Unidentified anomalous role models

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Above: A Mayan space traveller as suggested by Erich von Daniken in his Chariots of the Gods

 

STARLOG PALINDROME 230623: Was getting worried there for a bit. No signs of intelligent life trying to make contact with Earth for quite some time.

Makes you wonder what kind of future our kids might have without someone somewhere out there looking out for them.

But then an email came out of the ether from my mates at Close Encounters Australia. An Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena update. They’re UAPs, not UFOs these days if you didn’t realise. And there’s a seminar coming up on all things extra-terrestrial – whistleblowers, recovered craft, bodies …

Plenty going on once again, it seems. Thank Buddha. I was mightily pleased also by website thedebrief.org assuring me: ‘Intelligence officials say US has retrieved craft of non-human origin.’ And that this important news is being illegally withheld from the US Congress.

Curious, however, that NASA’s meant to be on the job with a 16-member taskforce of astronomers, technologists, astrobiologists, physicists, and astronaut Scott Kelly, trying to nut out just what UAPs are. But coming up empty-handed.

What the? Something’s going on, my conspiracy antenna tells me.

They reckon the UAPs/UFOs are just commercial aircraft, balloons, even radiation from microwave ovens. Nothing extra-terrestrial. What would they know? Their astronauts have been driving across the US in nappies and getting thrown in the slammer.

And the brightly-lit UFO in Las Vegas recently? Nothing doing, says NASA. Clearly they didn’t see the same eight-foot-tall alien on video in a back yard that I saw online?

All right, all right, it might have been an LA Laker in a onesie on a lost weekend but why are they so quiet about it?  Something fishy going on, I reckon.

I’d hate to lose our fascination, imagination and trepidation about aliens, extraterrestrial oddities and sub-orbital flights of fancy to the subjugating forces of common sense. Worse still, to science. Look what it’s done to religion.

Where would we be without Min Min lights stalking people? Without aliens living inside the hollow Moon? Or Antarctica’s alien crystal city, the US Navy Tic Tac UFO sightings, Roswell, the Bermuda Triangle, ancient astronauts among the Mayans and Incas?

What about our own Freddie Valentich’s disappearance after reporting a UFO while flying off the Otways in 1978?

Fishermen earlier spotted strange lights in the sky off Apollo Bay. A South Aussie farmer reckons he saw a plane stuck to a UFO next morning. A Manifold Heights clairvoyant even told me she’d seen Fred on the other side with other pilots dressed in WW2 outfits.

I once had a North Geelong bloke told me he’d been visited by aliens. He’d seen spaceships over Shell multiple times. Swore it black and blue. Wouldn’t talk about probes, that tells you something.

If you can have frogfalls and poltergeists, and curses and pointing the bone, if you can have spontaneous human combustion, yetis and impossible subconscious memories from hundreds of years ago, then why can’t you have a few UFO sightings over the Belmont Common?

Incidentally, I’ve heard old Granny Clats from the Sawyers Arms used to do a bit of barnstorming there back in the day. So much fake news and AI about these days but try telling me that isn’t true.

By the way, NASA says it didn’t conduct any testing or manufacturing of the Titan submersible that went woomph last week, in contrast to reported comments by OceanGate boss Stockton Rush that it was a co-designer.

I wouldn’t be putting my hand up for that crock, either. It’s hardly got me itching to head off into space in any Bezos or Musk rocket. I’ll stick with little green men, thanks, they seem much better drivers.

And in the meantime, like Eric Idle sings, I’ll “pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space. 
‘Cause there’s bugger-all down here on Earth!”

 

 

You wouldn’t be dead for quids

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Above: cartoonist Johannes Leak’s take on the week’s revelations. 

It’s good news week,
Someone’s dropped a bomb somewhere,
Contaminating atmosphere,
And blackening the sky …

Good song from the old one-hit wonder Hedgehoppers Anonymous, even if its 1965 lyrics seem a little dated and, frankly, a bit out there too.

Someone’s found a way to give,
The rotting dead a will to live ….

Doctors finding many ways,
Of wrapping brains on metal trays,
To keep us from the heat …

Yeah, well, the news cycle can be a bit weird. No doubting, though, that some days, some weeks, you just have to love the news train. It’s wild entertainment, pure and simple. Stories are ridiculous, unbelievable, venal, political, self-serving, unprofessional … the whole gamut. Seriously, check it out, you wouldn’t be dead for quids.

