratic force our country has seen in ages a microphone and an evening of airtime. We can’t let this keep happening.

This release from the Lincoln Project says it all. Trump is not a conventional figure. He is a projected evil avatar from a comic strip which has been released into a world where normal behaviour does not apply.

As I have written in my novel “Marigold”, which has been written with licence of the novelist to plumb the supernatural.

“Those adversaries are trying it on again. They have cast us into a comic strip. It just can’t be real.”

The man had raised his shotgun and pointed it at us. Like a comic strip villain, he cackled. Like the comic strip villain, he fired. Red flashes of “Bam, Bam, Bam, Bam” before our eyes. Egrets rose around the cabin.  A duck with a brown-feathered breast fell dead on the roof of our car. This was not my kind of comic strip. We scurried back in the car.  The duck had slipped to the side of the road. The man with the shotgun was laughing – a huge hole of mouth and crinkled eyes. There was the last comic cartouche, as my character at the wheel of the car let out a frustrated maledicta of quimps, jarns, nittles and grawlixes as the car was slow to start.

Maledicta raining down without constraint accompanied by the canned laughter from his selected audience has proved a toxic mixture which Trump ladles out to an American audience. His immediate butt in New Hampshire recently was the CNN anchor, Kaitlan Collins. She is the duck, overwhelmed by the volume of lies and maledicta. She is constrained by the mores of civilisation, and thus not allowed by modern convention to rise up like the avenging woman warrior of the Old Testament, Deborah, and smite him dead.

Unfortunately, modern society does not know how to deal with this character, a simulacrum who has stepped out of a comic strip, where the morality is simple and binary – good and bad, black and white. Unlike the comic strip, Trump is less easily discarded.

The aim is thus to ensure that America laughs at him, not with him – to use the same artifices which he has used to fashion his cut out persona – look at all the ridiculous golden aura in which he has encased himself. Start the laughter – oh, for a Chaplinesque character to parody him; then pursue him back into the comic strip.

His other avatar, which may then emerge, is Trump the Messiah, where he has honed himself into being a religious figure of destiny. After all, 76 million people voted for him in 2020; certainly a large congregation. The apostles he put forward two years later were not much good at promoting the Gospel of Trump – but then religion has been caught up in the comic strip. It takes a real believer to seek redemption in a comic book character. That is essentially what Trump is becoming – the malevolent comic strip character full of vile maledicta with a grease paint golden aura re-imagining himself as the glossy Messiah, freed from his comic strip representation. One does not ridicule a Messiah without paying a stern price for doing so.

I have raised the question of Trump’s mental health before, but whether he is on the cusp of dementia or has some other pathology associated with unbridled narcissism, it should become increasingly obvious that in a rational world his support will inevitably evaporate. But how much will it evaporate? In his warped mind it is important to maintain irrationality by lying in such a manner that it blitzes truth.  But such an approach must eschew ridicule among his erstwhile supporters.  Once they start laughing at him not with him, he is finished.

But not quite!

When I look at Trump, unfortunately I think of the Jonestown massacre in 1978, instigated by Jim Jones. Murder-suicide maintained Jones’ notoriety – in his own dead eyes.

Trump’s tormentors – as the Lincoln Group are – in pushing him to more and more irrational acts, have to remember that his actions in relation to 6 January 2021 could only be a forerunner of a more extremist performance, catastrophic to the future of America. It is very easy to say he is mad; to make him a figure of ridicule. However, he is so full of hatred that he could try and bring the whole country crashing down in the name of himself, Trump Messiah.  Instead he is the revengeful cutout villain of the comic strip or its modern successor, the video game. Except in Trump’s case, it is not a game.

Peter Byrne

You cannot find any mention of Peter Byrne, when people talk about those influential Melbourne cooks of the seventies, when people like Stephanie Alexander and the late Mietta O’Donnell were emerging as culinary heroines, in a field where to get a good meal, there were the fine dining establishments, the growth of the bistros and then there was Peter Byrne.

Peter Byrne was the quintessential Australian with an Irish heritage and a strong Labor Party affiliation. He had worked for the leader of the Victorian Labor Party, Clyde Holding. Holding was the silent partner in Waldron’s restaurant. Waldron’s was a restaurant in Bridge Road Richmond, and close to where I then lived.  This night a party of four of us for some reason went to dine there. It was the late seventies and it was a BYO restaurant. There was only one other couple in an otherwise empty converted shopfront restaurant. The other couple I recognised as being Claude Forell and his wife.  Claude Forell was the food writer for The Age newspaper (and later foundation editor of The Good Food Guide). He was there as the anonymous food writer. We recognised each other, and in short, the night was hilarious, the wine flowed, the food was excellent. Byrne joined in with his wife after he finished cooking. Rhonda was as cool as Peter was pugnacious. The end result was that Forell lavished the evening with praise, particularly the food, in his Age column, and the restaurant took off – from being empty it became full every night.

Peter was like many people of Irish heritage, complex and contradictory. He affected a brusque exterior, but was a very kind and generous man with a sense of humour which the Irish have and the non-Irish parody – mostly unsuccessfully. We would have political arguments, because like many of his persuasion they treated me as a member of the extreme right wing of a mythical Reactionary Party who still believed in the Divine Right of the Monarch.  It was often the starting point but somewhere in the midpoint of a very long night when the alcohol was seeping through the soles of our feet, we would reach some denouement.

I was going through a bad period of my life in the following year and he accepted my voluntary offer to help out in the evenings at the restaurant, which gave it an aura of the eclectic while pursuing the dialectic in the kitchen.

Byrne and I became friends without ever prying into the circumstances of the other’s life. He liked my sons, whom he called the louts (because, as one son put it, he couldn’t always remember which was which). The elder son, Paul,  at 14 years then worked there as a kitchen help during the holidays. It is somewhat ironic, that Paul himself has become a food writer. Eventually I went to Sydney to pursue my career. I lost contact with Peter for a while and during that period Waldron’s ran into financial difficulty as Peter succumbed to excessive drinking and mental stress.

As Forell put it in a subsequent piece in The Age writing in 1982, years after Waldron’s had closed, “Waldron’s has been a culinary oasis”. He was writing about Peter after he had moved to the London Tavern just around the corner in Lennox Street. Forell described the food at this new place as “Restaurant food at pub prices”. Forell went on “With entrees at around $2.50 and main courses from $4 to $5, it is remarkably good value”. He himself had tucked into a meal of Byrne’s own country terrine followed by venison sausages “with a sauce rich in fresh mushrooms.”

I saw Peter from time to time, including on one memorable occasion at an airport in India, but he was one of those guys who for a brief period in your life was an important anchor, even though he had similar frailties. I remember his famous Mao Pie – it was one of my favourites. Peter is long since dead, but retrieving this newspaper cutting kindled my regard; he certainly never sought the plaudits, but he was a very fine chef.

Claude Forell

As for Claude, I don’t remember when I last saw him or whether he is still alive, but I think this anecdote about him told by the late Age Associate Editor, Peter Cole Adams is, well, priceless. “History recalls Claude’s celebrated 1988 exchange with Stephen Downes, a rival food critic and former Age colleague. Downes unkindly described The Age Guide as the ‘Turin Shroud of Gastronomy’. Claude’s riposte was to dismiss Downes as ‘the Reverend Ian Paisley of Gastronomy’. He was not a man to be trifled with”.

Mouse Whisper

You must have heard of the definitive proof that the world is not flat. If it was, the cats would have pushed everything over the edge.

Modest Expectations – Shot to Pieces

A union hack, part time actor and superannuation call taker beat a Brunswick barrister for a federal seat. 

Mary Doyle, Member for Aston

This nasty tweet about the new member for Aston, Mary Doyle, hides an inconvenient truth. One can postulate that when Mary Doyle was pre-selected in 2022 to stand against the then incumbent, Alan Tudge, the seat of Aston would have been considered a safe Liberal seat. In 2019, after preferences, Tudge had won 60 per cent of the vote. In 2022, with Mary Doyle now the Labor candidate, a swing of 7.3 per cent was achieved. Then, with Mary Doyle again as the Labor candidate in this 2023 byelection following the resignation of Tudge, she increased her vote not only winning the byelection but also winning the first byelection for the incumbent government since 1920. In the person-in-the-street parlance: “Mary, you’re a legend!”

Nevertheless, the unpleasant Twitter comment has a grain of truth given that nastiness and arrogance occurs on both sides of the political spectrum. When she was first pre-selected, she was probably awarded the pre-selection on the basis that it was an unwinnable seat. Mary Doyle has become the accidental winner, an ordinary person, a loyal servant of the Labor party who had left school early and whose life epitomises the battle for the vast bulk of Australians wanting to survive. “Ordinary” is not to disparage, but she seems to be a true representative of the people, not an apparatchik coddled through the processes which seem to determine the current batch of successful political aspirants. She seems to be a well-balanced, optimistic person despite her various travails. I hope she does well and retains the “ordinariness” that so often is lacking in the rarefied Canberra atmosphere.

Borough or Burrow?

It was a cold morning when we entered the PikNik café on the Queenscliff Road. It had once been a service station; franchised Golden Fleece, which had fallen on hard times. The Golden Fleece brand in addition no longer exists.

It had been converted into a place where rugged-up local tradies and dog walkers came for their morning shot of caffeine. We had just come off the car ferry, which berthed at Geelong at a time which coincided with the middle of peak road traffic to Melbourne.  We had thus arranged to meet a friend, who now lived in Queenscliff, for breakfast.  Queenscliff lies almost at the tip of the Bellarine Peninsula, which forms one of the land masses enclosing Port Philip Bay. The Borough of Queenscliffe is a quaint hangover of the times when Victoria had over 200 cities, towns, shires and boroughs. In mediaeval parlance, the borough was a fortified town, and as a description of a local government area, it still remains elsewhere, notably in New York.

Bellarine Peninsula

Queenscliff in the Borough of Queenscliffe (note the additional “e”) is a burrow for the conservative elderly retirees, and when the reductions in Victorian local council numbers occurred in the 1990s, the local burghers exhibited their isolationist muscle and persuaded the conservative State Government that they should not be absorbed into the Greater Geelong Council, thus saving the requirement to rub shoulders with those Greater Geelong hoi polloi.

One of Victorian politicians made a very perceptive comment: “The Borough of Queenscliffe has not been included in the proposed amalgamation probably because of the number of elderly retired people in the area. The residents of Portarlington, Drysdale and St Leonards have expressed concern about their rates and the retention of the services that have been provided by the local council, such as nursing, podiatry and other services. Those people are used to the availability of face-to-face services and feel comfortable in a rural setting.”

It reminded me of several decades earlier when I was finishing my Doctorate of Philosophy on some aspects of angiotensin I and angiotensin II in the Monash Department of Medicine. I had a fabulous but challenging time, being supervised by Professor Bryan Hudson whose explosive charisma and glittering eye tended to scare the bejesus out of one; but I ended up on very good terms with him. Nevertheless, I could not see myself as a long-time researcher. Frankly, I was not good enough, and being a mediocre researcher was not where I wanted to be for the rest of my life.

While I was undertaking this PhD, I undertook a Master of Arts (prelim) at the University of Melbourne, where I needed to obtain six subjects at honours level before proceeding to writing a short thesis in order to graduate. It was in those days when university education was free, and I completed the coursework over three years. I had always been keen on the social contribution of health care since I had become “the accidental medical student” before graduating as a doctor. My social and student political agenda, marrying before graduation and my involvement in early childhood education with a working wife and two young children made my twenties a busy time. If I had wanted to undertake public health it would meant decamping to Sydney for a year to gain the appropriate qualification from The University of Sydney through its School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. In my then situation, impossible.

Nevertheless, my career was never destined to be mentored in any conventional way, and when I searched for a job that would provide the transition into social medicine, there was nothing. Then for some reason, John Lindell, took an interest in me. He had headed the Hospitals and Charities Commission since 1953 and had been an innovative force in the development of Victorian health services. He showed some interest in my desire to change from the laboratory to the community health area.

He raised with me the possibility of setting up what he described as a community health service in Queenscliff. As he said to me, he already had representation from the Borough to set up a health service for the community. There were no specifications, but from my then experience, which included undertaking a multitude of part-time jobs to augment my meagre research fellowship, plus the sociological theory absorbed by my MA prelim, I believed I had the grounding if I had suitable support. Youthful enthusiasm is not enough when confronting a conservative community that wants the resources without any outside interference. John Lindell never pursued my appointment to what was a pilot program, even though I had popped up, seemingly at the right time, willing to set up a pilot program. However, once there was pushback compounded by the negativity of his Deputy, Manny Wilder, he just let the project drop.

This all occurred several years before the development of the community health service concept under the Whitlam government. By that time John Lindell had retired and died. I had moved on, and seemingly the Borough got the services it wanted without having to deal with a pesky neophyte.  The above quote from the parliamentary member 20 years later seems to suggest that it had.

I visited John Lindell in hospital when he was dying of cancer. I think he would have liked me to come along earlier, because our resultant association would have been strong enough to assure his vision of the community health centre.  One unfortunately can’t alter the calendar of birth and death to assure the right mix of people at the right time to assure change. That conjunction had to wait for later in my career.

Queenscliff

Breakfast at PikNik lasted two hours of warm friendly chat and reminiscence, and the bread bought just before we left was likewise still warm, being freshly baked. I wondered how many times more I would visit the Fortress of Queenscliffe, especially as some eccentric just down the road was promulgating setting up the Republic of “Jimland”. Its sovereignty would be defended presumedly by armoured lawn mowers. Not too far away from the sentiments among some of the burghers of Queenscliffe, I suspect. 

Watcher from A Cast Iron Mind

I watched this TV program called Q&A, which I have mostly ignored in the past because it is the megaphone of the self-opinionated who have little to say, aptly described as if “they are reading your own watch”.

In this episode of Q&A, the discussion between the Aboriginal people exhibited a rising crescendo as they attempted to talk over one another – one stridently anti-Voice, the other pro-Voice.  In fact, as the anti-Voice proponent pointed out, the Uluru Statement from the Heart had positioned itself as being that of all Aboriginal people, whereas Uluru was a totem of Walpiri people, who had incidentally not been involved in the development of the statement. This anti-Voice, Jacinta Price, the National Party Senator from the Northern Territory is Walpiri on her mother’s side, giving her a firm base from which to launch her salvoes. Having derided the Uluru Statement, her position was clear, whereas her fellow Senator from the Northern Territory (her land is in the Gulf Country), Malarndirri McCarthy, who represents the ALP, is very pro-Voice; hence the dispute between the two.

Listening to the competing voices reminded one of the disputes within Aboriginal medical services. At one moment one family would be in charge of the finances of a particular service and then that family was displaced by another family, both members of the same mob, the downside of that rivalry providing a lack of continuity with each family having different priorities. This does not help in maintaining staff. Aboriginal medical services do not generally have after hours service nor are open on weekends and public holidays. Disputation among Aboriginal people means that any Voice may not be a unitary force once it goes beyond this pre-referendum oratory.

A recent report among the authors of which were Aboriginal professionals, concluded in relation to the health of Aboriginal people thus: Unfortunately, the Government’s 2020 report card on Closing the Gap progress showed that life expectancy for Indigenous people, and the Indigenous life expectancy gap, have improved only slightly, and outcomes lag behind targets. Strong Indigenous voices are concerned that increased research funding and volume alone will not address this disparity without a corresponding broadening of intellectual investment in Indigenous health. This intellectual investment involves a shift in focus to self-determination, Indigenous-led research, community consultation, and research into the actual causes of ill-health, including racism and other social determinants of health.

Unravelling the learned article speak – nothing much has happened. This financial year, the Federal Government is committing $284.3m with the Ministerial anodyne: The Albanese Labor Government is continuing to work in partnership with the Coalition of Peaks, other First Nations partners and all levels of government to ensure sustained progress over the life of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap. The dissonance in full writ is very clear between the two quotes. Obviously quotes can be cherry-picked, but these Aboriginal paradoxes have always worried me from the time I first became involved sitting around the campfire outside old Parliament House yarning with Charlie Perkins in 1973.

Another matter which troubles me is where the tribal elders fit within the Voice. The elders are of paramount importance in a people where there is only an oral tradition to assure passage of tradition.  I have witnessed on many occasions the difficulty of passing on the lore with all its complexity so distinctive for any particular mob, to the younger generation.

