Mike Wran re: Climate Change, Israeli hypocrisy

Some good on line radio past programmes here.
Do you ever listen to on line radio? It's Good!
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/brkfast/

Today's breakfast show was good, but it's too early in the day for the ABC to have posted it.There was a very good interview with Mike Wran re. climate change. A slap in the face for that idiot Senator McGhaurin (I think I've misspelt it) Who cares.

I like this letter to "the Age" this morning.

Israeli hypocrisy
THE outrage expressed by Israel over its captured soldier must take the cake for hypocrisy. The Israelis currently imprison more than 9000 Palestinian men, 336 juveniles and 113 women.

Many, if not all, are held illegally in direct contravention of the Fourth Geneva Convention and Security Council Resolution 1322 of 2000. Israeli contempt for international humanitarian law is perennial, but in this case it is stark.

Matthew McKenzie, Gumeracha, SA

New book by John Pilger.

New book by John Pilger.

The War on Children
Posted: Jun 15 2006, 08:52 PM

The War on ChildrenJohn Pilger – New Statesman June 14, 2006

The most vulnerable people in Gaza are suffering the worst acute mental and physical trauma as a result of Israel's actions: almost half the population is under 15.Arthur Miller wrote, "Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense.

The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied." Miller's truth was a glimpsed reality on television on 9 June when Israeli warships (1) fired on families picnicking on a Gaza beach, killing seven people, including three children and three generations.

What that represents is a final solution, agreed by the United States and Israel, to the problem of the Palestinians. While the Israelis fire missiles at Palestinian picnickers and homes in Gaza and the West Bank, the two governments are to starve them. The victims will be mostly children. This was approved on 23 May by the US House of Representatives, which voted 361-37 to cut off aid to non-government organisations that run a lifeline to occupied Palestine. Israel is withholding Palestinian revenues and tax receipts amounting to $60m a month. Such collective punishment, identified as a crime against humanity in the Geneva Conventions, evokes the Nazis' strangulation of the Warsaw ghetto and the American economic siege of Iraq in the 1990s.

If the perpetrators have lost their minds, as Miller suggested, they appear to understand their barbarism and display their cynicism. "The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet," joked Dov Weisglass, an adviser to the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert. This is the price Palestinians must pay for their democratic elections in January.

The majority voted for the "wrong" party, Hamas, which the US and Israel, with their inimitable penchant for pot-calling-the-kettle-black, describe as terrorist. However, terrorism is not the reason for starving the Palestinians, whose prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, had reaffirmed Hamas's commitment to recognise the Jewish state, proposing only that Israel obey international law and respect the borders of 1967.

Israel has refused because, with its apartheid wall under construction, its intention is clear: to take over more and more of Palestine, encircling whole villages and eventually Jerusalem. The sniper's woundThe reason Israel fears Hamas is that Hamas is unlikely to be a trusted collaborator in subju- gating its own people on Israel's behalf. Indeed, the vote for Hamas was actually a vote for peace. Palestinians were fed up with the failures and corruption of the Arafat era.

According to the former US president Jimmy Carter, whose Carter Centre verified the Hamas electoral victory, "public opinion polls show that 80 per cent of Palestinians want a peace agreement with Israel". How ironic this is, considering that the rise of Hamas was due in no small part to the secret support it received from Israel, which, with the US and Britain, wanted Islamists to undermine secular Arabism and its "moderate" dreams of freedom.

Hamas refused to play this Machiavellian game and in the face of Israeli assaults maintained a ceasefire for 18 months. The objective of the Israeli attack on the beach at Gaza was clearly to sabotage the ceasefire. This is a time-honoured tactic. Now, state terror in the form of a medieval siege is to be applied to the most vulnerable.

For the Palestinians, a war against their children is hardly new. A 2004 field study published in the British Medical Journal reported that, in the previous four years, "Two-thirds of the 621 children . . . killed [by the Israelis] at checkpoints . . . on the way to school, in their homes, died from small arms fire, directed in over half the cases to the head, neck and chest - the sniper's wound." A quarter of Palestinian infants under the age of five are acutely or chronically malnourished.

The Israeli wall "will isolate 97 primary health clinics and 11 hospitals from the populations they serve." The study described "a man in a now fenced-in village near Qalqilya [who] approached the gate with his seriously ill daughter in his arms and begged the soldiers on duty to let him pass so that he could take her to hospital. The sol-diers refused." Gaza, now sealed like an open prison and terrorised by the sonic boom of Israeli fighter aircraft, has a population of which almost half is under 15. Dr Khalid Dahlan, a psychiatrist who heads a children's community health project, told me, "The statistic I personally find unbearable is that 99.4 per cent of the children we studied suffer trauma . . . 99.2 per cent had their homes bombarded; 97.5 per cent were exposed to tear gas; 96.6 per cent witnessed shooting; a third saw family members or neighbours injured or killed."

