Too High, Too Happy For Violence

An interesting paradigm for our times. Do journalists not see the link here, or are they not allowed to draw such obvious conclusions?

Cocaine and ecstasy use are on the rise across the state but domestic violence rates in Sydney have dropped for the first time in seven years, crime figures from the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research reveal.

Crime rates have fallen in almost all major areas, including a 26 per cent drop in robberies with a firearm and a 19.2 per cent drop in robberies with other weapons. Common assaults have remained stable.

But arrests for recreational drug use have surged, with a 55.4 per cent increase in ecstasy use and a 37.5 per cent jump in cocaine use in the two years to September, the report shows.

There are a lot more middle aged couples in Sydney who drop Es now on Saturday night, or Sunday afternoon, or smoke joints, instead of getting stuck into the piss. For a big night out in the clubs, or at a party, dropping an E can be a lot cheaper than drinking heavily. Most people don't drink hard if they're on Es and having a good time, and they are far less prone to beating the shit out of each other.

Instead of booze-fueled seething, jealousy and arguments, middle-aged couples on Es mostly dance and laugh and fuck instead. Well, those that aren't getting arrested.

Porn, Rape, Sex, Incest, UFOs, Sorry

Can you tell much, if anything, about Australians by the news stories they read online?

The Top 100 Most Popular Stories For 2008 from news.com.au, and its network of city daily online newspaper sites, features an abundance of stories about porn and rape and tech and sex and freak animals and incest and UFOs.

The ultimate online newspaper headline, then, would go something like this :

Incest Aliens Video BigFoot UFO Rape On iPhone

Rudd's 'Sorry' to the Stolen Generations made it in at Number 27, while the death of Heath Ledger hit number one.

Violent Pleasures

What exactly is the Daily Telegraph's Piers Akerman trying to say here?

How can the social cost of alcohol-fuelled violence or the dismal effects of wasteful wagering be measured against the temporary pleasures of engaging in such pastimes?

So now you know, engaging in alcohol-fuelled violence, as a pastime, provides only fleeting enjoyment.

Saving Lives Or Wasting Your Money?

Police and drug dogs were out in force at the HomeBake Festival. They made plenty of arrests, mostly drug-related. Eight people were done up for supplying drugs (that is, possessing a quantity of drugs deemed beyond personal use), and 76 were charged for possession.

The entire police operation on the day cost beyond $100,000 and yielded this not so impressive haul :

...police detected 78 grams of cannabis (less than three ounces), 256 ecstasy tablets and 18 grams of white powder (consisting of cocaine and speed) at the event.

I'll be generous in calculating the total street sale value of that one day haul - $30,000 max.

Obviously there were a hell of a lot more people on 'prohibited' drugs at HomeBake than those arrested. Those caught carrying drugs into HomeBake were dealers, or idiots.

As regular drug-using festival goers already know, you do your shit before you walk through the gates and come face to face with drug dogs. And, as regular drug-using festival goers already know, there are any number of ways to consume cannabis and Es and speed well before you reach the cop-crowded gates of a music festival, and still be high as all fuck for most of the day, and well into the evening. You can cook your cannabis into cookies, you can make toffee and dip your Es in the cooling toffee a couple of times (coating the E in shells of sugar delays the final dissolving of the pill), and you can sprinkle your speed into a cigarette rolling paper, 'bombing' as it used to be called, and then wrap the small wad in a few more layers of cigarette papers (the papers take a while to dissolve in your stomach, but this is a good way to give yourself ulcers if you do it too often).

Most cops will tell you the main reason there is so much LESS VIOLENCE at music festivals these days is because more people do Es and pot than get stuck into the booze. Music festivals in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s were regular bloodbaths, mostly because the alcohol flowed so freely.

However, policing music festivals is a great day out for most cops, surrounded by happy kids and great music, soaking up the sun. It's a fuck of a lot better than responding to domestic violence calls in St Clair or Rose Bay. But many cops hate the fact they have to bust kids for carrying cannabis, and that some of these kids they bust will wind up with criminal records.

