Kate gets awesome presents

I just think the world should know that my wonderful wife gets truly awesome presents. This birthday it was something that solved a problem that's been the bane of my life as a journo: how to keep an easily-accessed note of a conversation that's also word-perfect.

Every journo I know spends ages going through voice recordings trying to get accurate notes of their interviews; or, like me, they have shorthand that's a bit rusty and sometimes leads to them missing things.

So Kate got me this James Bond-style pen which contains a voice recorder and a camera just under the nib. If I write "important stuff" when the person I'm interviewing starts saying important stuff, then once I'm reviewing my notes I just have to tap the words "important stuff" to jump to that bit of the recording. It's hard to explain just how natural and intuitive this is until you try it yourself.

Anyway, the one drawback is that you need special paper to write on (same price as a normal notebook, but you've got to seek it out). I'm off to a conference this week but left my stash in my desk at work, so I've just been out stocking up. Hence the post.

PS It's called a LiveScribe Echo if youse want to buy one

There is no US debt problem!

OK, clearly there is a US debt problem. There's a problem because the world economy is being held hostage by a fanatical faction of US politics which is morbidly obsessed with the national debt. But there isn't a debt problem the way someone who'd maxed out their credit card has a debt problem.

The US can amply pay its bills. As has been pointed out before, if Congress does nothing for the next five years, deficits will disappear of their own accord. Just failing to renew the "temporary" Bush tax cuts will wipe out most of the deficit at a stroke. The reason we are having this debt crisis in the US isn't because market events beyond the control of policy-makers have forced the situation. That's the case in Europe, but in the US it's the opposite: policy-makers, in the form of House Republicans, have used their control of events to force a critical situation on the markets.

I think a major tactical mistake of the Obama administration in this fight has been to accept the Republican party's terms about this. I'm sure the White House is fully aware that this is a fight that the Republicans have chosen to have, but they seem to be doing that JFK thing of seeing "crisis" as embodying both "danger" and "opportunity".

Listen to Obama's speeches and it's clear that he has looked at the US's long-term demographic problems--an ageing population, rising retirement and healthcare spending--and decided that this is a good moment to set the country on a better path and start to bring those long-term revenue and spending lines back together. If Republicans are going to force him to deal with America's fiscal problems, then by gosh he'll deal with America's fiscal problems.

That's all so sweet. It reminds me of another Democratic President, who had some high-stakes battles with a Republican House, went to the wire a few times, but managed to enact a package of fiscal reforms that eventually delivered budget surpluses by the end of his time in office.

And when Bill Clinton left the White House and George W Bush came in, the administration looked at these surpluses and declared them a bad thing. Vice-president Dick Cheney famously declared that deficits don't matter. And they enacted two massive tax cuts, started two unfunded wars and introduced one ruinous pharma industry giveaway to spend all that lovely money. Throw in the effects of the recession they started, and you're back to where we are today.

This is like a political version of the omnipotence paradox: can Congress build a political rock so heavy it can't overturn it? Obama appears to want to set in train a long-term solution to America's fiscal problems, seeing that a feckless Congress is not up to the job. But the problem here is ultimately not America's fiscal problems, but the fecklessness of Congress. Solve the problems, and Congress or another administration can just come along and remake them again.

What if McCain had won?

As an ardent leftie who was deeply gladdened by the election of Barack Obama in 2008, it pains me to say this. But the US, and by extension the world, would possibly be a better place if he'd lost.

This is through no fault on the Democrats' side. Indeed, it's a result of the profound irresponsibility of the modern Republican party, and their contempt for the conditions of the majority of their constituents.

Broadly speaking, US Democrats, whether they're in the White House or not, want to keep the country functioning. Attacking the other party is a second-order concern. Whereas US Republicans, whether they're in the White House or not, want to attack the other party. Keeping the country functioning is a second-order concern.

This isn't just my polemic speaking. The Republican leader in the Senate--who these days almost counts as a voice of moderation in his party--considers making Obama a one-term president his chief priority. This, amidst the worst economic downturn in the US since the great depression.

For Republicans, the recession really doesn't seem to matter much. Judging by their laser-like determination to cut back on welfare spending at this desperate time, they appear to see it as a sort of healthy kick up the backside for an idle lumpenproletariat, in accordance with the bonkers 'philosophy' of their idol, Ayn Rand. So, naturally, damaging the other party comes first.

Look at the votes that Democrats took towards the end of the Bush term and I think you see a different attitude. They supported, en masse, the first round of stimulus in early 2008, although it mostly consisted of tax cuts so was (a) less stimulative than benefit payments and (b) mostly helped Republican constituencies. They backed the first TARP bill giving $700 billion to bail out the banks, though it went completely counter to their own interest-group needs. It was the Republicans who voted TARP down and sent the markets into a tailspin. And bear in mind these difficult votes were in support of a President with popularity figures in the teens, as opposed to Obama's figures still in the mid-forties.

The Democrats did these things because they have an interest in a functioning economy. If the economy doesn't work, their voters suffer, whereas, as we've seen since 2008, most Repuiblican interest groups will get on just fine. So I don't think we'd have seen the Congressional intransigence under a President McCain that we've seen under Obama. (Remember that under the US system, nothing gets done without Congressional approval.)

I think that, if the economy was still looking febrile in 2010, a President McCain would have likely proposed a second stimulus, knowing that weak economies are fatal for Presidents and stimulus money makes midterms voters happy with the governing party. Most Republicans would have backed it to help out their man, and most Democrats would have gritted their teeth and backed it to help the economy.

I think that the political atmosphere wouldn't be dominated by the hard-money craziness that even the White House now seems to believe, but instead by the Milton (Friedman)-(Maynard) Keynes consensus that guided Republican economic thought until Obama's inauguration. As a result, I think the Federal Reserve would have felt more free to pursue expansionary monetary policy to stimulate the economy. Unemployment would likely be lower and demand higher, and the whole global economy would be on a slightly sounder footing.

That doesn't mean I'd necessarily encourage progressives to vote Republican in 2012. A strain of lunacy has taken root in the modern Republican party that wasn't there before. But with a match-up of a vaguely sane* Mitt Romney who has a chance of running the country, and a Barack Obama who will have his every move opposed vociferously as the first step on the Road to Serfdom, you're tempted to wonder: wouldn't it be better to go with the one who is capable of governing?

*I know he's said plenty of insane stuff, but everyone knows he has zero integrity and will say anything to get elected. Not normally an endorsement, but it counts as a positive for Republicans these days.

The wrong lessons from Weimar

I'm a bit scared by what's happening in Europe at the moment, and not for the reason that most people seem to be scared.

The cycle of brief relief in markets followed by renewed fears seems to have been repeated again now after the latest bailout on Thursday. The explanation for this, I think, is explained pretty well by Matthew Yglesias: the eurozone is still unable to accept that Greece and other peripheral countries simply cannot pay their debts, least of all with an ECB intent on raising interest rates and so making those debts more onerous, while simultaneously choking off the chance of economic growth that could help service them.

I'm truly baffled at what the ECB thinks it is doing raising interest rates in the midst of a historic slump. The eurozone economy needs all the help it can get. Spain has 20% unemployment. And higher inflation is precisely what is needed to erode some of the debts that the peripheral economies are labouring under.

