An open thread, where at your weekend leisure, you can discuss anything you like.
Life, Culture and Politics from BrisVegas
Larvatus Prodeo was an Australian group blog which discussed politics, sociology, culture, life, religion and science from a left of centre perspective. more»
Five hours and thirty-one minutes ago our foremothers brought forth among this blog a new thread, conceived in liberty…
5 kids dead in Aghanistan. Why are we there again?
Here is a like for those who prescribe to what I might call ( politely and with respect )the Carbonsink View of the GFC – there are more disasters just waiting to be unveiled.
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http://reason.com/news/show/130843
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Underfunded pension liabilities , poor performance of their real estate investments and political interference in investment choices will combine to further sap the US and it’s tax payers.
If I were involved in opium or arms trading or terrorism I’d figure it’d make sense to carry on my business in the family home around the kids – probably make it less likely for armed forces to bust in shooting people right?
So now we have dead children, soldiers who have to live the rest of their lives with that ok their conscience, and people more than happy to step up to fill the roles of those who were intentionally killed.
But then, how is this day any different from any other. Dead children, resources wasted, banks screwing people, centrelink screwing people.
Is it ant wonder young people have little respect for their elders when it is more than obvious to us as we grow up that our elders have no idea on how to get along with their neighbours or safeguard our rescourses for our great grand children, or that we sell our parents assets to put them in aged care facilities the likes of which we would let our pets suffer.
But what can ya do? Off to the pub for another beer.
link that should be , “link”.
Adam @ 4,
That’s capitalism for you.
Inflammatory SMH
On Thursday Miranda Devine wrote a column in the SMH which is breathtaking in its bad taste. She wrote about the fires: “If politicians are intent on whipping up a lynch mob to divert attention from their own culpability, it is not arsonists who should be hanging from lamp-posts but greenies.” http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/green-ideas-must-take-blame-for-deaths-20090211-84mk.html
If there’s one area of policy Greens do not control, it is forestry, and it is ludicrous to blame them for forest management decisions. But leave all that to one side for now.
At a time when people are grieving and coming to terms with immense loss, and with community emotions running high, is it responsible for a mainstream newspaper to run a column calling for its scapegoats of choice to be strung up on lamp-posts?
The SMH has plumbed new depths in the gutter press.
Afghan kids and civilians in general seem to get killed when US forces call in air strikes. I don’t understand how Australian forces could get around to killing five kids. Did they call in air support? Were they using mortars where you can’t directly see the enemy. If you’re staring down a rifle sight you ought to be able to determine a child from an adult. The Afghan ambassador has complained and an ADF investigation is underway. I think I know the result.
Have just had a long hot bubble bath wqhile listening to rain pounding on the roof. Needed it – Amazon sent me the wrong book last week (but I wanted it anyway). Are sending a replacement copy but are now having minor problems bwcause I can’t pay till next Thursday. Didn’t expect this transaction so don’t have enough in my debit account. Bank shut, forgot password, can’t authorise overpayment from account over the phone as I can’t identify myself. Feels like Kafka is on the front doorstep. The joys of being a reader.
‘Why are we there again?’
To allow the US military-industrial-complex to make huge profits.
Why is LPG back up to 65 cents when 80% comes from natural gas and only 20% from crude? Where’s the incentive to buy new LPG vehicles? And why rip off the poorer motorists when 100,000 of them have tried the double of cleaner, cheaper fuel?
Also surely the new technology with injection of liquid gas per similar to common rail diesel must be introduced to new vehicles. Injected vehicles converted after sales can save 15% fuel with higher power but that’s nowhere near as effective as common rail and silicone injector switches. The Europeans and Japanese will run off with the entire market when we learn how good it is and we will still be stuck with our out of date crap.
Saturday = sushi. I’m starting a new tradition. do you think beer or wine goes better with sushi? I usually like a beer – preferably a pilsner, but maybe a Riesling with a bit of age on it, might be okay?
furious balancing @ 13,
Try a schooner glass containing half a glass of Guiness Stout and half of Strongbow cider,dry.
