Paul Sheehan, and news flash - rogue Syrian sowing wild seeds starts gigantic computer company with his entrepreneurial sexual activities ...

(Above: a pc joke to start the week).

Over at The Australian, the editorial team maintain the rage and the war against the law that brought Andrew Bolt un-done, by introducing an Indian perspective in Ramesh Thakur's India shows harmful effects of affirmative action.

Once again the very core of human rights are under dire threat, but at least the problem of how to maintain the rage is now solved. We can look forward to dozens of stories, from Iceland shows the benefits of ignoring affirmative action to Peru shows the harmful effects of affirmative action to Antarctica: the need to avoid affirmative action in this nascent country's booming mining economy.

Thakur shows a slender understanding of the actual functioning of defamation laws in Australia, and amazingly, while arguing the case for free speech, prohibits the likes of Bolt from discussing specific individuals in relation to identity-based offices, grants and awards ... the very point of his vexatious column ... but not to worry, the rage has been maintained ...

Meanwhile, over at Fairfax, Paul Sheehan offers a standard re-hash of the abundant material available in the wire services and the archives in the matter of Steve Jobs, his life, career and death, and manages no deep insight or understanding in Monopoly, mark-ups sour story of Apple's core, until we come to the concluding pars:

There's another subplot to the Jobs saga. He is the son of a Syrian Muslim immigrant to the US, Abdulfattah Jandali, but was adopted out at infancy. He never sought nor encouraged contact with his natural father.

Indeed, and thanks to the overflowing intertubes, and if so inclined, you can read The life and times of Steve Jobs' Syrian father for more details of that remote connection.

But Sheehan has a different axe to grind:

What if Jobs had been raised in Syria?

Now you might have asked what if Steve Jobs had been raised in Nazi Germany, or perhaps Soviet era Russia in the nineteen fifties ...

None of his mercantile genius would have been revealed to the larger world because the Muslim Arab world, despite all its latent intellectual talent and oil wealth, is a desert for the creation of patents, advanced technology and innovation.

Thankfully, Jobs was not raised under the deadening hand of a closed social and religious system but near the most intellectually fertile valley in the world, Silicon Valley.

Uh huh. So of course if Jobs had been raised in Nazi Germany, with the deadening hand of a closed social system, he might have turned into an autobahn engineer, helped with the development of the people's car project, the Kübelwagen, a grand exercise in popularising design, creating a company still with us today, or perhaps working for Albert Speer in the transformation of Germany, or best of all, helping design the tasty array of innovative military weapons that made Germany such a formidable force in the early years of the second world war.

Perhaps he might have even got shipped off at war's end to help the United States in its war to achieve supremacy in rocketry against the Soviet Union. Unless the closed social and religious system known as the Soviet Union had nabbed him first, and deployed him in the Soviet space program, which reached some kind of life-threatening peak in the fifties with Sputnik.

Sheehan, in his usual dill-witted way, has managed to confuse creativity, genes, cultures, Arabs, and closed religious and social systems, while at other times routinely getting his knickers in a knot about immigration and its dangers for a country like Australia.

If you were to take any lesson from Jobs, it's that the freedom to roam the world and for cultures to interact (as was the case for Jobs' father) is an important part of revitalising and energising any culture or society ...

And speaking of closed social systems, it's even funnier that in previous pars in his piece, Sheehan rails against closed corporate systems, most particularly Apple's tendency to use the patent system to litigate matters and do down rivals (right down to the absurdist point that the Samsung tablet uses a rectangular design with rounded corners, as reported in Apple sues Samsung for 'slavish copying of iPhone and iPad, but which could just as easily have been titled Apple sues nineteen fifties television manufacturers for deploying rectangular designs with rounded corners).

Sheehan also - speaking of closed systems - rails against Apple for deploying closed architecture, which means its users have to go through the exceptionally tedious business of converting their pirated avi files into mp4's (damn you Apple, damn you to hell, and damn you for Safari, and damn you for a dozen other things space stops me from describing in detail).