My experience itself was a generation ago, but I would like to know  how the “Voice”  takes into account the differentiated men’s and women’s business. I remember being in the mid-west of Western Australia in the late 1970s, in a one-on-one meeting, an elder of a mob spontaneously asked if I would like to see a couple of things that he had at hand. He said very little as he showed them, his voice monosyllabic. When I saw them, I must say that I have never seen the like again. This was men’s business; I was very privileged, the extent of which took me years to realise. I may have talked about what I had seen, but not in print. I continue to respect that insight; but where does that fit within the Voice.  In what appears to be a secular Voice where does the spiritual Voice fit, given that here there is not “One Nation” if the map is to be believed. There is just too much jargon to cover the unexplained; or unexplainable.

A further matter, which again raises questions, is that in traditional settings there is so much non-verbal communication. As I once said, communicating with Aboriginal people means being able to talk through the silences. The experience I’ll never forget was talking to a group of traditional Aboriginal people, and the sense of the non-verbal response I experienced from the audience, none of them announced who was who, but I detected who was “the elder among elders” and at the end of my talk, he said “bloody good meeting, let’s go and have a cuppa”. That was that. I had experienced the Aboriginal Voice.

My trouble with many of the proponents of the Voice is that they are “stateless”. The spiritual heritage of their tribes has been exterminated, and therefore they are faced with having to trying to concoct a lost oral tradition. It makes the symbolism of the Voice difficult to not only explain but also to justify.

It is over 20 years since I undertook the Rural Stocktake. It exposed me to various aspects of Aboriginal culture, including as it related to who is Aboriginal.  I was able to cut through some of the cultural blocks between myself, the “whitefella” and the “blackfella”, such that I had two who called me “brother”.

Therefore, given my exposure to Aboriginal bureaucracy which belies the oral tradition, I am concerned the Voice will continue to be just a flurry of words, full of fine oral argot but meaning nothing in improving the overall condition of the Aboriginal people. I have seen too much of the failure to improve the condition of Aboriginal people despite the accompanying rhetoric to be sanguine.

Finally, Noel Pearson has somewhat bombastically declaimed saying that if the referendum fails, he will fall silent. We whitefellas have a word for that – “sulking”! There is enough juvenile behaviour from the reactionary forces without having a proclamation like that, Mr Pearson.

Lunch on the Oregon Coast

The Oregon Pacific Coast is rugged, varied and, in parts, has quite beautiful beaches, so for an Australian used to living near the sea, one could be forgiven for being blasé. We stayed at Cannon Beach, and one beautiful autumn day, we drove down the coast, and when the lunch stomach rumbles intervened, we sought out a place to eat along the ocean road. We stumbled upon a small settlement called Netarts. We had no idea of the importance of this little place as we plonked ourselves down inside the Schooner café, there being no room outside on the terrace. We accustomed ourselves of the view over the estuarine Netarts Bay. Little did we know at the time that the bay was one of the major breeding nurseries for Pacific oysters.

The Schooner at Netarts Bay

The native Olympia oysters had long been fished to near extinction, and although tentative work was being done, they were not commercially available; but the Pacific oysters which I ordered were the plumpest I have ever eaten without losing a scintilla of taste. Those oysters remain my yardstick for Pacific oysters. Following the oysters, I ordered the Columbia River Steelhead trout, which was cooked in a cast iron skillet. This whole trout had both crispness and an underlining delicious flavour of wild white flesh. Both courses joined my gustatory memory bank. My wife had very small octopus with an admixture of capers, garlic, rosemary and char-grilled lemon. It was a memorable lunch, made even more so because it was so unplanned.

Definition of Obscenity – Washington Post Nuanced

As background to the newspaper report below, the Tennessee 5th Congressional District was one of the most closely watched of the election season because the Republican-dominated state legislature redrew the seat in 2022 during the redistricting cycle, “flipping it” from a Democratic-held seat to Republican, so that it was unwinnable for the Democrats. The District is now shaped like a person on the run. Nashville had been traditionally totally Democratic until this redistribution. There is now only one Democrat representative from Tennessee from an electoral district around Memphis.

Representative Andrew Ogles, a Republican who represents this Nashville district where the Covenant School is located, said in a statement that he was “utterly heartbroken” by the shooting there that left six people dead, including three children.

Gun-control advocates and Democrats highlighted another post from Ogles — a 2021 Christmas photo of his family posing with firearms.

After news of the Nashville shooting broke, Ogles said in a statement that he and his family “are devastated by the tragedy that took place at The Covenant School in Nashville this morning.”

“We are sending our thoughts and prayers to the families of those lost,” he said. “As a father of three, I am utterly heartbroken by this senseless act of violence. I am closely monitoring the situation and working with local officials.”

Merry Christmas from the Ogles Family

The 2021 photo, which Ogles shared on Facebook, showed him, his wife, and two of his three children holding weapons and smiling in front of a Christmas tree.

“MERRY CHRISTMAS!” Ogles wrote, adding a line that is often — and dubiously — credited to George Washington: “The very atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere restrains evil interference — they deserve a place of honor with all that’s good.”

Ogles is a strong proponent of the Second Amendment and gun ownership. On his campaign website, he said: “Disarming the people is the most effective way to enslave them, and we must remain vigilant when anyone seeks to erode our civil liberties. The rights of the people to keep and bear arms, protect themselves and their families, and prevent tyrannical rule is a fundamental liberty of our constitutional republic.”

Ogles is really a disgusting piece of work, so beware reading his Wikipedia entry. Sewage is everywhere in this entry.

Mouse Whisper

You learn stuff sometimes by not being satisfied with just accepting the name in this case of a racehorse. Many of the names are stupid concoctions, meaningless jumbles of letters, but since my Italian cousin Garibaldi was staying with me and we were sharing an excellent pecorino, the racing guide had slipped on the floor, and my eye alighted on a horse named “Bianco Vilano”. Garibaldi scratched his ear. “Vilano? Vilano – no. there is an Italian word, villano meaning “lout” or “oaf”. But vilano with one “l”? “Bianco” is white. I looked the name up on Mickipedia. For “bianco vilano” read the whorl of sepals of a flower collectively forming the outer floral envelope or layer of the perianth enclosing and supporting the developing bud; I must say I was none the wiser. Then the meaning paraglided in on the breeze – you mean Thistledown.

Modest expectations – Three hundred and four thousand four hundred and eighty

COVID-19 comes to all. I thought I had some idea where I picked it up. I have limited contact with people, because my disability makes it difficult moving around, especially when there are steps. Until you are disabled, you do not realise how difficult it is to avoid them; the world is not a level field.

The virus is harassing my upper respiratory system, and it has been a challenge to dislodge the tenacious phlegm. The whole picture is that of congested misery.

On Wednesday last, we drove from Swan Hill to Albury, a distance of about 400 kilometres. Lunch was a Cornish pasty and coffee in the shade of pepper trees in Wycheproof.

By the time we arrived in Albury, I had developed a cough, and initially my RAT was negative; but next day it was positive.  The inevitable march of the Virus through the house had commenced.  By the weekend, we were all RAT positive. For us, it was inconvenient to say the least to be away from home, but at least we were isolating ourselves.

I was prescribed Lagevrio (molnupiravir). Paxlovid (nirmatrelvir/ ritonavir), the other antiviral drug, was contraindicated.

Of course, there are no controls to confirm whether Lagevrio had any effect, but now with the cocktail of vaccines and anti-viral capsules, I seem to be holding my own. I have just taken my last four capsules. The congestion has much improved, but is still lingering.

In Albury there has been a supply shortage of antivirals. For a time early in the week Albury may have been in danger of running out of the antiviral drugs if promised deliveries didn’t eventuate. Familiar? Here we go again. Governments blithely change the conditions for availability without determining whether there is a sufficient supply. It is a nightmare, when we – like so many others – are confined to home and depend on the drugs being delivered.

I remember my last tussle with the flu about five years ago. That lasted six weeks with a residual cough for months afterwards., I could see the long dark corridor where there are no open doors and no light at the end.

The pandemic has persisted. Public health measures are now a matter of choice in regard to responsibility. No longer any of those public measures – such as contact tracing, hand washing, masks, social distancing observed. They work, but just as our forefathers did not throw away their weapons because WW11 persisted for more than two years, there is no reason why we could not have adapted if we had had anywhere decent leadership, beyond shutting borders.

Quarantine facilities have been built at great cost, but it seems nobody has thought how to use them. This is very ironic given the decades long experience of confining boat people. Having experienced a period of being in lockdown without any ability to go out, these facilities present the opportunity to enable that group of people to have a shelter until the infective status changes.

It is amazing to see how technology, through the manufacture of new vaccines, anti-virals and diagnostic tests, even down to improved masks, has occurred.

But such improvement in the efficiencies of social practices has lagged, and we all should share the blame, not just Dr Murphy. Nevertheless, it was a time when, except for brief flashes of government accepting responsibility and not blaming everybody else, our social structures have been found lacking. The pandemic still rages; thank God for the scientists and technologists who have provided some weapons, but the virus is far from unconditional surrender.

By the way, a week after testing positive, I am still positive, albeit weakly.

Can you believe these remnants of the Dark Ages!

When I was a first-year medical graduate working at a suburban hospital, one of my earliest memories was coming out of one of the emergency bays on my way to the next when I looked up. At the end of the corridor of flapping curtains against the emergency department wall was a trolley. On the trolley was a young woman who had apparently just been wheeled in and was waiting for a bay in which she could be seen. She was very pale, very grey; she looked very sick, even from where I was standing.

Immediately, I remembered I had seen her in the emergency department the previous day.  She was complaining of a vague lower abdominal pain.

She said she was not pregnant, but she did have some tenderness in the left fornix. She was unmarried; and it was a time when if you were unmarried and under the age of 21, there was a mixture of denial, stigma in her history, and yesterday she had not looked unwell, certainly not as she was now.

I could suspend belief or rationalise why I had missed the diagnosis, so obvious as I looked at her with that grey pallor of impending disaster.

In those days, when you graduated you were considered fully fledged. That was it. Your training wheels had been removed. You could practice unsupervised after you had been through six years of undergraduate education.  I had stuffed up. Looking at her lying on a trolley I knew that I had missed an ectopic pregnancy. I had stuffed up.

I moved with the speed of a penitent, and I immediately ordered that she be taken to the operating theatre. The senior obstetrics resident was alerted and in turn the general practitioner obstetrician. The operation to remove the ectopic pregnancy was successful. Nobody stood around, arguing her clinical diagnosis. They just saved her life; no problem.

I learnt a lesson that day; and my peers were forgiving. It just confirmed  that if you stuff up, admit it and learn; then recriminations are somewhat superfluous. There was none of the huge panoply of undertaking root cause analysis or any of the fancy names designed by bureaucrats to define the scapegoat , the sacrificial offering to protect the system from the predations of legal jackaldom.

Where am I leading? Ectopic pregnancy requires termination for the health of the mother. The embryo is developing outside the uterus, and undiagnosed or untreated will eventually cause a catastrophic haemorrhage and maternal death.

When I was a young doctor, chemical treatment of ectopic pregnancy did not exist. The drug methotrexate was introduced to destroy the ectopic pregnancy. Methotrexate can kill a wide and diverse number of targets, including the ectopic embryo. Usually given in a single injection, methotrexate has a cytotoxic effect on the trophoblastic tissue – the cells that enable the embryo to stick in normal circumstances to the uterine wall.

Methotrexate treatment of ectopic pregnancies is considered safe, effective and cheap, with no major side effects. Intramuscular methotrexate has the advantage of tubal conservation and saves patients from requiring surgery. It is easier to administer than intraoperative route, which these days is laparoscopic and hence needs expertise.

Now what is happening in the Redneck States of the America?

In addition to surgical abortions, anti-abortion laws in some states such as Texas have also banned several drugs that can be used for inducing abortions. Among the medicines banned under these laws include drugs such as methotrexate, mifespristone, and misoprostol. Besides inducing abortion, these medications are also used for the treatment of other conditions.

Moreover, these laws allow the state to prosecute health care prescribers and pharmacists for dispensing such abortion-inducing medications.

Recent reports suggest that the reversal of abortion rights has also indirectly impacted women who use these medications for conditions other than for a medication abortion.

Although States such as Texas have banned these medications for terminating pregnancies, the laws permit the use of these drugs for miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies.

However, the fear of penalties, including being criminally charged, has resulted in some pharmacists refusing to dispense these drugs for the above.

In addition to ectopic pregnancies, methotrexate can suppress the activity of the immune system and is used in the treatment of autoimmune conditions, including rheumatoid arthritis, scleroderma, and lupus. Methotrexate is also used for the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease and a variety of cancers, including breast cancer, lymphoma, leukemia and lung cancer. Depending on the nature and severity of the disease, the dosage required varies; for a period I was prescribed the drug but in a far lower dose than required for neoplasia – or ectopic pregnancy for that matter.

Nevertheless, in these anti-abortion States , believe it or not, there are reports of disrupted access to methotrexate for patients with autoimmune disorders. Some rheumatologists have stopped renewing prescriptions for methotrexate, and moreover pharmacists are refusing to dispense.

Paradoxically, methotrexate can cause birth defects.

This has had a knock-on effect. The risk of birth defects and the lack of access to abortions have made rheumatologists wary of prescribing methotrexate to women of childbearing age with these concurrent diseases. As one source has said: “Frankly, methotrexate is one of my go-to medications for any number of diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus, myositis, and systemic sclerosis. I expect that some rheumatologists will understandably worry about prescribing methotrexate to patients because if the patient inadvertently became pregnant, the foetus has now been exposed to this medication. This is really worrisome as methotrexate is a very effective medication that we rely on to treat a number of debilitating and serious autoimmune diseases.

Indeed.

Justice John Roberts

Now America has John Roberts as the de facto Surgeon-General. He presides over a Supreme Court which could be reasonably considered is now the legal equivalent of the untreated ectopic pregnancy – eventually if left alone it will all end up in tears – however you pronounce it.

America remains untreated. We await the death of this motherland in the eventual haemorrhage of a Constitution constructed when the population had a median life expectancy of 35 years.

Eventually, the blood of all is shed. See, your gloves, Chief Justice Roberts, are smothered in the blood of your country, shed for no-one but the hubris of your colleagues.

The Unsinkable Molly White

Anissa Gardizy a 35 year old reporter on the Boston Globe. Her short biography states that Anissa Gardizy is a general assignment business reporter. She graduated from Emerson College with a B.S. in journalism and took economics classes at Framingham State University. Prior to joining the Globe full-time, Anissa was a co-op on the business desk, and she held internships at the Telegram & Gazette in Worcester and The Information in San Francisco. 

Below is her recent profile of Molly White, who had to take time out because of her robust criticism of cryptocurrency. She has been verbally attacked; which probably means she has obviously come too close to the festering centre of cryptocurrency activity.

Ms Gadizy writes:

Depending on whom you ask, cryptocurrency is either digital snake oil or revolutionary technology. Crypto markets have plunged in recent weeks and everyone is looking for answers.

So it makes sense that a website dedicated to documenting mishaps, failures, and scams in the industry is suddenly taking off. And who’s behind it? Molly White, a 29-year-old Wikipedia enthusiast and former HubSpot employee who has emerged as one of the industry’s most pointed critics.

How the 2016 Northeastern University graduate, who lives in the Boston area, came to be one of the most listened-to people on crypto and blockchain tech is complicated. But it started in the past year, when the field became impossible to ignore.

The price of bitcoin surged to an all-time-high of nearly $70,000 in November. Ads for crypto companies were featured during the Super Bowl. Celebrities changed their Twitter profile pictures to non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. Some of White’s friends began quitting their traditional tech jobs to work for crypto firms.

White, a longtime Wikipedia editor on the side, started to research the technology. But the more she learned, the more she realized crypto was being marketed as something everyone should be getting into, despite a history rife with fraud, scams, and predatory marketing.

“[I was] seeing people get screwed over again and again and again,” White said. “There wasn’t a permanent record of what was actually happening and how poorly a lot of these projects were ending.”

Her first instinct was to start writing Wikipedia articles about crypto and the related field of web3.” But she quickly realized Wikipedia wouldn’t be the best place for her work — among other things, it would have required her to take a neutral approach.

“I have a pretty strong opinion,” she said.

