Get your hands off our water

Beware Australia.
The Business Council has discovered that profits could be made from water. It wants to get its hands on water and make it a commodity - something it can trade. It has appointed a slick, softly-spoken woman to puts its case to the media, with an unctuous superiority which asserts that we, the people, don't really understand the issue the way these business people do. Business could do a lot of good for water supply, they say - if it was allowed to attract investment. It could look at all sorts of "options", it could review "pricing frameworks", it could put summer water restrictions behind us. It is just a matter of people paying the right amount for its water use. If we pay, there is plenty of water and we can use all we like. Well, business people, there is not enough water and you know that damned well. Your long shot here is that very issue. Once you have your corporate hand on water, you can "discover" the shortages and jack up the costs - ever considering the profitable return on investment that your shareholders will demand. But, of course, anything they do will be better than allowing goverments to have control of this important resource, the Business Council purrs. Governments are monopolies, after all. Water management under compeitition, "dis-agregated", would be much better. Or so they claim - so knowingly and so charmingly. This is a massive and dangerous con job by the corporate sector.

Good onya, Steve

Bloody hell. Who would have thought one would be so touched to the Aussie core by Steve Irwin's funeral? Was there ever a more spectacular production, a media event on the grand scale? No wonder the family rejected the pompous old State Funeral on offer. They knew how to do it - on the stellar MGM scale. A la Steve Irwin.
The problem is, of course, that it still cannot sink in that this indomitable character is dead. His effervescence overwhelms. He was a one-off.

Nasty Nanny

The anti-smoking message in Australia has been to deface cigarette packets with the most gruesome and offensive images of diseased lungs, arteries, feet and mouths. They are images so grotesque that smokers cannot bear to look upon them - which is why everyone has returned to the gracious old custom of storing their cigarettes in silver or gold cigarette cases. Suddenly, thanks to the overkill of the health messages, smoking has become rather classy - and someone has become extremely rich on the revival of cigarette cases.
The television advertisments which reiterate the imagery are harder to avoid and it is not only the smokers who are assaulted by them. No one dares eat in front of the television any more in case they have their stomachs turned by this aggressive shock campaign.
I pondered, when they introduced this disgusting health nannying imagery, if there was not cause for the same sort of treatment of alcohol. After all, smokers only harm themselves. Drinkers are responsible for road accidents, domestic violence, general brawling and vandalism and, of course, the damage to their livers potentially caused by overindulgence.
Well, I need wonder no longer. The Salvation Army has begun the push and now the media is leaping about in excitement. Alcohol bottles require anti-cancer warnings, just like cigarettes!
Of course, there is a powerful wine industry here in Australia and it is not going to like this - defacing the bottles with photographs of diseased livers and upstaging the label designs for which they pay top desigers a fortune. Of course drinkers are not going to want to look at filthy, cancerous livers as they sit down to quaff a $30 bottle of lovingly-made fine shiraz. What a turnoff! Photos of sick livers on the dining table in front of them as haut cuisine is served? I don't think so.
Just watch as a new market emerges - providing handsome bottle sheaths, the drinker's equivalent of the gold cigarette case. Come to think of it, I could get in on the ground floor of this one.

There is certainly more cause to deter drinkers from getting sloshed and sleazy than there is to stop smokers puffing, for the aforementioned societal reasons. But this movement of putting offensive graphic material in front of everyone is simply appalling. Distasteful rather than deterrent. It is a grotesque overkill by a self-righteous nanny culture gone mad with power.

tobacco
advertising
wine

The old and English

To take Australian citizenship, foreigners will have to pass a test in English - or, so the Government proposes. The Government wants the people to be able to communicate and fit in - so they have three years from arrival in the country to get the language under their belts. That is, if they want to become citizens.

Skilled migrants are tested on English to get their visa. Refugees are not. Of course. Nor are family reunion or family members of a skilled migrant to speak English. There are a lot of grannies in this lot - not all with the advantage of an education, so the idea of forcing them to learn the language would be unkind. We have a very old Chinese grandma living a couple of doors away. She still speaks not a word of English, but she smiles a lot and chugs about the district with her wheeled shopping trolley, picking out the things she needs and then offering the shopkeepers her purse to take what they are due. Everyone loves her and forgives her lack of language. After all, her job here is to look after the younger generation, fluent English-speaking students who will be keeping the country ticking over in a few years, be they scientists or techies.