These children suffer unrelenting nightmares and "night terrors" and the dichotomy of hav-ing to cope with these conditions. On the one hand, they dream about becoming doctors and nurses "so they can help others"; on the other, this is then overtaken by an apocalyptic vision of themselves as the next generation of suicide bombers. They experience this invariably after attacks by the Israelis.

For some boys, their heroes are no longer football players, but a confusion of Palestinian "martyrs" and even the enemy, "because Israeli soldiers are the strongest and have Apache gunships". That these children are now to be punished further may be beyond human comprehension, but there is a logic.

Over the years, the Palestinians have avoided falling into the abyss of an all-out civil war, knowing this is what the Israelis want. Destroying their elected government while attempting to build a parallel administration around the collusive Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, may well produce, as the Oxford academic Karma Nabulsi wrote, "a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society . . . ruled by disparate militias, gangs, religious ideologues and broken into ethnic and religious tribalism, and co-opted collaborationists.

Look to the Iraq of today: that is what [Ariel Sharon] had in store for us." The new "body count"The struggle in Palestine is an American war, waged from America's most heavily armed foreign military base, Israel. In the west, we are conditioned not to think of the Israeli-Palestinian "conflict" in those terms, just as we are conditioned to think of the Israelis as victims, not illegal and brutal occupiers.

This is not to underestimate the initiative of the Israeli state, but without F-16s and Apaches and billions of American taxpayers' dollars, Israel would have made peace with the Palestinians long ago. Since the Second World War, the US has given Israel some $140bn, much of it as armaments. According to the Congressional Research Service, the same "aid" budget was to include $28m "to help [Palestinian] children deal with the current conflict situation" and to provide "basic first aid".

That has now been vetoed. Karma Nabulsi's comparison with Iraq is apposite, for the same "policy" applies there. The capture of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was a wonderful media event: what the philosopher Hannah Arendt called "action as propaganda", and hav-ing little bearing on reality. The Americans and those who act as their bullhorn have their demon - even a video game of his house being blown up.

The truth is that Zarqawi was largely their creation. His apparent killing serves an important propaganda purpose, distracting us in the west from the American goal of converting Iraq, like Palestine, into a powerless society of ethnic and religious tribalism. Death squads, formed and trained by veterans of the CIA's "counter-insurgency" in central America, are critical to this. The Special Police Commandos, a CIA creation led by former senior intelligence officers in Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party, are perhaps the most brutal.

The Zarqawi killing and the myths about his importance also deflect from routine massacres by US soldiers, such as the one at Haditha. Even the puppet prime minister Nouri al-Maliki complains that murderous behaviour of US troops is "a daily occurrence". As I learned in Vietnam, a form of serial killing, then known officially as "body count", is the way the Americans fight their colonial wars.

Put out more flagsThis is known as "pacification". The asymmetry of a pacified Iraq and a pacified Palestine is clear. As in Palestine, the war in Iraq is against civilians, mostly children. According to Unicef, Iraq once had one of the highest indicators for the well- being of children.

Today, a quarter of children between the ages of six months and five years suffer acute or chronic malnutrition, worse than during the years of sanctions. Poverty and disease have risen with each day of the occupation. In April, in British-occupied Basra, the European aid agency Saving Children from War reported: "The mortality of young children had increased by 30 per cent compared with the Saddam Hussein era."

They die because the hospitals have no ventilators and the water supply, which the British were meant to have fixed, is more polluted than ever. Children fall victim to unexploded US and British cluster bombs. They play in areas contaminated by depleted uranium; by contrast, British army survey teams venture there only in full-body radiation suits, face masks and gloves.

Unlike the children they came to "liberate", British troops are given what the Ministry of Defence calls "full biological testing". Was Arthur Miller right? Do we "internally deny" all this, or do we listen to distant voices? On my last trip to Palestine, I was rewarded, on leaving Gaza, with a spectacle of Palestinian flags fluttering from inside the walled compounds. Children are responsible for this. No one tells them to do it. They make flagpoles out of sticks tied together, and one or two climb on to a wall and hold the flag between them, silently.

They do it, believing they will tell the world. John Pilger's new book, "Freedom Next Time", is published by Bantam Press (£17.99). His website is [ www.johnpilger.com ] This article first appeared in the New Statesman.www.newstatesman.com/200606190029 (1) Actually the the shelling appears to have come from Israeli 155mm artillary. See 'Shrapnel Evidence Points to Israel's Involvement'. Ed.

a "turd with attitude".

