Big Kevin, Is He Watching Your Children?

By Darryl Mason

So this is why prime minister Kevin Rudd wanted to get a laptop in front of every school student in Australia :

....the laptops issued to high-school students....have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools' administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families.

Don't panic. Yet. This story is about an extremely creepy laptops-for-students program in Philadelphia.

But do the the tens of thousands of laptops being distributed to Australian schools have webcams as standard? And can they be remotely activated?

Students probably already know the lenses can be blinded temporarily, without damage, by taping a small piece of paper over that digital eye.

Just in case.



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Peter Garrett Quits Politics, Rejoins Midnight Oil



Come back here in February 2011 and tell me I'm wrong.

At every gig, for years to come, there'll be at least one person in the audience shout-singing, "How can we sleep while our batts are burning!"

Miranda Devine will do it, at least once. With Tim Blair on her shoulders.

The Chaser said farewell to Peter Garrett's political career in 2008



(the above image was screengrabbed from a larger banner here)

UPDATE : Philip Coorey, in the Sydney Morning Herald, hoses down the rumours :

Mr Rudd has no intention of shifting Mr Garrett. Sources close to the Prime Minister say Mr Garrett has defended himself inside and outside the Parliament better than anybody anticipated.

The Greens : Vote For Us Or....We'll Politely Ask You Again To Vote For Us

Below is the absolute opposite of your bog standard political attack ads. And it cuts through. The message is clear, there's a vision for the future, and The Greens are not trying to scare you into voting for them. That in itself is refreshing.



I like a tastily vicious political attack ad, and I'll probably run a few here during FedElect2010, but all that bitterness and "Gotcha!" and 'nyah!nyah!nyah!' becomes incredibly tiresome, very quickly.

Let's hope we see plenty of creativity, or at the very least something we haven't seen before, in the video messages and ads served up by the political parties this federal election year.

They have to catch our attention now with great vids to even think about catching our votes.

Crikey's First Dog On The Moon has some free bumper stickers for you :



BTW - Honk!

More Here

The 'Epic Beard Man' Top Ten

If you haven't seen this yet, be warned, there is sickening tension, violence, racism all round and plenty of swears. The list will follow :



The Epic Beard Man Top Ten

* The Epic Beard Man, clearly upset, tried to end the confrontation by walking away.

* The man who threw the first punch, threw only one punch.

* The Epic Beard Man stopped when the other man was down, and finished with "I told you not to fuck with me." And he did tell him exactly that.

* No guns were drawn, no-one else on the bus was injured.

* The loudmouth friend with the vid : First, "kick his white ass!" Seconds later, "Oh! What the fuck?"

* "It's not worth it, blood. It's not worth it." And it wasn't.

* 4Chan have already identified and contacted the person seen stealing the old man's shopping bag and demanded they return everything.

* "Oooh, he leaking."

* This motivational poster appeared online when the clip had clocked up just a few hundred views on YouTube.

* The brief glimpse at the end showing a bus seat sign that reads, "Keep Our City Clean And Safe. Do Your Part."

If you're a tryhard, the next time you encounter a Vietnam vet wearing a shirt that reads "I Am A Motherfucker", just assume that he is and keep your distance.

How The 'Epic Beard Man' Narrative Will Likely Unfold In The Mainstream News Media


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Truck Almost Ends Tony Abbott's Rise To Prime Minister

Maybe he really does have God on his side, after all :



God has now marked down Tony Abbott's name down in his 'You Owe Me One, Big Style' ledger.

(Via ABC Video)

Many will recommend this movie to Tony Abbott, starting now, but @idlaviv wonders if Abbott's driver has already seen it :



Yes, younger readers, that is a Steven Spielberg movie, one of his first, and still one of his best. Without it, there would have been no Mad Max.

AC/DC : The Product


SmartCompany.com argues famous brands can learn a lot from the decades of $50 million per year plus success enjoyed by Australia's geatest hard rock band. The cut-thru message is: don't fuck with the brand that people already love :

Classic, iconic products (think Coca-Cola as a long-bow example) never change their formula. They might introduce other new products, but at the core of the company's product range is the old favourite. An iconic product also lets you transcend generations, something Coke and AC/DC do very, very well.

