Head to the main blog for the current discussions

So, the main blog is being revamped. This may take a few hours if everything goes well, or a few days if the gremlins start playing up.

Have at an open thread here in the meantime, folks.

Hurrah!

Posting will now resume at the proper place (see RSS module in the sidebar for links to recent posts at our main site).

Well, Kevin 24/7 might want to keep on working all through the festive season, but for some of us lesser mortals it’s been a rather long and intense year and a bit of recreation is in order! So I’m taking a break from blogging until early in the new year. Let me take this opportunity to thank very much all of you for sharing many of its political and other highlights with me in the blogosphere, and for great comradeship and conversations! My wish is that everyone will have a very happy and relaxed festive season and a wonderful year in 2008!

I’ll leave you, as a bit of a counterpoint to the Christmas Baubles of Doom, with some images of Angels over Brisbane I’ve taken over the last few days on Christmas shopping trips to the mall – higher res versions available by clicking on the link.

Look forward to catching up with everyone in 08!

I’ve put this post in the “levity” category, however, I note Kimberella’s Culture Wars…now and forever! was also placed in “levity”, so perhaps this post should be in “so bloody shallow even Paris and Darlene would find it lacking depth”.

Anyway, readers of The New Zealand Herald have had their say (“baaa”) about what they think are the worst Christmas songs ever in the history of the earth, world, universe etc:

Snoopy’s Christmas – The Royal Guardsman (1966)
Feliz Navidad – Jose Feliciano (1970)
Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer – Randy Brooks (1979)
Santa Never Made It Into Darwin – Bill & Boyd (1975)
Mistletoe and Wine – Cliff Richards (1988)
The Christmas Song – Alvin and the Chipmunks (1981)

Before you think that New Zealanders have got brilliant taste (unlikely, but just in case) for hating the above, this is what they thought were the best Christmas songs:

All I Want for Christmas – Mariah Carey (1994)
Last Christmas (I gave you my heart) – Wham (1984)
Fairytale of New York – The Pogues featuring Kirsty McColl (1987)
Christmas Is All Around Us – Bill Nighy – as Billy Mack in Love Actually (2003)
Do They Know It’s Christmas Time At All? – Band Aid (1984)
Happy Christmas (War Is Over) – John Lennon (1971)
You’re a Mean One Mr Grinch – Thurl Ravenscroft (1966)

Why they’d hate those cute little chipmunks and love Mariah Carey is beyond me. Christmas works of “art” are often so bad that Jesus must wish his birthday was on a different day. It should be pointed out that watching It’s a Wonderful Life remains one of the best ways to spend a Christmas night. Anyway, my cat and I would like to take this opportunity to wish LP readers all the best for the holiday season.

Merry Christmas from Spotty

Now:

Clarissa Keil, a freelance writer who “shares her time between Switzerland and Australia”, piously explained it all in the Sydney Morning Herald last week: “The more contemporary practice is a charitable donation on behalf of a family member or friend instead of the purchase of a conventional Christmas gift.”

It works like this. You send your child, say, a note to warn you’ve become so high-minded that they’ll get no present this Christmas. You’ve instead sent the money for their present to one of the many charities now offering “ethical” Christmas gifts.

It’s not the tax deductions you’re after, of course, although you’re careful to keep the receipts. Waste not!

What really stirred you was the thought that your child’s present would do more good if sent to someone who might need it more, such as some herder in Africa or farmer in India.

So World Vision will send, for your children, a goat to Ethiopia or a beehive to the Gaza Strip. Oxfam will send condoms to Zimbabwe and even a $15 bag of manure to a Sri Lankan farmer—which hardly sounds in the Christmas spirit, frankly.

…

(Andrew Bolt, today)

Also Now

Of course, knowing mum sent a sack of shit to someone else for Christmas might actually give some comfort to the teary, but such gift-giving strikes me as astonishingly self-centred.

If you really want to donate something to some poor African or manure-deprived Sri Lankan, do it with your own money. Donating my present or your child’s instead of your own cash is stealing, not giving.

Worse, it’s stealing not just my present but the moral credit for giving it away, so please don’t boast.

You think I’m being too tough?