Software engineer Molly White at work on her laptop

So late last year, while working full-time at HubSpot, White created a website called “Web3 is Going Just Great”. (The name is as sarcastic as it sounds, with the longer version ending with “…and is definitely not an enormous grift that’s pouring lighter fluid on our already smouldering planet.”) On the site, she chronicles  sometimes several times a day — bad things happening in crypto.

“There’s a narrative that’s become so loud and pervasive, that everyone should be getting involved in this,” she said. “It feels like I have this obligation to speak out about it.”

And others are listening.

She is regularly quoted by national news outlets, was a guest lecturer at Stanford University, and has advised US senators, including Senator Elizabeth Warren, on blockchain and cryptocurrency.

As White has learned over the past year, criticizing crypto isn’t easy. In a space known for unwavering optimism and “bro culture,” she’s the outspoken opponent pointing out its problems.

White has been the victim of online harassment, doxxing (when private information is revealed about someone), and threats of violence. As a result, she doesn’t share much identifying information about her family or where she lives.

White, who grew up in Maine, started editing on Wikipedia around the time she was 13. “My family knew I was doing it, and to some extent my friends knew,” she said. “It was kind of just like, ‘Oh, that’s one of Molly’s weird hobbies.’”

Though she got started writing about her favourite bands, White now focuses on controversial viewpoints and male-dominated spaces, including right-wing extremism and “involuntary celibates,” or incels. She has also served on the site’s arbitration committee, which settles its toughest disputes.

Andrew Lih, a Wikipedia veteran who has known White since she was a teen, said most editors concentrate on topics they take a personal interest in. White, he said, tackles things “she absolutely doesn’t like.”

“She wants to make sure the record has the best information,” he said.

Lih credits White’s rise to her ability to present information in a way that is digestible. On her crypto website, she writes in a terse, matter-of-fact style and uses hashtags such as #yikes, #badidea, and #hmm. She isn’t condescending or alarmist, either.

Unlike some critics, White doesn’t think all crypto is a scam. Rather, she believes there has been an explosion of “really scam-y projects” that downplay the risks. She worries crypto is being cast as a “ticket to financial freedom” to people who don’t have money to lose.

According to data published by the Federal Trade Commission, more than 46,000 people have reported losing over $1 billion in crypto to scams since the start of 2021.

Long term, White believes crypto will likely exist as a niche, speculative vehicle for high-risk takers.

Most people would agree that regulators need to address crypto scams for the industry to be viable. More controversial is White’s sceptical view of blockchain, crypto’s underlying technology, which has been hyped in recent years as a potential cure-all for problems related to Internet security, privacy, and financial systems. Blockchains are public, electronic databases that are distributed across a network of computers. The technology is intended to be immutable (meaning records can’t be modified) and decentralized (meaning data are stored across the network and not held by any central party.)

Proponents believe blockchain tech could eventually transform everything from financial systems to social media, creating a digital world where individuals have increased control over their own data. Many people refer to this blockchain-based vision as “web3.”

There’s been a proliferation of venture capitalists, startups, and politicians touting its potential, including a growing cluster in Boston. Late last month, hundreds of people attended an all-day summit on web3 on the top floor of the MIT Media Lab, put on by venture capitalist John Werner. It drew industry heavyweights, including cryptographer Stuart Haber, who co-invented the blockchain.

But White doesn’t think blockchain is revolutionary technology. Last month, she and a group of about two dozen computer scientists, researchers, and academics, signed a letter to US lawmakers to express their concerns about the field. Signatories included well-known technology figures like Harvard lecturer and cryptographer Bruce Schneier, Boston-based entrepreneur Miguel de Icaza, and software engineer Grady Booch.

“By its very design, blockchain technology is poorly suited for just about every purpose currently touted as a present or potential source of public benefit,” they wrote, calling it a “solution in search of a problem.”

White’s critics say the technology is in its early stages and will improve. But she disagrees, noting that the two most popular cryptocurrencies have been around for more than a decade. She also thinks blockchain, by design, contains inherent flaws — such as the inability to edit or delete data — that will make it difficult to use and potentially even harmful.

Greg Raiz, managing director of Techstars Boston — which just launched a crypto accelerator program with Boston-based blockchain firm Algorand — disagrees with White’s assertion that crypto is past its early days. In fact, he said it feels like “we’re still in the first inning of this game.”

While he doesn’t think blockchain will be the “solution to everything,” he isn’t writing off its potential to address social, monetary, and business problems. He added that criticism of web3 is “super healthy.”

“Any type of unbalanced exuberance toward a technology isn’t great,” Raiz said.

Sounds that he is pronouncing an “Amen” to the unsinkable Molly.

Parliamentary staffing

The first reaction to the protesters of the newly-elected backbenchers – not aligned to any particular party – to a reduction in the four advisers to one  in line with other back benchers, was that of the howls of the deprived. Really, you poor diddums – only one adviser and four electorate officers. When perceived as privileged already, complaining about the level of the porks, is one way to lose the electorate, especially before you have even placed your toe in the political water. I was surprised when Dave Pocock started the Whimper.

In 1973, the Leader of the Opposition had a Press Secretary, a Principal Private Secretary (PPS), a Deputy Private Secretary and an Assistant Private Secretary. There was one other adviser who was from the government and picked up much of those tedious jobs and fashioning questions on notice and an add on to the Parliamentary Library. Needless to say, we were all male, and the secretarial staff who did all the work were women. I was the PPS. However, the Leader of the Opposition was thus limited to four advisers, including the Press Secretary – not one backbencher.

I believe it was more important not to interfere with the electorate staffing. For senior members of any party the electorate secretary is very important to remind even the Prime Minister that he represents an electorate, even if it may be traditionally very safe. Nowadays that cannot be guaranteed. Thus, the electorate office is an important bastion. In the case of the backbencher, especially those who have gained their seat by the adroit use of social media to win the popular vote, their activity will be augmented by an electorate office, government funded. Cathy McGowan in the northern Victorian electorate of Indi is an important bellwether since she developed an electorate office system, which was shown to be transferable to her successor, Helen Haines.

Cathy McGowan

As the sociologist Max Weber observed, charismatic leadership is very dependent on the individual’s appeal, but in her case McGowan (an unlikely charismatic) was able to “bureaucratise” the electorate staff so her successor did not need to change the systemic aspects of the McGowan legacy. In other words, the model was robust enough to survive the transition from one to another strong-willed woman.

McGowan concentrated on her electorate and where she thought relevant generalised the needs to that of Australia. Maybe the fact that she came from a large cohesive family provided her with a model for an electorate office, but whatever it was, her electorate brew worked.

Developing her model from an electorate base provides a challenge for the new raft of independents, whatever their colour. She had a strong personal appeal, which translated into strong personal loyalty by her staff. She did it with a strong electorate profile, which contrasted with the dysfunctional style of her predecessor.

A backbencher needing Canberra advisers is presented with the aspirant jetsam seeking to float as a successful “factional candidate” onto a red or green parliamentary cushioned sinecure. At this pupa stage the adviser may be more akin to N’drangheta Consigliere admixed with a tincture of Undergraduate Puerilism. Policy development is not one of the skills of this Canberra hybrid. More, it is a question of hanging out, gossiping, and covering the underlying boredom of those without any constructive thought coupled with outbursts of anti-social behaviour – sexism,  drunkenness and sexual harassment.

Policy becomes a joke; so-called policy becomes exercises in plagiarism – or just the “smart-arse” taking the role of the cynic – tearing down all constructive thought on the grounds that they are protecting Absolute Truth – otherwise excused as the role of the Devil’s advocate. Undertaking policy development is a skill, imperfect at best. It is a special quality requiring knowledge, so you know that you are not re-inventing policies that have been shown not to work, and enough knowledge to provide objectivity in an ocean of bias coupled with an ability to write clearly and succinctly. These skills lie outside the normal skill set of the normal adviser appointee.

Staffers aplenty

Well, minimising the number of advisers minimises the number of people designed to irritate and thus it seems leaving it at one each for all backbenchers is probably about right. Only need one person to get your dry cleaning, run errands, and ensure that the backbencher has his or her ego combed daily.

Mouse Whisper

Don’t know whence it came. Just a scrap of paper with the title “Death of a Babyweight.”

…needless to say, the comment was met with gales of laughter, but then that was another time when the sun shone and they were feckless and shallow students; and yes, the Associate Professor was as Federico would say a total bunghole who played the World for cheap laughs a person who always knew the mouse to kick – and now lies increasingly forgotten – someone essentially trivial. 

Perhaps you will understand the allusion, illusion and in the end the confusion.

 

Modest Expectations – Sudan

It was a modest dilemma, but a dilemma nevertheless. We had stopped in Genoa, a small sliver of civilisation which had nearly been razed to the ground two years ago by the 2019-2020 bushfires which had burnt through the far east of Gippsland. It resembled a ghost town. The late autumn day was beautiful, and we noted that there was a new bridge over the river which flowed through the hamlet. So even though there seemed to be no one around, someone had spent money on the bridge.

We stopped in front of a very shabby building. The sign on the front of the building indicated that it was once a hotel/motel. It seemed to me to be disused; my wife disagreed. She thought there were people living there. There was no fence around the front of the motel.

However, in the front of the building was a tree loaded with lemons. There was only one windfall, and that was on the wrong side of ripe.

As we were contemplating a guy riding on a tractor rode up to the north wall of the motel, but did not stop. That was the only person we saw.

I looked at the lemons. They were many beautiful ripe yellow lemons.

I was tempted; my wife said no.

The dilemma:  Would you pick lemons off the tree or not?

We were only 45 minutes by taxi from Eden. Could not see any apple tree though.

Wistful in Werriwa

Werriwa (Lake George)

My eye was caught by a small piece which said that Morrison was contemplating winning Whitlam’s old seat of Werriwa. He had descended on that electorate to start the day with a group of locals, or so it was reported. Now Werriwa is the Aboriginal name for Lake George, which mysteriously periodically fills up with water and then empties, with no river flowing in and out to explain its fluctuation. Werriwa was one of the original electorates at the time of Federation.  As the population has grown, the electorate has moved closer to the southern outer suburbs of Sydney, and thus has been a stronghold of the Labor Party since 1934.

Morrison believed such a seat was winnable, as he cast himself as the Everyman battling the Political Elites. He was encouraged by a media machine that we have endured for a long time, particularly after the accession of Rudd, biased to the Coalition. Morrison was also buoyed by his surprise victory in 2019, with a major swing in Queensland. He made the assumption that he could cast himself as the champion of the working man. “Man” was the operative word. Werriwa has a woman member, and with a very “Anglo” name, Anne Stanley.

Added to that were migrant communities where you could sow the divisive wedge politics, particularly playing upon conservative religious practices. Here, sexuality and general relaxation of patriarchal family relationships, admixed with spurious declamation about religious freedoms, were perceived by Morrison and his advisers to be fertile ground for playing on prejudice to gain votes. The Liberal Party candidate was Sam Kayal, the surname Lebanese; and obviously he seems to be very friendly with the Mayor of Liverpool, who is also of Lebanese heritage, presumably Christian.

When you reviewed the first preferences in the recent Federal election, the Liberal Democrats, the One Nation Party and United Australia Party collected about 23 per cent of these. The Greens received a modest increase of just over one per cent to 6.6 per cent.

Both the major Parties in the allocation of first preferences lost ground – Labor lost eight per cent and the Liberals four per cent. After the allocation of preferences, the swing against the Labor Party had been reduced to 0.3 per cent. If the three right wing splinters had been solid for the Coalition, the seat would probably have fallen to the Liberals.

When I first read the piece about Morrison, I scoffed. Now it is food for thought; maybe it was a lockdown reaction, where each side received electoral contumely. Certainly, how the votes flow in the NSW election next year will be more interesting, because the antipathy to the enforced “lockdowns” should have faded by then.

Enter Dr Ryan

Let me say, as I have said before, that my health care has been very good, considering my co-morbidities. Yet I do not have one health professional who can provide all my ongoing care. Why? Because the world of medicine is so sub-specialised that having all the information in one place is impossible. As I have been a medical practitioner, I have navigated the system with varying degrees of success. This has meant that for probably six months my auto-immune disease was undiagnosed; but I knew when I was fibrillating and not reverting to sinus rhythm.

Take for instance, because of arthritic changes in both my cervical and lumbar spine, coupled with some symptomatology which suggested impairment of neural function, a spinal surgeon that he would operate. I found his clinical approach puzzling and consulted a colleague of mine – a neurologist – who said that, in his opinion, the operations were unnecessary. That was six years ago, and the disability caused by these changes has not progressed.

He retired but referred me to a neurologist in Sydney. The cost for the initial consultation was announced by the practice to be $800, more than three times the appropriate Medicare benefit. I would have thought that outrageous, especially so given that he would have my notes passed on by my previous neurologist who had settled for the Medicare benefit as full payment for a consultation.

Ironically, through the consultant physician professional association of which I was vice-president at the time, I had negotiated with the Commonwealth Health Department in 2006 to create the Medicare item which reflected recognition of significant complexity in consultations.

Let me say that the neurologist whom I consulted was understated, yet had an eye for detail; more importantly, he had wide clinical experience and a great modicum of common sense.

Talking of neurology, Professor Monique Ryan, a prominent paediatric neurologist has been elected to the Federal Parliament. As a member of a small sub-specialty, her natural health constituency is one of the “elitist” areas of the profession – small patient load given there are about 120 paediatric neurologists; yet, irrespective of needs, the sub-specialities keep on expanding. There is also a tendency in these small specialties for the doctors to become researchers or even more sub-specialised. In a review of the field, 250 neurological disorders have been isolated, but most are very rare diseases.

Yet reflexly the tendency continues to also train more and more, despite smaller and smaller patient load per neurologist.

As a result, they tend to “keep” their patients rather than “returning” them back to the referring doctor. The other way to expand the clinical base of the paediatric neurology sub-specialty is by moving into the mental disability field, where rehabilitation is the aim, or areas such as attention deficit disorders and autism, which have become very “popular” diagnoses.

Whenever I watch reports on these spectrum disorders, I am reminded of the successful long distance swimmer, who was concurrently being treated for chronic fatigue syndrome.

While many of my medical colleagues would bristle and dismiss my comments, it’s very difficult to get any medical sub-specialty to objectively review what has been achieved as against that which was promised over a given period – and to agree on when is “enough is enough”.

Monique Ryan may now represent the electorate of Kooyong; she also represents by her professional attainment and experience, a rather narrow tranche of the health system. That is not to decry its importance; it is a matter of the allocation of scarce resources. Now she has Parliamentary standing, her utterances will be interesting; especially as the ego lurks very close to the surface in most maiden speeches to Parliament. I will read hers with very great interest, given my own experience, and see where her priorities lie, once you strip away the comments of the generalities.

The dangers of  rampant sub-specialisation in medicine and elsewhere in the health system is just one potential dysfunction which needs to be rebalanced in the health system after the COVID-19 experience, an indifferent series of Federal Ministers and the unfortunate influence of a number of public servants,  some of whom should be ashamed to take their pensions let alone the consultant work they fouled up – and that is before Australia has a decent Integrity Commission to investigate whether there are shenanigans and rorts to attract any action.

If the aim is to get a more equitable spread of health professionals, then as one whose nationwide Rural Stocktake in 1999 led to the creation of the rural clinical schools and university departments of rural health among other changes and who introduced a successful intern training program and opposed lengthening the post-graduate training in the name of professional “slavery” rather than education, I have been disappointed that its success has been seemingly ignored and structures dismantled. Yet there is a crescendo of complaints about the lack of rural health professionals. I shall define the systemic pathology and suggest what has to be done in a number of my following blogs.

I just hope that the incoming Health Minister can think outside and beyond the normal temptation to just get the matter off his desk and onto the States, with resumption of the “blame game”.

The Fall of Globalisation – How inconvenient.

Danube Delta

In the years just before COVID-19 struck, I travelled widely, and in doing so visited Finland, the Baltic countries, and the countries on the lower Danube (Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary), the boat on which I was travelling ending up nosing into the Black Sea before turning around; also Croatia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Montenegro; Slovenia. I had been to Russia and Poland on earlier trips. Although it did not occur to me at the time, I was able to do this under the mantle of Globalisation; in fact, as long as you flew there you could also then visit Belarus from Lithuania. Belarus, together with Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, were the only two places where entry was not automatic in these European wanderings.

