Give or take a few years

Like many conservative Victorians, I am disappointed with the results of yesterday's state election, having to endure four more years of the Andrews Labor government. 

On the lighter side, I found at least two errors in newspaper coverage of the election. Possibly soon-to-be former Liberal Opposition Leader, Matthew Guy visited his old primary school to cast his vote. I recognise the windows in the background. He was not, as the caption in this article says, visiting his electorate of Bulleen. The school is located in the neighbouring electorate of Eltham. 

Secondly, the school received its own indoor swimming pool at least one or two years before he started there in 1979, and not in 1982. At that time, Rupert Hamer, a Liberal, was Premier of Victoria, so the pool is hardly an example of Labor pork barreling. Either Guy or the journalist who wrote this story got his facts wrong.

https://www.theage.com.au/politics/victoria/on-election-day-smiling-matthew-guy-feels-the-love-and-loathing-at-his-old-primary-school-20181124-p50i3a.html

Razor gang

It's election time again. The Labor Party often resorts to caricaturing the Liberal Party as heartless bean counters, who have little regard for the human cost of their spending cuts, whilst the Liberals like to slam Labor as reckless spenders. This mock scratch card, produced by the Trades Hall Council, is an attempt to persuade voters of the dire consequences for Victoria of not voting Labor. They would have you believe that health, education, and workplace safety will all suffer. 

A harsh analysis of this issue would argue that if it wasn't for cost blowouts on major projects, the Liberals would not need state to cut funding for these services when they hold government.

Observers have recently warned of potential cost blowouts on major infrastructure projects. This will potentially cause budget problems for the next Victorian government. 

https://www.theage.com.au/politics/victoria/west-gate-tunnel-stand-off-to-blow-out-costs-and-delays-opposition-20180611-p4zktz.html

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/state-politics/victorias-building-bonanza-risks-cost-blowout/news-story/70c3de4390a52941b602ea67558a16a0

Even if these projects are not mismanaged, they often cost more than necessary. Those with long memories will remember that the previous Victorian Labor government rejected the offer of federal government funding for the 2002 Melbourne Cricket Ground redevelopment, because it would not accept its conditions.

https://www.theage.com.au/national/mcg-funding-fallout-20020606-gdu9zb.html

According to the Auditor General, it is also very likely that the total cost of the current level crossing removal project will be much higher than initially estimated. 

https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/level-crossing-removal-program-poor-value-for-money-auditorgeneral-andrew-greaves-20171214-h04ed0.html

Controversially, it also chose to build the Eastlink road project as a tollway instead of a freeway, rejecting federal government funding for the project. 

False hope

Amongst many significant events in world history, today is the anniversary of the death of former British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain (1869-1940). He readily springs to mind whenever a politician or any other public figure suggests that giving into the territorial demands of power hungry tyrants is a good idea, just like he did with his ill-fated 1938 peace agreement with Adolf Hitler. Apparently, war and armed conflict can be avoided by sitting down with militaristic leaders over cups of herbal tea, and giving them the chance to talk through their grievances. Then, as now, appeasement doesn't work.

Brain food

I consider myself fortunate to have never lived under a communist regime. Reading about the millions of people who suffered and died under communism in the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, North Korea, and Cambodia is enough to open up your eyes about how evil people can be.

It seems that some people have forgotten these lessons, stubbornly clinging to the belief that communism is worth trying again. I can personally attest to this. Radical leftists I have spoken with believe that the Russian Revolution was a good thing, and would have turned out alright if Stalin hadn't corrupted it. Marxists also hold a annual conference in my home city every Easter long weekend. Presumably this event is not just a talkfest, and they actually want to implement their ideas. Research cited by James Bartholomew shows that communism and communist ideology is particularly popular among young people. Barth is raising funds to establish a Museum of Communist Terror.

The aim of this museum is to keep alive knowledge and understanding of the deaths, terror and economic failure that took place under Communist regimes, primarily in the 20th century. The strategy is to do this through social media, its website, talks and films for schools and universities, lobbying for improvements in the teaching of the history of Communist regimes, events and the creation of one or more small museums leading up to the development of a full-size museum in London.

