The Australian, and government as a quantum unified TOE ...

(Above: more Tom Tomorrow here).

Only in Australia, or more precisely only in the Herald's National Times, or even more precisely only in Daniel Flitton's Palin did not pull the trigger:

The shooting of Giffords is not the fault of a philosophical movement or a permissive political culture. Part of the fault lies with the ready availability of guns in the US, but no one can seriously anticipate this sort of insanity. Loughner could easily have rampaged through the crowd with a knife and caused serious damage.

A knife as the equivalent of a Glock 19 with a 33 shot magazine and a semi-automatic capacity to discharge same?

No one can anticipate this sort of insanity? No one heard about Klebold and Harris taking out twelve students and a teacher at Columbine with a semi-automatic handgun in 1999? No one noticed Seung-Hui Cheo killing 27 students killing twenty seven students and five instructors using semi-automatic handguns at Virginia Tech in 2007 ... including a Glock 19?

The reality is that the United States is awash with weapons designed not for hunting or for target shooting, but for killing people, and that's not going to change any time soon, but can we be spared the risible notion of evoking the deadly potential of a knife up against a Glock. If Flitton wants a showdown and a shoot out, he's welcome to the knife. I'll take the Glock.

The rest of his abjectly pathetic column is yours for the reading, but why not take in instead Jared Loughner's Glock: Weapon of Mass Destruction, or marvel at the way Glock sales have risen in the wake of the Tucson killings.

One-day sales of handguns in Arizona jumped 60 percent to 263 on Jan. 10 compared with 164 the corresponding Monday a year ago, the second-biggest increase of any state in the country, according to Federal Bureau of Investigation data.

Handgun sales rose 65 percent to 395 in Ohio; 16 percent to 672 in California; 38 percent to 348 in Illinois; and 33 percent to 206 in New York, the FBI data show. Sales increased nationally about 5 percent, to 7,906 guns. (Arizona Shootings Trigger Surge in Glock Sales Amid Fear of Ban).

Golly gee, that's strange. You'd think there'd have been a surge in knife sales ...

Meanwhile, The Australian has gone Marxist Leninist. This usually happens during or immediately after a major disaster ...

Of course if you happen to believe government has a role to play in the modern world, there's no need for such an ecstatic transformation. There's a lot to be said for efficient government assuming responsibility for key infrastructure items such as water, sewerage, and energy, not to mention disaster relief, emergency services, health services, public transport, and all the other sundry ways government can intervene to assist the citizenry.

But it's always surprising when the free marketeers suddenly line up in a row, and rather than discuss the failings of the free market, blame the government for inaction or see the government as the wellspring of all action. There's rarely any discussion of the lack of coherent logic in their sudden conversion to the notion that government needs to do something, but that's hardly surprising ...

First out of the blocks yesterday was Rory Callinan muttering about Wivenhoe's dam operator in Engineers reduce dam flow. The "operator" in question is the South East Queensland Water Corporation, but Seqwater as it likes to call itself is actually wholly owned by the Queensland Bulk Water Supply Authority, which is just another mango quango statutory authority, designed to pretend that the government has organised its activities in a handy free market way that mimics the efficiencies of private operators ...

The "operators" have organised themselves in such a way it's hard to tell when it's the government, even when it is the government ...

Scott Prasser in With disaster comes opportunities and hard choices, has some grand plans for government interventions.

One issue is the present location of some small towns and communities.

Periodic floods interspersed by intermittent droughts make maintaining these towns in terms of reconstructing roads, rebuilding levees that often do not work, provision of an array of services and trying to find jobs for locals not just expensive, but also repeatedly so. Time for a rethink.

Yep, time to shut them down and ship the inhabitants out. I hear Siberia is still looking for settlers ...

Strange that he doesn't also mention the need to shut down Brisbane, inopportunely built next to a river, but there you go ...

Naturally the good professor is in favour of dams, more dams, and we're anxiously awaiting his explanation to Barners how a dam would have stopped the flash-flooding in Toowoomba (Senator says a Toowoomba dam would not have prevented deadly flash floods).

