Secret files
Following revelations in the Age last year about the keeping of secret police files on community and political organisations and activists, I submitted a Freedom of Information request for my file as I had been named in the Age article.
A letter from Victoria Police FOI office on 12 December advised that, due to high demand, an "incomplete manual index card system", "extensive culling" and the antiquity of collection methods, it would be some time before I hear from them again. Apparently even the file number I gave them is insufficient to locate the file.
Believing itself to be the US Navy, the Victorian Police "neither confirm nor deny" whether any "active records" on me exist (i.e. whether they're still spying on me or not). They say this is to safeguard any "covert investigations into criminal activities of individuals or organised groups within the community". All, of course, to ensure that the cops' "duty of care to the community" is fulfilled. Which is funny when you consider that the ombudsman is currently investigating the cops for the illegal operations conducted to collect this information.
To cap it all, the letter states that my request for any records or files they may have on me is "too generic" and could I please provide them with particulars regarding "a description of an event or incident that the documents may relate to time date and place". Well, sorry coppers, but this request is just a little too "generic" and I don't think I'll be providing Victorian Police with a resume of my political activity for their "neither confirm nor deny" files.
Melbourne
Vegetarianism
The merits, "ethical, social and nutritional", for a vegetarian lifestyle are not my concern. It is a fact — letters in GLW from Boyd Keller, Emma Lea and Robert Ryan in December not withstanding — that vegetarianism is not an ecologically benign alternative to omnivorousness in this society.
We can argue the merits of a vegetarian diet in a better organised society, where production is based on need and not on profit. That is not my point. The point is that the enemy is the profit system, with its short-sighted, wasteful and destructive attitude to all resources. It is not the production of meat per se which is environmentally destructive, but the capitalist methods of agricultural and livestock production, in First and Third World countries, that is rapidly despoiling the natural environment that we must live in.
New Farm Qld
Kyoto skulduggery
What Kyoto environmental victory? The outcome of the summit effectively allows a 25% or more national increase in fossil fuel pollution by 2010. The inclusion, by skulduggery, of land clearing in the equation for Australia, worth 17% of 1990 emissions, comes on top of the outrageously high 8% emission increase granted at gun-point to the Australian government.
The victory therefore is only one for the political low ground, the dirty-dealing, and for hide-and-seek diplomacy.
In its role as a representative of the Australian people, the Howard government has cuddled up to the fossil fuel industry even though recent polls show that 71% of Australians overwhelmingly support cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.
Greenpeace will continue to fight for the increased acceptance of solar energy as a viable solution to the greenhouse problem which worsens now that Australia has signed away our chance to be a responsible player. More balanced governments elsewhere are discovering that efforts to reduce greenhouse pollution can lead to new industries and create jobs.
CEO, Greenpeace Australia, Sydney
High moral fibre?
I love it when John Howard talks of high moral fibre.
What sort of moral fibre is it when we send serving army members overseas to train as a waterside strike-breaking force?
What sort of moral fibre is it when we take from the indigenous people their rights to hunt over their traditional lands or fish their waters?
What sort of moral fibre does it take to increase our greenhouse gas emissions from sources other than land clearing by some 44% providing we stop clearing land?
What sort of moral fibre does it take to ignore the rights of the East Timorese simply for the sake of trade?
Or to offer our four major banks for sale in the United States?
And what sort of moral fibre does it take to resist the temptation to apologise to the "stolen generation"?
Alawa NT
'Imaginary' numbers
Phil Shannon's recent review of The French Mathematician (GLW #297) contains a couple of dating mistakes which are of some relevance for understanding the mathematical revolution of the time.
First, it's not the case that "It was only in the 19th century that irrational numbers (the square root of 2) and imaginary numbers (the square root of -1) were accepted". Indeed, the so-called "imaginary" numbers were fully understood and accepted in Euler's time, the middle of the 18th century. This in turn was two centuries after mathematicians had been freely using them to solve equations, without quite recognising their "existence".
As for irrationals, these were well known by the ancient Greeks. Shannon may have been trying to make a different point, that only in the 19th century were the axiomatic foundations of arithmetic and analysis (calculus) established through the work of mathematicians like Cauchy and Dedekind. But the "mystery" of imaginary numbers had been completely solved a hundred years earlier.
Second, Shannon sells the "ancient, flat-earth Greeks" way short. These people were mariners and navigators, who knew perfectly well that the earth was not flat! In fact, the Greeks (and before them the Babylonians) understood spherical geometry and trigonometry.
What's astonishing, and still hard to understand, is how all the Greek mathematicians missed the fact that spherical geometry is a perfect model for a "non-Euclidean" geometry, where all lines meet, and how it took 1900 or so years before Gauss and then Lobachevsky noticed.
Detroit, Michigan, USA
Reconciliation
There can be no such thing as reconciliation while the Aboriginal people remain landless in their own country.
Reconciliation is a white man's plan to silence the Aboriginal people forever and they are using Aboriginal leaders to promote it. Reconciliation is another way of undermining the cause of the Aboriginal people.
The Native Title Act introduced by the Keating Labor government is the most vicious piece of legislation ever introduced to deprive the Aboriginal people of their land rights. It forced the Aboriginal people to get down on their bended knees and beg the white man's courts for part of the land that once was theirs. Can you call that justice? Do you call that a just law? It's like asking a man who has just robbed you to give you back some of the money he has first stolen from you.
I am in favour of state rights and self-government for the Aboriginal people. That is the only way the Aboriginal people will ever receive justice in their own country. North Queensland and the whole of the Northern Territory should be handed over to the Aboriginal people as part payment for the land that was stolen from them and compensation for the rest.
You only have to look at what the Howard government has done to the Wik decision to see that there can never be reconciliation between the haves and the have-nots.
There is only one way the Aboriginal people will ever get justice in their own country and that's through confrontation. What the Aboriginal people need to do is pin-point and weed out the ones who are soft peddling the Aboriginal cause. When you see Aboriginal bodies vigorously shaking the hand of Howard you can rest assured something is afoot. You don't shake the hand of the enemy!
It would not be the first time Aboriginal people have been used to put down their own people. It happened during the last century and it could be happening again.
Land first then reconciliation! Never let it be said that the Aboriginal people went down without a fight!
Brisbane
[Abridged.]