Odd that we’ve got all these people worrying about artificial intelligence who seem to forget there’s no shortage of the stuff about already. Fake news? Now or in the future, It’s the real news you want to worry about. The lack of intelligence is withering. Take a look at the carry-on by some of these media sweetheart geniuses recently.

  • US clown prince Trump’s indicted on seven counts relating to classified documents he took home to Mar-a-Lago from the White House. I did nothing wrong, he insists in broken record style. Tell it to the judge. Or better still, go try buy a judge.
  • Lisa Wilkinson and Brittany Higgins are caught out weaponising rape claims to try topple a government. Nope, nope and nope, nothing to do with us, says everyone they targeted, including PM Albo. Yeah, no.
  • Wilko’s then slammed as a racist for ridiculing Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s name while also proclaiming she has a black cleaner at her home. Priceless.
  • Journo Samantha Maiden, meanwhile, argues nobody deserves having their private phone contents disgorged across the media. Rather than a journalistic or public interest curiosity in the damning contents of the closed-shop $3 million woman’s phone, she’s perturbed at a lack of curiosity about how Higgins’ texts made it to media outlets. Curious and curiouser, as it looks like it’s the one thing Higgins and her cronies didn’t give to the media.
  • Speaking of phone hacking and other tricks, Britain’s clown Prince Harry goes to court on a media witch-hunt but fails to produce one iota of evidence to support some 30-odd media articles he says were predicated on information gathered by unlawful means. Didn’t read about it? You’ll have to wait for the edited Netflix version.
  • Australia’s Reserve Bank, impossibly oblivious to the Federal Government bringing in hundreds of thousands of migrants seeking housing, and jacking prices and inflation skywards, raises interest rates again to further push the prices up. A real Lowe blow.
  • Vocal yokel Pauline Hanson highlights a $4.5bn National Indigenous Australians Agency with 1300 staff she says are already doing precisely what The Voice is meant to do … except we don’t know what The Voice is supposed to do. Polls show PM Albo’s plans are losing traction with the public. But is anyone listening?
  • Loose unit Lidia Thorpe says she’s lodging a racism complaint with the Human Rights Commission against her old Greens party mates. Probably best if it’s ex parte hearing.
  • Dictator Dan Andrews goes all Joh Bjelke-Petersen, banning government adverts in newspapers in a move that will threaten their flagging profits. He says he’ll take his ads to social media and elsewhere. PR genius, not.
  • Melbourne breakfast-for-the-brain masthead The Age cuts its daily editorial opinion columns back to Saturdays and ‘when required’. Herald Sun and 3AW’s Neil Mitchell chortle in their cornflakes while The Age quietly advertises for a deputy opinion editor to come up with ‘bold ideas for columns and columnists’. But not their own masthead ideas. That’s quality journalism for you.

So, yep, it’s good news week all right. Someone’s definitely contaminating the atmosphere … and we didn’t even get on to climate change.

 

Travel Bites: Amazon chill, Lima vultures

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Tambopata River, Puerto Maldonado, Peru

IT’S cool down in the jungle. Yes, cold. In the Amazon. But apart from the bizarre temperature for an equatorial jungle, it’s most of the other things you’d expect.

It’s isolated, remote, dangerous, poverty-stricken, primitive, environmentally threatened and scary. It’s also beautiful, diverse, enlightened, even mystical. And it’s sultry.

Cool but sultry. That wonderfully evocative description that takes in leaves so dripping in condensation you’d swear it’s raining, dark thatch huts and hammocks, jungle bars with sour cocktails in sweating glass tumblers.

And it’s also full of nocturnal screeching by unknown species, howler monkeys bellowing in foliage high overhead, deadly bushmaster snakes, leaf-cutter ants and terrifying stinging trees to which adulterers are condemned.

That’s not to forget brilliantly-coloured macaws and toucans, giant river otters, piranha, naked children playing on riverbanks, shamans growing psycho-tropic drugs, riverside gold-mining operations from makeshift canoes, alligators, jaguars, tapirs, parrots and more parrots, waterways that rise 12 metres and more in flood.