That doesn't mean these brands don't innovate – last night's show was a perfect example of how AC/DC tweak their packaging (that is, the giant stage props used in the live show) while keeping the product (the songs) the same and cashing in over and over again.

The concert also taught me a lot about innovation in the area of brand extension. The amount of AC/DC merchandise being sold last night was incredible and the fans (many of whom were already clad in AC/DC T-shirts) were snapping the stuff up at an impressive rate.

So there's a lesson – when you find yourself with a product or service that your customers just love, be careful that you don't change it too much.

Read The Full Story Here

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Stories I've Been Reading Instead Of Posting Blogs Here :

American Soldiers In Iraq Listen To Slayer's 'Angel Of Death' To "Become A Monster" and Get Their Heads Into A "Predator Mindset"

Five Centuries Of New Media Technology Scares - From The Printing Press To Facebook

UK Police Surveillance Drone Grounded....For Being Illegal

Claims CIA Had Weaponised LSD By 1951, Sprayed It Over A French Village Causing An Outbreak Of Mass Hysteria That Killed Five

You Can Now Spend Days Riding The Entire Length Of The Trans-Siberian Railway On YouTube

Saudi Prince Owns Stake In Fox News, Conservative Activists Claim This Is "Dangerous For America"

Afghanistan : It's The Poor Of America's Generation Y Fighting This War Now - Prediciton That 300 To 500 Will Die There Each Month

What A Shock, The Same NeoCon Blood-Soaked War Pigs Who Demanded Bush Attack Iraq Are Now Demanding Obama Bomb Iran To "Save His Presidency"

Classic NewsMax : Claim Obama Plotted "Marxist Revolution" To "Redistribute The Wealth" While In College

George W. Bush, Pre-Iraq War : “Gog And Magog Are At Work In The Middle East...The Biblical Prophecies Are Being Fulfilled...This Confrontation Is Willed By God"

Captain America Recruited To Attack Anti-GOP Conservative Movement

Winners Of The World Press Photo Of The Year

Adam Curtis Deep Probes The BBC Archives For Afghanistan Doco, His Notes On A Fascinating, Shocking, Surreal History

Japan, Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Russia, Norway, New Zealand Have All Aired Stories And Docos Challenging The Truth Of The Bush-Era 9/11 'Official Story'....But Not The ABC

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Quality Death Exploiting Journalism

Glenn Milne, The Australian :

....more Australians have died as a result of the Rudd government's home insulation program, "administered" by Environment Minister Peter Garrett, than lost their lives in the Iraq war.

This is what years of alcohol abuse does to your brain, kids. So go easy.

Nothing from Milne, of course, about the dozens of young Australians who served in the Iraq War, witnessed the gruesome brutal reality of an illegal invasion that Milne fully backed and came home and killed themselves.

That Milne can even dare to mention Jake Kovco's name as he attempts to blame Peter Garrett for the deaths of four insulation installers shows just what a foul and odious Liberal Party hack he really is.

Oh, this is going to be a very, very bitter election campaign. Not so from much from Tony Abbott or Kevin Rudd necessarily, but it's already clear that aging, empathy-fucked Murdoch opinionists have convinced themselves they can ensure that the Rudd government only serves one term.

A politically historic event they no doubt intend to be an active part of.

It's going to be grim.


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Real world protests for virtual world freedoms :

(click to enlarge)

JG Ballard, 'What I Believe' :

I believe in the gentleness of the surgeon’s knife, in the limitless geometry of the cinema screen, in the hidden universe within supermarkets, in the loneliness of the sun, in the garrulousness of planets, in the repetitiveness or ourselves, in the inexistence of the universe and the boredom of the atom.

More Here


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Lit My Knnow If I Mussed Any Tyypos

Tim Blair, an editor for the Daily Telegraph, spots a typo (!) in The Age, while once again missing typo incidents in his own newspaper's online front page.

