Living In A Nightmare

Lately, I've had this feeling that I've been living in a nightmare.
Think about it:
G.W. Bush in in the White House for a scheduled 8 years; including that horrible little election-jobbing he pulled with hiss family in Florida. John Howard in power for 9 years and counting and it's enough to make one vomit everyday.
A 'War on Terror' that knows no bounds of civil decency back home. The anti-terror laws that are going to shut me up.
The rise of nut-bar religious types around the world who are violently uncompromising in their fairy-tale vision, blurring the lines between Church and state, participating in elections.
No World Series win for the Yankees since before September 11; also that ugly collapse job in the 2004 ALCS. Not to mention The Red Sox finally winning the World Series and now The White Sox seem headed that way, on the back of Jose Contreras!.
So, you know, the only conclusion to be drawn is that we must be living in a nightmare, right?

On that note I want to present a couple of links today.

Where Are You Now Paul Keating, A Nation Turns Its Lonely Eyes...


I guess I was a Keating-Labor man. I was never a party member nor an apparatchik; more like somebody who took a lot of delight in having a wit in the Lodge. Paul Keating was a pretty amazing dude to have as Prime Minister. I think I wrote a couple of days ago that I really missed the 1990s. More specifically, I miss Australia having a vision, and this was a Prime Minister who was providing oodles of it. He was everything John Howard is not; and to some, I'm sure that's a bad thing but really, how much more down a blind alley can Australia go?
So I dug up this little article in the Bulletin of all places.

Only now are historians trying to assess the Keating legacy. The most enduring will be economic reforms. After the Hawke-Keating reforms, Australia experienced one of the most prolonged periods of economic growth in its history.

But for all that, Keating could never break through his arrogance. The government’s and the Reserve Bank’s mismanagement of monetary policy caused the 1991 recession, says Paul Kelly. “Hawke has apologised for the recession, but Keating has not,” he says. “They were both responsible and it is the stain on their economic record.”

Like many of his cabinet colleagues, John Button was horrified by the “recession we had to have” comment: it damaged the government more than it should have because, while a business elite may have understood what he was saying, the mass of the Australian people did not. “[It] confirmed my view that at that time he was totally out of touch and a political fuckwit.”

Head of the Sydney Institute think-tank, Gerard Henderson, argues it was not Keating’s policy agenda that cost him the election: the Coalition supported most of the reforms and 80% of voters supported his general direction. It’s more simple, argues Henderson, “He was a smart arse and Australians don’t like a smart arse.”

As treasurer, says Henderson, it didn’t matter that Keating was flamboyant. Howard by contrast, he says, has carefully crafted his image, listening courteously to anyone who speaks to him. Hawke, likewise, moderated his language, personality and drinking. “Keating had a fan club patting him on the back but not many people telling him he should do this or shouldn’t do that. The successful PMs have all been cautious types.”

In the end, history is likely to view his judgment as flawed. He had come from a tough part of the country, and claimed to know what working-class Australians wanted. But he was seduced by the international world. Working-class voters – traditional Labor voters who switched to Howard – were waiting for him with baseball bats, as former Queensland leader Wayne Goss put it.

So, yesterday afternoon, I noticed that the SMH was reporting that the Australian populace is happy to forgo their rights in order to get Howard's terror laws in writ. The same idiots who voted for Pauline Hanson and voted out Paul Keating are going to get the Police State they always wanted. Who cares about their rights, their freedom of speech? "Screw it, get the elitist bastard, get the illegal immigrants, get the muslims! Get them all! Lock'em up and throw away they key; let them buttfuck each other for the rest of eternity..."
Edifying.
I say, bring back the elitist bastard and take us back to the future we once glimpsed in the 1990s.

Dave Brin's 'Holodeck Hypothesis'



There's a link to the right to David Brin's blog. I find it amazing that David Brin, a professional writer of some clout would bother to write a blog, but there you go. He must have a kind of graphomania or logorrhoea. The most recent entries covered an interesting thought; that we are merely figments of Dubbya's holodeck fantasy:

"The real exit strategy for the US in Iraq has already begun. Not because the war is won. But because W has begun to get bored with his latest Fantasy Job."

And what that implies may be the scariest possibility of all.

Come on! A youth spent in unbelievable frat boy party-stupor mode, with plenty of geeks to write your term papers while you get to torment em unmercifully.

Then... jet pilot! Wearing a snappy uniform and silk scarf while screeching over the Gulf, taking free flying lessons as you bravely defend your land from... Fidel! And each evening sipping margaritas by the beach, while a million other sons go off to battle Charlie in Nam...

...till that got boring. So then there came a series of other fantasy jobs: political operative, cowboy, oil man... oh!... and then baseball team owner! (The fantasy can't be baseball player, since that's real work.)

...then governor of the great Lone Star State of Texas. Yee haw! (Especially the way it starts, by putting down that Ann Richards bitty, who said all those mean things about people who are born with a silver foot-in-the-mouth. Here's my silver foot, Annie. Yeah!)

All right, so each of these jobs palled after a while. So each time you move on to something else, it means that you leave a train wreck behind you? A trail of steaming failures for others to clean up? Isn't that what nerds are for?

Oh, this kind of thing inevitably taxes the Holodeck. A long series of extreme improbabilities simply has to be hard on the machinery. Especially when a crucial parameter/rule is to keep everything consistent with some kind of "reality". How do you fill a world with smartypants types to defeat, while keeping those nerds from seeing the overall pattern? In other words, how to explain a string of impossible luck?

Well, within the simulation, smarty-pants pundits can be diverted, pointing to all sorts of “real world” explanations. Such as cronyism (so?) and Daddy's Friends (and your point is?) and even "genius Carl Rove (take THAT all you Nobel Prize pansies!) as the agents for this amazing string of events. (And that dipwad David Brin can yatter all he wants to, about the "return of boring old aristocratism" and the ultimate crony-subornation-influence of a certain foreign R-oil House. Let him!)

Even crank conspiracy theories only help distract from the real explanation for this incredible run for a fellow who frequently cannot even pronounce the name of his latest fantasy job?

Then there is religion. Isn't being the favorite of God an even better explanation?

Or maybe something a whole lot like God, in the present context? (In that case, haven't you been honest with us all along? Since you are the one who speaks to the Computer?)

If we need a QED for this hypothesis, just look at our situation today. The Presidency is the ultimate fantasy job. Especially if there's no duty, no hard work, no responsibility for outcomes, and none of the worry or care that has prematurely aged so many other occupants of the office.

What did I tell you? I'm not the only one thinking, "this can't be right! What the fuck is going on?"

Rosa Parkes Passes away.



The woman who ignited the Civil Rights movement in te USA by refusing to stand up on the bus, passed away. I kind of missed this in the shuffle of 'things anti-terror'

Michael Jackson Moves To Bahrain


this caught my eye for a certain kind of cultural dissonance angle, so to speak
After a lengthy trial, it is now apparent that Michael Jackson is going to move to Bahrain. The only conclusion I can draw from this is that it is okay to kiddy-fiddle in Bahrain... Only kidding. Who knows what's going there? Just look at that photo, will you? "Me and my buddies in Pederasty!"

Ichiro Is Unhappy



Ichiro Suzuki says he was very dissatisfied with the Mariners' performance this year. Well, I'd be too if I were him.
I've had this photo on my desktop for a few days now, so it seems this is a good a time as any to post it up.

Dead Shark



This Great White Shark corpse was washed up in a Japanese canal according to Yahoo. The thing was 4.8m long. That's one big beastie.