All the time Russians were seething; or rather Putin was seething with his Peter the Great complex. Plotting – planning for his dystopian world is just the end product of the authoritarian narcissist who gazes at their image in the world; the Chaplinesque caricature now widely spread across the world.

In the USA, it is unbelievable that the Republican Party, which ostensibly believes in free enterprise, has been complicit through the Vandal Trump in the Putin destruction of globalisation.

Trump was not the only one. For instance, the narcissist Rumsfeld cajoled a group of politicians into a “coalition of the willing” on the grounds that Iraq would be easy pickings for the American oil industry. Others may nuance it to share the blame around and saying pillorying one person is never the reason. However, George W. Bush’s famous assessment of Putin: “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country.” needs no commentary.

It seems that remains the belief of that great meddler, Henry Kissinger, who was so important in Hanoi winning the Vietnam war. Kissinger turned 99 a week ago; and his wrongheadedness is still being reported.

Nevertheless, the greatest win for Putin was to have his Manchurian candidate, Donald Trump, in the White House. Thus, while America slept or was “tarbabied” in Afghanistan, Putin consolidated his power base. If Hilary Clinton had been voted in as President instead of Trump in 2016, this current situation would not have arisen. She would have kicked the All European cocktail circuit which for years has gone under the name of NATO, in the backside. At the same time, Putin was meddling with a British Isles polity befuddled by one Nigel Farage who may well have been on the Soviet payroll in order to play wazir to the aspirant sultan Boris.

After all, in a prescient speech 12 years ago, Clinton stated inter alia: NATO Headquarters is bulging with over three hundred committees, many with overlapping responsibilities. Too often, our budgets – military and civilian – are divorced from Alliance priorities, and the most important priorities have been under-resourced for years. Our secretary general has not been invested with the power he needs to truly manage the organization. This must change – and we must agree to that change in parallel with the new Strategic Concept. A new Concept with old structures will not be transformational. In fact, it may not change much of anything at all.

But that did not happen. Hilary Clinton was a casualty at a time when the world was reaching a crescendo of dystopian behaviour.

Now, it has taken a young man, unencumbered by the cocktail circuit and with the true insight of the comedian, to stand up and fight. As he said, he does not need martini glasses, he needs the armaments to vaccinate Europe against this particularly virulent Russian variant of Monkey Pox. But old habits die hard; the clinking of glasses still resonate around the palaces of Brussels.

Old Age

“It is a giant labyrinth that you walk into, they lock the door behind you, and there is no exit,” she said. “I can’t keep doing this. I’m falling apart.”

I have been concerned with care of the aged since not long after I graduated in medicine in 1963. It is now 2022. During this time, there has been a huge change in the technology surrounding care of the aged.

Yet is this reflected in the care?

People are living longer, and hence the gap between ceasing employment and death is growing. I have joined the throng.

There is this myth that looking after old people is more about care rather than medicine. When I was in practice, I was less concerned with “fast rehabilitation”, typically treatment of the sporting injury, but more with so-called “slow rehabilitation”, the staff, including the doctors, employed all the expertise available to assures each person attains his or her highest level of capability, and then maintains it. While most are old; that is not necessarily the case.

The projected Labor Party policy is to have a registered nurse on duty 24/7 in every aged care facility, which equates to employing six registered nurses to cover the one position. This is very difficult to achieve given that government has allowed the nursing home to be separated from mainstream health care with different rules – and for aged care to be largely private. The more you diffuse the expertise of a group of professionals, especially with an absentee landlord, the more you undermine the staff morale which, in turn, leads to increased staff turnover.

When almost 20 years ago I started working as Director of Medical Services in a country hospital, to which was attached a nursing home, the first thing I did was a drug audit for each of the residents with the local pharmacist. I then asked each of the general practitioners how often they reviewed each resident’s medication charts, which most did with varying degrees of reluctance.

There was a visiting geriatrician at the time. “Visiting” was a joke. He would not visit the nursing home; insisting each patient be brought to the rooms from which he worked. Incredible. In the end I secured a mate of mine, a city geriatrician to periodically visit to not only see the nursing home residents but to also provide tutorials to the local doctors and other health professionals. The problem with any program which involves visiting staff is its sustainability.

When the policy makers – divorced from reality – say “train more staff”, it is far from a magic solution.

There are basically three ways of training staff

  • In dedicated training institutions,
  • On the job – apprenticeship style,
  • Importing staff trained in other countries,

coupled with:

  • Periodic in-service training programs.

To me, what is important is to reduce the attrition levels and minimise the spread of disease. Simple to say; hard to accomplish.

There has been a shift from people suffering stroke to those suffering dementia. The incidence of stroke has fallen because of improvement in cardiac treatment, in particular in the treatment of high blood pressure. With stroke, the hope is that the patient will improve; once improvement is stabilised, then the level of independent living ability can be assessed. The problem with dementia is to slow the rate of deterioration; but in both cases, redemption is a limited commodity.

Care of the aged as I have found out is care and competence. One of the most frustrating aspects to exercise even the basic function of getting out of a chair, which once was automatic, is having to wait for someone. The horrors of not being able to undertake normal bodily functions without soiling yourself is ever present. If many of the population are like me, impatient, then learning to wait becomes one of the challenges. This is compounded everywhere by the challenge of the furniture: once it was great to be able to sink into an armchair. Now the softness becomes a giant jellyfish from which you alone cannot escape.

The giant jellyfish

When I was involved with a nursing home attached to a country hospital, the key to its success was that the manager was very competent. Competency is being able to utilise the resources allocated to achieve that no patient is neglected – falls, hygiene, bed sores, nutrition, compliance with treatment being uppermost in those items monitored continually. She had an eye on how everyone was performing, which is what is needed in developing a coherent happy team and thus reducing the turnover of staff. This is important if employment is continually being disrupted by the pandemic.

I am one who believes that in community health structures you build from the bottom, not with great fanfare spray funding from the seat of government and the assumption it will work. There are packages of care everywhere, but who is monitoring the implementation rather than just the distribution of these government initiatives, which are often encased in impressive language, but of what meaning?

One may suggest a number of ways to improve the quality of care of the aged. I believe that there are indicators which denote good care. I also believe that there should be a credentialling, definition of practice and privileging system across the whole sector. When I tried to implement this process in aged care, despite it being the norm for hospitals, the Commonwealth Department of Health protested. Gives you an idea of the appalling track record of the Commonwealth Health Department in that sector. after all, has the sector improved since the kerosene bath era when Bronwyn Bishop was the Minister at the turn of the century? I have viewed hapless Federal Ministers, but the antics of Richard Colbeck in this sector shows how little the Coalition continue to view this sector of human existence.

As a result, a bad situation has festered.

Nursing homes should not be an area where the output is conspicuous consumption, as shown in the media by the acquisition of a yellow Lamborghini because of the apparent profitability embedded in the current aged care arrangements. As can be seen in the media, or in expensive church vestments (as we saw during the first year of COVID-19 when deaths in nursing homes were rampant), the residents of these facilities, many without comprehension, are in need of care, compassion and dignity. However, then give some thought to all the marvellous medical technology which has enabled lives to be extended in this way.

I am well aware that any system which seeks to monitor behaviour in all its forms will receive resistance; however, over a long period of time I have found that it works if you have the will to make it so. I am also a believer in hands-on management, not of the individual interaction between patient and health professional, but of the system. This has enabled me to pick up when inevitably, even with the best of intention, events go “pear-shaped”.

Also accept the blame for such situation where you are ultimately responsible. Then review when this happens – and one of the results of credentialing, defining the appropriate clinical practice and then privileging is that the staff members can learn from others – both the right and the wrong – with recriminations as a last resort.

Unfortunately, most systemic failures have an individual implicated; and that is often the hardest part – to get rid of that individual or individuals. A well constituted system under the new government, where all the parties are bought together in perhaps an electorate-based arrangement, so that each elected member can follow the monitoring of aged care in their electorate – and, as I said above, credentialing, definition of clinical practice and privileging would be one way of attracting attention to an area of past government neglect.

Perhaps a Prime Minister faced with the care of the aged will find out sooner than he thinks that he may need to enter its portals. Therefore he may like to receive periodic factual reports of what is currently occurring in his electorate of Grayndler and aim to visit each over the lifetime of the Parliament. After all, across Australia 151 committees should not be too much of a burden to assure better care of the aged, providing  insurance for that time which each of us will eventually reach, if we live long enough. To face being placed in a nursing home, and knowing that I will be cared for in the best way possible; not left to wallow and nobody comes.

After all, as I found out, 70 may be the new 50 years; but I assure you 80 is still 80.

I am not alone. However, even though there has been an extensive review of this area recently, who of us has been consulted? Who among us aged is the protector of that increasing group of people alongside me who are demented? You see in your contemporaries the slow decline in cognitive function, the irrational behaviour, and unless each one of them has a carer who truly cares for them and has the resilience to battle the many hurdles to getting an acceptable aged care situation, they end up on a scrap heap which, for administrative purposes, is called a nursing home.

The nursing home nightmare is when I cry out, but nobody comes.

Mouse Whisper

Serious Mouse! 

Since 1982, 123 mass shootings have been carried out in the USA by male gunmen. In contrast, only three mass shootings (defined by the source as a single attack in a public place in which four or more victims were killed) have been carried out by women.

Mass shooter

Modest Expectations – Romeo, Romeo, where art thou?

Overlooking wild surf beaches, through rolling forested areas, past marae on the road between Russell and Whangerei was the sign in Ukrainian colours “Stop Putin – Stop War”.

Yes, this week we are in New Zealand. The only readily available news is sport, and the Sky sport channels provide one with the luxury of tuning into any of the popular football codes. However, in regard to news there is BBC, Al-Jazeera and CNN, together with the Murdoch propaganda channels – and Ukraine is there with all the Putrid reminders.

The wonderful feature of New Zealand is how varied yet peaceful is the countryside. Nevertheless, New Zealand lives on the edge, and its nickname of “The Shaky Isles” is well-earned. New Zealand lies on fault line; here the Pacific and Australian tectonic plates meet in a complicated manner. The edges of these plates, which meet under New Zealand, are not straight lines so the collision zone does not behave the same way along its whole length. Also, the convergence is not perpendicular to the plate boundary and there is rotation of the plates, hence an addition to this complex boundary.

New Zealand’s volcanoes and earthquakes happen because it is in this collision zone where the edges of two plates converge and moreover to the east of the North Island the heavy, oceanic Pacific Plate is sinking below the lighter, continental Australian Plate. This is called subduction.

When major earthquakes and volcanoes are plotted worldwide they reveal that New Zealand is part of a huge “ring” of volcanic and earthquake activity. The plate boundaries around the Pacific Ocean are the most active in the world and this area is often referred to as the “Ring of Fire”. Although the Pacific Plate is the world’s largest tectonic plate, the South Island is the only significant area of New Zealand on the whole plate, thus making it a truly oceanic plate.

The upshot of this long description is that the further north one travels, the less likely there will be a major earthquake. To me, if I were to migrate to New Zealand as I have been sorely tempted to do, given the state of Australian turpitude, I would thus prefer to live in these upper reaches of the North Island. As I remarked before, when staying a little further north, there were bananas ripening and the flowers are distinctly tropically flamboyant. In this motel outside our door is a rhododendron with delicate tangerine flowers. Opening the local newspaper there is a double page spread about coffee growing up here in the Northland.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the Hawkes Bay area, but the beautiful Art Deco architecture is a reminder of the massive 1931 earthquake, which effectively levelled both Napier and Hastings; hence the characteristic architecture of the rebuilt towns. I remember the story of the earth movement raising the floor of the lagoon to such an extent during that earthquake that the water drained away leaving a huge number of fish literally out of water. The image of people scurrying across the floor of the lagoon grabbing as many fish as they could, while all round was trembling and 256 people have just died is somewhat Brueghelesque.

That is enough incentive to move to Northland.

Bay of Islands

However, enough of this rhapsodising, for in this new world of COVID-19 before you leave Australia and enter New Zealand, you need to have a COVID test – either a PCR or a supervised RAT (Rapid Antigen Test). Now we all know that you can test yourself; but not if you are going to New Zealand, you have to go to a “certified testing site” for this supervised test.

Ah, Australia – the land of neoliberal gouging! We got off lightly – $110 for two. However, elsewhere the gouge was on – over $100 for one. Try one of the multi-national pathology companies which repatriate our Medicare money overseas. The unintended consequences of government indifference to what was once an excellent scheme called Medicare – now MediCarruptus!

However, I digress.

Get to New Zealand where neoliberalism lingers in the ghost of Rogernomics. Concern for the Virus is sustained more than in Australia. On entry to the country the New Zealand authorities gave us three RATs each, for free, for self-testing on day one and day five/six. An extra test was provided in the event of the test needing to be repeated. Self-administered; self-reported – at no cost. Day one RATs went without a hitch, as did RATs on Day 5.

Higgins 2019 as writ by The Guardian

“The people of Higgins — a compassionate community that wants to see a transition to a renewable economy to tackle climate change — see that the Liberals don’t represent their values anymore.”

Ms O’Dwyer joins a string of Liberal women who are departing at this year’s election. (describing in other media she wanted to be with her family and wistfully wanting a third child even though she was already over 40)

Queensland MP Jane Prentice was dumped by preselectors, South Australian Lucy Gichuhi was relegated to an unwinnable spot on the party’s Senate ticket, and Ann Sudmalis blamed “branch-stacking, undermining and leaks” for her decision not to recontest the New South Wales seat of Gilmore.

Julia Banks also abandoned the Liberal Party late last year and moved to the crossbench, describing the treatment of women in Parliament as “years behind” the business world.

The usual suspects?

Less than one quarter of Government MPs are women, while nearly half of all federal ALP MPs are women.

The Liberal Party has a goal for women to make up half of its party room by 2025

Higgins 2022 as writ by Katie

Kelly O’Dwyer having resigned, the Liberal Party preselected a woman, a paediatrician with impeccable credentials in allergy – particularly peanuts.

Katie Allen – wow Katie – not Katherine or even Kate but Katie. She must be a radical.

Alas no; if the opinion piece she recently ventilated is any guide.

After all, what was such an educated person doing in a party where misogyny is rife, where its ministers allegedly bash their partners, where funding for universities, health and research is routinely sacrificed to satisfy the coal fetishists lurking in the denizens.

Perhaps Higgins is perceived as a safe seat. Harold Holt held it for decades.

After the former leader of the Greens, Dr Di Natale, boasted before the 2019 election that Higgins was up for grabs, it was retained by the Coalition.  Thus, in the end he was wrong. Katie Allen sneaked over the line with a six per cent swing against her.

Given she is a woman, with substantial credibility from her career achievements, her electorate stretches from South Yarra and Toorak, (her comfortable stamping ground) to Murrumbeena and Carnegie – less so. She is a classical Liberal lady in the Margaret Guilfoyle tradition – very self-contained – only showing her real hand rarely.

Yet here we have an opinion piece which is just arrant nonsense.

I suspect if she were not a female she would have a Teal candidate added to the Rouge et Verde already confronting her.

I read her piece and thought here we go again. I was working for the Liberal Party leader when little Katie was a six year old and the only difference is that it is a woman allegedly saying the same old “broad church” crap – the apologia of a conservative person, who has been caught up in the brutish rural socialism and plutocracy of the National Party; wedged among the kleptomaniac remnant of the Liberal Party. Whether she authored the piece would be the subject of a statutory declaration saying that she had actually written it.

Dr Allen as reflected in her pronouncements is deeply embedded in the Liberal Party, and once stood for the seat of Prahran. Her electorate at one end represents the environment in which she has lived for her 40 years. Her electorate encompasses the dilemma of once being safe, now redistributed to include areas which traditionally are more Labor in orientation.

Over the years Higgins has stretched out to include areas that somebody inured to living in Higgins for 40 years would find unfamiliar. The image she projects in her advertisements is that of wholesome privilege; many photos of her with children from private schools, but then they have traditionally been the backbone of the future voters in Higgins. After all, she herself was a student at Merton Hall, which is now just outside her electorate – a matter of a few streets.

So here is the member of Higgins defending a party that is deeply misogynistic, deeply embedded in financial miscreance, opposed to an anti-corruption commission with real power, and moreover a former paediatrician who should be voicing opposition to the internment of refugee children including the “Biloela Four”. She bleats that she has actually crossed the floor once – and is that the face of the moderate Liberals?  Once, surely not!