In the big box lead story no less :



It's not the first time this kind of thing has happened.

Nor did he notice a columnist for his newspaper fabricated a quote from a book he hasn't read.

But, to his credit, he has been busy lately....

* Checking the fashion choices of visiting celebrities.

* Mocking a scientist who became suicidal after death threats and emails telling him to go kill himself.

* And calling avid gamers "sad case" people, while claiming millions of Australian "gamers" have been "gamed" because a 24 year old (who he needed to highlight "still lives with his parents") has been fined $1.5 million for illegally uploading an old Mario game to a file sharing site.

Bagging gamers. That should prove very popular with the over-50s.


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Midnight Oil To Reunite For PeteAid

Four people had to die so the Sydney Morning Herald's Miranda Devine could deliver this joke :



Genius stuff.

Some day soon, all protests will be conducted only by people dressed as Na'vi, wearing V (Guy Fawkes) masks.

The Joe Hockey Experience

Isn't Question Time humiliating enough? No.



ABC's Lateline, February 11, 2010. Let's go straight to the highlights :

TONY JONES: ....if the next election is largely about economic management, and most likely it will be, we can pretty much script the Labor Party's election ads right now. Tony Abbott says he's not interested in economics. Barnaby Joyce can't tell his millions from his billions, and says the country's pretty much bankrupt and wouldn't be able to repay its national debt, and then up flashes a picture of the Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey wearing a tutu, a tiara and carrying a golden wand. I mean ...

JOE HOCKEY: Well they've obviously shown you the ad.

TONY JONES: I have seen it.

JOE HOCKEY: (Laughs). You have seen it already!

TONY JONES: I've seen the pictures.

JOE HOCKEY: As long as you weren't a part of the production of the ad, Tony.

TONY JONES: I've seen the pictures and imagining what the ad would be.

JOE HOCKEY: Well, you know what: Australians can see through that, and they will see through that, because Australians ...

TONY JONES: See through your tutu.

JOE HOCKEY: No, no, look, can I tell you - gosh. I mean, if you're a real person and you do real things and you engage in, you know, the activities that Australians do ...

TONY JONES: Cross-dressing!

JOE HOCKEY: Oh, well maybe you do, Tony. I mean, you don't know what happens at the ABC, do you, really?

JOE HOCKEY: If you want a real person...I care about real people, I live with real people, I engage with real people.

In this Lateline interview, and many others, Joe Hockey seems obsessed with the idea that there are both real and fake people, in politics and walking around in everday life.

I hope Joe Hockey pursues this idea further. Here's Philip K Dick on the subject :

Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans.

Okay, maybe that's a bit too far.

JOE HOCKEY: ...I really want real people to be in politics. I want real people with real words engaging in real activity. Barnaby Joyce is real. Lindsay Tanner, Peter Garrett - these people aren't real. Kevin Rudd's not real.

TONY JONES: You cut them and they bleed, they are real.

JOE HOCKEY: Well, no.

Perhaps Hockey could push for mandatory Voight-Kammpf testing of all politicians running for election this year.



The imitation people must be weeded out, even those with pre-programmed four year life spans.

And to finish, back in the 'real' world :

JOE HOCKEY: ....Australia was very lucky to have China with massive stimulus and fantastic terms of trade and demand for our resources.

TONY JONES: Oh, so - sorry, can I just interrupt you there? Stimulus works in China, but not in Australia?

JOE HOCKEY: Well, their demand for our iron ore and various other resources had a huge impact.

TONY JONES: But their stimulus worked to drive their economy, but not ours?

JOE HOCKEY: Oh, well, yeah, well.

The video of the full interview is here. It's mostly Gold.



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Ray Of Lite

ABC Managing Director Mark Scott, on Twitter :

That 24/7 news recruitment must be underway. Just saw Ray Martin in the Ultimo foyer. I'm always last to know.

