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Tuesday, October 07, 2008
Crunchy, Chickeny, Trippy
Can we eat our way out of the environmental destruction wrought by the repulsive Cane Toad?
Maybe. If the cane toad had a value high enough to make it worthwhile spending a night catching the invaders; if as a food product it proved profitable to round them up, gas them, and prepare them for cooking, then we could shut down their spread, wind back their numbers and unleash a new Australian delicacy into restuarants. That is, if you can hold your vomit.
Local food activists are having a hard enough time convincing Australians to get stuck into roo burgers, let alone grinding down on deep fried toad legs.
I wrote a comment to this post by Tim Blair at a Daily Telegraph blog, about claims Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin linked the Iraq War to 9/11 in a speech to US troops, but it was censored for supposed 'trolling'.
I cited this story from the reputable Jane's, published on September 19, 2001, which shows that Israel's military intelligence service, Aman, were probably the first to publicly draw deep linkages between Saddam's Iraq and the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the WTC :
Israel’s military intelligence service, Aman, suspects that Iraq is the state that sponsored the suicide attacks on the New York Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington.
When I sent a second comment, asking these questions...
How exactly is trying to clear up where the Iraq Did 9/11 myth came from 'trolling'? Or is Jane's not a reputable enough source for Tim Blair's blog?
...the comment was again censored for 'trolling' :
So what exactly did Blair and his moderator object to in my comments? Was it that Israel is responsible for trying to link Iraq to the 9/11 attacks, a myth eventually rejected by President Bush? or was it the fact that I mentioned the Jane's story also details how the CIA and Mossad have used car bombs, killing dozens of civilians, as part of their joint 'counter-terrorism' operations?
A year later, in a combined CIA/Mossad operation, a powerful car bomb went off at the entrance to the house of Hizbullah’s spiritual leader, Sheikh Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah. Seventy-five people were killed.
Terrorism, ironically, is a fairly effective weapon used by the West to supposedly fight terrorism, in the 'War on Terror'. Is this really such a big secret? Only if you read nothing but the Murdoch media.
Obviously Tim Blair's readers need to cushioned from such uncomfortable truths. Wouldn't want facts to get in the way of the 'Our Terror Bombs Are Freedom Bombs' modern warfare narratives.
Busted
A massive police operation swept through the grinning crowds at the Sydney ParkLife festival yesterday, and came up with a measly handful of drug-related arrests :
The operation included general duties officers, traffic units, drug detection dogs, plain clothes officers, mounted police, licensing supervisors and operational support group personnel.
It's not that people are doing less drugs at these gigs, they simply know to imbibe their gear before they reach the police checkpoints. Police mostly cautioned those busted with personal-use amounts of cannabis, instead of hauling them away.
Police are in an interesting quandary. They know the more people on cannabis or Es, at festivals like Parklife, the less likely it is they will have to deal with toxic, violent drunks. But police have to spend their 'Fighting Drugs' budgets at the same time.
Still, there are no cocaine dogs patrolling the financial district, or Macquarie Street, of course. And while you will find police leading drug dogs through Kings Cross and along the platforms of Blacktown and Penrith train stations, you still won't see them along New South Road, Double Bay, Military Road, Cremorne, or Queen Street, Paddington.
Cops have to bust people for carrying small amounts of illegal drugs, just not so much the ones that can afford a battery of expensive lawyers or who have hassling political connections.
Rupert Murdoch Doesn't Back Climate Change Fear Mongering, Except When He Does
I asked Daily Telegraph opinionist Piers Akerman why he shreds Labor and professors and Al Gore and the ABC over climate change fear mongering, while continuing to give a free pass to his own boss, Rupert Murdoch, now the most prolific and influential promoter of climate change reality in the world :
Your boss backs the fear mongering as well, Piers. Why don’t you get in his ear?
"I don’t think he backs fear mongering, I believe he makes decisions on the best available evidence and is not afraid of admitting his mistakes when he’s been wrong..."
I stand corrected. Rupert Murdoch and his media, like the Daily Telegraph, do not back the fear mongering promotion of climate change reality, apparently. Which is why stories and headlines like this never appear in The Daily Telegraph, except when they do, which is often :
Rupert Murdoch has admitted to a parliamentary inquiry (in the UK) that he has "editorial control" over which party The Sun and News of the World back in a general election and what line the papers take on Europe.
