2010/01/31

Un-Know1ng Benefits

What Precedent?

During the week, Pleiades sent in this link about Alex Proyas' company getting the Producer off-set for producing 'Know1ng'. :
IF you were giving somebody a gift of $20 million, the recipient may want to know about it. But in a farcical situation last week, the Australian director and producers of the film Knowing, Alex Proyas and Topher Dow, were unaware that their film had finally qualified for the federal government's 40 per cent producer offset, a subsidy that could pay for up to $20m of the $55m film.

The Australian contacted their Sydney production office on Friday to ask why federal agency Screen Australia had included Knowing in its annual analysis of Australian films at the box office. The film had previously been denied the offset, presumably because it wasn't considered Australian enough.

Last year, Proyas had not been quiet about the rejection, saying both publicly and privately he was flummoxed by Screen Australia's decision, given his thriller - starring Nicolas Cage, Rose Byrne and Ben Mendelsohn - was shot in Melbourne and post-produced here by Australians. Proyas and Dow's office could "neither confirm or deny" whether the film received the offset on Friday. The truth is, they didn't know until The Australian called to inform them that Screen Australia had pronounced Knowing the third highest-grossing Australian film of 2009, with takings of $7.6m. It came behind Mao's Last Dancer ($15m) and Baz Luhrmann's Australia ($10m in 2009, after its 2008 release).

Knowing had previously not been considered an Australian film. It did not receive Screen Australia investment and was not submitted for any local film awards.

Matters were further confused by Screen Australia in its explanation. It said statistical definitions were "applied independently of the producer offset unit", and that Knowing qualified as an "unofficial co-production", meaning that it "satisfies the co-production requirements despite not being made under a treaty or memorandum of understanding with one of the 10 countries [with] which we currently have official agreements."

Screen Australia analysis of box-office data from the Motion Picture Distributors Association of Australia shows we spent $54.8m on tickets to Australian films last year. The figure represents 5 per cent of the total box office of $1.09 billion.

It was the best domestic share since 2001, a year that produced Moulin Rouge!, Lantana, The Man Who Sued God and Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles.

After Mao's Last Dancer, Australia and Knowing, the next highest-grossing local releases of 2009 were the comedy Charlie & Boots ($3.9m) and Warwick Thornton's acclaimed debut Samson & Delilah ($3.2m).

Without Australia and Knowing, however, the Australian box office would have slumped to $36.6m, or 3.3 per cent of total cinema revenue, down appreciably from the 10-year average of 4.4 per cent. (Happily, new release Bran Nue Dae has already topped $3.6m in receipts in its first two weeks of release.) Proyas was unavailable for comment but said in a statement on Monday: "As producer, co-writer and director of the film, I am extremely pleased at this decision, as the film was made by Australians and shot and post-produced in Australia. The production brought a great deal of work to the local industry and I hope that with this film now qualifying, more projects of its type can be made locally. I feel the Australian film industry will benefit enormously from this decision."

The case raises or highlights many questions about the new federal incentive for film and television production, ahead of an expected discussion paper and departmental review this year.

First, the privacy provisions surrounding the offset - it is administered under tax law - are of no use to anyone other than perhaps Screen Australia. Government subsidies for other industries are transparent; the financial secrecy regarding the administration of the offset only obscures the means of film financing and hurts the industry's desire to be treated seriously. Changes to tax legislation heading to parliament will be of minor consequence.

Second, while Proyas did not know his film had received the offset money, no doubt his US studio, Summit Entertainment, did. In many instances, the offset subsidy provided by Australian taxpayers is being swallowed by international studios and financiers. As Luhrmann told The Australian when asked about the rebate available to his film Australia, "Don't ask me, that's all handled by Fox!" (Twentieth Century Fox is owned by News Corporation, the parent company of News Limited, publisher of The Australian.)

Malcontents have suggested several other theories. Was Knowing granted the offset in order to boost Australian box-office figures at a testy time in screen politics, ahead of the departmental review and as industry distress with Screen Australia's management grows?

Or was approval of Knowing kept quiet so as to distance it from a decision to deny the 40 per cent offset to George Miller's Justice League: Mortal? That film, like Knowing, would have been shot in Australia with a largely Australian cast and crew but had a script written by foreigners.

This leads again to the issue of transparency. Knowing was arguably successful in obtaining the offset because it was developed by Proyas, an Australian director, and - unlike Justice League: Mortal - ownership of intellectual property in the film would be retained in Australia. If the decision becomes a precedent, it will affect international studios and whether they choose to invest in production here. Yet no one knows which criteria Knowing satisfied and what the precedent may be.

At a policy level, transparency is key. Producers are willing to divulge what financing process they use, if not the amount of money raised. If Screen Australia is unwilling to provide clarity on sources and dollar volumes, the public or industry scrutiny of the new incentive scheme is aimless.

Consequently, when Screen Australia announced late last year that the offset had helped screen productions to the tune of $123m since July 2007, there was no way of knowing how much that figure was boosted by the eight-figure sum heading the way of Luhrmann's Australia. One insider suggested the offset is working "as the government expected". Unfortunately, as Proyas discovered, that is as precise as film policy gets.

So let's see now... It's 'Australian' after the fact if it helps boost the bottom line for Screen Australia then? That's just swell. Not only is it policy by Post-hoc, it's Ad-hoc.

2010/01/30

JD Salinger Passing

Symbol In Search Of Meaning

The most extraordinary thing about Salinger might have been the breadth of appeal his most famous book 'Catcher In The Rye' possessed. Let's face it, it inspired David Mark Chapman to murder John Lennon.  Perhaps because of this murder I've always had a dim view o the book - and at the time of Lennon's murder I hadn't read the damn thing yet. It was a distaste more in line with the sort of distaste a young girl has for foreign cuisine she is yet to taste "Yuck!"

At the time of Lennon's death, you could read any number of analysis of how the book might have related to the murder or how Chapman may have misunderstood the meaning of the book. It's always a little weird when a literary work gets dissected by journalists instead of critics because the Who-What-Where-When-How demands of journalism inevitably strips the work of its fine ornamentation. I have to say there's a side of me that thinks that such condensation and reductio ad absurdum of a text is in of itself interesting.

I finally read the book when it was given to me when I was nineteen. A girl I loved dearly thought I was like Holden Caulfield. Some people might find that flattering. Most of my friends thought it was hilariously wrong. Having read the book I was dismayed. At the time I felt Holden Caulfield as a character was a nonstarter, determined not to start anything meaningful. I was a dude waiting to do a myriad of things with my life. I couldn't have been more dissimilar to Holden. Suffice to say, she liked Holden, she liked me, and she was projecting Holden on to me - a mot unlikely target - which kind of explains why we busted up.

