I Don’t Hear No Fat Lady Singing – Kate Paulk
Rather more years ago than I care to admit, I was a teenager living in Australia, in the state of Queensland, during what is generally regarded to be the most corrupt government that country and state has ever experienced – and by corrupt, I’m talking the real thing. Bribery, protection rackets, severe restrictions on political speech by individuals, you name it. It’s sometimes referred to as the “Joh era” for Joh Bjelke-Petersen, the Premier and not-quite-dictator of the time (I suspect he wouldn’t have minded full dictatorial powers if he’d been able to swing them).
Some background for those who aren’t familiar with Australian politics and particularly the Queensland version (which is almost everyone here): most state governments in Australia follow the Westminster system, with a lower and an upper house elected on a more or less 3 and 6 year cycle. The leader of the majority party becomes the Premier and is the effective head of government. An appointed Governor is the official head of state, with the power to dismiss governments if they become non-functional.
Queensland is unicameral: there is one house, and the party with a majority can do pretty well anything they want. Since it’s a representative system, the party with the most votes is not necessarily the party that has the most representatives and governs. In addition, policing, education, public hospitals, most utilities and roads and the like are all managed at the state government level, so the Queensland Parliament has a hell of a lot of power. There are also a lot of Quangos – quasi-non-government organizations – whose leadership is usually appointed by the state parliament and which manage a lot of the state level infrastructure.
Yes, I know this is pretty dry stuff, but it’s important to where I’m going.
During the Joh era, the state parliament drew the electoral boundaries. You want to talk gerrymandering? These guys had it refined to the point where they were retaining power in parliament with less than 30% of the vote. As I recall the record was a smidgen above 25%… To manage this some of the districts had three or four times as many voters as other.
The state police ran the largest protection rackets in the state – the Vice Squad was notorious for tipping off illegal brothels in time for them to vacate the premises before a raid so they’d be “clean” and able to continue operating. And of course, paying their protection money. If they didn’t pay, they didn’t get the tip-off. The Drug Squad operated much the same way with illegal drugs.
At the time, the accepted method for businesses to get the coveted government contracts was to make large “anonymous” cash donations by leaving a brown paper bag full of cash on the Premier’s desk. The contracts would be forthcoming and keep coming as long as the “anonymous” donations continued.
Of course, everyone knew what was going on. You couldn’t miss it. There were jokes – usually rather black ones – snide comments about how the opposition party would soon require all their members to have been jailed for participating in illegal demonstrations, and periodic inquiries into corruption that always found that there were no problems.
Sound familiar?
Here’s the thing – this was a conservative government, by Australian standards. Taxes were lower than any other state. They balanced their budgets (mostly) and for the most part kept to the areas the Australian Constitution defined as state government responsibilities. But under the covers… the political cartoonists who drew Bjelke-Petersen in a fascist-style uniform with crossed bananas on the armband weren’t that far wrong.
Because it doesn’t matter what the official flavor of a government in power is, once it becomes corrupt and abusive. It can be as fiscally responsible as all get-out (of course, all that extra slush money helped with the budgeting), have low taxes, and all of that, and still be functionally a fascist police state. What makes it that is the preferential treatment of those who paid their dues (cash only, in brown paper bags left on my desk) and the ability of the police to make arbitrary arrests and find something to charge them with later. Both happened.
This should sound really familiar by now.
Everyone thought it wasn’t going to change any time soon. The prevailing wisdom was that there wouldn’t even be a chance for anything to get less corrupt until Bjelke-Petersen eventually resigned. He had the media fairly well controlled, using a combination of withdrawing government advertising from any media outlet that criticized his regime and punishing libel/defamation suits to prevent too much from being circulated (he was well known for referring to press conferences as “feeding the chooks” (chickens)).
Then one media outlet ran a carefully researched documentary that they’d researched for six months. They immediately got hit with the usual defamation lawsuits, but the makers had anticipated that and had their defense lined up and ready to roll. The piece got enough attention that an inquiry was set up – but someone neglected to tell the commissioner that he was supposed to whitewash the whole thing. Instead, the Fitzgerald Inquiry had Queenslanders avid for the next round of revelations of just how deep the corruption ran.
The end result was that two state ministers and a retired police commissioner faced charges of corruption and did jail time. The only reason Bjelke-Petersen didn’t join them was that somehow an utterly partisan supporter ended up on the jury and refused to entertain anything except a not-guilty verdict. Since the jury had to be unanimous to return a verdict and everyone else was just as certain from the evidence that he was guilty, a mistrial was declared, and the state declined to retry on the grounds that Bjelke-Petersen was too old (he was well into his 70s at this point).
In the meantime, that horribly gerrymandered electoral map? It wasn’t enough to save the ruling party. They lost, badly (an Australian political saying is that oppositions never win power. Governments lose it), and the new government promptly turned over management of the electoral boundaries to the Australian Electoral Commission.
Now after that long-winded run-up, here’s the point.
Even though it seems like the vileprogs have everything wrapped up just the way they like it, even though they seem to have the media in their pockets, even though they’ve managed to create a functionally fascist police state here in the USA, they can still lose.
It’s not over. They haven’t taken the gloves off yet because they know they don’t have the power they’d need to go openly where they want. In fact, they know they’re losing ground – that’s why the ever-louder screams of outrage.
Under the surface the ones with brains are desperately trying to deny that the wheels have fallen off the cart, and the cart itself was never worth shit anyway.
We’re gaining ground. As long as we don’t fall for their games and manipulation, we can expose them for the frauds they are and turn this mess around.
It won’t be easy. They’re burrowed in deep, like ticks in a Shar-pei’s hide. But it can be done and we – the ones who’ve spent our whole damn lives cleaning up the messes of those who have preceded us – we can do it.
And we will.
UPDATE: A note from Sarah — My novelette The Big Ship and the Wise Old Owl is free this week on Amazon. Get one. Get two. Give one to your in laws. Give one to your best friend. Give one to your best enemy. It’s free.
According To Hoyt 
Yes, they (the “progressives”) can still lose. But politics as such, though it can provide hope, can only provide temporary answers. As you’ve already pointed out, “conservative” governments can become ineffective, corrupt, and brutal quite as easily as “progressive” ones. Indeed, we in the U.S. have on several occasions replaced liberals with conservatives yet have seldom been satisfied with the consequences.
Perhaps there are no permanent answers. History does tend to testify to that. But as important as politics can be, for more enduring relief from oppressive states, we must look elsewhere as well.
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The Gods of the Copybook Headings hit societies because they are human, not a particular political arrangement. If we could escape intoa a Brave New World, we would have, by now.
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Yep, perfection is something we can strive toward not something we can reach.
People who talk about “perfect systems” ignore that fact.
Even “good systems” have to constantly be maintained to make sure they work as designed.
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“They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
But the man that is shall shadow
The man that pretends to be.”
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Source or your own?
Very good no matter who it’s by. [Smile]
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Part of TS Eliot’s Choruses from The Rock.
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Thank you kindly.
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Oh, and here’s another finely-crafted link.
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And for those whose Google-fu is weak, here is a finely crafted link for your enjoyment.
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And of course, your Brave New World is my idea of hell, and vice versa for damn near any random pair of humans.
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Eh, there’s a limited number of things we want in society, so there’s probably a lot of clumping.
But a true Brave New World doesn’t have space for a lot of people. Fraudsters, for instance, we can all agree have no place there.
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The price of liberty is eternal vigilance – and no matter who gets elected, politicians will take office. The only way to keep a new set of politicians from going down the same path is to stay on them like flies on roadkill.
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That Liberty requires vigilance is not merely a self-evident truth, it is a tautological statement. You cannot be Free while relying on the kindness of strangers. Once you have entrusted another with protection of your Liberty you are no longer in possession of that Liberty.
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Many years ago I read a story about an invading army who lost the war because their victims wouldn’t go along with the plan. The phrase, “No, I won’t!” was the rallying cry.
I bring it up (also hope someone else recognizes it!) because we’re in the same position. Yeah, politicians of all stripes will get away with it – if we let them. But if we LOUDLY point out their every indiscretion, if we repeatedly remind them of our long-held customs and Constitutional rights, and if we refuse to allow them to stomp on those rights – we’ll win.