My favourite recent opinion piece from "The Australian"
I think there's a lesson in it somewhere for me.

Bill Leak: To a conceptual artist, dog doings are a nice little earnerTHE WRY SIDE
June 19, 2006

I'VE known some artbags (ratbags of the art world) in my life, but a bloke I met in Paris in 1978 was one of the greatest. Mort hailed from Canada and realised his potential as a conceptual artist one freezing day when he accidentally kicked a dog turd in the street and, instead of making a mess of his shoe, it rocketed off like a small piece of concrete and landed a couple of yards in front of him. Mort described it as a "turd with attitude".

"It just sat there, defying me to kick it again," he said.

So he did. And not just once. He kicked it all the way down the block to his home, wrapped it carefully in plastic, placed it in the snow and, the next day, took it off and had it cast in bronze.
When he took receipt of his objet d'art a few days later, he was so pleased with what he saw he amassed a pile of photos of it and paired them up with copies of a page or two of the most impenetrable drivel imaginable. He then came up with a reasonable price, doubled it, got out the envelopes and fired off his first once-in-a-lifetime offer to every gallery he could find an address for in Canada, the US and Europe.

A few weeks later he was back at the foundry, placing orders. His cold turds were selling like hot cakes and Mort was looking at a stellar career in art. When I told him I couldn't work out whether he was a bullshit artist or a dogshit artist, Mort just laughed, and said: "What does it matter? Shit sells."

While in Paris, he went through a phase during which he wasn't capable of selling quite enough of it to keep body and soul together. It was time to come up with another Mort rort. Once again he set off in search of a foundry, this time with a set of dessert plates, all of different sizes, and had them cast in brass. He instructed the metalworker to attach little hooks to the bottom of each plate and, back in the studio, constructed a frame from which to hang them, upside down and in a row.

A couple of weeks later he invited me to come along to the second performance of Mort's Evening of Meditation. "Promise not to laugh during the show," he insisted.
He'd hired a dingy church hall and advertised widely. I duly turned up, paid my few francs at the door, received my complimentary candle and went inside. When I saw the other meditators squatting around all over the floor I remembered Mort telling me to bring a cushion. Too late. The lights illuminating the little stage went out, leaving me clutching my candle and wondering what to expect.

Looking around, I could see the others were veterans of this kind of thing. Most of them had their eyes closed, presumably already half the way to Nirvana.
Mort could have probably left it at that and not bothered to appear at all but no, after what seemed like an eternity, he glided out on to the stage, whopping big candle in one hand and a couple of mallets in the other. Dressed only in a white robe, he looked as though he might have left a camel parked outside.

He calmly took his place, knees crossed, on the floor behind his ominous looking line-up of bowls and proceeded to do absolutely nothing except bow his head and keep the punters waiting for another 10 minutes or so.

Then, with a slow but definitive gesture, he bonged the biggest bowl with one of the soft mallets. The sound went on for quite a while before we had silence in the room again. A minute or two later he bonged one of the smaller bowls, waited for its tone to disappear and then bonged another one. He kept this up - and I kept a straight face - for almost 90 minutes. I was glad I could stop maintaining control when afterwards we both laughed uproariously, drinking the proceeds in a pub.

Soon the place was getting so packed on Sundays he had to start doing matinees.
The money he made was enough to tide him over until he had a brilliant idea for another conceptual artwork too tiresome to describe here, originals of which he managed to flog off to 15 galleries in America, thereby getting his art career back on track. He even had the gall to call the piece Money because, as he said, that was what it was all about.
So, if you're visiting a conceptual exhibition or happen to find yourself wandering about in the Sydney Biennale, look at the artworks themselves and try to avoid reading the gibberish on the walls beside them or in the catalogue.

That way you might be able to work out for yourself if you're in the presence of great art or if another Mort is behind it all, gleefully pulling your leg.

and to top it off, here's Bills cartoon for the day.

Nope, it's got me buggered why they hate our way of life.

Nope, it's got me buggered why they hate our way of life.

This seems to be a "feel good" story. I hope it is, ------ but why do I feel cynical

Greenie in charge of the greenbackEnvironmentalists have welcomed George W.Bush's choice of financier Henry Paulson as Treasury Secretary, writes Sarah Baxter
June 09, 2006

This seems to be a "feel good" story. I hope it is, ------ but why do I feel cynical

FOR greens used to bashing US President George W.Bush, it is a puzzle. Last week, the hater of the Kyoto treaty and former oilman gave the key job of Treasury Secretary to one of the most environmentally friendly multi-millionaires on the planet.