 

Lima, Peru

VULTURES. Last thing I expected. And haze. Thick, enveloping haze. Like a bushfire approaching. Thick, close, under-your-shirt haze. Creeping in like a London pea-souper.

Except this isn’t London. It’s Lima, Peru, just a few degrees south of the equator. It should be steaming, hissing, like a busted boiler valve. Instead, the temperature’s a mild mid-20s Celsius. Balmy.

And the setting sun – slumping lazily into the vast watery desert of the Pacific – is a warm, gilded disc, all fuzzy, indistinct, at the edges. A gently vanishing glow, hardly a sunset proper.

Adjudicating over this trick of nature, from the vantage of San Domingo’s steeple, is the wizened black vulture, Coragyps atratus, with a basilisk eye. 

Breathe in. The warm jet-stream rising west of Chile; the abused children’s fate adorning the billboards of this confused, for years even train-less city; the demonic Christian conquistadors of Spain and their legacy ever-present … all are considered under the withering eye of the vulture; cousin of the native Quechuans’ chief totem, the condor.

 And the sunset’s fogged, blotted. Warm, soaking, otherworldly. As if like Peru and its history, perhaps its future, it too has been forgotten by the Fates.

 

When taking offence becomes offensive …

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Above: David Rowe’s commentary in the Australian Financial Review

Have to laugh when a bunch of comic administrators can’t see the irony in B-rating a professional cross-dresser for his comments on cross-dressers.

Especially when that cross-dresser is responsible for that bunch’s existence. Talk about biting the hand that feeds. Like the cannibal who ate the comic said: tastes funny.

Definitely something funny going on with the snarky little snub of Barry Humphries by the Melbourne Comedy Festival.

Cartoonist Johannes Leak summed it up neatly with his image of the festival thought police sitting about at a crisis meeting moaning: “We’re a laughing stock.”

Doubt they would have laughed either at David Rowe’s cartoon of Bazza’s alter-egos lined up at the Pearly Gates being told by old Peter to form an orderly queue.

Dame’s Edna’s eyes are popping as Sir Les Patterson, equipped with signature cigarette, drink and blazing erection, jumps queue on Sandy Stone and squeezes in behind her.

“ ’Scuse me for pushing in Edna,” he apologies, his face a lascivious purple not unlike the backside of a rutting baboon. Edna’s set to jump, to use Les’ diction, like a kangaroo bitten on the balls by a redback spider.

Are you with me, Parkie?

Barry Humphries’ disdain for wowsers, the woke PC, the patently unhappy cancel culture, tub-thumping moralists, is having an extended field day right now. He’d be jumping for joy in his grave, if he was in there yet.

Dan Andrews is talking of a State funeral for the comedy giant. He should be thinking of a statue, too. Might want to start thinking about an inscription, as well. Maybe something from Barry Mackenzie:

“I was down by Bondi pier

“Drinkin’ tubes of ice-cold beer,

With a bucket full of prawns upon my knee

“When I swallowed the last prawn,

“I had a technicolor yawn

“And I chundered in the Old Pacific Sea.”

 Probably a bit too Sydney-centric for a Melburnite, though. And glorifying grog, instead of gambling. Maybe something a bit more generic:

“One day I got to reading

“In an old sky-pilot’s book

“About two starkers bastards

“Who made the Lord go crook

“They reckoned it was a serpent

That made Eve the apple take

“Cripes that was no flaming serpent

“Twas Adam’s one-eyed trouser snake.”

Hmmm. Having a go at the Christians. That should get it a run but it’s probably still a bit too close to the humour that made Alvin Purple a hit in 1970s Australia. And Paul Hogan with his dopey drooling over a bikini-clad Delvene Delaney. Or Benny Hill with his cast of buxom, wink wink, co-stars.

Appalling stuff. To think that people used to roll up in droves to theatre restaurants such as Dirty Dicks. And to drive-in theatres with hard porn flicks on giant screens that could be seen for miles around. Hippies danced naked at rock festivals. Nudists made themselves comfortable on beaches.

Aaagh, excuse me, but the Kath and Kim character Sandy Freckle just suddenly came to mind. Shh, don’t laugh. The fun police will get you. Bit like that other farce, No Sex Please, We’re British. That was packing them into the West End way back when Barry Humphries was just hitting his straps.