After my bust up with the said girl, I threw away the book. I've never really wanted to read it again out of distaste for the whole experience - Lennon/Chapman and the girl were enough to put me off it for life. But Salinger kept popping up even in fiction.

Ray Kinsella wrote 'Shoeless Joe' and he had this to say this week.
"When I was writing the novel I was a fan of Salinger," said Kinsella, who lives in Canada but earned a master's degree at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1978. " 'Catcher in the Rye' was the quintessential book of growing up male in North America."

In Kinsella's book, the main character - Ray Kinsella - takes Salinger to a baseball game to discover why he was called to build the field of his dreams.

"What if - which is what authors spend their time considering - what if Ray got into this adventure when he goes off to wherever he goes off to," author Kinsella mused Thursday.

The ball field, today a tourist attraction outside Dyersville, and the movie's lines ("If you build it, he will come," "Is this heaven? ... It's Iowa") are now firmly part of Iowa folklore.
Kinsella said the working title of the book was "The Kidnapping of J.D. Salinger."

After a name change and publication of "Shoeless Joe," Salinger's lawyers wrote Kinsella, outraged about the portrayal of the world-wary author.

"Salinger made a career out of being publicized for not seeking publicity," Kinsella said. "It was controlled and planned, and it kept his name in the media for 50 years."

But the lawyers had a warning: "In a legalese way, they basically said we don't have enough money to sue you but we will (expletive) on your wish to use it in a movie," Kinsella said. That's why, in the "Field of Dreams" movie, Ray Kinsella seeks out fictional author Terence Mann.

Of course, the voice of Darth Vader, James Earl Jones would play Terence Mann and deliver that famous speech about baseball. And it has to be said that the transformation the Terence Mann character makes in the movie is a stirring moment in the film, so much so that I liked him better than Salinger who just kept being a recluse. Yes, Ray's vision about Shoeless Joe and the field in the cornfield and all that is literally corny. Yet if I had to side with Kinsella or Salinger about the dynamic of the American personae, I think I'm in Kinsella' corner. The impulsive intuitive dynamism of Ray is so much more understandably American (in a Captain Kirk kind of way, I might add) than Salinger's introverted depressive misanthrope in Holden Caulfield. Is Kinsella a better writer? Probably not. But he's more on the money about the pulse of the world he lives in; and let's not forget, he's not the one who is a recluse.

Quite frankly, most of us men don't want to be Catchers in the rye. We want to be Thirdbasemn at Yankee stadium; or a Beatle; or an astronaut in space; or something. The fact that so few get there makes life poignant and so interesting. I don't think not even making a run at it is terribly great or a literary virtue.

Salinger's most prominent characteristic as a man of letters may just be his reticence to offer anything beyond the book, which makes him the great unknowable. So much has been written about Salinger's retreat from public life that I guess Salinger himself has become a cultural cipher without much reference other than his book. People are projecting all sorts of things on to him through their experience of his book and the dearth of information on the man has helped create a mythic void in the middle of 20th Century American Literature. He may as well have been dead all these years so it took me by surprise to find out he died, aged 91.

2010/01/24

From The Mailbox - 24/01/10

Doug Glanville's View

I've refrained from the Mark McGwire castigation on this blog since his apology. It's because there's not much that can be done about it now, and because his record-breaking feats were a symptom rather than the disease itself that ate into baseball. I've seen enough from Jason Giambi, Andy Pettitte and A-Rod to safely say I didn't want to go through a dissection of McGwire's so-called apology. Needless to say, none of it makes me happy.

That being said, Walk-Off HBP sent through this link during the week and I've been meaning to post it for a couple of days now.
I knew that what I was seeing was impossible. When you play the game long enough, you develop a sixth sense for the realm of the possible. You learn your body’s limitations (and your opponents’ bodies) in short order, because knowing is integral to your longevity. Sure, limits are pushed, but it doesn’t happen overnight. I played centerfield and had to know that when Chad Kreuter or Todd Zeile hit a ball, there was a good chance it would come off their bats with no spin, making it dance unpredictably while I was trying to catch it in the outfield. I could tell from the angle of Vladimir Guerrero’s bat and the location of the pitch when the ball was going to slice away from me. From bat-ball contact I could tell to a fine degree where a ball would end up long before I got there. As the Phillies announcers always used to say to me, “I knew right away when you had the ball in your sights, and then you would just be there.”

That’s because it was my job to be there — to know the field, the wind, the conditions so well that I could take the ball out of the equation after contact, and get to where it was supposed to be. I had all the data I needed without relying on my eyes exclusively. I could run to the spot and wait for the ball while getting into position to throw to the next base (should a runner be on base).

The first time I questioned those instincts was during a game against the Kinston Indians and Manny Ramirez in 1992. It was my first full minor league season with the Winston-Salem Spirits of the famed Carolina League. I was in centerfield and Manny hit a line drive into the gap in right-center. No problem, I thought. I’ll run at an angle and cut the ball off near the warning track. Even if can’t quite get there to catch it, maybe I can hold him to a double.

Well, the ball hit part-way up the light tower, well over the fence for a home run. I could not believe my eyes. Up until that moment, I’d never seen anyone who could hit a home run to the opposite field, let alone a missile like that. It was stunning. As far as I knew, this was pure hitting ability. Ability that none of my college opponents had possessed.

There you have it. Incredulity as the reason for suspicion. The problem at the time was that even with the professional opinion of a fellow player, the Glanville line of reasoning would not have stood in a court of public opinion. Most of us who suspected, did so on the basis of our incredulity at the feats being accomplished. Those who denied the possibility o steroids demanded proof and gloated behind the absence of testing in baseball.

The Onion's Take

Which leads me to this other link to The Onion whose headline reads: "Mark McGwire Admits It Was Really Fucking Fun Hitting Baseballs So Far.
"I can't remember having a better time in all of my life," McGwire said during an hour-long interview with the MLB Network's Bob Costas. "Do you have any idea what it's like knowing instantly that a ball you hit is going to fly—no, soar—over a fence in a major-league stadium? Well, I do. And it's fucking fantastic."

"I'm sorry everyone had a problem with it," McGwire added. "But I was having a blast."

Though McGwire told Costas there were times he almost regretted taking anabolic steroids, the former Oakland Athletics star said that, considering the tons of fun the performance-enhancing substances allowed him to have, he never thought twice about his decision.

"I was hitting baseballs over 450 feet," McGwire said. "That's really far. And high, too. Oh my God, were they high. Towering, in fact. I was, like, crushing these things."

According to McGwire, he had the most fun during the 1998 season, when he fired off 70 home runs and broke Roger Maris' single-season long-ball record. McGwire said he had the second-most fun the following year, when he hit 65 home runs, many of which, the giddy slugger proclaimed, "went for miles and miles."