Clearly the ECB is making policy as if only Germany has a serious stake in the eurozone economy, and clearly Germany is terrified of inflation because, as we all have been told, the Weimar hyperinflation led to the rise of Hitler.

I really take issue with that. The hyperinflation ended in 1924; Hitler came to power in 1933. Saying that the hyperinflation lead to Hitler, while ignoring all the pretty dramatic economic events that happened in the intervening years, is like saying that the tech bubble was responsible for the high-stakes battle now going on over the debt ceiling in the U.S.

Let's just go through the events:

1919: Treaty of Versailles imposes crippling reparations debt on Germany

August 1922: Reichsmark goes through 2,000 to the US dollar

September 1923: Reichsmark hits 60,000,000 to the US dollar

November 1923: Rentenmark established, pegged to the gold standard. Currency stabilises.

1924-29: Foreign capital starts flows back into Germany, attracted by the high interest rate and finance ministers' promise of austerity budgets

1929: Wall Street crash. Germany catches a cold and the economy declines 25% in three years.

1931: German banking crisis. Foreign capital flees in a headlong rush. Series of bank collapses. Unemployment surges. Finance ministry responds by imposing more austerity, but partly quits the gold standard.

1933: Hitler comes to power. His finance minister Hjelmar Schacht defaults on reparations payments and severs link with the gold standard. Uses the Reichsbank to heavily buy government debt, financing public works programmes which bring down unemployment. Inflation rises, but the economy starts to grow robustly for the first time in a decade.

This is obviously not a defence of Nazi economics, but if you look at that timeline I find it hard to argue that the answer to Europe's problems is to do what German governments did from 1924-1933 - which is pretty much what the ECB and eurozone governments are in fact doing.

Schacht basically instituted a programme of hard Keynesianism, defaulting on unsupportable debt payments and using the central bank to gin up a fiscal stimulus which could kick start the economy. And this was enough to reconcile many of the German people to being ruled by Nazi thugs.

Indeed, it was so successful that for much of the Depression there were significant constituencies in other developed countries arguing that Germany had a model worth emulating; the fact that they mistakenly attributed this to fascist leadership, rather than sane economic policies, doesn't change the fact that it was the performance of the German economy they were admiring.

I worry that what the victors of World War I and hard-money believers in Weimar's finance ministries did to interwar Germany, the ECB is now doing to peripheral eurozone economies. And I'm not saying that this will lead to the rise of Greek, Irish and Portuguese Hitlers, but I'm certainly saying that you can't pursue a policy of immiserating large numbers of people for problems they were not responsible for, and be surprised if some sort of backlash eventually results.

Tantrums can be fun

 



Another bit of play-learning that Anya's doing was a bit more unexpected. Yesterday morning we brought her to bed when she woke up, something that she always enjoys. But amongst the giggles and fun, often when she was lying down she would throw herself into a sort of mock tantrum. She'd roll around with looks of distress and delight flickering on her face, grinding her forehead onto the pillows and flinging her arms around like some 18th century actor playing Antigone, or a baby version of the Laocoon. But she wasn't actually upset: she seemed to be having a lot of fun.

I've always been attracted by the idea of play as essential to development. By making the most essential types of learning enjoyable, evolution has ensured that animals do learn skills rather than sit around doing the biological equivalent of watching daytime TV. But I suppose I had always had an unconsciously positivist view of this: children play so they can learn nice things that adults like, such as building block towers, giving gifts of flowers and talking.

In retrospect, it's blindingly obvious that the play instinct is robustly self-interested. Evolution wants the baby to learn anything that's useful to it. And whether you're needing an overdue nappy change, or trying to get your point across in the supermarket about how much you want daddy to buy chocolate biscuits, tantrums can be useful.

Ministry of baby walks

We're in that long anticipatory period at the moment where Anya is practicing all sorts of walking-type moves without actually walking. So she stands all the time, and given a walker she'll do some steps as well; but she's still reluctant to take the leap of faith and start lifting one foot at a time.

I don't blame her to be honest. Given how recently she's mastered the far easier task of balancing on two feet, moving to one must feel as difficult as it would for you or I to start tightrope walking. Even adults find balancing on one leg a bit tricky for extended periods, and while walking only involves doing it for split-seconds I imagine that to her it feels like she has to be able to balance more comprehensively.

Anyway, yesterday saw another of those mysterious games that babies take up, always with some sense of a further purpose. While Kate was reading to her before bed, she leaned on her sofa and pedalled her legs, one at a time, lifting them up to shoulder height like a veritable ballerina at the bar. Not quite as elegant, I admit: there was a certain playful-crab quality about the movement too. But the big smile on her face told you that she'd worked something out and was pleased with it: how to balance on one foot while the other is all over the place.

Journalistic ethics - isn't that a contradiction in terms?

First of all, no. It's an oxymoron. Read your style book.

But on to the news. This News Corp stuff is obviously massive and, as James Fallows says, is turning into a sort of Watergate for our generation (I'd actually say that's probably Wikileaks, but maybe Wikileaks is a Pentagon Papers for our generation...).

I'm going to be all weird and general in this post because I am, of course, an employee of the News Corporation and it's in my contract that I don't go round talking smack about the internal workings of the company. And of course the fact is I know sod all about the internal workings of any of the stuff now under scrutiny. In fact, at the time the most heinous events happened, I was working for News Corp's inquisitor-in-chief the Guardian, whose reporting of all of this has been exemplary.

So just a couple of throwaway thoughts:

1. John Hempton makes an interesting point here about on-record and off-record sourcing, but I think he misses the point slightly. As he puts it, the Murdochs were doing exactly the right thing by not inquiring into the sources of their stories. To do so would be unethical in a proprietor - it's tantamount to meddling in the reporting of the news, and there should be Chinese walls ensuring that such behaviour stops at the editor.

I think that's all well and good, but the problem here as I see it isn't that proprietors should be allowed to quiz their reporters about their sources. I quite agree that's unacceptable. The problem is that proprietors should have both a disinterested, and self-interested, view on how the news they publish is gathered. If you publish material that is poorly sourced--and you don't need to know the identity of a source to know whether something is poorly sourced or not--then you are damaging your publication's credibility and putting yourself on the hook for any legal action that comes about as a result. Ditto if your reporters obtain material through illegal means, make up quotes, etc.

Publications have codes of practice, which are often observed more in the breach than anything else. But I see no problem with a proprietor being involved in crafting that code of practice - in fact, I think it's a good thing, as long as the code is uniformly and broadly applied (no more-ethical-than-usual standards should be enforced for articles relating to the proprietors' mates, for instance). I think we can all agree that News Corp, as a company, badly fell down in failing to inculcate any decent standards, and ignoring breaches of them when they came up.

2. The journalistic standards of Fleet Street have been appalling for too long. I studied on the most respected journalism course in the country--Nick Davies, who broke most of these stories, used to teach there--and I'm shocked to admit that I never had proper training in journalistic ethics while I was there. Simple stuff like the importance of always calling every party you're writing about was simply never taught. I had to learn it on the job.

Equally, publications frequently fall short of their more high-minded standards. Back when the News of the World was tapping Milly Dowler's family's phones, I was working at the Guardian in the wake of the David Kelly dodgy dossier story. There was a big ethics post-mortem at the BBC in relation to this, and the Guardian sent round a similar missive telling journos to always use two sources if something was anonymous, always detail the circumstances of any quote, etc.