However, the Top Cops are warning there will be no easing up of heavy policing of music festivals :

Police said the results served as a warning to those planning to take or supply drugs at forthcoming events this summer.

"Police will be present at all similar upcoming events, and those people found supplying and possessing prohibited drugs, along with any anti-social behaviour, will be arrested and charged," they said in a statement.

Naturally, this level of hardcore drug-policing at music festivals will also apply to Opera In The Park as well...right?

"Why Does It Have To Be Morning?"

Doc Neeson, in videos like the one below for Face The Day (the paranoid speed freak's lament), used to scare the absolute shit of me when I was a kid. But he turned out to be such a nice guy, so very well read, and polite, unless you screwed up his onstage lighting.

Fantastic song, excellent video. By looking at it, you'd barely be able to guess it's almost thirty years old.



The Angels, at their prime, are still the best live band this country has ever produced. Evidence :


I've found a couple of interesting articles and interviews on The Angels I wrote back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which I'll post up on Junkhead in the next week or so, but they'll also be linked here.

Beer Banned In Bourke

It may be necessary, but it just sounds so downright UnOrstrahyun :

A violent NSW country town that is drowning in broken glass will have the state's most draconian liquor laws when takeaway sales of bottled beer are banned.

Liquor and Gaming director Albert Gardner said it was the first time a town-wide ban on retail beer sales had been imposed in NSW.

In Bourke, police say most of the alcohol-related violence occurs in the homes of locals, not in the pubs or in the street. It's almost impossible for the cops to stop people guzzling litres of cheap piss in the privacy of their own homes, but it's easy to imagine a day coming when the card you have to show to legally buy booze also reveals the number and ages of the children you have in your care.

Alcohol related crime and violence costs taxpayers billions a year, and that's before the health costs associated with hardcore alcohol abuse are factored in. Millions of Australians getting hammered and harming themselves, or members of their families, or total strangers, is an incredible drain on public resources, and state and federal governments are already showing their tolerance of these rising costs is fading fast.

How long before widespread limits on alcohol sales become a part of everyday life for all Australians?

"Just these, thanks."

"Sir? Why are you buying four cases of beer and ten litres of cask wine?"

"What? It's grand final weekend."

"I know that, sir, but it says here you have two children under the age of five years old. I'm only allowed to sell you six cans of beer, and two bottles of wine. By law."

"Are you fucking shitting me? What in all fuck..."

"Now you're being abusive, sir. Therefore, I can only sell you low alcohol beer and wine. By law."

"That's fu...that's wrong."

"I'm sorry, sir, but that's just the way it is."

"All right. I'll just have four doses of Happyland Ecstasy instead, thanks."

"Grinners or Laughers?"

"Better make it Grinners. My mates might get violent if I laugh my head off when their shitty team is losing."

Be Very Careful Who You Poke In The Eye

Being an idiot on the piss in front of your mates can be extremely dangerous :

A soldier bit a police officer on the face at a pub after being accidentally poked in the eye ...

Security camera footage played in court appeared to show the 31-year-old policeman apologising to Koutsoubos as he held his swollen eye. "All I said was 'oh f---, sorry bro, I didn't mean to bump into you'," Constable Hogan said.

"As I attempted to walk past, he grabbed my head and bit me on my left cheek. I remember him grabbing that side of my head and pulling it down. I couldn't understand why he did it."

Automatic self-defense, or attack, responses from special forces training appear to have been activated by the eye poke.

Following an application from the Federal Government, the judge hearing the case imposed a number of protective orders under the Commonwealth Crimes Act to suppress information about Koutsoubos's role in the defence forces.

This involved the suppression of information about military training, tactics, procedures and the capabilities of the Australian Defence Force's Special Operations Command and the 4th Battalion Royal Australian Regiment, also known as the Commandos.

I had a friend who'd done fairly similar training in Canada, and if you happened to bump his chair when he was snoring-sleeping he'd leap upright and have you in a choke hold, eyes blazing, faster than you could say "Oh, fuck..."