(Andrew Bolt, a little bit later today)

No Andrew, I don’t think you’re being too tough – it’s good to see that underneath the wannabe he-man exterior, you’re just a little boy at heart. A spoiled, self-centred, self-righteous, whiney little sook of a boy.

Crybaby.

The political influence of big business is often, and justly, maligned. But there are cases where the (theoretically) not-for-profit nature of certain large organizations gives them a political reach far in excess of what an equivalent for-profit company would have – and it’s an influence that has been used for unfortunate purposes.

Theoretically, I’m a member of the largest club in Victoria – the Royal Automobile Club of Victoria, otherwise known as the RACV. For 60-odd dollars a year, they’ll assist if your car breaks down on the side of the road – something that happens increasingly rarely, but it’s still arguably a handy service. Oh, and I also get a monthly copy of RoyalAuto, which features endless road tests of Toyota Camries and “secret weekend driving holidays” to the “captivating Western District”. All it’s missing is a fashion section on the latest trends in cardigans.

But my nominal “membership” of the RACV, and the mouthpiece that RoyalAuto and the equivalent publications of the other state-based motoring associations, seems to give them the ear of governments state and federal.

So what do they do with their influence? For a start, the mainly NSW-based NRMA seem to be fans of conspiracy theories about the price of petrol. The RACV doesn’t go for this, but want big cuts in fuel excise. Then it’s endless screaming for more road funding. And all of this political lobbying funded out of “members” who, mainly, just want assistance if they break down. As the Wikipedia article on the NRMA notes, despite the demutualisation of the insurance business of 2000, the association continues to run an ever-growing range of commercial activities; the RACV has a similarly broad range.

So, through historical accident, we have multi-million dollar businesses, with nowhere to spend their profits other than political lobbying, with mouthpieces that reach hundreds of thousands of people every month (at least in the case of the RACV). They represent a substantial obstacle to sensible transport policy. Does anybody know of companies or organizations that provide similar services but don’t bundle free donations to the road lobby with their product?

I noticed just before on gmail that a friend I was chatting to via google talk had a song listed next to her name. Enquiring further, I was introduced to a very spiffy Firefox addon that enables you to control your music player via buttons on your browser. And it has the further merit of enabling me to tell you in this post what I’m listening to… and this is rather spiffy too, I think, to click on a link which takes me to a web page with all sorts of useful links about the song and the artist – including vids and photos and lyrics and other good stuff – as demonstrated here.

You can install Foxytunes here.

—————-
Now playing: Jolie Holland – Crush in the Ghetto
via FoxyTunes

News has a vote quiz up which purports to show who Australians would vote for if they had a vote in the 2008 US presidential election. (It’s similar to the flawed quiz they ran during the Australian election.)

I, apparently, would go for Al Gore, who isn’t even a candidate, with John Edwards as my runner-up. I was surprised, especially as yesterday I read this scathing indictment of the Bali ‘roadmap’ by George Monbiot, which was based on a scathing indictment of Al Gore. (At least, that’s how I read it.)

There’s a television program on SBS called Who Do You Think You Are?

The episodes currently being shown date back to 2004, but the show is obviously popular because an Australian version will appear on our screens early next year.

The premise of Who Do You Think You Are? is that if you find out something about your ancestry you’ll learn something about yourself.

Last Sunday’s episode featured comedian Bill Oddie and his attempts to obtain such family facts as why his mother was put in a mental asylum.

While the show was sad and interesting, in the end we really just discovered what Oddie wanted to believe about his mum, his seemingly domineering grandmother and his sister and grandfather’s deaths.

Whether Oddie’s own bout of depression was linked to his mum’s mental health issues was never established because nobody could say for sure why she was institutionalised.

Alas, many women languished in asylums in days gone by for a whole range of reasons, including not conforming to dominant ideas of femininity.

A lot of folks find constructing a family tree a worthwhile pastime, but I wonder whether people think the basis of the show is valid.

In the advertisement for next week’s instalment, flirty cook Nigella Lawson says something to the effect that she believes we make her own lives, which conflicts with the Oddie effort in which issues of class and paternal encouragement in the face of expectations due to class were raised.

