(Above: the Adelaide oval re-development. The salvation of Adelaide, via a football led recovery).
Much blather has been written about the middle east, but as the week draws to an end, we'd like to nominate Brendan O'Neill for the most egregious bit of blather - right up there with Jon Stewart's smack down of Charles Krauthammer.
Under the header Hypocrisy makes life worse in Mid-East, O'Neill offers up this gem as he contrasts the activists of the Spanish Civil War days with current activists:
Yet those individuals were driven by a thirst for freedom, by positive visions of the future, by a willingness to take serious personal risks, and above all by a belief that people alone and not powerful, self-serving institutions could change mankind's destiny for the better. Not a single one of those admirable traits was present on the ship of fools sailing to Gaza.
A willingness to take serious personal risks absent on the ship of fools? Does that mean these days that death isn't an actual serious personal risk?
Moving along - as we must when fools write about ships of fools in a foolish way - we were charmed by David Nason's cry from the heart for Adelaide in City needs a renaissance.
You and I, mere humble-bum students of history, might associate a renaissance with the actual Renaissance, that great meld of reborn thought and art and culture, and upheavals in the political and technological ways of doing things.
Nason has a different vision:
But much more important is how the permanent return of top-line AFL football to the city centre can help lift Adelaide from its notorious mediocrity.
And we thought Adelaide was a city of churches and the arts and with its very own festival, when what's needed is a return of AFL football to the centre of town. To relieve it from its notorious mediocrity.
A footy led recovery. And pray tell, what can football do?
That's not just a footy led recovery, that's a bloody miracle. And all from the love of men chasing a Sherrin.
Yes the west end can resound to smell of a Sherrin, and the raucous cries of footballer lovers and the stench of beer and pie vomit and the odd bit of piss unloaded into a quiet doorway.
Can't get enough of this kind of deep thinking about the way to a financial, cultural and spiritual recovery? Here's more:
There's a once-in-a-generation opportunity at hand to give Adelaide one of Australia's most vibrant CBDs.
But it will be a wasted opportunity if political expediency delivers a cut-rate stadium that only reinforces all of Adelaide's negative stereotypes.
Dearie me, does Mr. Nason have the foggiest clue that in one short burst of word smithing, he's done more to reinforce negative stereotypes of Adelaide than a year's supply of Mike Rann's speeches?
Hey ho, hey nonny no, on we go, and how better to celebrate the end of the week that with Henry Ergas's opener to Going retro with cash grab:
When our iron ore reserves were opened to development in 1961, Japan exported T-shirts and 30 million Chinese were being killed in Mao's Great Leap Forward.
Well I guess there's nothing like flinging together figures in a swill of inaccuracies, all to associate Chairman Rudd with Chairman Mao, and I guess it has a ring of rhetoric about it that actual accuracy would ruin. How about:
When our iron ore reserves were opened to development and export it was long after iron ore was mined at Iron Knob and Iron Baron in South Australia in the late nineteenth century, and associated with a lifting of export controls in the nineteen sixties. It was however only shortly after Japan had already, in the nineteen fifties exported the first Toyota Crown vehicle to the United States, and by 1957 had established its American and Brazilian devisions. The brakes reportedly worked, but Toyota only devised related T-shirts much later in the company's history.
The export of iron ore is more closely linked by date, but otherwise by complete irrelevance to the time in China between the years 1959 and 1962, commonly called the "Three Bitter Years" and the "Three Years of Natural Disasters", it's been estimated that somewhere between 20 and 43 million Chinese died of famine, far in excess of the official toll of 14 million associated with the Great Leap Forward.
Sheesh, that's so bloody dull. How on earth will that move more apps for the iPad for The Australian, seeing as how its app is an advertising driven piece of crap that's an affront to the eyeball? Pay for this nonsense?
Never mind, a man so keen on rhetoric and so cavalier with history can only have an axe to grind, and indeed Ergas has the straw and the hole in the bucket:
Yet entrepreneurs risked billions of dollars turning the Pilbara into a mining powerhouse, for very uncertain returns. Now the government wants to tax those returns more heavily by applying its resource super profits tax to existing mining projects.
Oh brave bold multibillionaires, going where everyone feared to tread, and their reward only a few humble billion, and now the poor lads are seemingly facing back taxes retrospectively fitted back to ... gasp, can they be talking of 1961?
Not really, it's just Ergas's idea of how to whip up a creamy frothy latte laden with hysteria and panic, while urging us all to cry for the billionaires. I immediately had an impulsive desire to sing a mad romantic song, as Henry signs off his column "Need one say more?"
No no speak on Henry, tell us about the time that Australia rode on the sheep's back at the time the Nazis were gassing the Jews, or how about mentioning the way the gold rushes took place when the blacks were being wiped out. We have a yen, a taste, for historical allusions on the pond. We love them, we can't get enough of them ...
Yep Henry Ergas's clever historical allusiveness, or was that elusiveness, takes the loon pond cake for the week, and now, please, allow me to clear my throat:
The truth is I never left you
All through my wild days
My mad existence
I kept my promise
Don't keep your distance
And as for fortune, and as for fame
I never invited them in
Though it seemed to the world they were all I desired
They are illusions
They are not the solutions they promised to be
The answer was here all the time
I love you and hope you love me
Don't cry for me Henry Ergas.
(Below: a 1957 Toyopet Crown, and most strange of all, with Victorian number plates).
Oh hell, and here's Jon Stewart, at the end of his opener, handing a back hander to Charles Krauthammer. A pity Brendan O'Neill didn't hover into his line of fire.
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