Brian@7
Just read the Devine piece following your comment, and I despair at the scapegoating of conservationists by some in the media. Reading some of the coverage, it seems like the only way to manage forests is to open them up to further exploitation, just so we can have logging companies’ heavy equipment on hand, and driven down tracks of their making, in the event of fire. Woodchip the lot and I guess we’d be completely safe, seems to be the argument. Instead, as a recent comment on my own blog said, we should be adapting to the wilderness, not adapting it to us. This should be a central theme of the forthcoming Royal Commission.
Then there was Shaun Carney’s piece in today’s edition of The Age. Carney lumps in with those of the Devine perspective anyone who invokes climate change as a factor in these fires. I guess that includes the National Secretary of the United Firefighter’s Union. The trouble is, the climate perspective has strong reasons behind it, unlike the lynch-a-greenie mentality.
While it is clearly difficult to pin down climate change as the culprit for any individual extreme event, the fact that global warming makes such events more likely is clealry accepted, and was recently stated by Professor David Karoly, head of the Victorian State Government’s own climate change reference group.
What we can then say is that the Rudd government’s climate policies are entirely consistent with an increased number of very severe bushfires because they are entirely consistent with runaway global warming. Even if we can’t dictate an effective policy to the world, we can show leadership. Is our own policy failure – a pro-bushfire position – in any way morally acceptable to our leaders? Carney appears to think this argument ‘bone-headed’. I suggest his criticism is short-sighted and dismissive of the reality before us.
Finally, while the focus in this utter (and continuing) disaster must be on quelling the fires and the welfare of victims, we will ultimately need to look for reasons why this happened. The answers will show many factors made this inferno – the despicable acts of arsonists, the inadequate response of government in comunicating about the emergency, and – yes – global warming that has pushed our tinder-dry forests beyond the temperature records. When the terms of reference appear next week, let us hope they afford a genuine opportunity to acknowledge the truth of these matters.
Sushi goes best with miso soup and if you have to have a buzz on as well hot sake.
If you don’t like sake then beer .
Certain sushi – uni( urchin ) and salmon ( or other ) roe go well with red wine.
I like Paul’s instruction to drink them all by the schooner too!
imagine if Parliament house started letting private companies put up advertising banners on the walls inside.
that would be just outrageous, wouldn’t it? especially if it these companies were oligopolistic pirates that use market dominance to rip-off Australian consumers at prices totally out of line with what is charged in other countries.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/45779011@N00/3277476261/
Brian: that’s absolutely bloody outrageous.
While we at LP do not command the huge audience that a columnist in a daily newspaper does, we have a sizeable readership, and the nature of the web is that if something we say draws attention anyone in the world – including those who are in some way directly involved – with internet access can read it instantly.
Given that, I’ve personally been very careful what I say on posts dealing with this issue, particularly right now while the fires are still burning in some places.
But it seems that something that goes within a bee’s privates of inciting violence against “greenies” is OK for a broadsheet newspaper these days.
murph the surf @ 15,
)
Ah, yes, I forgot about sake. How could I after the pleasant times I’ve had on it. (The Guinness and cider is probably better with oysters and prawns.
Now. Amazon. All has been satisfactorily, in fact excellently resolved. Kafka lost.
Really M. Divine should lose her job for this.
She’s written some disgusting things in the past but this takes the cake. I can’t even imagine Bolt or Ackerman writing something like that.
Comparing greenies to arsonists and saying that they deserve a lynch mob is something that no responsible newspaper would ever put to print.
Here is what I wrote to SMH:
You can send feedback to SMH at this link. It only takes a couple of minutes and if enough of us do it they might get the message that this sort of thing is completely unacceptable.
http://www.smh.com.au/contacts/readerlink/
Even better, pick up the phone:
(02) 9282 2833
This is fucked. It should be frontpaged, Mark.
I think it’s a very poor piece, but it’s unlikely to incite anyone. I don’t think would-be vigilantes comb the opinion pages to select their targets. Instead, the real danger is that it might simply influence public opinion by distracting attention from the more pertinent questions that should be asked about these fires – in the media and in the forthcoming Royal Commission. It would be a pity if public sentiment settled on conservation as a cause of the fires, and failed to sufficiently acknowledge global warming as an issue, or the need for an urgent review of fire-response strategies. That said, by all means complain – poor journalism is poor journalism, and the impact of it becomes worse with the importance of the issue it covers.
