MSNBC presenter Mika Brzezinski refused to read a Paris Hilton story as the lead news story, believing that Republican Senator Richard Lugar’s attack on Bush’s Iraq policy should have lead the news:
Somebody should have the same guts at online “news” bottom feeders and hit wh*res, the Smage online. Here’s how Fairfax covered Brzezinski’s actions:
News anchor loses it over Paris story
Their story was followed up with an exciting item about:
An empty gourmet dog food can plundered from Hilton’s rubbish bin has launched an eBay bidding war reaching $US1.5 million ($1.8 million).
The most read story at their purely online “newspaper”, The Brisbane Times, which some naively thought would give the Curious Snail a run for its money with serious Brisvegas journalism? Beauties brave Brazilian wax. The Brisbane Times employs fifteen journos. I swear MX has broken more news.
According to its website, the Institute of Public Affairs believes in something called the “free market of ideas”. I think that’s actually econo-babble for free and open political and public debate, otherwise known as “freedom of speech” and “freedom of expression”.
Whatever the free market of ideas is, it seems that in the view of one IPA research fellow, there’s no room in it for “fair trade” and, when it comes to the one social institution whose freedom should be paramount - the market - it shouldn’t be sullied by charities selling so-called “fair trade” products.
On Wednesday this week, the ACCC - a government organisation that exists either to protect consumers from their own laxity and stupidity or from the effects of market-distorting interventions by other government agencies - dismissed a complaint from Sinclair Davidson and Tim Wilson against Oxfam Australia for deceptive conduct and retail price fixing in the sale of Fair Trade Coffee through its web-site.
Lauredhel at Hoyden has a great links post up, and I’m also going to post some links supplied by some of our commenters in the various threads we’ve had going since Howard announced his NT plan. Go round to Hoyden to read more about the reaction from the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, the ACT Human Rights Commissioner, and importantly from Rex Wild QC, one of the authors of the NT report which sparked the declaration of a state of emergency.
It’s astonishing that people can be denounced so vociferously for being cynical about the Federal Government’s motivations, when you read a week after the announcement was made that Indigenous employment programmes in WA dealing with the welfare of children, domestic violence and alcholism are being closed down due to Commonwealth funding cuts this weekend. Alan Carpenter also points out this is a “work to welfare” transition orchestrated by the Federal government. In this instance, it seems to be one policy conflicting with the aims of another - a sign of Federal incompetence, failure to understand “whole of government” approaches, and general confusion, complacency and bloody mindedness.
Evidently, as pointed out by derrida derrider, I was in a much too forgiving mood on Thursday night when I mused that Howard might have been snookered into providing funding for serious long terms solutions rather than short term PR fixes (and how soon the media gets tired of highlighting what’s actually going on in the Territory is an important variable in how this all plays out).
The Hon. Duncan Gay: There was snow at Crookwell yesterday. It will all be flowing into the catchment. The Hon. MICHAEL COSTA: That is what I love about these people. When the drought was at its worst, I kept saying, “It will rain”. But the Greens and idiots like Tim Flannery said, “It will never rain.” The Hon. Melinda Pavey: He is the Australian of the Year. The Hon. MICHAEL COSTA: You made him Australian of the Year, not me! Well it has started to rain and it seems as though it is going to rain forever. These people do not understand climate cycles. When it comes to the climate they are alarmists and cannot see beyond the end of their noses. They create division, panic and fear so that they can rustle up a few naïve people to vote for them at election time. Climates change. If there is one constant about climates, it is that they change. I do not mean that they are changing now; but they have changed over history. We will continue to see climates change, and rain cycles will vary from drought, to normality, to heavy rainfall incidents. That is the reality of the world and that is what we have to plan for. We do not plan on a day-to-day basis, as the Greens do. It is easy for them to make unaffordable promises and to come up with an economic model that could apply only in cloud-cuckoo-land. It is easy for the Greens to make policies that no-one need fear will be implemented. But that does not stop them putting up ridiculous propositions every question time. The Government’s policy is clear. We have a range of alternatives to secure our water supply, including capturing water for our dam system, recycling and, now, desalination.
I like an open mind. I’m happy to know the minister accepts that climate changes and continues to plan for a water poor future.
Reports emerged today from Britain that Prince William, heir to the British throne, aspires to becoming Governor-General of Australia. Political reaction from Australian political leaders seemed strangely unimpressed with the idea.
Prime Minster Howard was quoted as saying “Although I remain a supporter of our current constitutional arrangements, I do think the practice of having a person who is an Australian in every way, and a long term and permanent resident of this country, is a practice I would not like to see altered.”
What? Deprive David Flint of serious royal schmoozing time? “The appointment of Prince William would be very popular, and attract international attention. Unfortunately, the disgraceful, appalling behaviour of some of our leading politicians – all republican - has ensured that it won’t happen. Imagine how they would behave if they controlled the presidency.�
From a lot of cultural indicators, you’d think that religious belief in Australia was on the increase. Certainly politicians and commentators talk about it more than they used to; Kevin Rudd is more open about his Christianity than any of his recent predecessors, and Paul Kelly assured us last year that secularists “are fighting a losing cause”.
…
But if we move from the world of rhetoric to the world of hard data, the picture is quite different. This week’s release of 2006 census figures shows that only 70% of Australians identified with a religion, and only 64% with some variety of Christianity (down from 71% in 1996). Just under 19% said they had no religion, while about 11% declined to answer the question.
