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The judges said that the interpretation of clause 7.1 of the act, which allowed regulation of conduct deemed to be a cause of "annoyance", was invalid because it "affects freedom of speech in a way that, in our opinion, is not supported by the statutory powers".

There was "no intelligible boundary" on what "causes annoyance".

The regulation relating to annoyance "could be expected to have a chilling effect upon the exercise of their freedom of speech because of the very uncertainty about the degree of its infringement upon that freedom", they said.

- Two Sydney activists have won a Federal Court challenge to special World Youth Day laws that carry $5500 fines for annoying pilgrims

Excellent!

Now, protest the WYD debacle all you like. Just remember: attacking a foolish belief or foolish actions is OK; attacking people is not. In some cases, people will feel attacked when you attack their belief in a magic invisible zombie superheroes, so play it by ear. Don't be nasty; leave that to the religious nuts.

And if you still get arrested, don't worry. Just pray to the Doctor and he will send his TARDIS to rescue you, yea, even though you walk in the quarry of Skaro and the Silurians be at your back!

Vote for this man, or show me a bloody good explanation for how the man you do vote for is any better.

(Via Pharyngula, of course.)

Now the truly terrible thing about this advertisement isn't that Avery Brooks so desperately wanted to be Morpheus, but rather that all that stuff about needing "a different kind of software" was advertising Lotus products. If you go to any reasonably exhaustive pictorial dictionary and open up the page to "Arse Pudding On Toast", you will see a picture of Lotus Notes. Even if IBM was only borrowing the name for some unrelated software, the taint remains. It's the computer equivalent of starting a branch of the RSPCA dedicated to saving kittens and calling it The Nazi Party. Freakish.

But I digress.

"It's the year 2000," Captain Sisko tells us, "but where are the flying cars?" And later: "Because millions of people all over the world can work together on the web twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week: you don't need flying cars..." And that's quite right. And it had better be right! Oil prices are up at the moment because of increased demand and/or increased unrest in those uppity dark-skinned countries that think they've got a right to our Texas Tea, by jingo, by crikey. The unrest won't last forever, gods willing, but the demand will. It will increase. Oil prices aren't coming down.

Unfortunately, people are still looking at this as a matter for the petrol bowser. They're forgetting two things: (1) food transport, and (2) fertilisers. And possibly (3) plastics. Oil is used to produce a hell of a lot more than SUV fuel; a serious oil shortage will mean a serious food shortage in pretty short order. The results will be impressive.

What will happen -- may already be happening, even -- is that people will start thinking locally. In nice civilised countries like Australia and NZ and... ummm, I'm sure there are others... cars and roads will start to be things you deal with on a weekly, not daily, basis. For as long as we have employment and an economy, telecommuting will start to become more common: when it costs $200 to fill your family car's tank, you'll reconsider how desperately you need to attend every meeting face-to-face. People are already curtailing their spending on travel and tourism, preferring to spend at home instead. "Cocooning", they're calling it. That's not going to go away.

A dozen years from now, Daddy won't get up and drive to work every morning. In the best-case scenario, a lot of work will disappear as nations spend more time keeping their populace fed and less time worrying about torch relays and international relations. Canberra's large inter-suburban open spaces, which the more short-sighted of our brethren consider a bad idea because they allegedly make it essential to own a car to live here, will start to be seriously useful: I can imagine a lot of community farming and a fair bit of make-your-own-fun recreation on those "useless" patches. Public transport will actually grow in popularity for a while, then presumably dip again as people realise how utterly useless our bus services are and how unnecessary all that travel is. Neighbourhoods will turn into communities, as people realise that they might as well love the ones they're with.

Well, that's the best case anyhow. The worst case is resource wars, Christofascist governments, excesses that make the Rome of the vomitorium era look like a medieval monastery, and the total meltdown of any civilisation that isn't centrally controlled and probably speaking Mandarin.

I'm hoping for the former. Humanity needs to grow up a little, and part of that involves getting its priorities right. We have to get off this planet and out into the stars sometime in the next several centuries, or we're dead as the dinosaurs. So we'd better start getting some things right now.

If not for that damned swimming rabbit, Carter might have got his second term and the world might have been saved.