Bawdy, risqué behaviour has been going on since Chaucer’s time. And the Romans. You should check out what the Greeks were up to. Maybe check a few cave paintings too if you want to get real funny about it all.

Sorry, it’s human nature to get down and dirty. Barry Humphries did all of that, with great skill and humour. He targeted the wowsers and what we’d now call the woke and PC brigades. The stuck-up, self-righteous and up-themselves do-gooders.

And there should be more of it.

As for the transfolk, well, according to Sir Les: “I yield to none in my abhorrence of sexual prejudice. As for some courageous folk who claim that they were born in the body of the wrong sex, Les Patterson has this to say: ‘I’ve been there, guys. I know. I need to get into the body of the opposite sex on a regular basis’.”

Les insists he defends “to the ultimate my right to give deep and profound offence … so long as people laugh while they’re being offended.”

When he was asked do they laugh as much nowadays?

“Oh yes, of course they do.”

Seems, it’s just not at the Melbourne Comedy Festival.

 

Bingeing on science faction

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Ascension, by Nicholas Binge, Harper Collins

Pseudoscience stuff’s good clean fun, right?  Why shouldn’t the world’s crust just ripple up and accelerate the movement of land masses like Pangea, Gondwanaland and Pannotia to a couple of million years rather than the eons we thought?

Authors like Graeme Hancock, and more than few psycho creation scientists, will try to convince you it’s all possible, even true. The world’s fossils were all buried in Noah’s cloudburst of 2348 BC. Six days fair slog and a day off on Sunday, all that.

Others writers, like Ian Plimer, are lauded for eviscerating the God-botherer science revisionists with common sense but spurned for doing the same to climate zealots. Yep, science is all good fun until someone loses an eye. But colour its reason and evidence with politics, religion, activism, fraud or other shape-shifting and that’s what you’ll get. And worse.

Nicholas Binge, however, seems more bent on fun than mischief with his Ascension fable of a giant mountain that springs up in the Pacific Ocean, drawing an autocratic monied/warmongering/science-led expedition – it’s a little unclear which for a while – to investigate its singular peculiarities. And he’s having a lot of fun.

Singularity’s probably a better term because there’s a good bit of space-time continuum shape-shifting as Binge coerces a crew of physicists, anthropologists, medicos, biologists, ethicists, mercenaries and explorers onto the mountain and points them upwards.

Strange things are happening, as protagonist Harry Tunmore smartly learns. Old friends can see the future, predict card turns perfectly, amid a catatonia punctuating by ramblings about time, about watching the seconds.  But they self-immolate before exploiting their new skills in the casino.

And they’re the smart ones. So you imagine what the wild-eyed soldiers of fortune make of things as time moves back and forwards, dead people come and go before their eyes, unearthly life forms start as microbes before infecting everything, as alien creatures from beneath the ice attack.

Yep, here there be monsters, as the old cartographers cautioned of uncharted waters. And they’re getting into everyone’s brain as the mountain, a good bit taller than Everest incidentally, lures everyone higher.

Brutal cold, hypoxia, paranoia and open hostility colour the research mission as it moves painfully higher. And the body count mounts as Harry tries to fathom what the devil’s going on, why his personal life is a disaster, how to survive his own expedition members as much as the creatures and why on earth the mountain’s luring them all higher like a physical hunger.

But Harry’s sharp physicist grey matter nuts out what’s going on and how to traverse the monolith. In a fashion, that is, his road map’s an inter-dimensional thingo which leaves a lot to be desired. But like TV’s It’s About Time, never know if you’ll wind up in the Stone Age with Gronk or in New York City, still with Gronk.

The physics, existential philosophy and violence make for a good rollicking yarn. Just don’t ask why Harry’s abandoned his family yet happy to relay his deeply personal story in letters of extraordinary minutiae to his 14-year-old niece. Or why he’s constantly writing them while trying to escape death climbing up a mountain, for that matter.

It’s a mechanism, I suppose. You know the drum. Don’t let reality, let alone facts or science, get in the way of a good narrative. After all, what do those scientists know?

Take the Big Bang, for instance. That’s a once upon a time story if ever I heard one. Here’s a poser for you. What was there beforehand?

Please don’t tell me fairies ….