Even those figures, however, overstate the extent of religious commitment. While, for example, the 1.1% who described themselves as Pentecostals are probably serious about their religion, we know that more traditional categories - principally Roman Catholic (25.8%), but also Islam (1.7%) and Judaism (0.4%) - function more as social or cultural identities, and do not necessarily involve religious belief.
They certainly don’t equate to church attendance: the 2001 National Church Life Survey found that weekly attendance was down to 8.8% of the population. A 2002 survey found that 18.8% “claimed to attend religious services at least monthly”, down from 20% in just four years. And surveys of what people actually believe consistently find that many professed adherents of traditional religions are in fact gripped by what George Pell calls “heresy or unbelief”.
There’s another particularly interesting aspect of the census data on religion, which was picked up by Bernard Salt in The Government Gazette yesterday. Ignore the gibberish about generationalism - his explanations are his stock in trade pop sociology, but he’s quite right to identify the crucial aspect of the data beyond the headline figures.
I was wondering if anyone would pick up on the link I inserted into my Blade Runner post, but apparently not. So here’s the headline:
Let women give birth to human-animals say Catholic bishops
You could approach that one from any number of angles, but I’m simply flabbergasted at the ludicrous lengths to which the “right to life” position can be stretched. But if you want to discuss it in terms of bio-ethics, that’s fine. Or talk about mythological Chimerae. Incidentally, the Empress of Racnoss on tonight’s Doctor Who is one.
All week, Crikey has been rating various media for bias. Today, it’s the blogosphere’s turn. I didn’t write the bit on LP. Other than that, it’s a collective effort, so I won’t be responding on behalf of the authors. The article is reproduced, with permission, over the fold.
There are several bullets that can potentially be bitten in the process of making sure that the supply and demand for urban water meet, and none of them are particularly pleasant for state governments. But the particular bullets that have been bitten have varied somewhat from state to state. In a nutshell, the bullets are:
the perceived ickiness of drinking water that’s been through other people’s digestive systems - in a nutshell, the pooh factor.
the energy usage, and potential brine disposal problems of desalination
the screams from the farming sector if water is taken from river systems currently exploited for irrigation, particularly the Murray-Darling
whatever technological fix is adopted, the cost of water will go up, and the best way to recover that cost is user-pays (with possible compensation for low-income earners)
I was talking to two university students last week - one aged 40, the other 20 - and was surprised to learn that both of them still write their essays by hand. Sure, they both have computers, use email and the Internet, but they said they couldn’t “think” and edit via the keyboard. Continue reading ‘Caught in the Web’
As Gwynne Dyer argues in The Mess They Made, the Middle East is about to change fundamentally, and everything is now up for grabs: regimes, ethnic pecking-orders within states, even national borders themselves are liable to change without notice. Five years from now there could be an Islamic Republic of Arabia, an independent Kurdistan, a Muslim cold war between Sunnis and Shias, almost anything you care to imagine.
Dyer’s book is important because it’s one of the few books on the topic I’ve read (and I’ve read a lot) to really make the effort to place the current conflicts in their long term historical perspective, and to speculate on a future beyond the immediate political and strategic context (although he nevertheless documents the now familiar litany of disasters that has characterised the Iraq War). He does, however, extrapolate from that context to a conclusion which I think is becoming inescapable - much as the Democrats, either through lack of courage or political calculation, might be prepared to maintain US forces in Iraq until the 2008 election, it’s almost certain that the “implosion of public support” for the war will see troops leave when a new President, of either party, is sworn in. Dyer adds his voice to those scholars and analysts who’ve seen the US war in Iraq as a monument to its decline, not a sign of its growing power. Further, he argues that it’s likely that the US will walk away from the Middle East in toto, and he suggests that may not be an undesirable outcome.
Blair’s going, going, gone, and Gordon Brown will be off to the Palace soon to kiss hands. We’ve already had some reflection here at LP on Blair’s legacy (and, incidentally, I think his new choice of role as a Middle East peace envoy is quite bizarre in a way), but I wanted to make some observations on John Quiggin’s post on “Thatcherism after Blair”. John argues that Thatcherism can now be seen within its historical context:
In some respects, this was a necessary response to the times. Demands on the postwar welfare state had outrun state capacity, and a combination of retrenchment and refurbishment was inevitable. Since the political right was correctly pointing this out at a time when the left was still recovering from the impossibilist fantasies of the 1960s, it was probably inevitable that the adjustment would come with some of the ideological baggage of Thatcherism.
It’s a bit astonishing to read that Blade Runner was released twenty five years ago. Perhaps that’s because the visuals set the scene for so many other films, and the android/human ontology can be traced, via anime through The Matrix to a world where the Catholic Church defends the right to life of Chimerae. Ridley Scott’s LA 2019 is not only the metropolis of our nightmares, but actually possibly of our desires, and uncannily prefigures the path California has actually taken - towards an Imperial hub gazing East and drawing in capital and populations from the Asian rim, as urban decay sits uneasily against the latest corporate empires to be founded on hypermobile finance and tech savvy. The literary critic Fredric Jameson has recently argued that Deckard’s dilemmas - how do you tell the human from the android, what are memories, what if I am non-human? - are in fact the same sorts of solipsistic problems Descartes struggled with in his ontology, and thus, defining questions of a materialist and post-Enlightenment era. But, in the film itself, they’re set against quite a non Cartesian background - almost the stuff of memory and feeling itself. It’s a phenomenology, then, not just of the future but of the eternal present that is our (late) modernity.
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