Ah well, too late now. Learn how to farm organically and get ready for fascist governments everywhere, because that's what happens when a standard of living becomes unsustainable.

(Transcript here, if you prefer your depression in a textual form.)

It would appear that Chairman Kevin and his control-freaked cabinet can do some wrong after all. I knew we couldn't trust a bunch of frakking Christians to keep getting things right.

Regarding the 2020 Summit on the weekend, there's this (emphasis mine):

The Leader of the Opposition, Brendan Nelson, said he had heard many of the ideas before and implied the summit was stacked with pro-Labor people.

"Whilst I have high regard for all of those who came to the conference, it seemed not to be fully representative of Australian society," Dr Nelson said.

The trouble with this argument is that Chairman Kevin has something like a 70% approval rating. Australian society is stacked with pro-Labor people right now, Doctor B. Wait around until the extended honeymoon is over and then tell us if there's a problem; but right now, if you want an unbiased cross-section of Australia, "pro-Labor people" seems to be a good working definition of that.

Go on, you bastards, be cynical about this. I dare you.

Interesting chat with a senior public servant neighbour on the way home. Apparently, Chairman Kevin insists on keeping a finger in every pie, meaning that every decision has to go through him. While he's swanning about overseas meeting future presidents and offending free-market communists, nothing gets done because he's not in his office busily crossing and dotting. So one encounters situations like: senior public servant gets call from Minister's office, asking for a heads-up on the official government policy on X. So senior public servant is faced with a choice: does he (a) delay until Kev gets in, (b) make something up based on past policy statements and election promises, or (c) just tell the Minister that the government can't come to the phone right now because he's busy giving a speech somewhere in Beijing? The jury's out on that one at the moment.

I have a feeling Our Chairman will relax as he gets a feel for how government -- and the PS -- are working. He's a control freak now, but he'll figure out sooner or later that he has to delegate some stuff to a trusted team of decision makers, not least because he's going to need to sleep occasionally. Probably his problem is that he already knows this, but mistakenly things the trusted team of decision makers has to be chosen from among his ministers, a large number of whom have the brains of a second-hand chest of drawers and the moral integrity of a Wollongong land developer. He will no doubt come to realise that he needn't worry: the trusted team he can best rely on is the public servants, who've been happily running the country uninterrupted for the last hundred years and can get on with the job effortlessly if he'll let them. He just needs to brush up on his understanding of the workings of government and he'll do fine.

Let's review.

Governor General

Wee Johnny: suffers through the whole term of an unmanageable rabble-rouser with a conscience; replaces him with an ex-priest who should be able to toe the line; discovers too late that he didn't do his homework and the man is, and was, utterly hopeless, so hurriedly gets rid of him in favour of a career soldier of no distinction whatsoever, who disappears completely from view as instructed.

Chairman Kevin: makes history.

Human Rights

Wee Johnny: -- look, let's just gloss over this, OK? The man deserves some self-respect. Don't dwell on the past.

Chairman Kevin: makes history.

Aboriginal Reconciliation

Wee Johnny: does his best, honest he does, but can't bring himself to say sorry because, after all, it wasn't his fault. His lawyer sense is tingling!

Chairman Kevin: makes history.

Climate Change

Wee Johnny: isn't entirely sure there's a problem, and doesn't want to risk his economy just because a couple of scientists are a little nervous.

Chairman Kevin: makes history.

Right at the moment, Chairman Kev is dealing in symbols: a speech here, a signature there. You might say, why not stop talking and actually do something? But then I have to ask: if these symbols are meaningless, if they're just good domestic PR with no lasting effect on the world, why didn't John Howard ever do anything like them?

Because he knew, and Kev knows, that words have power. Our PM is changing the world by changing the words. That's a very interesting path, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it goes.

Chairman Kevin is doing something ballsy and morally good again - this time refusing to revert to standard politician's weasel-mode in talking to China, in China, about China.  Wee Johnny didn't do anything to match that, did he?  Come to think of it, not even Keating or Whitlam (or that other bloke, what was his name, short fellow who kept bursting into tears... Bob something) ever did anything like that.