I quickly found I was the only one following this. Brief decoder: when you read a news story including a quote and the words "he/she said", 90% of the time the journalist in question has simply read a press release or a newswire story. Strictly speaking, that journalist should declare how they're getting the information--"he/she said in a statement" would be fine, or "he/she was quoted as saying by XYZ"--but almost inevitably they don't. On the other hand, people frequently write the words "he/she told This Publication" as if getting someone to speak is some great achievement, rather than the bare minimum work a journalist should be doing.

I think an interesting dynamic that's happening at the moment is that the internet is leading to a spread of American-style journalistic ethics to a lot of places where they previously didn't flourish. Journalists expect their arguments to be challenged in the comments/blogosphere free-for-all, and I think that means they construct their arguments more carefully now. In additions, UK publications that have previously had pretty shoddy standards are in many cases upping their game to compete for a global readership.

3. There's a huge reconfiguration of ideas of public and private journalistic standards going on in the UK, and I don't think any of us really know where it's going. We seem to have decided that it's wrong for Ryan Giggs to use the law to hide his indiscretions, but it's right for soldiers or victims of terrorist attacks or, of course, grieving relatives to be protected from intrusion. I'm no fan of the rise of super-injunctions, but this emerging standard doesn't really pass the ethical sniff-test--it's a sort of rule-by-Trisha, where if you're beloved in the court of public opinion you deserve protection, but if you're a rich snotty footballer or a fleecing bank boss you don't.

The problem of course is that the rights to privacy and to a free press are ultimately incompatible, so there's never really going to be a neat division between what's right and what's wrong. But I think getting the distinction right depends on being a lot more precise about our definition of the public interest, and I find it hard to believe that Ryan Giggs' sex life would be considered fair game under that standard.

4. This is getting waaay too long. My editor said I've got a 1,000-word limit. Ends.

It's wet doon sooth

This is my bag and trouser leg after the five-minute walk, with umbrella, to Newtown station. It's been raining in great sheets all night, and the gutters are a stepping-stones obstacle course for the unwary.

Jasper, appealingly, has decided that it's too inclement for him to piss in the flowerbeds at the end of our yard, and so squatted down outside our bathroom window while I was shaving this morning instead. That window is his front door and it's always open. So I hope it was just a piss.

The return of ideology

That previous post on Aussie politics got me thinking about an aspect of political life since the financial crisis: ideology has returned, with a vengeance, but not everyone seems to realise this.

More specifically: ideology has returned, but only the political right seems to have noticed. Which is why they're making a lot of the political running at the moment.

It's hard to remember, but many of the issues that are so contentious now for parties of the centre-left were utterly mainstream before the financial crisis. Barack Obama's healthcare plot to destroy American freedom is basically Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's Massachusetts healthcare plan, on a national scale. The need to extend healthcare to America's uninsured wasn't a point of disagreement between the parties during the 2008 presidential campaign: since then, it's almost seen as some extremist socialist shibboleth.

Ditto carbon pricing in Australia. Even John Howard promised to introduce carbon trading, something he now dismisses, along with his party, as a big new tax on everything TM.

Meanwhile, to my mind the right has been making advances, ideologically. The idea that all taxation is immoral, previously a fringe notion, is increasingly embraced by mainstream elements of the American and even Australian right. The previously ringfenced NHS in the UK has been targeted for a shakeup of its spending powers that frankly only makes sense if you want to reduce its bargaining power in buying goods and services from the private sector.

I'm probably drawing a fairly long bow here. The left has ultimately had some notable successes in recent years: there is a federal healthcare bill in the US, new taxes on mining and carbon in Australia, and a Tory government in the UK which regards most aspects of the welfare state as sacrosanct.

Still, I think the left hasn't noticed what's happened. Politicians of the right tend to be quicker at picking up on shifting public moods (maybe not so much in the UK), and they've been much quicker in dumping the consensus-driven politics of the "great moderation" in the 1990s and 2000s, and switching to a policy of total war against the fairly centrist policies the left is still introducing.

It'll be interesting to see if this is a temporary trend, or the start of something bigger. Looking at the eurozone, I suspect the latter.

Teeth!

After that word odyssey, a shorter sweeter post to note that she now has TEETH! Two more, to be exact, coming through in the middle of her upper jaw.

They're still a little shy right now, and we pretty much only get to see them when she's eating or having her face washed. But her smile gets cuter everyday.

Also, health update: she's been much better today, still a tad off the food but otherwise fever-free and happy as well. Fingers crossed she sleeps well tonight.

The pic was taken at the playground yesterday, before the screaming fits started (see earlier post...)

Decline and Fall?

My god, the Australian Labor Party is a mess. Since coming to power in a landslide federal election in 2007, it has lost governing majorities in four of eight states and territories and of course in Canberra itself, where it clings on to power thanks to a motley group of independents and minor party MPs.

Now Labor's electoral support is at an all-time low - just 26 per cent - and rumours are flying round that the backroom boys of the party are plotting to make Julia Gillard the ALP's Lady Jane Grey.

Consider that Australia is in the middle of a once-in-a-generation boom and you have an idea of how weird this is. The UK Conservative party is in better health, despite introducing massive spending cuts against a backdrop of a moribund economy and a continent falling to bits. This is truly extraordinary incompetence on the part of federal Labor.

I've got no very coherent thoughts on all this, but a few disjointed ones:

1. Dumping Kevin Rudd so soon before the election last year was an unmitigated disaster. By numerous accounts he is a difficult politician to work with, but then Gordon Brown occupied one address or other in Downing Street for 13 years: one of the purposes of politicians' private offices is surely to make these egotists capable of rubbing along together. The decision made voters think that Labor was more preoccupied with its internal squabbles than with running the country.

Moreover, it was a tactic lifted from the playbook of the reviled and corrupt New South Wales right faction of the party, who were booted out unceremoniously in state elections earlier this year after changing leaders more times than Lady Gaga changes outfits.

NSW is the biggest state and a crucial swing area in elections: linking federal Labor with these crooks was a big, big mistake. It also underestimated the voters, who actually do care more about policies than personalities, if they perceive there to be a real choice in terms of policy.

2. Labor has utterly mishandled the rise of the Greens. This dynamic was visible years ago: I remember writing about it back in 2004. Labor seemed to see the Greens as a second coming of the Democrats, a now-defunct party who tried to be a bit of everything. Fatal mistake.

The Greens have always had a very clear ideology - it's there in the name - and as Australian politics has drifted towards interest-group-ism and dog whistles to alienated bigots, they're probably now the closest thing Australia has to a mainstream European social democratic party of the old school. Labor has responded by treating them like a passel of Stalinists, picking up a frankly bizarre talking point from the rabid ends of the News Ltd papers. That makes them look silly and vindictive, and makes it very hard for them to woo the green vote.

An excellent Peter Hartcher column in the SMH a few months back made the point perfectly. The Greens stand for left environmentalism. The Lib/Nats stand for right state capitalism. What does Labor stand for? Nobody can say. Labor are the true heirs of the Democrats, and look what happened to them.

3. On a related note, we all know Labor is institutionally a mess. This isn't just in the NSW right - although the continued rise of that faction since the NSW state elections is a piece of chutzpah on a par with Wall Street's ability to use the financial crisis to advance its interests.