Head-shrinking as a political art form …

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WATCHING Parliament the other night got me to thinking of the Peruvian jungle, of headhunters and, given the cranial magnitude evident in Canberra, the Amazonians’ skills in shrinking heads.

Not the psychiatric head-shrinking, mind you there’s probably a job there, but the real thing _ the secret savage lore that’s fascinated everyone from anthropologists to horror film directors.  

Ghoulish practice that it is, head-shrinking’s a time-honoured, popular pastime which as recently as the mid-20th century was commonplace from Panama to Ecuador and Peru. Not Canberra, regrettably, but had the simple procedure for shrinking scones been better known … well, who knows?

It’s not so hard, really. When you’ve despatched your subject _ presumably an enemy of some species _ hack off his head as close to the body as possible. Slit the scalp from the crown downwards to the nape of the neck. Through the opening, flay out the skull, remove the flesh and skin of the face and scalp.

Still with me? Next, ditch the skull, unless you need a conversation-piece ashtray or somesuch. Stretch the skin over a wooden handle and immerse it a vessel of hot water to contract it a little.

If you’re a purist, like me, you’d then sew a ring made from a vine into the neck to keep it open so you can drop hot stones inside.

Add hot sand to the pebbles and keep the head in constant motion, swinging it about, to allow the heat to apply to all the parts uniformly. When things cool, tip the sand out, reheat it and repeat the process.

Gradually, the head will dry out and become smaller. Remember to knead the features with your hands, pinching and moulding the face to retain its natural appearance _ even its natural expression.

That’s it. Simple, really.

If you were ambitious, mind you, you might care to shrink the whole parliamentary carcass. Peru’s Jivaro folks abbreviated one particular Spanish officer, an old conquistador supposedly searching for El Hombre Dorado _ the Golden Man _ reducing him to just a shadow of his former self. From five feet nine inches to just 31 inches.

According to Robert Ripley, of Ripley’s Believe It or not fame, he’s located in the National Museum of the American Indian as best I can establish and possible relocated from New York to Washington in recent years. He sports a rather grand moustache for such a little bloke.

Funny but he looks a little like the late defence minister Jim Killen to me, which is odd _ he was one of the least big-headed figures to grace parliament.

The once wildly-popular Ripley has been resurrected by folks at Five Mile Press in a colourful scrapbook entitled Search for the Shrunken Heads and other Curiosities. It features everything from a bloke with a full-on horn growing out of his head to pink polar bears and ancient talking Egyptian statues.

But it’s the shrunken heads that are the stand-out curiosity. And Ripley, true to form, offers an intriguing insight into the custom.

“The taking and shrinking of human heads is an ancient rite with the Jivaros, and one which has not vanished with modern times.

“It has, rather, been stimulated by the demand of tourists for specimens of the head-hunters’ skill as souvenirs and all the laws against the practice that have been passed by the South American republics are of no avail.

“While there are traders to pay a price, and tourists to buy, the sale of human heads will probably continue.

“The method of reducing and shrinking the heads remained a secret for many years and it is comparatively recently that anyone has witnessed the actual process.

“Friends of my mine in Quito (Ecuador) told me of a German scientist who ventured into the unexplored Pongo de Seriche _ the land of the Jivaros _ in hopes of learning their secret, and six months later a shrunken and mummified head with a red beard and light hair was offered for sale.”

This article appeared in the Geelong Advertiser

Trying to stop courting disaster

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Never fail to be appalled by the time-worn old adage that you get the kind of justice you can afford.

Should never be that way but time and time again we see justice dispensed like an insurance company’s write-off car crash assessment. Too much to fix, car’s not worth that much, cut your losses all round. In jurisprudence-speak, just settle.

See it all the time. The cost of defence is going to be too much, cut your costs.

Lots of people happy to do it, too. Bordering on scam. People who might sue for defamation, for instance, for the supposed loss of their reputation among friends and colleagues. They’re happy to forego that sorry loss for filthy lucre instead.

Makes you wonder what a reputation’s worth if you can buy it back with a court order. You can’t, of course.

You can trick up the legal system in other ways, too, if you’re short of cash for legal fees.

Vocal accusations, untested police charges, the rabid court of public opinion and the cesspool of social media are terrific ways of buying the justice you want for next to nothing.