Even the chattering morons of Reddit have noticed, and put the report at #1 on their front page, despite its lack of any mention of Ron Paul or the evils of Microsoft.

It's hard to be cynical about politics when the guy at the top gives every indication of being a Good Man.  Quite an odd sensation for an old idealist, really.

thelancrewitch  and possibly lauredhel  have commented on the fact that the Australian media are fond of picking the ugliest pictures of Hillary Clinton to illustrate their articles, contrasting sharply with the noble, statesmanlike Barack Obama shots and the so-dynamic-you-can-hardly-smell-the-death photos of John McCain. Clearly they want to get in the next president's good books, since the only way Bill will ever be First Lady is if every Republican in the US drops dead¹.

However, here's one writer who hasn't noticed the tendency. Perhaps they're a little kinder in the US itself?

The mainstream media, for the most part, tends to only publish their "best" photos of her -- pictures that make her look good. As a result, awkward, funny, strange, and patently ridiculous candid photos of Hillary can be a little hard to come across.

Even if this were true, it's not any more: the above comes from The Really Truly Hillary Gallery, which solves the "problem" once and for all.

I am forced, somewhat reluctantly, to conclude that it's not a conspiracy.  I suspect that Mrs Clinton, whatever her strengths, is simply not especially photogenic. This might be because most photographers are used to photographing only men and young women (cos, like, everyone knows they all turn ugly at 30), or it might simply be that the particular arrangement of skin, bone and muscles that Mrs Clinton has been blessed with do not lend themselves to a look of solemn contemplation or statesmammallike nobility. Some people are like that; I can think of at least a couple of women who are utterly gorgeous in real life but who always show up in photographs looking like badly decomposed wildebeest.  It's a lighting thing.  Nothing you can do about it.

The Australian newspapers could still do better, however, if they wanted to.  I suspect they simply don't.

¹ Fill in your own footnote here. What am I, Captain Obvious?

The US Democrats are having trouble picking a nominee for the 2008 Election.  If they go with Hillary Clinton, every Republican in the country will get out and vote to save the country from her evil (because, you know, she married a guy whose lies have killed, at last count, zero people, so that makes her unsuitable for a job where your lies should kill thousands at least).  But if they go with Barack Obama then the Republicans, the Ku Klux Klan, the anti-Moslem Christian loonies and the gun nuts will all get together (like that's an unusual grouping) and shoot him down like a dog.  What to do?  What to do?

Here's the solution: nominate Obama for President and Clinton for VP.  The assassins will have to back off then, because shooting Obama means Clinton becomes president, so they'll just have to put up with that well-known secret Muslim terrorist because he's the lesser of two evils.  But the mass mobilisation of the knee-jerk Republicans won't happen, because Obama just doesn't make their blood boil as much: he's only an uppity black, whereas she's an uppity woman!  And after The Cosby Show introduced the idea that uppity blacks can be just like white people (if they're rich and boring enough) they're much more ok with them than they used to be.

Yeah, I know, it won't work.  The Republicans will still work on the principle that the devil you know is better than any devil you don't, and the Democrats haven't showered themselves in glory (or anything else non-biological) since they got control of the senate.  The US is setting itself up for another eight years of Stupid.  Ah well; time to move to Tau Ceti, I think.

This from Alastair Rankine at girtby.net is just perfect:

If (hypothetical) you wish to renounce the wrongdoings of the past, you are free to do so. However, to be consistent you must also renounce the achievements of the past.

Can you imagine John Howard renouncing the sacrifices and achievements of the ANZACs? His past sporting heroes? His hero Robert Menzies? No, I can’t either. However it is necessary to do so in order to avoid the responsibility for the Stolen Generation.

Wee Johnny's absence from (a) yesterday's apology and (b) the entire fabric of morality in the last decade is hereby explained.

Even the machines are getting on the bandwagon now.

Bloody impressed with Chairman Kevin this morning. A bit long-winded toward the end, and perhaps less mention of Iced Vo-Vos than we have come to expect, but he nailed it. His talk of targets and goals was restrained and therefore believable, exactly as we'd expect from the control-freak diplomat. And Brendan Nelson's reply, apart from a bit of "they meant well, honest they did", was quite creditable. Certainly a lot better than the former PM could have managed.