There's a problem in that the internal power structure of the party comes from the conservative wing of the union movement. That means that the Labor voting base is fundamentally split on a whole host of issues. It explains why the carbon tax has been so dangerous, because major union bosses don't like a deal that is seen as hurting the metal-bashing industry. It also explains why supposedly liberal Australia will be one of the last countries to grant full partnership rights to gay couples.

The right and left streams of Labor's electoral base often dislike each other more than they dislike the alternative parties on either side. So both sides are picking them off.

4. Australia's boom hasn't been nearly as good for people as it's supposed to be. People are up to their eyeballs in debt and trade-exposed industries are being killed by the strong dollar. Bricks 'n' mortar retailers can't compete with offshore operations when the currency is so strong. The government is coming off the sugar high of the financial crisis stimulus, which means a fair bit of retrenchment in the public sector. And people are aware that the world is collapsing up in the northern hemisphere, and can't quite believe we'll be immune. All in all, people feel they're not doing as well as they should be doing, so they feel disillusioned.

5. Tony Abbott makes stuff up, the News Ltd. papers regurgitate it, and the ABC regurgitates that. The groupthink that permeates the media and political classes here is astonishing, and astonishingly mindless. Still, as a government you have to play with the hand you're dealt. I'm quite sure that the media tilts the debate rightwards, but I'm equally sure that the government could do more to combat this, and doesn't.

6. Julia Gillard is a terrible figurehead. Lacking much visible sign of spark, inspiration, or talent. She may be much better at managing the warring factions of the Labor party but, publicly, she just fails as a leader. It's a sign of how repellent Tony Abbott is that it's taken him this long to overtake her in the polls, despite a conga-line of craven admirers in the press and, let's face it, considerably greater reserves of school-bully charm.

As for what they should do? I'd follow that old Irish saying: "If you're going there, I wouldn't start from here." I think they have to accept that they will lose the next election and try to act to maximise their policy gains till then, and minimise their political losses. Of course, those two objectives work at cross purposes: the carbon tax is a policy win that is looking politically horrible for Labor. So, cynically, I think the best thing to do after stealing a remarkable skin-of-the-teeth electoral victory last year is to do what successful thieves have ever done after the act: lie low. Try not to get noticed.

I spoke too soon

Weird Sunday.

As I said this morning, Anya has mostly been a lot better today. Temperature down, eating food, the whole bit.

All was going great for most of the morning, and we even took her out to the park where she had a giggle on the slide and a sit on her favourite rocking toy. Then as we headed back, she started getting grumpy. Like, These People Are Trying To Kill Me grumpy. Grumpy like something had been amputated.

We figure that she's tired and put her down to sleep, where she continues to wail like she's trying to cough up a lung. We try food, milk, changed nappies, cuddles, everything; even breastfeeding, the ultimate Anya pacifier, barely touches the sides of her despondency. Eventually we leave her and after about 5-10 minutes she drops off to sleep.

Half an hour later she's awake again and screaming blue murder. Again, nothing consoles. And the screaming is really not like anything we've heard before, so we decide to call the health info line to check. After veerrryyy sllooowwllyy taking my details, the person on the end of the phone runs through a checklist to no great avail before catching a bit of Anya's screaming. She sounds like she's turned a bit white.

"Was that her screaming then?"

"Yes."

"OK, are you able to take her to the ED?"

"Is that the emergency department?"

"Yes. You were heading there anyway, right?"

"Er, yeah."

Well of course I wasn't really. I mean, we were ready to, but I thought she was just having a sook. But the note of alarm in the woman's voice is infectious, so we go into full-on mercy dash mode. Bundle Anya in the car, grab a change bag and a bottle, and head off tires screeching.

Hospital waiting rooms clearly have a different effect on babies to the one they have on adults. Whenever I sit in a waiting room I automatically feel worse than I did before. I don't know if this is the power of suggestion but it clearl operates the opposite way on Anya. As soon as she's through the sliding doors a beatific look comes on her face, a smile spreads across her lips, and everything in the world starts to delight her.

We get put through to the pediatric waiting room but Anya is being so sweet and amusing that we're clearly at the bottom of a long list populated with Sunday-afternoon accidents: wrist sprains from catching footie balls, head cuts from walking into cupboard doors. Weirdly, all the kids in the waiting room are girls. Maybe all the boys get injured on Saturdays to balance it out.

Anya of course is thrilled: the waiting room is full of new toys she's never seen before, as well as older kids she can watch and learn from. The whole thing is just great fun to her; less so to us - we're exhausted and had been looking forward to an afternoon nap. After about 2.5 hours, we give up and take her home for dinner and bed. And she almost instantly gets very grumpy again.

Well. I'm just glad there doesn't seem to be much wrong with her. Obviously, it's always going to be better to spend the afternoon in the emergency department on a false alarm than to go there with good reason. But I think not spending the afternoon in the emergency department is best of all.

Feeling a little better

Anya's been eating LOADS and while she's still a bit poorly she's been way better. More later.

Recipe: Fennel and chestnut soup

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pE1hV4dSBmc]

Well contrary to popular belief we do have winters in Sydney. It's been bitter this week, and today it turned wet and miserable as well. On top of which, Kate is now going back to work which means we're getting to the end of our period as a single income family, so we've been feeling a mite short of cash. So we made this leftovers soup, which was dirt cheap.

Fennel in Australia is a weed, as it is round the Mediterranean. Last week I did a reporting trip to the mines in the Hunter Valley, and the smell that sticks in the memory is not coal dust but fennel. Every time I stopped the car to get a photo of an open cut mine, it was growing in canes all along the roadside, well above head height. It's in season now and you can get a bulb the size of a grapefruit for a dollar; not something you'd put in a salad, but great for cooking.

Chestnuts are also in season and pretty cheap, but wow are they a pain to prepare. We cut crosses in the flat side of the nuts and put them in cold water, which we brought to the boil for a minute and then took them out to peel when they were cool. The shells come off easily but the tricky bit is the papery skin on the nuts, which gets under your fingernails and can be hell to separate from the mealy flesh.

Anyway, the recipe.

Take some pancetta or bacon. We probably had about 125 grams of pancetta, maybe a bit more - it needed finishing up. Fry it up in some olive oil till it's soft and the fat has gone translucent. Then put in one big bulb of fennel, the size of a grapefruit - maybe two smaller ones - two sticks of celery, and three cloves of garlic. The fennel and celery can be roughly chopped, the garlic finely. Chuck in a teaspoon of fennel seeds too - you could crush them but I didn't bother. Sweat the whole lot on a low heat for a good long time - this could be a good moment to peel the chestnuts. You want them sweating for at least 15 minutes.

Once this mirepoix is smelling fantastic and softening nicely, throw in your chestnuts - we had probably 40-50 chestnuts, I didn't check the weight. Add stock (we had some yummy home-made chicken stock and topped it up with water), plus a sprig of thyme and a couple of bay leaves. Leave to simmer for a while - again, at least 15 minutes. I didn't check. Some cookery book writer I'd make.