The minute stated: "For The Sun and News of the World he explained that he is a 'traditional proprietor'. He exercises editorial control on major issues..."
He also helped "shape" the pro-Iraq War message across his worldwide media empire, and admits it here.
Embracing Corporate Greenism has proven very profitable for Rupert Murdoch, and his media, as energy giants flood his newspapers and websites with advertising promoting their new Green Consciousness.
The blogs of former Murdoch 'global warming deniers' now 'climate change realists', like Akerman, Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt are where you will now most often see such Corporate Greenism advertising.
Flanked by two large televisions, Rae played a split-screen video showing Howard and Harper, then leader of the Canadian Alliance party, giving their speeches to their respective parliaments.
Howard delivered his speech on March 18, 2003, before the bombs fell on Baghdad. Harper gave his on March 20, the first full day of the Iraq war, which has killed more than 4,000 U.S. soldiers.
Both urged support for the U.S. effort. "Alliances are a two-way process," Howard and Harper said. "We should not leave it to the United States to do all the heavy lifting just because it is the world's ("only" added Harper) superpower."
At several points in the video, the voices of the two leaders are heard to overlap perfectly, prompting laughter and cries of "Shame! Shame!" from the crowd.
Lethally Non-Lethal
They will probably prove to be very handy in encouraging former home owners to leave their homes, as banks somehow are able to deploy police to do their dirtiest work, but who will be the first mother and child to be tasered in New South Wales?
In May, the former police minister David Campbell said the government would spend more than $1 million on 229 units to give police the option of using "less than lethal" force.
A report by the NSW Ombudsman into the safety of tasers is not expected to be tabled before the NSW parliament until later this month.
It surely can only make sense to hand out hundreds of tasers nearly a month BEFORE the safety report is made public.
Brendan Nelson may have been an idiot, but as opposition leader he was a mostly harmless idiot. And he was our idiot. The peoples' idiot. He put on his show, and we enjoyed it, most of the time. Brendan Nelson was fun as opposition leader.
...a picture of political bastardry, animosity and aggression. I now understand why Dr Brendan Nelson took what at the time appeared to be a dangerous and illogical decision to open up his leadership position to a vote less than 10 months after becoming his party's leader. He couldn't take the pressure any more. And the pressure was unrelenting.
Turnbull carved a big X on Brendan's forehead, the very first day of Brendan's reign :
Turnbull walked up to Nelson and gave him a negative review of his first performance as leader. Soon after, unable to contain himself, Turnbull walked into Nelson's office and dressed him downin front of his wife and staff.Nelson was stunned. So were his staff.
Now that's downright nasty, and no accident. Turnbull wanted to shatter Brendan, he wanted to fuck with his mind.
The denigration soon spread. Turnbull told a member of Nelson's staff that his boss was "hopeless". He told journalists the same thing. It became common knowledge in the press gallery that Turnbull's attitude toward Nelson was dismissive and corrosive, a corrosion which built up the pressure and ate into Nelson's credibility in the press gallery as his opinion polling numbers floundered.
Turnbull holds very good, very grand parties to which he invites his friendly media. And they love him for it.
The state of chaos that was the Liberal Party for most of this year has subsided, somewhat, with the completion of Turnbull's all but unprecedented four year rise to the top of conservative politics in Australia. Well, liberal-Green-Conservative politics. Turnbull's invention.
What the fuck do they stand for now, anyway? Turnbull wants to bail out the banks, and the front bench wears its newfound greenism unconvincingly, uncomfortably. They champion The Greens years long demands for increases to the pension, and more investment in new, alternative energy. Nobody in the Liberal Party wails about how awesome the Iraq War has turned out for everyone involved, including all those dead Iraqis, like Alexander Downer did. Now the free market is viciously mauling the poor yet again, with far more bloodshed to come, everyone wants to be a socialist.
As of now the Liberal Party is not a political movement or a political philosophy but, apart from a band of idealists, a collective of opportunists masquerading as a cause. The deeper you go, the less you find.