Nicely done.

It's a bit silly for an Australian to be watching the US election particularly closely, because ultimately whatever happens there, Chairman Rudd will make diplomatic overtures involving carefully-honed phrases and complementary Iced Vo-Vos, and life will carry on. But there is a point that a lot of USians seem to be missing, and that worries me. So I want to set it out here and maybe get it across to anyone who may be reading who hasn't already figured it out:

A vote for Hillary Clinton as Democratic Nominee is a vote for a Republican landslide.

Let me explain that. Republicans hate two things, deep down: sex, and Bill Clinton. So a woman who has actually had item #1 with item #2 is doubly hated. (Granted this doesn't narrow the field down much, but Republicans always have plenty of hate to go around.) Voting isn't compulsory in the USA (because, you know, freedom is more important than democracy, though less so than every other bloody thing) so typically the only people who vote are the ones with very strong opinions one way or another.

Now, sadly, nobody among the Democrats has strong opinions about Hillary vs Obama. Either the woman or the black guy; either way, guaranteed chapter heading and nice photo in all the history books forever. But among the Republicans, there are a lot of strong opinions, and they all say that Hillary is the antichristette, and she must be opposed at all costs. So if you want to guarantee close to 100% voter turnout by every Republican voter in the 50 states, Hillary is all you need.

It seems a bunch of Democrats don't get this, and I think that indicates that their brains all atrophied some time ago.

Now, Obama looks like a good guy. If he gets nominated, I'm pretty sure people are going to look at his competition (the religious extremist or the guy who's actually older than Ronald Reagan was on his first day as President) and they're going to vote for Change. He'll romp it in, because -- and this is fairly important to people in the USA and absolutely vital to the rest of us -- he's clearly different from everyone who's been set in DC concrete to date. But really, he could be Ross Perot and it wouldn't matter. What's important is that he's not Hillary Clinton.

Gods, I hope they figure that out in time. Because if USA votes for another Republican president, it's only fair that the entire nation be nuked from orbit, and then we'll never get another series of Heroes.

Via the Slashdot of the noughties:

• Animator vs Animation, by Alan Becker. Remarkably good. It's Shockwave Flash, though, so I'll have to finally get around to following the convoluted steps one must follow to get that working on a real operating system. Turns out it's not. Which is weird, because it says it is when you check the format. Maybe I'm misunderstanding something about MIME types. Hey ho.
• An explanation of those little islands to the left of France: what are "the United Kingdom", "the British Isles", "Great Britain" and all the rest, and how do they relate? And why does everything get named after the inventor except if the inventor was Leonhard Euler? Oh, and there's a lot of good stuff on that first link too, including my personal favourite for sheer zen uselessness, the List of United States Presidents by intrinsic comedy value.
• And just to show that I'm paying attention to pretend politics, the National Organisation for the Reform of Marijuana Laws published a quick statement demonstrating yet again that Barack Obama is the only sane candidate running for office the entirety of the USA before popping down to the 7-11 for some chips.

The lovely and uninymous Stilgherrian (the man who described me as "worth [my] height in anchovies") points out that our Dear Leader is trying to make petitions matter. As those wacky lexicographers would say: w00t!

Internet petitions remain useless shit, however. Not even Pope Kevin can work miracles.

Am I the only one? I saw the headline "Hillary dies" and I thought "Obama's a lock for 2008 then!" I thought Sir Edmund dropped off the twig decades ago. Freaky!

Received just now from Internode, in response to my question about Winston Conroy's Ministry of Truth:

Hi Paul,

Thank you for your support request with Internode.

As of January 20, we will have to comply with the new internet censorship laws as they will be mandatory.

You may be already aware that you are able to opt out of being censored.

At this point in time we do not have any specifics about being able to opt out.

We would suggest that when January 20 arrives, that you hang onto this ticket and just state that you do not wish to be apart of the internet censorship.

If you have any further questions regarding this matter, please reply to this email or contact our Helpdesk by phone on 1300 788 233.

Kind regards,

Greg
Customer Support Officer

I like that he's calling it what it is -- censorship -- and taking it seriously. Another point for Internode, and a black mark against the Iced Vo-Vo Empire.