Henry "Hank" Paulson is a leading name on Wall Street, where he accumulated pound stg. 370million as chairman and chief executive of investment bank Goldman Sachs. But he is also known as an ardent advocate of nature conservation and the prevention of global warming.
"He's way too green for some folk," a former Bush administration official said.
Environmentalists are cheering over his nomination. "It's very encouraging to have somebody at that level in the financial world who understands that promoting the economy and the environment go hand in hand," said Dave Willett of the Sierra Club, a leading conservation group.

Placing an avid green in charge of the mighty greenback is a stretch for Bush, but support for the environment is no longer confined to tree-huggers or Al Gore, the Cannes Film Festival darling whose documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, has Democrats buzzing about a 2008 presidential run.

Some of the toughest neoconservative hawks in the war on terror, such as James Woolsey, the former CIA chief, and General Brent Scowcroft, a veteran of right-wing realpolitik, have become alarmed by the prospect of climate change. They also oppose the financial and political muscle that oil hands to the US's enemies in the Middle East. Bush signalled that he was shifting his position during his State of the Union speech in January, when he called for the production of ethanol for cars, "not just from corn but from wood chips, stalks or switch grass".

The comedians had a field day, but Paulson's appointment is a sign that American greens are going mainstream. The 60-year-old is chairman of the Nature Conservancy, the world's wealthiest environmental group, which supports the Kyoto Protocol on global warming and last year donated $70million in Goldman Sachs stock to the cause.

Paulson is expected to bring his passion for the subject to the Bush administration's cabinet table. "He is unhesitant in expressing his opinion when he thinks it is the right thing to do," said Steve McCormick, president of the Nature Conservancy. "I'm sure that if there's an opportunity for Hank to provide his point of view on this issue, he will take advantage of it."
Raised as a Christian Scientist on a farm in Illinois, the teetotal Paulson dreamed of becoming a forest or park ranger as a boy.

He and his wife, Wendy, an environmental education teacher who went to college with Hillary Clinton, have raised a menagerie of flying squirrels, raccoons, lizards, snakes, mice, frogs, cats, dogs and a tarantula on a site that used to be part of his parents' farm. On his way to work in New York, Paulson would often stop off at Central Park for a spot of birdwatching and invited falconers to show off birds of prey to office staff.

He had to be wooed into accepting the Treasury post and commentators have hailed his nomination as an unexpected outbreak of competence on Mr Bush's part. "They're so desperate they're scraping the top of the barrel," is one of the jokes doing the rounds about his nomination, which still has to be confirmed by the Senate.

Bush chose Paulson for the job because of his sound reputation on Wall Street, his strong support for tax cuts and free trade, and his soothing belief that economic growth -- which hit a cracking pace of 5.3 per cent in the first quarter of this year -- will help to solve the yawning US budget deficit. There are not expected to be any sudden changes of heart about drilling for oil in Alaska, the signing of the Kyoto treaty or other touchstone environmental issues.

Bush has dropped his outright scepticism about the existence of global warming, but still doubts whether it is a man-made phenomenon. He said recently that he regretted the hostile anti-green tone he struck during his first term as President.
Instead of simply opposing the Kyoto treaty on global warming as "a lousy deal for America", the President reflected: "I guess I should have started differently ... and said we will invest in new technologies that will enable us to use fossil fuels in a much wiser way." Christie Whitman, a Republican who had an unhappy time as head of the Environmental Protection Agency in Bush's first term, believes that Paulson's appointment will nudge policy along.

"One of the biggest raps against some environmental proposals is that they are not economically sound," she said. "One of the things that his kind of advocacy can do is to put a lie to that."
A few lone conservative voices, who believed that a Bush government of Texas oilmen would have no time for green nonsense, are urging senators to reject Paulson's nomination.

"You do not want someone serving as a cabinet officer who has a habit of indulging his environmental hobby at the expense of his financial responsibilities," said Tom Borelli of the Free Enterprise Action Fund. Yet Paulson has just as fearsome a reputation for ruthlessness, which should serve him well. On fishing trips, colleagues recall how he would not stop until he had reeled in the best catch of the day. In his time at Goldman Sachs he bagged big clients with the same tenacity. "He loved going after the big fish," said Robert Hurst, his former boss.
Persuading Bush to go green could be his greatest catch yet.
The Sunday Times

The Way Americans Like Their War

Be thankful for reporters the calibre of Robert Fisk

Published on Saturday, June 3, 2006 by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer
The Way Americans Like Their War
by Robert Fisk

Could Haditha be just the tip of the mass grave?
The corpses we have glimpsed, the grainy footage of the cadavers and the dead children; could these be just a few of many? Does the handiwork of the United States' army of the slums go further?

