2010/04/30

Things To Depress You

Hey, I Don't Invent This Stuff

Wordle: Gulf Coast oil spill could eclipse Exxon Valdez

It was one thing for a wayward tanker to crash right into the Great Barrier Reef this month, there's also been this disaster in the Gulf of Mexico where an oil rig blew up and now oil is spewing everywhere.
NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (AFP) – Oil is leaking from the ruptured well of a large rig that exploded, burnt and sank in the Gulf of Mexico earlier this week, the US Coast Guard said Saturday.

The Coast Guard estimated that up to 1,000 of barrels of oil, or 42,000 gallons (158,987 liters) were spewing each day from a riser and a drill pipe, prompting further concerns of damage to Louisiana's fragile ecosystem, already stressed by hurricanes and coastal erosion.
Officials confirmed the discovery a day after the Coast Guard said that no oil appeared to be leaking from the well head.

Coast Guard Eighth District commander Rear Admiral Mary Landry told reporters the leak likely began on Thursday, when the rig sank two days after an initial explosion tore through the Deepwater Horizon semi-submersible oil drilling platform.

The best case scenario is sealing off the pipe ruptures in a few days; the worst case scenario is a matter of months. The Coast Guard said it would take several days before they determine how to stop the pipe leaks 5,000 feet (1,525 meters) down in the Gulf waters.

Petty Officer Connie Terrell told AFP the oil sheen was now 20 miles (32 kilometers) in diameter about 40 miles (64 km) off the Louisiana coast. Over 33,700 gallons (127,570 liters) of oily water mix have been recovered in the cleanup effort so far, she said.

Now that's got to be an ecological disaster the size of which has not been seen since the Exxon Valdez. I know our civilisation runs on oil, but surely these kinds of disasters have to force us to think of alternatives means of running out civilisation. It's depressing to think that 21 years on from the Exxon Valdez outrage we're still just as hooked on oil and vulnerable to massive ecological disasters.

The Big ETS Delay

Meanwhile back in Australia, the Labor Government is now making noises that it will delay the introduction of the ETS.
A spokesman for Mr Rudd said the government would legislate an emissions trading scheme by 2013 if there had been ''sufficient international action''. The strategy has been the subject of fierce debate within the government. The move will save $2.5 billion over the next four years.

A special prime ministerial task group will report in June on options including an energy efficiency trading scheme and new industrial and building efficiency measures.

Together with new fuel efficiency regulations and existing funding for solar and clean coal projects, the measures will become pre-election announcements to justify the claim the government is still committed to tackling climate change and able to meet the reduction targets it has pledged internationally.

But environment groups said the deferral - aimed at defusing the opposition leader Tony Abbott's scare campaign about ''a great big new tax on everything'' - would drastically increase the cost of meeting Australia's targets, no matter what other policies the government adopts. They said it would also send a disastrous signal to the flailing international climate negotiations.

In other words, you delay it and pay more, but you're not crossing the road alone, first. Was tat really what we voted for back in 2007?

Here is another piece on it, with more of an explanation why they will delay the introduction of the ETS.
The Climate Change Minister, Penny Wong, told the Herald the government would not try to legislate the ETS even by its new delayed start year of 2013 unless there is ''credible action'' by the end of 2012 from countries such as China, India and the US. It would also require a resolution of the Copenhagen deadlock over how national efforts are checked.

''We will only [legislate] if there is sufficient international action,'' Senator Wong said, declining to explain exactly what that meant. She admitted the delay would ''make meeting our [emission reduction] targets more expensive'' and that without a carbon price Australia would not meet the targets at all.

''You can't get to your targets without a cost on carbon … we have been very clear that we have to put a price on carbon,'' she said.

Which all goes to show they understand what they're trying to do, they understand how urgent it is to do it, but they're letting the rest of world's intractability get in the way of doing the right thing. Consider that Kevin Rudd's government got elected on this promise back in late 2007.  2013 would be 6 years lapsed from that election. The wait is intolerable, and this is absolutely the kind of failure of leadership for which Kevin Rudd was lambasting the Coalition.

The commentary on this very moral cowardice is here.
Tony ''the settled science of climate change is absolute crap'' Abbott and Kevin ''the greatest moral challenge of our age'' Rudd know they have to have a carbon price to make a significant difference to Australian greenhouse emissions. But both now say they want to wait and see what the rest of the world does.

To understand just how far this debate has shifted, think back to poor old Brendan Nelson, who lost the Liberal leadership in 2008 for suggesting the wait-and-see approach that now seems to have bipartisan approval.

Kevin Rudd suggested yesterday he was just shifting the timing of the ''implementation'' of his carbon pollution reduction scheme - like it was a minor administrative matter.

But then he also said he would be assessing at the end of 2012 what the rest of the world had done, and the political realities in the Senate. What if the rest of the world hasn't done much? Seems he could drop an emissions trading scheme altogether.

The Coalition's decision to abandon bipartisan support for an emissions trading scheme last year obviously changed the politics of the issue. Labor could have put the issue to a double dissolution election, or said it would try again after a normal half Senate poll. Instead it has distanced itself as far from the scheme as it can without dropping it altogether.

And therein lies the heart of the shit-fight that is the ETS scheme. For a start, the best thing about the ETS is that it puts a price on carbon. When you look at it closer, it's a crappy price they put on it, because they don't want to hurt the current emitting industry too much, but it also stalls the growth of carbon capture/management businesses that are waiting for a price. Then of course the ETS arrangement isn't even perfect. It gives away too many freebies to polluters, which is why the Greens won't even countenance negotiating with the ALP.

So really, the Rudd Government is basically strapped to both extremes of the argument having to put something in the space dead-bang in between, while the extremes move further out in their cloud-cuckoo directions... rather than just doing what's right. It should be willing to go the double-dissolution on this alone, but hasn't. There's something that reminds us of the politics around the introduction of the GST back in the day. There was no way known a Labor government could/would introduce it, so it fell to the Coalition. The electorate bitched and whined and moaned all the way but hasn't really found the GST regime to be so crippling to the economy or daily life. It seems there's no way that a Coalition government an ever put in an ETS given its 'Global Warming Sceptic' constituency, so it's inevitably going to fall to Labor to pass it. And the electorate will bitch and whine and moan, but chances are that in years to come it will be accepted for what it is.

The thing is, if it's so necessary - and sane people all agree it is - then why don't they just do it properly? That's all I'm asking for.

2010/04/25

Buy This Book!

You're A Philistine If You Don't

I went to the Sydney launch for 'Glissando' by David Musgrave.
When it comes to looking back over his life, Archie Fliess has got some understanding to do. So begins a sprawling reflection on his life during the early twentieth century, starting the day the fortunes of Archie and brother Reggie change when they are taken to be the rightful owners of the property built by their grandfather in country NSW. Along their journey, they are introduced to an odd collection of family and caretakers who don’t always have the best interests of the boys at heart. Archie becomes embroiled in the mystery surrounding his grandfather’s life, and as the two stories “ Archie’s and his grandfather’s“ unravel, we see familiar themes of disappointment and failed ambition. Glissando is a tale that travels along many threads, told in a playful, philosophical voice reminiscent of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, with shades of Patrick White’s Voss. It’s an Australian classic, a satirical romp of epic proportions.

Here's an interview with said Musgrave.


