Howard again

A more considered take on the Howard Aboriginal move, taken wholesale from Daniel Davies at Aaronovich watch writing about something completely different:
"Asbos and CCTV [read 'police sweeps and pornography bans'] are potentially a powerful weapon for good, but you can’t be a weapon for good without being a weapon. And our current government has, to say the least, an uneasy psychological relationship with weapons of all kinds, and a record of remarkably poor self-control when facing people who annoy it."

Age bin

Colin Rubenstein says we shouldn’t talk with Hamas because it’s committed to extending its religious grip over all the governments in the entire world, it doesn’t believe in toleration except as a temporary expedient, and it has a severe down on the Jews. All these things may indeed be true, but it’s only fair to remember that the exact same beliefs were held by the Catholic Church until the second Vatican council, only forty years ago, and by the eastern bloc until the fall of the Berlin Wall, only fifteen years ago. Religious fanaticism withers away when exposed to the temptations of the consumer society and the intellectual solvents of liberalism. It is reinforced and potentiated, on the other hand, by poverty, oppression, and national feeling, just the conditions the Israelis are fostering in the occupied territories. There are more ways of killing a cat than choking it with cream, but in the long run that’s the most effective alternative.

Howard's Aboriginal Policy

Howard's new policy on taking over aboriginal settlements is likely to fail because, like all Howard's initiatives, it is
a) done on the back of an envelope without consulting any public servants
b) underfunded and underresourced and
c) motivated - and this is the important bit - primarly by a desire to stick it to his enemies.
It's Howards way of doubling down on his refusal to appologise for the stolen generation- he's not only not going to apologise, he's going to do it again.
Which is not to say that the liberal solution was getting anywhere very fast. I am prepared to forecast, through, that Howard's way won't work either, partly because I don't believe he gives a stuff whether it works or not.

The Dodo

The dodo
Was suaviter in modo;
And would be alive today
Were he fortiter in re.

Hall Palmer.

Anne McDonald

Oh, good. My friend Anne has a piece on the Pillow Angel in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Very telling.

These Names Make News

What have I learned in my last week's reading?

• Wittgenstein was a renowned whistler
• Marlborough, in his youth, fought alongside D'Artagnan
• Einstein had a number of patents on refrigeration design

I should concentrate more on the big picture, I suppose.

Phallicism

My got, I love Nightingale Electrics. It's just up the road from the office, and I can drop in in my lunch hour and contemplate the kind of implacable stud I would be if I had a jackhammer (only ($250) or a nail gun or a welder or (very tempting) an electric nibbler that would cope with 4-cm steel (only $175). Or a folding bicycle.
Or a stud finder, I suppose.
I ended up getting a small 12-in boltcutter ($7) to trim the springs on my mattress (long story) - very wearing, as the absolutely enormous one (36in) was only 16$ and passing up that kind of a bargain on kingsize is always something of a strain, but the yardlong one won't fit in my bedside drawer. Actually, I should get the $16 one in quantity - I'm sure I could make a profit selling it as scrap. I am baffled absolutely as to how the Chinese can make a penny out of sales at this price.