I remember clearly the first suspicions I had that murder most foul might be taking place in our name in Iraq. I was in the Baghdad mortuary, counting corpses, when one of the city's senior medical officials, an old friend, told me of his fears. "Everyone brings bodies here," he said. "But when the Americans bring bodies in, we are instructed that under no circumstances are we ever to do post-mortems. We were given to understand that this had already been done. Sometimes we'd get a piece of paper like this one with a body." And here the man handed me a U.S. military document showing with the hand-drawn outline of a man's body and the words "trauma wounds." What kind of trauma is now being experienced in Iraq? Just who is doing the mass killing? Who is dumping so many bodies on garbage heaps? After Haditha, we are going to reshape our suspicions.

It's no good saying "a few bad apples." All occupation armies are corrupted. But do they all commit war crimes? The Algerians are still uncovering the mass graves left by the French paras who liquidated whole villages. We know of the rapist-killers of the Russian army in Chechnya.
We have all heard of Bloody Sunday. The Israelis sat and watched while their proxy Lebanese militia butchered and eviscerated its way through 1,700 Palestinians. And of course the words My Lai are now uttered again. Yes, the Nazis were much worse. And the Japanese. And the Croatian Ustashi. But this is us. This is our army. These young soldiers are our representatives in Iraq. And they have innocent blood on their hands.

I suspect part of the problem is that we never really cared about Iraqis, which is why we refused to count their dead. Once the Iraqis turned upon the army of occupation with their roadside bombs and suicide cars, they became Arab "gooks," the evil sub-humans whom the Americans once identified in Vietnam. Get a president to tell us that we are fighting evil and one day we will wake to find that a child has horns, a baby has cloven feet.

Remind yourself these people are Muslims and they can all become little Mohamed Attas. Killing a roomful of civilians is only a step further from all those promiscuous air strikes that we are told kill 'terrorists" but which all too often turn out to be a wedding party or -- as in Afghanistan -- a mixture of "terrorists" and children or, as we are soon to hear, no doubt, "terrorist children."

In a way, we reporters are also to blame. Unable to venture outside Baghdad -- or around Baghdad itself -- Iraq's vastness has fallen under a thick, all-consuming shadow. We might occasionally notice sparks in the night -- a Haditha or two in the desert -- but we remain meekly cataloguing the numbers of "terrorists" supposedly scored in remote corners of Mesopotamia. For fear of the insurgent's knife, we can no longer investigate. And the Americans like it that way.

I think it becomes a habit, this sort of thing. Already the horrors of Abu Ghraib are shrugged away. It was abuse, not torture. And then up pops a junior officer in the United States charged for killing an Iraqi army general by stuffing him upside down in a sleeping bag and sitting on his chest. And again, it gets few headlines. Who cares if another Iraqi bites the dust? Aren't they trying to kill our boys who are out there fighting terror.

For who can be held to account when we regard ourselves as the brightest, the most honorable of creatures, doing endless battle with the killers of Sept. 11 or July 7 because we love our country and our people -- but not other people -- so much. And so we dress ourselves up as Galahads, yes as Crusaders, and we tell those whose countries we invade that we are going to bring them democracy. I can't help wondering today how many of the innocents slaughtered in Haditha took the opportunity to vote in the Iraqi elections -- before their "liberators" murdered them.Robert Fisk writes for the Independent, published in Great Britain.
© 2006 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

More to life than families, families, families;

This opinion piece hits the nail right on the head

June 4, 2006

The sacred place of 'The Family' is all politicians talk about these days, writes Jason Koutsoukis.
The Family. I know it's a wonderful institution, but can we talk about something else please? Politicians barely open their mouths these days without waffling on about the sacred place The Family holds in all our lives.

Which I find slightly odd, given that most people I know seem to spend at least half their waking hours trying to think of ways to escape their families and do the things they really enjoy. Like playing golf, or shopping, or drinking with their buddies.

It's no coincidence that most murders involve one family member killing another. Or that domestic violence incidents soar at Christmas time when the stress of the family becomes too much for many people to bear.

Then there are the families we have when we grow up. How many of us really relish the thought of spending a week or two with the entire family? Worse still, your partner's family?
At best, most adults struggle to spend one day in a whole year with the family they grew up with all in the same room.

It's a terrible thought that all those hours of love and labour bringing up your kids might not be worth two cents when your kids grow up and decide they don't like you very much.
If you're really lucky, your kids might not hate you. And they might not blame you for all their problems, or all the things you didn't do for them.

