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»
Well if no one is going to make a comment, I might as well quote from my own twitter feed.
Buddha’s “man boobs” a turn off for followers. Buddhist leaders have conceded that they have no hope of matching Jesus’ “blasted abs”
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Empire of The Sun’s Luke Steele to play Lady Gaga in new telemovie biopic. Steele, who is called “Lord Gaga” by his friends is already rehea…
It’s still Friday here which makes it easy for me to be first!
Have just been watching Lateline and the insufferable George Brandis would have had me switching off, except that Leigh Sales was unusually even handed so she and Craig Emerson handled him reasonably well. Handled is probably the right word, what a snake!
Very hot and unusually muggy here, as it was last night when we were rewarded with a wonderful thunderstorm in the early hours. A real downpour. I guess it’s too much to hope for the same again tonight, though our sunset was very subdued, hardly a touch of pink. I find the old red skies at night formula works pretty well.
Goodnight.
Ah well, happy to concede first place to another sandgroper.
Very disappointed that the federal government are now allowing in beef from Argentina, Mexico, the UK and other countries known to have a BSE risk. In a nation like Australia we are more than capable of producing enough beef for our own domestic market while also maintaining our overseas market. It would be very different if we were in short supply but this is not the case. It will undermine our own beef industry and the family beef operations will now be forced to shut down. Another win for the corporate sector and offshore beef producers as our own beef industry comes to its knees. Economically, this will cost Australia dearly.
Jim, I could not believe it when I saw, in my local IGA, the only available kiwi fruit were imported from Italy. It just seems so bloody stupid and energy wasting to be shipping this stuff from so far away. I wonder how long it will take to arrest the madness.
When some one dies of mad cow disease.
Also, when is Rudd going to stop being our moral policeman? Even though I agree with him over the nastiness of stuff on recent tribute pages, he shouldn’t use it as an excuse to impose his twisted Xtan morality trips on the rest of us.
Talking about local industry decisions that seem to be designed to harm rather than help. Years ago I had a small transport business looking after the needs of an iconic Murray River citrus co-op in Adelaide. I was called in one saturday morning to collect a load of produce from the wharf that turned out to be concentrated orange juice from Brazil.
Each pallet had four drums holding 44 gallons[200 litres] and was covered with a box made from marine ply. At the time the co-op’s growers were having difficulties selling their produce and this seemed a bit anti-grower to me, saturday secrecy and all.
Only the juice factory engineer was on site to take in the load and he wanted to take the marine ply off the pallets so they wouldn’t stand out from the rest.
So armed with a jemmy bar I proceeded to de-box them as he dropped them to the ground with a forklift.
Working on the last pallet I saw a huge insect leap onto the concrete apron and race out between me and the forklift where it stopped, spun about and watched to see what we were going to do next.
The engineer jumped off the lift and grabbed a bit of four by two and went to clout the alien. With that the huge bug moved like an automatic artillery piece, spun 180 degrees, jacked up it’s abdomen and looking over it’s shoulder took careful aim and shot a stream of acid straight into his eyes!
I helped the engineer over to a tap and washed his eyes for some time until he was able to see and by which time the insect had disappeared, never to be seen again.
paul @ 6…yes indeed it gets worse & worse.
I see while reading about the MOSSAD Dubai hit using several ‘passports’, including of Australian Israelis, that Australia did not allow people to obtain dual citizenship until 2002. Of what benefit is it to Australia to allow dual citizenship when the practice can be abused in this way? I wonder how many Israelis are moving through the Middle East on fraudulent passports of Australian Isrealis? Time to go back to no dual citizenship.
I thought Mossad was supposed to be really efficient killers. Why did they need to team of 26 to kill 1 man? Was it the new recruits graduation exercise?