If that doesn't illustrate the moral obtuseness of McGwire's 'apology', then this bit mows down the complicity of the MLB and MLBPA:
According to the three-time Silver Slugger Award winner, the fun he was having also seemed to make everyone else—including teammates, fans, and Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig—have fun while they watched his at bats.

McGwire said that the main thing he learned in his 16 years as a player was that people tend to be happier when players are hitting the ball really far.

"By their reactions, I just figured they were cool with me taking steroids and having a good time," McGwire said. "They clearly knew I was taking performance-enhancing drugs, right? I mean, look at me. I look like a fucking monster. Plus, come on—I was hitting the ball really, really fucking far."

Ouch.

Cinematographers' Blues

For Budding Cinematographers

Here's an article exploring cinematography, post-'Avatar'.
Every decade of filmmakers feels that it is at the center of a maelstrom. The simple fact is that film, being a technologically driven art form, has always been prone to sudden and disruptive changes. It is one reason there is such a huge turnover in talent, and why so many artists and technicians have shorter rather than longer careers. Yes, it is a stressful business—but the truth is, if you are looking for security and stasis, you should find another career path.

The past decade witnessed the emergence of HD video into mainstream feature film production. Despite the best efforts of some studios to drive a stake through the heart of 35mm. motion picture film, Kodak has continued to improve its signature product and has kept more than a few steps ahead of a quickly pursuing digital raptor:

Sony.com 2K & 4K movies link

Sony.com 4K Digital Cinema link

This nipping at film’s heels has been more than slightly abetted by some of a generation of experienced cinematographers, hell-bent on staying inside the curve of hipdom, who have jumped into the deep end of the digital pool. The irony to this that I see, is that many of the young and emerging cinematographers who were nursed on digital video milk, now are crying to be weaned to the more solid sustenance of motion picture film. Even some directors, who have well-deserved reputations as film stylists, and who, as early adapters, embraced digital video as an auteur’s dream medium, have had to acknowledge that the extended margin of control afforded by a “what you see is what you get” digital camera, can not yet “get” the image subtlety, color, and resolution of motion picture film. Several of these veterans are returning to film for future productions.

Since beginning this blog I have had a lot of communication with young cinematographers and filmmakers, digitally savvy and cognizant of all of digital video’s potential, who, nonetheless, want nothing more than to shoot movies on film. Even more surprising, many of them have expressed a passionate interest in working in the anamorphic format, which was all but given up for dead less than a decade ago. For my part, though I am far from Struss’ or Rosher’s experience level, I have been witness to many of these same changes in technique, style and grammar. I came eagerly to digital photography over a decade ago and have shot feature films and shorts such as The Anniversary Party, Incident at Loch Ness, and The Architect in various digital video formats, with varying degrees of satisfaction. But my abiding love has been, and continues to be, film. I read with interest a statement in a recent American Cinematographer article that Avatar was not only Mauro Fiore’s first 3-D movie but also his first in digital video. What more compelling testimony can you have that it is the artist, not the medium, that is the creative entity?

I'm not so sure that Avatar augurs well for continued use of film. I think it augurs for the likely demise of film as the shooting format. I know cinematographers by dint of their trade are not going into the night without a fight, but if you're a director working with tighter an tighter budget constraints, I think one of the things you jettison is the fetishistic attachment to 35mm film.

Then there's this little bit:
I will be the first to admit that movies as I studied them in film school and that for the major part of my career I have been fortunate to photograph, are disappearing. The dramatic, humanist film rooted in real life experience, or some reasonable simulacrum of it, is slowly fading away. Those that are continuing to be made seem more and more to come out of an ever-shrinking indie world or from abroad, especially from developing countries that are still exploring their own poetic myth and identity—and of course, France. I often joke to students that most of the studio films I have photographed the past 30 years would be unlikely to be green lit today by the same studios that had made them. In a vicious spiral ever downward into new levels of mediocrity, the majors have largely abrogated responsibility to produce films for a broad-spectrum audience. The lower the bar is dropped toward the slithering testosterone impacted young male adults that seem to constitute the “target demographic,” the lower they clamor for it to drop; and the digital magicians of CGI visual effects have become ever more adept at manufacturing convincing explosions, car crashes, eviscerations, and gravity-defying punch-ups and shoot outs. Sure, there is room for crap like that; there always has been, even in the days when such fare constituted the bottom half of double bills and when this genre of film only had money enough for cheesey effects. Today, the effects and stunts are the budget. Even sadder, one of these 100 million dollar plus bloated behemoths prevents half a dozen human-scaled, dramatic films from being made. If you think I am exaggerating, talk to the young writer-directors who are being ushered out of studio executive suites with an assurance that their scripts are wonderful, but “too soft” for today’s market.

It is not simply that such mature themed films do not now, and will likely never again, occupy the place of primacy that they did for nearly a century, nor even that of the smaller niche of “art film” that they had during the crazy and heady days of the Nouvelle Vague.

That's all true. The only way to tell those stories now is to go low budget, which mean abandoning the perforated stuff. I don't have any easy answers, but I will share my own from another field - music.

It used to be that music production was ponderous and expensive. The arrival of digital temporarily made it even more expensive, but then suddenly the music-making technology became widely available on domestic computers. The subsequent explosion of recorded music that now exists on the web shows that this democratising of the artform has been a grand success. And while I haven't heard of anybody who has made a lot of money out of their digital music as a result of this development, I have met a lot more satisfied musicians than before the advent of this technology. Overall, it has been good for music.

What this seems to show is that the future of motion picture might be that everybody gets to be a director, but nobody gets to make money - but motion pictures would be the better for it. I don't mind that future.

2010/01/16

Binfield For Bankers - 15/01/10

"The Nerve Of The Guy!"

Lloyd Blankfein, head of Goldman Sachs, the leading investment bank that led the markets to the brink in the GFC says he's sick of apologising for it.
Called to Washington on Wednesday to testify before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, Mr Blankfein made it plain that he was done apologising.

The commission chairman, the former treasurer for California, Phil Angelides, pointed out that some regarded Goldman's behaviour - in which the firm sold mortgage securities to customers and then placed bets against those same - was ''the most cynical'' of practices.

''It sounds to me a little bit like selling a car with faulty brakes and then buying an insurance policy on the buyer of those cars,'' said the chairman.

''That's what a market is,'' Mr Blankfein said.

''I do know what a market is,'' Mr Angelides replied sourly. He tried again to get Mr Blankfein to acknowledge that ''excessive risk was being taken''.

''Look, how would you look at the risk of a hurricane?'' the man from Goldman retorted.

''Acts of God we'll exempt,'' Mr Angelides said. ''These were acts of men and women.''

What do you do with people like this? I'm surprised there isn't  vigilante group out to find where he lives and fire bomb his property.Not that I'm advocating it, but you wouldn't be surprised if it happened.

