Views from the front of 47, 23rd August, 2015

 The view across the road from where I sit at my front door.

From where I sit, up to the door of 45.

Down the front of the house, where I walk in sometimes, not to disturb the birds.

 

Another view across the road.  Some wattles are already out, but not mine.

The wattle is starting to shine, but it is not clear in this photograph.

Beautiful bird at Billy's new feeding table.

Well

This morning I felt so well.  I even ran for the tram, just because I could, only half a  block, but it is only about the second or third time I have ever been able to do it.  I remembered the time in form two, my last at Malvern Grammar, when I got talking to a boy after school who said come back to my place, about the only time anyone ever said that to me, and then we walked to the tram and it came and he ran to the stop and caught it, but I could not run that short distance, and was never invited again.  Today it was just up Elizabeth Street to catch the tram at Collins Street to save the walk to Burke Street, how silly was that, except running for it was a real thrill.

A bit later I got to thinking how this could be my last healthy day.  What should I do on my last day?  Shouldn't we live every day as if it were going to be our last?  But if I truly knew it was really my last day, I would not do anything extraordinary but would live a perfectly normal, average day, but a perfect one, as if they all are not.  Much later, home Phillip Adams talked about attitudes to death.  Mine is apparently unusual in that it does not worry me, it is just that I enjoy being alive.  I have no expectation of my consciousness surviving my death, just as it did not exist before I was born, which is not to say my "soul", by which I mean the energey system in my body, would not survive, because energy always survives, but it would dissipate and be absorbed into other energy systems.  My "mind" would be absorbed back into the "universal mind". 

Actually, I have been feeling "well" on and off for a couple of weeks now.  I was going to write about it before, as if it were significant, but it is certainly unusual. 

My New Billion Dollar Idea

Here is how Ellen and I can make a billion dollars.
It is something that the world is crying out for and we can be famous for doing it.
Ellen can teach me to read and write basic Chinese, but through English, not learning any Chinese words at all.  It is totally possible.  All different spoken Chinese languages are written the same and it is not dpendent on any.  I understand that Vietnamese used to be written in Chinese till the French colonialists changed it to a latin alphabet.
Each week she can teach me one lesson, learning one word a week to start and then a few each week.  Not only the word and its strokes, two stroke words, then three stroke words etc but the meaning of the word, but not a sound, all described in English.  She can teach me two lessons a week, and see how it goes for division into terms or whatever.
No one has done this before.  A book, or online, or in classes, where people learn to read and write chinese but not speak it.  They can then participate in online, chinese Internet.  The world cannot go on with such a division, with only Chinese people being able to participate on both sides of the divide. 
This would also be a good gateway into the spoken language as well as it would cover a lot of the conceptual differences between the languages, making later learning of a spoken language much more straightforward.
Even if we don't get a dollar from each of the billions of people who will take advantage of it,

It's a women's world.

It always strikes me as inconsistent with human nature than so many Xian or ex-Xian women want to make their entire lives part of the wider world inhabited by men and totally reject any type of feminine seperatism as suression and isolation.

I have experienced a few different cultures where men were excluded from the women's world, mostly in the home, where little bubbles of testosterone-free tranquility reigns.  There is a genuine sisterhood, with a hierarchy based on age and experience, not competition.  As a man, I have only seen glimpses of it, but I was prililaged to be invited into some family homes when I was living in rural Utrakhand in the central Himalayas, where there is an annual "Women's Festival" barred to and unknown to men; I watched its procession from across the river with all the men of the village who all professed utter ignorance of what it meant as none of their mothers, sisters, wives or daughters would tell them anything, since the days of the Puranas.  But I digress. 

Rubber Stamp

Someone commented on the ACM page that The Queen was also a "rubber stamp" after a post accusing Presidents in Republics of being just rubber stamps.   They missed the subtle but important difference.  The Queen is happy to "rubber stamp" as long as everything is running correctly, but has the power to step in if things go totally off the rails.   A factotum President under parliamentary control, as envisaged for Australia, could never do more than be a rubber stamp a disaster, as in Greece.  There is always the risk of an unforeseen totalitarian President who assumes ultimate power, whether formally assigned it or not.