Once it's all smelling irresistible take out the herbs and blend it up, add some cream, check the seasoning and serve. We had a little bit of leftover single cream and a little bit of leftover sour cream, so I stirred the single cream through it and put a dollop of sour cream in the top. Althea had given us some red wine-infused salt that we scattered artfully across the top, but we then ate it so fast that the only photo I have is of a second helping looking a bit messy and grey. So I might not bother to post it.

Edited to add video at the top. Kate and I still have bits of chestnut membrane under our fingernails. This looks like a good way to prevent the pain.

Still ill

The poor mite is still sick with the gastro bug, and her fever is actually quite a lot worse today - above 38 on several occasions.

That sounds worse than it is because baby-fevers go a lot higher than the adult versions. True to form, there were plenty of smiles today when we took her to bed for a cuddle. But there was plenty of pretty despondent wailing too, more than is at all usual for her. And a fair bit of vomiting too.

Kate saw the doctor today and we're going to monitor it over the weekend. I'll keep you updated.

Physics FAIL

In the last post I likened the US debt limit on August 2 to the singularity of a black hole. That's the place where pressure and gravity become infinite and the usual laws of physics cease to apply properly.

Of course I meant the event horizon - the place where an observer is ineluctably in the clutches of the black hole, but doesn't actually notice anything distinct changing in their environment.

ie, the US will be falling towards disaster once we get to that point, but to lots of members of Congress (ie, crazy Republican nutmeat), the game will seem pretty much the same.

As you were.

Past the US debt singularity

Everyone seems to still be assuming that somehow the US government will work out a compromise and raise the debt limit by the August 2 deadline. That's reassuring, because if it doesn't all hell will break loose.

I don't think that's actually going to happen immediately, because I think Barack Obama would rather cut his own hand off than be the president who let it happen. But I think we're all underestimating how comfortable some key political actors will find the status quo on the far side of August 2, when the US passes the singularity into the black hole of default.

First things first: The Treasury has made very clear it will keep up interest payments on government bonds. So, though lots of ratings agencies say they will consider the US in default on August 3, I suspect bond investors who have kept the faith so far (pushing US bond prices near all-time highs, such that some people are actually paying money for the privilege of lending to the US government) will continue to keep the faith, more or less, until every other option has been exhausted.

So what you have on the far side of the singularity is, at least initially, an old-fashioned spending fight. Politically, the US government has three types of liabilities: ones that both parties regard as sacrosanct (ie., interest on government bonds); ones that Republicans like more than Democrats; and ones that Democrats like more than Republicans.

After August 3, Timothy Geithner and the White House will have the job of prioritising which of these payments to make. Debt payments will come first, so the battle is over whether to please the Democrats' favoured groups, the Republicans' favoured groups, or some mix of the two.

The assumption within the Beltway commentariat is that they'll cut off Republican interests at the knees, unleashing a storm of lobbyists who will force the Republicans to come to their senses and raise the damn debt ceiling. I think that could be a serious miscalculation.

The US government has been described as an insurance plan with an army, and that pretty well describes the Administration's spending options: one, payments to defence contractors; two, healthcare programmes for the aged and the poor; and three, welfare programmes for retirees, the unemployed, and the disabled. The other stuff is pretty small-scale.

Liberals like me are hoping that the minute Tim Geithner touches a hair on the defence industry's head, the Republicans will give up and raise the debt limit. But the defence industry is cashed up, can surely get by for a while on IOUs, and is strongly pro-Republican. Plus, defence payments don't add up to much of the immediate bills coming due.
So quite soon, the US has to start defaulting on payments to the welfare state. And, crucially, this is what Republicans want to happen. They want the welfare state wound down. They passed a budget two months ago promising to do exactly that.

Now the problem with that budget was that, while Republican voters in next year's primaries will love it, mass electorates in the election itself will hate it. Republicans in Congress are already trying to kick it under the sofa.

But imagine if, as a Republican facing re-election, you could take the credit for refusing to raise the debt ceiling and forcing Obama to make spending cuts, without having explicitly voted for any of those spending cuts? You could blame Obama for withholding social security cheques, for forcing cuts in healthcare programmes, and for tipping the country into a second recession with the inevitable fiscal squeeze. And you could wave your hands a lot and say that if things had been done your way, everyone would be a lot better off. Yes, that's an utterly inconsistent position to take: welcome to the modern Republican party.

A lot of Democrats are banking on the idea that the playing field will start tilting in their favour come August 3. I think the range of choices just gets worse.

Who goes to garage sales?

We had a garage sale with our friends David and Kathy on Saturday. Or at least a front porch sale: we provided the porch, they provided most of the junk. And we made a massive A$31. If you looked at our porch before and after, I'd challenge you to notice the difference.

I don't know if there was some mythical time when these sorts of things did really well, but if there was it's past. People only go to garage sales for necessity or recreation, but the small consumer goods you'd get there are now so cheap that the saving you make between paying 50c on someone's porch and paying even A$40 to buy something new is not that great. As a rule of thumb, I'd say that stuff that costs less than a night's rent is usually pretty affordable to most budgets; and hardly anyone round here pays much less than A$40 a night in rent, even students.

Add to that the growth of searchable online garage sales like Craigslist, Gumtree, Freecycle, eBay, and there's already another, much more efficient, route to get this stuff at knockdown prices, or for free.

So without bare necessity, the recreational shoppers seem to be the only ones left. Our biggest sale in four hours was of a bag of junk that David literally pulled out of a bin in the basement of his block of flats. The only real customers were people who seemed to love the thrill of the chase, who looked on our display of junk as some sort of degustation menu of trash.

I can see the Lovejoy-style attractions of finding the gem amongst the dross. My friend Jane's antique-dealer father once found an 8th-century Byzantine silver reliquary amongst a box of costume jewellery at a car-boot sale (with a true antique-dealer's diffidence, he offered something like a tenner for the whole box). But there just aren't enough junk junkies out there to get rid of several years' accumulated trash in a morning.

More baby sickness

I forgot to update, but Anya's infected hand has now totally cleared up, leaving a dull smooth scar which will probably vanish as time goes by. This being toddlerhood, however, one ailment is following fast on the heels of the last.

This time it's the gastro flu. Her baby-friend Sofia (OK, the daughter of our friends Jessie and Mark) has apparently had an awful bout of vomiting of late, even losing weight with it all, and it has apparently been running through all the playgroups. So it was pretty inevitable that it would come to Anya.

That meant that I ended up working from home today, as the little one isn't allowed into playgroup due to the tummy bug and Kate has just started working full days so couldn't just take the day off.

Anya had a slight fever earlier in the day but, as I've said before, her general good humour makes dealing with this sort of thing so much easier. After I discovered the fever I gave her a dose of baby paracetamol to lower her temperature--a sickly numbing liquid that tastes of cloves dipped in saccharine. She clamped her lips on the syringe and sucked it down like it was breastmilk. Even when she vomited--first a lilac number after I gave her blueberry porridge for breakfast, and later a complementary pool of mango-yellow slime after her lunch--she did it with a smile, and certainly more of a smile than I showed as I ran around trying to clean it up.

Of course she was occasionally a bit whingey, as I am when I get sick. But she still made us laugh all day. Early in the morning, when I put her down in the lounge clutching her security bunny, she spotted something in her daycare bag and made a beeline for it: a second, identical bunny! We have three of them because she gets them dirty so fast from all the loving she gives them; so far we have managed to make sure that she never saw more than one bunny at once. Well, so much for that. She held them both in the air and grinned at me, like a hunter showing off a brace of pheasants. Double the bunny, double the fun.