CBA's Profit Upgrade

Get this. The CBA has made a huge pile of money in a year of the GFC.They've upped their profit forecast by a dirty big margin, sending their shares up 2.31% in the last 15minutes of the trading day.
Key drivers of the result were the solid income growth across the business, good volume growth, disciplined cost management and a decline in impairment expenses, the bank said.

Also helping the result was a positive return of $240 million after tax as equity markets recovered over the six month period.

The profit forecast shows that CBA has rebounded from the slowdown associated with the global financial crisis, and is driving earnings higher with its biggest market share in home loan lending and deposits.

EL&C Baillieu analyst Stewart Oldfield said CBA is just getting stronger.

‘‘They have got the premier retail franchise in the country and it’s a case of the strong getting stronger,’’ Mr Oldfield said. ‘‘In an environment post the GFC the strongest have just gotten stronger.’’

I guess it's a company that won't be allowed to fold, so you would buy their shares.  Lots of institutional buyers in that one, judging from the volume. It's about recaptured its peak from just before the GFC.

So seriously, what exactly the hell was the GFC to Australia? Iceland's been completely shafted by the GFC and here's Australia sailing smoothly as if nothing had ever happened. Take this column on unemployment.
Yesterday’s confirmation of labour market strength makes a return to neutral monetary policy a given. It used to be thought that a neutral cash rate was about 5 per cent, but the banks boosting lending rates by more than the RBA’s official increases has lowered that a touch. And with higher personal debt loads, it’s arguable that the RBA doesn’t have to do as much to achieve its desired impact on purses and wallets.

So, pick another number. Maybe neutral now is more like 4.5 per cent, just three more consecutive monthly rate rises of 25 points and we’d be there.

And, as the RBA has reminded us, just because it hasn’t done something before, it doesn’t mean it won’t do it.

Also remember that the unemployment rate is supposed to be a lagging indicator, in which case the extraordinary straight-line employment growth since June is all the more amazing, even while being the sort of performance that naturally has any graph watcher thinking that there must be some sort of pause at some stage.

In other words, if you're an employer, the labor market is tight, inflation is knocking on the door, the economy is right back to the point where it is about to overheat, as it was in July 2007.  It's worth asking, what exactly the hell was the GFC and all that drama? Because as of today, it's looking like it never happened for the big banks.

2010/01/14

Google vs. China

Do No Evil

China's IT brigade tried hacking Google. In response, Google is going to stop its censoring of content as retaliation. In the mid-term Google is likely to pull out of China.
GOOD FOR Google. The company's decision to stop censoring its Chinese search engine is more likely to mean the end of its China-based service than a breakdown of Beijing's political firewall. But more important than the question of whether Google.cn survives is the larger issue that Google has now raised for other Western companies and democratic governments -- which is whether China's gross and growing abuse of the Internet should be quietly tolerated or actively resisted.

Google cited a major instance of that abuse in announcing its policy change: "a highly sophisticated and targeted attack" on Google and more than 20 other large companies aimed at stealing software code. "A primary goal of the attackers," Google said, was breaking into the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

This is shocking but unsurprising. Cyberattacks from China aimed at U.S. businesses, the Pentagon and other government agencies have become commonplace, if not epidemic, in recent years. So have Beijing's demands that Western companies collaborate in its efforts to censor political content on the Internet and snoop on the private e-mails of its citizens, several of whom have been prosecuted with e-mails supplied by Yahoo. China aims not just at eliminating the free speech and virtual free assembly that are inherent to the Internet, but at turning it into a weapon that can be used against democrats and democratic societies.

They have 24 million marriageable men with no access to internet porn. It's a powder keg waiting to explode out there! :) It's really strange how china keeps on making the news with such negative reports so regularly. Maybe not so much surprising - a bit like Mark McGwire's admissions of steroid use - but strange it's happening now. We're suddenly seeing bastards for what they are.

From The Mailbox - 13/01/10

4-Piles-Of-Dung Policy

The famous 4 pillars policy of Australian banking regulation is a bit of two edged sword. The problem is that it is anti-competitive to only have 4, but anything smaller either was going to get swallowed up or has already been swallowed up. On the other hand, it was anti-competitive enough that they didn't feel a rush to place bets on sub-prime loans... allegedly. Either way the Australian consumer gets to feel smug and mugged at the same time.  It's fascinating to see. :)

With that said, I want to share with you this link from Pleiades:
Since it became clear to our Government that the local economy could not remain immune from the global downturn, the public largesse handed out to the self proclaimed 'healthy' banks has been astounding. We've had deposits guaranteed, all overseas borrowings guaranteed (using the Federal Government's credit rating), car dealer finance has been propped up and former CEO aspirant at the NAB, Ahmed Fahour, is now in charge of the aptly named 'Ruddbank' which has been designed to support the commercial property sector (to which the Big Four Banks have over $100bn of loan exposure).

The question which now comes to mind is this - as is the case with A.I.G., do Australian banking executives need to be paid large salaries and bonuses when the ever grateful taxpayer is the one doing all the heavy lifting? As a free marketeer I'm happy for any bank brave enough to wean itself off the public teat to pay its senior people whatever it likes. But while my (and your) money is being used to support their businesses, I say it's time for banking bonuses to be stopped.

Like I said, it's pretty interesting to see. It's a good question indeed to ask, how com our banks get propped up and their top execs get to keep their top pay?

Here's another link from Pleiades:
Australia is undoubtedly over-banked. The banking regulator, APRA, lists over 190 ADIs (Authorized Deposit-taking Institutions) for which it is responsible, including foreign and domestic banks, credit unions, building societies and various specialists. That works out at one whole bank for every 120,000 Australians (men, women and children). For comparison, the largest bank in the USA, Bank of America, reports almost three times as many customers as the entire population of Australia. Who picks up the bills for all of this duplication and waste in this country - the Australian consumer!

The big banks have long claimed that the Four Pillars policy restricts them from growing, presumably overseas since the local market is saturated. The creation of an OzzieBank would free up the banks to go their own way if they wanted to, although they might find the going a bit tough without an implied government guarantee and the resulting AA credit rating.

But the needs of Australians for basic banking services are changing anyway. Young Internet savvy customers are demanding services delivered instantly and electronically on their iPhones. Ageing baby boomers have less need of traditional banking services but increased demand for superannuation advice - which is why banks are piling into that particular niche, with little evidence that they will do it any better than the incumbents.

I'm actually in the fortunate position to be able to say that my four-pillars bank is quit satisfactory in its performance. But I can imagine it could easily change with a slight tilt of the global financial axis.I guess I should be happy my deposits got guaranteed but at the same time I'm thinking, is this even *right*?

As I look through the shares of the big four, I note that while their bottom line looks fine, I'm still inclined to think their shares are priced way too high.

2010/01/13

One Child Policy Outcomes

It's Raining Blokes Over There Ladies!