It was said long ago that it is the powers the Queen does not exercise that are important, not anything actually done.  

It is like having a safety valve, safety net, a fuse or an insurance policy.  You hope you never have to use it, but take great peace of mind from knowing it is there.  The same powers are passed on, like the laying on of hands, to our Governors and Governors-General, who can rightly be called our "Heads of State"

Republists

Anti-British sentiment fuels the Republican push.  This latest move is sure to fail because the majority of Australians like our Monarchy and our secure socio-political system.  However, popular opinion can be easily swayed.  An intense campaign by fanatical Republicans, “Republists”, could result in an irrevocable change to our lasting detriment.

Will there be a Cost-Benefit Analysis?  It is not mentioned with the expensive plebiscites and other costs, for no economic benefit and a major change that is supposedly just cosmetic.  In Canberra and throughout Australia everything printed will be renamed and then re-printed.

For the sake of ideological purity, the self-appointed intellectual leaders want to destroy something that gives a lot of people a lot of pleasure, far in excess of any alleged cost or harm.  Despite this issue bheing led by the Labor Party, most Labour voters support the Monarchy, as evidenced in the electorate call in the last referendum.  It is possibly those people with least of their own, and with the most unfortunate or miserable lives who derive the most pleasure from Royal News.  These are the people that the Labour Party purports to support, yet treats them with contempt on this issue.  Republicans always answer this point by claiming that there will be nothing to stop people reading about the British Royals, once they are reduced to just Monarchs of England, or even totally dethroned, but this is a dishonest response because the Queen and the Royal Family only have their celebrity status from being what they are.  There are thousands of pretenders to thrones that very few people know or care about.  You cannot, in this case, destroy your cake and eat it.  Republicans are mostly wowsers who care more for theory than for people.  

It is perhaps no coincidence that the Labor Party is resurrecting this stale issue right when the Constitutional question before everyone is the Recognition of Australia?s First Peoples in our Constitution, and ancillary matters.  Some of the people who are opposed to Recognition will use the Republic to derail their cause.  Others, by contrast might see more chance of success by coupling the two questions.  There are elements within Aboriginal Politics that oppose the Crown as the symbol of dispossession and want to see it banished.  “The Apology” came from a Prime Minister who did not have bipartisan support, and it is little wonder that after some decades it is now seen as a nice symbol, but with no lasting benefit.   Perhaps it would be more appropriate for an apology to come from Her Majesty, in the same way that Peace in Ireland was promoted by a Royal Visit and a few hand-shakes, something only the Queen could have done.    One might cynically argue that this issue is a perennial red herring to distract voters from Labor Party wrangling and from other matters, and perhaps its use as a political digression will ensure that it never succeeds, a roundabout way to protect our constitution.

There are no logical reasons to become a republic, just a passionate loathing of the medieval concept of totalitarian kingship that is totally out of date after centuries of development, fed by an equally passionate hatred for the British and a denial of the British origins of all our Socio-Political institutions.  There are a few sound reasons to retain our shared, British Crown.

Of all reasons, perhaps the most important is that it is the most egalitarian system of government, because we are all equally subjects of the Queen.  It is not a pattern for inequality, but the single, exception.  Also important is that we retain a constitutional system that we know works instead of changing to something simplistically expressed with unknown consequences.  Perhaps it is the prospect of endless, profitable legal disputes that have won so many of the legal profession to want a republic.   Least spoken of but very significant is the security consequences of change.  

We are not Sinophobes by being very wary of the Communist Government in Beijing.  Without care, Australia may end up like Tibet, where all the best jobs go to Han Chinese and the local people are second class citizens in their own country.  Anyone who wants Australia to shift its alliance from the Anglosphere to the Chinese will want us to change, because Australia’s security still relies on our Commonwealth connections, and they are not written in treaties.  Do we want to be fought over like the islands in the South China Sea?  

However, it would be better to bring on the question.  Let us get it out of the way for the next century.  We cannot go on with the endless sniping at our Constitution by Republicans.  We need to be united.  Our multi-cultural society and our vast distances mean we need a tried and tested socio-political system that can cope with diversity.