Sitting on the couch nursing the flu I watched the Senate Inquiry into the roof insulation. From what I could see and hear it is clear the Department did a good job rolling out this scheme and that the famous Minter Ellison report is not relevant as they acted on the key findings. It was odd that as far as i could see there was no media there. If they had been perhaps it would have occurred to them that they had been drinking a lot of Tony Abbott Kool aid and maybe things weren’t as presented. The Lib members of the committee were heavy on the death porn angle “After the first death did anyone tell the PM?” Gimme a break this was a tragic industrial accident the sort that sadly happens everyday on every job in the country. Does The PM have to be told of every industrial workplace accident? But by weaving deaths into the narrative against Garrett and Rudd the Libs have succeeded in beating this story up. There was no need to suspend the program it was working well . As Possum showed insulation has been causing house fires for years but there have been less since the Government roll out because for the first time the Government tried to regulate what was up to then a do it yourself operation. And lacking from the Senate’s crocodile tears and outrageous posturing was any indication that the people who employed the young people who died would be called before the committee to show why they hadn’t provided a safe workplace for their employees. I urge everyone to have a squizz at Possums’s treatise on the Minter Ellison report and his statistical analysis. It is an indication that we haven’t been well served by the media.
The government of Israel claims it has no evidence that Mossad was responsible for this hit.
Have they asked Mossad?
It is claimed that Mossad must seek permission from the PM of Israel to assassinate.
Naturally, Israel PM Netanyahu won’t be owning up whether or not he gave permission.
But is the government of Israel as concerned as other governments that citizens of their country have been victims of identity theft? Isn’t such theft very dangerous to Israel if terrorists can pass themselves off so easily as Israeli citizens?
What does the state of Israel propose to do to ensure that foreign terrorists don’t use these means to enter Israel?
Is the state of Israel prepared to give every assistance to Interpol and other international law enforcement agencies to capture and to prosecute those identity thieves who passed themselves off in several countries as citizens of Israel?
Israel’s smarmy “neither confirm nor deny” policy con’t conceal what a complete bungle this all was. Now we all know what 12 Mossad agents look like. It was hardly clever piece of work, an unrepeatable exercise, which has wasted 12 agents training – who can never be used again – and exposed their mafia-like tactics, and pissed off 3 allies. And abolsutely no one above the age of 5 is in any doubt they did it, They’re litterally fooling no one.
Mossad are actually famous bunglers – there’s a book about it somewhere. Comes from mainly oppressing unarmed civilians, and operating under conditions of near complete impunity- you lose your edge over time, and no one is held to account for stuff ups.
Oh, and not to mention stealing the identities and potentially ruining the lives of 12 completely innocent Ixraeli residents in the process, in order to carry out a yakuza style extra-judicial killing. What happened to the rule of law? And even if this weere acceptable in relation to terrorists, I thought we tried to protect innoocents, not use them? Its all just plain creepy. Yeergh.
That’s really scary, Zorronsky. I hope it didn’t bump uglies with any locals.
The imported concentrate has a lot to do with why I don’t buy orange juice any more, BTW.
Reflecting on the insulation imbroglio …
I wonder whether this doesn’t tell us soimething about what may be descibed as the political character of media content.
I’m not for a momewnt asserting that anyone is telling anyone else what to write or how to write it. Yet even if that doesn’t happen, it’s perfect5ly possible to see how notions of salience can predispose a particular view of the world.
Assume for a moment that there was a government run program that was cost-effectively producing significant value to the community without any unintended or unmanageable negative consequences. Would this be news?
Probably not, though it might be buried somewhere on page 27 of the paper or heard by some news tragic like me on the radio. It might be a press release from some minister’s office and those who did hear it might regard it as boring or even spin. Before a journalist could even report it, he or she might seek out some critic for “balance” regardless of how outlandish the criticism might be.
Worse yet, the scope of “government” is very broad, embaracing everyone from the person who takes you money for a parking permit at the local council to the head of the UN. Any example of maladministration is a failure of government, and yet more proof of the pernicious character of bureaucracy.
On the other hand if some company does the wrong thing, it’s a failure of that company rather than private enterprise in general. If one mentions Bhopal, many of us will think of Union Carbide, but one suspects the numbers who even recall the comany’s association with this are falling, and even here, many will blame government for failing to do its job before and after the fact. In the insulation matter we have been discussing, hundreds of small companies did the wrong thing, but it was the funding body that the media cast its glare upon.