If you’re on the attack, that is. If you’re happy to see your target vilified, harassed, ridiculed, thrown out of work without a fair hearing. If you don’t subscribe to notions of a fair trial, innocent until proven guilty, the rule of law or the annoying notion of justice not only being done but being seen to be done.

If you’re on the defence, it’s a different matter. No amount of money can stave off this kind of out-of-court barrage. You can be done right over no matter regardless of any court outcome.

Which is why the Federal Court is restricting media access to various legal documents. To avoid undesirable consequences by non-parties, viz, reporters.

It means journos can’t report on untested initial applications and claims as soon as they’re lodged with court. They have to wait until the case has its first hearing.

There was a time when sub-judice meant something to reporters. The idea was that you wouldn’t potentially influence any juror, or judge for that matter.

The Federal Court is basically trying to restate that kind of legal protection, by guarding against a level of digital public discussion way beyond what a paper/radio/TV might once have prompted.

Media outlets are filthy on it. Chiefly because, I’d suggest, they’re worried social media has a massive jump and audience on them. They’re claiming the Fed Court has a fundamental misunderstanding of journalism, free speech and democracy.

I’d suggested they’ve got a pretty good idea.

That said, there remain some serious shortcomings to the idea of keeping jurors in the dark about defendants, notably about prior offences and all sorts of evidence that might be deemed inadmissible by our courts.

Jurors are basically treated as dummies. Not smart enough to weigh evidence without stuffing it up. Maybe there’s a case, if you consider how some people react to social media campaigns.

But the one-sided, bias confirmation indoctrination that activists rely on, and web giants happily exploit, is not what justice and the courts are meant to be about.

What we increasingly have these days is pure kangaroo court stuff. Like the old cowboy movie line: Sure, we’ll give you a fair trial, then we’ll hang you.

Jurors need full information, not just some biased information – and definitely not finessed, prejudicial information – if they are to make the same fair and accurate rulings/reports that journalism is obliged to present.

Situation’s pretty simple, really. Anything else and the media’s just embarrassing itself like the targets it too often seeks to lynch with public opprobrium.

 

 

Fear and loathing in the court of the kangaroo

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Remarkable to see the angst, stupidity, arrogance, and vengeful and avaricious behaviours attached to the Higgins/Lehrmann rape case.

Not to mention the miserable failure of the judicial system to uphold either itself or the individual’s basic rights.

Feral. The whole lot of it, start to unresolved finish. Nothing in there to really flatter anyone involved in the entire brouhaha.

Any semblance of innocent until proven guilty out the window. Might as well be in China, Iran or any other totalitarian state you can think of, including America of course.

Any semblance of courts or lawyers looking to uphold the fundamental rule of law – that philosophy that portends that people are accountable to the law – has been tarnished, sullied, compromised, bent or straight-out ignored.

Neither plaintiffs nor their supporters care a jot for the idea of pulling their heads in for fear of prejudicing a fair trial. As sub judice and contempt of court laws demand. Also as their lawyers and even the judge have advised. But there’s no penalty.

There are, instead, ratings, circulation, awards, notoriety and the next contract to always consider. No such thing as bad publicity.

The media don’t really care. They’ll publish whatever they think they can get away with. Calculated risk, as their lawyers advise. Or they might not publish what they suspect their audience might not like.

Some jurors don’t care. Even when they’re told 17 times not to undertake their own research. And again, no penalty. Mind you, more seriously, there’s no structure whatsoever to check on the behaviour of jurors. Who guards the guards? Been a problem since Roman days.

It’s all grist to the mill in the great Land of the Fair Go. A land buttressed by an adversarial judicial system drowning in a maelstrom of activism and entitlement, derailed media and legal ethics, politicking and political interference.

The Higgins case has been shonky from the go-get. Nothing’s been done properly. Vital evidence-gathering never happened. On-off police dealings, no-show medical appointments, book deals, media interviews, Press Club and Logies performances, electioneering, even a bizarre prime ministerial apology – plus a long-running media commentary heavily fixated not on any regard for Lehrmann’s right of innocent until proven guilty but on the outrageous injustice visited upon Higgins.

Allegedly, of course. Not that the word ‘allegedly’ carries any weight anything legally. Anyone not living under a rock knew of the Higgins claims. Jurors included.