[caption id="attachment_3302" align="alignleft" width="209" caption="Glissando book cover"][/caption]

The title, Glissando: A Melodrama, immediately informs the reader that music will underscore everything in the novel. It is present both in metaphor and as a constant accompaniment to the characters’ lives. How did the musical effect of ‘glissando’ in particular come to be of such central importance to the novel?


One of the main themes of Glissando is the arts and how they are interrelated and the role art can play in our lives, and  the focus is really on architecture and music, although food, memory and writing also play important roles. The musical aspect came naturally, as I have played and written music since I was a child; the architectural aspect I guess came from a preoccupation with forebears who were colonial architects (and who feature in the book). Because I was interested in the arts in combination, Glissando refers to the musical technique of the glissade, to the house Glissando where the narrator lives and writes (the man who built it conceived of the house as a glissade realised in architectural form) and to the dying fall of the narrator’s life. So, in a way, music itself is a kind of master trope in the book for how art can shape our lives, for good and for ill.

He's an interesting dude, but he's even more interesting in print! :) Jokes aside, have a read.

If you're preference is on-line shopping of books, then you can find it HERE!

So be a good little cultural munchkin and buy it now! Buy it today and you won't regret the purchase! :)

Here's a review at SPUNC:
Glissando: A Melodrama is the latest novel from Sleepers Publishing to receive rave reviews.

David Musgrave's first novel, Glissando travels along many threads: It is an Australian story, told in a playful, philosophical voice. It has a burlesque bravado similar to Steve Toltz' Fraction of the Whole. It is a satirical romp of epic proportions.

"Glissando is something unique: a thoroughly contemporary novel that marries the intensity and fervour of Patrick Whiteto the displaced cosmopolitan wit of Murray Bail and Gerald Murnane.
-James Bradley

Here's a review at Readings.com:

Here's a review in Rupert's press:
DON'T, whatever you do, mistake David Musgrave's first extended prose fiction for a novel.

Recall instead the satires of Pope, Swift, Rabelais and Thomas Pynchon: parodists, whose intentions could not be more serious, storytellers whose characters are not facsimiles of the human so much as super-sized grotesques, scintillating minds on stilts.

But Glissando is also something apart from these. Satire on the European model requires a shared moral framework, an unspoken agreement about what a culture's philosophical underpinnings may be. In these pages, an eccentric Viennese architect named Wilhelm Fliess arrives in rural NSW during the middle years of the 19th century, hopeful of building a house based on designs far from Europe's deadening norms. In keeping with his high-minded Mitteleuropean ideals, Wilhelm has legal documents drawn up to ensure that the traditional owners of the land he purchased will not be dispossessed.

And so the review goes. It's pretty nice. Anyway, go buy it and read it. Heck, just buy it to adorn your shelves with it so you can tell your grandchildren in years to come, "hey look, I own a first edition copy of 'Glissando' by David Musgrave".

2010/04/24

News That's Fit To Punt 23/04/2010

In Brief...

Olympic 400m champion LaShawn Merritt tested positive for anabolic steroids found in his over the counter penis enlargement product.
Merritt, who is also the world champion at 400 metres, said in a statement via his lawyer that he was "deeply sorry" at failing three doping controls for the banned substance dehydroepiandrosterone.

The 23-year-old American, who faces a two-year ban, said: "To know that I've tested positive as a result of a product that I used for personal reasons is extremely difficult to wrap my hands around.

Very unfortunate turn of phrase there...

ETS Fight Is Back On

So says K-Rudd.
KEVIN RUDD says the great moral challenge posed by climate change is undiminished and he will keep trying to implement an emissions trading scheme if Labor is re-elected.

In an interview with the Herald, Mr Rudd rejected growing criticism that he had abandoned the climate change cause because it was no longer a vote winner after the Copenhagen conference and the defeat of his emissions trading scheme.

"It's very clear cut that whether climate change is topical or not, whether it is popular or not, the reality of it does not disappear," he said.

"This remains a fundamental economic, environmental and moral challenge. Whether it's newsworthy or not in a particular season is beside the point. We haven't changed our view of this.''

The Senate has twice blocked legislation for the emissions trading scheme. The legislation is again before the Parliament but the Senate has delayed debate until at least next month and there is next to no chance there will be a vote before the election expected in the spring.

Mr Rudd said that if he is re-elected, he will try again to have a scheme introduced but it would depend on the make-up of the Senate.

''We've got to ensure that we act on climate change and we do so always within the scope of our powers. We maintain our position that this is part of the most efficient and most effective means by which we can reduce greenhouse gas emissions with the least cost to the economy.''

Well it's good to hear he still has the appetite for putting a price on carbon. There I was thinking that maybe there were secret briefings that told him an Ice Age was coming anyway and made all global warming redundant or something, but clearly that's not the case.

It's nice to know it's on the agenda-radar again.

The Health Deal We Had To Have

A cool article from Peter Hartcher here.
Once the NSW Premier had landed in Canberra on Sunday, Rudd zeroed in on her as his first target. He assessed Kristina Keneally as the most likely of the three recalcitrants to yield because the NSW Government was in the weakest political position of the three, facing an election it's likely to lose, and was the one most in need of a deal to deliver more hospital funds.

Under the offer already on the table, NSW stood to gain an extra $964 million in upfront Commonwealth health money over four years.

Before going to the dinner that Rudd was to host for all the premiers and their treasurers that night, the Prime Minister sweetened the offer to NSW by hundreds of millions of dollars and asked Keneally to commit immediately.

Keneally was not as desperate as Rudd had hoped, however. She refused to commit and said she needed time to think about it.

Just before all the premiers and treasurers were due to arrive at The Lodge for dinner, the treasurers' invitation was cancelled. They were told that they would be dining separately at the Hyatt Hotel, with the federal Treasurer, Wayne Swan, as their host. The state treasurers were unimpressed when they were led into a small, windowless dining room next to the hotel cafe. They were even less impressed when they tried to discuss key issues with Swan and he rebuffed them.

The state treasurers also asked Swan about the forthcoming Henry review of the tax system. ''No one will be worse off,'' Swan told them, and otherwise wouldn't tell them a thing, not even the date of its release. ''It'll come when it comes,'' he said.

To round out the experience the states again went at each other about the health deal, with John Lenders and NSW's Eric Roozendaal defending their decision to reject the Rudd plan.

The state ministers concluded that Swan had been sent to ''mind'' them so that Rudd could corral the premiers and try to win them over. It didn't work.

That evening the state delegations heard unofficially that Rudd intended to hold them for a day longer than they had planned, into Tuesday.

The blow by blow of how these people staggered to the finish line is very interesting. Kristina Kenneally is still a stinking mess of a premier and really, this does not raise her from the low estimation in which I hold her; but all the same she did all right to bluff to K-Rudd that "we-was-not-so-desperate-yeah?"

2010/04/23

Melbourne Losers (On A Technicality)

Parramatta Won In 2009!

Melbourne Storm have been stripped of their premierships and points for this season, for breaches of the salary cap. I know some people who would be happy to find out that Parramatta won in 2009 and Manly won in 2007.
NRL chief David Gallop has just announced the extraordinary penalty, after it was uncovered that the club paid $1.7 million to its players outside the cap in the past five years.

The Storm have been stripped of their premierships in 2007 and 2009, three minor premierships and their eight competition points this season. They will not be able to accrue any more points this season, have been fined $500,000 and must pay back $1.1 million in prize money.