So even in circumstances where the processes by which the media gathers its data and reports on it can be said at the conscious level to be politically neutral (and we know that evewn this regularly fails), what emerges in practice will be a view of the world skewed against the notion that humans can collaborate effectively to run their affairs — and that is of course a very pro-business outlook, and troubling to those of us who favour the notion of inclusive governance as a means to human progress.
That said, the Australian government is being disingenuous, and b) slapping the Israelis round with a feather as usual.
The only thing the Aussie government is outraged by is that the Israelis were dumb enough to get caught.
today my partner is off to a 30s-era town called Bungotakeda to dress up in a kimono and wander the streets looking at dolls. I’m staying home to opinionate on blogs, and then I’m off to the local kickboxing school for two hours.
The town I live in doesn’t have a single gym, so this kickboxing school is a bit of a lucky break. In place of gyms, the town has “onsen fitness”, which consists of a room with 3 weight machines abutting a hot spring. You do your weights and then slide into the hot spring to relax. A good idea I suppose, except I’m not so great in hot water – and I would rather have a decent weights room than a good bath. What’s a man to do? Go get punched by a stubby Japanese guy with only one ear, I suppose…
The question, Robert, is will they downgrade relations if they can’t get serious cooperation?
I’d say not.
Joe2@5:”I wonder how long it will take to arrest the madness.”
When we all refuse point blank to buy imported food. Not any time soon I’d say. I try to grow my own, then buy within the 100 mile rule – but the basmati rice sitting in my pantry shows up my hypocrisy.
There are promising trials of local rice cultivation here on the NNSW coast, relying on our high rainfall, so with a bit of luck I can reduce my karma in the next few years.
Correct Robert and Fran.
Israel is now a world leader among nations that exults in its breaches of international law.
Israel certainly did not take the first step into this amoral and illegal morass. but nations that do step into it must be willing to take the last step.
Did anyone catch the hysterical North Korean newsreader last night on SBS news threatening a nuclear strike if a joint US/South Korean war game became too threatening?
This lack of self-constraint and acceptance of dire consequences signifies a very dangerous return to the atmosphere of the early Cold War in the 1950s, when brinkmanship was all the go.
Have national elites forgotten the dire consequences of too bellicose brinkmanship, or don’t they care any more?
Just a stray thought: perhaps this bellicosity on the part of national elites is a tacit acknowledgement that current material conditions of life on earth aren’t sustainable. Thus their willingness to end it with a bang rather than with a whimper.
DI[NR]@15 Good move! The chemicals I carted turned me off fruit juice drink which is part orange or whatever juice plus plenty of sugar and water and preservatives. The fresh processed juice was marginally added to, but I preferred to grab one of the oranges on delivery. And in the 30 odd years since I’m still to see, in any retail outlet, anything remotely resembling those beautiful, big, juicy, Navels and Valencias. One time when I was having a winge to the chemist about the process he told me that having come to the juice gig from the milk industry, that I should be equally, if not more, concerned with milk. And that was when milk seemed to be similar to what could be bought in a pail straight from the dairy farmer. What it is now is anybody’s guess.
I just caught the second installment of “Something in the Water”on the ABC. Scary stuff. It seems that despite compelling evidence that the Georges River contains exceedingly cytotoxic material, possibly originating in the runoff from E. Nitens plantations, the Tasmanian government is not going to investigate further because the toxin is “natural”.
Katz another slant on that could be “survival of the fittest” that might well be the thinking behind denialism, as used to foment division between the haves and have nots. The haves ultimately securing their future by paying their way to safety.
With milk as well, Zorronsky, I hardly ever buy the stuff (my son and daughter-in-law work in the dairy industry … ) but when I do, it’s non-homogenised, biodynamic milk (despite my opinions on the value of doing stuff by the phases of the moon and burying cowhorns packed with compost in a corner of your vege patch).
Zorronsky (7). Don’t worry – some Rodent probably had it for his supper. After all, “we will decide which insects come to this country…blah…blah…”
Katz said:
I rather doubt it. I suggest cultural hubris and cognitive dissonance are at play here as they are in most elite policy decisions.