"I'm Weird In The Head....Sometimes"

I haven't spent as much time as I'd hoped on digging through my old archives of the rock journalism I wrote back in the first half of the 1990s for newspapers like the West Australian and the Herald Sun, and magazines like Rolling Stone and Hot Metal, but I'm getting there, bit by bit. Where possible, I've gone back to the original first or second drafts I wrote, which were usually cut way back in length by the time they were published, and were far more loose.

Here's an excerpt of an interview I did with Jeff Buckley, back in August, 1995. The full interview can be read over at Junkhead :

Is it like you have all these other people, these many other sides to yourself, is that what it's like?

"People have many people inside them, many selves I feel, and I feel that they shift from one to the other sometimes in times or stress or total importance. I'm not talking about psychopaths, I'm talking about normal people.

"You notice the difference in your girlfriend if she becomes the mother, and she slips into the mother telling the child what they can or can't do - drawing boundaries around the child. It's a normal thing.

"And every side of you has a language and a feel and rhythm and a melody and a colour, and it's hard to get to it, you just have to be open and unafraid. The more uptight and conservative that I am, the more conservative the music I'm making will be."

Is that a totally different self of you up onstage, from the one who walks through a garden, thinking about the world?

"Oh yeah, (onstage) that's me with the floodgates open. A different me....I don't fear that person......that's more me, empty......like a faucet with water gushing through it. But I know who that person is.

"People are different when music is in them, they change physically. A child feels different when it is singing. The energy in the room is different, you stop and listen, or you laugh, whatever. "When any artist is channeling through other people, they transform into this......I don't know, some people might call it the divine.....it has a special nature that is yours, even though you don't see it very often."

Have you got your head around (facing death) yet?

"These two friends of mine were robbed. These thieves broke in and tied them up and pointed guns in their faces.......my friends were talking about the numbness that came with the acceptance that they were going to die......and the calmness, almost a ridiculous calm."

He think about this for a while, a sigh, a silence of maybe 20 seconds.

"Like missing a bus, 'oh well, I'll just wait for another one'."

He laughs to himself. He seems appalled and fascinated by what happened to his friends. To face death, to know you are going to die.

"It must be the fear that hits you and it stops the mind from panicking, you just freeze and think 'okay, here I am'. I think that's the sensation that hits the rabbit before the truck plummets into it, they freeze.....I've frozen many times.....there's no life without death......it's very simple...."

Read The Full Jeff Buckley Interview Here

God : "Stupid Humans, Brains The Size Of Grapefruits And They Think They Know What I've Got Planned For Them"

How many other Australian politicians believe, truly believe, in this crap?

Labor MP James Bidgood thinks the Christian God is a vengeful God and has wiped out the stock portfolios of retirees, slashed the value of homes and crushed world financial markets because...well, that's what God does, isn't it? He fucks with us. God does whatever the fuck he wants and we struggle to comprehend how he can be such a complete bastard, and why he deserves our love, respect and reverence.

"I believe there is God's justice in action in what is going on here," says James Bidgood.

Okay, I think he's going to Say It.

"We haven't seen the end of it."

It's coming, I can feel it.

"The ultimate conclusion is like I say, we look at Bible prophecy, we are going towards a one world bank and a one world monetary system."

It's coming, he's really going to say it...

And if you believe the word of God and you read Revelations..."

The final book of the deeply superstitious King James 16th century re-write of the biblical canon is actually called Revelation, not Revelations. Anyway, Bidgood is definitely going to say it, any second now.

"...you will see clearly what is being spelt out."

I don't think I can stand the tension. Here it comes...

"We are in....the End Times."

Bingo!

The End Times, to true evangelical believers of John The Hallucinatory, are not necessarily a bad thing. You see, we have to have the One World Bank and One World Monetary System in the lead up to the Final Battle between Good and Evil, and all the apocalyptic firestorms, blood moons, star falls, mantle-splitting earthquakes, exploding mountains and mass death that goes along with it, before JC can finally return and then...well, it's not pretty.