Yes, there will be personal injuries and abuses. The Founding Fathers were well aware of the possibilities facing them – and paid the price regardless. It takes courage, but it can happen.
Nations are built by imperfect men and women. But our progenitors realized that, and warned us. One, Jefferson, warned, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Thomas Paine wrote a poem in that direction,
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Liberty_Tree
The first symbol of resistance the early colonists chose was a tree. I think we should follow their example.
We need to feed the tree.
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I think that the story you are talking about would be one of two by Eric Frank Russell. The first is the last chapter of THE GREAT EXPLOSION, in which the colonists rander a ptaternalistic takeove totally impotant with the philosophy “F,IW!” (Freedom, I Won’t!). He wrote at least one short story with a similar structure, the name of which escapes me.
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Exactly. If we stay on them and expose their abuses no matter who “they” happen to be, then we can rein them in and improve things.
We’ll probably need to prune rather heavily at this point, since we’ve been kind of slack on the preventive maintenance (we as a whole, not we as in the readers here specifically. The pruned won’t like it, but then they don’t like anything except their own power, so we’re better off without them (and I sincerely hope said pruning can be managed metaphorically and without the generation of large quantities of blood and bone).
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Oh lordy. :D I was in Australia in 19[redacted] and went to hear GIlbert and Sullivan’s “The Gondoliers” in Sidney. Now, political scandals had been rocking Queensland, Tasmania, and IIRC New South Wales, and the cast managed to work a lot of the current headlines into the production. It was fantastic!
There have been cases in the US where similar, smaller, administrations got cleaned out. Tamany Hall in NYC and Pendergast in KC are the best known. In each case it was a few individuals with the public’s ear (a cartoonist and a newspaper editor) who started it, and others fed them information and supported them, until the tide of public opinion turned. A book about a murder case in NM that triggered investigations and eventually improved things is Cricket in the Web by Paula Moore.
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The counter example is Chicago where the corruption is so deep, and so entrenched that it passed from father to son with one or two administrations in between, is *nationally* known, and then we elected a sack o’ corruption from that environment.
Yeah, the fat lady ain’t singing, but that’s mostly because she doesn’t have to sing for her supper any more. She’s down the block performing in Vagina Monologues and dating a 15 year old because it’s her right.
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Chicago is a whole ‘nother world, true. But you can’t let it serve as an excuse for not trying to do something elsewhere. And, Bog willing, if we clean up enough of the rest of the country, we can start nibbling on the edges of Chicago.
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There is the story that, on the arrest and prosecution of a Louisiana governor, the populace as a whole had one reaction: yes, we know he was a corrupt crook, but he was our corrupt crook.
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Well, Louisiana is, to the best of my knowledge, the only state with a museum dedicated solely to the state’s politics.
(It’s in the old capitol in Baton Rouge and I highly recommend poking your head in if you get the chance. The building is beautiful inside, and the history is more interesting than you’d think.)
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It’s entirely possible that even Chicago isn’t completely lost. The right triggers haven’t been found, and the people who *could* do something have been looking at the situation and making the perfectly sane and sensible decision to go somewhere better.
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I’ve been pleased with the surge of ordinary Chicagoians showing up at aldermen’s “town hall” type meetings and giving them hell and threatening not to reelect them if things don’t change (mostly the lack of actually, you know, taking on the gangs instead of paying off “community organizers”).
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Good to hear. They might actually tip the balance if they keep it up.
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“It’s entirely possible that even Chicago isn’t completely lost. The right triggers haven’t been found”
I’m partial to Timney’s, myself.
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Lovely mechanisms, if a bit on the pricey side.
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That sounds interesting. If I ever am near there again I shall have to see if I can fit in a visit.
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Better to burn it with fire.
Again.
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It’s quite remarkable to see something like that unfold from the inside. You really appreciate how quickly what seems like an unassailable hold on power can crumble once the dam starts to break.
That time and place it was rather “Queensland: business as usual one day, what the fuck is happening the next.”
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It’s called a “preference cascade”, and its something you can observe happening every time there’s a revolution. All of a sudden, the mass wakes up to the idea that there are a bunch of people who are similarly unhappy, and then the fit hits the shan…
Part of the problem with a country like ours is that things have been so peaceful for so long that the politicians have forgotten just how quickly things can get really, really bad for them. When the political classes grow so disconnected from the voting public that they think things like Obamacare and open borders are really, really good ideas that everyone else wants to have happen, they move forward on things with an insouciance that borders on criminal. Which is when the revolution comes. In our society, that’s likely to manifest itself as more Tea Party/OWS activism and a bunch of people getting put out of office, but if they try to suppress that sort of thing for too long, and are successful at it? Yeah, it won’t be too long before certain elected parties are swinging from the streetlight poles.
These fools know not what they’re doing. Soap box, ballot box, cartridge box–Suppress the effects of the first two, and you’re going to wind up making the use of the third almost inevitable.
I’m thinking that when the effects of this recent border BS become clear, come this fall when schools open, and people start hearing about drug-resistant TB epidemics and other things happening in their nice suburban schools, there’s going to be a huge amount of blowback. Even some of the more practical Hispanics I know of, who came in as illegals back in the 1970s and 1980s aren’t very happy with this shit, at all. One of the Catholic parishes a friend of mine is in was talking about sponsoring a bunch of these kids up here, and the priest involved got his ass chewed by the parishioners for sticking them into it–And, the angriest ones were the groups who’d come up here as real refugees from the war in El Salvador. I don’t think this is going to work out the way the geniuses in the Obama administration think it will…
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There was an exchange on Facebook a few weeks ago that I found quite enlightening. My friend Nick, a Boston liberal who actively campaigned for Chief Warren, consistently maintained that revolution in the US would be *impossible* – because the destruction of property wouldn’t be in anyone’s self-interest, that conservatives would never begin a shooting war, and would always work to de-escalate, because it’s better to have 50% (or 25%, or 12.5%, or…) of something, than see a war in which it’s all trashed.
Joseph, a Texas conservative, *simply could not get through to him* that it was possible anyone would ever actively “actively work against their self-interest” by creating a situation where that infrastructure, those physical assets, would be destroyed or endangered, as would be the case if things went hot.
It scared the living hell out of me, especially when I discreetly broached the subject with other liberals who basically reacted the same way: the other side is never, ever going to push back, they’re not crazy enough to, it’s not in their self-interests, a fight is inconceivable.
Seems to me that when the aggressor is absolutely convinced that a fight is inconceivable, that it pretty much becomes inevitable.
A lot of left-wing people, including quite a few I know and like personally, are going to have VERY rude awakenings inside the next 10-20 years, and I can imagine some of them still trying to explain, as the noose is fit and the box kicked from under them, that it’s not rational for the conservatives to do anything but submit.
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It scared the living hell out of me, especially when I discreetly broached the subject with other liberals who basically reacted the same way: the other side is never, ever going to push back, they’re not crazy enough to, it’s not in their self-interests, a fight is inconceivable.
That would explain a lot about how the current administration behaves…..
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There is a point beyond which a shooting (civil) war will happen. Nobody knows when, but it will happen.
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For arguing about the destruction of property wouldn’t be in anyone’s self-interest and : the other side is never, ever going to push back, they’re not crazy enough to, it’s not in their self-interests, a fight is inconceivable I suggest bringing up What’s the Matter With Kansas? a book full of odd ideas but it’s hard for the soft headed to deny an existence proof for action against interest when it’s one of their own making the argument. In asking “what ’s the matter with Kansas?”—how a place famous for its radicalism became one of the most conservative states in the union—Frank, a native Kansan and onetime Republican, seeks to answer some broader American riddles: Why do so many of us vote against our economic interests?. In the alternative either people are indeed acting against interest or people are a better judge of their own interest than Thomas Frank is willing to admit.
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*shrug*
“Their interests” doesn’t mean “what they believe is best,” it’s entirely in the power of the person talking about “interests.”
You know, for their own good type stuff…..
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Have you noticed that our current occupant of the Oval Office seems quite incapable of understanding Russian aggression because it runs contrary to Russia’s self-interest?
