December 2009

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Liberals: an endangered species?

December 22, 2009 in politics | No comments

Abbott’s new cabinet confirms what has been obvious for some time: that the Coalition parties have forfeited their right to the term ‘liberal’. Robert Manne nailed Howard – a mendacious populist. People like Ruddock and Andrews are authoritarian reactionaries. (There are no words to describe Bronwen Bishop.) In The Age the other day a Liberal lamented the death of the party Menzies founded.

Andrew Norton (“Carlton’s only classical liberal”) gives some interesting survey figures to show that on the Australian “Right”, there is a clear statist majority.

Some of us can’t support either major party, and are tired of flinging tokens to Bob Brown. How’s about a re-formed liberal party – Turnbull at its head, Keating the grey eminence?

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Have a reasonable Christmas

December 21, 2009 in unreason, values | No comments


Sceptics can take this comfort: they now make up the biggest denomination, followed by Catholics and then Anglicans. But this puts Australia only about midway in a list of the top 50 non-believing nations.

All the same, we’re getting there. Agnostics and atheists together = 30%, a figure that in my youth would have astonished my parents’ generation – and delighted my father. Read the rest of this entry »

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Dr Boli does his bit

December 15, 2009 in literature | No comments

support-troops

(Click on the pic.)

Which reminded me of Auden’s ‘Under Which Lyre’, a rhyming address to Phi Beta Kappa, Harvard 1946.

Encamped upon the college plain
Raw veterans already train
As freshman forces;
Instructors with sarcastic tongue
Shepherd the battle-weary young
Through basic courses.

Among bewildering appliances
For mastering the arts and sciences
They stroll or run,
And nerves that steeled themselves to slaughter
Are shot to pieces by the shorter
Poems of Donne.

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Keeping it in the family

December 14, 2009 in politics | No comments

White Christmas in Dubai

White Christmas in Dubai

Abu Dhabi pledged on Monday to provide $10 billion to Dubai, easing fears about an outright debt default by the smaller, struggling emirate.
Let me see, now, who is it who provides most of the subsidies for the Palestinians?

CD of the year

December 12, 2009 in Music | No comments

Yes, it’s time again for the Wordability highlights of the year, that consoling list which doesn’t include anything too recent.  The music award this year has been easy: Rossini’s Il Viaggio di Reims on DGG, Claudio Abbado, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, the Prague Philharmonic Chorus and a cast like a fleet of Rolls-Royces.

Rossini wrote it for Paris to celebrate the coronation of Charles X in 1825. It was given four times, then withdrawn. For 150 years it was thought the complete score had been lost. (About half the music was re-purposed for  Le Comte Ory.) But three separate manuscript discoveries and some careful editing restored the whole. This 1985 recording, based on performances at Pesaro, is the work’s first. Charles X, by the way, was a reactionary so boneheaded that he brought on the 1830 revolution.

It’s first-rate Rossini. There are samples of the work on YouTube, from both the 1984 Pesaro performances, a 1992 performance again conducted by Abbado with much the same cast. and an Opus Arte video of another production.

Here’s the Pesaro version of the incomparable Sextet (the tenor who leads off is Franco Araiza).

This is the encore of the finale, this time from Berlin 1992. Watch ten virtuosi deliberately skating on thin ice.

And if you want more of Silvia McNair (who doesn’t?)

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Blake on Copenhagen

December 11, 2009 in politics | No comments

blake


Le texte rêvé des pays émergents said Le Monde. The emergent countries in question, led by China, would like:

  • to emit carbon in any quantity indefinitely (to eliminate poverty)
  • to have developed nations (who have caused the problem) meet all the costs of climate-change damage – and to bypass the World Bank
  • to export freely without the importing nation imposing any carbon-related duties
  • not to submit to any regime of international inspection

A text for negotiation, says Le Monde. Looks more like a gauntlet to me. Whatever decisions are reached in Copenhagen, the conference has helped to clarify the new political polarisation of the planet. We can expect this document to bring cheers from the international Left, who in every aspect of life would like the West to pay and to go on paying.

Hovering over it all, the 2 per cent target, which the BASIC nations say, rather oddly, that they accept. The developing situation resembles the nuclear arms race, another political conflict with scientific constraints on its resolution. But whereas most decision-makers then understood (in the end) that destruction was mutually assured, there seems little likelihood that countries like Sudan will allow their dreams to be limited by statistics.

Meanwhile the Chinese are pouring money into Africa without all those fussy bits about the environment that Western countries insist upon.

In every cry of every man,
In every infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear:

How the chimney-sweeper’s cry
Every blackening church appals,
And the hapless soldier’s sigh
Runs in blood down palace-walls.

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