But then there is the painful possibility that those beautiful children of yours, in whom you instilled so much virtue, might not actually like each other. It's practically against the law to say any of these things in public these days, but much of the statistical and anecdotal evidence seems to at least point in that direction.

Maybe that's why Treasurer Peter Costello's $40 billion tax giveaways in last month's budget bombed so badly. There was the Treasurer, proud as punch, handing out buckets of money for families, yet strangely the voters haven't responded with much enthusiasm. It's possible people are getting just a little bored with the talk being about families and nothing else.
Maybe people are missing something, like nation building, or education, a word that wasn't mentioned once in Costello's budget speech.

In a bygone age, the Liberal Party used to be proud about spending money on institutions such as universities, but not this mob. According to the twisted logic of the modern Liberal Party, any money not spent on families is money wasted on the "elites".

When Sir Robert Menzies retired, one of the three things he said he was most proud of was what he did for universities. Imagine John Howard saying something similar. It's nigh on impossible.
In 1973, then Governor-General and former Liberal foreign minister Sir Paul Hasluck delivered an address at the University of Queensland. Titled "On Learning", Hasluck's speech extolled the pursuit of excellence in education in a way unimaginable today from the mouths of any of our political leaders.

Learning was important, said Hasluck, "so that we shall have in Australia a body of learned men and women whose standards of judgement and level of knowledge will be such as to create an intellectual environment in which all that is cheap, shoddy, glib, ignorant, ill-organised and unverified will be revealed in its ugliness and pettiness and rejected and so that our people will become accustomed to and require a better level of learning from those who purport to instruct or lead them".

It seems a futile hope that politicians will aspire to talk about something broader than just The Family, as if families are the only institution in this country worth preserving, or building upon. What a refreshing change it would make to hear a political leader speak with the same passion and vigour on learning.

If the nation is to grow, mature and acquire the critical faculties that Hasluck wished more than 30 years ago, then our political leaders will surely have to start thinking about it soon.
Jason Koutsoukis is The Sunday Age's federal political reporter.

So...We really are all musicians

Cave raves may link music and speechFrom correspondents in Reading
May 31, 2006

IT WAS a dark and stormy night, and in a cave in what is now southern France, Neanderthals were singing, dancing and tapping on stalagmites with their fingernails to pass the time.
Did this Ice-Age rave-up happen, perhaps 50,000 to 100,000 years ago, on a cold night in the Pleistocene Epoch? Or is it purely a figment of the imagination of Steven Mithen, professor of early prehistory at the University of Reading in England?

Impossible to know, Mithen, 45, readily admits, but in his book, The Singing Neanderthals, he has built a strong case that our hominid ancestors had a musical culture, and a rudimentary form of communication that went with it, that has left traces deeply embedded in modern mankind.

Why else, for example, would music have universal appeal and such a strong pull on the human psyche? Why, when we hear music, do we feel the need to tap our feet, or dance?
Why do we think some passages of music paint pictures, or instruments have "conversations" with each other? Why indeed.

In the book, published last year in Britain and this year in the United States, Mithen attempts to re-create - against all odds - a "soundscape" of pre-history and plug what he thinks is a huge gap in human knowledge - the link between language and music.
"Obviously, I'm trying to address a sort of impossible topic. I mean, how stupid for an archaeologist to write about music because you can't hear anything in the past," Mithen, who is also involved in more conventional projects like digs in Scotland, said in an interview at his university office.

AS MANY SOURCES AS POSSIBLE
"So I'm trying to draw on as many sources of evidence as possible and some are more tenuous and more controversial than others, but you put them together and you make an argument about how music and language evolved." He rose to the challenge, he writes in his preface, because "the propensity to make music is the most mysterious, wonderful and neglected feature of mankind."

Mithen is not the first to tackle the musical nature of prehistoric man, and music's links to language, but he's one of the most industrious. He spent two years thinking about the book, nine months writing it and his end notes run to 80-plus pages. o make his case, he draws on everything from scans of the human brain, studies of music and language ability in people who have suffered brain damage, skeletal remains of prehistoric hominids - and his own imagination.
He argues that Neanderthals, as well as some other, early hominids, developed a form of communication he refers to by the acronym "HMMMMM" - standing for "holistic, manipulative, multi-modal, musical and mimetic."