The old granny darlings will never cope with language testing - so will never gain the citizenship which would give them certain rights - voting and pensions. However, so long as they are Asian or European, their families will take care of their aged needs - which is more than one can say of most Australians.

Sweet spring

Spring is in the air. Boronia is in the flower stands.
Beautiful boronia. Well, it is, oddly, one of the least beautiful of flowers - little brown cups with yellow interiors, as it is grown hereabouts. But the fragrance, oh the fragrance!
The scent of boronia is in the city, that perfect scent of spring. It wafts from the flower stands and perfumes the streets and malls, drawing one to the buckets of brown and green. I love it with a passion - so much so that it is the perfume oil essence that I wear on my body every single day.
Perchance my attachment to this fragrance comes from the childhood memories of this seasonal scent - to the rapture which wafts through the city and heralds spring. I've never analysed it - just loved it.
I've tried and tried to grow boronia which grows quite happily in the wild. To no long-term succcess. I've done better with gardenias, and that is not saying much. Boronia seems such a hardy little West Australian native, but it seems very fussy about its soil. So I gave up and let the native flower farms do the work, patiently waiting for this time each year when, for a brief time, we have this aromatic bliss.
And there it sits, a big bunch here in my room - and oh, doesn't the air smell sumptuously divine.


perfume
australia

Obesity's new epidemic

The obesity issue rises stridently into international headlines. There are now more overfed people than undernourished. So the powers that be want to tell fat people what not to eat. They want to swamp the media with anti fat food advertising on the assumption that obese people are plain stupid.
How are we going to put up with it? Advertising to counteract advertising?
This is all knee jerk stuff. Research on the obesity phenomenon is emerging with all sorts of answers - not all of them pointed at McDonalds and Coca Cola. One theory points to a virus. There may be other theories linked to food additives and chemicals. Research is scant.

Of course the comfort food/fast food indulgence definitely plays a role in weight gain, as does just eating too much. Sugar drinks are major culprits, and they are not just Coke. Orange juice and milk coffee drinks are right in there.
Indolence is a key player in the weight stakes, too. But we all know all of this. Obese people know this.

So what is a new advertising campaign going to achieve?
It is going to alienate us all. It is going insult us and irritate us. It is going to compound the existing overload of intrusive marketing messages delivered by a rapaciously greedy consumer industry. The advertising world will get fatter on the anti-fat message while our brains shrivel under the repetitive barrage of it all.

If anything is an unhealthy epidemic, it is advertising.



obesity
advertising

Goodbye Steve Irwin

Vale Steve Irwin.
As he lived, so did he die - taking risks with dangerous animals.
A stingray barb in the chest is about as rare and exotic as a dangerouos animal death may be. Stingray barbs in the foot or ankle are not uncommon. But on the chest? We are assuming Irwin was swimming low over the stingray, as they filmed their documentary about dangerous seacreatures, and that the stingray became alarmed and defensive. One imagines the death of Steve Irwin was captured on film, as were the many near-misses of a danger-dotted career.

What is interesting is the effect Irwin's sudden death had in this busy metropolitan newsroom. Nobody had ever bothered to express much of an opinion on Steve Irwin in the daily joust of the work environment. But news of his death sped across the floor producing a current of jaw drops and gasps. When the first report emerged on the television news monitors, people stood at their desks, straining to hear further details. There were none - just the same wire story, embellished with old footage of Irwin among animals. There is no shortage of images of Steve Irwin dicing with danger amid snakes and crocs.
And it seems that we are bonded in sorrow about this 44-year-old enthusiast who, albiet once causing kerfuffle by waving his baby near a croc, had carved a niche as a good-natured, high-spirited Aussie. He was a real life Crocodile Dundee - not an actor. His life was unscripted and his antics ever more dangerous. So there will be no re-take of the stingray scene. It is the final reality - that dangerous animals are really dangerous.

The world's most colourful conservationist is gone - by the world's most extreme and extraordinary freak incident, stabbed in the heart by a stingray. He may be the only person ever to have died that way.

And we are all very sad.