You’re right Darren but this isn’t just “poor journalism”. the author literally says “greenies are worse than arsonists”. This is old fashioned “Jews are poisoning the wells” hate speech and it crosses a serious line.
Now, this headline from the Australian (their quotation marks, not mine):
‘Rush for green vote aids predators’
Is it open season on greenies or something?
The biggest irony are that these wackos are treated as resposible and tree huggin’ shark lovin’ greenies are depicted as controlling the political system whilst simulataneously being extremists.
I’m off to watch the footy, its less depressing.
yeti@22
Yeah, maybe ‘poor journalism’ is too mild, but I still think we have to keep our eyes on the main game, otherwise the tactic succeeds as distraction. BTW, has anyone referred this to Media Watch?
On the contrary, the danger of incitement is very real. There is a real vigilante atmosphere about in some of the most traumatised communities. Rumours are doing the rounds pinning specific fires on specific conservationists and the threat of mob violence is in the air.
What Bill said.
If there were any justice, Devine would lose her job. It is simply unconsciable that someone would use a tragedy like this to promote a political agenda, and in the process incite vigilantism.
Everyone who feels strongly about this should contact the Herald. Surely they can’t afford to offend a large number of readers by publishing such filth.
Of course they can. The number of readers offended enough to complain is probably miniscule – LP-ers, Greenies and my Socialist Alliance mates – a couple of hundred out of tens of thousands. Most people have probably forgotten about Devine’s disgusting piece of trash. Where on earth did they find her, btw? (When she’s not in her sewer.)
The fringe burbs have always hosted your trail bike riders who enjoy their chain saw action and your green-tinged romantic seeking harmony with what they imagine to be nature.
The attitudes of these folks may temporarily harden in the aftermath of a big burn, but their opinions won’t change much in the medium term.
It’d take a better writer than Devine to whip up a lynch mob over this issue.
Devine’s rant, however, does the SMH no credit, while it merely confirms poor opinion of its author.
#28. Isn’t a person (Devine) under the scrutiny of the editor, if not, what are they there for, to incite, to encourage rubbish that Devine and another churn out day by day. Or has the Murdoch bible clawed it’s way into the remaining semi rational outlet that we have left. ($) of course.
As for the Sushi, go with the schooner by all means and drop the fish(a small amount at a time) into the glass,fill with a nice hoppy lager of your choice, swallow. And repeat, several times. Takes away the taste of the fish. Other thoughts occur, best left lonely.
What adrian said and Bill.
Fairfax merged with Rural Press some time ago and “the boys from the bush” have been flexing their muscles, lately, according to Andrew Jaspan who was dumped from The Age as part of this move. It looks mighty likely the environmentalists are now in their sights as well as every other bloody paper.
Not easy being green, eh.
On the topic of Miranda Devine and greenies – I liked this letter in the SMH today.
“Greenie sharks
Shame on you, greenies, for stopping toxic waste dumping (“Navy diver fights off shark”, smh.com.au, February 12). Now our harbour is infested with killer sharks.
Harley Stumm Redfern”
I just looked up Frank Devine’s daughter in Wikipedia to see what she’s ever actually done, and the Geek said, “Oh, looking up Drongo, are you?” Neither of us read her column except by mistake, and we would never have known about this article apart from the furious letters it provoked. Darren, she’s not a journalist, just an op-ed writer. The SMH publishes columnists from left and right, and I read most of them, but I won’t read Devine any more simply because she’s so nasty. Her nastiness has a slightly lunatic edge that I find quite disturbing — this column is typical AFAICT. I may not often agree with (say) Gerard Henderson, but I don’t worry that he will go postal in the Herald offices!
Re the many posts regarding the Devine (sic) person’s rant (one who I long ago switched well off from.)
. . On a hunch, on Sunday last, I looked up the flash point of eucalyptus vapour.
Eucaluptus globulous = 47 deg C
Temperature in Melbourne = 47 deg C
Perhaps this explains the instantanious ignition of entire areas, and the speed of passage of fire fronts, and their awesome temperatures?
The US military has been experimenting with petrol vapour bombs for some time – cheap, & all too effective.
The 1st trigger vapourizes a bunch of petrol above ground, which expands outwards. The second trigger ignites that vapour. Reports and photos show that such excitements resemble a small nuclear explosion, with similar effects to those & that on the ground below.