Katz #21 “Did anyone catch the hysterical North Korean newsreader last night on SBS news threatening a nuclear strike if a joint US/South Korean war game became too threatening?”
Yes that woman with an artificially male voice screaming at her audience. In our house we commented, “How would it be if six party talks were all in this language style, yelling and shreaking across the table”.
But Fran, for a long time, especially in the post Cuban Missile Crisis era, national elites became much more aware of the potentially dire consequences of bellicosity.
Your explanation:
is ahistorical in that you have universalised a set of elite values and mental processes that have in fact gone through significant change and evolution since the 1950s.
Everything I hear or read about today’s politicians makes me despair. Only the aging are safe (and even then both Abbott and Rudd want to take our pensions away. Have once more reverted to the 18C, reading Allen French’s The First Year of the American Revolution. Published in 1934 (and it cost me over $200) its still one of the best books on the American Revolution I’ve read so far, and I’ve only just finished reading about the battle of Bunker Hill.
Following Rudd’s lead on being a moral policeman (thanks Paul):
Why isn’t that murdering scumbag Eugene McGee and half the South Australian judiciary in jail?
This mongrel gets a skinfull, kills a cyclist with his car, renders NO assistance, then hides from the police long enough that his blood alcohol level is no longer admissable as evidence, aided by his brother.
Naturally, these low down scum sucking dogs are lawyers.
There is no justice in South Australia
Having also watched both sittings of the Senate “inquiry”(hatchet job) mentioned by durutticolumn@11 I am amazed that the pig-ignorant rantings emanating from the media and its card-carrying followers are just so – well, bloody ignorant or outright lies, and that they have been largely ignored all round. The Opposition led majority on the Committee lacked any semblance of wanting to properly examine the matter and indeed the Chair, in examining new witnesses, invited them to “state their rank and number”. Turning to another witness she invited the witness to put their “argument”. Obviously she had closed her mind to “evidence”.
The charade regarding a question about one death which durutticolumn@11 has also drawn attention to was followed by pretty much the same line in referring to “the second death” “the third death” and the “fourth death” which is now the Opposition mantra. The Committee was supposedly operating under such a tight schedule that there was not time for the two Labor members to put their last questions, which they had to put on Notice. This did not stop two Liberal Senators from asking further questions, taking up time which the Labor members could have used. To cap it all off, Greg Hunt is today out and about sprouting the mantra and claiming it reveals startling evidence from the Senate inquiry.
I was very impressed over the two days of hearings with the professionalism of the relevant Department and its officers and wonder how the Public Service feels about the slurs and lies being thrown around about them.
It is frustrating in the extreme that the deliberate muddying of the issue has now rendered it almost impenetrable unless it is carefully unpicked, which so few people appear ready to take the time to do (Possum being a notable exception).
If people who regularly post on this blog really care about justice this filthy exercise by the Opposition and media should be exposed. To expose the hypocrisy of the Opposition would in no way mitigate the real problems in the program but perhaps we’d all feel a little cleaner in the end.
Katz said:
I don’t agree, if by “aware” you mean more than a dispassionate and cynical lip-service to the concept. Certainly, the whole “how many minutes to midnight” it is thing was much touted along with how many times over the notional destructive capacity of the world’s nukes could wipe out of humanity.
This “awareness” however did not translate into any policy which suggested a move towards less bellicosity amongst the elites. Indeed, we recall not merely an escalation post-1962 of projections of western military power and a focus on winning the arms race, overcoming missile gaps, having more deployable weapons etc but the accompanying assurance that precisely the dire implication of M.A.D was what would constrain policy on both sides of the Cold War alignment. If anything, the formal “awareness” of the consequences became a new weapon for dragooning populations into supporting the “security” policies of each state.