What mechanisms were in place to ensure jurors might effectively cast any pre-knowledge of the case from their minds? Or do a bit of their own digging about on the side?

Nix, your worship.

As it unfolded, a court cleaner accidentally knocked a folder off a desk and spotted something that shouldn’t have been there. And that’s the best security the court can offer a defendant against prejudicial jury deliberations?

Talked about the system being stacked against a defendant.

We know the system’s stacked also against rape plaintiffs, too, of course. An appalling percentage are unsuccessful and the mental anguish and humiliation attached to physical and evidential demands, court appearances and cross-examination can be withering.

But at least the plaintiff’s identity is protected. Rape claims can be pursued in court in anonymity unless they prefer otherwise. Like Higgins.

The accused doesn’t share the same privilege. The defendant, however, does have the right not be cross-examined. Which might be seen as taking the fifth, not incriminating themselves – the guilty’s so-called defence.

But this also protects the defendant against prosecution fishing expeditions. And, just to be clear, it’s not the defendant not making the allegations. If the prosecution doesn’t have a case, it shouldn’t be there in the first place.

And of course allegations need to be tested in court. As much as the plaintiff might not like it.

The system might have its drawbacks, and considerable drawbacks at that, but it’s better by a country mile than any lynch mob nut jobs pretending to render justice honestly and fairly.

And it’s better than justice dispensed by patently conflicted interests going out of their way to create their own narrative about what constitutes justice.

That’s pure kangaroo court stuff.

 

 

Justice denied in court of woke entitlement

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It’s a while back now but I can still well remember when I spent almost every working night talking with media lawyers.

Checking stories for potential defamatory comment, police and court reports for sub judice and contempt of court issues, suppression orders. Might need to check every so often that weren’t scandalising parliament. Yeah, it’s apparently possible, believe it or not.

Ran up a fair old bill, if memory serves right, but that might have been a lot more had things gone belly-up. Which was always a possibility, even with the best efforts of sharp journos.

Information tendered to the media might be incorrect. Comments might be false. Right of reply might not be sufficient. Other things could aggravate a bung story. Story positioning in the paper was important, page one carries more risk than down page on 26. Headlines needed to considered carefully.

You didn’t want to be too cautious, though. You were selling news after all and trying to keep the reading public aware of what happens on their turf. So you often weighed calculated versus unacceptable risk. Public interest, fair and accurate reporting and all that.

Odd thing about defamation, to my mind, was that people who argued their reputation had been ridiculed, vilified or otherwise mangled up by some report could always be appeased with a public apology and a fat monetary payout, with the emphasis on the latter.

Saying sorry was good but money was better. Which raise the obvious question of what a reputation is worth if you think you can buy it back again after it’s been damaged beyond repair. It’s a conundrum,

Bit of the same, again to my mind, in the way courts deal with sub judice. The idea is that prior convictions and information relating to an offender/offence should not be detailed before a court case. Juries might be Influenced.

Okay but judges would never own up to such shortcomings themselves. Mind you, you could still find yourself in strife if you crossed the line in a judge-only case.

It’s an odd system, Australia’s court system. It actively works to prevent juries knowing too much about a defendant’s background. Each case has to be viewed in isolation.

It’s different in some European court systems where juries get all sorts of information to digest: prior convictions and hearsay, for instance. Lawyer theatrics aren’t allowed. The idea is that the more information they have the mire accurate a ruling they’ll come to.

It’s a throwback to the Napoleonic era and some Aussie lawyers pooh-pooh it with contempt. Others again, however, argue the Aussie system treats jurors as dummies so thick they can’t distil evidence, patterns, background information – and so they’re kept in the dark.

What you may have noticed in recent years is that Aussies papers have been stretching the limits of what they think they can get away with reporting. The George Pell case is a prime example.

The $1 million penalty dished out for contempt of court – for breaching a suppression order – highlighted the risk of playing your circulation booster versus coughing up potential fines. There’s no denying the media knew what they doing, and that they paid the prosecution’s cost, but their apology was slammed for lacking remorse and contrition.

Makes you wonder about the Logie performance of TV’s Lisa Wilkinson, which carefully distanced itself from anything and everything in Journalism 101. I thought for a bit she was trying to get the bloke off by banging on about the case in front of some 800,000 viewers.