This sounds very similar to what so many survivors have reported.
OK.
That explains the ferocity of things, when things were hot.
It’s now cool, & it’s still burning down there – heaps of 11 year dry fuel.
Back about 1958, when I working at East Sale, VIC, I heard a Radio National talk on the local forests. It is burnt into my grey matter. When our grand-oldies (GOs) arrived in the area it resembled an English park. Rolling green swards, all the way up into the mountains, intersected with stands of excellent timber, & game roaming everywhere on the lush grass. Easy pickings. A good life, well managed for a few.
Then our GOs took over (by whatever means) and decided that ‘fire was dangerous’, and we’ll have no more of that native nonsense.
An ex New Guinea warrior I worked with then stated that the bush was ‘a damned sight thicker than anything he’d seen up there’, with resultant thicker & denser fires, I’d suspect. Then we service types were not allowed to even volunteer to help with a major local fire, (TG for Rudd, Oz Army, et al, now, in VIC)
If only we had some active first nation people around, who still knew the burn cycles for those areas. But then, how could we burn around the whitey’s humpies, built so close to the danger. Them silly buggers (we whities.)
furious balancing — personally I think beer goes best with sushi; don’t have much of a taste for sake, but obviously many do, and it seems to work for them. I find it nigh impossible to eat sushi without some form of alcohol accompanying. But wine with sushi strikes me as barbarous, though I can’t say exactly why.
Paul Burns: If this is how you think about Kafka, I’d suggest your idea of Kafka could afford to go a little deeper. Skip The Trial (too often misunderstood anyway), read the stories and parables instead; mark down what was the first thing in The Castle that made you laugh out loud. HINT: if you don’t think The Castle is funny, then U R Doin It Rong.
#10: (h’s d?). Speaking of funny, the left never disappoints.
Thanks for the link, Yeti
Here’s the spray I’ve given the SMH:
“Fellas,
My missus is a subscriber to the SMH and I generally read it daily. It beats the Hell outa that scandal sheet Rupert calls a newspaper.
But really, is it necessary to publish this sort of stuff:
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/green-ideas-must-take-blame-for-deaths-20090211-84mk.html
Surely you didn’t pay Ms Devine to write this. It’s scandalous.
If you’re going to keep this person-on as a contributor, can you at least make sure she takes her medications before banging-out an article?
If I want to listen to the ravings of a nutter, I can always wander down to Caritas at St Vinnies and talk to the first person I meet at the bus shelter there.”
One point I’d like to clarify wrt Devine. To some extent, everyone uses tragedy and misfortune to advance a political agenda. That’s not in itself cause for condemnation. The reason Devine’s piece is so offensive is that – particularly at this moment in time – it does so by accusing one’s political opponents of, at best, callous indifference to human life, and comes very, very close to inviting those who agree with her to take matters into their own hands.
Whereas Akerman this morning is just a sackful of lies leading to the usual conclusion, it’s all Rudd’s fault.
“IN December, Kevin Rudd promised to create 75,000 jobs when he spent $10 billion, but there is no evidence that he created even one.”
We live in extraordinary times, but Australians must confront the reality that the Rudd Labor government has already had to increase taxes to pay for its irresponsible spending spree.
The Coalition, which the electorate turned its back on in November 2007, took decisions to cut taxes and had surpluses. Rudd has taken decisions to increase taxes and the nation now has deficits.”
The most distressing thing of course is that The Insiders still sees this clown as fit to be one of their ‘Insiders’.
Can’t think of anyone more brain dead and outside the tent than this loser.
Well I see through Cassidy.
Ditto the crew on ABC2 morning news.
Maybe Mirande Divine is doing a job for SP Ausnet as they face class actions? http://sl.farmonline.com.au/news/nationalrural/agribusiness-and-general/finance/huge-bushfire-class-action-launched/1433945.aspx
And even longtime L.P. reader, Christopher Pearson, while also joyfully putting the boots into the lower levels of government, as they are entirely under the evil sway of them greenies -ignoring the fact that even there appearance in the upper house of Victorian state parliament is just yesterday- does not incite to violence. He just reckons people should all just ‘toughen the fuck up’ and be like Wilson Tuckey. Simple really.
