Age, as it were, bin

 

Kirbyana

 

If in any doubt that Mr. Justice Kirby was a fine man, see his impeccable politeness to a contentious litigant here

 

http://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/cases/cth/HCATrans/2003/641.html?context=1;query=rout%20;mask_path=

I'm over 70

Sitting at the bus stop today I was humming Joplin's 'Mercedes Benz' and I realised for the first time since hearing it in 1965 (also my introduction to Robert Crumb's art, actually) that the line was not 

"Oh lord won't you buy me a colour TV.
Darling, four dollars is tryin' to find me -
I'll wait for delivery each day until three:
Oh lord won't you buy me a colour TV."

but rather

"Oh lord won't you buy me a colour TV.
Dialling for dollars is tryin' to find me - 
I'll wait for delivery each day until three:
Oh lord won't you buy me a colour TV."

Fifty-five years. 

Agey bin

 If the half-billion dollars that is to be spent on extensions to the Australian War Memorial were to be spent on good history, it might conceivably be worth paying. It won’t be.  It will be used to sell the same message as the current displays; that the Australian army was both heroic and virtuous, and that war brings out the best in us. 

No presentation of our engagements in two world wars and after can be taken seriously that does not include any reference to the Battle of Brisbane (where diggers fought GIs), the Battle of the Wazza (where the diggers burned down part of Cairo), or the massacre of Sarafand (where the Anzacs killed forty civilians and burned down a Palestinian village).  

In every war we’ve ever fought, from the Boer War and Breaker Morant to Afghanistan, Australians have been notorious for killing their prisoners. My grandfather’s letters from Gallipoli refer to it unashamedly.  No Australian has ever been prosecuted (by Australians, at least) for war crimes.  If the AWM shows us got a wall of VCs, it also needs to show us the other side of the picture.

The message – the only message - of the War Memorial needs to be General Sherman’s: war is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.  When we send our soldiers out to fight, we take that responsibility on ourselves.  We need to know precisely what it means.  

Chris Borthwick

While I remember

The last time Native life seemed on the brink of apocalypse, at the end of the 19th century, the Indians were also dancing. They called it the Ghost Dance. It foretold a world in which the colonists disappeared, the buffalo returned, and the land was restored to the people.

That spiritual movement ended on December 29, 1890, when the United States military gunned down hundreds of Lakota ghost dancers and buried their bodies in a mass grave. A week after the massacre, L. Frank Baum, who later wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, penned an editorial in the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer. “Our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians,” he wrote. “Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.” 

Robert Graves on Australian war crimes

There are other accounts of downright cruelty - even war crimes - committed by Australians against the enemy. The British officer Robert Graves quotes (in Goodbye to all that, 1929) an anonymous Australian who told him: 'Well the biggest lark I had was at Morlancourt, when we took it the first time. There were a lot of Jerries in a cellar, and I said to 'em: "Come out, you Camarades!" So out they came, a dozen of 'em, with their hands up. "Turn out your pockets," I told 'em. They turned 'em out. Watches and gold and stuff, all dinkum. Then I said: "Now back to your cellar, you sons of bitches!" For I couldn't be bothered with 'em. When they were all safely down I threw half a dozen Mills bombs in after 'em. I'd got the stuff all right, and we weren't taking prisoners that day.'

‘Acnestis’: the part of the back (or backbone) between the shoulder blades and the loins which an animal cannot reach to scratch
(Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed.)

I wish I'd known that earlier in life.

Ever thus

It's the politicians I feel sorry for.  Morrison has set up a two billion dollar slush fund for bushfire relief, which means that at $127,000 per giant novelty cheque each of the 16 National members is going to have to hand out four of them in marginal electorates every working day from now to the election (excluding sitting days). That's a killing pace. It won't leave them much time to spend with their families, considering that many of them have several of those, too.

T'was ever

Pea and Thimble Trick

Science Minister Karen Andrews’ talk about climate change being real may be ‘a shift in rhetoric’, but it isn’t ‘a blunt warning’.  The live rail in Coalition politics is, specifically, the word ‘anthropogenic’. After thirty years denialists have now reluctantly come round to agree that climate change is happening, but that doesn’t mean they’ve conceded that humans have caused it. They’ve moved on to talking about adaptation to change only because that doesn’t involve doing anything to stop it, and people like Andrews will happily fight on that front for the next thirty years. When Andrews refers to ‘unnecessary debate’ she means ‘science’. She isn’t actually the Minister for Science: like every other minister in the Morrison Government, she’s the Minister for Coal. The Age shouldn’t enable her evasions. We're well beyond the point where 'a shift in rhetoric' is anything but adding insult to injury. 

Thus

Those who complain about our Prime Minister’s religious biases are surely neglecting the obvious. God is keeping his side of the bargain, in spades.  If this year’s fires had happened last year the Coalition would have lost in a landslide.

