1. And for more Goldwater goodness:

Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies.

Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed. Their mistaken course stems from false notions of equality, ladies and gentlemen. Equality, rightly understood, as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences. Wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.

2. Who would go into the car business? Capital intensive, lots of competition, and the product lines have a three year run. Holden reports 200 million loss. G8 V8 under 35K and HSV Clubsport spotted in Michigan.

3. Dinner in three acts (nights): beer brauts; apple, cheese and crackers; pistachios.

4. VA humidity was so high yesterday there was a grey moisture haze two thirds of the way up into the sky. North Queenslanders would feel right at home. Since all the moisture got pulled out of the ground, we had thunderstorms in the afternoon.

5. Palm Island case finished. Politics and judicial uniformity collide. Judicial uniformity (rightly) wins. Rule of law is only of value with its consistency.

6. Jack Bauer is a suitable debating point on terrorism and jurisprudence according to Antonin Scalia. I remain convinced that Firefly is an authoritarians wet dream and that the moral universe in Firefly has to be warped to meaningless in order to make Mal look like a good person. Entertainment is entertainment though, and Dirty Harry is not a suitable model for judicial practice. See Goldwater above.

7. Avocadia on Piers Ackerman using the TV show Law and Order to argue against a Bill of Rights in Australia:

What can you say to that? What? What can you possibly say to a man who uses a television show as an discussion point in a debate. You can't; merely by bringing it up, Ackerman has reduced the whole argument to farce. Argue the point and you merely lend it a veneer seriousness.

You just can't argue with this stuff. The whole premise is based on the idea that judges - unelected judges, no less - will suddenly be given the power to legislate, to create human rights out of whole cloth to smack down the legislative body and rule Australia like rough-trade-cruising, homosexual kings. Kings, I say!

Oldie but a goodie.

8. Came home with Plato's The Republic and Aristotle's The Politics. Looked at Plato's definition of a constitution for luxury and how it must be organised for war:

Because war is an art according to Plato, then the state must organise to promote the skill of war and soldiery in order to protect itself from other states seeking expansion, as well as expand itself to meet its own demands of luxury.

Which is all a bit simplistic and more a moral tale than one that can inform political structures.

Was pleased with myself later, when discussing those books with lm on irc, when he said The Republic should not be read as a political book, but a moral one.

9. Also got a book on the American Transcendentalists. What a mixed bunch. Emerson's Self Reliance and Thoreau's Civil Disobedience are absolute rib-crackers though. I suspect these two essays are where Dan Deniehy and Charles Harpur got their influences from. I certainly don't see any Brooks Farm stuff from Deniehy and Harpur, they are far more liberal than that (Thankfully or I would be dissappointed).

10. Pursuant to this; some Charles Harpur goodness:

Let civilized men be but placed for a few generations beyond the direct action of courtly and aristocratical influences, and the idea of Equality becomes fundamental in their sense of political and social obligation. They are republicans, in short, and mostly democrats also, before they can render a definite reason, it may be, for the faith that is in them. And this results, I repeat it, from a moral and social progress purely natural to civilized men, though quickened by peculiar circumstances.

"for the faith that is in them" is probably consistent with American Transendentalist thought, though it could just be Unitarian thought,a repudiation of Calvinism, making its way to Australian shores too.

11.