Australia's carbon plan

After all the drama and sniping and disorder, Australia actually came out with a pretty decent plan for pricing carbon emissions yesterday.

A fairly good initial price of A$23/ton; a price floor starting at A$15 to prevent collapses and give certainty to renewables investments; and linkages to international systems to help create a global market for this stuff. There's even some failsafes in there to make it difficult for future governments to repudiate the whole thing.

But of course I'm a critic by nature, so here's three things that I think tell you most about the political settlement in Australia these days.

1. Households end up, on average, 20c a week worse off under the initial stage of the plan (fine; we can well afford it); and government revenues end up A$4.9 billion worse off. Econ 101: if households and government end up worse off under a policy, who ends up better off (assuming deficits and debt are constant)? That's right, the private sector. You wouldn't know it from the howls of pain we're hearing from every business lobby in Australia, but this is a net transfer of wealth to private companies on the back of households.

2. Of the A$9.6 billion of compensation adjustments being given to private industry, A$1.3 billion goes to the coal sector. Coal mines at present are mostly sitting on profit margins well over 60%, and about 90% of them are owned by major multinationals or conglomerates such as BHP, Rio Tinto, Xstrata, Peabody, Anglo American, Yanzhou Coal, Idemitsu, Wesfarmers. Barring Wesfarmers, which is unlucky enough to be hitched to a retailing empire, these guys are doing so well right now that they literally don't know what to do with the money. Poor little rich kids.

3. If Australia really wanted to make a difference to climate change, raise revenues, please domestic industry hard-hit by the strong dollar's effect on exports, and limit carbon pollution in emerging countries, it would have a very simple solution: attach a per-ton carbon price to its energy exports. We are the world's biggest coal exporter and the ninth-biggest energy exporter all told. We are well on the way to overtaking Qatar as world's biggest LNG exporter. Most energy products are priced ultimately on their carbon content, because it's almost directly proportional to their energy content; such a measure would be quite legitimate under WTO rules, especially in combination with a domestic carbon price. And it would send a price signal to encourage greener policies not just within Australia's rather piddling economy, but worldwide.

I've asked several senior politicians over the past year why this has never been mooted, and the answer has always been, essentially, "That's not how we're doing it." Which is a fancy way of saying "no comment". I suspect the reason is that, the EU having gone with domestic carbon trading (it's a net energy importer, after all), politicians feel no desire to pick a fight with the resources sector over something no one is pressing them over. So, Australians should start pressing them about it.

News of the end of the News of the World

I have to admit to feeling a twinge of sadness that the News of the World is closing. It's not because I had any great respect for the paper and it's not something I'd expect any non-journalist to share: more just that someone-walked-over-my-grave feeling that Dagenham Ford workers must have got when MG Rover went bankrupt.

Still, the fast-moving cynicism of the move is fairly breathtaking. After all, was it really the 158-year-old paper, per se, that people were outraged about? Or the sordid methods employed by some of its journalists and--though they won't admit it--surely endorsed by senior management? If you've ever opened the pages of the NotW, you could hardly argue that its brand is now irreparably tarnished--it's been a gutter rag since it was reporting the Jack the Ripper case, and it's never been short of amnesiac self-justification. The problem here is a culture--clearly accepted and likely encouraged by its then-editors Rebekah Wade and Andy Coulson, who have and will continue to go far--that encouraged journalists to break not just ethical norms but the law, and to have no qualms about callous disregard for the most basic aspects of humanity in pursuit of a story.

The fact that News International is clearly gunning up to replace the NotW with a Sunday Sun really completes the cynicism of the exercise. My sympathy goes out to the poor damn journalists who had nothing to do with this and are now paying with their jobs. Newspapers employ a lot of people and these sorts of activities seemed to have involved a relatively small number of "investigative reporters" who left five years ago, plus no doubt a cadre of editors and managers who remain or have moved on to greater things. I'm not sure why everyone else gets to suffer.

I realise that this sounds a lot like the "few bad apples" theory of corrupt police officers, famously overthrown when the Stephen Lawrence inquiry found there was a culture of "institutionalised racism" within the Metropolitan Police. But I don't remember anyone suggesting at the time that the Met be closed down before eventually being replaced by a bunch of people transferred from some other institutionally-racist police force. What you need to do after an event like this is sack a lot of managers who have enabled this culture and any reporters who participated in it, and replace them with new journalists who will inculcate a culture that deems the former behaviour utterly, unequivocally unacceptable. The fact that it's hard to imagine any Murdoch Sunday tabloid that represents that sort of culture tells you all you need to know about how long this particular mea culpa will go on.

Early to bed, early to rise?

This morning Anya decided that the day started at quarter to five. She did it in an utterly charming way, of course: waking up and moaning a bit for a feed, and then finishing off by murmuring a few of the increasingly speech-like babbles that she comes out with all the time, as if to say: "That's that done. What are we going to do today?"

Kate had a go at leaving her to see if she went back to sleep, but Anya wasn't having any of it. For a while she lay in her cot, chatting amicably to her bunny, but eventually she decided this was just boring and started wailing for someone to come down and play with her. After about 10 minutes of that you know you're either going to end up playing with her and both having fun, or lying in bed feeling miserable because you're listening to her being miserable. So the day started a bit early.

This is a bit of a change as she's actually been great on the sleep front of late. There's been backsliding and moments of weakness on both sides, but she is more or less sort of sleeping through the night now. It's just unfortunate that she considers the night as finishing somewhere around 5am.

As the nightest of night owls, getting up at 5.30 in the morning--and, moreover, being glad to do it because it gives me time with my baby girl--is not a situation I ever thought I would find myself in (and this morning Kate did it - I did it yesterday). But it's actually pretty fun: Anya's at her sparkiest and most amused with the world first thing, so you can have a good time watching her crawl around the carpet and climb stuff and generally shriek with laughter for no accountable reason.

I think she might have been up particularly early the past few days because there's been some crazy wind storms across the state for the past 48 hours, which have made it pretty noisy with gusts swirling down the street. All the same, Kate and I are scouring our baby sleep books to work out whether the solution is to put her to bed earlier, or later, or something else altogether.

Annals of baffling news stories

There's a story all over the Australian media this morning about some beef farmer in the Top End who's planning to shoot some 3,000 head of cattle to protest government policy.

Rewind for those who haven't been following this: a few weeks ago the government suspended exports of livestock after a TV investigation revealed the horrible treatment of the animals in Indonesian slaughterhouses.

As always with this government, a combination of inept handling, a generally hostile media and swivel-eyed opposition, and interest group special pleading has turned this into a huge political mess. If they lift the moratorium, the animals will be sent back to Stalag Luft Bandung. If they don't, the poor farmers (who have supposedly been running a monitoring programme to make sure these sorts of abuses don't happen) - oh, the poor farmers will lose out. It's Catch-22.

So back to our guy who's planning to shoot 3,000 cattle - so he says, because he can't afford to feed them if they don't get sold. Leave aside the fact that, while morning radio is in a complete tizz about this, even the spokesman they had from the National Farmers' Federation seemed reluctant to take the bait - pointing out the practical challenges of gunning down several thousand large animals in the wild.