I keep hearing there's a bloke shortage in Sydney.

"What do men and car parking have in common?" I got asked by a woman who was pontificating on this point.

"I dunno," I answered obligingly.

"The only ones available are either disabled or too far away."

"Uh-huh."

"...or they're gay!" She spat out with a witch-like cackle.

Not being single or disabled or gay, I thought, "maybe it's not them, maybe it's *you*."

With that I bring to those "luckless" ladies, this news:
BEIJING (AFP) – More than 24 million Chinese men of marrying age could find themselves without spouses in 2020, state media reported on Monday, citing a study that blamed sex-specific abortions as a major factor.

The study, by the government-backed Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, named the gender imbalance among newborns as the most serious demographic problem for the country's population of 1.3 billion, the Global Times said.
"Sex-specific abortions remained extremely commonplace, especially in rural areas," where the cultural preference for boys over girls is strongest, the study said, while noting the reasons for the gender imbalance were "complex."

Researcher Wang Guangzhou said the skewed birth ratio could lead to difficulties for men with lower incomes in finding spouses, as well as a widening age gap between partners, according to the Global Times.
Another researcher quoted by the newspaper, Wang Yuesheng, said men in poorer parts of China would be forced to accept marriages late in life or remain single for life, which could "cause a break in family lines."

"The chance of getting married will be rare if a man is more than 40 years old in the countryside. They will be more dependent on social security as they age and have fewer household resources to rely on," Wang said.

If a bloke called 'wang' says it, there's an unintentional pathos to the conclusion.

Bottom line though is that with 24million excess blokes, there a re bound to be non-crippled, not-gay blokes for all of Sydney's luckless ladies. I know, I know, it's still far away, but that's not the insurmountable part, is it?

2010/01/10

News That's Fit To Punt - 10/01/10

China Inc.

This article was on Yahoo's front page for all of 30minutes before it got pulled, which is not what normally happens to Yahoo front page articles.
James S. Chanos built one of the largest fortunes on Wall Street by foreseeing the collapse of Enron and other highflying companies whose stories were too good to be true.

Now Mr. Chanos, a wealthy hedge fund investor, is working to bust the myth of the biggest conglomerate of all: China Inc.

As most of the world bets on China to help lift the global economy out of recession, Mr. Chanos is warning that China's hyperstimulated economy is headed for a crash, rather than the sustained boom that most economists predict. Its surging real estate sector, buoyed by a flood of speculative capital, looks like "Dubai times 1,000 -- or worse," he frets. He even suspects that Beijing is cooking its books, faking, among other things, its eye-popping growth rates of more than 8 percent.

"Bubbles are best identified by credit excesses, not valuation excesses," he said in a recent appearance on CNBC. "And there's no bigger credit excess than in China." He is planning a speech later this month at the University of Oxford to drive home his point.

As America's pre-eminent short-seller -- he bets big money that companies' strategies will fail -- Mr. Chanos's narrative runs counter to the prevailing wisdom on China. Most economists and governments expect Chinese growth momentum to continue this year, buoyed by what remains of a $586 billion government stimulus program that began last year, meant to lift exports and consumption among Chinese consumers.

Still, betting against China will not be easy. Because foreigners are restricted from investing in stocks listed inside China, Mr. Chanos has said he is searching for other ways to make his bets, including focusing on construction- and infrastructure-related companies that sell cement, coal, steel and iron ore.

Mr. Chanos, 51, whose hedge fund, Kynikos Associates, based in New York, has $6 billion under management, is hardly the only skeptic on China. But he is certainly the most prominent and vocal.

Did that get your attention? It got mine. If China is showing signs that it is like Enron, we're all in for a world of hurt. And I mean a whole world of hurt.

Raiders Of The Lost Amazon Civilization

Here's one from Pleiades.
It's an ill wind that blows nobody any good. The combination of land cleared of its rainforest for grazing and satellite survey have revealed a sophisticated pre-Columbian monument-building society in the upper Amazon Basin on the east side of the Andes. This hitherto unknown people constructed earthworks of precise geometric plan connected by straight orthogonal roads. Introducing us to this new civilisation, the authors show that the ‘geoglyph culture’ stretches over a region more than 250km across, and exploits both the floodplains and the uplands. They also suggest that we have so far seen no more than a tenth of it.

There's a .pdf file that's here for a download. A quick google revealed this news article.
"The combination of land cleared of its rain forest for grazing and satellite survey have revealed a sophisticated pre-Columbian monument-building society in the upper Amazon basin on the east side of the Andes. This hitherto unknown people constructed earthworks of precise geometric plan connected by straight orthogonal roads," the researchers wrote in the journal.

David Grann, author of the book "The Lost City of Z," points out that the existence of the ruins overturns the previously held belief that this portion of the Amazon basin had always been a pristine wilderness, even though legends of a lost Amazonian city still lingered by the time the Spanish arrived on the continent.

"Although the early conquistadores had heard from the Indians about a fabulously rich Amazonian civilization, which they named El Dorado, the searches for it invariably ended in disaster," Grann wrote on The New Yorker's Web site. "Thousands were wiped out by disease and starvation. And after a toll of death and suffering worthy of Joseph Conrad, most scholars concluded that El Dorado was no more than an illusion."

According to Martti Parssinen, Denise Schaan and Alceu Ranzi, the authors of the study, the community likely had a population of more than 60,000 people. The researchers said they have only uncovered roughly 10 percent of the existing structures, which may date as far back as A.D. 800.

As Grann describes in his book, British explorer Percy Harrison Fawcett claimed he had found evidence of an ancient civilization, which he called the City of Z, in the same area. He disappeared in the jungle on a 1925 expedition undertaken with his son and a companion.

Which is cool because parts of Indiana Jones' persona and Doyle's Professor Challenger were an homage to Percy Harrison Fawcett. Cue the Indy Jones theme music!

Cricket Stuff - 10/01/10

C'arn Mr Roebuck!

I was at a barbecue gathering last night with some folks at Puncher And Wattman and the subject inevitably turned to cricket. It prompted a quick discussion on what people thought of this column by Peter Roebuck.
On the form shown at the SCG against Pakistan, Ricky Ponting and his team will be hard-pressed to recapture the Ashes. At present, they ought to be cast as outsiders. England have a long batting list and are managing to retain a narrow lead over a reviving South African outfit.

Admittedly, the Poms have frailties of their own: they lack a fast bowler, and need Kevin Pietersen to recapture his former powers, but they will not wilt in the heat or be cowed by Australia's victories this season.

On paper, it looks good: four wins in five attempts and every reason to expect a clean sweep against shattered opponents in Hobart. But the tally is misleading. Australia ought not to read too much into their dramatic triumph at the SCG.

