So Why Did That Chicken Cross the Road? - Uncut

For light holiday reading, here's a chicken-joke special I did for the 2005 summer edition of AAP, including those that failed to escape the editor's space-saving buzzsaw. Some of them are a little dated by now, but not too much.

Why did the chicken cross the road?

Philosophy major: To get to the other side.

Adam Smith: The comparative advantage of chickens lies in crossing roads.

John Kerry: The chicken crossed because this President was fighting the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time.

Swift Boat Veteran for Truth: I was there and I can assure you, that chicken did not cross that road.

Steve Bracks: The impact of the chicken’s road-crossing on the state's finances meant the Government had to make a difficult decision. The decision to fund the road by a toll was not made lightly, but it is the responsible decision for the future.

John Howard: In a world where chickens cross roads, who do you trust to manage the economy and keep interest rates low?

Lee Kuan Yew: The chicken’s behaviour illustrates the moral breakdown of western society.

John Stuart Mill: So long as the chicken’s action does not harm others, it is at liberty to cross roads.

Michel Foucault: This was the chicken’s journey of self-actualisation, an act of mapping its own external reality in resistance to the hidden normative. By crossing the road the chicken shows how power is socially constructed, bottom-up and inherently diffuse.

Ralph Nader: Our two-party system left the chicken no other choice.

Phillip Ruddock: Given the suspicious circumstances of the chicken’s crossing, the Americans were quite justified in locking it up for three years without charge.

Dan Rather: After extensive additional interviews, I no longer have the confidence in the fact of this chicken crossing the road that would allow us to continue vouching for it journalistically.

Deng Xiaoping: Black chicken, white chicken – if it crosses the road it’s a good chicken.

Thucydides: What made the crossing inevitable was the growth of the farmer’s power and the fear which this caused in the chicken.

Noam Chomsky: The chicken’s action is another step in the expansion of the US hegemonic system.

Rush Limbaugh: I mean, before we even get a proper report about this chicken, naturally America is already the guilty party!!

Franklin Graham: I believe that road-crossing is a very evil and wicked religion. I don’t believe chickens are evil because they cross roads – I personally have many friends who are chickens – but I decry the evil that has been done in the name of road-crossing.

Osama bin Laden: It is a sacred duty of all Muslims to kill chickens that cross roads.

Thomas Hobbes: Because life for chickens is nasty, brutish and short.

Mark Latham: Chickens cross roads because they don’t have a ladder of opportunity. There are two types of chicken on this road, slackers and hard workers, and we need to ease the squeeze on them and practice democracy in the raw.

Pentagon spokesman: We can neither confirm nor deny that a chicken crossed the road.

Donald Rumsfeld (1): It’s a misunderstanding to see that image over and over, of a chicken crossing the road, and say ‘You didn’t have a plan’. Freedom’s untidy, and that chicken is free to make mistakes and cross roads.

Donald Rumsfeld (2): The Army leadership is sensitive to the fact that not every road is as clear of chickens as would be desirable, but you go to war with the Army you have. It’s essentially a matter of physics.

Lenin: Any act of the chicken was justified, if it advances the revolution.

Homer Simpson: Mmmmm, chicken.

Chinese Communist: This chicken was clearly taking the capitalist road, as part of a hypocritical imperialist effort to split the sovereign Chinese nation. The Chinese People will never bow to such blatant aggression but will resolutely pursue the Four Modernisations along the scientific materalist path of socialist spiritual civilisation, adhering steadfastly to the Four Cardinal Principles and the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence while fortifying their minds with the unshakeable dictates of Marxist-Leninist-MaoZedong Thought!

Team America, World Police: Who gives a f--k? Let’s f-----n blow the G-dd-mn sh-t out of it!

Return Of Ozone Man

Follow the link below to a very good article by one of the Guardian's top writers, Jonathon Freedland, interviewing a previously ridiculed US Democrat - American comedian Bill Maher said he ran in the 2000 campaign "on a platform of ending charisma as we know it" - who is very suddenly back in vogue as a presidential candidate for 2008.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,1786438,00.html

Abolish full-fee places…and raise HECS

Universities need money. To be world-class, as the University of Melbourne aspires to be, requires lots of money. And government is steadily decreasing the amount of money it supplies. That means, inevitably, this shortfall will have to be filled, at least in part, by the students who attend.

I see nothing particularly evil about this. Why should education be free, or even cheap? Education sets you up in life: most courses more or less guarantee you a relatively prosperous career path. And the fact that in Australia, students are not charged while they are studying and hence impoverished, but take on a no-interest loan until they are earning enough to pay it back, sweetens the deal further.

But it’s simply wrong to lower academic standards to get money, as is the current situation. Students, international and domestic, with lots of up-front cash, can get into uni with lower qualifications than those with more smarts but less money.

I say, all remaining hold-outs should reach the conclusion that the basic formula, of students having to pay their university more money to ensure its quality, is the only realistic one. But instead of a double-standard of entry to unis, a more equitable solution is to progressively phase out full-fee places, while significantly raising HECS fees - doubling or tripling them, probably - to make up the shortfall.

Affirmative action for public schools?

I don’t actually agree with the Labor Party that funding for private schools should be slashed and put into public schools. It’s reasonable to think government schools need more money – very reasonable – but this should come from elsewhere in the coffers. The only immediate effect of taking funding away from independent schools would be to cause their fees to rise, and so drive away everyone except the rich. The only major effective change, then, would be to make some worse off without making anybody much better off, as there’d be no real improvement in school quality from the cash redistribution in the short term.