He is incapable of grasping the long term strategy in play here because he is purely focused on (what he perceives to be) Russia’s short term interests.
The British, French and other world leaders made similar assumptions about Germany’s self-interest in the ’30s.
These are the same attitudes that said we should ignore the 9/11 attack because, well, terrorism really doesn’t pose any significant danger, killing fewer people annually than auto accidents.
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*lightbulb*
It’s kind of like how “everyone is really the same”– exactly like the person talking, unless they’re evil or insane.
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Not long after I suffered through WTMWK?, I read about Gramsci and the idea of cultural hegemony. Frank seems to argue for Kansans succumbing to cultural hegemony, rather than accepting that perhaps Kansans got what they wanted and so they don’t feel like rebelling (at least for the moment.) And there’s still a swath of central Kansas that’s politically and socially Progressive, according to some grad students from there.
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The question also betrays a very short term perspective on what somebody’s “self-interest” might be.
It is against your short term self-interest to give up that job in a welding shop and go to college for an engineering degree. It is against your medium term self-interest to get an engineering degree when as a welder you could have spent those six years earning and saving money, enabling yourself to open your own welding shop rather than sitting on >$100K in college debt.
Over six years it is not improbable the welder could have netted on average $40K a year while the student accrued a similar amount in annual college related debt, producing the circumstance where there is a $400+K difference in their relative capital situations with the welder holding six years of practical work experience and the engineer being ready to commence an apprenticeship.
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The usual “why don’t you peasants listen to your betters” diatribe?
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Once upon a time we got C-span 2, which broadcast a program called Booknotes on the weekends. I got to watch a presentation, by author, on What’s the Matter With Kansas?
As I understood his argument, the author was confounded because Kansans were not voting for government programs that would, in the opinion of the author, help them individually — that immediate self interest was not their primary motivator. Nor were Kansans inclined to buy into a government-as-Robin-Hood-plan — take from the rich to give to the poor.
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I wonder why the British did not make a separate peace with Germany after Dunquerque? Hitler offered generous terms as all he wanted was to secure his Western flank in order to defeat the terrorist state to his East? Surely it was in the Brits’ self interest?
For that matter, why did thousands of Yankees leave their homes, going to war to prevent the Southern states leaving the Union? How was it not in their self interest to not tell Dixie “so long, mind the door on your way out”?
For that matter, it was not in the self-interest of the colonials to fight for their independence from Britain in the late 18th Century. The taxes levied were both trivial — a few cents, that’s all — and justified, considering the costs borne by the Crown protecting the colonies (and the costs the colonies would have to bear themselves if they got their independence.) Besides, what they attempted was unprecedented; no colony had ever broken away from its mother before.
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Jo Walton’s Small Change series starting with Farthing is an interesting and fairly credible in the main alt-history in which the UK did make a separate peace. Most of the main book characters in the government and public life are clearly and obviously by intent drawn from life. I was most impressed that some of the stage dressing NPC if you will, although in fact Jo made them up from scratch for the needs of the book, had real life analogs – it really is an almost possible alternate.
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Yes, I know this is pretty dry stuff, but it’s important to where I’m going.
Oh, I don’t know, doesn’t seem very dry to me– sounds like the “wake up sweating” sort of setup. There’s gotta be upsides, but the abuses sure seem obvious to me!
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There’s that. This whole thing was twenty-something years entrenched, and nobody really believed it could change. Then it did.
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I am reminded of the quote from the latest Honor Harrington book, where Thomas Thiesman reminds Eloise Pritchart,”The citizens of Nuveau Paris didn’t think they could change things either…. until the Manty 8th Fleet came calling. You know what happened next.”
All it will take is one little push to start the avalanche.
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Reading your post made me homesick.
I grew up in downstate Illinois about a hundred miles outside of Cook county, Chicago for those uninitiated.
We drove on gravel roads so they could build yet another expressway with the roads taxes. We had fundraisers to patch the leaky roof of our school while they built another glorious public building with our property taxes.
Illinois is a rural conservative state with a cancerous boil on its neck with tendrils reaching deep into Springfield, the state capitol.
I left there in 1984 for a better life elsewhere which I found and now enjoy. Unfortunately, long after the passing of King Richard the First, Hizzoner da Mare, nothing much seems to have changed bases on accounts I hear from family still in the area.
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plus, the Boil’s hand picked minion is now the resident of 1600, and his former chief of staff is now Hizoner the Prima Ballerina of the Boil.
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Hi Uncle Lar, I have given up on that the “cancerous boil” I live in being lance, it’s going burst from it’s own hypocrisy. http://heyjackass.com/
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I say the city needs a new motto Chicago. Could be worse. Could be Detriot
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It probably won’t look like anything can change – then something will split it wide open. Obviously it’s been ripe for that for a long time, but the event that will trigger the explosive decomposition hasn’t happened.
I rather suspect this is what the residents of the former East Germany (those who weren’t high up in the Party, anyway), Romania, the USSR, and the various other Communist regimes believed right up until Communist regimes started going down like dominoes.
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You’re describing the mechanism of social change that I’ve heard likened to “mechanics of the sand pile.”
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Pretty much. It looks different from the inside.
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My experience of Chicago politics is a little different. Certainly a machine city but also under Mayor Richard J. Daley
– an Imperial Mayor if you will. When Mayor Daley was dying an emergency room turned away at least one patient at the point of death (who did die quickly) to stay vacant in case Mayor Daley arrived. In the event Mayor Daley was taken elsewhere but in the meantime a man died –
a very livable city. I’d say that under Mayor Richard J. Daley the city’s needs were met and anything left over was stolen. Under Mayor Richie Daley the corrupt had their needs met and anything left over went to the city’s needs.
Under Mayor Daley the first it was pretty much the rule that political types could be corrupt or they could have personal power (people from the Cook County state’s attorney’s office who made the famous Black Panther Raid believed the FBI furnished false intelligence as part of a conspiracy between da Mayor and Hoover’s FBI to bring down Ed Hanrahan who was alter boy honest but knew too much – I can’t personally speak to any such conspiracy but I can vouch that folks who made the raid thought it was such a setup – and my wife who worked around Ed Hanrahan later is the source for alter boy honest) but the Mayor was the only one allowed to be both powerful and personally dishonest. The Mayor allowed no rivals and so no long term successors but party and his son.
The system of Chicago like say Warsaw was a parallel power structure of party and state and as such could be responsive to citizen input – need a city service see the precinct captain who would know you by name and address.
FREX seems to me it was Vulcan Materials who got a buy on 50 Autocar trucks suddenly too small for open pit mines but legally over size and weight for the road empty. The company then put 14 yard transit mix bodies on them. Perfectly OK to operate under the Party rules in Cook County but necessary to sneak them past State police check stations to go as far as Joliet.
Like say much of the history of Rome the system was beyond reform (see e.g. Marius both historically and as by Poul Anderson) and despite best efforts – maybe Jane Byrne or less so Harold Washington could go nowhere but down.
by Father Brown in The Flying Stars G.K. Chesteton
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Here’s the thing – this was a conservative government, by Australian standards. Taxes were lower than any other state. They balanced their budgets (mostly) and for the most part kept to the areas the Australian Constitution defined as state government responsibilities. But under the covers… the political cartoonists who drew Bjelke-Petersen in a fascist-style uniform with crossed bananas on the armband weren’t that far wrong.
So “Fiscally conservative,” in American terms; while a properly three-prong (FiCon, SoCon, military/law&order) conservative gov’t would have to actually follow the rules. (including limits on what they get involved in)
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No, they wouldn’t.
The DoD and the industries that feed it are so corrupt, abusive and wasteful it *hurts*, and they are *generally* SoCon and L&O.
The *ONLY* way is eternal vigilance, and that’s just not going to happen.
Remember, the guys in my tribe are flexible and work with each other to get things done. The guys in YOUR tribe are using their cronies to get the work done and avoid following the rules.
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Remember, the guys in my tribe are flexible and work with each other to get things done. The guys in YOUR tribe are using their cronies to get the work done and avoid following the rules
Cynicism isn’t an argument, and the phrasing here is actually pretty illustrative– “flexible and work with each other” are magical good words to the left, while “get things done while following the spirit and letter of the law” are higher for the right.