For most of the contest, Ricky Ponting and company were outplayed by the world's sixth-ranked side. Certainly it was an extraordinary victory, but sober reflection removes it from the list of great wins likely to remain in the memory. Australia's performance was too flawed to carry the weight assigned to it.

We just couldn't agree with Mr. Roebuck's position on the lesson to be drawn form the test. The way I saw it was that the pitch was diabolical, but Australia can still bat down to the tail. The Pakistanis were tentative and inexperienced and susceptible to the inevitable pressure. Ricky Ponting himself assessed that given how difficult the pitch was, he thought what the Australians were likely to do on the first day with the bat was going to be better than what the Pakistanis were likely to do on the last day.  As events panned out, Ricky Ponting was right.

You'd be hard pushed to argue the toss with a result that worked out just as planned, even if the process looked ugly. Given that part of the thinking was that the process would be ugly, it's a bit much to argue that the ugliness of the process proves the side is deeply flawed.

But then Mr. Roebuck goes on to argue this point:
Certainly, Australia recovered from a much weaker position but even that tells a tale. Historically, turnarounds on that scale can only be achieved by incredible partnerships (Dravid and Laxman in Kolkata, Steyn and Duminy at the MCG) or momentous innings (Lara in the West Indies, Botham at Leeds) or stunning interventions with the ball. No such inspiring efforts were produced at the SCG.

None of the bowlers surpassed themselves, and Peter Siddle was downright ordinary. Nathan Hauritz invited batsmen to plunge into folly, and they obliged. The pitch did not break up, Pakistan did. Australia did take two commendable catches. Had Kamran Akmal had even a moderate match, though, the hosts would have been crushed. It was that close to calamity. Pakistan were the better side but did not believe it.

We just couldn't come at how this was even a point. The way I see it, it's a very well balanced side that can churn out runs with an even spread. They don't come along very often. Ditto with the bowling. At most, it says the Australian team is not built on the 'Stars & Scrubs' model.

I remember those sides in the mid to late 1980s, back when the batting was Allan Border, David Boon and waiting on the potential of the Waugh twins to blossom, plus some serious scrubs. Even with Border mounting many a rescue, those sides lost a lot until the side got more balanced with the addition of the likes of Healy and Tubby Taylor, and then the Waugh twins finally did blossom.

Conversely, I wouldn't want to count on single big partnerships and momentous innings all the time for a come back. If anything, the way the Australians did it shows the side is quite good and without an obvious weak link. But Mr. Roebuck argues this:
Nathan Hauritz's contribution was almost as hard to pin down as Hussey's. Clearly he has improved but he's not suddenly Jim Laker reincarnate. Rather he is a fine cricketer and a game bowler. But batsmen won't keep slogging catches to deep fieldsmen. All told, Pakistan lost eight wickets to skied hits.

Suddenly, Hauritz has taken five wickets in consecutive Test matches, results indicating the welcome and unexpected restoration of finger spin and flight. Yet he is no demon. He was never as bad as he seemed, and is not now as good as recent returns indicate.

The same applies to Australia. Alongside the misfiring Marcus North, the top performers seen at the SCG had been regarded as the team's weakest links. Apart from Brad Haddin's catch, the highlight of the match was Ponting's decision to persist with Hauritz after lunch despite his previous over costing 12 runs. Otherwise it was a mixed bag. Did everything change? Or nothing?

Wouldn't this suggest that the degrees to which the weakest links are considered weak, are a little over-stated? That, maybe the people they've selected are good at some aspects of the game enough to warrant their selection? The joke this summer has been that Hauritz has been the replacement level player, and anybody can get a 5 wicket haul once in a while, but the guy's done it several times in quick succession lately, I think it's possible he's getting the hang of playing at the Test level.

Anyway, we all agreed the column was a real headscratcher from a writer we all respected, and wondered if he's welcome in the Aussie clubhouse at all.

And One More Thing

Here's another Roebuck column where he suggests Ponting is in decline. Judging from his age, it's not surprising if he was, but then Allan Border and Steve Waugh played well, well into their late 30s, so I wouldn't dismiss Ponting just yet.

Anyway, the thing I've noticed is the media vitriol against Ponting has been more snarky than when Kim Hughes was Captain and his side kept losing. A lot of it is criticism about his personal style, which I can live with because I don't care if he's a bit dismissive to journalists as long as he can play. But this business has been going on some time now and the guys at Puncher And Wattman thought it was because Ponting lost the Ashes in England twice.

It's kind of weird to be singling out the winningest Test Captain on record and slamming him for the loss ledger. It's like the practice of American sports journalists where they single out the best player of a team and blame them for a losing season, as if to say they should have been a super-duper star to bail out a bad team from itself all the time - which is the similar kind of analysis to Mr. Roebuck's above. It's just absurd.

The proper understanding should be that the Australian side is in a rebuild and it's going to take some time to shake out the guys who are going to be there for the long haul. The task is harder all the more because Hayden, Langer and Martyn over-stayed their welcome and McGrath and Warne departing in quick succession has meant the side is starting from scratch. The Australian side hasn't been this young since the Kim Hughes days or the 1980s Border sides before the '89 Ashes tour. And you have to admit, Ponting has won a bit more than those guys in that era.

2010/01/07

From The Mailbox

From Russia With Political Intent

This came in from Pleiades who is always on the look out for shifts in the global geopolitical game.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin launched Russia's long-awaited Siberian oil export route Monday, giving energy-hungry Asia a new supply source from the world's largest crude exporter seeking to diversify its client base away from Europe.

Putin, clad in a heavy winter parka, pushed a button that initiated the first filling of an oil tanker bound for Hong Kong at a new oil terminal near the Russian Pacific port of Nakhodka, the projected terminus of the new Siberian oil pipeline.

"For Russia this is truly a serious event," Putin said during the terminal inauguration ceremony at the port of Kozmino near Nakhodka, in comments broadcast on state television.

"This is a strategic project because it allows us to enter completely new, growing, promising markets of the Asian Pacific region," Putin said.

"This is the completion of one of the largest projects in modern Russia. And not only modern Russia. It would be a grandiose project for the former Soviet Union too."

Earlier this year, Russian oil pipeline monopoly Transneft completed the construction of the first 2,694-kilometre (1,600-mile) section of the oil pipeline known by the acronym ESPO (Estern Siberian Pacific Ocean) linking Taishet in eastern Siberia with Skovorodino in the Amur region.

This portion of the project also included the construction of the Kozmino oil port inaugurated by Putin.

The second portion, a 2,100-kilometre (1,300-mile) stretch of pipeline, will run from Skovorodino to the Kozmino port.

For now, oil is being delivered by rail from Skovorodino to the Kozmino port where it is then to be pumped into tankers for shipment to markets in Asia.

Putin said the state-of-the-art terminal, which he praised as "eye candy," had cost 60 billion rubles (two billion US dollars) to build.