“The Bracks and Brumby governments stand accused of insufficient action to reduce fuel loads, especially on crown land and wildlife reserves, and not maintaining permanent firebreaks. They compromised public safety in the hope of ingratiating the Green vote.”
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25051445-7583,00.html
A private power company has been implicated in the Kinglake fire and a class action has been initiated – see the ABC coverage for more. The Age also has coverage, noting:
This is far bigger news than just another instance of a right-wing commentator stepping over the journalistic line. Watch out for the terms of the Royal Comission, to be released, I think, tomorrow.
At least we now know who was behind those bushfires back in 1939, 1944, 1951, 1955, 1961, 1967, 1979, 1983, 1994, 2001, 2003 – those Greenies! Who knew they were such a dominant force in Australian politics all that time? Still, we seem to be doing OK in the face of the Global Financial Crisis – so obviously all their dominance has protected us against the US sub-prime meltdown … well done them, insidious though they may be …
Interesting, Darren.
haiku. you forgot our fire 2006!
2006: huge fire in East Gippsland? Lives lost near Toongabbie (central Gippsland)?
Just started reading a small gem of a book, on Doc Evatt: “Moving in the Open Daylight” by Ashley Hogan, Sydney University Press, 2008. 55 pages plus notes. Succinct, well-researched.
http://evatt.org.au/publications/books/207.html
Zorronsky – sorry, those greenies have obviously got to me as well with their near-omnipotent control of everything in Australia. But the truth will ou … …
I was always told if I didn’t eat those greens it would come back to haunt me.
By the way, in terms of area burned, the 2003 fires were much, much bigger than the recent ones.
j-p-z, it quite some years since I’ve read Kafka. I was using him as a symbol of being intertwined with a bureaucracy in which one gets hopelessly lost.
The QLD government fast tracking land developments that destroy ecosystems in exchange for money. The QLD Labor party owned by big business? What a surprise!
http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,25055641-3102,00.html
Here’s a submission from a bulldozer contractor in relation to the huge 2003 fires. He criticised DSE for allowing a build-up of fuel. More interestingly, he pointed out firestick practices of whites in the area:
If a parallel regime were adopted for localities like Kinglake, etc., residents would be living in smoky conditions for weeks every year. Moreover, Kinglake, St. andrew’s Steels Creek, etc., are drier and warmer environments and much more densely settled areas than the Dargo High Plains. The possibility of expensive and tragic mistakes directly attributable to government actions would be much greater. It’d be a lawyers’ picnic.
Any regime of fuel reduction in fringe suburbs faces a plenitude of difficulties and contraindications. (I presume that no one would suggest that Kinglake residents themselves ought to take it upon themselves drop a match at the end of autumn.)
and also over at the snail: Greens are almost cutting Labor’s vote. Would be interesting to see the Greens as one of the majority parties in QLD parliament! WOOHOO
http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/poll/1,,3102-5038176-0,00.html
furious balancing @ 13, I’d concur with others’ suggestions of sake with sushi. There’s a very good Australian one which comes in a blue bottle and can be drunk chilled.
alas, it looks like Borg has the snail-reading, online-poll-answering vote locked up.
furious balancing @ 13,
Have you got a sake set. That way, you can have the sake warm and have the pleasure of it sneaking up on you.
I wouldn’t recommend a middy glass, let alone a sachooner of the stuff.
thanks for the sushi drinks suggestions. I haven’t had sake much, and no I don’t have a sake set. So you warm it through, like you would Mead, eh? that sounds okay…I might wait until the winter to try it though.
I think I’ll avoid the cider/stout shandie…we call that a ‘snake-bite’ over here, and the last time I had it with seafood [crabs] it had ugly consequences..don’t know whether the booze or the crabs were to blame!
For all LP Labor partisan stooges, you too can be first to be Anna’s friend on her Myspace page There’s just Tom and MyspaceCorp ATM… It looks like her saturation eCampaign has just got jump-started: the obligatory facebook page got loaded up with vidlinks and wallposts this morning, there’s flikrs, and hertube got loaded up with ads last night.