The reason why the media, particularly the ABC, keep boring us with stories about Peter Costello still eyeballing the leadership of the Liberal Party is because he actually is, and a very anti-Brendan-like campaign of undermining Turnbull has begun. Costello expects Turnbull to crash and burn. He will piss on the flames and take over.
Forever the optimist.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
The Dark Reality Of Kokoda's Heroes
A new generation of film-makers discover there is so much more to the horror of Australians fighting in New Guinea during World War Two than they ever could have imagined :
Structured around candid interviews with saddened Australian veterans, this beguiling piece of filmmaking by two young director-producers, Stig Schnell and Shaun Gibbons, also speaks publicly for the first time with still-shocked Japanese warriors. With a production team made up of both nationalities, Beyond Kokoda provides a deeply personal account of the thoughts, feelings and experiences of those directly involved in the awful battle that lasted from July 1942 to February 1943.
Of course, the film revives the simmering debate over whether the Kokoda campaign was not just a decisive Australian victory but one that delivered Australia from Japanese encirclement and possible occupation.
"This film doesn't attack the national character; we just want to raise questions about what we have been told about Kokoda," Schnell says. "So many books are about beating Australian nationalistic drums, and the jingoism takes us away from what really happened."
...Schnell says he and Gibbons wanted to strategically pinpoint the corrosive and increasingly pervasive Kokoda myths, not only the notion that the Japanese were poised to sweep into Australia but also the feel-good mythology of the so-called "fuzzy-wuzzy angels", who helped transport Australian wounded.
"No one has told us before that they were principally indentured labour, slaves really," Schnell says.
They were also occasionally executed to set an example to the rest, not to help the Japanese, not to refuse orders and not to steal.
In this documentary, the veterans from both sides sadly distinguish the Kokoda experience as a campaign of exceptional savagery. Few prisoners were taken; most were shot. War conventions were routinely flouted by both sides. The troops were reduced to a primal level, such were the inhuman conditions in which the battle was waged and the impossible expectations made on soldiers of both sides at the front line. "Bombs, mortars, screaming, yelling, swearing, bayonets; you name it, it was there," says the dapper sergeant Joe Dawson, one of the most articulate subjects, a strong man who wears compassion for his enemy easily on a tired face. "It was a shocking state of affairs; the fellows were going down like flies."
The physical torture, the mental assault, endured by both the Australians and Japanese soldiers in New Guinea - and many of them were children, really, late teens, early 20s, who had never traveled more than a few dozen miles from home before they went to war - is unimaginable, incomprehensible to us today.
The documentary discussed above, ' Beyond Kokoda' is screening on cable and digital, but I'd imagine it will be on DVD by Christmas :
Kokoda was a living hell torment shared by the Japanesel :
"I have seen blokes crying with fatigue. They had to drag themselves up the side of a mountain, and sliding, and scared of being left behind, and being isolated, it's very frightening country... "...we were trying to drag ourselves up the side of a mountainside, he was a big strong bloke, and I had my rifle, and I wasn't going to make it. He didn't say a word to me, he just reached over, and took my rifle, and put it on his other shoulder....He did not say a word...and that got me to the top."
20-Somethings All Fkd Up On Drugs And Booze....
Well, A Few Are
By Darryl Mason
Studies that show young people are blasting themselves out of reality on drugs and booze should never be trivialised. Then again, it is traditional for tabloid media to take statistics and turn what could actually be good news, positive news, into another 'Young People Today Are Anti-Social Drug Pigs' set of headlines and community decaying charicatures.
When the stats actually reveal that most Australian 20-somethings are not actually fukk'd n' bombd out of their minds, tabloids must apply the word 'underclass', and load up the intro :
An underclass of young Australians is battling depression, booze, drugs, and poor health, according to a landmark study.
One in five Australians in their mid-20s has a serious mental or physical health problem.
Twice as many suffer depression or anxiety, take illegal drugs, or engage in risky, anti-social behaviour.
What the decades-long, landmark study, the Australian Temperament Project, actually reveals is far more interesting than that guff. But the good stuff, that is the positive news, is dumped beyond the headlines and the first few paragraphs, where most people do not read :
"(They seem) to be an industrious, engaged group of young people..."
About 80 per cent had jobs, 20 per cent were studying, half of them worked 39-50 hours a week and another 10 per cent worked more than 50 hours a week. And 60 per cent were involved in a committed relationship with a partner.