For a better way of redressing the ugly imbalance that is a two-tiered school system, why not affirmative action for government schools? Defenders of private schools and the taxpayer money that sustains them are always banging on about how parents who make the private ‘choice’ are not actually trying to buy a high ENTER score. They say it’s much more than that: better facilities, better students and staff, and, of course, ‘values’. Well, let’s test it. Let’s start adding, say, five, even ten percent to the ENTERs of students from government schools, as a way of addressing the obvious inequality, fixing the skewed entry to uni, without reducing the (supposed) quality of private school education.

It wouldn’t damage the goal of a meritocratic education system, either. The old analogy comes to mind about two sports players, one fully fit, the other recovering from illness, and both seem relatively even in ability at training. The coach, having to pick a single player for the upcoming season, chooses the one not fully fit – the one with potential to get better.

The Taiwan Strait War, 2013

Fast-forward to June, 2013. Consider the following sequence of events -

The Republic of China's president, a DPP independence hawk with a legislative majority, announces his intention to seek a constitutional amendment changing the island's name to the Republic of Taiwan. Despite PRC warnings, the US government's response is watered down to 'non-support', in the face of overwhelming sympathy for Taiwan from Congress and the American public.

Amidst mounting rhetoric from Beijing, two US carrier battlegroups are despatched to the waters east of Taiwan. The ROC government unveils its constitutional changes, which - in another unpleasant surprise for Washington - exclude any part of mainland China from the new republic, amounting to irrevocable rejection of the 'One China' principle. The PLA is mobilised.

With the American media howling 'appeasement', the US president reiterates that an attack on Taiwan is a matter of grave concern for the United States. All Washington's regional allies declare neutrality; Japan and South Korea even deny the US use of military bases on their soil. China's central bank floods the market with US treasuries, sending Wall Street and the US dollar into tailspin. Congress passes a landslide resolution pledging to defend Taiwan.

The PLA occupies Jinmen and Matsu, and in response the two US carriers enter the Strait. China announces a blockade and fires a hundred missiles into Taiwan; the ROC airforce hits back at mainland targets. The penny drops when US and Chinese forces engage. Who shot first remains in doubt, but the Chinese simultaneously launch an electronic warfare offensive, cancelling the traditional US information dominance of the battlefield.

A US carrier goes to the bottom, with almost all hands. The American public cries for blood and US planes join the ROC airforce to plaster targets along China's southeast coast. Both Washington and Beijing put their strategic nuclear forces on maximum alert. Urged to send the B2's against Beijing and Shanghai, the US president blinks at armageddon and calls his Chinese counterpart, who's also getting cold feet. China lifts the blockade and withdraws its forces on a number of conditions, including the resignation of Taiwan's president and the opening of reunification talks. Faced with a threatened US withdrawal, Taipei buckles.

In the aftermath, the US severs diplomatic ties with China and slaps a total ban on commercial intercourse. The US and the world economy suffer, but not as much as China, which for a while looks ready to descend into chaos. But the Communist Party clings on and settles in for a new cold war across the Pacific, which three decades later is still going strong. After a decade of talks, Taiwan joins China in a loose confederation.

At this point I should confess that this cheerful scenario isn't my own work, but a summary of the second chapter in America's Coming War with China. It does happen to tally almost exactly with an essay I wrote last year on the ominous trends in the 'Taiwan problem'. Unless some serious political lifting is done, we're more likely than not to have a war in the Strait within the next ten years.

That lifting needs to come from both sides of the Pacific. At a general level the whole power structure of the Asia-Pacific needs a makeover, as I argued a while back on this blog, if Sino-US conflict is to be averted. On Taiwan specifically, the US needs to junk 'strategic ambiguity' in favour of a tougher stance towards the governments on both sides of the Strait. The key elements of the above scenario are Beijing's readiness to attack Taiwan upon a decisive bid for independence, and Washington's failure to preempt such a bid or squash it the moment it happens (as happened to Taipei's nuclear program). A clearer US commitment to the status quo wouldn't guarantee against this situation, but it would help.

It's high time that someone with foreign policy credentials spotlighted this issue, in the form of an accessible read. So kudos to America's Coming War With China, even if in other bits it shows up the incapacity of Western commentators to get basic China facts straight. Memo to Mr. Carpenter: it wasn't the Ming dynasty which occupied Taiwan in 1661.

Scoff at this scenario if you like, but recall that September 11 was unthinkable before it happened. (Whether some people foresaw the use of passenger jets as weapons of terrorism is besides the point). By contrast, analysts have been warning for the better part of a decade - Carpenter's book was published in 2001 - that the 'Taiwan problem' is heading towards a violent resolution. We even had a dress rehearsal in the form of the 1996 Straits Crisis, which played out along similar lines to Carpenter's scenario. Since then the PRC's military position has strengthened, vis-a-vis the US and especially the Republic of China, which has elected a president who rejects the basic principle underpinning Beijing's approach to the problem.

And yet we're sill waiting for some creative thinking in Washington about management of the Taiwan issue and relations with the PRC more generally. Instead we've got a 'China Threat' literary industry, long on hysteria and short on knowledge of contemporary China, let alone the country's history and long-term prospects. At the official level we now have a US strategy for 'full-spectrum dominance' and the cleansing of terrorism from the earth, into which China is expected to fit meekly. The issue of Taiwan's independence gets once sentence, and it doesn't offer concessions to Beijing.

Next to the potential consequences of this war, the threat posed by Islamic extremism pales into insignificance.