Might sound at odds with everything else she’s done with the story to date but if you wanted to get the case shut down, that’s pretty much how you’d do it. Tell me how this bloke’s meant to get a fair trial in our peculiar judicial system. Wilkinson had been warned as much, and had even earlier tweeted to that effect herself.

The Australian’s cartoonist Johannes Leak wrapped  things about as clearly as many of Wilkinson’s critics will see the matter. As he might not be far off the mark.

Whatever way you want to look at it, now the case is months off again. Fair case of justice delayed becoming justice denied I’d suggest.

In the meantime, we’re stuck with the case being adjudicated in that lynch-mob court of public opinion where media lawyer advice isn’t worth two-bob. But it’s certainly where the entitled woke brigade are happy to accept a kangaroo court ruling.

Rhyme and verse, and a little worse …

/in /by

Was a time when poetry was the last thing held any interest for this word-mangler.

Too esoteric, too flowery, concepts too emotional and hard to plumb. More times than not, too cathartic and revealing. Hadn’t poets something better to do than sit around all introspective, navel-gazing and self-pitying? Who needs need to know their innermost ruminations?

But then, that’s not all poetry. And it’s okay, really. Plenty of people probably do need to know, if not stroppy journos. Besides poetry’s actually lots of other things too, even the outrageous limericks I once made a mission of committing to memory. Blokes named Bates and Bings, blokes from Kilbride and Kent … grand silly stuff.

Slowly, the old grey matter warmed to the possibilities of poetry – via song lyrics. Slow because I was more interested in the music side of things. Introspective stuff was rife but occasionally you’d find some inspired material, evocative stuff. Social documentary, political commentary, voices left behind but heaving with everything from love and persecution to anger, cynicism and humour.

The best stuff, so I thought, blended these peregrinations with words that jumped off the page. Words that shocked, words that looked odd, words that mightn’t garner much airplay otherwise, words with an artistic aspect to them. Typography is a thing, of course.

It’s a quair thing writing in unfamiliar areas. Like songwriting, for instance. You can write thousands of journo yarns but opening yourself to a song’s lyrics is a very different creature. Eventually, though, I thought I’d have to have a crack at some sort of poetry, even if it was just brain salad slosh. Not knowing what you’re doing in might be handy, who knows? It’s not a blood sport,  I’d venture, but I could be very wrong.

Recently, I pulled together the following brain-spit to a theme raised by a poet mate down the Surf Coast: Can you buy the ocean? Can you buy the land? If nothing else, it was fun playing with those weird little characters and their finials, bowls and shoulders, their apertures and strokes, and their spines and serifs and ligature.

So here goes, best of luck figuring out what I’m on about. There was some sort of rationale to it, if I remember rightly …

CUSTOS …

Fisherman, monger, trawler and troll,

Say the kraken will take a grown man whole,

Neb full of salt, breeches of piss,

Spirit him down a perpurean abyss.

 

Sad, sullen fate for a jack of the brine,

But not minus merit, for the best of mine,

A crab needs to scuttle, a squid to squeeze,

Amoeba shape-shift, hyperborean freeze.

 

The djinns of the seas offer baleful trust,

Abstruse, symbiotic, misfortune, unjust,

White horses, maelstrom, storm and squall,

Dreams rent beyond hope from their chalice of gall.

 

But yo ho, on Jack goes, all belligerent plunder,

Sirens of vainglory and greed hauling him under,

Fates and muses, they can plot and inspire,

But Jack Tar still fuels his own funeral pyre,

 

So whaler, the poets sing, quell your daughter’s hunger,

Ambergris, candlewax, won’t hasten your slumber,

Poseidon’s all bubble, bubble, toil and trouble,

Hug the land instead, to your fortune redouble.

 

But hold, terra’s a blight, conniving and craven,

Its beauty a snare, its lustre no haven,

A mercantile magnet of thirst and lust,  

Mammon underwritten In God We Trust.

 

So tread ware as you grift, you huckster and spiel,

Grounds shift and they tremble, oscillate like your krill,

Lords, lairds, liens of the land, caveat emptor,

Dangers deep as the sea, no call to plumb more. 

 

ⓒ copyright Noel Murphy 2022