Ever

Actually, this is a great opportunity. Make an offer, toss in a few million dollars, do up Yarralumla, and Australia can have a king of its own and an Australian head of state. 

Or, alternatively, if you think it’s stupid to put our governance into the hands of a British upper-class twit of the year then why haven’t we got a republic now? 

T'was

If these fires are spreading even though we’re meeting our carbon targets, that surely means we need more ambitious targets. 

Ages on

Remember when at the last election Bill Shorten couldn’t say exactly how much his climate change policies were going to cost?  Just said that not acting had costs too. As if!  We sure dodged a bullet there. 

From Quiggin

The most fundamental constant in Australian politics is that nothing is going to get better, and we shouldn't waste our time speculating about what would happen if it did.  Between Murdoch, Palmer and the electorate's I'm-all-right Jackism no remotely progressive policy can survive. The government is not going to bend: Morrison has learned from Trump and Johnson that what the electorate really want is a government that can look sincere as it tells them that nothing needs to change and all will be well. They're lying, of course, and we know they're lying, but if the alternative is facing reality then we prefer being lied to.  There's a bit of a fuss now, but he's got God in his pocket and it'll rain the day before the next election and that'll be enough to diffuse the anger.

Looking back

Just found this as 'Age letter 2016".  Did I put it up on site?  I'm too lazy to check.

"Let’s run over some of the cases where someone might shoot a policeman in the conduct of his duties and still have a good argument that there were mitigating circumstances.

1)    You’re his wife and he’s been beating you up for years.

2)    He’s been sexually abusing you since you were twelve.

3)    He’s Roger Rogerson and you’re Warren Lanfranchi and you see him coming.

None of these, admittedly, apply to Craig Minogue, but this law will still be on the books in a hundred years. Hard cases make bad law, and Murdoch-driven moral panics make very bad law."

Age binnacle

If the pollution from the fires takes a day off the life expectancy of everybody in Sydney, that’s the equivalent in terms of years of life lost to about 290 people dropping dead in the street. That’s a minimum figure – London’s five-day great smog in 1952 is estimated to have killed about 6,000. It’s becoming clear what Australia’s part is going to be in the great war on global warming; we’re the horrible example designed to scare other nations straight.  Good to see we’re still punching above our weight.  

Age - Not this one either

Q. How many National Party MPs does it take to change a lightbulb?
A. It’s not the moment to ask these questions when people are getting hurt bumping into sharp objects blundering around in the dark.

Bin L'Age

Fires

It’s plainly stupid to suggest that Scott Morrison has any responsibility for this year's horrific fires.  It’s perfectly reasonable, though, to suggest he and his policies are  going to be responsible for many of the much worse and more numerous fires we’re going to have in 2030, let alone 2050; not all of them, as it’s a worldwide problem, but perhaps 3% of them - 150, say. And when I say ‘Scott Morrison’, of course, I mean the people who voted for him. It’s mathematically impossible for a government to be stupider than the people who elected it. 

The New Crucible

CRUCIBLE II 

Increase Mather        All rise for Judge Hathome.

Judge Hathome         Increase Mather, can I have a report on the morning's executions?

Increase Mather        There has been a holdup in one case. The girl Carla.

Judge Hathome         What's the delay?

Increase Mather        Apparently there's a lawyer outside who wants to mount a defence.

Judge Hathorne        A defence? This is very irregular. On what grounds?

Increase Mather        He says Carla's innocent.

Cotton Mather          How can she be innocent? She's a witch. Look, it's right here in Malleus Mallificarum-III-Revised, in the criteria for witchcraft Let me see, the criteria are A, significantly subaverage sanctity, B, gross and sustained deficits in church attendance, and C, not innocent. By definition. It's that simple.

Increase Mather        It is being claimed, I think, that she's been misdiagnosed.

Cotton Mather          Nonsense. She's had all the standard test batteries. We administered nonlinguistic tests like being thrown into the duckpond and being stuck with pins, and linguistic tests like saying the Lord's Prayer backwards, and she scored in the profoundly or severely bewitched range on all of them.

Increase Mather       He does have some criticisms of the tests themselves. A suggestion, I believe, that they don't necessarily measure what they purport to measure.

Cotton Mather          Lord save us. These tests have been employed for years, and I can assure you that they've been exhaustively standardized on the entire surviving population of Salem.

Judge Hathorne        The tests are generally accepted, then?

Cotton Mather          Of course they are. It's only common sense, after all. The empirical correlations are absolutely undeniable. People with high sanctity test scores have an 80% higher than average chance of entering the ministry, and people with low test scores have a 100% higher chance of being burnt at the stake. You can't argue with the facts. 