Steve Irwin
stingrays

Euthanasia Kanckered

The Euthanasia debate has lurched backwards thanks to the misguided efforts of Democrat politician Sandra Kanck. She's an odd bird, Kanck - a Christian of sorts, I believe, with a musical bent. Over the years, I've had cause to love or loathe her, depending on the issue she is embracing. Her stance on euthanasia leaves me fiercely ambivalent. She has chosen to state under Parliamentary privilege the assorted accessible ways in which a dying person may take his or her own life. By law, that which is spoken in Parliament is transcribed and archived for ever in the pages of Hansard - pages which, nowadays, are available to read online. This means that the methods of suicide which are forbidden to be published in the public arena now are there. And, of course, furore has erupted. Rightly so. Kanck has done this to make a brave protest in the cause of euthanasia - but she has done inordinate damage because she has exacerbated the blur between euthanasia and suicide. Now everyone is talking suicide in various forms of strident indignation and the issue of euthanasia has been obscured.

The important thing has always been to make a clear distinction. "Assissted suicide" in the form of euthanasia of those in a terminal state of intolerable suffering is not the same as the suicide committed by the otherwise healthy depressed, disappointed or spiteful.

And it is not "mercy killing" although, good grief, mercy plays a large role in asssissting the suffering. But "mercy killing" has come to mean knocking granny off if she is too old or dependent or turning off the life support. And euthanasia is nothing to do with others making decisions on granny's behalf. Euthanasia has to be a self-made decision acknowledged in its legitimacy by the medical profession. It is between the dying and the doctor - or it should be. But the doctor is forbidden to take any action. Which is were the whole issue becomes so dreadfully messy, becomes an emotive public debate in which suicide gets mixed up with euthanasia.

And, rather like George Bush telling critics of his administration that they are unpatriotic and on the side of terrorists, the anti-euthanasia arguers are telling the pro-euthanasia lobby that it is pro-suicide.

For once and for all, supporting the compassionate measure of allowing those who are dying in pain and loss of dignity to make a graceful exit of their own choosing is absolutely not comparable to condoning lovelorn teens or bankrupt businessmen in cutting off their lives before their time. These are different issues.

Unfortunately, Sandra Kanck, in revealing the not very secret methods by which people may leave this world by their own hand, has thrown the baby of euthanasia out with the bathwater of suicide. And it is all a bloody mess.
Silly woman.

euthanasia
suicide
Sandra Kanck

The patient traveller

Travel merits dread. It is not as bad as one anticipates. It is worse.
As if the dramas of security delays are not bad enough, the economic woes of the airlines would seem to have them all in a state of staff shortage. The result is, of course, longer and longer queues.
Let's face it. The reason people have to go to airports hours and hours early is not for the security scrutiny queues, albeit that they are long. It is to queue for checkin.
I stood for an hour with my luggage at Logan in Boston, inching forward in a condensed snake queue of hapless fellow travellers.
At first it seemed as though there were four people operating the check-in desks, then three, then two, then one... And the queue stood frozen, passing time gazing, chatting, soothing children, waiting... Then there were three check-in desks working again - from a line-up of 12, mind you. Most of the desks were unattended. And, from time to time, the clerks would just vanish from the existing posts leaving us all wondering where they had gone and why, since it was clear that there were a lot of people waiting.
From time to time, someone would patrol the queue calling out for people who were at risk of missing their planes because they were still waiting in the queue. These people would be taken to the front and put in a special priority queue. The rest of us just had to wait a bit longer. After all, we acted upon the advice of the airport system and arrived with the hours to spend waiting in the queue. We could afford to be kept waiting. The people suddenly taken to the front and causing us to have to wait even longer were the people who had not given themselves the time to wait in the queues. They were, in other words, the late-comers. Late-comers are given priority over those who have been early or have responded to the requests of the airport authorities. In other words, if you want the special VIP treatment, be late.
You will be put at the front of the queue. You will be saved the back-aching stand in line.
What is wrong with this picture?

I am a punctual person, daughter of a punctual person, trained to punctuality. I like punctual people. If everyone was punctual, the world would tick along quite efficiently.
I understand that things can go wrong and even the most punctual people can be thrown out of whack by an unexpected - breakdowns, accidents... I am eminently sympathetic towards such crises because I can feel their stress. Punctual people get veery stressed if they cannot be punctual.

But there is another world of people who just don't get the punctual thing. They march to the beat of their own drum - and to hell with the rest of us. They arrive late at theatres and cinemas. Worst of all, they arrive late to dinners - leaving hosts in a spin and food losing its zest. Latecomers insult and inconvenience others. They are just rude.
So there we were, standing in the snake cordon at check-in, silently seething as we watched the latecomers, Latinos on a flight to Miami, being rushed to the front. I am sure I was not the only one thinking that perhaps they should be allowed to miss their planes to teach them a lesson about punctuality.