The latest in pollie-boasts for who is mostest switchest onnest: “Anna Bligh ..has her own Tumblr! She’s the first Australian politician to have one” and “Anna Bligh is the first politician in Australia to use FriendFeed to aggregate all her social networking presences into one RSS feed”. Woohoo.
She had campaign workers out with electoral enrolment forms in her electorate this morning. The swing is on.
friendfeed? that’s a newie. For me, it evokes images of force fed ducks being fattened up for foie gras.
On a related note, I just had a phone call from a friend who lives out in Oondna-woop-woop, he’s a 60-something Aboriginal bloke and he just asked me if, “that face-thing on the internet would be a good way to keep in touch”. oh dear.
Furious balancing @ 60,
If I remember correctly you put the cold sake in the sake jar and put the jar in a saucepan of water that reaches three quarters up the sake jar until just before it boils. Long time since I’ve done it.Don’t boil it. You might boil off the alcohol.
j_p_z re Han’sDad,possibly the resason the left never disappaoints is that it is usually right. cf the rabid leftwing pinko communist Ike in his farewell address warning of the danger of society being taking over by the “military industrial complex”.
He’d intended a devilish trinity with the inclusion of ‘bureaucracy’ but was dissueaded by his.. er.. bureaucrats.
Found myself over at the Sydney Institute Quarterly, where Gerard Henderson reprints all his email correspondence, at great length, presumably to show off his sharp and penetrating intellect, up close and personal with various academics, bloggers and other communists.
Amazingly funny, unintentionally hilarious:
http://www.thesydneyinstitute.com.au/downloads/SIQ34.pdf
It should be re-named “The Henderson Letters: complete, unabridged, and correspondence will be entered into…”.
Gerard is a one-man comedy festival. If only he knew.
Ricky Gervais where are you?
Grace, thanks for the link. I’d almost forgotten about the Sydney Institute and their faux think-tank circle jerk of hermetically sealed political irrelevancy. (although the fake Gerard Henderson on Twitter is a hoot!)
When one starts citing Pies Ackerman in an article, surely one must realise that they are no longer even in the debate?
It’s all sort of… well…. “insipid”
Vaporthought meets yesterday’s counterfeit conservative McCliches.
I honestly don’t understand how anyone can front up at an Australia Institute do and not be embarrassed.
epicene — in all seriousness, political sniping aside: after all that’s happened in this awful decade, do you genuinely think that the true reason for the Afghan war is to generate profits for arms dealers? Or to perpetuate a military-industrial complex? Now I don’t doubt that these interests have got their grubby fingers in numerous pies on an on-going basis, but still. Do you really think the thing is that simple?
Re the MIC.
One difficulty with being forensic about the influence of the MIC in US decision making is the identity of the MIC. Who is in it and who isn’t?
It should be noted that there is no such thing as a club called the MIC. No one meets under its auspices. There is no executive. They don’t hold AGMs, or anything of the sort.
The MIC is a product of the conspiratorial mindset. This particular example is remarkable because the charter member of this conspiracy theory was a US president and a supreme commander in the biggest war in history.
Eisenhower perceived an unholy alliance between unnamed general officers, unnamed arms manufacturers and unnamed members of Congress in misallocation of taxpayers’ funds into unnecessary and corrupting military expenditure. So far, so vague.
But the problem is, whenever the US did go to war — Vietnam, Iraq I, Afghanistan, Iraq II — virtually then entire Congress voted for the enabling resolutions.
Thus if this is a conspiracy, then virtually everyone was in it, or alternatively virtually the entire legislature were dupes, suckers, or patsies.
As Japerz says, it can’t be that simple.
This site is very flaky ATM.
My uneducated guess is that thebigchair ad is gumming up the works in some way.
The word ‘complex’ already implies that it’s not a conspiracy that’s in question, though, but something more, well, complex: an emergent form of power. That it’s used by conspiracy theorists and has come to mean something like a conspiracy probably reduces the usefulness of the term for thinking about apparently spontaneous alignments of interest in the post-WWII era. If the concept is useful at all it isn’t as an answer, but a question (or set of questions) that hasn’t yet been sufficiently answered.
You’re welcome, Possum.
“…When one starts citing Pies Ackerman in an article, surely one must realise that they are no longer even in the debate?”