Increase Mather       It's possible, I suppose, that she could just have a specific sanctity defect. Differential diagnosis in these cases isn't always easy. If she had a developmental biblereading disorder, say, the prognosis then would be much better - hanging, I think, rather than burning. In mild cases I believe there are recorded instances of patients achieving lashing at the cart's tail.

Cotton Mather          No, no. There may be a grey area around borderline diabolism - that's fairly prevalent, I think the last study said that there were soft signs of developmental depravity in something like 98% of the normal population – but profound witchcraft is quite unmistakeable. I sometimes think it should be given a separate listing in the manual, something like organic devilry, to distinguish it from the sinners at the bottom end of the normal curve.

Increase Mather       The defence has done their own tests, and they say that they have evidence that she's been independently producing prayers at a sin-appropriate level.

Cotton Mather          Oh, I know what they're saying. It can sound quite convincing to a layperson, so I took the precaution of having their papers looked over by an independent professional. Allow me to introduce Dr. Bob Shopland, an officially registered witchfinder with extensive clinical experience.

Judge Hathorne        Has he appeared as an expert witness in any other proceedings?

Cotton Mather          He testified at several of the last dozen burnings. Goody Crossley, I think, and Goody Morton.

Judge Hathorne        Good. There's no question of his impartiality, then. You may begin, Dr. Shopland.

Dr. Bob Shopland     Thank you, your honour.

Judge Hathorne        Have you administered any tests to Carla yourself?

Dr. Bob Shopland    Yes, your honour. I administered the standard test in this area, the hydrometric evaluation.

Judge Hathorne        A hydrometric evaluation?

Dr. Bob Shopland    We threw the accused into a carefully measured body of water - 68,540 liters plus or minus 7 litres, accurate to within the 0.0% confidence level - and observed whether she floated Studies have shown, your honour, that witches have a specific gravity greater than two point one four standard deviations from the norm, and correspondingly float. Innocent people, or, to give them their technical name, 'corpses', sink to the bottom of the pond and stay there. Carla did go under four times, for a mean time of 1.35 minutes, although the amount of water she swallowed wasn't statistically significant, but towards the end of the session she moved her arms to propel herself back into the mud at the edge of the pond. On the basis of my observation, I would say that her arms were clearly manipulated.

Judge Hathorne        Manipulated?

Dr. Bob Shopland     By the evil One. The prince of darkness. Old scratch. Doug Biklen.

Judge Hathorne        Quite. And have you had an opportunity to look over the so-called defence evidence?

Dr. Bob Shopland    Yes I have, your honour. And I'd like to say at the outset that I view with some concern the prospect of nonprofessionals venturing into the field of witchcraft. Bewitched people suffer from severe and global moral and spiritual problems, problems which have been amply documented over the years in a veritable bonfire of research. The intransigence of their diabolic handicaps is well known, and one has to be wary of raising false hopes in vulnerable parents.

Cotton Mather          I couldn't agree more. Show me a hope, I've always said, and I'll show you a false hope. They've taken years, sometimes, coming to terms with the fact that their son or daughter or husband is – different - and then along come these people, some of them quite sincere, saying no, all you need to do is let him out of the stocks or out of prison or not hang him and he'll be just like anybody else. Families are so vulnerable to that kind of charlatanry. They don't want to face the truth, and they'll snatch at any excuse to put off the ugly realization that they have a devil worshipper in the household. I've seen it a thousand times. It's what we in the profession call "Being in denial' or 'avoidant coping'.

Judge Hathorne        And this being in denial' – would that affect the value of their evidence?

Dr. Bob Shopland    Oh, worthless. Completely unreliable. Denial works as a cognitive barrier, you see, and until they've worked their way through it parents can't really be trusted to tie up their own shoelaces.

Cotton Mather          Guilt, denial, anger, acceptance - they have to work through the stages. When they've come round to accepting what we've told them, then we can listen to what they have to say. That's why it's such an important part of the role of professionals working in the area to help families to come to terms with limited hopes for their child. In this case I had get them to learn to deal with the notion of having her fry in hell for all eternity, and I may say that that putting that across was a real challenge.

Dr. Bob Shopland    Absolutely. Sudden and rapid cures promised in a field where we know they aren't possible can be very damaging, and undo years of hard work and hard won adjustment.

Judge Hathorne        And what about these prayers people have heard them say?

Dr. Bob Shopland    I'm not convinced. I feel — and I'm speaking here as a trained professional - that both the content and format of these purported communications are quite inconsistent with informed expectations. They simply defy rational explanation in terms of established religious, medical, or educational theory.

Judge Hathorne        No coherent theory as to the underlying principle, eh? That's very significant.