Ray Martin is at the ABC to discuss doing a show for the ABC's 24 hour news channel?

That can mean only one thing. The long awaited full hour version of this pilot :



Laugh if you like, but you know full well if you were sitting in front of the TV at 11pm on a Friday night, nine beers down, brain-drained and body slabbed after a hectic week of work, you'd watch at least 20 minutes of Small Talk before you changed the channel.

Me too.



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They Should Be Scared, If Our Serial Killers Don't Get Them, Our Psychotically Violent Fauna Will



They just make this shit up, so everyone has a definable and thereby treatable phobia :

Novahollandiaphobia - Fear of Australia, Australians, Australian culture etc.

There's a lot to choose from in that list, of course there is, but I think this is my favourite surreal phobia :

Chronophobia - Fear of time

Actually, it's probably a toss up between that, and this :

Levophobia - Fear of things to the left side of the body.

And I have to cram this one in, because hearing or seeing the name of the phobia should trigger incidents of the phobia in 'sufferers' :

Macroxenoglossophobia - Fear of long, strange words.

Sorry if you've just crumbled in a shattered heap.

Come Visit Beautiful Australia.....And Die


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It's A Wonderland Land, It's A HoneyLand

If Australia ever needs a Village People-esque 12 inch disco remix national anthem, here it is.

@cosmicjester via @justinnorrie finds some YouTube Gold :



The song, Good News Australia, charted somewhat in 1979-1980, according to here.

You can download the MP3 here

Kevin Rudd Admits It : The Great Global Warming Conspiracy Is A Commo Plot!

You didn't believe it when Andrew Bolt told you. You didn't believe it when puzzle maker Christopher Monckton told you. So will you finally believe it when prime minister Kevin Rudd tells you?

"Let me tell you, (global warming) is all one global communist conspiracy. So watch out, and lock up your friends. It's going to come and get you in the middle of the night."

An interesting strategy. That line got Rudd one of his biggest, and most genuine, laughs of the night from the Q & A audience of students, and successfully deflated some of the tension of the room.


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Murdoch Defamation Payout Spigot Piers Akerman Faked Famous 'We Must Announce Disasters' Quote That Fueled The AGW Skeptic Movement

The Daily Telegraph's Piers Akerman, November 5, 2006 :

This alarmist approach reeked of stupidity, snake oil, and misguided gospel preaching but was in line with a formula adopted by the first chairman of the IPCC, Sir John Houghton, who produced the IPCC's first three reports in 1990, 1995 and 2001 and wrote in his book Global Warming, The Complete Briefing, in 1994: "Unless we announce disasters no one will listen.''

That bolded quote cited by Akerman did not appear in Sir John Houghton's book. Today's UK Independent quotes Houghton :

"It's not the sort of thing I would ever say. It's quite the opposite of what I think and it pains me to see this quote being used repeatedly in this way. I would never say we should hype up the risk of climate disasters in order to get noticed."

Even though the quotation appears on about 1.77 million web links, no one seems to know where it originated.

Akerman's November 5, 2006 article is cited by the UK Independent as "the earliest record" of the fake quote appearing online. How proud he must be.

Sir John, who was the former head of the Met Office but is now living in semi-active retirement in Wales, said he is considering taking legal action because he feels that the continued recycling of the misquotation is doing him and his science a huge disfavour.

"It doesn't do me any good because it suggests to everyone that I have hyped things up. I've been growing aware of it now for some time. The trouble is, if I just deny it then it cuts no ice with the people who want to believe it. I have to consider legal action," Sir John said.

If Houghton does take legal action, it will be the latest in a long line of defamation suits against Akerman, who must have cost Rupert Murdoch at least $2 million in payouts, payoffs and legal fees in the past few years alone.

How did Akerman respond to questions from the UK Independent about his fabrication of this famous quote? Well, how do you reckon, once he knew he'd been busted? Again?

Mr Akerman did not respond to enquiries by The Independent.

Daily Telegraph lawyers probably have a rapid response unit solely devoted to Akerman by now.

More soon....


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