The support the US gave to the failed Ba’athist power grab in 1963 against the Nasserites and the successful one in 1968 bears witness to that. There was the action against the Dominican Republic and of course the escalation in Vietnam/Indochina. The US moved decisively behind Israel in 1967. After a brief hiatus after the embarrassment in Indochina the US resumed its policy, backing the Shah of Iran and later Saddam Hussein, the Mujihadeen in Afghanistan and various despots in Pakistan, despite the fact that they knew Pakistan had acquired nuclear weapons. By the time Reagan came to power, they were talking of winning a nuclear war through the SDI, and deploying “neutron bombs” (ERCs) which would leave infrastructure intact but just kill the people. During this time the US boasted that the arms race would be what would force the USSR to its knees, which hardly sounds less bellicose or as showing greater awareness of the risks, still less a passive fatalism about going out with a bang.
It is more than lip service to change significantly the modalities of command and control of nuclear weapons and their exploitation in public threats made against enemies. The superpowers did both of these things in the 1960s.
Both sides became aware that a nuclear war was unwinnable. Once that option was removed from the table much else changed.
You’re correct about the domestic use of nuclear confrontation to attempt to discipline national populations.
However, as the rise of the counterculture in the US in the 1960s and their admittedly temporary success in combating and undermining the security state have demonstrated, American power elites were less than successful in actually imposing discipline on US citizens.
And in the end the communist regime of the USSR proved itself to be utterly incapable of using the nuclear threat to impose discipline on Soviet citizens.
You seem to have misunderstood my original comments. I never claimed that either side became less bellicose. Rather I suggested that after about 1962 they avoided the kind of bellicosity that might end in nuclear confrontation. I trust you now perceive the difference.
Ute Man @ 31 I see that Eugene McGee’s lawyer is using as a defence the idea that “Brothers just do what they are asked to do out of family loyalty.” Really? Not my brothers, I hope. What about giving good sound advice about facing up to consequences while still being there to support when a family member is in trouble.
There may not be justice in some state legal systems but “Vengeance is Mine sayeth the Lord” and surely He has wreaked revenge on the brothers McGee, their mother and extended family by condemning them all for many years to the purgatory of public shame and daily anxiety. This far exceeds the mandatory sentence of a few years imprisonment Eugene McGee might have incurred all those years ago.
Do brothers always do just do what they are asked to do? Isn’t it more important to ask – Is Eugene McGee, the lawyer, his brother’s keeper? Is Craig McGee, the teacher, his brother’s keeper? And if their mother had the chance, how would she have advised her two sons to take good care of each other?
I meant to post this last Sat. but forgot. Was listening, then, to the always excellent Geraldine Doogue on Radio National “Saturday Extra” in the morning.
She was talking to an American security consultant about something I had never heard about.
Apparently the guy who planned the 2008 Mumbai attack was American citizen David C. Headley.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/08/world/asia/08terror.html
Patricia WA said:
I wish it were true, but these particular elites display no shame for their actions. They feel the life of a cyclist and father is worth $3100 in fines plus calling in favours not just from family, but from their mates.
Faith in institutions is precious – I fear that the ediface of faith in financial, political and now judicial institutions is showing worrying cracks and dirtbags like the McGees do not help.
It’s bizarre to me that I qualify for citizenship of Israel, or I would if I bothered to get my birth certificate corrected to reflect my actual parentage, rather than the person my mother was married to at the time of my conception. Oh…is that even possible?…How would one go about changing their birth certificate? I’m kind of sick of living with a fraudulent document.
Some poor Palestinian person who may have a direct connection with Israeli dirt is stuck in a glorified prison camp in Gaza, and yet Australian people with Jewish heritage can gain citizenship to Israel. It’s disgusting, really.
With a light wrist and a bouyancy of character,a wasted day goes past to find a Tsunami Warning tonight.If you live down near the beach, check your batteries fuel,torch,blankets undies etc.Remember even with Warnings who knows what the complete happening will occur .I have a very big doubt that if the Tsunami hits Antartica that along the coastline of Oz life will be normal after a normal 8.8 Richter Scale motive force Tsunami.Dorrigo Plateau has a few spuds still in the ground,Herbst Horst Doctor on the job and some big sheds fairly high above sea-level.And I am serious.Bring the gas bottle though.We are dependent on electricity from lower sea levels.Lord have Mercy.Laugh or be fully threatened,perhaps both, as sharpness of mental facility maybe required.