Then she has the temerity to rhetorically ask: “But what does he (Fred Chaney) think will happen after the election if any of my moderate colleagues, who sit inside the party room, have been replaced by teal independents who aren’t inside the tent?”

What indeed.

I hesitate to say it but if she survives this election, she should use her expertise in peanut allergy to reform the Coalition. Otherwise she had better leave the tent flap open.

The Big Question

What does a breakout company like Moderna do for an encore? More than a decade after its founding, the Cambridge biotech rolled out its first commercial product last year. And what a debut it was: a cutting-edge COVID-19 vaccine that helped to save thousands ― if not millions ― of lives around the world.

It was also a massive money maker for Moderna, which up until then had been unprofitable. With more than $38 billion in total COVID-19 vaccine sales expected by the end of this year ― many of the doses paid for by governments ― investors are wondering what the company plans to do with that windfall. Despite Moderna’s spectacular success, the question of what’s next looms large, and the pressure is on to avoid becoming a one-hit wonder.

The same profit is expected for Pfizer and their vaccine. While there are accusations of excessive profits floating about, it is noted that Moderna is not seeking any payment for its vaccine being copied in South Africa.

Teal – the added colour of Port Adelaide

When Port Adelaide were admitted to the AFL the colour card was held at their head. Collingwood were the true Magpies – and their colours (even though neither is technically a colour) would remain black and white. The interlopers with their Prison Bar black and white jersey would henceforth have teal added to their colours and be forever “Power” not “Magpies.”

After all, this was a proud group of Croweaters, who at various times have been Cockledivers, Seaside Men, Seasiders, Magentas, Portonians, Ports. So switching onto the Power should have not been too much of a “big Teal”.

The colour “teal” comes from the green flash on the side of the teal duck’s head (teal comes the old Dutch word for this bird). Well, the colour is not actually green but a shade of blue admixed. To me the colour of the bird’s head is more a metallic green sometimes seen as the colour of souped up Holdens. However, those who have appropriated the colour for political purposes as was attempted in New Zealand in an aborted attempt to form  an alliance between the Greens and the conservative blue Nationals left the colour as its legacy.

Interestingly it was in the Italian town of Comaccio in the Po Delta where I encountered a cooked teal. We had arrived at this restaurant famous for its eels, as was the whole area, located as it was so close to the sea – in an environment of both fresh and salt water. I naturally ordered the eel, and immediately met resistance from mine host because the time that would be taken to cook it.  It was after four. They wanted to close by five pm – and we were offered an alternative.

“Alzavole” was the offer, and that was how I had a meal of roast teal. It was excellent – a fitting replacement.  The Italian word for “teal” in Italian literally means “get up and fly.”

How fitting for this group of Independents seeking election.

Success is always the result of timing.  A group of women provoked by the appalling record of the government on climate change and the failure of  placement of women on the same societal level as men, should enter the political arena. Some years ago at a lunch with a journalist of about my vintage I said that this country needed a group of candidates, independents of the three major parties to get together to prosecute a centrist role. My luncheon companion was sceptical because it was 2019 before the pandemic, and he was right. The time was not yet right although the saffron cauldron was bubbling. Then enter Simon Holmes a’Court.

My experience of student politics came before the student electorate became factionalised. You were voted for as an individual not on a party slate. Mistakenly I believed that one could weave a path through politics where issues were the subject of debate not of maximising self indulgence and corruption, in all its forms. Ideals burnt with the books.

These women are all articulate and counterpoint the shallow ugliness of some of their opponents, where lurk allegations, which if true, reveal a disgusting degeneracy in those who purport to be our leaders. What currently exists in the Coalition is akin to a cancer, which keeps metastasising. On the sidelines there are, among others, Fred Chaney, a former Coalition Minister, who represented the Liberal Party I once knew, where there was a balance within the conservative ranks, but where radicals were generally on the left of the conservative element, not on the right.

The whiff of the fascist has always been there, but with the demise of the Democratic Labor Party, the Falangist element drifted into the Liberal Party. This has been coupled to this heretical mob of creationists that used to be confined to Sunday morning ranting but unfortunately given a legitimacy by one Billy Graham, has now become a suffocating legacy of humbug in the Liberal Party.

If the Teal women can exert their influence by getting elected and restoring some secular order, then Australia can look forward to moving from the current situation with some hope. What is also very important is David Pocock winning a Senate seat in the ACT under its banner. An all woman faux-Party does have a certain political vulnerability, as Maxine McKew found out when she drifted far too close to the Sun (and probably the Daily Telegraph). Some say the cause was more a defective Rudder.

Nevertheless, the accession of the Teals will mean one positive effect – the gradual removal of the Murdoch influence to another place – the sporting pages. Then they can remember that Collingwood are still the black and white; and well, Teal was a compromise.    

To Chris Brook – with considerable help from W.H. Auden

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, 
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, 
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum 
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. 

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead 
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead, 
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves, 
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves. 

W.H. Auden’s beautiful poem is so eloquent in setting  aside that time to mourn but Chris was not for me

… my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest,  My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song.

Instead, in my own words without Auden’s genius to guide my hand,

He was my irritant
My collaborator
That solitary polymath thinker
That unleashed gregarious drinker
He was stoical
He was not
He was rude
He was generous
He was Quixote
But also Voltaire
Above all he was my mate Christopher, flaws and all. 
And I shall miss him dearly

The last time we had an exchange of emails was on the morning of his death. It was about Aspen Medical. Just a normal day. Then we went to New Zealand. And Chris went to God knows where.

Então meu amigo não Adeus; apenas Até logo.

Tilting at Windmills … God knows where

It is always Caos in Italy

Prince Rupert is always “banging on” about correctness of language, syntax, constantly worrying about splitting his infinity and when to appropriately use the colon and the semicolon when expressing opinion. Journalism is notably attracting the barely literate, he moans. Take the example of the football writer for an Opposition Roundhead publication who talked about “zealousness”. The word is “zeal” or perhaps “zealotry”, but not “zealousness”.

It is a small sign of where journalism is headed – to the bottom.

Yes, my dear journalist who confuses “tortuous” with “tortured” and struggles with “disinterest” and “uninterest”. And spells “chaos” with either a “K” or without the “h”.

What does make sense if these bottom feeding journalists want to play “Gotcha”, then journalists themselves are fair game. After all they rank just above politicians in community ranking. Prince Rupert did not say that!  The community did.

The smart arse journalist is always trying to find the electoral tipping point so that it is sufficient for an intrinsically lazy pack to pile in and attribute failure to this one tipping point.

The 1993 election is always mentioned in the context of the birthday cake episode in which Mike Willesee in interviewing John Hewson asked him the effect of GST on the price of a birthday cake. Hewson gave a qualified reply, as any honest politician should give, but his answer was transposed into a triumphant fourth estate “gotcha”.

As John Hewson said later, after his defeat in the 1993 election and subsequent ousting from leadership and retirement from Parliament, he should have told Willesee to get stuffed. Increasingly, the smart arse journalist should receive what should be known as this “Hewson Solution”. Adam Bandt recently demonstrated its application in one of his Press Conferences.

Finally, that hesitant young journalist recently reading a very stupid irrelevant question from her phone, obviously planted by some other journalist higher up in the Albanesegotcha phylum, will live long in the annals of rank idiotic desperation. As for the young journalist, my advice is: “Get a brain and not to rely on another person’s Offal.”

Mouse Whisper

This is an Iranian puzzle – not that difficult.

What is blue in the field, red in the market, yellow on the table?

Answer in above text.

Modest Expectations – Indium

Before the age of blogs I used to listen to Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America, in which he would take a current situation and tie it into past lessons learnt, and in such a way that each letter was a beautifully crafted piece of writing with a beginning and an ending – a complete expression of his view, with a moral woven into it. An Englishman, he had gone to America before War II and became a US citizen in 1941. He not only had this gift as a writer but also as a TV and documentary producer and presenter. His insight into the American way of life was his core expertise, and he wrote it. His voice, with its perfect diction and ghostly tone with a slight tremolo, was particularly engaging, because of his distillation of intimacy. He may have been broadcasting to the world, but as you listened you felt he was speaking directly to you.

Alistair Cooke

I would have liked his life as an intellectual commentator but writing a “Blog from America” for 58 years … I wonder. As for emulating his TV career – no.  I would have been hopeless. The smell of the greasepaint and the roar of the crowd makes me throw up, so phobic I am of the TV studio.

Forty years plus ago I went to the Kimberley and wrote several short stories centred on the places I visited. The story reprinted below entitled “The Island” recounted most closely my experience, while stretching reality into a yarn. It was the first time I felt the unspoken force of this country, without being privileged to have Aboriginal heritage. I have divided this story into several parts, and the first part introduces the Wandjina.

As background to the story, I searched throughout the various places I visited in the Kimberley looking for a bark Wandjina. Apart from a few images in books, I knew very little until I saw images of Wandjina on rock walls.

I managed to find one small bark Wandjina for sale in Kununurra, which I gave to my elder son. Since then, my wife and I have acquired several Wandjina painted by the Karedada sisters – Lily and Rosie (the Karedadas were the family with the responsibility at that time for painting Wandjina); a small bark painting by Waigan and one where the provenance was unknown as it was created in the mid-1960s when such bark representations of the Wandjina were new. Most of these bark images came from the Aboriginal people living at Kalumburu, a settlement on Mission Bay about 230 kilometres north of the Gibb River Road turnoff in Western Australia. Here the Spanish Benedictines had established a mission in the early part of the twentieth century. One of my teachers had said that during WWII, when he was in the Australian navy, he had been stranded there. The priests only spoke Spanish and he not; therefore, they communicated in Latin. No mention in any of his anecdotes of contact with the Indigenous people; such were the times.

Anyway, here is the first part of the story; the eyes are those of my hero, Bill:

In the Northwest of Western Australia in the winter of 1979, the sun starts to set before 5 o’clock. In fact, in that season, it sets at the same time every year. It’s a big country, Western Australia. Bigger than Texas. And the clocks are set to Perth time, even when one is far from the comfort of having a second martini and enjoying the broad sweep of the Swan River. The clocks of suburbia determine that the sun sets prematurely in the north country where the gulfs in the dreamtime were torn out of the coastline and waterfalls run horizontal.

Sixty kilometres up one of these gulfs lies the Port. The expanse of water it overlooks is called the Gut. It vaguely resembles a flaccid stomach.

In the pale purple twilight, the hills brood over this tiny town with its shacks distinct from the new fibro-cement houses on the other side of the hill.

Bill surveyed the car in the fast falling light. Parked on the rise outside the police compound, it had two flat tyres.

The lady from Avis had said that he could have the car if he could get to the Port and pick it up. It was the only hire car available. She said it would be very recognisable because it was iridescent purple — just a medium-sized sedan.

However, as he surveyed the car, he could see it had no protection — none of that ugly but highly effective steel tubing, the so-called roo bars, nor chicken wire to protect against stray rocks through the windscreen.

And there were the two flat tyres.

The Port began to twinkle with ship and house lights. The timber shop fronts threw pools of yellow light onto the street.

But back to Bill. The highly qualified Bill.

Bill, the centre of his own rather inconsiderable space, was a medical practitioner in his early thirties. His family was “old money”. He had mixed his profession with research. His days were spent closeted in a laboratory, occasionally venturing into the antiseptic stretch of the ward to teach a few students and to pronounce on the inmates’ futures, for a price. Bill had reached a steady kind of existence, punctuated by dinner parties, the game of squash, the odd casual affair, and cultivated displays of intellect at conferences, seminars and workshops.

Holidays were spent in expensive resorts. That is to say, generally. This year, Bill had decided to come north and have an adventure of sorts. Bill was accustomed to pre-booked travel, accommodation with deferential staff and a car readily available, with a driver if necessary.

When he had flown into the Town on the Dam, he expected the same, even though his arrangements had been made in a hurry. “No way!” she had said. Cars were at a premium. You can try other hire car outfits, but you’ll get the same answer. She had paused. There was one option. “The only car is up the Port, and if you can get up there, it’s yours.” She paused again and then went on. “It’s got two flat tyres you’ll have to get fixed.”

No wonder it was stuck there, he thought. Didn’t know whether he could do it — make the Port. But when he got back to the motel, he noticed a group preparing to leave. He recognised one as a prominent ear nose and throat specialist from Perth. The specialist was heading a team charged with doing good. He wondered where they were going. He asked. They were going to the Port. He was offered a lift, and straight away accepted.

These guys knew the north — they had spent the latter part of their professional lives coming back and forth at least twice a year to treat the local Aboriginal people and the whites alike. Ear infections were rife among the Aboriginal kids — needed grommets in many cases.

They were good blokes, with a sense of enjoyment of the Land. They had an easy familiarity with the sweeping majesty of the country, where the Cloud spirit was still in control and white people only visited. She had bestowed her grace on the black people, which reflected from the deep pools in their eyes. Look into their eyes and see the arcane. It was Aboriginal country. They walked free in the country without compass. They defined their ownership and boundaries. Bill listened to this explanation. Maybe it was a white man’s interpretation.

Bill had sat next to the specialist surgeon who was leading the team, and who had provided his view of what he called “the blackfella”. It was all so unfamiliar to Bill. He had hopped from town to town, seeing the sights, seeing the Aboriginal people roaming the streets, but he had no experience of communicating with them.

Their driver was identified as a Ngarinyin man who knew the country. They called him Stanley. He was a broad chested man with an equally broad smile. He wanted to know whether Bill wanted to see some rock paintings on the way. The leading specialist thought it a good idea, that it would give Bill an experience — probably “teach you something.”

“Sure” said Bill.

The sun was pleasant. It was June. The company was convivial. Even when they stopped and walked, it was exhilarating. There had first been a track which could be negotiated for some way with the four-wheel drive, but in the end it was easier to walk through the deep sands of the dry creek beds. This was Stanley’s country. The guide shaded his eyes and indicated the rock face.

The brown cliffs where the paintings were, he’d explained as they’d walked, were thankfully not well known and the track, although not particularly difficult to walk, was sufficiently far from the main road to deter any casual defiler. There was always some idiot wanting to scratch his name on the wall — any wall. Weaving in among the woollybutt eucalypts, the track moved up and then downwards. As they walked, the day was imperceptibly vanishing. The shadows were lengthening as they picked their way along the rock face where the figures were displayed.

There were large fish — here a snake — there a hand, an impression in red ochre dust. Tasselled dancing figures. He was told they were called Bradshaw figures, and there were doubts about their authenticity. They were not Aboriginal figures, unlike the wandjina. He had never seen them before. The wandjina were cloud spirits — images with eyes and speckled brows. Their heads were surrounded by radiating lines, which completed an aura. This wandjina was a wellspring of sacred images for the Aboriginal people, unlike the Bradshaw figures.

Some of the paintings were high on the cliff walls; some under overhanging ledges. The gallery ran for hundreds of metres around the cliff until it reached the point where a waterfall flowed in the wet season. The artists had stopped here; the mural was complete. The rock pigeons, their fusty brown feathers giving a sense of an age past, were coming in to roost as the day began to wane.

“Better get going. Still got a way to go.”

The voice broke the stillness, as they had said little, as if in church. The others had seen it before; they had pointed out features in quiet, clipped tones. Bill had nodded and absorbed as much as he could. He wondered at how irrelevant had been his experience in Downtown Perth on a Sunday afternoon, sipping the art gallery ambience. He had really not particularly liked Aboriginal art — bark painting. There was not much of it that he could remember anyway.

But here, in a brief moment, he had got some sense of the art, some context for it — a fleeting insight only; not the meaning that Stanley possessed. (to be continued).

Door County

Door County is a spit of land separating Lake Michigan and Green Bay in northern Wisconsin. Green Bay, the city, lies at the gateway to the peninsula, and has been settled since the seventeenth century when it was a base for fur traders. It is now known for paper manufacture, of being the toilet paper capital of the world – and the home of the NFL Green Bay Packers, so called because a meat packing company gave them $500 for uniforms when they were founded.

Anyway, we bypassed the city of Green Bay, which gets its name from the periodic algae infestation of the Bay. Yet Door County, once you clear the environs of Green Bay, is one the memorable places we have visited.

