Well, my motorbike has been stolen from outside my house. This makes me sad on a very profound level. I don’t hold out much hope for it being recovered considering it would be quite hard to steal so I assume it was done by professionals.

You were a wonderful thing to ride my dearest Hirokae – but I’m afraid the love affair is over.

The insurance company is saying it could take up to 3 months to get my money – my god I hate insurance companies.

So, while I’m waiting, I’ll also be doing a little window shopping. Here are my choices and I’d like some comments (please note that I will be upgrading from a 600 cc to a 1000 cc which does things to me I’m ashamed to admit):

• Honda CBR1000RR Fireblade
• Honda FireStorm (update)
• Yamaha YZF R1
• Kawasaki ZX 10 R
• Suzuki GSX1000R
• Buell Lightning XB12S
• Triumph Speed Triple
• Ducati 749
• Ducati Monster (update – thank you Julie for reminding me)

All comments welcome on either performance or appearance. They are all in the same ball park in terms of performance and price.

On the front page of The Age today was an article about QC Peter Farris who has come out in favour of torture. This is following the debate that was sparked after it became known that Professor Mirko Bagaric, and fellow Deakin law lecturer Julie Clarke are to publish an article advocating torture in extreme circumstances.

This debate has been more than adequately teased out in the mainstream press and the blogsphere so I won’t go into it here (except to assure you all that I oppose torture under all circumstances).

What I thought was noteworthy was that Peter Farris has a blog which is quite admirable for a QC – albeit a rightwing one. A quick skim of the links leaves no doubt about his conservative bias. It is also noteworthy that he’s got a poll running. You might like to vote according to your feelings on torture. When I voted ‘no’ at about 10 am this morning there was an overwhelming anti-torture vote.

I inadvertently joined a protest yesterday. I was getting on the freeway from the docklands in Melbourne on my motorbike. As it turns out I merged into a pack of a hundred odd motorbikes.

Now riding in a pack is always a lot of fun and has a real sense of solidarity so as a rule I generally join in and follow the pack. It wasn’t long into the ride through the tolled Burnley Tunnel that I noticed a few riders with slogans on their jackets and so forth protesting against tolling motorbikes. Then I noticed the Motorcycle Riders Association (MRA) marshals and I knew who the protest was organised by.

Now I generally oppose any user-pays system for public infrastructure so broadly I support the protest. Moreover I don’t think it is unreasonable to afford motorcycles certain concessions considering they pollute considerably less than cars, and cause less wear and tear on the infrastructure etc. Motorcycles have to pay the same amount for registration etc as other road users plus we pay a $50 ‘safety fund’ levy which most motorcyclists agree we see very little for. I can’t help but feel that if more people rode motorbikes then the government would be saved a lot of money. It is also a reasonable solution to the single driver situation that is such a problem in big cities.

There is also a fairly blind bias on my behalf considering my love of motorbikes.

That said, I find that the MRA aren’t a very good organisation on an administrative level. Working at OurCommunity as I do you come across an amazing amount of organisations that just won’t help themselves. This is a continuing frustration because it means these excellent organisations aren’t as effective as they could be. I remember actually emailing the MRA, asking to give them some money (for membership if memory serves me correctly). No response. So I emailed them again, no response. Seriously, if people want to give you money and you can’t reply to an email to take that money you shouldn’t be in business (particularly when an organisation like OurCommunity exists to help you with precisely this.)

Last night I was fortunate enough to attend a lecture given by Tariq Ali – an activist and academic that I’ve admired for some time. I’ve read a couple of his books and have always admired his uncompromising position on so many issues – particularly related to the Middle East.

His talk covered the usual areas you’d expect it to cover and unfortunately much of what he had said I’d heard (or read) before – but it’s a very interesting commentary none the less. I was particularly interested in comments he made about the growing and powerful social movements in South America and his criticisms of Lulu in Brazil for capitulating to the neo-liberal order. He also heaped, perhaps rose-coloured, praise on Hugo Chavez which he rightly pointed out is far from as revolutionary as he is viewed and only 10 or 20 years ago his presidency would have been considered progressive but not nearly as radical.

However this was all old news. The comment that he made that stood out most to me was on the issue of Israel and Palestine. He argued that any hope for a truly sovereign Palestine (by which I mean a two state system) has now been lost and the death of Arafat certainly hasn’t done anything to improve the chances of this – particularly while Sharon is still in power. Instead, he argued that the only way that any sort of emancipation for the Palestinian people can be achieved is through a one state system where power is shared equally by all ethno-religious groups (including Arab Christians as well as Jews and Muslims).