The airline staff are exquisitely trained. I have never had an unpleasant experience with a single one of them. If they are harried and overworked, they mask it well. They are charm and helpfulness - when, at last, one comes to interact with them. But, one learns later to one's cost and disappointment, they lie. They would seem to have been trained to lie as a customer-soothing strategy. For instance, they may tell one they are giving one a terrific seat allocation. I have even been told, when there has been some sort of cock-up, that I have been upgraded - only to discover, when boarding the plane, that it was not an upgrade at all. Just as the promise of a vacant seat beside on the Qantas flight home mine proved hollow. I asked the man sitting in the supposedly vacant seat how long ago he had booked said seat, thinking that perhaps he had been a last-minute booking or on standby. Oh no, he had booked a month ago, he said. The empty seat had been booked for a month! Why did the check-in woman choose to tell me it was empty? I had not asked. In fact, there were no empty seats at all on that plane. It was a crammed cattle crate of humanity.

Security queues also are long and tense - manned by officers who keep a stern facade. It's a bizarre sort of factory line - the steadily moving people and the loaded conveyers, the scrutineers watching their screens like fierce quality control operators. Officers are calling out instructions - "all shoes must be removed". The queues seem resigned to their ordeal as they shuffle slowly forwards. But when it comes to their turn, people seem to dissolve into a frantic dance of urgency, pushing impatiently to grab trays and squeeze in to make a place at the unpacking bench. And off comes the jacket, the belt, the shoes. Pockets are emptied. One unloads the laptop and sends it rolling along with case and handbag before stepping through the metal detectors under the eagle eye of ranks of uniformed security guards and then stands, waiting, at the other end, braced for quick response to gather one's possessions and be out of the way without holding up the production line..

Once reassembled, the waiting begins again since, inevitably, one is early for the boarding time. It is time for finding the quietest spot one can, for people watching, reading, killing time as engines roar outside and muzzled announcements crackle out of the tannoys. Every ten minutes or so at Boston, the warnings against taking fluids on the planes were reiterated - listings of lip gel, lipstick, hair gel, toothpaste, hairspray, skin lotion, bottled water, coffee... And there were more queues, people lining up at departure gates, all in some pointless hurry to get on their planes before the next person.

Mine was a fairly uneventful flight to LAX, unpleasant in being sardined between a Dylan-like musician who pulled down the window blind and went to sleep and, on the aisle, a stodgy businessman who drank four whiskeys in a row and went to sleep with his elbow intruding into my space. I was in enforced physical contact with that man throughout the six-hour flight, although not a single word was exchanged.

LAX is always hell. Asking directions to the Tom Bradley International terminal, I was directed out of Domestic and into the street. Not where I wanted to be, since there is an internal passage which saves one from further security screening. But, once out of doors, I took the chance for a cigarette before entering the queue hell of that vast. cavernous terminal. I headed straight for security - only to be turned away. My boarding pass was unacceptable, said the officer. Qantas now rejects boarding passes issued by its airline partners. I would have to join a Qantas queue and have my American Airlines Qantas boarding pass replaced by a Qantas Qantas boarding pass. So I join yet another queue and wait and wait - watching the mysterious comings and goings of the desk clerks. Twentyfive minutes later, I have new boarding passes and can join the security queue. It is huge. But I have time. And I am in the existential mindset - there-is-no-other-reality.

Funnily enough, there are few franchises after one has passed security - limited choices for refreshments. I bought a bad fruit salad, found a deserted departure lounge and sat down with my book as hyped-up kids shrieked and hurtled around the place. The time will pass, I told myself - and, of course, it did. Slowly. But the loaded plane departed late - and lost more time on the Pacific crossing. Packed in like sardines, it was an uncomfortable flight and I envied the sleepers. Despite a valium and a glass of red wine, I managed a scant 45 minutes. I was devastated. Cabin service was cheerful but slow. They handed out dinner menus but had run out of menu choices before they were a third the way down the economy section. The meal was just food - not tasty at all. And it featured a butter bean salad and further black beans in a hot vegetable medley. All those beans for all those people packed hip-to-hip in a metal tube? What sadist designed this fart city menu? My stomach was soon popping and seething with wind - which added very effectively to the general discomfort.

