Birthers

In a chat with my brother-in-law a month of so back I mentioned the birthers. Jo unhesitatingly dismissed the topic as too trivial for reasonable people to waste their time discussing (he has admirably high standards; I am more a We-cannot-live-forever-on-the-heights kind of person - OK, if you insist, a Wow, shiny objects kind of a person. And proud of it!). My response at the time was to say that I was prepared to bet that Obama's eventual assassin would be a birther, thus upping the seriousness count. I didn't actually contemplate that the conspiracy theory would move into the mainstream, or at least into the Republican mainstream, which seems to be happening.

Anyway, the odd thing is that to we outsiders the actual purported offence seems so inoffensive. Truthers, yes; we can agree that if the government had flown planes into tall buildings that would be a very bad thing. If Hilary Clinton had murdered Vince Foster, ditto, to a rather lesser extent. But for somebody born of an American mother who'd lived all his adult life in America to stand for president of America seems perfectly reasonable to any Australian - a minor technical breach at most. There's the Manchurian Candidate element, I suppose, to give sauce to the dish, but surely we need a string of hypothesized coverup murders to make this thing really filmic.

Boys

Boys with unpopular, girlish or uncommon names often are ridiculed by peers, come from families of low socioeconomic status and face discrimination in the workforce based on a preconceived bias about their names, according to the study, which analysed more than 15,000 names.

Top 10 bad-boy names

Alec, Ernest, Garland, Ivan, Kareem, Luke, Malcolm, Preston, Tyrell, Walter.

My father was named Alec! My nephew’s called Luke, too. Obviously we’re a family of low socioeconomic status.

Actually, half those names are bog standard respectable. Scots, even. And I simply refuse to believe that there are that many Garlands out there. This whole things sounds suss.

Nine Principles

Rudd put up an Emissions Trading Scheme of sorts. Turnbull "held a telephone hook-up of his front bench yesterday and secured agreement to nine conditions." Penny Wong said that these weren't proper amendments and refused to consider them.
Leaving aside everything to do with the actual merits of Turnbull's nine conditions, it's surely worthy of note that no newspaper or TV show that I can see actually thought we needed to see them. The most we got was from the Australian, which said "If accepted by the government, the conditions would offer extra compensation to coalminers, electricity generators and possibly other heavy industries such as steel, aluminium and cement. And farmers would pay nothing but possibly make money from their emission reduction efforts."

The principles ran to 420 words, not an impossible burden - less if cut. That's apparently though to be too much for us. All that was reported was the political events - dispute, proposal, rejection. All gladiatorial, nothing contemplating that policy could in itself be important.

That said, and maintaining a lack of consideration of the merits, Turnbull's principles were really crap as interventions into the debate. No hint of a connecting narrative, no overarching principles of which these specific points were examples, just a random walk through industry demands with absolutely no persuasive effect at all. I'd call it a wasted opportunity if it wasn't also true that Turnbull obviously picked the operations mode of the Australian media a lot better than I would have. I would have wasted my time trying to get something readable; he knew nobody would have a chance to read it and that all that counted was to be seen to be acting out a role.

The statement isn't even given any special prominence on the Liberal party website.

And of course yes, I would disagree with most of them as being too indulgent to large polluters, but I also disagree with much of the government bill for the same reasons, so I'm not sure how much difference it would make.

For old time's sake

This lovely poem

Astroporn

Of course, it would have been so much better if it had been Venus.

Explains everything

Another Palin post...

Deep insights (II)

(5) For internal doors that don't demand security or privacy, substituting Velcro on the door jamb for lock fittings is a great convenience. You don't have to turn the handle, you can just push!