"The elaborate lengths that they went to to hide the payments was quite extraordinary," Gallop said. "These payments have allowed them to recruit and retain some of the best players in the game. There's no alternative for the NRL in terms of penalty."

Gallop said that the club had run a long-term system of "two sets of books".

"This morning the Storm representatives have come in and confessed to a well-organised system of paying players outside the cap. On what we know this amounted to $1.7 million in the last five years, including approximately $700,000 in 2010.

"The breakthrough in the investigation was the discovery by the salary cap auditor [Ian Schubert] and his team of a file in a separate room at the Storm to the room that contained the file with the players' contracts."

In statement released by the NRL, it was revealed that "the Storm maintained a dual contract system and the club has today confirmed that side letters promising extra payments were stored in a secret file at the home of the Chief Executive. The accounts were structured in such a way that it would appear the commitments were not apparent to either the Melbourne Storm Board or its owners."

Hmmm, what joy. I'm so glad I don't follow the NRL any more. Would totally suck to be a fan right now. When you start invalidating whole seasons of outcomes, there's no integrity left in the record books for the code. I don't see how you could remain a fan of a code that basically takes away 2 trophies from a team that won and hurting that fan constituency and then awarding it to another bunch of fans who, years later realise their team won even when they lost the grand final and were somehow denied a big celebration. What are the latter supposed to do now? Hold parades in May?

Which all goes to show how artificial it is to have an NRL team in Melbourne, and how salary caps are in the end, no solution to the competitive imbalances inherent in the league.

It's always been very suspect how some of the expansion teams that represent whole cities have dominated the grand finals at some points of NRL and ARL's history. Brisbane, Canberra, Newcastle and Melbourne have each had extended periods of dominance over a rabble of Sydney clubs but you wonder if this happened legitimately; or indeed if these periods of expansion team dominance has actually taken the sport to the national level as hoped. I'm wondering if there really are that many bandwagoneering fans who leapt on to being Melbourne Storm fans when they won the grand final in its second year of existence. I mean, do they think are people that stupid and shallow?

Can a sport even sustain itself in the long term if its cache of fans are a bunch of bandwagoning Shallow-Hals? What kind of hell kind of plan produces such outcomes? I know winning is the only thing, but surely it's not the only, only, only thing on the minds of the viewers. Surely the spectacle and *ahem* beauty* - sheesh I hate to use that word for the game of rugby league - itself of the game should also count for something. Surely the spirit and style in which the game is played and so on must mean something to the die hard fan.

However let's say you can run your comp with Shallow Hal fans as your core constituency. How do the newly minted shallow-Hal fans of Melbourne Storm stick with their club when it ups and loses two Grand Finals in the boardroom, years after the event? Why would they stick around? I really don't know where rugby league can go after this. It's like they sledgehammered the last nail into the coffin and the coffin shattered, exposing the corpse.

Congratulations Parramatta and Manly! You should be so lucky.

2010/04/22

Tony Abbott's Dumb Idea

Bludgeon The Dole Bludger, He Says

I don't know how Tony Abbott comes up with this stuff.
Mr Abbott raised the controversial idea during a two-hour meeting with senior resources industry leaders in Perth on Monday night, The Australian newspaper reported today.

He said cutting dole payments to people aged under 30 would take pressure off the welfare system and reduce the need to bring in large numbers of skilled migrants to staff mining projects in Western Australia and Queensland.

Does this even make sense? The unemployment rate in Australia is 5.3%, and this is in spite of the so-called GFC and its aftermath rocking the world economy. At 4.5% it pretty much reaches full capacity employment at which point inflation kicks in hard.

So we are to understand that the 0.8% gap between where we stand today and the 4.5% full capacity is going to be the zone of anxiety he's going to take to the electorate as a problem issue? We're talking somewhere in the order of 80,000 people at most. Of whom, if they are under 30, he wants to cut their welfare payments and send them off to work in mines in WA. The mind boggle at how he comes up with this stuff.

He really should meet some of the people who are under 30 and are the long term unemployed. I meet them from time to time as they come through looking for work if only to get away from the prying fingers of Centrelink. They're a really miserable, sad, intellectually deficient bunch. I doubt they'd get work being toughs for a gangster somewhere.  They're just dysfunctional human beings.

These folks are not going to be successful working in a mine in WA, no matter how desperate those employers might be for workers. It's just simply stupid and irresponsible to think that you can just grab some of those kinds of guys, give them shovels and stick them on a mining job. It would be an OH&S hazard for a start. If Tony Abbott's so damned worried about them, he should be talking about creating real opportunities for them to get real jobs that these kinds of people can hold down.

At a certain point Tony Abbott should acquaint himself with the bell curve and face the reality that some people at 3 Standard Deviations to the left of the median bands are just no employable regardless of age, and that there's a point to keeping these people fed and housed even if it seems like a waste of money. It sure as hell beats having them turning into petty criminals that end up in jail (at the public's expense anyway) or as suicides on Crystal Street or some other sad statistical outcome.

But of course he's the Liberal Party leader and a Jesuit-wannabe; short on compassion and common sense while long on not sparing the rod and meting out humiliation.

2010/04/20

Kafka Would Be Proud

When Will This Stop?

One of the most shameful, disgraceful things the Australian government started doing under John Howard and still indulges in under Kevin Rudd is this business of deporting people on permanent visas on character grounds. A few years go, they deported a Serb Robert Jovicic and a Turk Fatih Tuncock, and many others. Today, it is reported that yet another such deportee Andrew Moore died last October, 2 days after being deported, due to an overdose.
A DEPRESSED father with known drug and alcohol problems died from a heroin overdose two days after Australia deported him to Britain and left him at Heathrow Airport with a cash allowance of about $700 in his pocket, a British coronial inquiry has found.

Scottish-born Andrew Moore, 43, had lived in Australia for 32 years, but had never become a citizen, when the government removed him last October for failing the Migration Act's character test after he served a sentence for manslaughter.

Mr Moore's family in Australia, including a teenage son, and supporters had pleaded for him to be allowed to stay due to severe physical and mental illness. The family says the government failed him, and legal and migration experts say it could have prevented his death, but the Immigration Minister and his department deny any responsibility.

Mr Moore's government-appointed doctor, Ed Morgan, provided him with an open letter to British doctors warning that he was at risk of relapsing into alcohol, heroin and benzodiazepine abuse.

''He has expressed fears that in a new country with limited support he will again be likely to relapse,'' Dr Morgan wrote. ''Having known Andrew for many years I … feel drug and alcohol support is paramount to his ongoing care.''

In a statement, Mr Moore's family expressed their ''disappointment at the failure of the Department of Immigration and Citizenship to put in place sufficient support networks for Andrew on his deportation to the United Kingdom. This is particularly given that Andrew had lived most of his life in Australia and was being deported to a country that he had no existing connection to.''

The government does not owe a duty of care to non-citizens, but the family's lawyer, Natasha Andrew, said: ''It begs the question, where the department has been put on notice of a detainee's significant physical and psychological illnesses, as was the case with Andrew Moore, whether deporting an individual in these circumstances amounts effectively to an additional layer of punishment beyond any ever sanctioned by our judicial process.''

The London policeman who investigated the death, Detective Constable Matthew Porter, concluded that Mr Moore had used the cash allowance to buy heroin, the inquest at London's Southwark Coroner's Court heard.