In brief, it means prehistoric man or woman used phrases, a modern example of which is the almost universal expression of distaste "yuck," to communicate simple suggestions or commands, such as "let's go hunt" or "food to share." The "multi-modal" part refers to the use of body language, which Mithen says hominids were much more attuned to than we are today.
This wasn't language as we know it, in which words are assembled to convey meaning, but was more like a phrase of music. The individual notes mean nothing, but the sound as a whole can touch us to the quick. Or, in the case of Neanderthals, sing everyone to come to supper.
MOTHERS AND BABIES

It's a bit of a leap to ask modern readers to accept that our ancestors uttered "holistic" phrases, all traces of which have long since vanished into the ether. However, Mithen says we still resort to something like this, most notably when mothers talk to babies. It is the cooing and reassuring sounds she makes that count, not the language, since infants at first don't know Chinese from Hungarian from English.

He also remarks on the prosody, rhythm and pitch of modern language, and points out that hominids have shared ancestors millions of years ago, with each other and with apes and other primates, whose grunts and pants also have musical qualities. A little wistfully, he notes that Neanderthals, despite having a brain even larger than homo sapiens - the rumbler from the jungles of Africa who would eventually supplant them - and vocal tracts and larynxes suited to singing or talking, did not make the leap to modern language and became extinct.

Perhaps Neanderthals were content to sing and dance in their caves, ignoring innovation and turning out the same hand axe for 200,000 years. They may never have known what hit them.
Mithen believes it is important that we, modern-day homosapiens who have perfected the use of word-based language to communicate, do not ignore our music-loving "inner Neanderthal."
"In the vast majority of cultures, kids are growing up just doing music as a musical thing, yet in our culture we're excluding the majority of children from participating because music's become an elitist activity," said the author, who was assigned to woodworking after he auditioned for the choir.

"I don't think we're enabling kids to fulfil their potential ... because they've evolved, and we were born, to be musical."

Too many folk on a planet too hot for comfortJune 1, 2006, Why I like political cartoons

Some letters to "The Age" ... just spot on.

Too many folk on a planet too hot for comfortJune 1, 2006

While focusing attention on greenhouse emissions and climate change, Tim Flannery ("Let's talk about nuclear power", Opinion, 30/5) ignores or overlooks a range of other problems we face or from which we already suffer. These include, as well as greenhouse emissions and climate change: holes in the ozone layer, reactive nitrogen, restricted water supplies, electricity shortages, urban sprawl, traffic congestion, increasing pollution, overstretched health and education systems, overfishing, river and dry land salinity, soil degradation and diminishing oil and gas reserves.

All of these have a single underlying cause: people, or to be exact, too many people. They are, in fact, symptoms of a fundamental problem: overpopulation. There seems to be a strange reluctance, especially on the part of governments, to face up to this and do something about it. A common response is that science and technological developments will provide answers. This is wishful thinking. There can be no guarantee that such developments will occur.

In any case, those in the past have depended on cheap and plentiful oil and natural gas supplies. There is a growing expert consensus that these supplies, coming as they do from finite resources, are reaching a global peak and will begin to reduce with increasing rapidity and run out in the not too distant future.

Unless we do something to reduce population, worrying about greenhouse emissions and nuclear power is a waste of time and only diverting attention from the real problem.

Bruce M. Dinham, Hawthorn, SA

It's not surprising that states fail under the loadAny understanding of failing states, social chaos, refugees, depleted resources, unemployment and international tensions must include what is happening to population growth as the world zooms from 6 billion today towards 8 billion in 2050:

¦Food aid and police cannot keep pace with the growth rates in East Timor: 1950 population, 436,000; 847,000 in 2000; heading for 1,943,000 in 2050 — estimated from its burgeoning proportion of youth.
¦Solomon Islands population has grown in 50 years from 106,000 to 466,000 and is heading for 1,110,000.
¦PNG: 1.4 million to 4.9 million, heading for 10.6 million.
¦Half the population at Wadeye is reported to to be under 15 years old. What economic sustainability is possible?
¦Formerly Iraq was self-supporting in food. Now it imports, with population growth from 5 million (1950) to 22 million (2000) heading to 56 million (2050).
¦Afghanistan: 8 million to 23 million to 81 million.
¦Nepal: 8 million to 24 million to 53 million.
¦Ethiopia: 20 million to 64 million to 144 million.
¦Sudan: 8 million to 35 million to 84 million.
¦Rwanda: 2 million to 7 million to 19 million — despite the millions massacred.
¦The Gaza Strip: population 245,000 in 1950, by 2000 it was over 1 million, and heading for over 4 million by 2050.
And so on. If humane stabilisation plus economic security is not attempted now, the solutions will be inhumane.

