A David and Goliath Story in Australia

What do you do when laws that are designed to protect children aren't enforced? This situation came up in Victoria, Australia when the Watchtower Society (also known as Jehovah's Witnesses) became the only major religious group to refuse to comply with the Working With Children Act. This act required that ministers have a background check before they work with children. This seems a reasonable precaution, especially for a group that has faced many scandals about alleged coverups of child abuse within their religion.

For whatever reason, they refused to comply with this law for years. Strangely, the police also refused to do anything about enforcing this law.

Fortunately, Australia has legal provisions that allow citizens to act as private prosecutors in cases like this. (I don't understand how exactly this works.) This is what a Mr. Steven Unthank did when he took on the Watchtower Society and related corporations.

I have been watching this case with interest as it seems like a true David verses Goliath type showdown. The Watchtower Society has a vast army of lawyers who work for free and have ample experience defending the actions of their client. Steven Unthank, on the other hand, is just a private citizen without legal experience. Remember that this is not a lawsuit, but an actual prosecution for violations of the law, something that would normally be handled by the government.

Things seemed to be going pretty well with several hearings where the charges remained on the books. It looked like the government might take the case and relieve Mr. Unthank of his burden.

Today I learned that that Mr. Unthank received an email from the Director of Public Prosecutions where he indicated he was interested in taking over the cases "for the purpose of discontinuing them.” He even made the shocking suggestion that these prosecution were "not in the public interest."

Well, there a lot of people who feel that protecting children is in the public interest. I don't know how anyone can suggest otherwise. I realize it can be difficult to prosecute the leaders of a religious organisation, but it is cases like this that must be prosecuted to prevent a powerful organization from trampling on the rights of helpless children in order to seve their own interests.

I have emailed the Director of Public Prosecutions to express my disappointment and will be watching this case closely. If you would like more information, you can visit this discussion or #protectingchildrenisinthepublicinterest on Twitter.

Four Dimensional Animation

It looks like portions of the object are passing through itself, but that is just because we are limited to three dimensions.

206

Two hundred and Six is the smallest number that contains all five vowels exactly once when written.

Another Possible Use for a Junkdrawer

I think junkdrawers are great. I prefer to use them to keep entropy at bay, to isolate the inevitable clutter that accumulates in my life, to avoid the awkward mental challenges that come from sorting items that resist any obvious kinship with the more mundane objects that I tend to keep neatly organised, by type and proximity to their probable area of use.

Junkdrawers conceal our embarrassing inability to bring the kind of order to our lives that we may sometimes desire.

You can also build stuff with them.

Here's a video of a guy who built a very functional oud from a drawer. Of course, the question arises as to whether or not this was truly a junkdrawer. He portrays it as a normal clothing drawer. However, it seems improbable to me that he would actually requisition a clothing drawer that was already in use for it's intended purpose. I prefer to think it was merely a left over drawer from a discarded dresser. I bet it began to accumulate various items before he found a use for it. Such is the nature of junkdrawers.

If you build an oud from a drawer, where are you going to store it?