When it opens, it will be high on my itinerary when I visit London again.

https://www.museumofcommunistterror.com/

http://thesydneyinstitute.com.au/blog/communism-what-the-young-should-know/

A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic

More convenient historical amnesia. According to some people, you'd be forgiven that Stalin was infallible.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/10/nyt_reports_russian_ceremony_for_stalins_victims_forgets_to_mention_s_word_or_walter_duranty.html

Give me pedantry or give me death

My knowledge of the American War of Independence is somewhat patchy, but even I know that it was not still being fought in 1978. The November 2018 issue of History Revealed magazine would have you believe otherwise.

Flying too close to the sun

The other day we received a brochure from the Labor Party's candidate for my electorate in next month's state election, promoting the Victorian government's solar homes package. I for one am not confident that the scheme will be successful.

They are offering to subsidise the cost of purchasing a domestic solar power system.
A cursory reading of the scheme's information website seems to indicate that it will be tightly regulated, and only approved suppliers will be permitted to participate in the scheme, and the installation work must be done by suitably qualified tradespeople.

Even so, it is more than likely than unethical operators will find a way to circumvent the regulations, and exploit both the government and customers. Just last night we received an unsolicited telemarketing phone call from a solar energy company, offering to sell us a solar power system. You (possibly) read it here first.

What a day

Today is International Blasphemy Rights Day. According to its website, it was established to
"show solidarity with those who challenge oppressive laws and social prohibitions against free expression, to support the right to challenge prevailing religious beliefs without fear of violence, arrest, or persecution.

International Blasphemy Rights Day is observed every September 30 to commemorate the publishing of the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons, which angered religious believers around the world, many of whom expressed their disapproval with violent protests, riots, and in some cases, murder."

Maybe the Center for Inquiry are no friends of any organised religion, but religion should be able to be openly discussed, debated, and criticised, without fear or reprisal, just like any other worldview. Religious believers should have nothing to fear from this sort of dialogue. I support this, as opposed to mean spirited and immature mocking, and ill-informed sledging.

https://centerforinquiry.org/cfe/international-blasphemy-rights-day/

Radio snob

I don't listen to Fox FM. I haven't done so for many years. One of the songs I remember hearing on it was Stop Your Fussin'. The song was a Top 10 hit for Toni Childs. She had a unique singing voice. Thirty years later, Childs is still singing. The last I heard, she had to give up her singing career for health reasons. It seems she's recovered. Not only that, she is now living in Byron Bay, Australia. 

https://www.last.fm/music/Toni+Childs/_/Stop+Your+Fussin'

https://rateyourmusic.com/list/jwjstone/fox_fm_top_10_singles___29_september_1988___melbourne_vic_australia/

Prototype soy boy

Back in the late 1980s, side scrolling fighting games were all the rage. In DJ Boy (1989) the main protagonist wore roller skates. When seeing screenshots of this game in a video game magazine at the time, a school friend of mine remarked, "Don't mess with me. I roller skate." I never got to play this game, not that I'm losing any sleep over it, mind you. I remember seeing a rolling demo of it in a window display of an independent video game store. 

Innumeracy

This is Helen MacInnes (1907-1985), Scottish born librarian and novelist. She combines two of my favourite things; being Scottish, and librarianship. MacInnes died on September 30, 1985. Today is September 20. Why am I writing about this ten days early? The Wikipedia article erroneously places her death on September 20. Cross checking her biography on other sources confirms the Wikipedia error.


By Unknown - ebay.com, front of photo, back of photo, Public Domain, Link

Sheltered upbringing

The Internet Archive is a fantastic resource, containing millions of print, digital, audio and visual documents. As something of a retro video gaming aficionado, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that a complete run of Super Play magazine is available for download from the site.

Published by Future Publishing in the picturesque English city of Bath, Super Play covered Nintendo's 16 bit video game console, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. I liked this magazine because it covered both Western and Japanese game releases. Unlike some of its rivals, I felt that it was pitched at my age group at the time. I also liked the humorous writing style. At the time some of these jokes went over my head. Part of the fun of rereading issues of the magazine is to pick up on some of the humour that I didn't understand at the time.

When reviewing Japanese games, almost none of the reviewers understood the Japanese language, so they resorted to educated guesses of what these games were about. A review of a Nigel Mansell Formula 1 racing game was written in long paragraphs with no punctuation. This was deliberately done to mimic the way Mansell spoke in long sentences without pausing for breath.