Yep, while getting agitated about a closed Islamic world, Sheehan also manages to get agitated about the closed world of Apple architecture and its proprietary systems, and with nary a clue that he's aware of the painful contradictions in his scribbles.

And naturally he recycles stories about how Apple and Jobs ripped off Xerox, the idea of the mouse, the interface and sundry other ideas first trotted out by others:

Apple is currently the most successful company in the world because of its intellectual capital, its brand value and its ability to create closed systems which charge consumers high premiums.

Why it sounds like the very model of a canny Syrian trader, leveraging and extorting what he can from the trade between east and west in the old medieval trade routes (and more on the ancient Syrian trade routes here), what with Apple's purloined, begged, borrowed and bought intellectual capital, its closed systems, its high premiums, and its lawyer patent driven ways. Totally unlike Microsoft ...

As usual, Sheehan doesn't have much of a clue, even when recycling and rorting the thoughts of others, but speaking of recycling, his piece does give the pond a chance to reference Adam Gopnik's piece on Spenglerian thinking in Decline, Fall, Rinse, Repeat (sorry, the paywall strikes again).

You see, next week, or the week after, after celebrating and excoriating Apple and Jobs in the self-same contradictory breath, Sheehan will return to harping about the decline of the west, and the way the closed social and religious systems of Islamic societies will eventually do down the energetic, vigorous, open social and religious structures of the west (yes, yes, it's a stretch to call fundamentalist Christianity an open system of belief, as opposed to the perverted liberal secular Hollywood lifestyle of typical outrageous, decadent, geeky nerdy Californians, but let it go for the moment).

Gopnik delivers blow after blow to the foundations of sloppy Spenglerians, but we'll settle for just this one quote:

After Spengler, it isn't enough to say that the past two decades have been rough in Japan, or that the recession has been hard on Americans, or that the war in Iraq was a folly; the mistakes and the follies have to be shown to be part of some big, hitherto invisible pattern of decline - and made more vivid by contrast with the patterns of some other, as yet undeclined society. The simpler, saner idea that things were good and now they're bad, and that they could get better or worse, depending on what happens next, gets dismissed as intellectually disreputable. His imprint is left in the idea that a big wheel must be turning in the night sky of history, and only the author of the book has managed to notice it.

Oh okay, here's another:

Whatever happens next, short term or long, is likely to be more affected by accident and by invention - and by new ideas - than by any trend now in sight. The philosopher Karl Popper once offered an important proof against "historicism": what we know next will change what happens next, and we can't know what we'll know next, since if we could we'd know it now. Amid all Spengler's genius and silliness, his silliest moment is when he announces that physics is finished as a science, its task of description complete. This in 1918, when Einstein's predictions about the bending of light rays by gravity are about to be confirmed, and Bohr and Planck are already at work.

Back to Sheehan, because it turns out that while Jobs' biological father Jandali was born in Syria, he spent much of his life in intellectual ferment in Lebanon, until the political situation in Beirut pushed him to travel to the United States in 1954.

Yep, it was the closed moral and religious situation of Lebanese society that led directly to the birth of Jobs.

Even better, it was the closed moral and religious situation of conservative American thinking that kept father and son apart:

When he was studying in Wisconsin, Jandali dated a German-Swiss woman, Joanne Carol Schieble. Joanne got pregnant but her conservative father refused to allow her to marry Jandali, who left Joanne a few days before the baby boy’s arrival in 1956. He would never see his son.

Yep there are more accidents, accidents and reactions in the world than are dreamed of in Sheehan's closed observations of the world, though each week he does his best to reveal that insight, by peddling contradictory thoughts and contradictory arguments, usually with some kind of bias against lazy Celts, cheating druggy Greeks and now closed Islamic Syrians.

Perhaps it takes a closed mind to recognise the closed minds of others ... or perhaps it's just a case of a closed mind ...

(Below: and now because the pond is fair and balanced, an Apple joke. We merely report, and you decide).