As did the lateness of the plane. Departing late and flying into headwinds, the 15 hours was going to be 16 - and it was clear that connections would not be made. I called the "cabin manager" and asked if he could radio through to re-jig the Adelaide connection for me. He made an inordinate fuss of me thereafter, popping back and forth to give me updates on "company response" - which was, of course, that I would be put on the first available flight. In fact, after hauling my luggage through the massive customs queue, then through the airport and joining yet another snake of a queue, I was put on the last available flight. Perversely, the 30 other Adelaide-bound passengers were given the two earlier flights. I guess I was being put in my place for asking. A Qantas gift of more time-killing at an airport - zombie-like exhausted and demoralised time-killing.

But at least the trip eventually ended, 30 hours after it had begun.
It is now a matter of recovering the strength and the spirit, overcoming the jetlag (I write this at 4am) and wondering why I have this feeling that Qantas hates me.

Qantas
airport security
travel

LaPaglia - a celebrity riff

Anthony LaPaglia calls his hometown, Adelaide, "like a little Bronx, but with Australian accents".
I don't think anyone has ever described the city thus - or even thought of it. Certainly Adelaide has a strong and well-entrenched Italian community which, from the migration heyday of the 50s, has added substantially to the city's soul, as well as to its cuisine.
And isn't that laudable actor, LaPaglia, an export of whom we can be proud! Unlike Mel Gibson who we now prefer to see as "American-born" and not Australian, despite his Aussie upbringing and NIDA training. As a regligious extremist, Gibson is now an embarrassment. He and that moronic Tom Cruise are the disgraces of Hollywood - ill-informed loudmouths who gain a global platform for their dangerous and warped views because of their wealth and stardom.

I have always been of the opinion that actors are actors. They act because they have more substance as other people than as themselves. Their skill is in expressing what other people have thought and written. When interviewing actors, it is often necessary to "feed" them worthwhile things to say, since most actors are not profoundly well-informed outside of their metier. Yet the the media insists on trying to pump newsworthy things from their mouths - because their popularity attracts reader interest. Making them inherently interesting is another matter.

This is where gossip has become an industry.
It breaks my heart to see the massive output and the lucrative turnover which assuages the apppetite of this market. The vapid for the vacuous.
Are the starlets too fat or too thin? Do we like their taste in clothes? Do we like the company they keep? We care. We care!

This obsession with the minutiae of celebrity has spawned a new population of paparazzi - desperate freelance photographers everyone loves to hate. Theirs is a perilous existence in a shallow and fickle world. I know the adrenalin which drives their chase. Poor bastards.

Paparazzi are not a new phenomenon. Back in 1970 I chummed up with a Rome-based gossip-chaser whose primary purpose was to come up with the goods on Liz Taylor and Richard Burton. Those were still the days when movie stars were stars.

Now the star system has been replaced by the celebrity circuit. Talent is not in the formula. One only has to look at the absurd phenomenon of Paris Hilton or hear the grotesque vocal contortions of Jessica Simpson to have this rammed home. And who among us does not know who those dreary glamour girls are? We can't name Grigori Perelman, the Russian mathematician who has just contributed the most important piece of abstract thought since Einstein, but we can quote the trite comments of Paris Hilton who has just told us that she can't believe how good she is.

One wonders if people will tire of the celebrity saturation. Will they wise up? Will they get interested in people or issues of more substance? Or will the cynical media moguls just go on manufacturing new celebrities to sustain the vast profits generated by tinymind turnover?

We know the answer.
Oh, well, I am still proud of Anthony LaPaglia. A fine actor, a great Australian and a proper, old-fashioned movie star.

Anthony LaPaglia
celebrity
Grigori Perelman

Travel blues

The melancholy of last days. With such inexorable swiftness they melt one into another until one is there at the Valium gates of departure. Another finality in this finite mass of finites.
But another beginning awaits - or, at least, a resumption. I do not dread returning to my desk at the paper. Indeed, I look forward to seeing my colleagues and to the surprise of the next assignment.
It is just that, from this vantage point, it has no reality. It is so impossibly far away - and the path is tortuous and torturous. It is to be adrift in that somewhere nowhere which will never end - the pergatory of security queues, waiting bays, transit lounges, departure boards, vast walkways, harried air crews, tiny seats in those big metal cylinders which roar and lurch and surround one with vile, viremic air. My fear of flying has not abated with experience. I think fear of flying is just plain commonsense. I have loads of commonsense. Thus, I am ever terrified of flying. And once on the vast journey, there is no other reality. There is no existence outside the airports and planes. It is an enclosed, eternal world. It is hell.