All of this is stuff that's been talked about before. Clearly policy doesn't seem to have changed, and the Department of Immigration is continuing with what is essentially social sadism whereby the Australian Government gets to mete out a second punishment worse than the incarceration handed out by the judge for the crime.

This bit is clearly the kind of bureaucratic sadism that Kafka would be proud of:
The Australian government booked accommodation and a drug and alcohol appointment for Mr Moore, but the inquest was unable to confirm whether he used either service before dying in the hallway of a South London apartment block two days after being escorted to Britain by a doctor, two federal police officers and an immigration official.

The coroner noted removal happened despite representations from Mr Moore's parents.

In other words, "say goodbye to Oz mate, and here's your one last bit of money and an appointment so you can sod off and die." How can the government of Australia not bear moral responsibility for Mr. Moore's death? How can there be government bureaucrats in the Department of Immigration going home to sleep safely in their beds tonight when they've done this to another human being without trial, without review, without any recourse? How do these people sleep at nights?

Well, here's how:
A department spokesman said: ''The coroner's findings do not alter the department's earlier position that Mr Moore had no lawful right to remain in Australia. He was assessed by a medical professional as fit to fly, he had an appropriate treatment plan in place and the department had made contact with relevant UK authorities about his ongoing care''.

Cloaked in the impassive statement that seeks to distance itself from the grisly, flesh-bound reality of Mr. Moore's death - Just following orders, we see. Clearly the Nuremburg defense is alive and well in Australian bureaucracy. I'm sure this immoral, banal-evil, bureaucratic claptrap works very well for Kevin Rudd equally well as it did for John Howard. If anybody thought there was a difference in the two when it comes to social attitudes, they can toss that notion away.

Amazingly, these people will keep cushy their jobs, even when this shit hits the fan eventually. It's truly diabolical.

2010/04/17

Mars Direct Is Back

Spacefreak Moment For Mr. Obama

Back in the day when this blog's predecessor was the 'Spacefreaks Weblog', and shared writers - yes it wasn't just me writing stuff - the big topic in 2004 was whether the space program should be looking to Mars or not and whether the Shuttle program should be continued in light of the Columbia disaster. There are a lot of pros and cons to both these ideas but the most important thing to come out of those discussions was how direct flight to Mars was probably going to yield far more knowledge than space stations and shuttle programs whose operations were always limited in scope.

So it's good to find today that President Obama has scrapped the Lunar missions for a Mars mission.
US President Barack Obama says he is aiming to send US astronauts into Mars orbit in the mid-2030s as he seeks to quell protests over his earlier space policies.

"By 2025 we expect new spacecraft designed for long journeys to allow us to begin the first ever crew missions beyond the moon into deep space," Obama told an audience at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.

"So, we'll start by sending astronauts to an asteroid for the first time in history. By the mid-2030s, I believe we can send humans to orbit Mars and return them safely to earth, and a landing on Mars will follow."

Obama, who was accompanied on his trip by astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the second man to set foot on the moon, vowed he was "100 per cent committed" to NASA's mission as he sought to set a new course for future US space travel.

The US president was making a whirlwind trip to the heart of the US space industry after he was hit with stinging criticism for dropping the costly Constellation project which had aimed to put Americans back on the moon.

"We should attempt a return to the surface of the moon first, as previously planned. But I just have to say, pretty bluntly here, we've been there before. Buzz has been there," Obama said.

"There's a lot more of space to explore and a lot more to learn when we do," the president said, as he unveiled a plan to increase NASA's budget by $US6 billion ($6.4 billion) over the next five years.

His plan includes ramping up "robotic exploration of the solar system, including a probe of the sun's atmosphere, new scouting missions to Mars and other destinations, and an advanced telescope to follow Hubble", he said.

"As president, I believe that space exploration is not a luxury, it's not an afterthought in America's quest for a brighter future. It is an essential part of that quest," he said at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.

"I am 100 per cent committed to the mission of NASA and its future."

Which is great. Back when George W Bush put forward his space project, the feeling was overwhelmingly, "why are we going back to the moon? Why are we wasting our money re-doing that trip?" At least this plan makes sense.

That being said I do sort of wonder what he means by "...new spacecraft designed..." The beauty of the Mars Direct plan is that it doesn't really need too much new in the way of new spacecraft.

2010/04/13

Crusader Complex

A Fool, Even in Thought, Is A Fool

Here's an article about the moral crisis allegedly affecting Australia and the western world.It's interesting because it shows there's a philosophical sense of crisis being addressed, but with inadequate tools.
''Sometimes Western civilisation is treated with outright hostility,'' read the invitation letter. ''Cultural relativism has led to our education system often undervaluing the achievements of Western civilisation.''

''The rise of the nanny state is undermining our freedoms of association, of speech, of liberal democracy.''

John Roskam, from the institute, said the evening tapped into a debate about values, where they come from and what they are grounded in - Western civilisation.

''It's rounder than the concept of a threat, it's under challenge,'' he said.

This is some pretty paranoid thinking. I am hard-pressed to think of anybody who is a cultural relativist who thinks that the values of Western civlisation are not worth preserving. Even Johnny Rotten in his rotton-est hour would concede that Western civilisation is pretty cool in parts. The single hallmark of John Howard's time as Prime Minister was his utter defensiveness about these things, and his language that almost reeked of a victim's complaint when it came to things to do with say, Aboriginal Reconciliation and Feminism. You have to take a somewhat culturally relativist position (but not much really) to let Aboriginal Reconciliation happen and be a good thing and let feminism advance. Indeed it's arguable that these kinds of things are good things that are the fruits of Western tradition.

But no, John Howard is worried.
Howard spoke off the cuff. According to those present, he argued that Australia has a secular tradition with no established church. But, while that tradition must be respected, it was his personal belief the Judaeo-Christian ethic has been the most profound moral and cultural influence in this country and it should be preserved. Other religions could be embraced and welcomed without in any way diminishing the Judaeo-Christian influence.

Howard, who never wore his faith on his sleeve, gave examples of where he saw erosion caused by a combination of factors such as post-modernism and people who think the values of Western civilisation are not worth preserving.

Really now. Again, I seriously doubt people on the Left from the champagne socialists out to some hardcore communists in Australia think that the "values of Western civilisation are not worth preserving". The extreme wing of the environmental movement probably want the West to renounce heavy industry but it's seriously questionable if they want the West to renounce, say, Socrates or Pascal or Kant or Freud.

What's really funny is that this meeting is somehow a meeting of people trying to preserve the Western civilisation and they're actually raging against the Enlightenment, so to speak. note especially John Howard's call to have more taboos. If that's not a backward step into the medieval darkness, I don't know what is.

Then you have Cardinal Pell, he of the kiddy-fiddlers-anonymous Catholic Church:
Pell went further, saying he felt suicide today was being ''celebrated''. Faith and values, he said, meant you're living for some reason other than yourself. He lamented that a secular view is legitimate but a religious view should not be heard in a public place, and that is was deemed permissible to speak openly of a green god but not a religious God.

Beyond religion, Julia Gillard's proposed national history curriculum was singled out for a belting, because it supposedly does not place enough emphasis on British and European influences.

Howard cited the recent push for a human rights charter in Australia as a consequence of a lack of understanding of our system of parliamentary democracy and an independent judiciary.

Both he and Pell acknowledged the flaws and blemishes of Western civilisation and the ''black spots'' these had left in Australian history.

