Weekend News

The Brisbane Test
As the days unfolded, I sat and watched Australia pound England for all the sessions except the last on Sunday. That's 3 and 2/3rds of a day's beatings before England sort of woke up. They sure won't play for anything but a draw this Test match, but it just might be that the English bats have woken up. Other than that, it was a replay of the sort of Test matches from the 1990s.

As England got bowled out for 370 this morning, it felt oddly familiar and made me wonder why I was watching it at all. :)

State Power In Decline
Here's an interesting article.

At the rate the Howard Government is centralising power and over-riding state rights, our state and territory governments are already hopelessly neutered.
Remember when the Northern Territory introduced dying with dignity legislation?

The Prime Minister killed it in cold blood.

The recent High Court decision on the Federal Government's workplace reform legislation was the nail in the coffin for state governments.

Now, the Commonwealth has the power to meddle in virtually any area of policy or regulation it chooses.

Big Ted or Bracksy, what does it ultimately matter?

If John Howard wants state schools to have the same curriculum in Queensland and Victoria, he can have his way.

And, as we've seen, he's very keen to involve himself in our schools, right down to their flagpoles and religious teachings.

One might well ask what sort of preacher would choose to be paid by a government rather than his church, but we already know what sort of politician is willing to play boss to preachers and premiers.

The big issue now, of course, is nuclear energy. John Howard states that his taskforce's evidence provides compelling economic evidence that Australia must pursue a nuclear future. This simply isn't right.

It actually provides compelling evidence that any nuclear power industry would need to be given huge financial advantages by government and would come on stream too slowly to bring the urgently needed reduction in our greenhouse gas emissions.

The allegedly unprejudiced taskforce made no serious examination of sustainable, renewable forms of energy, such as solar and wind.

Instead, it was asked to examine our uranium industry and possibilities for nuclear power. The Federal Government instructed it to do this with our massive uranium deposits kept in mind.

Now, this is not terribly good science. It is akin to asking for a report on capital punishment in light of us having plentiful supplies of good rope.

A wee bit hysterical, but you get the gist.
We had a double brown-out in our area last week and it has screwed with one of our computers. There are signs this summer already that power shortages are looming. So you sort of wonder how this is going to get addressed. After so many years of resisting nuclear power stations, we might suddenly find ourselves inundated with them.