Memory of that time was bought on this week by the news of a three generation Ukrainian heritage family that has been mass producing candles in the Ukrainian colours (sale proceeds going to the Ukrainian cause) which, unsurprisingly once this was published on national television, elicited a strong demand for the candles across America.

It was Halloween when we visited Door County; pumpkins were everywhere, and the normal crop of witches, faux cobwebs and skeletons and things that are supposed to go bump in the night was very much in evidence.

We stayed in the traditional white clapboard Ephraim Inn, overlooking Lake Michigan. When we went to dinner, we had an unexpected shock. I asked for the wine list and was informed that Ephraim was “dry”. If we wanted a drink with our meals we would have to go down the road to Fish Creek. Fortunately, Fish Creek was well served by restaurants and the Coho salmon fished from the Lake was so good it enticed us to order it two nights in a row.

Since our visit, I believe that Ephraim has lifted the 163 year old ban on alcohol sales which was imposed in 1853 within this Moravian community, where its church with its delicate steeple still stands on a green knoll overlooking Ephraim.

Honeycrisp apples

It was the end of the apple picking season, and there was an abundance of places from which to buy apples. The Gala apple was a familiar variety, but there were at least 20 other varieties and we chose the Honeycrisp, a hybrid noted for its juiciness and crunchiness. But there were many more completely unfamiliar to our Australian palate such as Ginger Gold and Courtland.

We drove the length of the peninsula through the small seaside towns, beside orchards, around windy cliff roads. To me, village America always has its gentle attraction – so different from the dusty flood plain called Australia. As for Door County, even though it seemed to be an endless excuse for Bing Crosby or Doris Day songs, we said we would be back, but we have said that about many places – plans that the Virus has impaired if not totally destroyed.

Anyway, we must get a candle making kit.

Need to Ramp Up

In The Monthly two months ago, Russell Marks wrote a very prescient article about South Australia opening its borders at the time the Omicron virus hit and now has followed the B.a.2 variant.

Simply stated, the Premier, Stephen Marshall, opened the SA borders prematurely – at a time when the Omicron variant first appeared on the scene. The SA Chief Health Officer hurriedly changed her mind when she saw the rapid increase in the number of cases, and recommended the borders be closed again. The Premier did not take her advice. He deferred to the select audience of the Rupert Murdoch and Peter Costello media and its impatience with public health measures.

It was the people of South Australia who could see what damage the Virus was wreaking. This was particularly reflected in the disruption to the health services, and the so-called ramping.  In other words, there was the number of ambulances lying idle unable to discharge the patient into the hospital’s emergency department.

I have reviewed extensively two major ambulance services in Australia and have a fair idea of the problems, which extend far wider than the problems that a pandemic introduces. The pandemic has only emphasised these problems.

Against that background of a State under public health stress, the Premier said that he would prefer funding a basketball stadium and a convention centre which only compounds the politico-pathological requirement to build monuments. Once it was hospitals and universities, now it is modern day colosseums where the pork barrel stops.

Despite the media in his favour, Marshall was soundly defeated; and yet elements of the media still say it doesn’t necessarily translate into a Federal electoral defeat for Morrison, despite him being invisible during the campaign. The sight of John Howard being rolled out in the last days showed how far the Liberals were tapping the bottom of desperation. One question – never to be answered – would a Morrison intervention counterpointed by Dutton and Frydenberg, a modern magi, have helped? The locals thought not, but presumably when they do turn up during the Federal election the public will be able to have a direct say in how much it likes the frankincense.

What will be more interesting is how the new Premier will approach the Virus.

I am confused by what the current approach to the Virus is. It seems that the Governments have given up – the public health response is exhausted. Who are the public health champions? The public health talking heads have subsided with the media’s apparent loss of interest. One of public health’s weaknesses is how ineffectual the Australasian Faculty of Public Health Medicine has been and yet two decades ago it led the Australian campaign against French nuclear testing in the South Pacific until the French stopped their tests.

I would have thought that there would be a clear approach. On the one hand there are no restrictions, until a person gets the Virus and then you go into isolation until you test negative. Politicians are scared solid by lockdowns, and the core of preventative measures – social distancing, hand sanitiser and masks – are increasingly a matter of choice.

Vaccination has proved effective up to a point, but now there are no penalties for not being vaccinated, and the relentless anti-vaccination advocates leave a confused community. If this new variant is as contagious as measles, then without due precautions that will mean the whole community will contract it and for a substantial part of the community, the experience will not be a mild one.

The difference with measles is that once infected, once immunised, measles will not recur. No such guarantee exists for the Virus, even if the experts decide it is less virulent.

In public policy terms, I have been advocating dedicated quarantine centres. But once that line of defence is breached, then the next lines of defence are dedicated infectious diseases hospitals with an equally dedicated transport service for those who need hospitalisation. 

Hardly the Little Match Girl 

They buried Kimberley Kitching this week. A Senator from Victoria, she had been parachuted into the Senate under controversial circumstance in 2016 by Bill Shorten when he was ALP leader. She died prematurely at the age of 52, and from then, she became a cause célèbre – a woman harassed to death by unfeeling female colleagues.

As reported in some quarters, it was as though Senator Kitching was the “little match girl”, judging by the ferocious story being constructed around her demise.  She was married to Andrew Landeryou, once joint owner of a palatial home “Wardlow” in Parkville; friend of Chloe Shorten since school days and embroiled in the Health Services Union known for its shenanigans while she was general manager.

The Little Match Girl, Norman Rockwell

Unlike the “little match girl”, Kitching came from a privileged Brisbane private school background. Her father was a university professor, and she benefited from a time in France to becomes fluent in French. She seemed to be a very quick-witted woman. Nevertheless, like many ambitious people she carved out a career never far from controversy.

In 2000, she married Andrew Landeryou, a scion of the inner ALP circle which his dad inhabited. He too has had his moments, from the time of his presidency of the Melbourne University Student Union (formerly, in my time, the Student Representative Council), where he apparently tried to commercialise aspects of that student body. It is strange that when I was President of the same body there were moves, ultimately squashed, to have the Council purchase property at Venus Bay, then an undeveloped collection of sand dunes. I remember looking at it and saying thanks, but no thanks. SRCs were not structured to be land developers. In any event, in his case it did not end well for young Landeryou.

Later he popped up in 2005, with a venture financed by Solomon Lew in part – and when it failed he decamped to Costa Rica leaving Kimberley, portrayed as the victim wife trying to deal with the remains. The suggestion was that Kimberley had been deserted, but whether that was so, they had been swiftly re-united even though Landeryou was bankrupted.

From December 2012, Kitching was employed by the Health Services Union and she was never far away from the controversy which surrounded the criminal behaviour of the local secretary of the union, the recently convicted Kathy Jackson, and the other national officers of the Union, also convicted. Whatever her role was, she obviously was close to some sordid shenanigans and her name was mentioned often in despatches.

For instance, in 2016, the Senate voted 35-21 to note that she, although its newest member, was found to have provided untruthful evidence to the Fair Work Commission. The Greens joined the Coalition in backing the motion, which also received support from three One Nation senators and Victorian senator Derryn Hinch. Quite an introduction!

The conservative Tasmanian Senator Abetz noted in a media release at the time, The fact that Opposition Leader Bill Shorten has backed Kitching so strongly in the face of findings against her from a body that Bill Shorten oversaw for two years, for conduct undertaken while he was the Minister responsible, that she was “untruthful and unreliable” in evidence speaks volumes about his personal and Labor’s standards for public office.”

Ironically, Kitching worked with him in the Senate to introduce a Magnitsky law that allows the government to seize assets from people who have abused human rights around the world.

This was no poor little waif as the media and a few of her mates are trying to portray now. She dined with persons who had clearly shown themselves to be enemies of the ALP, and thus one of the problems for a networker as aggressive as she apparently was, with all “the form” behind her, was whether she could be trusted.

To be able to do what Kitching, herself apparently conservative (in very much as I remember some of the Democratic Labor Party members were), was trying to do, is a particular art form, if one tries to balance on the barbed wire division of an adversarial political system.

Her colleagues who voted against the condemnation of her in 2016 were worried by her free-wheeling approach, whether right or wrong. She was not bullied; she was ostracised – however, the use of “bullying” is more emotive. Ostracism is a favourite ploy in politics.

She dies, and the conservative side of politics well known for their Salem approach to female opponents were on the job. The real target seems to be Penny Wong, as Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs, who has been a courteous brick wall. She made one exasperated comment which has been turned into a causal relationship with Kitching’s death despite occurring three years ago and eliciting an apology from her.

Morrison wants to run an election based on sabotage and camouflage and if Senator Wong can be discredited so much the better, especially given her appearance and name – nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

I suppose last Sunday’s ABC Insiders Program took the proverbial cake. I generally accept bias as part of politics, but this… Australia may be going to Hell in a handcart, but there they were, all over the Kitching case – at least Samantha Maiden and Spears Interruptus were.

Greg Sheridan played the avuncular role, his views laced within his long time association with Santamaria and the National Civic Council – a fading reminder of the strife within the Labor party, particularly in Victoria, generated by Santamaria and certain elements around Archbishop Mannix so many moons ago, but still apparently latent.

Mark Kenny, knowing he was in a setup, just let it flow apart from a few comments drowned out by the Interruptus.  Australia is entering a time of a new form of Government – Murdocracy – a neologism to describe rule by the media.

Now, to the next phase – Albanese portrayed as the weak leader in the grip of three women – each of whom portrayed as having a doubtful allegiance to Australia. Yes, Murdocracy indeed.

As a postscript, I was interested in the association of sudden cardiac death and thyroid disease. Obviously I have had no access to Kitching’s clinical notes but it is worthy to note that in a 2016 cohort study in The Netherlands, an association was sought between thyroid disease and sudden cardiac death. This was an extensive population cohort and it was shown that raised levels of free thyroxine were associated with an increased incidence of sudden cardiac death, even when the patient was “apparently” euthyroid (in other words in the normal range).

It is well known that the thyroid hormone derived from the thyroid gland in the neck is a major component in the regulation of metabolism. For example, in thyrotoxicosis tachycardia is often present, as in hypothyroidism bradycardia is evident. However, The Netherlands’ paper could not establish any causal relationship for the phenomenon of sudden cardiac death, which incidentally also occurs in the autoimmune Hashimoto’s Disease. There was no mention of “bullying” or “ostracism” in this analysis

Mouse Whisper

In response to the article on banana boats last week our Swedish correspondent has informed us there is a job available in Stockholm for a banana ripener. The incumbent has recently retired after 33 years during which he has assisted the ripening of 55,000 bananas per year. Sounds a succulent job. I may apply. The Swedish text books with a tipple of Aquavit beckon.

Modest Expectations – Harry & Izzys

Old Geelong Grammarians?

What on earth prompted the Prime Minister to label Richard Marles the Manchurian Candidate. He doesn’t look a bit like Laurence Harvey. But then again, the trailer to the film says that if you come into the film five minutes late you won’t know what it is about. Sounds familiar.

Look, we all know that Richard Marles did go to Geelong Grammar School, and he is the member for Corio. A Cambridge blue scion amid the dark blue singlet brigade of Corio, but known to have actually eaten Beijing duck in Beijing. That must have been the clue which triggered off Marco Morrison, with his rendition of Frank Sinatra.

Now you must know something, Prime Minister, who is this assassin you alluded to because, as you know, the Manchurian candidate was programmed to kill, and the trigger was the queen of diamonds. Are you sure that you are not the target, and who plays the part of the wicked Angela Lansbury as Eleanor, or moreover Janet Leigh then fresh from her Psycho scream?

In a way, the film ended up with there being no Trumps, but you’ll have to see the film to understand exactly what I mean.

Remember the advice above. Don’t be late. Watch the 1962 film before you, caro Scott, utter the words again – if ever.

Pity that Albanese hadn’t seen it either.

The Mammoth in the Room

Mammoth – looking for a room

I read Crikey. The problem is that it has become an exposé for the incompetent and corrupt.   One gets the aroma and taste of a foetid Australia. After all, it is an unpleasant business sifting through the garbage to find something worth recycling. I do not know what keeps Stephen Mayne cheerful, given that he would need a gas mask for most issues he crawls through, the Murdoch detritus in particular.

I have already written about John Elliott, and Rundle got it mostly right. The preservation of bluestone warehouses as an Elliot legacy may not read as well as the “Jam Factory” effect, when one sees what happened to those former bluestone warehouses transitioning to “gentlemen’s clubs” at the Yarra end of King Street.

I was not going to go on record about Andrew Peacock, because he was never a serious figure in Australian policy development. Except to say that if he had become Prime Minister, he could have been very good. Andrew was intellectually lazy, but superficially affable with the ability to recruit very good staff. Vanity and a need to be loved always needs therapy, but until Andrew and I spectacularly fell out because of my diatribe directed at him, we had a cordial relationship; however, it was always very ambivalent, even at the best of times.

But contrary to Guy Rundle’s commentary in Crikey, they are not the only remnants of that era. There is still Lloyd Williams to carry the flag for, among other matters, the building and commissioning of the Crown Casino in Melbourne, before an expletive-laden Kerry Packer stepped in to bale out the project.

It was early times but even then the customers were allegedly urinating on the Crown Casino floor rather than give up their spot at the poker machines; and for which persons were sacked for not using “alternative facts” to deny that it happened.  Nevertheless, there seems to be an axiom in Australian public life that success in horse racing will forgive any transgressions, and the more so in the number of Melbourne Cups your horses win, the higher one rises in the hagiography stakes. Williams has won seven.

And finally, there is Rupert Murdoch, another alumnus of Geelong Grammar School. Rupert seems to have never spiritually left Melbourne, because even in old age he has the trophy – the trophy that avenged the treatment the “Melbourne establishment” meted out to his father, and originally only left Rupert with a small Adelaide paper as the legacy. The “Herald” may be no more; the “Sporting Globe” may be no more; but son, we will still have the “Herald Sun”.

The mists of time may have meant some lessening of his attachment, but when you say that the old generation has evaporated, I believe it cannot be underestimated how much effect Rupert’s eventual passing will have on Melbourne. None of his children have any reason to venerate Melbourne.

As part of that generation who is disappearing, I grew up in a Melbourne with three morning newspapers and one evening newspaper, which appeared in multiple editions.

I may live to see a time when there may be no Melbourne newspaper, but who knows how many years Murdoch will remain relevant; his last words will not be Rosebud like Citizen Kane, aka William Randolph Hearst, but maybe Langwarrin.

Cruden Farm, Langwarrin

The Slivers of War or Putin’s Lebensraum

His alliance of autocrats would also have a psychological cost inside Russia. It would demonstrate Mr Putin’s dependence on the siloviki, the security bosses who see in Ukraine’s democracy and deepening ties with the West a threat to their own ability to control and loot Russia. It would be a further sign to the liberal capitalists and technocrats who are the other pillar of the Russian state that they had lost. More of the best and brightest would leave; others would give up. Stagnation and resentment would build into opposition likely to be met with heightened brutality.  The Economist

A conventional view. Here we have a little ageing Russian secret police agent invading Ukraine to destabilise the world order to satisfy some tortuous agenda. He has had some previous so-called victories in predominantly Russian areas of Ukraine such as Crimea (now plunged into poverty) and along the Ukrainian border in some of the poorer areas where Putin’s war can be cynically described as slum clearances.

Kiev

Putin may weave and feint, but this is not the Hitler bloodless annexation of the Sudetenland. The Ukrainians are not prepared to embrace their Russian cousins. As he proposes to go deeper into the country, Putin will encounter – while presumably destroying – increasing signs of affluence, towns and cities increasingly becoming costly rubble until he reaches the peak of his ruinous agenda to destroy Kiev, the spiritual capital of everything he professes to hold dear.  Icons smashed among the rubble of centuries old tradition. All to satisfy a smirking crypto-maniac full of venom. What have the Russians to gain?  Germany found that out in the ruins of 1945 as another maniac met his fate.

So, assume Putin’s troops blast their way to the Polish border into increasing hostile territory, their casualties rising.  While the invasion is happening, NATO would be freed from the accusation of aggressor, apart from the bleats emanating from the Russian hackery, but now freed, able to respond. Troops begin pouring over the Belarussian border from Lithuania. The Russian exclave, Kaliningrad is an easy target for missile attack; the new Polish corridor destination.

The ripples of War.

Then what?

