Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

Australians is a grand and absorbing feast of a book. There were many sections that I lingered over slowly, savouring Keneally’s gift for bringing such a wide cast of characters to life, making the book a real experience. Keneally also writes in a witty, almost lapidary prose that is most appealing.

Mark Lynas has posted on the Guardian a fascinating and depressing first person account of the final Heads of State meeting. How do I know China wrecked the Copenhagen deal? I was in the room

The following editorial will be printed today by 56 newspapers in 20 languages, mostly on the front page. "... both the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age dropped out of the project after climate change convulsed Australian politics, demanding, they felt, a more localised editorial position." Write and tell them they were wrong.

There is no knowing the time table towards an ice-free Earth, the current “experiment” by Homo sapiens being unique in the history of the planet. The atmosphere is not waiting for human decision. 

Peter Garrett: A copy of that episode of Futurama where therobots solve Climate Change by farting Earth into a new orbit.  Heneeds new ideas to amuse his disillusioned supporters.

Now their Senate Leader, one of the last bastions of appropriatepolitical conduct, has walked away from the shadow portfolio indisgust, and bovver-boy Abbott and so many other front-benchers withhim, the Federal Liberal party appears unlikely to have any politicalclout for the next decade.

 As Rann and his army of journos prepare to extoll both the man's and his government's virtues before the March State election, manyare now going to have trouble trusting the words they hear.  Defencehubs, a new live music coloseum and new highways; everything they doto try and win at the polling booth is going to be tarnished by thePremier's "porky".

"There are tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of thesestories, each as important as the other, each with its own hurts, itsown humiliations its own traumas - and each united by the experience ofa childhood without love, of childhood alone."- Prime Minister Kevin Rudd

While we in the West can hold our nose when we read about these terrible troubles in the rest of the world, the reality is that our oil dependence means we help contribute to this ugly reality. Our leaders cheerfully extol the virtues of globalisation, but don't like to talk about the money that Saudi Arabia funnels into supporting fundamentalist causes.

Which brings us to a separate issue, yet one with tentative connections to the one mentioned above – the spectacular dumping of the contentious Traveston mega-dam in south east Queensland, which represents a belated day in the sun for the long-maligned Peter Garrett and more eclipse for Labor's cover-girl of such a short time ago, Anna Bligh.

"To me, this is both a statement of fact and an article of faith, an aspiration. Because it’s only if you believe in the fair-minded mainstream that you can create content for it. And even if you sometimes doubt this is what “most people” think, then, in fact especially then, it’s still important to maintain belief in the better natures of our fellow citizens."- Julian Morrow

Go on Kev mate, show us your inner (real) man (you know, like Malcolm Fraser); be courageous (nope, don't drop your daks) and speak the truth to Australians. You do have the numbers to support the fact that overwhelmingly these poor refugees are just that – poor pathetic souls who have sacrificed everything and risked their lives for a safe and secure future for their children.

It now seems almost certain that, if it has not occurred already, within the next several years enough warming will be locked into the system to set in train positive feedback processes that will overwhelm any attempts to cut back on carbon emissions. Humans will be powerless to stop the shift to a new climate on Earth, one much less sympathetic to life. (Clive Hamilton)

Then ... then ... does anyone really care about these issues of contrasting and unprovable faiths until they face the reality of old age and its infirmities? Until they find themselves waiting, waiting for death, but not allowed to die yet - by God, the medical/surgical professions, and the priesthood?

Hubris nurtured by groupthink is the Achilles heel of publicly unaccountable power. The only known human cure for its toxic effects is the free circulation of differing viewpoints, courageous conjectures, corrective judgments, checks and balances, the institutional humbling of power. (John Keane)

Normal transmission is about to be resumed.

Fiona & Richard are both in need of a break, and I'm in London, still. So, we'll close the comment boxes for a while and have a break. 

"The Water Dreamers" is a haunting and thought provoking history of a dry land that refuses to yield to the fevered imagination of its colonisers. With our current water crisis do we continue to dream on, or do we submit to the land and live within it?

One is reminded here of White House chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel's April words: “In the next four years there is going to be a permanent status arrangement between Israel and the Palestinians on the basis of two states for two peoples, and it doesn't matter to us at all who is prime minister." It is enough for me to plan to be at his computer on the last Saturday in September rather than be watching the AFL Grand Final.

My view is that there is a semantic confusion between "abortion" in its most negative, "laden", and controversial sense and what I would describe as "retrospective contraception", particularly involving RU486.

Hours before the release of the CIA info, the US Attorney General, in an echo of Obama policy, put a letter up on the Department of Justice home page explaining how he didn't want to convict people who believe they were acting with a prescribed US legal framework.  From his words, it sounds like anything he does will only be a token gesture:

It's about time the convenient yes minister-type arrangements for the Murray-Darling catchment allowing state government interference based on cronyism against genuine reform of resources management, were ended, and a governing body capable of making the changes necessary for that protection were incorporated, as promised in 2007.

The Israelis also need to receive a message. In their case the message is that the world has changed and that the kind of tricks that allowed the continued expansion of the settlements do no longer work. Further, it is not just a single person in the White House but a change of perception of them by many people around the world including a substantial number of US Jews.

A quarter or two where the GDP manages a dribble of growth isn't "out of recession". If I'm right about the likely oil price reaction to any sustained return to growth, we possibly never will be.

The latest update from the Democratic Audit program at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, on how our democracy is working.

Stuart pulls his focus back from the dumpster to give a big picture view of the shocking inefficiencies in the way we make and market food. When the veil is lifted on how food is farmed, processed, marketed, sold and often thrown away your jaw will hit the ground.

My claim to expertise on this is simply that I am, as far as I know, the only writer to have sampled the different conditions of these three regimes, or samples of regime; the kind of government as I'll start right out by phrasing it, considers the citizen essentially to be the property of the State. (Christopher Hitchens)

I've found before that when you go out alone to watch a football game you kind of spontaneously meet people who are also interested. It's a contrast to going out alone to listen to music or trying to get laid, when I inevitably just get lonelier as the night goes on.