Toothache terrorist

Pity those of us scheduled to take long-haul flights in this new era of carry-on carry-on. When faced with 28 hours of travel between the east coast of the US and South Australia, one tends to like to be prepared for problems, not to mention being able to freshen-up along the way. The prohibition on deodorants and toothpaste in cabin baggage has been glorious fuel for the comedians - the birth of stinky passenger syndrome. But it has prospective passengers very apprehensive. Hell, one doesn't want to be one of the stinky passengers! Tourist class in jumbo jets gets fetid enough with fragrant passengers. How ugh is it going to get?
Oh, boy, is this restriction a win for terrorists! It is another erosion, a quiet humiliation of the Western capitalist travellers.

I don't go down to the corner deli without my tiny bottle of perfumed oil. It is always tucked in pocket of my handbag. I'll have to do without it in the impending trip to Oz. Oh, well. I always have my pack of moist towelettes.

The other thing I like always to keep on my person is a tube of dental antiseptic gel. I am a poor old thing with a long history of gum disease and, hence, a tendency towards sudden flareups when under stress. Toothache and abcesses. I hold this in check this with fastidious dental hygiene and the use of peroxide mouth washes. At the first sign of trouble, I apply Colgate Peroxyl - the best of all effective treatments. And I always carry a tube of said peroxide gel, just in case. Insurance, if you like.

Now what was it the terrorists were planning to use in their thwarted scheme to blow up planes? Peroxide!
Suddenly I am a person carrying terrorist weaponry!
A toothache terrorist?
It's almost funny.

What is funny is that, according to the Homeland Security list of can and cannot carry items, while I will have to live without my Peroxyl gel, it seems that I am still allowed to carry long, sharp knitting needles!

terrorism
peroxide
air travel

Terrorism lessons from NBC

American news services are not particularly good. They are constant - but they are not comprehensive. Rather, they are delivered with a rapid-fire, breathless urgency by which they assume a gravitas, a sense of importance, is imparted. This delivery is meant to obscure the fact that the stories are short on detail or explanation. They are essentially grabs. Everything is grabs. Teasers followed by grabs.

Tonight, however, NBC actually decided to expand its coverage of the foiling of the London terrorists by delivering a blueprint of what they intended to do. Yes, the newscasters who give habitually truncated reportage of world news, suddenly have gone thorough. Too thorough. From the sublime to the ridiculous. They have gone to the trouble of preparing detailed graphics and computer renderings so they can show exactly how the terrorists would have exploded planes over major cities. They showed the ingredients. The common household ingredients! They showed the tools. They showed how mixes would be made and of what and where. And where the terrorists would sit and connect with each other. It was a copybook "how to".

Well, aren't they smartypants exploitationist showoffs "in the public interest"?
And aren't they complete morons!


terrorism
NBC
London bombers

Oh, no.

Fear of flying rises to new heights.
I am a cot case before the most routine air travel and more important than packing when getting to and from the USA is taking Valium to dull the anxiety. I need Valium to pack, since packing means departure and that means takeoff and landing.
Now, thanks to the brutal-mindedness of terrorists, I crave Valium at the very thought of my impending travel.
I had been warned by an on-the-ball blogger that rumour was out and about that there would be some appalling terrorist action coming up towards the fifth anniversary of 9/11. My source was right on the money.

This morning I woke to the barrage of reportage, views of Heathrow jammed with displaced passengers, terror alerts on the highest, airports in bedlam across the world as air schedules descended into chaos and new restrictions were asserted - all fluids banned and in the UK, all handluggage including computers and handbags. Passengers only permitted to carry boarding passes! The idea of my computer being thrown around as freight simply terrifies me. I can't bear for it to be out of my sight at the best of times.

One can only hope that Britain's crackdown has disabled this large, sophisticated terrorist cell. But Britain is unsure. So we all quake.
And we wish it was otherwise, we people of love and trust and peace. We wish there was not all this hatred and spite. We wish there were no extremists. We wish the political world were more agreeable. We wish that America was not so hated. We note that America was not so hated before George Bush took power. Had there been a Democrat government in the USA right now, would this world situation be so grotesque? One thinks not.
But what is, is.
And we must live in fear.


terrorism
George Bush