Meanwhile, Hedley Thomas demands that the government mount a tough inquiry, as outlined in Bligh's 'tough people' owed a tough inquiry. Amongst the terms of reference:

There must be hard-headed analysis of the decisions of the dam's operators to let the dam fill to levels close to maximum capacity, forcing a critical release of huge volumes of water before the Brisbane flood occurred.

The dam's operators? Oh never mind.

Hedley also wonders why people have been allowed to build on the low-lying areas of a floodplain. Well Brisbane, explain yourself ...

Actually it's good old Henry Ergas who explains in Neglecting to place a price on risk ...

... successive governments have allowed development in high-risk areas without requiring that development, and more generally those areas' populations, to face a price signal that properly reflects the costs those risks create. This has attracted additional activity to risk-prone areas, compounding the pain when catastrophes occur.

You see, governments do too little - by failing to intervene - and do too much, by intervening, such as by providing public disaster assistance.

And they also intervene by failing to intervene, you know like failing to provide adequately detailed maps of flood proneness, and leaving poor old befuddled hapless private insurers totally in the dark, flailing away because the government can't get its act together. What ever happened to harden up private insurers, go do your own field research?

Nope, what's needed is mandatory coverage so that you get the money to re-build your house in the same spot ... unless of course the mandatory insurance coverage might be used for two tickets to Siberia and never mind the methane gas in the swamps ...

But perhaps the juiciest contribution comes from Barry York in Seeing red on dams, not green. Naturally York is for dams, but in a Marxist way:

In chapter one of The Communist Manifesto, Marx expressed his enthusiasm for the revolutionary consequences of the rise of the new bourgeoisie in transforming nature and extending human horizons.

Strange times indeed, for The Australian to be running a Marxist blogger. But there it is, and some amongst us might be transported back to meetings of the comrades to discuss matters of urgent revolutionary import:

In practice, revolutionary left-wing parties in power - such as the communists in Russia/Soviet Union in the 20s and 30s and China in the 50s and 60s - were gung-ho in the building of dams.

They did so because making a revolution is about changing things for the better, raising the standards of living and opportunities for liberation from wage slavery.

To borrow from Karl Marx, it's about "unleashing the productive forces" - not forcing them into a sustainable relationship with nature.

It's about an attitude based on "You ain't seen nothin' yet!", not "tread gently - nature's resources are finite". But this is red politics, not green.

Phew, that's a relief, and what a relief to know that in the good old days we hadn't seen nothing yet from the Russian empire.

At least we can now bring to an end old jibes about the green watermelon which is deeply red (apart from the seeds) on the inside.

So how did all that dam building work out for China in the 2010 China floods?

Never mind. York too has incisive plans for an enquiry:

It always strikes me, when these issues arise, how backward the social system of capitalism really is.

Human lives and billions of dollars are lost, yet only a pittance is invested in geo-engineering research and development, let alone dams, and even that is contested by the reactionaries.

It's disappointing that York didn't go the full hog - 'lickspittle reactionaries' would have been a nice touch - but it's touching to see someone affirm that China is currently a backward state.

And it reaffirms the pond's fervent belief that in times of trouble all commentators come together into one single homogenised grand quantum united TOE (theory of everything), which is to say that government is responsible for everything, either by omission or commission ...

In times of crisis, be it gun driven assassination or floods, the result is yowlings and cries and hideous lamenting such that the pond becomes a crescendo of competing voices, and as a result the wayward absent derelict workings of the missing god gets off the hook for sending rain Australia's way ...

Meanwhile, on another planet, Last year wettest on record, say US figures ...

US government figures for the global climate show that last year was the wettest on record, matching 2005 as the hottest year since record-keeping began in 1880...

... It was the 34th year running that global temperatures have been above the 20th century average; the last below-average year was 1976. The new figures show that nine of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since the beginning of 2001.

Quick. Build more dams! And use them to run air conditioners ... It's the Marxist way ...

And finally to end on an up note, Radio National yesterday repeated Tony Judt's talk What is Living and What is Dead in Social Democracy?

Well worth a listen if you want a sensible alternative theories and thoughts about government and the social contract ... but perhaps only suitable for reactionaries who wear cardigans and listen to the ABC ...

(Below: and another Tom Tomorrow for luck).