Dr. Bob Shopland    People who have previously given every clinical indication of being utterly damned are said to be uttering complete prayers, things like - "Oh Lord, get me out of here, oh god stop the pain...." And, if I may say so, I find it particularly suspicious that they all seem to say much the same sort of thing. Nothing but criticism of the church and the elders, complaints of injustice, misunderstanding, shoddy treatment, prescriptions for appropriate treatment for accused people, statements about how they want to live in the community (or just live)..... One could be forgiven for wondering if this was just the kind of thing you would expect if words were being put into their mouths by people with a bee in their bonnet about the evils of large institutions like jails.

Cotton Mather          Well, we all know their agenda. It's the same old gang that pushed for religious toleration, and look what happened there! All the religious deviants pushed out of their correctional institutions onto the streets. Oh, the liberals are all right, the academics are all right, they've all gone back to their ivory towers, they aren't the ones that have to cope with the consequences, you can't go out into the street now without bumping into a gang of Quakers wandering around not taking their hats off. 

Increase Mather       Get a family of quakers in the street, and bang go your property values. No wonder people don't like it.

Cotton Mather          It's not just the property values, either, it's for their own good. They don't fit in, they don't belong, much as we would like to get rid of prejudice against them it's there and there's no point pretending it doesn't exist, they'd be much happier in so many ways being in a disciplined and supportive environment with people of their own kind in the jail.

Increase Mather       Or the stocks?

Cotton Mather          Or the stocks, that would be another possible option. Or the ducking-pond. There are a variety of possible placements. (Smiles indulgently) This isn't the bad old days!

Judge Hathorne        Gentlemen, gentlemen, we're wandering from the point. We're not talking about quakers now. We're talking about witches.

Dr. Bob Shopland    Well, yes, Quakers are at the other end of the spectrum. Higher functioning, certainly.

Judge Hathorne        The point is, the defence is claiming to have evidence that this person isn't a witch. If there is evidence, shouldn't we look at it?

Dr. Bob Shopland    Judge, I can assure you that there hasn't been a single instance where a claim of this nature has stood up to scientific scrutiny. Oh, there's lots of anecdotal evidence, people claiming that these people have displayed undiabolic behaviours in the family or in the community, patted a child on the head or put a coin in the poorbox, but on every single occasion where these claims have been appraised scientifically in a controlled study by bringing these people in and applying red-hot irons to their feet they've been unable to do anything except scream like fiends.

Cotton Mather          Exactly like fiends.

Judge Hathorne        There's no consensus among professionals on this new theory, then?

Dr. Bob Shopland    I would say, in fact, that most professionals would be quite strongly against it. I've spoken to quite a number of witchfinders myself, and I haven't found one yet who's prepared to say that all the people he's had burnt as witches were innocent. I'm not saying that it's never true – if someone is accused of curdling the cows’ milk with the evil eye the question of whether or not they're a witch remains an empirical question for the interrogator on each occasion – but I do have to say that for anyone to imply, in the absence of empirical validation, that this technique can break through the power of Satan raises serious ethical concerns.

Cotton Mather          Very serious. Has your honour considered having the defense lawyers burnt?

Dr. Bob Shopland    I have to warn you, judge, that if all this rhetoric and media hype continues it may well succeed in setting witchcraft services back forty years. Our only hope is that rationality and the rules of evidence will prevail.

Judge Hathorne        The rules of evidence?

Dr. Bob Shopland    Standard scientific practice. A valid test, judge, is a test where
1) the variables are strictly controlled - preferably with leg irons, handcuffs, and choke collars;
2) the outcomes are double-blind - that is, both the subject and the torturer wear blindfolds; and
3) there's a control group - that is, one group is in control of the other group, generally with whips and red-hot pokers; and
4) the outcomes can be correlated with the consensus of the existing literature.

Cotton Mather          All we ask, judge, is that people claiming that you can drive out demons without the use of fire in large quantities have to prove their point first, to me. It's not as if I have a closed mind; I just want conclusive proof, through rigorous and properly designed experiments that meet the rules of evidence and identify the variables and eliminate the possibility of outside influence, that the use of fire is no longer appropriate because hell has frozen over.

Judge Hathorne        I'm afraid I have to agree with you. We can't hear this evidence until there's a consensus in the witchfinding community. It's most unsatisfactory, I must say, and I wish I hadn't been put in this unfortunate position. Out of concern for Carla and all other children who may be suffering from their inability to free themselves from demonic posession, the court implores those individuals who are able to do so to conduct the necessary studies to determine the reliability and validity of this most interesting technique. Given the potential for breakthrough to understanding and possibly remediating some of the tragic and mysterious conditions affecting some children, professionals and non-professionals alike would eagerly welcome definitive findings. Until this is done we will never know if there is
“a knocking in the skull, an endless silent shout,
of something beating on a wall, and trying to be let out."

Cotton Mather          And what about Carla?

Judge Hathorne        Carla? Oh, burn her. 

Chris Borthwick 11/21/92