Spin the 'underclass' stats another way, and you get this :
5 out of 6 23-24 year olds do not suffer depression or anxiety.
5 out of 6 do not engage in anti-social behaviour.
5 out of 6 do not use cannabis, or any illegal drugs, and do not binge drink regularly.
4 out of 5 do not have any long-term mental or physical health problems.
Consuming toxic quantities of booze, however, remains a problem. They hit their mid-20s, they drink more, and more often. Then again, isn't 3 or 4 drinks regarded by health officials as a 'binge' now? But as with cannabis, Es, speed and acid, most of them will likely decrease their drinking as they get bored with it, in their late-20s, and tire of hanging in nightclubs and pubs most weekends, when clear-headed work and love and hibernation Saturday nights become more desireable, along with healthier bank balances.
If the worst that can truly be said of a reasonably small number of 23-24 year olds is that they drink too much, then they're not doing too badly after all.
They may not be marrying and having kids at the rate that Baby Boomers did, but they are not soaking up anywhere near the same quantities of drugs and alcohol. More of them have jobs, more of them are working longer hours, and far less of them are dying on the roads.
Plus, more importantly, the mid-20ers are nowhere near as isolated from their families as Boomers were in the 1970s. Look at this remarkable stat, shamefully buried at the bottom of the story :
...94 per cent of young people said their relationship with their parents was important to them.
The best news of all.
Friday, September 26, 2008
Turnbull : Buckets Or Spliffs?
Malcolm Turnbull has joined a long list of once blaze-crazed state and federal politicians who have openly admitted to guffing the gungun.
"Yes, I have smoked have pot," he said...
"I think most well not most, many people have, it was a mistake to do so."
He says it was a long time ago and he would not have done it if he knew the risks at the time.
He didn't explain what the risks were. His experiences with the Assassin Of Youth certainly didn't seem to have harmed his career. It's a shame that we still live in a hypocritical tabloid media land where Turnbull would be unable to explain what he believes some of the benefits of using cannabis were, along with the risks.
So we know Turnbull once danced with rainy day women. But for a deeper insight into his personality, we need to know whether he was a purist or a hashnflash man. Did he bang down buckets or suck on fatties? Did he punch billy, or spark up a few Phillies Blunts? Was his usage confined to single schlooks or did he go chronic for weekend wastelands?
It'd be interesting to know Turnbull's opinion on medical marijuana, an issue of growing popularity in his Sydney electorate, in particular. Baby Boomers with arthritis, and there will be hundreds of thousands of them, will want their weed, without the risks of prosecution.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
They're Both Birds, With Footballs
I was wrong. Maybe the new opposition leader, Malcolm "John Howard Broke This Nation's Heart" Turnbull, will be as hilariously gaffey as the already missed Brendan Nelson was.
On Radio National on Tuesday morning, Malcolm Turnbull was asked the simple question of who he supported in the AFL: “I have to confess I vote for, I support, in Australian Rules the Roosters, who of course aren’t in the grand final - sorry the Swans.”
Could Turnbull be any more thrown off guard by an unexpected question? Labor has just found a gaping chink in his armour.
Battling to recover his composure, Turnbull hastily added, “And the Roosters in Sydney in rugby league which are, of course, the Eastern Suburbs Rugby League Club which is right next door to my (Bondi Junction electorate) office in fact.’’
As Jack The Insider calmly reminds the oppo leader, the Swans are based in his electorate. If Labor are smart, they will never let Turnbull forget this.
If they're smart, they will find a way to bring this up in Question Time answers, and in Lateline anecdotes, every few months, for years to come. It's pure dynamite, and reminds all politicians, particularly leaders, that if you don't follow a sport, or any sport, never pretend that you do. The real fans will instantly that you are full of shit.
Sure It Doesn't
I know these have been kicking around in e-mails for years, but I think they're excellent and I wish there was a whole collection, instead of just two :
Who made these originally? Anyone know? They deserve a credit. Why don't we have a real tourism campaign that takes these ideas and runs riot with them? That blows apart the tired old cliches, however true some may still be, about Australia?
The re-appearance of these images on Digg and other blogs have unleashed some vile, rabid anti-Orstrahyanism. Witness :
I’ve traveled all over the world, 5 different continents, and I can honestly say that Aussies are the only people that are dumber than Americans.