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The thing is that it doesn’t *matter* what the definitions are. Everyone gets corrupted by power, and the people who go into politics are more likely to be corrupted than those who avoid it.
Some are more corrupt than others, but give a conservative damn near absolutely power and it will be a very rare one who doesn’t end up abusing it (often with the very highest of motives). And yes, you can replace “conservative” with “liberal” here. Or with “human”.
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The thing is that it doesn’t *matter* what the definitions are.
Of course it does– it’s like an inversion of the “No True Scotsman” story, but with what folks claim to be; if someone says they’re X, but they don’t do mandatory-X things– or do opposed-to-X things– then they’re not actually that. Like the cases you’ll sometimes find of “Christians” who insist that Jesus was not actually the Christ*.
If someone is corrupted to the point that they are then opposed to the essential points of their claimed identity, then they are not that thing anymore.
Sure, folks get corrupted, and folks make excuses for those who are in power– that doesn’t mean that black becomes white at their claim.
* (Thinking of “Spirit of Vatican II,” the blogger, specifically here– to head off anybody guessing!)
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I test software for a living. That’s a field where no matter WHAT the definitions are, everyone uses them differently. The first thing testers do when they start discussing things is state their definitions so there’s no confusion…
I tend to apply that perspective everywhere, and look at the results rather than the definitions or terminology.
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That’s a basic principle of logical thinking: define your terms and your givens.
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I see the “reject those who are doing the opposite of what they say they will” as a vital part of killing off the corruption– how far would “civil rights” have gotten if they guys who now make arguments based on the one-drop rule of race had been booted at the start?
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Not very.
And yes, rejecting those who do the opposite of what they say – and those whose efforts have the opposite effect of what they’re supposed to have – would go a long way.
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But it does matter, because we still need to communicate.
I have known leftists who haughtily declare that people are allowed to describe themselves as they choose in specific defense of using labels with an intent to deceive.
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I don’t generally find them extending that same privilege to
conservativesfascists or TEAPartiersBaggers.LikeLike
Well, duh.
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>sigh<
That's a variation on "the men in your tribe are worthless and lazy. The men in my tribe are down on your luck. The women in my tribe are friendly and affectionate. The women in your tribe are faithless sluts".
Conservatives tend to forgive different stuff than Progressives, but we also have a tendency not to really look too hard as long as we are more or less left alone.
How many people on the right *like* Oliver North, despite his violations of the laws? Yes, he was probably asked to do these things by "higher", but he *did* them, and when caught he did not "squeal", which is to say HE COVERED UP FOR HIS BOSSES.
How many Conservatives SHOULD have known about Ted Stevens, and even when HE WAS TRIED AND FOUND GUILTY he was still narrowly defeated, because MY TRIBE GOOD YOUR TRIBE BAD.
Until we can get past that everything can change, but it'll be exactly the same because we'd rather trust a smooth talking sociopath with a good narrative than do the hard work of thinking ourselves.
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It may be a variation on a classic; that does not mean it is a classic itself, nor that the cynicism of both is accurate.
It speaks to a tendency, however it assumes that nobody has noticed this and corrects for it– an assumption that’s not just false, but laughably false when one pays attention to the behavior of the two national parties.
More importantly, it’s lazy. Rather than dealing with stuff on the merits, it assumes that everyone is equally flawed, so why bother.
I’ve been getting a steady stream of this junk because of the current Israel to do, and my tolerance for it wasn’t too big in the first place.
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Okay, I don’t know what Oliver North did that was illegal, but for 95+% of the possibilities, I would respect him more for not squealing. I despise snitches, and won’t associate with them (for one thing, you KNOW they can never be trusted). And yes I will respect a leftist more that takes his lumps and refuses to roll over on his buddies/bosses. I may not like it, because I want the proof to nail his buddy/boss; but I’ll respect him more for it.
That is the culture I was raised in, and one that those in power, on both the left and the right would like to eliminate; unless of course it is their buddy/subordinate that gets busted.
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You might want to review the
persecutionprosecution of Senator Stevens, given that the Justice Department attorneys had the case thrown out on appeal on grounds of extreme prosecutorial misconduct.I quote:
An extraordinary special investigation by a federal judge has concluded that two Justice Department prosecutors intentionally hid evidence in the case against Sen. Ted Stevens, one of the biggest political corruption cases in recent history.
A blistering report released Thursday found that the government team concealed documents that would have helped the late Stevens, a longtime Republican senator from Alaska, defend himself against false-statements charges in 2008. Stevens lost his Senate seat as the scandal played out, and he died in a plane crash two years later.
The 500-page report by investigator Henry F. Schuelke III shook the legal community, as law professors described it as a milestone in the history of prosecutorial misconduct.
http://www.npr.org/2012/03/15/148687717/report-prosecutors-hid-evidence-in-ted-stevens-case
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I could well be wrong on this, but I think for about a hundred years we were actually working to get rid of the tribal mindset by pushing allegiance to a larger, overall tribe – that of being Americans. We even had our own mythology and folk heroes, like Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill.
But then it became cool to not be part of the ‘tribe’ in the ’60s – to go off on one’s own and not adhere to society’s expectations and mores. Now we’re descending more to a tribalistic format where the outsider is looked upon with suspicion.
There’ve been a few unifying events – like Gulf War 1, 9/11 – where the tribalism was briefly counteracted with patriotism, but with that being seen as such an old-fashioned and outmoded idea there were plenty ready to rip at the foundations of such an idea. They’ve got the power of narrative – and a good story always beats an unpleasant truth… until the truth can no longer be ignored and everything falls apart.
I don’t really know what will reverse such a thing. When I get REALLY cynical, I think about the only thing that might save us as a functioning country would be a triple nuclear strike – LA, DC, and NYC. Otherwise, the people who want power and control and are willing to rip everything down to get it are going to keep fractioning the country.
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Except that Ted Stevens wasn’t found guilty without substantial and proven prosecutorial misconduct. See also DeLay, Tom. See also Libby, Scooter. See also D’Souza, Dinesh. In this era of selective prosecution and “Three Felonies A Day”, guilty does not mean what you think it means.
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Both the Left AND the Right need to be taught the difference between “law ‘n’ order” and the Rule Of Law. The Rule Of Law means following established law even if people ” we know are juilty” get away. “Law ‘n’ order” is generally keeping the riff-raff down at the behest of the Right People.
The two may intersect, but not often.
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Indeed. Rule of Law explicitly includes the presumption of innocence and the notion that it’s better that guilty people go free in order to keep innocent people from being caught up in the dragnet. Lawnorder doesn’t.
Lawnorder also makes a nice easy rallying cry without all those nasty complexities: so much easier for someone trying to get elected.
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“I would cut down every law in England to get at the devil!”
“And when every law in England is flat, and the Devil turns around on you, where will you hide? No, I will give even the Devil benefit of the law– for my own protection!”
If you’ve got to break the law to get the result you “just know” is right, then you’re not law and order, you’re part of the problem. (Bad laws need to be changed, not ignored. There’s a difference between bad laws and laws that are currently in the way….)
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Shucks, next thing you will be saying that the President can’t enact policies that are popular unless the Congress passes enabling legislation! What kind of country would that leave us with?
It is especially important that bad laws be enforced, rejected and repealed, otherwise the legislature and executive have little incentive to take the time and pay the attention necessary to pass good laws. The entire concept of Civil Disobedience is to force recognition of bad law by forcing enforcement of it. Excessive prosecutorial discretion is de fact bills of attainder.
A judges’s duty is to enforce the law as written, not rewrite it to do what the judge imagines the legislators would have written the law to do had they not been hungover the day it was crafted (please note I am granting some few legislators the benefit of the doubt that they were not still six sheets to windward.)
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Somewhat off topic but what would happen if political boundaries were randomly generated after every census? How much would that alter the landscape? I think the idea of no safe seats would help.
Thanks, Kate, for the wonderful read.
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I’ve often thought that legislative districts (at least) should be drawn starting at the upper left (northwest) corner of the undistricted area, adding one household/resident/voter at a time, keeping the district as close to square as physical boundaries permit until the apportionment limit is reached, then move on to the next one. Let the chips fall where they may. This is meant to be a country where the individual is sovereign. Consideration given to pressure groups is not only invidious, it is un-American.