Nana Levu @ 9. I don’t know where you got your information about dual citizenship not being allowed until 2002 unless there were certain nations proscribed until that time, but I became an Australian citizen in 1972 and still retained my British citizenship (and passport). I still have both and indeed used them when travelling to the UK recently. The British one in particular is handy for any EU country. Obviously you leave and arrive back in Oz using your Australian passport otherwise you would have visa problems but I can leave Australia on my Australian passport and arrive in the UK on my British passport. It is quite legal.
Also I have a friend who was born in Australia and has both Australian and Swiss nationality (and passports) and has had since the 1980′s.
Perhaps there was a distinction made between British and/or Australian born citizens and other nationalities?
Allan #40 was just quoting this Australian government site.
http://www.citizenship.gov.au/current/dual_citizenship/
‘Prior to 4 April 2002, Australian citizens who became citizens of another country lost their Australian citizenship automatically.’
Wikipedia has an extensive discussion of Australian nationality law at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_nationality_law
Prior to 4 April 2002, it was still possible for Australians in some circumstances to hold dual citizenship, including:
those born in Australia who automatically acquired another citizenship at birth;
migrants naturalising in Australia, provided their former country did not revoke their citizenship;
children born overseas to Australian parents who automatically acquired the citizenship of their country of birth (eg the U.S. or Canada) as well as Australian citizenship by descent.
Holding a foreign passport did not in itself cause loss of Australian citizenship.
A doozy even by Dennis Shanahan’s standards:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/dont-blame-the-polls-for-parties-woes-politics-has-its-ups-and-downs/story-e6frg75f-1225834951395
I wish I hadn’t bothered, Jacques. Shamaham is obviously taking a double dose of stupid pills.
J de M @ 43m
The bookies did indeed. They also favoured an election at the end of August. The Gillard stuff meant nothing. Because ONE punter bet she’s supplant Rudd before the election, there was a book on her,
In reference to the Dubai hit, Tony Abbott declared, “I don’t wish to assume bad faith in the case of a democracy.”
By this, I presume Abbott means that a democracy should be assumed innocent until proven guilty. The corollary of this assumption, of course, is that non-democracies should be presumed guilty until proven innocent — Howardian dog-whistling at its very best.
But here is an opportunity to kick Abbott in the bum. The interviewer could well have asked, “Do you, Mr Abbott support the most vigorous measures to discover the circumstances of the misuse of the identities of Australian citizens? How would an Abbott government pursue this question?”
Hey Jacques de Molay wasn’t it you, a while back, asking about a group Crikey purchase?
Good ol’ Nicholas Gruen has come good again.
http://clubtroppo.com.au/2010/02/26/crikey-crikey-crikey-out-it-goes-its-on-again/
Sounds Okay, joe2, so what does it cost?
I think the discount depends on how many punters Nich get’s to sign up PWA. From memory it was under 60 bucks last time.
Had another “discussion” with my Dad about climate change today. To return to some of the ideas expressed in the “What is truth?” thread, I asked Dad where uncertainty featured in engineering (he’s a retired electronics engineer and a CC skeptic), and the response was: uncertainty occurs where you haven’t clarified your thinking enough. Dad also commented that he “didn’t believe in statistics, but it works!*”
I’m guessing that there’s a group of people out there for whom any uncertainty in science sets off the big red warning lights because in their particular profession, any level of uncertainty IS a Bad Thing. We just need the climate illuminati to hunt down all these binary state people and then we can get on with world government.
* I have much the same feeling about the relationship between electricity and magnetism: I don’t believe in induction, but it works. Caused me a bit of a problem in high school physics. I never really grokked AC current either (what are the electrons actually doing in there?).
joe2 @ 47, yes it was, thanks a lot for the link.
Discovered I don’t have to write the two book reviews I have to do til April. So, today I can begin writing chapters 4 and 5 of my book. Am, naturally, delighted to have got to this ponint and temporarily away from the tedious research. Its good when you reach the point of diminishing return in your research, because then you’re ready to write.
(There are one or two more books I’d like to read, but I don’t think they’re essential. Any insights they might have that inspire me I can incorporate later.