One would think such a pipeline cements the close ties between Russia and China as well as increase the pressure on the Arab Oil exporters to sell more oil, faster and cheaper. Not good for the global warming thing, but doubly, given the likelihood of peak oil scenarios, this is going to be very interesting how the diminishing oil resources are going to be accessed.

One ramification for America is that it is conceivable that the USA, Europe and Japan reach the bottom of the Saudi and Iraqi supply way before the Russians and Chinese exhaust their supply.

Medieval Records Show...


Here's another interesting article from Pleiades about Global Warming.
The study found evidence for periods of significant warmth (890 - 1170) in the Northern Hemisphere during medieval times and for clearly colder periods (1580 - 1850) during the so-called "Little Ice Age".

Their key conclusion was that the 20th century stands out as having unusually widespread warmth, compared to all of the natural warming and cooling episodes during the past 1,200 years.

The research team gathered climate change data from a number of regions in the Northern Hemisphere especially:

Long life evergreen trees growing in Scandinavia, Siberia and the Rockies, which had been cored to reveal the patterns of wide and narrow tree rings over time -- wider rings relating to warmer temperatures.

Ice from cores drilled in the Greenland ice sheets revealed which years were warmer than others by the chemical composition of the ice.

They also used a record developed from diaries of people living in the Netherlands and Belgium over the past 750 years that revealed for example the years when the canals froze.

I particularly liked the bit where they took records of when the canals froze as a reference. The Global Warming deniers are ever louder in their denials about what the scientists are saying. Here's a sample of Lord Monckton:
Well, after a decade and a half with no statistically significant "global warming", and after three decades in which the mean warming rate has been well below the ever-falling predictions of the UN's climate panel, that notion has not been disproved in reality.

However, the question I address is whether the cost of taking action is many times greater than the cost of not acting? The answer is yes.

Millions are already dying of starvation in the world's poorest nations because world food prices have doubled in two years. That was caused by a sharp drop in world food production, caused by suddenly taking millions of acres of land out of growing food for people who need it, to grow biofuels for clunkers that don't. The policies that you advocate are killing people by the million. At a time when so many of the world's people are already short of food, the UN's right-to-food rapporteur, Herr Ziegler, has rightly condemned the biofuel scam as "a crime against humanity".

Yet this slaughter is founded upon a lie: the claim by the IPCC that it is 90 per cent certain that most of the "global warming" since 1950 is man-made. This claim - based not on science but on a show of hands among political representatives, with China wanting a lower figure and other nations wanting a higher figure - is demonstrably false. Peer-reviewed analyses of changes in cloud cover over recent decades - changes almost entirely unconnected with changes in CO2 concentration - show that it was this largely natural reduction in cloud cover from 1983-2001 and a consequent increase in the amount of short-wave and UV solar radiation reaching the Earth that accounted for five times as much warming as CO2 could have caused.

Nor is the IPCC's great lie the only lie in the official documents of the IPCC and in the speeches of its current chairman, who has made himself a multi-millionaire as a "global warming" profiteer.

It is also a fact that, while those of the UN's computer models that can be forced with an increase in sea-surface temperatures all predict a consequent fall in the flux of outgoing radiation at top of atmosphere, in observed reality there is an increase.

In short, the radiation that is supposed to be trapped here in the troposphere to cause "global warming" is measured as escaping to space much as usual, so that it cannot be causing more than about one-fifth of the warming the IPCC predicts.

He doesn't seem to be aware of global dimming that is masking the global warming effect and that the likely outgoing radiation is a result of the pollution particles in the air. In fact, the more you read Monckton's article you get the feeling of a man trying to construct a straw man out of global warming and taking immense satisfaction in beating the straw man.

It's classic private school debating bullshit, where if you spin bullshit hard enough, you might persuade the world to your ways. Well, physical reality says otherwise.But Tony Abbott indulges in this crap too, an he's now the Leader of Opposition. You sort of wonder where it's all going to go. I guess that as long as they deny it, their coal mining friends an coal-fire power generator owning friends don't have to fork out the money to pay for the carbon they're throwing in the atmosphere.

Talk about having their heads in the sand.

2010/01/06

Avatar

It's Avatar, What More D'You Want?

Every time James Cameron directs a film he seems to smash some paradigm or parameter in the business. He's been doing it for some time now so we shouldn't be surprised, but that being said each of the films he's made this side of the original 'Terminator' have gone on to redefine the parameters by which films are made.

So Avatar finally made it to the big screen 12 years after 'Titanic' which was the last time Cameron directed a MEMEM (Most Expensive Movie Ever Made). When I was location hunting over in NZ in 2007, I kept hearing James Cameron was bring Avatar to Peter Jackson's studio and WETA, so I did have some warning on the scale of the project. I was something that was going to make 'King Kong' look, well, small.

Now that I've seen it, it's everything that it's been billed to be.

What's Good About It

Do I have to count them all? The effects, the vision, the 3D thing, the sound, the production design, the cinematography that keeps it uniform, the editing, the pace, the whole damn thing is good. It's exactly as advertised - a spectacular piece of event cinema.

What's Bad About It

Picking nits with this film is going to look like I'm envious of the achievement so I'm not going to go there. If I had just one complaint about the whole film, it would be that it was a little didactic and message-heavy. But then I would be the very choir Cameron is preaching to, so maybe even that's not such a big deal.

What's Interesting About It

This is a beautiful film. It looks like a phantasmagorical assembly of Roger Dean album covers and 'Magic:The Gathering" cards. From landscape to life forms to objects to the aliens, everything is beautiful.

Which brings to mind the problem of aestheticisation. Imagine the same story if the planet wasn't so beautiful. If the aliens weren't these blue felinoids but instead were the Geiger Alien. Imagine now that Jake Sully has to project his pscyhe into an Avatar that is like the Geiger alien in an attempt to communicate with them. Imagine instead of the beautiful forest, Sully's Avatar, shaped like the Geiger alien had to travel into the hive of aliens like in 'Aliens' and communicate with the big Queen alien in the hive...

The repulsiveness of the Geiger Aliens justifies the Gung-Ho militarism in 'Aliens', just s the attractiveness of the world of Pandora in a sense justifies Jake and Grace's betrayal of their human heritage in favor of the alien world.

Thus we have to ask, would we be so happy to be on the side of the aliens if the planet weren't so beautiful? In a sense, what happens on the planet Pandora in this film, where the natives beat the human colonists is exactly the same thing which brings about the trip the Marines and Ripley make to the planet where the Queen Alien resides in 'Aliens'.

The bookmarking is quite weird and interesting. The aestheticisation in turn brings up the question, are we getting propagandised? In a sense, this film is the prequel to 'Aliens'; it's just dressed up way too pretty to be noticed.