Valerie Yule, Mount Waverley

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Why I like political cartoons

Cartoonists: a last redoubt against spin
Robert PhiddianJune 2, 2006


It has been a big year for cartoon controversies. There was the fear that political cartoonists would be muzzled under the new sedition laws delivered for Christmas last year by the Federal Government. Then there was the international uproar over the Danish cartoons of Muhammad. Before that entirely settled, relations between Australia and Indonesia were sorely tested by Bill Leak's trademark tastefulness in depicting the Indonesian President sodomising a Papuan. And very recently The Sydney Morning Herald has shown high sensitivity to taste by refusing to run a Leunig cartoon about John Howard that, to my jaded eye, was only averagely scatological.

There is, I think, a growing sensitivity to cartoons' potential impact in public debate. Maybe that is because they are becoming one of the last redoubts for undisciplined, unspun commentary. You might argue that the powers that be could reasonably expect loyalty in time of a war against terror. I don't agree, however, that we are made safer by limiting the organs of dissent.

When I started formally studying political cartoons back in 1996, it looked like a beautifully designed research project. Now it's becoming clear that there's much more to it than that. Cartoons are the hub of the surviving anti-spin and shaming devices in the mainstream media at a time when spin and shamelessness are a ballooning element in public life. Think everything from Big Brother to the AWB inquiry, from Shane Warne to weapons of mass destruction. Cartoons have increasingly been at the heart of storms over free speech and the pressure from governments, corporations, and opinion-makers to control the message.

The clearest recent example has been the response to the Tampa crisis of 2001 and the subsequent incarceration of asylum seekers. Every one of the hundreds of cartoons I have seen on the topic (in tabloid and broadsheet, metropolitan and regional papers) has advocated more humane treatment for refugees, and none has shown any tolerance of the subtle legalisms spread by ministers and their bureaucrats. Their unanimity clearly had little impact on public opinion, which remained broadly opposed to "illegal immigrants". Still, cartoonists were quite the most ungovernable part of the media on this topic, and remain so. At the very least, they provided support and consolation to those opposed to the policy and its media-managed execution.

Governments have learnt the lessons of Vietnam and Watergate, and corporations the lesson of big tobacco; even churches are beginning to learn the lesson of the Hollingworth saga. We are reaching a stage where the old light-bulb joke could be reworked as: "How many investigative journalists does it take to write a story? One, plus 24 public relations officers and four beautifully presented, if mendacious, information packages." Cartoons are one of the last frontiers for product placement and controlling the message.

Any competent editor knows that a cartoonist's only real responsibility is to be funny and interesting without breaking any laws. The great New Zealand-born cartoonist David Low even managed to get himself onto the Gestapo's hit-list for after the invasion of England by dint of his cartoons attacking Hitler in the 1930s. No amount of Foreign Office pressure on the Evening Standard could get him to tone them down.

The last Australian media proprietor to direct a cartoonist to a topic was Frank Packer back in the 1940s, and the cartoonist, Will Mahoney, preferred to be sacked rather than follow orders. Such fearlessness is now the stuff of legend, and the independence of the cartoonist is widely established in Western nations.

This doesn't mean that newspapers must accept whatever cartoon their artist offers. That would amount to the same level of unqualified privilege enjoyed by members of parliament. Editors can nag cartoonists, refuse particular cartoons, and sack recalcitrants. This is all perfectly sensible and legitimate, but it's also a slippery slope of pressure that must be constantly negotiated.

A cartoon can be a very emotive thing. So far as one can tell from electoral commission surveys, individual cartoons by Leunig or Tandberg have been about as insignificant in directly shifting votes as individual opinion pieces by Robert Manne or Andrew Bolt. But over time, they mark the ethos of the papers they appear in just as strongly, and colour the views of those who choose to be regular readers.

That is why we need to be careful that cartoonists are free to be antsy and difficult, that the pressures out there to make us all disciplined team players in corporate solidarity for the safest return on investors' capital are kept at bay. At present in The Australian, Bill Leak is cartooning strongly in tune with that paper's crusade against the maintenance of remote Aboriginal communities.

This is just a coincidence of view, and Leak is often at odds with his paper's editorial line, but the coincidence is remarkably powerful. It becomes very hard for a consistent reader of that paper to resist the overall argument that remote communities are beastly. The emotive effect is well in excess of the real evidence led.

The spin doctors out there will be noticing how much cartoonists can add to an argument, and will be thinking of ways to cultivate them, ways of helping them over the fear that dogs them all: that the paper will have to run with a blank space where their cartoon should be. Let them and their editors be warned, and long may they remain uncultivatable.

Robert Phiddian is head of English and director of the Flinders Humanities Research Centre at Flinders University.