But Pell referred to China, where he said an erosion of values was also occurring as capitalism took hold. ''This radically different culture is now searching for the secrets of Western vitality to provide a code for decency and social cohesion compatible with sustainable economic development.''

He quoted the Chinese economist Zhao Xiao's ''fascinating comparison with the selfism of Western radical secularism''.

''These days, Chinese people do not believe in anything,'' Zhao asserted. ''A person who believes in nothing can only believe in himself. And self-belief implies anything is possible - what do lies, cheating, harm and swindling matter?''

This is just too rich.

I've never heard the Catholic Church in Australia champion Confucianism. Ever.  Cardinal Pell lamenting the passing of the old values of Confucianism is therefore a new development. You sort of wonder how he reconciles that with his Catholic beliefs, after all Confucius clearly states that belief in the mysterious, the strong, the chaotic and gods is not a rational course of action. i.e.  a proper person does not run to cults and religions.

That China is losing its old ways as a result of capitalism is sort of interesting, as it is China's attempt to reap the fruits of Western civilisation without taking on board the core values of the west that provided for them. Like, good old liberalism. Indeed, it is the free-marketeering profit-above-all-decency kind of economic rationalism that is enabling the contemporary economic animal of China, that is being so disparaged here. Not so long ago, these were the exact western values people like John Howard and Cardinal Pell were peddling to a God-less, communist China. Surely they can't be too shocked at the results! Not if they had any continuity of thought. But of course if you listen to these people it's the fault of 'cultural relativists'.

And that's just the bit that pertains to China's modernisation. It strikes one that perhaps the biggest problem with John Howard and Cardinal Pell talking about  Western civilisation is that they don't understand its historical significance and only want to keep the bits that suit their personal political positions and agendas ("no, you don't say, art!"). This is why they're willing to admit there are 'black spots' in its history and yet they don't really want to deal with those black spots too much. Doesn't this show that the very malaise in the Western civilisation they're talking about with much alarm  is also showing up in their own discourse in their inability to recognise the faults of their own system?

Then there's the complete  muddling of religious doctrine with philosophical and historical traditions of the so-called Western civilisation. It is true, that historically the Church has played a large part in the history of Western Europe and the colonial states they have spawned. It is also true that the Judeo-Christian faith has provided the largest framework from which thinking on ethics and philosophy has been undertaken. Nonetheless, it is totally fallacious to claim that all of this has been good. We only need to look as far as Gallileo's or Darwin's experiences in having to explain scientific findings to the retrograde faithful. The Church and Judeo-Christian thought cannot lay claim to all of Western civilisation, just as Western civilisation cannot lay claim to just the good bits and not the 'black spots'. It certainly can't own all of science and therefore modern technology. It can't even own epistemology these days.

Indeed, the mere fact that we're even talking about Darwin today as a controversial figure in certain circles suggests that the Catholic Church still has not come to terms with science, let alone the enlightenment, and that the true fear of the cultural relativist is actually a fear of the Church's own irrelevance to thought.

What's really frightening is that people like this have so much influence in our society.

What Is This? A Religious Putsch?

The SMH also had this stupid little column, with this hysterical closing bit:
Secularism is certainly not neutral and those who wish to expunge Christian values from our schools and public institutions should more fully explain the worldview from which their alternative values derive.

In the mean time, if we are going to continue to recognise and celebrate our Judeo-Christian heritage, the state government should not dilute the influence of Scripture classes because they are the one opportunity in life the majority of young people have to understand what it is all about.

I don't know why religious types think that they have a monopoly on thinking about goodness. It is the single most repugnant thing about the article. A lot of Christians I know would probably balk at the degree of intellectual hubris of this writer.

Here's news for some people. Ethics is a difficult thing for religious types precisely because it seeks to address and critique morality; and morality is often defined by things like scriptures such as the Bible or the Koran. You can't have ethics unless you're willing to get objective about morality and where it comes from. It's not a big claim, it's just logic.

The simple version of ethics comes down to questions like "religion X says it's okay to do X, but religion Y thinks not. How do we address the goodness and badness of doing X"? If X is male circumcision, nobody bats an eyelid. If it's female circumcision, we all get uptight about it and rightfully so. The question then becomes, what makes it "rightfully" so? That very question is where ethics sits.

So, it's probably important to address what is considered moral under the Judeo-Christian framework of morality, but to do teachings of ethics correctly, you must critique whether thee claims to goodness or badness within the moral frame work stand up to analysis. For instance here's an ethics question for Catholics, was it good for the Pope to have covered for pedophiles when he was a Bishop? The Pope is currently trying to say, it's okay because he ended up as Pope and how dare we question the representative of God? Is this really 'good'?

What's really disturbing is that columns such as the one the SMH put up shows a clear attempt to muddle the water between what is ethics and what is morality so as to shoe-horn religion - in this instance Christianity of this particular dudes' particular denomination - back into the middle of discussions. Once again, this is such a backward step that even if you weren't a strident secularist, you have to combat it by saying how 1) misguided it is 2) how politically motivated it is in its misguidedness 3) and how deliberate it is in its confusing argumentation because it deliberately seeks to muddy the waters.

The long and short of it is, 'secularists' are not trying to sideline religion because they think it's bad. They're trying to sideline it from discussions of ethics because ethics can only begin when we stop harping about morality, and we cannot go there while the religiously motivated keep on trying to bring ethics back to "My God is Better Than Yours" routines of religious thought.

So, Mr. Jim Wallace, please stop trying to corrupt the youth of today with your opiate for the masses!

Apprehend That Pope!

Which brings me to this interesting article today.
Two leading atheists are investigating the possibility of arresting the Pope for "crimes against humanity", lawyers have confirmed.

Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are paying lawyers to investigate whether Pope Benedict XVI should be arrested when he visits Britain in September.

Mr Dawkins and Mr Hitchens believe the Pope should face charges for the alleged cover-up of sex abuse in the Catholic Church, The Guardian reports.

The Guardian reports that a letter written by the Pope in 1985, when he was then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, urged that a paedophile priest in the US not be exposed for the "good of the universal church".

Mr Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, told The Times: "This is a man whose first instinct when his priests are caught with their pants down is to cover up the scandal and damn the young victims to silence."

Mr Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great, added to the London-based paper: "This man is not above or outside the law. The institutionalised concealment of child rape is a crime under any law and demands not private ceremonies of repentance or church-funded pay-offs, but justice and punishment."

Well, right. Somebody's got to be held accountable for all this grief. I say, book him, Danno.

2010/04/12

Science Fiction

I recently started putting some thoughts down about Science Fiction cinema and got distracted. What follows is a cut and paste from my notes with a bit of fleshing out.

From Make Believe To Making Belief


There was a time back in the last century when science fiction was pulp literature that it didn’t warrant proper inspection as literature. In a similar way, science fiction cinema was the staple of B-movie and it too did not warrant close inspection as cinema. This all changed with the advent of Star Wars in 1977 and since then debate has raged as to the merits of the phenomenon. On the one hand it has been argued that the great success of Star Wars has allowed ‘B’ movie fodder to get ‘A’ movie budgets and has contributed to the dumbing down of cinema, while the transformation of the marketplace that resulted with the success of ‘Star Wars’ helped Hollywood and by all of extension, all cinema a period of sustained growth through three decades.

