the inner curmudgeon

Mobil Sucks

I have mixed feelings about rising petrol prices (currently around AUD$1.35). On the one hand, it puts pressure on people to use less petrol by buying more fuel efficient cars, or using public transport .. or both. That’s all good for the environment (or less horrendously bad anyway) and I am all for that.

On the other hand, I drive to work every day. I tried public transport and it just doesn’t work for me. Partly because the pricing structure is insane, partly because it is unreliable, and partly because it takes an unacceptably large chunk out of my day.

I live in Melbourne’s “Zone 2″, which means that not only do I get fewer public transport options and less frequent train services than those in Zone 1, I also have to pay something like twice as much for the privilege. To the extent that driving in by car is not much more expensive than taking a train, even with the ridiculous price of petrol at the moment. Also, because I don’t happen to work in the CBD, the closest train is a 20+ minute walk from work. If I bought a bike, it would cut the travel time down to something reasonable, but we are discouraged from taking bikes on trains during peak hour, and the trains are getting more crowded, so even if I am allowed to take a bike, it may just be impractical.

Anyway, I think public transport should be free. The whole user-pays thing is a crock. Even if you discount the environmental costs, we drivers do not pay the full costs of our road use, and cost recovery for public transport is a mug’s game.

/rant

Satirical cartoons have a long and venerable history in public discourse. However, many political cartoons simply express bigotry, ignorance and plain old fear. The pieces at the centre of the recent Danish Cartoon nonsense are a case in point. The illustration (at right) accompanying an opionion piece in Saturday’s Age is another. It depicts a handshake - one hand representing the West, the other clearly intended to represent the Middle East. The fingers of one of the hands are actually nuclear missiles representing the massive stockpiles of WMDs that the Middle East has trained on the haplessly nuclear-free West.

Flogging the Simian has some astute observations on the Danish cartoon furore. There’s nothing I can add to what Soj has already said except to say that Karl Marx had no idea - these days it seems that religion is the rohypnol of the masses.

With the passing of Red Rag, it’s good to see that Cast Iron Balcony has started the year with a resolution to take no prisoners. I don’t always agree with her particular brand of feminism, but I do like reading what she has to say. Mind you, she does give it away a bit in her next post, but I guess we can forgive her the occasional lapse ;)

My favourite Australian political blogger has shut up shop. He refers us to Larvatus Prodeo for all our seditious needs, but it’s really just not the same.

This morning we had various motoring groups screaming blue bloody murder over a planned increase in the petrol excise. I was outraged when I first heard the news, then later mollified when the government backed down, apparently cowed by the righteous wrath of the motoring lobby.

Then I looked into it a little closer.

For a start, the increase was announced two years ago and wasn’t planned to take place until next year. So, it’s not as if Johnny Howard woke up this morning and decided it was a good day to really stick it to petrol consumers.

Secondly, just how much extra was the government planning to gouge out of the nation’s hapless motorists? A whopping 0.06 cents per litre. That’s approximately 0.05% on current prices. Depending on your habits, that might amount to somewhere between 5 and 10 cents extra per week.

Finally, what was the increase for? Well, it was to fund an incentives program to encourage the oil industry to move to low sulphur fuels. Has the program been dropped? No. So where’s the money going to come from now? Taxpayers of course.

So the real outrage of today is that to save motorists a few cents a week at the pump, the general public is now going to pay for mitigating the continuing health risks posed by petrol consumption. Pay extra, that is. The good news is that if we motorists put aside the money that the motoring lobby groups have saved us, we should have enough money to each buy a bicycle in about 120 years.

You’re charged with accomodating a number of people who are predominantly from Middle-Eastern and South-East Asian countries. Bearing in mind that most of these people will be either Muslims or Hindus, what are you going to feed them? You’d probably start with an essentially vegetarian menu and draw up a list of Halal producers to supply a range of meat options, wouldn’t you? Well, not if you’re the mob running the Baxter Detention centre where it seems the “beef for the boys, chicken for the girls and fish for the vegetarians” school of catering rules. According to a recent report, “beef appears on the menu 24 times in four weeks.” Twice on Mondays.

Two gobsmacking observations come from this news: firstly, that it took an expensive and lengthy government investigation to find this out. Secondly, their solution is what? Focus groups! Why not just buy a couple of fucking cookbooks?

After yesterday I’m thinking the government can take their Certificate of Evidence of Australian Citizenship and shove it. I really don’t want to be associated with the kinds of fuckers that mail packets of white powder to diplomats, apparently in protest over a trial outcome, and just knowing that I’m on the same land mass as the likes of Malcom Elliott makes my skin crawl.

The Schapelle Corby trial has prompted a truly embarrassing display of willful ignorance from Australians. For sheer vapidity it’s hard to go past this:

The Australian public has seen what Corby’s defence team saw long ago: a transcendent grace that makes her guilt implausible. Her strength of character, not to mention the careful styling and stunning good looks, improved in recent months by jail-time weight loss, have bolstered her claim she is innocent [...]Miranda Devine

Others have already marvelled at the notion that pretty people shouldn’t be convicted of crime, but they failed to miss the other revelation implicit in Miranda’s legal tour de force: Schapelle Corby should be thrilled at the prospect of twenty years in jail. She’ll lose so much weight!

Unsurprisingly, many people are talking about the parallels between the recent atrocities at Abu Ghraib and the Stanford Prison Experiment. One wonders how Sabrina Harman and her colleagues could possibly consider the abuses she participated in acceptable with or without the Geneva Convention. It is clear from the photographs that we have been permitted to see thus far that the perpetrators of these crimes considered the prisoners in their care to be less than human.

While the SPE demonstrates that it is remarkably easy to turn a group of ordinary people into sadistic brutes, it is difficult to imagine how the conditions necessary to do so could exist in a modern western military detention facility.

Funny isn’t it how when you want to weed out some namby-pamby, so-called experts from your intelligence services and install your own, politically motivated group with no accountability and less actual experience, then the story is that something should have been done about 9/11 before it happened.

But, when an official report points the finger at an administration obsessed with the “plight of the Iraqi people”, well then it suddenly turns out that there was “no actionable intelligence” regarding 9/11.