M
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sorta like counties in Georgia? (where they were made so a man could get to the county seat and vote then back home in a day)
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That would work in most areas, but in some rural areas, or places with interesting geography you need to work with the existing roads. In the San Mateo County (were I was an election official/poll worker a few times) there literally were parts of the county that to get from one address to an address 2 miles away map and compass would be a 2-3 hour drive.
These days computers can, and IMO should be able to sort this out rather handily.
But as the Blog Fadda puts it, not enough oppurtunies for graft and corruption,
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*shrug* You’d just see even more illicit shenanigans with the census itself than we do now. Might still be worth doing, as a useful tool, but it would have to be accompanied by other fixes as well.
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Don’t do it based on the census. Do it based on voter registration as an average over the previous 4 years.
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Too gameable, until the registration system is fixed– there’s still people getting ballots for their dogs, and hundreds of people “registered” at an empty lot type shenanigans.
As part of a fixed voter registration system, maybe? That would avoid the “gov’t has a record of where every citizen lives” issue.
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If you don’t fix the registration system then there’s no point in doing anything else because it’ll be gamed to hell and back.
Heck, the Democrats here (CO) have voted themselves a permanent majority by mandatory mail in ballot. Folks are (allegedly) \ going round to apartment/communal mail facilites when the ballots are delivered and getting them off the ground where uninterested folks just drop them.
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Washington, ditto; I’ve mentioned before that I got double-ballots after directly contacting them years in advance.
The registration cleaning might be doable on a private scale, though. Dems clearly think so, since they tried to destroy the “True the Vote” lady.
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Washington, yeah. I believe I have mentioned here before that they continued to send my ballot to my parents house (for all I know they could have sent it to other Washington addresses I had after moving away from home, although most of them weren’t too permanent) after I had moved to Idaho and registered to vote here. I contacted them, then my mother contacted them the next time a ballot came, THEN they FORWARDED MY WASHINGTON BALLOT, TO MY IDAHO ADDRESS!
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*headdesk*
And yet, not once did my military ballot make it to me…..
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I would like to see a Constitutional amendment that would force the drawing of boundaries of representative districts be the shortest possible boundary that includes an equal amount of people as all other districts. No more contortionist drawing of district boundaries to ensure they include all the “right people” to ensure a particular outcome — all districts would be “equal”, and the boundaries could be drawn by computer. There may need to be a bit of tweaking to ensure that homes weren’t split or when boundaries are so defined as to be difficult to understand, but otherwise things would be easier to draw, easier to understand, and quite a bit more “fair” to all residents.
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“People”? Bah. CITIZENS!
Apportioning representation based on population, without regard to the citizenship status of that population, is part of why we’ve got the illegal immigrant problem we have today.
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+1
Maybe even “citizens over the age of 10” or something, and have computers draw the maps based on roads.
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State borders, Interstates, city and county lines, major arterials, rivers and mountains, coastlines where relevant, school district boundaries… As long as they don’t reference voting preferences it’s all good.
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I suspect that was an unspoken assumption in his description. I know I seldom use “citizens” instead of “people” when I’m talking about such things, but that’s because I don’t even consider counting anyone else.
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I wish our Congressional Masters didn’t think of anyone else, but alas, they do. The Constitution says “persons” rather than “citizens”, so they take full advantage:-(
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That’s how the Australian Electoral Commission works – they have a set of guidelines: State boundaries (no district can cross State lines), major geographical features (rivers, mountain ranges, coastlines, and so forth), local government boundaries (more or less the equivalent of US county lines), major highways, major arterial roads and so forth.
No reference to voting patterns or demographic breakdowns are allowed, and each seat has to have the same number of people within (I think) a 5% range. When enough districts fall outside the tolerance, the boundaries are automatically redrawn using the same set of rules.
The result is that there is no such thing as a safe seat in any Australian government. There have been elections where the Prime Minister lost his/her seat (along with power – usually a swing that kicks out a sitting PM is enough to reduce their party’s representation significantly – leading to jokes about them convening in phone booths). The last time I checked, a swing of around 5-10% would change the party in power in most Australian States and the Federal Government. Nobody has more than a 20% margin.
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I’ve often thought that we ought to just cut to the chase, and elect our freakin’ lobbyists.
Retain a bicameral legislature, keeping one house based on geography, and have the other one a freakin’ free-for-all, so that every interest that can muster the votes can have a representative elected by their partisans. As a citizen, you’d get a chance to vote on a geographic representative, and then maybe two-three “special interest” representatives. Cut the number of special-interest legislators at 500 or so, and then the top special interests get a proportionate number of seats.
It would have the benefit of getting the special interests out in the open, and it would serve to reduce the indirect corruption. Hell, let’s go even further–Sell some or all of the seats to the highest bidder. Let corporations like Microsoft or Disney spend their billions openly buying legislators, and put the money straight into the treasury. After a certain point, they’d reach a place where they couldn’t effectively change things by buying more, or they’d run out of money. Leave the other house of Congress there for the common folk to elect as a check, with draconian rules for falling prey to corruption. Maybe make that one lottery-based, with every registered voter being eligible for a 2-year term.
Hell, I bet we could retire the national debt in a couple of decades, if we did that.
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I am the producer for the Mike Slater Show on KFMB in San Diego and The Blaze Radio. I wanted to let you know about our new app LibertyTree.
Our goal is to connect and inspire the conservatives across the country in a mobile community and feature your great work to our audience.
One part of our mobile community will be the Resource section. We believe that your writing is a perfect fit. The opportunity is simple, and I would love to discuss how we can promote your work. We just want to promote the app and the conservative movement.
May I speak on the phone with you sometime during the week. How would Tuesday or Wednesday at 8:00am PST work to discuss?
Look forward to talking!
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Is this for me or for Kate?
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You want spam and eggs, or eggs and spam?
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Well, dearest over here would take Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam and Spam — that is if he liked Spam. So, in truth, he would probably just tell you were you could stick your Spam.
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As long as it’s not green eggs and spam I’m fine.
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Bloody Vikings!
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Only at the end of a hard day’s work.
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Go tell the Samoans.
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Did someone say Samoa(n)s?
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You are an evil, evil man. Oh, for anyone who has not tried them, the little Nestle candy bars really do taste like a G.S. cookie (thin mint or samoa) crossed with a chocolate bar. I’ve been stocking up, because a local shop has them for $0.39 each.
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You are an evil, evil man.
Bwahahaha! (I’ve been told that I do a VERY good evil laugh, but you’ll just have to imagine this one.)
Incidentally, I am finally in possession of an oven, after living in this house almost a year. Guess what I’m going to be making soon?
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Miles, if you’re talking to me, you’ve got the wrong person – Sarah’s the one with the voice around here. I just guest post once a month.
This is kind of out of the blue, and does read a bit spammy (although I’m not sure how the heck anyone could intro something like this without being spammy).
Schedule wise, weekdays don’t. I work full-time testing software. My employers would not appreciate me taking phone calls for something not-job-related during work time.
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Kate – Thanks for a rare peek into another country’s problems.
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I get that about them by reading Tim Blair’s blog. Used to get some about the UK from a few friends, but that forum/IRC is inactive now
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Since we came back to the US, we get less info on other countries. Go figure–
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what’s the saying about politics being local or some such (OT, I’m home from work fixing a plumbing leak …yippy!..not. it is eating the floor in the kitchen/laundry area)
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I just sat down from spending most of day doing prep work to paint front porch because of hail storm. So, yay.
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yeah, I couldn’t see and fix it Friday when I was off work and oh by the way, when the temp was 75 or so. No … it had to be today when it is 97 and I should be at work. But I finally got it sorted and other than the floor wanting to collapse now, I just need to cool off a bit.
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The US is so big and so diverse (real diversity, not fake skin-deep stuff) that there really isn’t much of a *need* to follow what other countries are doing.
Australia watches the rest of the world pretty closely because most of us know if the fecal matter hits the rotating blades we’re stuffed. Small population, huge and effectively indefensible landmass. It means you anticipate your neighbors AND stay on good terms with them even if they make you want to beat your head (preferably their heads, but that’s another issue) against a wall.