James Cameron Films As Survivalist Fantasies


There's a strong link between James Cameron's films and the survivalist fantasies of an apocalypse and guns. The Terminator universe is built on this stuff. If anything, I would have categorised James Cameron as a pro-Gun lobby, Pro-Republican, global-warming-denying sort. Even 'Aliens' seemed like a pro-military, reactionary romp in the 1980s which fuelled the popular politics towards the first Gulf War, together with 'Top Gun'.

Then there was the immensely racist and somewhat prophetic 'True Lies' which rested on a truly fascist paradigm where US might was right because it was American and mighty, and the bad jihadist Arabs just had to cop it sweet as Arnie meted out the punishing blows.

It's really surprising to see James Cameron making a movie that is pro-environment and somewhat anti-military. I never would have guessed such a transformation was possible. Then again, it is full of romanticised imagery of people with bows beating up on a high tech military.

Moving Goal Posts

James Cameron's predilection for making the MEMEM never seems to get addressed properly in Australian Film Making circles. This is possibly because it just seems too far away. The thing is, it didn't start yesterday. As far back in 1991 when he came out with 'Terminator 2', it was clear that the cutting edge of cinema had changed. 'T2' with its bone-crunching metal-rending action cost $120m when Bruce Willis was reviled for making 'Hudson Hawk' for $40m. It was 3 times more expensive than anything that had ever been shot to that point in time - and it still made its money back in the first week.

One of the many things 'T2' signaled, was the end of the Australian film industry as having any kind of budget ratio with American cinema. American cinema went on to make more and more films in the same extraordinary budget range while Australian indigenous cinema was consigned to the dustbin with its tiny budgets, aiming for ever-shrinking niche markets.

Looking at 'Avatar' today, it's amazing how far James Cameron has moved the goal posts once again. It's like he's taken them out of the park, past the next 6 suburbs and into the next city. I doubt Screen Australia's taken notice of this. If our industry was screwed yesterday, it's about 6 times more screwed today. Not only are we not in the league, we're not even qualitatively playing the same game any more.  We're not even in the minor leagues, we're beer league softballers next to the A-Rod of Cinema.

Nobody in Australian cinema can catch James Cameron. Not Peter Weir, not Fred Schepsi, not Bruce Beresford, not Jane Campion, not PJ Hogan, not any of them.  This is no disrespect to these directors, but seriously, James Cameron has kicked all their asses, all our collective sorry asses, and as Hudson says in 'Aliens' "it's Game Over man".

2010/01/04

The Akmal Shaikh Song And Execution

Crazy Is As Crazy Does

I recorded the song 'Come Little Rabbit' by Akmal Shaikh. The description of that process and song are linked here. Since recording that song I've actually had some interesting conversations with people and so would like to clear up a few points.

"What Is Your Position On Heroin Trade?"


I got asked this a lot because Akmal Shaikh was caught trafficking 4kgs of heroin. I don't approve of the heroin trade nor of people who are users. That being said, I don't think executing Akmal Shaikh forms any kind of deterrent to the international trade. All claims to the point that China is doing the right thing by being tough on drugs has to convince a lot of people that doing that right thing is actually of some use. I don't think that case has been made.

To make my point clearer, executing one drug mule is not going to stem the international drug trade, not matter how despicable the said trade might be. Claiming that it would is a bum claim.

"How Do You Know Akmal Shaikh Was Insane?"

Actually, we don't. And we should all hazard a diagnosis without professionals actually talking to the man, which rules out most of humanity. That being said, this is a guy who thought this song would bring about world peace. Think about that.

He also thought that at Age 50+, with his not-so-inviting looks, that his performance of this song was going to send him into stardom in China. That indicates that he actually had no perspective of who he was or what he was doing. The other reported facts about him include his writing of emails expressing that he should have a press conference and this press conference should bring about world peace. The man was reasonably delusional.

If it had been in the western world, they would have assigned a doctor to find out. The Chinese judicial system didn't bother. The fact that it didn't says that it's a system that isn't really interested in finding out the truth; just a system finding out the most expedient solution. It's hard to respect something like that.

"Are Claims Of Insanity Enough To Let A Man Off The Hook?"


There's a case to be made that the increased medicalising of criminal problems means that more and more people are "getting off" on the grounds of their mental un-health. Some see this as a travesty of justice and some see it as a sign that the medical profession is getting too much of a say in the judicial an criminal system.

Law and Order types want to lock up every criminal, regardless of their sanity. I understand that. After all, what good is a criminal justice system if it doesn't punish crimes? We may as well dismantle the whole damn thing and set up a massive  asylum system instead. Heck, it might look like some of our prisons anyway.

That being said, I happen to think that mental health is far more widespread and the mentally ill are exactly the portion of the population who are more vulnerable to being persuaded into doing criminal acts. Or read another way, there is no way a person in the right frame of mind would take on the task of running drugs to China where they have death penalties for such crimes.

I'm not objecting to a guilty verdict. I'm objecting to the severity of the punishment, without a proper examination Akmal Shaikh's mental state.

"Doesn't China Have The Sovereign Right To Do As It Sees Fit?"


Yes it does. One of the things that got my goat in the days leading up to and after the execution was the claim that the world did not have the right to criticise China. I beg to differ. The world reserves the right to crtiticise anybody and everybody for the miscarriage of justice.

While I am against capital punishment in general, I can allow for the fact that China sees fit to carry on with the legal practice. I do believe that due process is required in any legal system and as long as there is any doubt, a government shouldn't readily commit to terminating a life. The crux of the biscuit is that there was significant doubt that Akmal Shaikh was corpus mentis.

Really, you have 2 possibilities given the facts. Either the system sucks, or the people in the system fucked it up.

So if it is the case that China has a crappy judicial process, then I think it's right to say it has a crappy judicial process. This is not a case of interfering in China's internal problems. It's calling a duck a duck.

If it is the case that it isn't that the judicial system sucks, but that the officials miscarried the judicial process, then China should swiftly condemn those culpable and shoot them. But they won't. So you have to conclude that the whole system sucks.

"The Opium War"

In its usual hysteria, China brought up the Opium War in denouncing Gordon Brown's condemnation of the execution.

Imagine if a German drug mule was caught on the border of Israel and immediately sentenced to death amid claims he was crazy. If the Israelis went ahead and executed the crazy drug mule and their foreign affairs department used the Holocaust as justification, wouldn't you think that was drawing a mighty long bow? This is that kind of bow.

The national grievances China might feel toward England might be legitimate in a historic context, but it does not in any way justify miscarriages of justice. The fact that the diplomatic corp of China thinks it does speaks volumes to their myopia more than anything else. I mean let's face it, the Jardine Company selling Opium might have been a legitimate extension of the British Empire, but I strongly doubt Akmal Shaikh was such a state organ. Bringing up the Opium War is just plain stupid.

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