The magazine lasted from November 1992 to September 1996. Towards the end of its run, the number of reviews dwindled as the console lost popularity. The massively successful
 Sony Playstation took most of Nintendo's third party support, and readers were anticipating the Nintendo 64 console. I had fond memories of reading this magazine, and am glad to be able to read it again. I now regret throwing out my collection, because they're worth a lot of money now.

https://archive.org/details/superplaymagazine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Play

Don't bother me with the facts

This is why historical literacy is so important. As well as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Anne Applebaum, those who think that Communist gulags were pleasant places to live should also read books by Timothy Snyder, such as Black Earth and Bloodlands. 

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/09/11/soviet-labour-camps-compassionate-educational-institutions-say/

The wild dogs cry out in the night

I just finished reading The Looting Machine by Tom Burgis. This book is the written equivalent of the blues bar that Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) visits in The Naked Gun 2 ½. There were pictures of the Hindenburg disaster, the sinking of the Titanic, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and failed US presidential candidate Michael Dukakis hanging on the walls. In other words, quite depressing. Despite having highly productive oil, mining, and diamond industries, African countries such as Nigeria, Niger, Congo, and Angola are mired in poverty. Corrupt local and  international government officials, corporations, and financial services firms collude to loot the wealth generated from these industries, while ordinary people subsist. It seems that there is neither the will nor the prospect of these problems being solved, and Burgis doesn’t offer any solutions either.

I miss John Howard, heck, I even miss Paul Keating

Scott Morrison, 30th Prime Minister of Australia

Australia has a new Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, its sixth Prime Minister in six years. After a Liberal Party room meeting, Malcolm Turnbull is no longer leader of the Liberal Party, and therefore no longer Prime Minister. Whoever wins the next federal election, due to be held by mid 2019, I hope that many years of political instability will now come to an end, and we will see a return to federal governments retaining one leader for an entire term. I also want a government that makes tough and sometimes unpopular decisions in the long term interests of Australia,

A lesson in humility

According to an article by Roqayah Chamseddine in today's Age, customers of major supermarket chains who are upset because of their recent decision to stop providing single use plastic grocery bags feel that it is appropriate to abuse supermarket employees. Not only is this futile, because they had nothing to do with this decision, it is also highly arrogant behaviour. 

I had a couple of low skilled jobs earlier in my working life. They were not very fulfilling, but they were character building. In those years I learned valuable life lessons that have stayed with me to this day. The first one is to treat customer service workers respectfully, and the second is to never look down on somebody because of their occupation.

https://www.theage.com.au/lifestyle/life-and-relationships/the-plastic-bagoutrage-is-only-the-beginning-20180822-p4zyz7.html

Not so happy anniversary

Today is the 50th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, brutally crushing the Prague Spring. That's what socialism looks like. As if a reminder was needed.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/08/eyewitness_to_the_soviet_invasion_of_czechoslovakia.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/20/world/europe/prague-spring-communism.html

I'll take that as a comment and not a question

Can you spot the superfluous punctuation mark in this article from today's Herald-Sun?

My fingers must have slipped

When Nine takes over Fairfax later this year, one hopes that there will be less spelling errors in their newspapers. These are particularly embarrassing in the Letters to the Editor section. 

China's exercise in futility

China's ruling Communist Party has started a new crackdown on Christianity.

Churches were raided and demolished, Bibles and other Christian literature were were confiscated and new laws were established to monitor religious activities in Henan province, which has one of the largest Christian populations in China.

Under President Xi Jinping, China's most powerful leader since Mao Zedong, Christians are seeing their freedoms, such as they were, eroded even further. 

Experts and activists say that as Xi consolidates his power, he is waging the most severe systematic suppression of Christianity in the country since religious freedom was written into the Chinese constitution in 1982.

Open Doors, which supports persecuted Christians around the world and monitors persecution of Christians, publishes a World Watch list annually. The 2018 World Watch report ranks China as the 43rd most repressive country in the world for religious freedom. 

One motivation for this suppression is to clamp down on Western infiltration of Chinese society. 

Western missionaries may have brought modern Christianity to China, but Christianity is not Western in origin. It is estimated that there are 97 million Christians in China, and if trends continue, in coming decades it will become the country with the world's highest number of Christians. This suppression will fail.

https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/christianity-china

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/china/article-6034995/Christian-heartland-opens-window-fight-Chinas-soul.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/04/china-unregistered-churches-driving-religious-revolution/521544/