But before answering that question, consider this comment in the NYT this week:

The die was cast. The clock has been ticking since then, with Mr. Putin taking enough military action in Georgia and Ukraine to freeze the countries in strategic limbo, as he awaited his moment to avenge the perceived humiliation of Russia by the West after the Cold War’s end 

This refers to the aftermath of a NATO summit held in Bucharest in 2008 when it was breezily stated that Georgia and the Ukraine would eventually become part of NATO.

Putin was not amused as he showed us on February 21 this year. Russian troops moved into the disputed area of Eastern Ukraine. This was accompanied by the Russian recognition of the Lugansk and Donetsk Peoples Republics in the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine, population about 2 million. The recognition of another Sliver Republic. Putin has done it before – for instance, Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, and Transnistria in Moldova.

Putin has found out that there are initial protests but then these tiny slivers are forgotten, but then they become buffer zones. He seems now to have done it again in Ukraine, and created a buffer zone in a part of  Ukraine  that NATO are not going to give up their comfortable existence to contest.

OK, there are sanctions, which seem not to be particularly effective, as Germany would remain very dependent on Russian natural gas; others less so, even though NATO is recommending its member countries introduce sanctions on Russia. Germany has refused to sign the agreement to start the flow.

One difference is that while both Moldova and Georgia have small populations, the Ukraine is 55 million against Russia’s 150 million. By his antics, Putin’s chances of quietly re-installing his puppet as Head of the Ukrainian Government are gone especially as there are strong incentives for Ukraine  to move to a Western-type democracy.

On the other hand, Belarus is inevitably going to be absorbed into this sliver approach. President Lukashenko grew up to run piggeries and he has learnt nothing. To him, Belarus is just a larger piggery , a mixed metaphor for the rust bucket industries of the lost Soviet Union, as are these new sliver companion tin pots in Eastern Ukraine which also retain  rust bucket remnants of the old Soviet order.

Soviet nuclear expertise … Chernobyl

It is a wonder that Putin has not taken over Chernobyl as one of his Slivers. It shows what one can do with Soviet nuclear “expertise”, and already as an unexpected  consequence provides a buffer between Belarus and the Ukraine.

Of course, there may be another reason for all this. Putin may have just flipped his switch and spends most evenings scheming with Peter and Catherine. “Great, aren’t both of you? Now where is Poltrava exactly?” 

May I introduce Q fever

Some years ago, when I was working in North-East Victoria, a transport driver responsible for collecting the waste water from an abattoir in the Ovens Valley presented with a flu-like illness. It took a substantial time for him to be diagnosed with Q fever.

Sir Macfarlane Burnet

The challenge presented by Q fever is to recognise it, caused as it is by a rickettsia-like organism called Coxiella burneti, named for the Australian scientist, Sir Macfarlane Burnet, who discovered it.

Q Fever is contracted through the inhalation of air or dust from contaminated animals and their environments. Therefore, hazard prevention circulates around respiratory equipment and reducing stirring up sediments in the yards. Sound familiar?

There has been much deliberation over the mandatory vaccination of the population against COVID-19, a cost of which is largely taken up by the Federal government. In contrast to COVID, there are no state or federal subsidies for the Q fever immunisation program due to the low prevalence rate for Australia’s population. In Queensland around 300 people are diagnosed every year. In fact, the symptoms of COVID-19 and Q fever are similar, with high fever and general malaise, including the flu-like illness.

The cost of the vaccination ranges from $150 to $450. It’s not a large outlay but with seasonal staff and low industry retention rates, it adds up. Currently there is no legislation that mandates workers to be vaccinated against Q Fever. However, a business owner is required to manage risks to workers under most workplace health and safety legislation.

If unvaccinated staff are allowed to work with farm animals, appropriate management strategies need to be implemented and provided to employees, for instance PPE, masks, changing from a high pressure hosing system to a low pressure, dust controls in yards, hand washing.

In short, employers are responsible for immunising their staff, otherwise appropriate risk mitigation and prevention strategies need to be implemented. As for this transport driver, whose diagnosis was initially missed, and who developed the chronic form of the  disease; he became much more difficult to treat.

At various times, there have been questions about the long term efficacy of the vaccine. But it has been accepted by the industry as being better than nothing and augmented those industries with high health and welfare standards.

Q fever is a disease of the workers, but Australia has not experienced the same scream of the lumpenproletariat shouting “Freedom forever”, their ugly face sprouting from the social media. The worker in question had not been vaccinated against Q fever; and now was destined to a long period of chronic disease and disability.

Australia has yet to reap the full legacy of “Long COVID”; but let me reiterate, as a legatee of a chronic disease with a recent relapse, I would not wish it on anybody.  I cannot be vaccinated against my disease, and thus will never have freedom from it – think about it if you are one of those unvaccinated  COVID-19 idiots wrapped in your yellow rags, while you rail against vaccination. You at least can gain protection from the disease. For the unfortunate it may become chronic, when sometimes you may wish for the freedom of dying as preferable. You can be assured that will be “forever”.

Ground hog days in New Hampshire

On the way up

Most skiers were pacing between 42 and 50 minutes per lap, but at 6 a.m. Monday, I walked lap 44 with a 34-year-old from Ohio named Brody Leven who identified himself as a “professional human-powered skier” and had been hitting 39 minutes a lap like clockwork, always at the front of the pack.

“I seek out testing myself. I live for this,” he said, reading off the vertical gain from his watch, now showing 46,771 feet. “I’m competing against them, but I’m competing against myself. And I have no intention of stopping.”

This describes what one of the 100 skiers were doing near Jackson New Hampshire on Mount Black, with “The Last Man (sic) Standing” being the ultimate laurel. This event occurred over a few days recently, when these blokes apparently had nothing to do but indulge in an endurance event of uncertain length. It just depends when the last person is skiing the ultimate run down the Mountain.

Brody Leven happened to be the eventual winner. Sixty-five times he skied up the 1.25 miles to where the vintage chair lift was the marker for the turn for descent. The time allowed was one hour and Brody did it in about forty minutes. Thus, he had twenty minutes to recuperate.

He thanked the journalist for accompanying him because he had stopped on a previous run to help a bloke who was bending over a car only to find out that the man was talking to a rock and a tree. This tendency towards hallucinations makes night time skiing treacherous, but it doesn’t deter these enthusiasts. The Olympic Games may be held contemporaneously in China, but there is other madness abroad.

I thought it must be very lonely on that last ski run when you are on your own and that tree and rock you are trying to avoid is actually a bloke bending over his car.

How long before this practice hits Australia?

Massachusetts General Hospital

Massachusetts General Hospital has agreed to pay $14.6 million to settle a federal lawsuit alleging it fraudulently billed government insurers for surgeries performed by trainees without proper oversight because supervising surgeons were working in another operating room.

The settlement marks the third time since 2019 that the renowned Harvard-affiliated teaching hospital agreed to pay millions of dollars to resolve a claim stemming from the controversial practice known as concurrent surgery, or double-booking, in which surgeons juggle two operations simultaneously. The three out-of-court settlements total $32.7 million. 

Beyond contempt, as reported by The Boston Globe. Dodgy practices like this have been rumoured to occur in the bottom feeding area of the health industry, but at the Mass General!

What Bird is That?

February is the best time to be on the west coast of Tasmania. In fact, it has been much drier than normal. This has not deterred the New Holland Honey Eaters from feeding off the kangaroo paws, which thrive under the north facing windows. At the side of the house, the leatherwood tree is in full bloom, and smelling the delicate white flowers provides a honeyed fragrance. This is the time of the year when the bee boxes are everywhere, and near Mount Arrowsmith there is a particularly dense stand of these trees. The jar of leatherwood honey on the kitchen bench is testimony to this intense period of apian activity.

Red browed finch

Then my wife came in one morning and said she had seen a bird she did not immediately recognise. We are not bird watchers; I for one do not have the patience. Anyway, a bird that is a visitor to our bush lined property is intriguing. The bird she had seen was small but had a distinctive red tail. After some research, we agreed it was a red browed finch. Being a female, it lacked the red brow, but otherwise the bird picture seemed to confirm that she was that finch.

A hairy wren’s nest

On further reading, it so happens that this bird is found where fairy wrens live. The underbrush on our property is very conducive to being a wren habitat and they share the title to the property. I was having my hair cut outdoors by my wife and the silver strands were going everywhere in the breeze. Our mate said: “Don’t worry about sweeping the hair up. The wrens will come along and line their nests with it.” I was glad to be of service.

Mouse Whisper

Our household always reads the Washington Post’s Voracious Eating. (We have the special rodent edition of Nibble Voraciously). Good word “voraciously”!  There is a variety of recipes, many of which have a Central American heritage, and they frequently embody recipes unusual here in Australia.

The commentary attached to each recipe is often entertaining. The following from one distinguished cook may cause the fire brigade bosses to splutter over their lemonade: “The pan is going to get very hot, and when you add liquid to a ripping hot pan, it’s going to sputter. Fear not! If you’re not regularly setting off your fire alarm at home, you’re not really cooking, (Though, you may want to have a splatter screen handy!)

Modest expectation – Border on the Fly

When I was around politics, our office had a regular visitor called Emil Delins. He was a Latvian-born journalist who was a strong supporter of the exiled Baltic countries – Estonia and Lithuania – being joined to Latvia in his advocacy mix. He was very polite, always articulate and fiercely anti-communist (and certainly anti-Russian).

Delins had graduated from a French Lycée in Riga one week before the Soviet occupation of Latvia in June 1940. The Russians then went on a selective elimination of Latvians, concentrating on the armed forces.

A year later it was the Germans’ turn to occupy the country, and a section of the Latvian people welcomed these new invaders; in fact they were numerous enough to create of division in the German army. Latvian Auxiliary Police battalions were raised from volunteers, the first sent to the front was involved in heavy fighting in June 1942 and acquitted itself well. Latvia however wanted to raise a Latvian Legion, under the command of Latvian officers, offering to raise an army of 100,000. In January 1943, Hitler agreed to the creation of the 15th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Latvian). These Latvian police units were deeply implicated in the massacre of 90,000 Latvian Jews and 2,000 Roma people.

It was in the confused situation during the War, but Delins was able to spend time in university studies. Meanwhile, Latvia was occupied by the Germans, but then nearing 1945, the Russians were back, first occupying Estonia before moving towards Latvia. Along the coastline the German resistance, with Latvians involved, was successful in that it remained intact even on the day Germany surrendered, May 8th, 1945.

As such this battleground provided a conduit for Latvians fleeing the advancing Russians by enabling them to cross the Baltic to either Sweden or Germany. Presumably this was the route taken by the Delins family because he bobs up in Germany where there was a note that he undertook further graduate studies in politics. They were lucky in their choice; those who chose Sweden were deported back to the Russian or their Latvian communist allies.

The Delins family reached Australia in 1947.

Even though the number was relatively small, the impact of the Latvian immigrants on our country was vast. There was always the suspicion of migrants, especially the educated, that they were German sympathisers escaping the wrath of their now Russian-occupied country. As I had found out through personal contact, in any country which had been a battleground there was always a group of true believers in a free democratic country, but their problem was that they were the targets for both the committed communist and the committed national socialist.

I knew Delins was anti-Russian and passionately anti-communist. His advocacy did not convince Whitlam, whose government recognised that the three Baltic countries were legitimately part of Russia. Emil Delins’ advocacy outlasted the Whitlam decree, and the following year the new Fraser government reversed the decision of the then status quo.

One could detect the hidden hand of Emil Delins.

A further reflection

Despite his courtesy and surface good-naturedness, I always felt uncomfortable with anyone who was part of advocacy anti-communist groups. Delins detected that uneasiness in me, and on occasions he asked me questions designed to see how strong my sympathy was for his cause.

My problem with all these refugee groups, including those where the members had come from countries where there had been a strong collaboration with the Nazis, and especially those who were well spoken and articulate, was knowing to whom I was talking.

Mill Road, Corofin

Not that Delins gave any suggestion of that, but in one conversation I did mention the similarity with Ireland and the centuries of oppression we had to endure at the hands of the British. But then what would he have made of one schooled in the best public school tradition? In a way my Irish ancestors collaborated as they worked for the British landowners. I always remember the disdain of the lady in the Clare Heritage & Genealogy centre in Corofin, when told that my ancestors were Egans from Clare but of the Church of Ireland. Egans from Clare not Catholics? Not possible. Nevertheless, that was the end of the conversation as I slunk off. I still can’t go back on the Egan side beyond the late 18th century.  My great-great grandfather, John Egan, was a flour miller.

I have written about some of this Irish heritage before; the flour mill still stands on the river Inch. The Irish have been long oppressed; it has how I rationalised the advocacy of the Balts for their freedom.

The problem is that oppression is a very ambiguous word. 

Tolarno’s – where we used “to get Shot” on Fridays.

Mentioning Latvians. I have known quite a few. One was Andris Saltups, who was then cardiology registrar at Prince Henry’s Hospital.  He and myself, together with Jan Stockigt, who was a young doctor researching diabetes, regularly lunched together. Of these three blokes who went to lunch on Friday at the then recently-opened French restaurant Tolarno, I was the only one born in Australia – Jan/Jim in Germany with an Australian mother.  Both Jim and his mother were caught in the crossfire fleeing from the Russian advance to escape from Germany.

We were all three mates in those days, in those far-off days of conformity we had ties with cannons on them to acknowledge the guys who got “shot” on Fridays. Andris, who had become Andy, was correct in a suit, Jan now transformed to Jim with a blazer; and Jack, once known as John, in an ageing stained sports jacket. Probably a bit formal by today’s standards.

Tolarno had a whiff of the exotic, even if our semi-jock doctor image did not quite fit the bill. The plat de jour and the red wine did.

Mirka Mora murals at Tolarno, St Kilda

The walls were covered with distinctive murals – distinctive faces – bit spooky I thought.

The documentary on Mirka Mora reminded me of those days in the 60s when both the Moras were in full flight. There was something exotic about a French restaurant. Drinking wine for me had become a relatively recent habit, for I grew up in a world of sherry and whisky; with perhaps a touch of Drambuie, crème de menthe or chartreuse after dinner. What is so everyday was new, and the Moras were in the forefront.  Not that we fitted into the arty-crafty school. Georges would acknowledge us because we regulars were often engulfed in hilarity, but his loquacious wife Mirka had difficulty finding an opening to talk to us, but perhaps we were not interesting enough. Understandable.

Prince Henry’s hospital is no more. Georges and Mirka split. Tolarno survived under Leon Massoni, whose family had owned Florentino’s, then the posh signature restaurant in the City.

Eventually, Jim Stockigt went off to California to work with Ed Biglieri, a research scientist /clinician. I remember just before Jim went that he made sure that he had a very short haircut, because haircuts were reputed to be expensive in America. Jim came from a musical family and was a highly skilled bassoonist.

Andy Saltups was friendly with my wife, as both were refugees, and I think the parents knew one another somehow. We saw him socially quite often as he was, for a time, very close with one of my then wife’s friends.

The lunches at Tolarno were a tiny wedge in one’s life. After lunch we would occasionally go down the hall to the Gallery, but there was only so much to see, and it seemed an extension of the murals which adorned the restaurant.

Over the years, I saw Jim twice more after he came back from America, the last just before he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The promise to catch up was there, but in this case Fate intervened.

As for Andy, when I left Prince Henry’s the link was broken – too little remained common.  He stayed there as a specialist cardiologist. I have not seen him in 50 years. Prince Henry’s closed in 1991 and is now the “Melburnian”, a high-priced apartment building.

As I watched the Mirka Mora documentary, Tolarno was mentioned more in the context of the gallery and her paintings rather than the Moras’ influence on Melbourne’s dining habits. Understandable, given the bias of the documentary.

When we lunched at Tolarno, Mirka was always there. She had a dark uncommon beauty then, suggestive of Leslie Caron. I was disturbed by the documentary. What was presented in the documentary were people remembering their link with an elderly Mirka.  There is a fine line between description of idiosyncrasy and that of pathology.

What I found most disturbing was the story of this woman seeing Mirka in what was probably 2005, sitting at the far end of the Georges’ tearoom. Georges was a department store which epitomised the Melbourne couture, a magnet for the well-connected or those who wished to be. However, even such a beacon of detached privilege was on its last pegs at that time.