Now that hurts. A lot.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Costello : I Am Immortal
Peter Costello finally confirmed tonight, on Lateline, what so many of his adoring colleagues always suspected. Death does not know his name.
Costello : "I'm 50 years old. I'm not going to die."
For me all roads once led to the Marriott, in Islamabad, capital of Pakistan. For six years the hotel was like a second home - as I worked on assignments in Pakistan or stopped off in transit on my way back to Australia from the madness of neighbouring Afghanistan.
Architecturally, the hotel building was unremarkable, 1970s vintage. But location is everything, and the Marriott was minutes away from the National Assembly, the Prime Minister's residence, Government bureaucracy and the headquarters of Pakistan's all-powerful spy agency, the ISI.
What made this hotel special for the privileged few was the commodity being traded day and night in the foyer, cafes and restaurant: information.
Information, as they say, is power, and in Pakistan, power is a life and death struggle.
The Marriott, as American diplomats and spies were fond of saying, was "the real deal".
It often seemed that Pakistan was run from this hotel to the strains of the incessant hotel muzak.
This was a neutral ground for competing politicians, diplomats, warlords, drug lords, peddlers of nuclear weapons technology, and perhaps a few who fell into all those categories.
Alcohol was a tool of the trade even in an Islamic state such as Pakistan. At first it was brought to my room in a brown paper bag - after I filled out a government form declaring myself to be an unstable foreign alcoholic.
Later, hotel management discretely opened a windowless basement bar - one of the few venues in the capital to serve alcohol. Occasionally I'd disappear into this gloom for a quiet drink with the army officers-turned spies who were running Pakistan's secret wars in Afghanistan and Indian-occupied Kashmir. Many had embraced the extremist zeal of the militants they sought to control and exploit - yet they still enjoyed a scotch or a beer when I was paying.
Change for the Marriott came after 9/11. As the Americans gathered their forces to invade Afghanistan, the hotel became media headquarters of the world.
Hundreds of foreign media established a surreal Tower of Babel in the hotel. TV networks fought for space on the roof to erect plywood studios, guests slept on stretchers three to a room. The function centre became a paying dormitory - and the room rate, like the punditry, seemed to escalate on a daily basis.
As CNN anchors shared their insight with the world from their rooftop plywood stage, South American journalists down in the foyer, watching the broadcasts on TV, transcribed every word before relaying back to anxious readers back home.
The foyer transformed into the theatre of the absurd. There was the chic French TV crew kitted out in the flowing robes of traditional Pakistani shalwar kameez; and the American reporter complaining that he couldn't bring his gun into the hotel.
With the fall of Kabul the circus moved on, but the Marriott had changed.
After 9/11 the security barriers went up outside the hotel, but no one seriously believed it would stop a determined teenager on a one-way ticket to martyrdom.
Australia Has The Largest Intact Wilderness Left On Earth
There really is nowhere else on the planet like Cape York, the Kimberley, Arnhem Land. This is true wilderness. Preserving our wilderness, for future generations, will ensure prosperity, sustainability and life :
A study has identified 40 per cent of Australia - 3 million square kilometres - as the largest intact wilderness on Earth, ranking in quality with the Amazon forest, Antarctica and the Sahara desert.
"Few Australians realise the extent and quality of their own wilderness," said Barry Traill, a wildlife ecologist who co-authored the study identifying 12 regions of Australia that "remain almost completely untouched by humans".
"As the world's last great wilderness areas disappear under pressure from human impact, to have a continent with this much remaining wilderness intact is unusual and globally significant," Dr Traill said.
The Wild Australia Program Study found that while Australia's wilderness areas support some of the world's richest concentration of flora and fauna, they face serious threats, including feral animals, such as pigs and buffaloes, and invasive noxious weeds.
Areas identified in the study include the Kimberley, Carpentaria, Cape York, Arnhem Land, Gibson Desert, Simpson Desert, Sturt Stony Desert, Nullarbor, Great Victoria Desert, the Great Sandy Desert, and the Tanami Desert.