When you think about it, it is remarkable just how much the old borders of genres and notions of ‘highbrow’ and ‘proper’ realist fiction has been crossed in those 30 years. The hallmark of Science Fiction cinema used to be that it was a cinema that attempted to show what we could be, as opposed to the realist dictum of what we are. As such, we can now reflect on the 30 year push of Science Fiction in the cinema and reflect on just what it was that exploded on the screen.

The Dystopia Is Now Here

So many science Fiction movies of the late 20th century worked as presenting a bleak future with great visions of dystopia. This might start with the Malthusian anxiety of ‘Soylent Green’ or the conspiracy phobia of ‘Capricorn One’ or the environmental catastrophe of ‘Blade Runner’. The future in many ways was actually uninviting. The funny thing of living in the 20th century, now that we have arrived in the 21st, is just how much we do live in that future and seem to be psychological adapted to it. It’s enough to remind one of the story about the boiling frog that doesn’t realise the water is slowly boiling. Well, the future is here and we’re soaking in it.

We’re not at the point where we are eating people or are all convinced there are massive conspiracies in place, or that the environment is so broken that it rains forever in Los Angeles, but we’re ever closer to the problems that were raised in these films. And amazingly, judging from the tone of the news media to the polls it seems we’re relatively okay with these developments. There are whole pockets of populations that disagree with climate change science – they think it’s science fiction – they think it’s part of a global conspiracy. Yet on the whole, we seem quite okay with all of this.

In some ways it’s enough to speculate that the hyperbolic nature of science fiction narrative was actually understated when faced with the reality of human aggregate behaviour. That is to say, the authors and creators and producers of science fiction were a tad optimistic about the way we would behave in the face of actual global issues.

Technology As Apparatus To Technology As Accessory

It used to be that science fiction cinema would be centred around a device or an invention. A classic example of this might be ‘The Time Machine’ or ‘Rocket To The Moon’. The point of the story was to explore the ramifications of time travel or space travel. Even in your early Bond movies, ‘Q’ would demonstrate a technological gadget, which would later be used by Bond to blow something up. The Tricorder and Communicator in the Star Trek TV series were all part of the narrative that explained the idea of science and technology.

It can be argued that the point of science fiction narratives was to elucidate the benefits and risks of certain science and technologies. As technology seeped into our lives, we saw more and more films that contextualised the technology – real and imaginary – into an apparent realist framework. Sometimes this gave rise to re-imagined classics like ‘Back To The Future’ or absolute stinkers such as ‘The Net’ but the point was the future got an awful lot closer than the year 2000.

Then, it is very telling that recent science fiction films spend less time on explaining the technology and cut straight to the action, as with the recent ‘Terminator’ sequels – the machine is a monster, sometimes it’s a good looking girl or a strapping Aussie bloke. In the case of James Bond, his gadget is now a Nokia phone. The point I’m making is that now that the entire world’s movie-going population has accepted technology into their lives it’s possibly going to be harder to mount new narratives based on an invention or a new technology.

Toy Fiction, Virtual Reality

John Gardner who wrote ‘The Art of Fiction’ took to task science fiction of his day, calling it ‘toy fiction’. He made the case that proper fiction deals with human emotions and philosophical questions; not gadgets and inventions and monsters from outer space. He said that such fiction were toy fictions that pretended to be real works of proper fiction. So goes the ever-lasting snobbery against science fiction as a genre.

The recent development of science fiction then perhaps mounts a strong counterargument to Gardner’s position. Firstly, if one were to make an elaborate toy car that was so elaborate you could ride and drive in it, then wouldn’t it functionally be a car? I would argue that that’s what a supercar like a Ferrari or a Lamborgini was at once a toy and a car; and that perhaps something as elaborate and huge and technically accomplished as James Cameron’s ‘Avatar’ happens to be both ‘toy’ as well as ‘real’.

Is ‘Avatar’ good fiction? Is it properly high-brow enough? Do such questions even matter any more in the face of its enormous success? However I wanted to bring these points together for consideration exactly because this is the centre of the snobbery against science fiction. ‘Avatar’ was a cultural phenomenon of immense undertaking. ‘Avatar’ is the cutting edge of cinema, produced and directed by one if its leading practitioners. It’s led to popular acclaim, commercial success and much critical discussion. If ‘Avatar’ was still to be considered a toy… then it’s Disneyland all on its own.

Of course, there’s a short essay about the importance of Disneyland and the ersatz by Philip K. Dick that comes to mind wherein he argued that such toys and fakery and forgeries teach us exactly what makes us human. And if that wasn’t a realist fiction’s goal then I don’t know why they get such high standings in the totem pole of genres.

Artificial Unintelligence

Some time in the late 1990s marked the future-dated birth dates of HAL and Astroboy amongst other characters in science fiction. As these calendar dates have come and gone it seems particularly interesting to note what humanity has attempted, what humanity has accomplished and what humanity has failed at. An artificial intelligence like HAL or a trip to Jupiter like in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ is still in our future, but we do have a space station now and yes, the shuttle does dock with it. Space tourism is around the corner. Everybody has far more computing power at their disposal than ever imagined in any film prior to ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, but it seems a little ways off before our environment control unit suffocates us deep in space.

Indeed, computing itself seems to have been the dark horse technology of all the technologies, big and small, that has been shown on the screen. Not flying cars or personal jet packs or anti-aging clinics or nanotech santa-claus machines. Perhaps then one of the most laughable moments in science fiction cinema might have been the computer virus delivered into the computing system of the alien mothership in ‘Independence Day’, which at once was a paraphrasing of the influenza virus from ‘War of the Worlds’ (the source text of the story), but also a tacit nod to the humble laptop computer as the enabler of our civilization. There they were, the big menacing invincible aliens with the huge spaceships they flew in across light years, only to crash, thanks to some cyberpunk geeks. Thanks for coming, play it again.

The Star Wars Chronology

Above all else in the ever-evolving genre of science fiction was the completion of the cycle of stories as begun by ‘Star Wars’. The first 2 sequels in the 1980s expanded the scope of the milieu considerably, so much for it spawned an undying demand for the rest of the story to be told, and so George Lucas gave us what he thought we wanted with a new trilogy, which seemed to restate the first series.

Yet, viewing the films in the order they were made seems to indicate that the story is how the authorial protagonist - George Lucas - starts off innocent and idealistic as Luke, but through the war-like experience of making films has buried himself in machines and has finished up as Darth Vader, a captive of his own machinery, dark, imposing, tyrannical and devoid of compassion or sympathy, a slave to power.

It is then quite tragic that science fiction cinema which once seemed so promising is now an integral part of the Hollywood juggernaut that keeps churning out a particular kind of action packed, short-on-thought, long-on-explosion movies as blockbusters. They are all chasing the elusive franchise movie where they can capture the zeitgesit and milk it for every buck. Looking back today, the balance sheet of what the Star Wars cycle of films has done for cinema and against cinema might actually be a very tight margin.

I love the Star Wars universe in the older episodes 4, 5 & 6. I find the Star Wars universe in episodes 1,2 & 3 a lot harder to like, and the only person I can blame for that is in fact
George Lucas himself. What's really absent in the new lot of films is actually the sense of wonder. The films take place in a world that is now too used to technology as paraphernalia to civilisation.

The Star Trek Phenomenon

The other deeply geekly cinematic pursuit has been the other franchise of science fiction cinema, the Star Trek series. What started off as an adventurous TV drama series devolved into a bad action show, only to reborn as a 6-movie franchise of the same superannuated actors bemoaning aging. But it too has spawned a self-sustaining market that has managed to turn itself into a minor industry. In some ways it is heavily derivative of formats from older pieces of fiction, and yet it is so fecund it keeps re-inventing its form and guise until it latched on to the recent re-boot craze.