By comparison, there isn’t another military in the world that could invade *and keep* the US (and if the US government was idiotic enough to capitulate to a hypothetical invader, there’d be a government-in-exile coordinating resistance in no time flat – as well as more local militias than you could poke a stick at).
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Yes – and the guns hidden in the backyard would be dug up and ready to use. lol
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Oh, hell yes.
Not to mention the potato cannons refitted and repurposed to handle something a bit more… potent. (I rather suspect that with enough duct tape, a potato cannon could hurl something seriously damaging just enough times to be useful. I further suspect that someone here has already tried this and has photos. Please post them.).
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lol – oh yea potato cannons and pumpkin trebuchets — we are ready.
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FEAR the potato cannons and the punkin chunkers!
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*eyes get wide* Ooooh…. alright, who’s done the tests to see if flaming jack’o’lanterns are effective?!
*BING!*
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I’m impressed with their accuracy with a trebuchet, with less than completely uniform ammunition.
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Man, those air-powered punkin chunkers could probably take out a tank if loaded with something heavy and metallic.
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When potato cannons & pumpkin trebuchets are outlawed, only outlaws will have potato cannons & pumpkin trebuchets.
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How do they do with zucchini? Or does that come under the Hague Convention prohibitions?
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Ooh – zucchini, shoved into a pipe slightly smaller than itself, so it’s a tight fit, but with a 16-penny nail stuck in the front of it.
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I haven’t done it, but the obvious option is a potato shotgun– I’d suggest golfballs as the pellets in front of the potato.
For fun stuff, anyways. For deadly purposes? I know there are some alcohol mixtures that mimic napalm fairly well, and I’m sure a tin can full of them would go far enough to really, really suck without going out.
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I’m enjoying that prospect *far* too much…
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Alton Brown says concentrated Orange Juice makes for great Napalm (His daughter was “dissing” him after a Mythbusters show, so he showed her how to blow things up)
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The Daughter had Mythbusters on while they did a show devoted to duct tape. Every time I walked through the room I found myself stoping for a moment to listen. They even built a working cannon out of the stuff…
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Seen those. I tend not to watch them often because I end up yelling at the TV when they make one of their common stupid mistakes.
But for the cannon…just add a thin liner and use the tape to strengthen it and it would have greater range with better accuracy if the ammo was shaped like a mortar or a sabot. Sorta an oversize potato cannon talked about above
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I want to make one with steel pipe for the liner, then reinforced with epoxy and fiberglass. That should last a long time.
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carbon fiber is getting rather cheap and is available as a long ribbon … spin the pipe and wrap it like a wire wrapped gun from days of yore (or the 1632 series)
My uncle had a Ruger 10/22 that had a tensioned barrel that was made of a rather thin liner with thick ends, put under tension and then wrapped with carbon and cured, then the tension released. very accurate, and very light even though it was nearly an inch in diameter.
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Wow. A lot cheaper than I thought. I looked it up and a 5’x1′ roll is under $20 on Amazon with Prime.
But now I’m also irritated, because there are people selling “Carbon Fiber Vinyl”, which LOOKS like carbon fiber wrap, but is not.
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yeah… poser supplies for making your riceboy car look like you bought cheap vinyl instead of springing for poorly made black fibreglass
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and look up the Britten motorcycle. He made all the carbon fiber bits with a roll of iirc 10mm wide ribbon
Kiwis are very industrious
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Whoever makes one and demonstrates it, please send pictures and/or videos. I *so* want to see that.
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Oh, of course! Sugar. Could probably weaponize it a bit more if you have some everclear.
There’s also the way that any flammable substance that’s powdered and in the air is explosive. (Thus the famous “exploding flour.”)
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he was giving a Google talk, and of course was hedging his stuff so it may have been made with OJ and Everclear or similar.
enough flour with a secondary delayed explosion can be used as a thermobaric bomb.
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I learned in high school food service (coed boarding school, everyone worked in one department or industry on campus in addition to their classwork) why disposing of weevil-infested flour in the burning incinerator might not be the best idea. My hair grew back, and nothing worse than some light second-degree scorching happened, but the memory has been retained.
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My mom made sure to explain WHEN it became dangerous:
if it’s in the air, powdered, it can do sorta like the “Backflash” in that fire fighting movie that Universal Studios had for a while. (Backdraft, maybe)
So, if you want a big boom, you need to have a big area, a LOT of powder, a good ignition point and something to trigger it.
Basically, exactly like setting up a “backdraft” but POSSIBLY a container of flour hitting the floor right would trigger it.
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I have only ever used the gasoline and Styrofoam, or gas/Styrofoam/ivory soap mixtures, but here are some other recipes:
“Improvised Munitions Black Book wherin in Volume-2 of a three book series, “Gelled Flame Fuels” is covered.
From this publication, namely Section V, No. 4 — GELLED FLAME FUELS — from which I quote: Gelled or paste type fuels are often preferable to raw gasoline for use in incendiary devices such as fire bottles. This type of fuel adheres more readily to the target and produces greater heat concentration. Several methods are shown for gelling gasoline using commonly available materials. The methods are divided into the following categories based on the major ingredients:
4.1 Lye Systems
4.2 Lye-Alcohol Systems
4.3 Soap-Alcohol Systems
4.4 Egg White Systems
4.5 Latex Systems
4.6 Wax Systems
4.7 Animal Blood Systems
End Quote.
Furthermore, and unless you are both a trained professional and practioner of safe handling methodology, attempting to make any of the above systems can be extremely hazardous to your health, even if they do not run you afoul of the laws within your jurisdiction, muncipality, state, and federal alcohol, tobacco, firearms, explosives regulations within the Dept. of Justice. Having provided the necessary disclaimers, here’s more about Gelled Flame Fuel systems.
4.1 Lye (aka caustic soda or sodium hydroxide) can be combined with powdered rosin or castor oil to gel gasoline into either a very firm paste of gelatinous liquid.
4.2 Lye can also be used in combo with gasoline, ethyl alcohol ‘n a tallow, such as lanoline (very good), or castor oil (good), or any vegetable oil (corn, cottonseed, peanut, linseed, etc), or any fish oil, or butter or oleomargarine.
4.3 Common household soap (not detergent soap) can be used in combo with ethyl alcohol and gasoline to gel gasoline for flame fuel which will adhere to target surfaces.
4.4 Combining gasoline with whites of bird eggs plus any one of the following substances: table salt, ground coffee, dried tea leaves, cocoa, sugar, saltpeter, sal soda washing powder, baking soda, or asprin will produce a gelled fuel.
4.5 When gasoline ‘n latex paints/adhesives are combined with one of the following acids: vinegar, motor vehicle battery acid, or muriatic acid, a gelled flame fuel substance is produced.
4.6 Mixing gasoline with several common waxes, such as leather polish, sealing wax, candles, crayons, waxes paper, furniture/floor waxes, beeswax, bayberry wax, or myrtle wax, will produce flame fuels suitable for adhering to target surfaces.
4.7 Animal blood and gasoline mixtures that include one of the following: salt, ground coffee, dried tea leaves, sugar, bricklaying lime, baking soda, or epsom salts will gel gasoline suitable for target adhering.”
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And now I’m envisioning close combat things involving a super-soaker, the cheap 70% rubbing alcohol and flame. (Such as the dollar store chaffing dish things.)
People don’t think very well when there’s fire involved, especially if they’re on fire. Says the woman who has set her hand on fire several times messing with rubbing alcohol. (Usually while cleaning out candle holders to use as glasses. It doesn’t burn YOU for at least five, ten seconds. And yes, they are really nice glasses, which survive children dropping them.)
….
I think we’ve proved Kate’s point, no?
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Next time, put the candles out first.
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The whole point is to set the rubbing alcohol on fire so it warms the wax enough to get it off– hot water just doesn’t manage it, for whatever reason.
It actually works really well, as long as you aren’t clumsy.
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Indeed you have. Now I want the photos of the home-made flamethrowers, home-made napalm bomb and all that – although I’ll pass on pics of anyone setting themselves on fire.