Friday, September 19, 2008
NSW Premier : I Want To Save Sydney's Children From Monster Cat Attacks
I'm not too sure where random vicious leopard and puma attacks on bushwalking children sits on The Priority Ladder for the new NSW premier, but it's reassuring to know he intends to take preventative action nonetheless:
New South Wales Premier Nathan Rees says rumours that a leopard inhabits bushland on Sydney's outskirts cannot be dismissed, because the safety of children could be at risk.
Talk of panthers or leopards in the Blue Mountains and Hawkesbury region has persisted for decades and there are almost 300 claimed sightings of a big cat in the area.
While there is still no conclusive proof such an animal roams Sydney's north-western fringes, Mr Rees says the animal cannot be discounted as an urban myth.
"I know I don't do policy on the run, but I think it's three years since Minister Campbell had a look at this, I think it's probably time to do it again," he said.
Sydney's Monster Cat(s) will probably take out a tourist first.
Australia's decade-and-a-half-long debt binge is coming to an end and a new era of austerity, in which consumers pay down their debts, live within their means and save for the future, is beginning, the Reserve Bank governor, Glenn Stevens, has predicted.
As US authorities were forced to stump up $US85 billion to prevent the collapse of the insurance giant American International Group, Mr Stevens said it was time for a debate about how debt-fuelled asset bubbles could be prevented in the first place, as opposed to regulators simply waiting to "clean up the mess afterwards".
... amid the financial maelstrom, Australian households were likely to hunker down and focus on repairing their debt-burdened balance sheets.
"There is … a good chance that households will for some time seek to contain and consolidate their debt, grow their consumption spending at a pace closer to income, and perhaps look to save more of their current income than in the recent past," he said.
Since the early 1990s, households had run up their gross debt as a proportion of annual disposable income from about 50 per cent to 160 per cent. A period of low inflation, low interest rates and rising incomes had enabled Australians to indulge their love affair with housing. "As we have become wealthier, our aspirations for housing in terms of position, quality and size have naturally enough increased. But … there is only so much well-located land … In the end, a lot more of our income is devoted to housing, acquired by servicing mortgages, than was once the case."
Relaxed lending standards had also fuelled the debt boom to the point where "anyone who was creditworthy - and some who were not - have been able to access ample amounts of credit".
But with the world entering a new period of constrained credit and tightened lending criteria, Mr Stevens said he expected Australian consumers would begin to rein in their big-spending ways.
We were relaxed and comfortable under John Howard, but mostly because the lounge chairs were so stuffed with credit card receipts and second mortgage demand letters.
The Australian stock markets have probably just about finished their "adjustments". But where will the credit come from that funds small businesses, that allows a builder to buy a ute, or a delivery man to buy a bigger truck? Nobody seems to know right now. This is the quieter, but far greater concern, amongst economists than share market ups and downs. Who will lend us money now?
The Australian government continues pouring tens of billions into the markets to keep the dream alive, as they keep telling themselves, "It's almost over, it's almost over, it's almost over."
The free market turned out not to be so free, after all.
Forget politics, Brendan. You gave it your all and those dirty bastards still stabbed you in the back whilst nodding collectively as you raged about pensioner poverty and the poor quality of cheap soup. Hit the open road, Brendan, jump back in a truck and plough those highways. And don't forget your guitar.
Grods pays a hearty tribute to the most entertaining leader of the Liberal Party since Alexander Downer.
Who will speak up now for the elderly pensioners of Australia who are so poor they can't afford toilet paper and have to wipe their bottoms with their cats instead?
It's What God Wanted, Apparently
If you don't have a legal right to make a choice about how you die, when death is close and living is beyond miserable, and yet the the law still sides with religious beliefs over simple humanity, well, it smells very much like theocracy, doesn't it?
Just a month shy of her 31st birthday and half a lifetime since she was diagnosed with the debilitating Crohn's disease at 15, Angelique Flowers was told she had colon cancer. It was so advanced and so aggressive, she was given only months to live.
Frightened of a slow, painful death from a total bowel obstruction, this softly spoken Melbourne writer wanted her life to end peacefully and on her own terms.
It wasn't to be. She regretfully turned away from her loved ones and spent her final weeks searching for information about euthanasia and a dose of the lethal drug Nembutal. Her final hours were robbed of the dignity she had wanted as she died vomiting the content of her bowels.