So how does the religious-based necessity - that is the realitising of ancient prophecies to concrete apocalyptic religious faith - of a One World Bank and a One World Monetary System influence the decisions MP Bidgood makes in Parliament?

We are only in the End Times if the loons who believe in this Necessary Massacre Of Humanity are in positions of power to make it a reality.

Does Prime Minister Kevin Rudd believe in the End Times as well?

Murdoch 'The Fake Conservative' Pals Around With Hollywood Liberals, And Likes It

Rupert Murdoch does what he is told by the women in his life. He always has. Now Australia's most famous ex-Australian Conservative obeys his wife and becomes a damned Hollywood Lefty Loving Lefty :

The author of a new book about media mogul Rupert Murdoch, which asserts that the owner of Fox News "absolutely despises" top-rated host Bill O'Reilly, believes that Murdoch's negative feelings about Fox go far beyond a personal distaste for O'Reilly's bullying.

Michael Wolff, author of The Man Who Owns the News, told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann on Tuesday, "I would mention ... Bill O'Reilly [to Murdoch] and he would get this look which was like revulsion." Wolff added that "I started to see this around all of Murdoch's people. ... No one says, 'O'Reilly, we hate him' ... but everybody goes into a contortion."

According to Wolff, however, the real issue is that Murdoch has "come to like the liberals more than the conservatives -- and many of them have come to like him, too. ... His life is now largely spent around people for whom Fox News is a vulgarity and a joke."

"If he became utterly convinced," asked Olberman, "not only would a liberal network make you five times the money that Fox News makes you, but one will exist and it will put Fox News out of business, would he go down the street tomorrow, shut off Fox News, and put on a liberal version of it just for the money?"

"In a New York minute," Wolff replied.

"He saw a market niche," Wolff explained. "It was easy to get into, it was easy to service these people, it was cheaper to service these people, and he went for it. ... He saw a money-making formula."

"...he's with a woman 38 years his junior, quite young, quite liberal, quite open, and certainly engaged with all of the Hollywood people."

Wolff is wrong. A lefty Fox News would be nowhere near as entertaining, or flat-out hilarious.

Yes, even more New Zealand photos.

This will end soon, I promise.















All photos by Darryl Mason

Beat My Tilt

Julia Gillard lays down the supreme challenge for all future head tilters :


(screengrab from an online front page photo in The Australian)

While Googling 'head tilting' I came across this 2004 post by the Daily Telegraph's associate editor Tim Blair, back in his independent blogging days. It's easy to forget what a nasty, insipid little shit he was back then, gloating about the Iraq War, before he knocked off the caustic edges and adopted his 'Nasty, But Nice' persona for the mainstream media gig.

The Last Days Of The Booze-Soaked Politician

How overdue is this? Very :

A push was last night under way to breathtest NSW politicians after Nationals MP Andrew Fraser's late-night altercation with a female colleague.

Health Minister John Della Bosca and Liberal leader Barry O'Farrell backed the unprecedented call to supply breath testing kits for MPs to ensure they do not turn up drunk.

"Honestly, if you are going to have breathalysers for people driving cranes you should have breathalysers for people writing laws," (Greens MP Dr John) Kaye said.

Why stop at testing for booze? If we have to fucking tolerate having drug dogs sniffing us at music festivals, the local pub and walking to the supermarket, then our state and federal politicians can put up with being drug-tested in their workplace.

Home Free, As Long As He Stays Home

'Freedom'? :

"This is the beauty of Australia or the common law countries. They do not as yet criminalise thoughts," he said.

"In European law your thoughts can be criminalised. We haven't got that in common law countries yet."

Not as yet. But maybe soon. Our government already holds a black list of blocked (or to be blocked) websites, supposedly around 10,000 sites in total, and not all of them are related to child porn or ultra-violence.

