Abortion and Democracy, Land Taxes, Neotopia, the New Zealand Option (Part III), Unitarian News, Tax

Cardinal Pell's recent comments represent an act of religious bigotry against Islam and an attack attack democratic right. He asks: Does democracy need a burgeoning billion-dollar pornography industry to be truly democratic? Does it need an abortion rate in the tens of millions?.

What Mr. Pell doesn't understand, because he has a theological perspective on such matters, that the right to engage in self-regarding acts, and the right to engage in consensual acts with other people is "dignity" is a democratic society. Universal rights are a good in themselves. On a related issues, despite the Prime Minister's assurances.
Cabinet to discuss abortion. Ho hum. Didn't see that coming did we?

First political change for me this week was joining Prosper Australia, a body which advocates the removal of taxes on production (income, company, GST etc) and
their replacement with resource rentals. It's a position which every economist from Karl Marx to Milton Friedman agrees with but politicians tends to avoid. Besides, there are some powerful vested interests even when it does work, as
Denmark once discovered.

Second big political change is neoptopia, an online political theory and "nation-building" excersise. A little bit like Jennifer Government: Nation-States, I suppose, but more rigorous.

Whilst the conservative partisanGerald Henderson can barely hide his glee that Julian Burnside hasn't hopped on the 'plane to New Zealand or Canada yet, has anyone noticed that Air New Zealand are offering discounted one way tickets? I wonder why. Further investigations have also lead me to discover that New Zealand has quite
a history of resource rents as a means of public funding. Good.

Next Sunday is the Melbourne Unitarian Church's one hundred and fifty-second anniversary, and the speaker will be Sister Brigid Arthur from the Brigidine Asylum Seekers Project. Yours truly will be conducting the service which is a great honour given both the time and the topic, although I'm still searching for an appropriate text for the reading.

Last Sunday's presentation was James Nevein (who is actually a Quaker), from the Uniting Church's Kildonan Child and Family Services speaking on Family Violence. He did a fairly good job, and especially managed to tie in family violence to economic circumstances which of course, is something that conventional wisdom often forgets. At the Church committee meeting afterwards, I was put forward as a delegate to the ANZUA conference in Christchurch (NZ) next year.

Financially, the past year has been absolutely appalling for me. My income has been at its lowest for several years at least, even lower than my volunteers allowance in East Timor. I'm not flat broke yet, but recently paying a $1 100 tax bill (all HECS) from two years ago, thanks to the poor administration at the Parliament of Victoria wasn't helpful. Fortunately, the business side of things is looking up. In the next two weeks I have no less three major web-development projects to carry out. It'll be a little while before the money comes in but there's light at the end of the tunnel.

Meanwhile, Red Friday Issue 4 has been produced and circulated with a special article encouraging community organizations and small businesses into networking and an article introducing networking technologies. The next issue's article is on "help desk horror stories" (the sort of thing that comes from alt.tech-support.recovery for example). Anyone have some silly tales out there?

Last week I promised to do a chart comparing state graduation rates with voting distribution. Well, I finished it and there's a slight difference. Pearson correlation coefficients do indicate that Democrat votes do more strongly correlate with Republican votes compared with graduation rates on a state-by-state basis. (Chart will be posted in four hours after this post - it's at work). OK, it's up now..

catbiscuit alerts me to
an apology. Whereas begedel has found a 'blog in Iraq with something to say. Some harsh words (with more than a modicum of truth) from rilian; Fuck The South.

Finally, patchworkkid provides the disturbing news that electronic voting and exit polls don't mix. Explain this please (brainbreaker for the week):

"In several swing states, and EVERY STATE that has Electronic Voting (but no paper trails) they have an unexplained advantage for Bush of around +5% when comparing exit polls to actual results. In EVERY STATE that had paper audit trails on their Electronic Voting, the exit poll results match the actual results reported within the margin of error. So, we have MATCHING RESULTS
for exit polls vs. voting with audits vs. A 5% unexplained advantage for Bush without audits."