This woman, who knew Mirka, recounted staring at the solitary figure who had a giant éclair in front of her. Once Mirka knew she had an audience, she promptly stuffed the whole éclair into her mouth, so that cream smeared her cheeks and chin. One enormous ingestion.  The watcher thought it was a supreme example of Mirka’s humour; whereas I felt a sense of sadness. Had she come to this!  The documentary was riddled with stories of her artistic attainments, her generosity, her sense of the ridiculous, her love of children as she aged.  Yet that image of stuffing her mouth  with an éclair stuck.

Sometimes I wonder whether the sense of the ridiculous, playing the fool, should not be translated into self-loathing. I have no right in one way to make a judgement on Mirka Mora, but then the documentary watchers did not see her in a newly-opened Tolarno in 1967. The documentary brushed over that time, and once you document a person then there should be nowhere to hide such crucial subject matter.

But for good or ill, it provided me with an opportunity to remember an uncommon time, which would become all too common as Australia emerged from its wartime monochrome and we talked endlessly about “multi-cultural”.

The woman who should have been awarded two Nobel Prizes

Janine Sargeant.  Guest  Contributor

In the week when Kate Jenkins, Australia’s Sex Discrimination Commissioner, released her report on the “frat house” culture (as described in The New York Times) of Australia’s Parliament House and the generally bad behaviour there, a revealing book on work culture and the treatment of women in another era has been reviewed in The Guardian Weekly.

For those of us who know Rosalind Franklin’s story, the book just serves to further highlight the appalling behaviour of her fellow researchers.  For those who don’t, we are talking about the discovery of DNA.

Rosalind Franklin

Rosalind Franklin was a graduate of Cambridge University, a chemist and X-ray crystallographer. She discovered the key properties of DNA, which led to the correct description of its double helix. Specifically, it was her work on the X-ray diffraction images of DNA, particularly “Photo 51”, that led to the discovery of the double helix.

Her colleagues, Francis Crick and James Watson not only appropriated her research findings as their own but hogged the limelight without any attribution to Franklin.

The reason? Franklin’s “Photo 51” was handed to Watson by a colleague, which led Watson to redo his 3D modelling and it was another piece of Franklin’s work that similarly led Crick towards “their” scientific discovery of a lifetime.

The book, The Secret of Life, by Howard Markel, condemns all the men involved, but singled out Crick and Watson whose “lack of a formal citation (in their historic paper for Nature) of Franklin’s contribution … is the most egregious example of their negligence”. Negligence? No, that word implies omission; this was a sin of commission – they deliberately excluded Franklin. Watson has been described as having many strong prejudices, but perhaps Franklin’s greatest sin was simply to be a woman in a man’s laboratory.

In his book, Markel went on to paint a picture of a culture of misogyny and egotism that punished Franklin for personality flaws that in her male colleagues were tolerated.

Photo 51

Crick, Watson and Maurice Wilkins – who had given Franklin’s “Photograph 51” to Watson – shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for “their discovery of the molecular structure of DNA, which helped solve one of the most important of all biological riddles”.

Nobel rules now prohibit posthumous nominations (although this statute was not formally in effect until 1974) or splitting of the Prizes more than three ways, which perhaps makes the omission of Franklin all the more egregious. Easier to just ignore Franklin’s contribution.  Apparently in 2018, Watson still remained outraged at the suggestion that Franklin might have shared the Nobel Prize, although he acknowledged that his actions with regard to Franklin were “not exactly honourable”. Too little, too late.

But there’s more:  after a disagreement with colleague Watson and the Research Director, John Randall, in 1953 Franklin had moved to Birbeck College at the University of London, a public research institution and much of her work done on DNA, including her crystallographic calculations was then just handed over to Wilkins.

At Birbeck, again using X-ray crystallography, Franklin led pioneering work on the molecular structures of viruses. At that time her findings were in direct contradiction to the ideas of the then eminent virologist Norman Pirie – it was her observations that ultimately proved correct.

In 1958, on the day before Franklin was to unveil what would now be excitedly announced as “a significant research finding” on the structure of tobacco mosaic virus, an RNA virus, at an international fair in Brussels, she died of ovarian cancer at the age of 37. Her team member, Aaron Klug, continued her research and he went on to become the sole winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1982 “for his development of crystallographic electron microscopy and his structural elucidation of biologically important nucleic acid-protein complexes”. This work was exactly what Franklin had started and which she introduced to Klug; she should have shared that Nobel Prize too.

Rosalind Franklin was never nominated for a Nobel Prize. Her early death meant awkward decisions about including a woman as one of the nominees didn’t have to be made.

An interesting endnote: on 28 February 1953, Watson and Crick felt they had solved the problem of DNA enough for Crick to proclaim at The Eagle, a local pub in Cambridge, that they had “found the secret of life”.

Watson and Crick did not cite the X-ray diffraction work of Wilkins and Franklin in their original paper, although they apparently admitted having “been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr MHF Wilkins, Dr RE Franklin and their co-workers at King’s College London”. In fact, Watson and Crick cited no experimental data at all in support of their DNA model. Franklin and Gosling’s publication of the DNA X-ray image, in the same issue of Nature, served as the principal evidence. So just whose “secret of life” was it that Watson and Crick were announcing?

(In the past 25 years there has been a catch up, with a plethora of recognition and awards, including a TV movie, two documentaries and three plays; the Boat Club of Franklin’s alma mater Newnham College Cambridge launched a new racing VIII, naming it the Rosalind Franklin, and in 2005, the DNA sculpture (which was donated by James Watson) outside Clare College Cambridge, incorporates the words “The double helix model was supported by the work of Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins” – elementary Dr Watson). James Watson is now 93 but it is not too late for him to acknowledge the actual role of Rosalind Franklin; he was absorbed into the same British research establishment mores that also distorted Alexander Fleming’s actual minimal contribution to penicillin research. This still did not impede Fleming sharing the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, whereas it should have gone to another.

Happy Hannukah

Latkes are deep-fried potato pancakes and are a traditional food of Hanukkah, but reporter Tamara Keith couldn’t figure out how to make them, even with the help of her mother-in-law’s recipe. After spending some time in the kitchen with her mother-in-law, she learned that the recipe was to blame

TAMARA: When I was converting to Judaism, my rabbi strongly recommended that I buy some cookbooks. It seems part of learning to be Jewish was learning to cook Jewish foods. Growing up Methodist in a small town, my first introduction to latkes was in college after I met my boyfriend, Ira. The potato pancakes Ira’s mom Andrea and sister Shannon made were terrific. Crispy and warm, dunked in apple sauce for that perfect balance of grease and fruit.

I asked for the recipe and Andrea photocopied a page from a paperback cookbook. The next year at Hanukkah, I followed the recipe exactly but the latkes came out all wrong, like over-crisp hash browns. Failure after failure led me to Manishevitz instant latkes. Just add eggs. It’s like defeat in a box. Ira and I are married now, so it finally seemed okay to go back to my now my mother-in-law and ask her what I had been doing wrong. The first step is easy, peeling the potatoes.

And then what comes next?

ANDREA, her Jewish Mother-in-Law: Next we have to grate the potatoes the proper amount of smoothness and roughness. They have to be smoother than hash browns, but we don’t want them to be completely mushy.

TAMARA: Which none of this is actually in the recipe.

ANDREA: No.

TAMARA: The whole consistency thing.

ANDREA: This is the magic of Jewish tradition and family tradition.

Hannukah occurs in December. In the second century BCE, against all odds, a small band of faithful but poorly-armed Jews, led by Judah the Maccabee, defeated their Syrian-Greek rulers, drove them from the Holy land, reclaimed the Holy Temple in Jerusalem and rededicated it to the service of Jehovah.

When they wanted to light the Temple’s Menorah (the seven-branched candelabrum), they found only a single pot of olive oil that had escaped contamination by the Greeks. Miraculously, they lit the menorah and this single pot of oil lasted for eight days, until new oil could be prepared with ritual purity.

To commemorate and publicise these miracles, the festival of Hannukah was begat.

There is thus no possible connection with the Christian Christmas apart from the timing, and in a season of presents, one tradition of Hannukah is giving money to children.  But once it arrives, the insidious euphoria of commercialism can overwhelm any religious significance.

Christians undertake an annual ritual engorgement around Christmas Day, presumably to counterpoint the meagre circumstances of the Bethlehem birth. Hannukah, because of the oil association, is a festival of the deep fried, as the description of Jewish potato cakes above attests.

Hannukah does not make the same impression on our community as it does in the United States. My attention nevertheless was directed to an article lamenting how Hannukah had been polluted by some of the impedimenta of Christmas.

This article in the Washington Post bemoaned the creeping tendency of Hannukah to be converted into a Jewish Christmas, where it is in fact one of the lesser Jewish holiday periods, and in the eyes of the author of this piece, acknowledging Hannukah could be as simple as lighting the menorah and let its light shine for eight days.

He describes a recent trip to a large retailer where he spotted the following abominations: a festive tray featuring four minuscule bearded dudes, their hats decorated with dreidels, above the phrase “Rollin’ With My Gnomies”; a throw pillow, in the blue-and-white color scheme of the Israeli flag, stitched with the phrase “Oy to the World”; an assortment of elves, sporting Jewish stars and looking like they belonged more in a Brooklyn yeshiva than anywhere near the North Pole; and a set of three kitchen towels with the truly baffling wording, “Peace Love & Latkes”. 

There is not much more to add, except for you, the reader to contemplate the Mouse’s Whisper this week. It is not only Hannukah, that Mammon defiles.

A Card from Our Seychellois Friends

This week we received a Christmas card from Michael and Heather Adams. Isn’t it so quaint to receive Christmas cards, especially from a family in the Seychelles.

The 2021 Christmas Card

We visited the Seychelles over 30 years ago, and it was the last leg of our African tour, which in that Apartheid period excluded South Africa. Qantas then flew to Harare in Zimbabwe, where we disembarked and roamed through a number of countries, including climbing Kilimanjaro and succumbing to malaria in Madagascar. Seychelles was the place to recuperate. We flew to the main island Mahé and stayed in the capital Victoria.

The Seychelles was once uninhabited and the first Europeans to sight the main island was Vasco da Gama. It later became a matter of disputed acquisition, between the United Kingdom and France. In this case, the UK were the winners, but there has remained a strong French influence. Once the Seychelles was settled, there inevitably were slaves, emancipated in 1835, from whom the Creole culture has emerged.

It should be recognised that Seychelles has a huge footprint across the Indian Ocean – 115 islands, of which only eight are inhabited, but it had to wait until 1903 to gain a separate existence from Mauritius.

At one stage during this stay, we ended up driving down this gravel roadway and coming up to a picture book wooden house set in this tropical backdrop, which spilt across the house itself. This was the home of Heather and Michael Adams. The home was on Anse des Poules Bleues and, it is said, true to the name of the Bay, the family had bluish hens which laid blue eggs.

Michael seems to have recently acquired a knighthood, which is not surprising given the high regard for his skill in silk screening, its composition and his depiction of his Idyll. He has been in Seychelles since 1972 and recently has said that he intended staying there. He had grown up in England and is said to have been inspired by the Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall, at a time when the garden was a wild unkempt neglected “lost garden”.

Heather had been in Kenya when they met after he left Uganda to get away from Idi Amin, and they married. They have two talented children, both artists, both having learnt the silk screening skills according to the latest Christmas card, all still in the Seychelles. Their names are Tristan and Alyssa.

When we stumbled upon his gallery, we were absolutely blown away by the complexity, yet a compelling simplicity of the lines of colours; colour which overwhelmed us when we entered his studio.

We bought some of Michael’s works, including a large screen print which adorns the wall, and required more than 20 screens. His works are so reflective of his perspective, of a person awash in the joy and yet serenity of his Seychellois life. No wonder that he has been likened to Paul Gauguin. One in French Polynesia; one in the French diaspora of the Indian Ocean.

I recently purchased one of his silk screens for one of our sons for his half-century, which has pride of place in his home in Melbourne.

Otherwise, the intention has always been to go back to the Seychelles, but we haven’t. For Australians it is off the beaten track. The Seychelles may be the playground of the wealthy Europeans; it may sit uneasily off the African coast where Somali pirates have recently roamed the archipelago. To see the giant Aldabra tortoises, reputedly the oldest one being about 190 years old, but apparently exiled to St Helena – a testudineous Bonaparte.

Yet every time the Adams family Christmas card arrives, it stirred the intention to return. But with the intervening years since 1990 when we were there, the intention has burned lower as age entangled us.

This year, the watercolour painting of copra workers of the Botanical Gardens reflects the time he and Heather had just arrived in the Seychelles – 1973.

But to emphasise how determined the continuation of this exchange has been with us and others, whether for such a period of time, on the bottom of the card is printed:

Apologies if you did not receive Christmas cards last year from us but due to Covid, our Post Office was closed for most of the year and no post was accepted to most countries.”

Our card to them this year will be emailed.

James Pindell has a few questions to answer

James Pindell is a bespectacled unremarkable looking graduate of the School of Journalism at Columbia University. He could be anybody’s journo at that Press Conference. Yet he is a political reporter for the Boston Globe, which lifts his ranking. He posed these questions on November 26.

He sets out three questions about Biden and provides commentary rather than answers.

Question 1: But why wouldn’t Biden run?

Very few American presidents have openly taken re-election off the table: One of them, James K. Polk, announced it the moment he received his party’s presidential nomination in 1844. His decision was part ideological — as a believer in limited government power — and practical: agreeing to only serve one term was likely the only way he could build a coalition of party power brokers to back him for the nomination.

Biden has different issues. The reason people talk about him serving only one term is largely due to his age. At 78, he was the oldest person ever elected to serve as president in 2020. He could break that record if he ran again in 2024 at age 82.

Mental and physical capacity to serve as the leader of the free world is something that voters must determine for themselves. While plenty of data is available from Biden’s doctors, it is still a subjective decision by every voter in how to read the data.

But lately, there is a second reason that people, including Democrats, are asking whether Biden will run: his poor poll numbers.

Now 10 months into his presidency, Biden’s approval ratings have never been this low. A Marist poll out on Wednesday showed him at just 42 percent, in line with other recent polls. This means Biden is the most unpopular president at this point in his presidency, other than Donald Trump.

Question 2: Can anyone other than Biden win?

Aides have already signalled in anonymous quotes to the press that if Biden does run it might be out of a sense of duty. The 2020 election turned out to be much closer than Democrats thought it would be. It is possible that among all the Democrats who ran in the 2020 primary — the most diverse field in history and one of the largest — only Biden could have defeated Trump for re-election.

With Trump looking more likely than not to run again, the Trump factor is not off the table. And the field of potential candidates is basically the same crew that ran in 2020.

And, yes, if Biden doesn’t run it likely would be a crew. The most obvious heir apparent to Biden, his vice president Kamala Harris, had a 28 percent approval rating in one recent poll.

This has led to open speculation, even this week, that Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg could run. Buttigieg would not only be among the youngest people to be elected president, but also the first openly gay person.

Let’s be clear here: Even after winning the Iowa Caucuses and coming in a close second in the New Hampshire primary, the Democratic electorate didn’t think Buttigieg could win (or that he sufficiently understood the Black vote). It is unclear whether a stint as transportation secretary would change that.

Question 3: If Biden doesn’t run how badly will tensions within the party explode?

As anyone could see during the Democratic presidential primary season or witness this year during negotiations over infrastructure and “Build Back Better” legislation, there is a lot of tension within the party.

The party’s base has moved left and wants leaders who are not old white men. There is also an establishment, led by Biden and South Carolina Representative James Clyburn, who feel like they are more in tune with Democrats and the electorate as a whole.

That next year the Republicans could win big because of Biden, prompting Biden and his allies to say that only proves that Biden has to run, is the conundrum.

Amy Klobuchar

Having read the questions, let me answer them in my normal ‘umble way.

  1. When you get to 80, it is not the new 60.
  2. I doubt whether Kamala Harris has the firepower. I have always been a fan of Amy Klobucher, but the question is, will Biden survive 2022 (and for that matter will Trump)?
  3. Chissà!

The Pindell article could now be subject to the “Omicron-scope”. A great deal can happen in a day or two while the Virus stalks, changes its clothes and attacks again. After all, he did write this opinion piece in the Pre-Omicron Age.

Mouse Whisper

Black Friday 1939

Fire sale. Damaged goods at a generous discount.