The destiny this farmer is planning for these animals is to herd them into overcrowded yards, pack them in trucks stinking of their own crap, load them into ships where the crap is knee-deep, herd them into abattoirs, and kill them using methods even the farmers agree are cruel and unacceptable. Given the choice between that and a bullet to the brain in the wilds of Australia, I know what I'd choose.

What do these journos think happens to livestock anyway? I'm pretty sure they're not being bred to manage the perfume counter at David Jones.

The end of European enlargement

 

There's a good, if slightly for-beginners, article on the Greek debt crisis in the LRB, which is reminding me of the extent to which a big part of the European dream involved precisely the sorts of troubled lending which has left the whole continent in chaos. OK, troubled loans weren't exactly part of the dream. But there's a tried-and-tested way of planning ahead for loans that turn bad: it's called not making loans. And nobody wanted that.

Going round the poorer parts of Europe in the boom years, you would come across signs everywhere marking the location as a recipient of EU structural adjustment funds. These are a great idea in principle. Rich European countries, via unified EU funds, transfer money to the poor countries to sort out some of their really intractable problems; that raises the conditions of the poor countries to the level where rich European banks and funds feel they can invest safely, and you end up with a virtuous circle whereby rich countries invest their savings in high-return projects in poor countries, while poor countries get an inflow of capital to help raise themselves to the level of the rich countries. It all seems so neat!

As we know, this didn't quite work out. But it's worth remembering that well into 2008 the likes of Spain and Ireland were model students in the European club, with hefty budget surpluses.

This is pretty much the same old story of development. In the 1970s the World Bank decided that poor countries were poor because they didn't have enough access to capital, and encouraged western banks to lend heavily on easy terms. The logic of it all was compelling, but when the weather changed the poor countries were left with debt overhangs they spent decades climbing out from under. If done well - think the Marshall Plans - these sorts of loan programmes can be fantastically successful, but if done badly you end up with a massive fiscal mess.

Anyway, it just brought home to me the sad fact that European Union enlargement is about as dead as a dead thing. I always rather liked the idea of a broader as well as deeper Europe, taking in Turkey, the Balkans, eventually even maybe bits of the old core USSR, the Levant, North Africa, or central Asia. Obviously a vision for decades rather than years, but it used to dismay me to see how many continental European politicians balked at the idea of admitting Turkey: if the EU is so insistent on describing itself as a strict ethno-cultural district, how on earth do its member states expect to integrate their own multicultural populations?

Of course that particular dream died years back when France and Germany made clear that Turkey wasn't welcome. Ankara certainly doesn't seem much interested in the EU any more. But if one side of the ideal was killed when the rich countries bolted the doors to new members, I feel the other will die now that the poor countries see less and less benefits from accession.

The great attraction of EU membership has always been that it would open the gateway to riches. Now, potential entrants know that they'll only get a diminishing pot of funds to kick-start the same loan programme they would get whether they were in the club or not. And woe betide them if people are prepared to lend them more than they can afford to pay off. The only help they can expect, following Ireland's example, is a series of bridging loans to help them make it through a punishing era of deflation so that the rich countries don't have to bail out their own banks a second time. Some deal.

Gig: Clare Bowditch

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6Wa2YW3-Iw&w=560&h=349]

Althea babysat for us on Friday night and so we went out to a gig. Clare Bowditch is a great Australian musician in a sort of nu folk vein; like all nu folk artists, she's been getting a bit rockier with each album.

Still, I wasn't expecting quite how er unexpected the gig would be. She started playing one of her tracks solo on stage with an acoustic guitar, but it morphed into a singalong version of Queen's "We Will Rock You"; then there was a spoken-word section that was almost stand-up comedy in which she told an absurd shaggy-dog story about the importance of creativity, accompanied by a rising crescendo of Vangelis' "Chariots Of Fire" soundtrack. Then there was a duet with someone who'd submitted a cover version of one of her tracks to her website; a teapot solo; and a bizarre section in which she came on as a Lady Gaga-style fashion maven called Lady Bodo and sung electro through an autotune application on her iPhone. Throughout, the audience was expected to join in with handcaps, humming, and imitated french horn solos.

In short, it wasn't really like any gig I've been to in two-odd decades of going to gigs. And that was great! It's always seemed bizarre to me that in an artform that cherishes its resistance to convention, gigs are for the most part so conventional - even down to the obligatory encore for which the band reserves all their most-popular songs.

On top of that, it was just a fantastic night in its own right. She was a great performer and, while I've always enjoyed her albums, I felt the songs gained a lot from the live performance. So this is basically a recommendation: if you have any chance of seeing her, do it. She's brilliant.

PS. We were outside with some friends afterwards and she turned up and started chatting to people; she was genuinely down to earth and pretty much as funny as she was on stage. Her and Kate mostly talked about childrearing. Apparently another of the people she was hanging around with was Sarah Blasko, who's famous or something. I should get to know my Australian music a bit better because I had no idea who she was.

PPS. Kate reviewed her first album when she was working at The Australian and gave it a glowing account. So she owes us.

And she's buuuuuyyyying the stairway, to he-eh-ven

At times I think our house looks like an MC Escher engraving. There are stairs everywhere, at different angles, in configurations that are impossible to baby-gate.

When we moved in a month before Anya was born we saw this as a bit of a drawback: stairs equal baby danger. But right now I think it's great: our house is like a giant playground on which she can learn the essential stair-climbing skills that would be lost to her in a bungalow.

We have a split level-bedroom with two steps separating the opposite ends. As I got dressed this morning, Anya was happily crawling up and down the steps, chuckling as she went; perfecting that technique of turning round, looking over your shoulder, and stretching one tentacle-like leg down to bear your weight, before getting to work on the other leg. She's basically mastered this particular obstacle and is ready to graduate to the ungateable four-step turn at the bottom of the main staircase.

This just reminds me of how silly the whole developmental-target thing is. Stair-climbing isn't a developmental stage, but it's pretty clear that Anya's good at it because she lives in a house with lots of stairs. Similarly, in the UK, her crawling accelerated very fast because there were big expanses of carpet that were comfortable and easy to crawl on, compared to our wooden floors.

Crawling is a developmental stage, sorta. It saddens me a bit to think how many people, in today's too-competitive parenting world, must end up worrying that their kid has something the matter with them, just because of the way they decorate their house.

DSK and rape

The apparent collapse of the rape case against IMF president Dominique Strauss-Kahn illustrates a point that feminists have been making for years: it's really, really hard to secure convictions in rape cases.

From the media reports, it looks like the two most damning problems with the case are that the Guinean-born alleged victim made an earlier claim of gang rape which she later retracted; and that she was friends with some suspected drug dealers. On the other hand, there doesn't seem to be much doubt that she and Strauss-Kahn had sex.

Given that Guinea and neighbouring Guinea-Bissau are one of the world's biggest drug transshipment points and migrants tend to hang around with members of their language group, I'm not sure that knowing some suspected dealers is all that damning. As for inconsistencies in the accuser's stories: I can't claim to know much about the state of mind of a rape victim, but trauma often seems to be associated with confusion and even delusion. And I'm not sure why, when told two contradictory stories, the prosecutors were so quick to conclude that the first one was invented, rather than the second.