I guess it fascinated me because, while I have a fairly limited knowledge of the region and the issues, I’d always assumed this position to be the most utopian position and hardest to achieve. It seemed Ali was arguing that it was easier to achieve than a two state system. Perhaps it also placed in context certain things I’d read by Said.

I’ve stumbled upon Puck’s blog, Australian Idyll.

He’s an interesting fella so it should make for some good reading.

I found myself captivated by Denton’s Enough Rope interview with Don Burke on Monday night.

Burke has always been someone that interested me in a funny, and not so home maintenance based way. He’s obviously got a massive intellect and can be a real task master. He made many insightful remarks, but the one that stood out to me was:

Occasionally in the early years they did, but somehow they’ve learnt, like anything else in the environment, to cope, and that is, what you’ve hit on now, is what the conservation movement doesn’t get. They keep saying that if you squeeze every muscle in your body real tight and you close your eyes and HOLD, the world will stay the same. It won’t and it’s changing. And to me, the challenge to a thinking person is – How do you create tomorrow’s Australia that allows us to live and raise our kids and all of that but allows the environment a chance to work with us.

Tim Lowe also makes this point and in many ways it exposes the conservatism of much of the environment movement as well as provides a very real challenge to environmentalists such as my self.

I was reading on a blog somewhere (and I’m really frustrated that I can’t find it again) that there are those that argue that the Simpsons and South Park are right-wing. It’s not the first time I’ve heard this either and it always strikes me as bizarre. To me, both have always been left-wing social commentary and I wonder what this says about me and these people.

The evidence sited seems to be the way both shows take the piss out of left wing people. But just because you’re left-wing doesn’t mean that you can’t have the piss taken and the over sensitivity of some on both the left and right always amazes me. For example when Matt Stone and Trey Parker (creators of South Park) put out Team America, David from the movie show was up in arms about taking the piss out of all these actors that spoke out about the war. At the time I was left thinking ‘thank god someone finally took the piss out of Michael Moore’. Did David forget Trey Parker’s appearance in Bowling for Columbine? And last night’s episode of the Simpsons were Marg’s sister Marries a woman and proudly affirms her homosexuality would surely leave any doubt behind. Moreover, Homer is a continual piss take of the American Dream and just keeps getting dumber (and funnier).

South Park tends to target Political Correctness gone wrong. It would be easy to see this as a right-wing opinion (particularly if you wear the blinkers that the right so often wear). I feel that their real target is oversensitive social conservatives. The Christian right is their primary target and their overt antagonism with regards to homosexuality is surely evidence of this. Perhaps this is yet another example of the right’s continual search for political point scoring – it’s hard to say.

Alex Malik has provided us with a really informative opinion piece in The Age today which I thought is was worthwhile drawing people’s attention to.

It confirmed a few things I’d been wondering about.

Update:Weatherall’s Law provides us with a noteworthy criticism.

In my mind, the decision to allow Lesbians and single women IVF treatment is a great victory.

I remember when this became an issue a few years back a couple of my friends saying “Lesbians, maybe, but single women – children need to be brought up by a loving couple.”

I argued quite strongly against this. If a woman wants a child then I believe she has a right to one. The implication of ‘social infertility’, as it was described at the time, was that a woman can get pregnant if she really wants so why waist public funds on her? Therefore, if you can’t get a man and want a kid, then just pop down to your local on a Friday night pick up some young, healthy looking fella, get your rocks off, pay for his taxi home and you’ve got yourself a baby.

Perhaps more importantly, is that it implies a very narrow view of family and child rearing. The old saying ‘It takes a village to raise a child’ is just as true now as it has always been. Child rearing should be a community responsibility. If a single mother is raising a child, the hope is that she has a strong support network who are there to look after the child and provide that child with a variety a carers providing that child with a wider range of experiences. In fact I’d argue that too many nuclear families are far to isolationist to the detriment of the child.

So this is a victory for women and the community.

When Costello says that they are going to impose tougher tests on disability support pensions I can help but think the episode of The Office where Gareth Keenan says something to the effect of, I just think people in wheel chairs should be tested to ensure that they are disabled. ‘Like what’ he’s asked, ‘I don’t know, maybe while they are all lining up to collect their benefits you could sound the fire alarm and see if any of them get out of their wheelchair to escape.’

(This is far from an exact quote but I think you get the picture.)