Star Trek actually is just as archetypal in our culture as Star Wars in that the characters and problems keep coming back to problems of drama and psychology. The intuition of Kirk, the logic of Spock, the passion of McCoy, the concrete rationality of Scott, all form the crux of the biscuit around which themes of immortality and yearning are played out. In its strongest moments the 'Star Trek' universe actually goes where no drama has gone before. In its weakest moments, it seems to regress to a soap opera mush of sentiment. Yet the point is that Star Trek is unstinting in its humanism and may offer the most answers about why we tell science fiction stories.

Star Trek stories are about discovery. In the best episodes and movies he external discovery is always mirrored by the transformative discovery within; whether it is Khan the transhuman or some alien computer that cannot calculate pi to the end, the transformation is always catalysed by the encounter with the other.

The Prognosis is Good

As with most genres of cinema, there probably is a use by date for Science Fiction, just as there was for Westerns in their heyday. It just seems to me that as long as there is science and things to be discovered, then the world is full of wondrous things we can wonder about, which suggests there's a long way yet before science fiction is exhausted.

2010/04/11

iPhone! (or Why The Apple Store In Chatswood Sucks)

Run With The Crowd Much?

My lovely little Sony Ericsson bought a farm. Just in its 24th month of its contract too. You seriously wonder about these phones they sell you on contract. I won't go into the details but basically the phone I've loved and cherished bit the dust and so it was finally time to go join the Apple-Throng and get an iPhone.

My retail Apple Products supplier of choice has been Maccentric in Chatswood for no good reason other than I've been going there for years, but it turns out Apple doesn't let these Apple stores sell iPhones. Only the Apple stores and phone company outlets can sell them.

So it was off to the Apple Store in Chatswood Chase. I must have waited 20 minutes to get the attention of one of their sales people and that person was whisked away by some other customer and never finished explaining things. Another dude started talking about what it's like working there with another customer across one of those demonstration benches from me.

Turns out the dude and the salesperson talked about cars, dogs and then the fact the salesperson was working there for the second day and how wonderful it was to work for the Apple Store. You could have gagged me with a spoon. Dude, this is your second day! Serve some frickin' buying customers, you toad!

Eventually I got the attention of yet another salesperson who as then taken away from me by another irate customer. "For Fuck's sake!" I muttered and walked out.

I ended up going to the Testra shop to buy my iPhone and had them switch over my SIM card and add the data pack on to my bill. Not hard. Even a tired old un-tech-savvy kind of dude could see me through. It was much less frustrating than the Apple Store experience.

It's not the first time the Apple Store's been like this - it's always like this. In the end I've had to pretty much snatch what I've wanted off the shelf and grab a sales person and wave the boxes in front of their faces to get them to serve me and let me pay my money and get out of that place. It's singularly the worst retail experience I can think of.

Which explains why I keep going back to Maccentric for my Apple paraphernalia. It's not because Maccentric are particularly excellent, it's because the Apple Store in Chatswood is AWFUL. It's retail, it's not that hard, but they make it look like it's the Hadron Collider. What in Steve Job's name are they doing in the retail business when they can't even do this stuff right?

2010/04/07

Malcolm Turnbull Quits Politics

I Love Being Right (As In Correct, Not Political Persuasion)

Malcolm Turnbull is quitting politics at the next election.
Talking to the Herald after announcing he would end his six-year ''wild ride'' of a political career and step down at the election, Mr Turnbull said there was no option but to put a price on carbon.

''The reality is if you want to efficiently and effectively cut emissions, you've got to do so with a market mechanism and that's what an ETS is,'' he said.

Mr Turnbull will stay in his seat until the election, after which he plans to invest in start-up Australian technology, including the green energy sector.

''Some people don't like a venture capital investment because it's risky. I've always enjoyed that and that's the area I imagine we will be focused on.''

The multi-millionaire's resignation sparked a preselection stampede for his eastern suburbs seat of Wentworth with 10 Liberal names in the mix yesterday.

These included John Howard's former chief of staff, Arthur Sinodinos; the executive director of the Menzies Research Centre, Julia Leeser; and Gabrielle Upton and Peter Doyle, both of whom are in the running for the state seat of Vaucluse.

The seat, a crucial marginal which Mr Turnbull holds by only 3.9 per cent, is now firmly in Labor's sights.

The Sydney lawyer Stephen Lewis is the only firm starter for Labor preselection thus far.

Mr Turnbull lost the Liberal leadership to Tony Abbott by one vote in December because of his support for an emissions trading scheme. He made no apology for putting principle before politics.

''I remain absolutely convinced that it is in Australia's interest to start cutting emissions now and to do so by means of a market-based mechanism,'' he said.

Mr Turnbull, who was overlooked two weeks ago when Mr Abbott reshuffled his frontbench, made the final decision to quit during the Easter break.

He said his two main regrets were losing the leadership and trusting the Treasury official Godwin Grech over the OzCar affair.

''I regret having made criticisms of the Prime Minister based on the email that Grech created.''

Oh well. There's also this bit of analysis:
So how could it have gone so badly for him? Paul Keating's assessment of Turnbull is that he is "brilliant, fearless, but he has no judgment".

It was his judgment that was exposed when he made his decision to hit the nuclear button - demanding that the Prime Minister resign, based on nothing more than a fake email concocted by a public servant. From then on Turnbull's leadership was hollow. Coalition discontent over the ETS finally collapsed it.

So it comes down to the fake email no matter what, and for all the talk of his high principles of sticking to the ETS plan, he was undone by not having enough principles to go and check the veracity of the Godwin Grech email.

Back in this post I wrote:
Now, it is true that if the allegations raised by the Opposition were indeed true, then it would amount to the scalp of the treasurer Wayne Swan. But if the e-mail was fake, then whoever stood up in parliament and lobbed it going to take the maximum heat for the slander. The really amazing thing is that it in this case, it is the latter scenario, with Malcolm Turnbull himself lobbing the accusations.

Something tells me that this is not going to go well for Mr. Turnbull, no matter which way they spin this. I’m not saying that Mr. Turnbull is going to commit suicide, mind you; I’m saying this thing might end up taking his political career away from him.

I sort of can’t believe anything so stupid is going on in Australia, but there you have it. Our very own faked e-mail scandal. Then again, I can see how politicians might have fallen right into this whammy. The Opposition should be moving to damage control within the week. This is ridiculous that they’ve run this up their flagpole without having done their verification and due diligence. It’s Amateur Hour with a good dose of incompetence there.

I’m more appalled by the low standard of rigor and the intellectual laziness of these polticians. It’s exasperating.

And here we are seeing the end of Malcolm Turnbull's shining political career, less than a year later.

As a side note, I like this bit in the Hartcher article:
The man he brought down as leader, Brendan Nelson, has said of Turnbull: "He says the most appalling things and can't understand why people get upset. He has no empathy. He's got narcissistic personality disorder.''

That's a likely story, but then I thought it was one of those prerequisites to be a Liberal Party leader.