We can't really conclude anything about what went on in that hotel room, but I think we can all agree that many crimes would never get prosecuted at all if they turned only on the witness-stand credibility of the victim. The problem with rape is that, given the ambiguous nature of the forensic evidence in all but the most violent cases, the credibility of the accuser and the accused is all you've got if you want to cross the bar from legal consensual sex to illegal rape. On that basis, a Guinean immigrant hotel maid with a record of making stuff up doesn't stand a chance against the now-former head of the IMF.

I don't really know how we resolve this without either some sort of breakthrough in forensic evidence or a law to put a thumb on the scale of justice in favour of the accuser (a terrible idea, of course--we don't want to lower the bar of a just trial, even for accused rapists). But I'm worried by the implicit message that, in the eyes of the law, you can't suffer rape if you've got dodgy friends or difficulties with the truth.

Book: Bouvard and Pecuchet

Imagine an episode of Morecambe & Wise scripted by Plato and you've got a decent idea of Gustave Flaubert's last, unfinished novel. I read this book years ago and remember mostly being struck by its quite broad humour. Re-reading it, the seriousness, and slightly overwrought quality of the learning displayed within, seems more prominent.

One of the things I like about Flaubert is that he never wrote the same type of novel twice: Madame Bovary is a melodrama, Salammbo a historical romance, Sentimental Education a bildungsroman, and the Temptation of St Anthony a piece of experimental theatre. Bouvard and Pecuchet is a satire, of pretty much every aspect of 19th century life.

The structure is extremely formulaic. Bouvard & Pecuchet are low-level clerks in Paris who strike up an instant, profound friendship; Bouvard inherits a sum of money from a distant relative, and they use it to retire to the Normandy countryside; they use their idle time to pursue every branch of knowledge they can find. After the introductory events, the novel follows them as they dabble fruitlessly in agriculture, science, history, literature, politics, love, philosophy, religion, and education.

It moves from slapstick early on - as their attempts at scientific farming come up against the brute realities of nature and their venture into landscape gardening produces tasteless monstrosities - to a more serious mood as they start taking up mental pursuits. Flaubert seems to have been pretty serious about examining, and challenging, most varieties of knowledge through the thoughts of this pair; indeed, at times it feels that there is so much learning on display that the spirit of the book flags.

In many ways, it resembles Erasmus' Praise of Folly more than anything else. Bouvard and Pecuchet start out as boobs, justly mocked by a society that includes the author and reader; but gradually, they become prouder and more critical, and you sense that Flaubert is using them to scold contemporary mores. A pair of fools, they end up exposing the folly of bourgeois society rather than their own; their endless curiosity and openness to new ideas distinguishes them from the self-satisfied provincial characters who surround them.

On the other hand, it's hard to see where this curiosity comes from. It doesn't seem to have been present in their lives until they retired to the country, and in that sense it feels that Bouvard and Pecuchet are really just ciphers for the comments Flaubert wants to make about contemporary life and thought.

That, I suppose, is why the book feels less successful when it moves to intellectual life: the ideas start to subsume the personalities, and you start to feel that the author was pushing through the stack of reference books on his desk in the face of writers' block. In parts their friendship is genuinely touching, but character perhaps wasn't Flaubert's strongest suit as a writer.

So: well worth reading if you like Flaubert, and the first three or four chapters would appeal to anyone; but you can see why he was having such trouble finishing it. Flaubert's control of tone and style is one of his greatest assets, but here it feels like it's got out of hand. The close structure of the book prevents it from really taking wing. By all accounts, he was only about a chapter away from finishing, but the novel would only be able to resolve itself properly if Bouvard and Pecuchet had real personalities which had developed over its course. You can't really kill off your characters if you've never quite brought them to life.

Her first line dance

The developmental breakthrough I've been most looking forward to has always been the moment when Anya does her first rendition of "Achy Breaky Heart". And it happened this morning!

OK not quite. But having mastered the art of standing, she's been experimenting with how far she can push her sense of balance. Normally this means waving her arms in the air, like she just don't care. Sometimes, the arms go up for balance and she just gyrates like she's keeping an invisible hula hoop aloft. And sometimes, well sometimes she just stands there grinning and doing what I can only describe as pelvic thrusts.

Anyway she's clearly been practicing, like some miniature tightrope walker, to see how much she can reduce her dependance on her arms as stabilisers. This morning I was playing with her and a country-tinged track came on the kids' music CD that she loves. And bang on cue she put her two hands on her belly, pretty much where the ZZ Top belt buckle would be if she were wearing a belt, and started swaying to the beat like she was St Billy Ray of Cyrus himself. And stared in astonishment as I fell about laughing.

In the future we'll all have cameras implanted in our retinas so we can instantly upload such moments to the global hive brain. But this morning my camera was upstairs so you'll have to take my word for it.

Chris Lilley over-reaches

Kate and I have been fans of Chris Lilley ever since Althea gave us a copy of his first series, We Can Be Heroes. So like a good half of Australia, and a fair few Brits, we've been keenly watching his latest series Angry Boys over the past couple of months. And we're a bit underwhelmed.

For those who don't know him, Lilley basically borrowed the mockumentary style of the original series of The Office but added some broader and absurdist elements as well as a certain tenderness. He's a unique talent and well worth seeing if you haven't already. But I probably wouldn't start with Angry Boys.

The problem for Kate and I is mostly with two characters who are basically ethnic stereotypes: Jen Okazaki, a Japanese woman who takes control of her teenage son's life to turn him into a skateboarding star; and S.Mouse, a juvenile and deluded black American rapper. Neither character really works, and I don't think the reasons are just because of the politics of race. Clearly, the politics of race are intertwined with the history of the entertainment industry. It wasn't so long ago that white comedians routinely trawled for laughs by wearing blackface, and Lilley must have known he was taking a risk to his reputation in trying out these characters. But I think he thought that his talents would carry him through, and that he would succeed in being both post-racial and a bit edgy. It's a high-risk strategy, and it fails for the same reason that this sort of ethnic comedy always failed: he doesn't really understand the people he's satirising.

It's telling that both characters exist in the world of celebrity. Celebrities seem so familiar to us that we think we know them and their backgrounds, when all we're really getting is surface. And surface doesn't work well for Lilley's comedy: his talent is for capturing the nuances of characters, which is why he plays various types of Australians so well. In previous series, he's tried out the minority-ethnic thing before: A Chinese-Australian biology student in "We Can Be Heroes", and a Tongan-Australian schoolkid in "Summer Heights High". Both characters work because he understands their backgrounds enough to make the portrayals convincing and give a certain poignancy to them. I think the success of those portrayals has led to some overconfidence in this series.

Both characters are intermittently amusing, and I certainly wouldn't say I was offended by either. But Lilley simply feels out of his depth. Even I can tell that S.Mouse only dimly resembles the sort of young black American he's meant to be satirising: he's just a hodgepodge of arrogance, swearing and stupidity. Jen Okazaki is marginally more successful because she's basically one of the truly vile characters that he normally does well; but far too much of the humour seems to be built around the old Engrish ranguage thing about how Japanese people can't pronounce 'r's and 'l's correctly. If the characters were better realised, I don't think Lilley wearing blackface would matter in the least. But given the history of racism and the entertainment industry, doing this sort of thing imposes a pretty high bar if you want to pull it off. Lilley doesn't clear it.