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Rumor I heard was after the mandatory “gun buy-back” the east coast of AU was sold out of PVC pipe for *months*.
So it ain’t just us. Heck, I know a dozen or so blokes in Alice that were more into guns than most Americans.
I suspect that AUs got more guns than you’d expect, and frankly what good would it do an invading army to land in Darwin and follow the Stuart south? There’s f*k all out there but Lizards, Aboriginals and station owners.
Well, and lots of land to burry the bodies. Lots and Lots of land. You think Texas is wide open? You think Wyoming is big sky? Those places are practically inner city crowded.
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I’d guarantee there are more guns in Oz than anyone would expect. There was a LOT of resentment over those stupid laws. The idiot that got everyone so worked up and led to the laws didn’t get the guns he had legally in the first place, so why ban the things?
Anyway, all the commentary about how lethal Australia is misses one important point – Australia’s infrastructure is frighteningly vulnerable. Fortunately I doubt it would occur to a would-be-invader to send in a small task force to blow the dams to pieces, but that would wipe the water supply for most of the major cities.
Yes, I have a nasty turn of mind. Why do you ask?
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Australia watches the rest of the world pretty closely because most of us know if the fecal matter hits the rotating blades we’re stuffed. Small population, huge and effectively indefensible landmass. It means you anticipate your neighbors AND stay on good terms with them even if they make you want to beat your head (preferably their heads, but that’s another issue) against a wall.
I noticed that actually. There’s a number of stuff / topics / laws that are brought in that seem to be a reaction to things happening in the US / England / Europe that they don’t WANT to happen here.
Effectively indefensible? Isn’t the running joke that the reason why most of the middle is largely uninhabited is coz only the toughest survive and the rest of those foolish enough to try visit/invade/settle got eaten alive by the surrounding trees/plants/landscape/bugs/animals? *grin*
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Friend of mine was a Marine, and when he sat through the safety briefings that were given before the were let loose in the Northern Territories for training, he openly asked the Digger giving them the briefing why the hell Australians bothered with an Army in the first place–From the way the briefing sounded, about all they’d really need to do to defeat someone was withhold native guides and rescue services, and the idiots who decided to invade would wind up dead and/or eaten in about a month, anyway…
Apparently, the safety briefing was really, really graphic. They showed the aftermath of confirming that a salt-water croc had actually eaten someone, and it was enough to make even hardened Marines blanch.
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Every time I show an Aussie here the map featured on the TVTropes “Land Downunder” page, I get “That’s pretty spot on,” as a response. Your mileage may vary about how much of that is mischief, but I’m generally erring on the side of caution and taking it with more seriousness than not. (So unless a spider is readily identifiable as harmless, I’m gonna act like a great big wuss. Fun fact: we have giant mosquito-things here in Queensland that have a big red part somewhere on their body. To show that it’s actually quite possible to horrify an Aussie with local fauna, Housemate, who moved up from Adelaide, went “WHAT THE MF-ING BLOODY FSCK IS THAT”, physically picked up both my kids -they were hanging out the laundry as part of chores- and hauled ass inside, and came out dual wielding cans of bug spray. He got bit a few times and they resembled bee stings, not mozzie bites.)
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/AussiesWithArtillery
Scroll down to the ‘fun facts’. Be prepared to be appalled, horrified AND amused.
Those invading Russia get to march home after they’ve been chewed up. Those who invade Australia will have to SWIM home.
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Well, yes. I KNOW those mozzies. Killed enough of the buggers.
Actually, the biggest, scariest looking spider you’re likely to see in Queensland is harmless (for Australian values of harmless) and a good thing to have around because it eats the bugs that are the real bastards. That’s the Huntsman – big bugger, can get to where the body plus legs are the size of a dinner plate, and is your stereotypical “big hairy spider”.
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Oh yeaaaah. I’ve met huntsmen. They’re what my hubby calls ‘lazy buggers.’ They look scary as hell but we like ’em around. XD I don’t mind those and in fact I like them for the same reason you mention: they eat bugs! We’ve only had little ones (none bigger than my hand) and one occupied a corner of our pantry for a little while. Hubby tried to move it to a more beneficial (prey filled) area, but it was back there the next day. When we moved it out to the garden, I think it finally got the hint that we were trying to feed it those giant mozzies…
The big irritation we’ve got aren’t big bugs though…. they’re the annoying little ghost ants. Bloody annoying things. They seem to love places that don’t have food, adore book glue, laptops and netbooks, and don’t show up when the pest control guy is around.
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Lead them into the nastiest areas, wipe the supply and communications lines, and wait. For added amusement, introduce some of the more “interesting” wildlife.
Yes, the salties eat large to medium-sized mammals. We’re snack-size.
When they take prey, they do the death roll to disorient it, hopefully drown it, and take the fight out of it. Then they stash it under a heavy object so it won’t float away and wait for it to soften up – those teeth aren’t cutting implements, they’re for holding. They soften it so they can rip off chunks small enough to swallow, since they don’t/can’t chew. The result is generally identifiable enough to be truly nasty.
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The reputation Australia has for deadly wildlife might affect invasion planning…
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EverythingTryingToKillYou
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After reading that article, I’m wondering why people live in Australia.
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Because we love it anyway. And you can have a shit-load of fun tormenting dinner guests with stories about the lethal wildlife.
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Plus, it gets really old having the same five-point conversation (which I could illustrate on a single-page flowchart) over and over and over and over with people at clubs when they hear your accent.
Australians in Australia do not have to endure that.
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Nor do we shock each other when the inevitable Australian language happens.
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Fair enough. :)
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One would hope. Considering some of the idiots who wind up in charge of governments, I’m not entirely optimistic.
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I’m frankly convinced that the reason why there are eucalypts EVERYWHERE – including planted as shade trees in suburbs – is coz of their tendency to drop meter long branches on the unwary (they’re nicknamed ‘widow makers’ for a reason), be particularly susceptible to fire and, given the proper pressures, explode. They’re not ornamental, they’re booby traps, I say.
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Where I grew up we had forests of Eucalyptus (though succumbing to the onslaught of Oak and pines.) I can’t figure out if they’d been there since before man (well, you see, the strip that’s Portugal was once attached to what became Australia) or is evidence of the sailor’s “I found this interesting seed.” I THINK the first though, because Eucalyptus don’t survive well in competition with other trees.
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Yeah, they don’t. And one of their methods of spreading quickly involve, apparently, bushfires. Those aren’t very common up north from what I’m aware of…
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There seems to have been a fad for planting eucalypts everywhere they didn’t natively grow starting roughly during the mid 1840s, probably in hopes of starting up new industry, or just for lots of firewood. Which in my experience is a lot of work to split to stove size. Maybe we only got the twisty varieties out here.
They’re seemingly everywhere in central to southern California. And have been largely implicated in local festivals, like the Oakland firestorm in 1991, with something like 3354 homes and 437condominiums torched in a couple of days.
There are a *lot* of eucalyptus maturing nicely in the same area these days…
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…oh? I thought they were planted as habitats for drop bears. ;)
(Yes, yes, I know they’re a myth. Surely Australia has mad scientists with skill in genetic engineering…)
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Well, yes. That is the running joke. It’s the coast that’s vulnerable, and that’s a relatively small area.
Of course, anyone who does that has to deal with trying to occupy a land filled with deadly wildlife, pissed off Aussies who can take passive resistance to astonishing levels (Oz labor unions do this thing called “work to rule” which scares employers far more than striking. Because they’re doing exactly what their contract says they’re to do and not one jot more. Oz citizens use the same thing to get laws they don’t like repealed), other pissed off Aussies who are damn good guerrilla fighters and know how to work with the terrain, and the Aussie notion of a “good joke” involving slipping potentially lethal wildlife into someone’s bedroom/clothing/toilet. (“There was a redback on the toilet seat when I was there last night….”).
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the Aussie notion of a “good joke” involving slipping potentially lethal wildlife into someone’s bedroom/clothing/toilet. (“There was a redback on the toilet seat when I was there last night….”).
There’s a Pom who transferred over into my hubby’s unit, and he made the mistake of telling people he was terrified of spiders. Screams like a girl at even the little daddy long-legs ones. Since I found out about the new guy after an out-field exercise, I asked my hubby who had done him the favour of warning their new Pommie about the foot-long, venomous centipedes who love being under sleeping bags. “I don’t think he slept much,” was the reply.