So, it’s the season where Carol rage escalates, and too much late night shopping is never enough time. Personally, I’m most disturbed by these enormous Christmas decorations at the Macarthur Centre on Edward Street. I wouldn’t like to be standing under one.

Hi-res version of image here.

Condemn away. You know you want to.

The Libs and the Nats appear to be placing their trust in… organisational change and intra-party bickering. This appears to be a reflex move when parties lose elections, but the inquirists might like to contemplate how successful Simon Crean was with a year and a half of navel gazing and factional fighting over party rules. That’s not to say that the Libs don’t need to address their weakness as an organisation and do something about branch stacking and the power of extremists in their midst, but Nick Minchin’s reference to the Valder Inquiry in 1983 is to the point.

Minchin should know, because he was then a junior apparatchik at Liberal HQ. Minchin’s argument is that the necessary organisational reforms are well known and what the Valder Inquiry achieved was actually to map out a philosophical and policy direction for the party. Of course, it was the time of the drys v. wets wars, and Minchin was and is happy about it because it was the first marker that Fraserism had been discarded and neoliberalism was the party’s future. I’m tempted to say it took them until 1996 to realise that the hard electorally unpopular edges had to be smoothed off (abolishing Medicare didn’t exactly go down a treat in 1987, and then there was Fightback), but maybe that ought to read 2007.

One thing is certain, though. There’s only so long that they’ll be able to get away with solemn pronouncements that the Parliament will examine Labor’s bills, and that Nelson will be consulting his colleagues widely. They need to articulate what they stand for – their record in opposition in the States suggests that just criticising governments for maladministration gets them nowhere.

Okay, let’s concede a point to Planet Janet, Bolta and the rest of the defeated culture warriors – we still need your voices in our national conversation! John Quiggin suggests:

With no share of political power anywhere in the country, the culture warriors can’t do any actual harm, except to the conservative side of politics. So, there’s an argument that they should be encouraged, rather than persuaded to give up the struggle.

In a long post about the culture warriors, Quiggin correctly argues that there’s no constituency for most of the moralising mendacity of the punditariat:

As regards the policies themselves, the idea that Australians are brimming with conservative fervour, or any kind of fervour, on these topics is silly in most cases. Most people are vaguely in favour of a republic, but aren’t in any hurry. As regards legal recognition of gay relationships, only a handful of people are aware of the fine distinctions between civil unions and registered relationships, and even fewer care.

Precisely. Which is why, aside from the comedy value, I’d be quite happy for Christopher Pearson and his ilk to go on with their “battlers hate teh gay!” denialism about the fact that the fast eroding economic credentials of the Coalition and WorkChoices were the key factors in swinging the “Howard battlers” away from the Dear Leader. If they’d prefer to believe that sanctimonious posturing about family values is going to be the bbq stopper that reinvigorates the Libs and hurtles them towards electability, so be it. And if the Libs buy it, we’ll be laughing all the way to the next election, fellas…

Ps: Of course, the culture warriors claim they’re vital because they vigorously fight the battle of ideas. Taking the civil unions will be an electoral liability for Labor ”argument” as a case study, the problem with that thesis (as enunciated by John Heard) is, that as Andrew Norton demonstrates, their arguments aren’t arguments and don’t make any sense.

Last week the Wilderness Society targeted the ANZ in protest against their involvement with the Gunns Pulp Mill. At the behest of GetUp, I wrote to ANZ telling them I intended to withdraw as a customer if they went ahead and funded the mill. Today I received a reply, saying the ANZ have “not made a decision on whether to finance the project” and have committed to “applying the Equator Principles to our decision … We have engaged an independent environmental expert to assist us with this process”.In summary, we will only fund the mill once we are assured that:

*    all potential significant social and environmental issues have been identified;
*    measures to manage these are put in place by the client; and
*    the regulating governments are satisfied with these measures.

More info can be found on the ANZ “current issues” website.

Now is the time for anyone who has a bank account or credit card  with the ANZ to get in touch with them about the pulp mill.

If we had a ’shameless plug’ category, I’d use it for this post. Some pals of mine have created a t-shirt for the new era. Unfortunately it’s too late for Hannukah, but if you hurry you could get one in time to give it as a Christmas gift and I think they’re eminently suitable as New Year presents.