Not as long as you have “strong views and a good filing system”, a permanently aggrieved attitude, and mysterious paymasters to keep the whole operation afloat!
…anyone else having problems with LP displaying incorrectly in I.E. (the RHS sidebar is missing)? And does Firefox normally display all those tag words at the bottom?
Yes, Katz is right about thebigchair. I blocked it and am no longer having trouble.
I’m browsing with Firefox and every ad-blocker, animation stopper I can add on the thing, and LP is working fine for me.
wizofaus @ 71,
I could open to LP but not get any further last night and this morning on Firefox. I thought it might be because my APG Sheild was temporarily disabled, but it didn’t work when I enabled it. I e-mailed Mark at Facebook and he seems to have fixed it. Thanks, Mark.
grace p @ 65,
The exchange between Hendo and Stuart McIntyre was priceless. Under the circumstances I thought McIntyre was incredibly polite. I guess Hendo sees himself as an historian first and a right wing polemicist second. I would have thought it was the other way around. What a needless dummy spit on Hewndo’s part.
For those of you wondering why I’m not at O Week (see Sunday thingamagig) I’m pretty crook this morning (it happens occasionally) and in this condition I would have been more of a hindrance than a help.
gp, my heart sank when the PDF you linked to came up in the browser. I thought, “Fuck! 52 pages of Hendo’s emails. Christ!” but it’s not that bad after all. The self-serving Hendoisms are nicely intersperced with other bits of comedy gold. Very nicely paced. So far, it looks like Quadrant without the intellectual rigour …
yep, comedy gold, there on the intertubes for everyone to enjoy.
What is the level of concern within the Australian Left as Obama essentially falls at the first hurdle? I mean, his stimulus package is $800 billion of utter rubbish. Opaque spending criteria, virtually no processes to test the cost-effectiveness of this or that. And as for infrastructure: about 15% of the discretionary spending. The rest is a grab-bag of Department, Governor and lobbyist-driven line items based on nothing more than back-room dealing and rampant horse-trading. Obama: Classic Washington Bullshit You Can Believe In.
BBB
Miranda Devine got a less than honorable mention on Media Watch last night. As Jonathon Holmes said, both her and the SMH should be ashamed of themselves.
And here I was thinking I had to watch Underbelly to get the low-down on Sydney/Melbourne low life.
The Media Watch link to what adrian talked about @79.
http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/video/
Thanks joe2!
My thanks too, joe2. Just downloaded and watched it.
On last night’s episode of Underbelly (the one without Miranda Devine). I didn’t think it was as good as the first episode. A bit slow moving, until near the end. At my age I need a bit more in a movie than a lot of bare boobs to keep me interested. Though next week’s episode looks more interesting.
Online Campaigning in the US Presidential Election
Public Lecture
Monday 2 March 2009 @ 06:00 pm – 07:00 pm
Carrillo Gantner Theatre, Sidney Myer Asia Centre, University of Melbourne
A lecture to be delivered by Mr Joe Trippi – “The Man Who Invented Internet Politics”
The success of Barack Obama’s campaign for the White House owes much to its bold use of the internet to rally grassroots support. Joe Trippi – the man who introduced the internet to US presidential campaigning – will explain the impact of the internet for both Obama, and his rivals’ presidential campaigns. Mr Trippi began his political career working on Senator Edward Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 1980 and has since run presidential, senate, gubernatorial and mayoral campaigns in the US and was most notably the National Campaign Manager for Howard Dean’s presidential campaign in 2004. Mr Trippi is widely-credited in the US as having reinvented campaigning and his innovative use of the internet for small-donor fundraising saw Dean’s campaign raise a record amount of funding for a Democratic presidential campaign – all with donations averaging less than $100 each. Mr Trippi is the author of The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet and the Overthrow of Everything. He has been profiled in GQ, Wired, Fast Company, The New Republic and The New York Times Magazine. He is a political analyst for the 24-hour US cable news channel MSNBC and a former Harvard University Fellow. He currently heads the Washington, DC political consultancy, Trippi & Associates.
Admission is free. Bookings are essential. To register please click on link below.
Speaker: Mr Joe Trippi
Enquiries:
Chris Fargher
+61 3 8344 6004
theath@ unimelb.edu.au
REGISTER ONLINE HERE