Also, someone put a palm-sized huntsman under a styro cup on the poor guy’s desk a few weeks later. He freaked right out and fled the building, shrieking I’m told.
Oh, on the ‘redback on the toilet seat’ note… Bunnings has custom toilet seats with amusing covers – one of them, of course, has a plastic redback the size of a man’s fist set into the plastic. I said I wanted that one in the guest toilet if we ever built a house of our own.
I’ll win him over on the idea. It’s naff, but amuses me.
The other one has a great white seemingly lunging out of the loo…
I’ve seen that passive aggressive to the letter lawyering used to hilarious effect too. Rhys and a mate had a singularly humorless CO once, and was the sort who’d write them up for the slightest obscenity. So instead, to annoy the everliving buggering hell out of the guy, Rhys and his mate (A guy from Perth, which is probably all the warning/ description needed) would have conversations in nothing but puns while they worked. They could do it for long stretches too – I think the record was an hour and a half until they got the CO to flee, red with rage because he couldn’t write them up for PUNNING.
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Oh, I love friendships like that– my husband and I (then… I don’t think we were dating, actually) did that for so long in text, while questing, that folks started to ask if we were professional comedians.
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Heh, it’s a shame really that the dude from Perth got sent to Sydney, but I take it the wife likes it better. However, Rhys has a new partner in chaos, and the workshop’s taken to calling them the ‘boyfriends’ or ‘each other’s missus’ because they’re inseparable and are… talented… with the verbal traps. This is done largely to keep each other from being bored when work tedium gets bad; the rest of the workshop’s kinda collateral damage – not literally thank goodness.
One of the higher ups made the mistake of trying to separate them during an assigned activity, and kept Sandy with him for the activity. Halfway through, he went looking for Rhys and swapped partners, and never made the mistake of doing something so silly ever again.
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Oh, hell yes! There used to be a place along the Pacific Highway between Brisbane and the Gold Coast that had a gigantic redback perched on an outhouse – sculpture of course, but it made a wonderful local landmark.
And yeah, that tactic works really well with the self-important pointy-haired boss types. Drives them up the wall because there’s nothing they can *legitimately* get you for, if they bend the rules they *know* you’ll be on them for it, and they know you’re doing it to piss them off.
This of course also describes the relationship between the typical Australian and Australian politicians.
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The new boss guy has a better sense of humor. Saw one of those big energy drink cans sitting next to Rhys while he worked on something, picked it up, read the nutrition info, and said, “I have no idea how you take this, man.”
Rhys (without looking up and hands still busy, in a completely neutral tone): “Usually orally, sir.”
boss guy: *long pause* “…. I walked into that one, didn’t I?”
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I LIKE that boss guy.
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Rhys has a reputation for being playful with words, and it’ll come out in the most unexpected ways too – and since he uses them with near surgical precision, he gets away with it most of the time. He’s one of those guys who looks like a Cheerful Good Boy with the big honest looking blue eyes, so nobody expects the mischief.
Boss guy’s nice. I got hassled by a bunch of TAFE-age guys who thought it would be hilarious to yell in Chinese at me, with rather threatening body language to boot (unusual for here, honestly.) After it happened again, Rhys and I reported it to the cops (because everyone said we should.) Boss guy was grumpy that it never occurred to me to talk to any of the workshop guys, and scolded Rhys that he only found out when Rhys asked for a half day so we could go to the police and report. Hasn’t happened again in months since so it’s hopefully gonna stay that way.
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Hopefully you won’t have any more issues like that. And yeah, that kind of shit IS unusual there.
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Yeah, hope so too. Frankly, a lot of people had to tell me I SHOULD report it, and MUST, because it was really considered very unusual. I’ve experienced far, far worse so for my own personal scale of ‘criminal offence’ that was below ‘random day in the Parisian Metro’ level of meh.
Seriously, there was a guy who liked to bump his groin into the face of Asian women because most of them wouldn’t complain / probably didn’t know enough French to lodge a complaint. He tried with me. I had a big hardcover book I was reading, brand new (Rainbow Six). The corner ended up rammed in the bulge during a very sharp turn in the route. I smiled up at him when he screamed and politely said “Desole.” He would make a point of getting off the car if he saw me get in ever since.
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I like Tim Blair’s blog. He’s got some very good perspectives, and has that oh-so-Aussie love of taking the piss.
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comments though, get potted for the oddest reasons by moderation there. I have had Tim put mine up a few times after I pointed that out
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Cyn – you’re welcome. Coming from another country gives me a perspective on things a lot of Americans don’t have. Things you grow up with tend to be invisible.
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True – plus I have lived in other countries (Japan, South Africa, Panama, and Germany) and can see things about each country I liked and a lot I didn’t like. Still it was a shock to come home and find the changes I am seeing now. I thought I was back in Panama or some other country.
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I imagine it would – after being away for a time, you’d get the changes all in one big splat instead of the gradual erosion that people who stayed in the US saw.
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Yea – I was asking people why they had allowed the Country to go towards Socialism while I was defending it, which didn’t go over too well. I was either in the military or supporting the military while I was gone.
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It didn’t help that I was out of my head with drugs at the time. (First year of the disease on heavy prednisone and chemo).
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I imagine it wouldn’t… Funny that.
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Invisible or highly magnified — such as the number of guys who can’t estimate distance because their visualization of six inches is badly skewed.
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Because it doesn’t matter what the official flavor of a government in power is, once it becomes corrupt and abusive. It can be as fiscally responsible as all get-out (of course, all that extra slush money helped with the budgeting), have low taxes, and all of that, and still be functionally a fascist police state. What makes it that is the preferential treatment of those who paid their dues (cash only, in brown paper bags left on my desk) and the ability of the police to make arbitrary arrests and find something to charge them with later.
Exactly.
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It won’t be easy. They’re burrowed in deep, like ticks in a Shar-pei’s hide.
Fat, blood-sucking parasites with tiny heads. Yep.
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That’s why they call government “poly ticks.”
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:D :D
Nicely done.
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“Polis” from either head or city. “tick” from parasite. Built into the word, it is.
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Both heads, at that.
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As I say over and over and over:
It’s got to get even worse before it can get better.
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You know, the problem with that perspective is that everything bottoms out eventually – and you can’t ever know that where we sit is the bottoming out of this particular trend or not. We’re imaginative. We can *always* think of ways it can be worse.
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I have a suspicion that, when historians from, say, 2100 write about the current mass, their analysis will suggest that Liberal Intellectual Radical Progressive power peaked with Watergate.
The LIRPs had managed, by changing the rules, to seize control of the Democrat Party and nomonate one of their own. America’s citizenry reacted by burrying him under a landslide victory for Nixon …. who was domestically about as Liberal as you’ll find. The LIRPs reacted by deposing Nixon in spite of his statism, mostly because he had had the gall to think he could get away with the kind of crap the LIRPs love to pull.
For their troubles, the LIRPs got Jimmy Carter, and then Reagan. Like the summer heat, their programs have risen for a while after their solstice, but since Nixon they have been spending more political capitol than they get back.
I could be wrong, but I think the reason things look so messy is that the LIRP coalition is running out of juice, and knows it.
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I’m inclined to agree. The insecure boast and shout about how great they are. The secure don’t *have* to. It shows.
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What is the size of the Federal Register?
How many laws have been repealed or rolled back since 1980.
How many fewer government agencies?
When was the last budget that was smaller–even if we allow for inflation–than the one before it?
The first two patriot acts had expiration dates. The last one? Law of the land until repealed.
The NSA now has the capacity to spy on a significant percentage of the population AT THE SAME TIME, and I mean *really* spy, not just track who you call and when, and where you travel.
I mean: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/07/ars-editor-learns-feds-have-his-old-ip-addresses-full-credit-card-numbers/
SRSLY? WTF.
No, Nixon wasn’t the peak.
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I got a copy of The Big Ship and the Wise Owl and read it last night. Very nice little story. Sort of a cross between “Starship” and “City of Ember”. I would definitely recommend it.
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Thank you.
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