Joe Vs Julie

Joe Hockey smells the blood in the water, and begins to make his move for the deputy leadership of the Liberal Party. Hitting the banks for being scumbags now is an important Us-Vs-Them scene setter, which Hockey will be able to cash in on monumentally next year when the 'economic downturn' really becomes the Economic Downfall.

Westpac was the biggest bank in the country, Opposition finance spokesman Joe Hockey said on Wednesday.

"You would think they would pass on the interest rate cut in full, but they didn't. They gouged it," he told Fairfax Radio Network.

"Westpac gouged it, ANZ gouged it. They are gouging small business, they are gouging farmers, and they are gouging credit cards."

Hockey's aim in this attack is solid, and precise. A few more serious months of this, and the new generation Liberals can claim, in 2010, that the Rudd Government and the Bastard Banks are holding hands and skipping along rainbows together while The Rest Of Us (that will be Australia's, by then, majority poor and the "We Feel Your Pain" Liberals) are queuing for food stamps and free buses to get to work.

Hockey and Malcolm Turnbull are exactly the kind of front-line tag-team combination the Liberals need to really start hammering the Labor Party next year. Turnbull can keep it classy, while Hockey can go for the throat. Unlike Peter Costello, Alexander "Absolute Commitment" Downer and (shudder) Tony Abbott, Joe Hockey can occasionally appear to be genuine, and sincere, and has a streak of the same instant anger that many Australians quietly liked about Mark Latham.

Speaking up for the New Poor against the Bastard Banks, and pointing out how cozy "Lapdog Labor and the Bastard Banks"are, will be one of Hockey's primary missions through 2009 and 2010. If he doesn't fuck it up, the Rudd government could soon be getting major migraines whenever Hockey's name is mentioned.

Australian politics might get very interesting again, very quickly.

Revelatory Moment Of Irony Not Noticed

Interesting choice of soundtrack :

Protestors swarmed on the Gold Coast City Council headquarters in Queensland to vent their anger over a planned Muslim school yesterday as rock anthems blared from loudspeakers.

Almost 200 residents turned out for the demonstration, draped in Australian flags and shouting pro-Aussie slogans while Australian rock classics such as Land Down Under and Great Southern Land boomed across the parkland.

Let's take a look at some of the lyrics from Icehouse's Great Southern Land :

so you look into the land and it will tell you a story
story 'bout a journey ended long ago
if you listen to the motion of the wind in the mountains
maybe you can hear them talking like I do
". . they're gonna betray, they're gonna forget you,
are you gonna let them take you over this way?"

Great Southern Land, Great Southern Land
you walk alone like a primitive man
and they make it work with sticks and bones
see their hungry eyes, its a hungry home
I hear the sound of the stranger's voices
I see their hungry eyes, their hungry eyes
Great Southern Land, Great Southern Land
they burned you black, black against the ground

I'll just take a wild guess here, but whoever loaded up the music was probably captivated by this single line "...are you gonna let them take you over this way?" not realising, presumably, that the lines were about Aboriginals reacting to the invasion of their lands by the English.

The full lyrics are here

"The Economy Is Bad, But I Would Not Ask An Elf To Do For Me What I Am Not Prepared To Do For Myself"

The getaway vehicle should be easy to spot, on radar :

Brandishing a large knife and carrying an empty green shopping bag, two men wearing Santa disguises threatened the female attendant at the Cutheringa Bowls Club about 8:20pm.

They demanded she clear out the till and put the cash in the bag.

She did as she was told before running out a back entrance.

Yes, it's more New Zealand :












All photos by Darryl Mason

The Ak Attack

Piers Akerman of the Daily Telegraph says British born Muslims were involved in the Mumbai terror attacks, despite official denials by the governments of Britain and India, and so Australians who think Australian citizens should not be held without charge in the jails of our allies are EVIL. Or something. It doesn't matter. His readers get the message, they understand, and issue yet more Murdoch-media hosted calls for massacres of Australians citizens :

...lawyers, civil rights groups, civil libertarians and refugee advocates... they should all be shot as traitors.

More New Zealand :