2010/04/04

Movie Doubles - 'Bruno' & 'Assassination Of A High School President'

Oh Boy

I have no idea how I'm going to make connections between these 2 films because they couldn't be further apart in style, content, and intent/conceit. Bruno is like a 90minute Homo-Fest as Sacha Baron Cohen allows his gay Austrian fashionista alter-ego to run absolutely wild. The 'Assassination of a High School President' (AHSP from here) is a film-noir narrative transported into a private high school setting.

The only reason these 2 films are being compared is because I watched them back to back. It made for an interesting viewing experience but I don't particularly recommend you mix these two films for an afternoon's viewing.

The Body As Capital

The first thing that pops into my mind is just how much nudity and exposure there is in both films. This is perhaps by accident but it allows us to at least make one connection between these 2 disparate films. In 'Bruno', Bruno's body is endlessly displayed as an object for adoration by the Bruno character because he believes through his insane narcissism that his body is entitled to celebrity stardom. To this end we are subjected to such scenes as when he goes to a beauty parlor in LA to have his "anus bleached". In the scene where he is "negotiating" a peace settlement between the Israeli and Palestinian academic, but he also gets them to extend a hand towards one another, and then has them touch him. The body is thus an important piece of working capital for Bruno, through which he ultimately achieves his desired goal of global fame.

AHSP is surprisingly interested in the same idea as well, for the character Paul who is the school president that gets metaphorically assassinated is a sport scholarship type, looking to get to the Ivy League. For him, the body is the means by which he well get what he wants. Similarly, Francesca played by Mischa Barton is willing to sleep with anybody to get what she wants, although it's not clear what it is that she is after. The whole school is in a sense hooked into a market place of bodies, and so the bullies and delinquents are equally interested in exchanges that take place with the body. The bullies want to sell drugs that enhance academic performance, the delinquents are constantly willing to sabotage their bodies in order not to participate in the school.

Whither The Family

AHSP is in some ways very similar to 'Brick', another film-noir story set in a high school. While 'Brick' had the novel pretension of having dialogue like a Dashiel Hammett novel, AHSP has no such pretensions. It is happy to simply work through the cliched voice-over stylings of a run of the mill film-noir story. In both films adults are conspicuously absent and the adults who are in the narrative are either disinterested or unaware. In AHSP Bruce Willis stands in as the ubiquitous adult authority, but he seems very misguided and deranged thanks to his endless patter about his war experiences and obsession with trivial issues such as chewing gum.

As such, AHSP has no shot at a narrative about the formation of a family. This is actually quite liberating for the text because what then happens is far less restricted by that myth in American cinema. In fact it works to deconstruct a very artificial family in which Francesca lives with a step brother her own age - and it is the image of them making love in a bath tub that turns the film around. By positing that there is something a little wrong going on in the artificial families in the post-divorce era second marriages is possibly more ideological resistance than at first glance.

Because wrongness is exactly where Bruno goes. In Bruno, there is a powerful impulse to literally shove gay culture into every corner of accepted discourse just to see what happens. You can imagine the moral outrage when earlier Bruno presents the black baby to a predominantly African-American crowd claiming he swapped the baby for an iPod in Africa. He even visits a Swingers Party and tries to turn them gay to which a Swinger responds "I didn't come here for some queer shit. I came here to fuck". Which is significant because again we see these swinging couples as coming out of families, so in a sense the family is where heterosexual normalcy is anchored. But what if heterosexuality alone isn't normal enough? The ensuing chaos at the Swingers Party tells us that there is indeed lots of likely problems in any family.

Bruno's project culminates in a gay marriage ceremony where a state celebrant refuses to celebrate, and the adoption of a black baby for the newly formed family. So on the surface 'Bruno' is playing up to the American ideology, but ultimately this questions the bedrock assumptions about family in American cinema.

Fear Of Anal Insertion

The fear is palpable through out Bruno. Everybody who comes across Bruno fears the great moral taboo of anal insertion. It's all to do with this anxiety and taboo. The martial arts instructor who teaches Bruno how to defend himself from attacks by not just 1 dildo, but 2 and 3; the hunters who go camping with Bruno; the crowd at the wrestling who cheer him on for the chorus of "straight pride"; the focus group participants; the head of the Arab terror cell;  basically, everybody he comes across is afraid of anal insertion. I am too, watching it. The great taboo of homosexuality gets exposed over and over again, but unlike with Borat who went and exposed anti-semitism, Bruno is (pardon the pun) getting at something a lot more fundamental to our civilization. People can consciously stop being anti-semitic. it's questionable if people will get over their abjection to homosexuality as readily. It's one thing to out people, it's another to hit them about with gayness until they become tolerant.

In fact we - the heterosexual stupid in 'Bruno' - spend most of our lives laughing at politically incorrect jokes to do with anal insertion of objects and body parts. The taboo is strong, otherwise 'Bruno' wouldn't be so funny.  While 'Bruno' offers a weird spectacle of a good, uncomfortable laugh at the expense of 'the sexually normal' (whatever that is when you see the swingers club you think "whoah they're nuts!"). 'AHSP' lives under the constant terror of the taboo being crossed. This in no way is accidental as it is set in a Catholic high school. Judging from AHSP, there is no such fear of vaginal insertion, but fear of anal insertion is a proper fear to have. The girls are not in fear of the penis. Men are in fear of other penises. The Spanish teacher priest who is inexplicably in the students' shower raises questions of the same moral/mortal fear. The threat is actually a lot closer.

I'm sure a gay critic or gender critic would have a better explanation of all this, but what I think is significant is that with these two films we see our society coming to terms with the fact that gay people exist and do as they do, and so do Catholic priests looking after young children.

2010/04/02

New Zealand Opts To Deal

Who Would Have Guessed?

What do you know? New Zealand is willing to deal and back the compromise plan to reduce the absolute number of whales that are killed.
New Zealand has backed the compromise pact, which would lift the current ban on commercial whaling while reducing the number of whales killed by Japan under the guise of "research".

NZ had been one of Australia's staunchest allies in the fight against Antarctic whaling.

But now the country's whaling commissioner, Sir Geoffrey Palmer, says he'll support the compromise proposal at the next meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in June, the ABC reports.

Currently, commercial whaling is banned but countries can hunt whales in the name of science. Up to 1900 are killed each year.

Australia wants Japan to stop whaling, but Japan insists that it has the right to hunt whales.

The issue has been stuck in diplomatic limbo and there is an increasing push to find a compromise, alarming conservation groups.

Federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett spoke out against NZ's support for the compromise proposal.

"I am alarmed and very concerned that NZ would support a proposal that is flawed and represents a huge compromise to pro-whaling nations," he said.

"Australia cannot support the compromise package now being discussed in the IWC."

That package was loaded in favour of the whalers, Mr Garrett said.

Well Peter Garrett would say that. In a trade off between numbers and principles, the Australian government wants to hold on to the principles and not trade away anything at all AND have their way. I don't think that's how deals work Mr. Garrett.

Of course that being said, this is April Fools day, so who knows if the New Zealand government is really considering this move.

UPDATE: here is an article with a better explanation of the NZ position on the issue.
Former New Zealand prime minister Geoffrey Palmer, who chairs an International Whaling Commission (IWC) group trying to negotiate a deal, said the IWC could fall apart.

"I think there is a big risk of that and I don't relish it," Palmer told reporters in Wellington.

"We cannot afford to see the end of the International Whaling Commission because if it comes to an end, there will be no international instrument for protecting the whales."

It raises the question what happens to the issue of controlling whaling if the IWC were to fold. After years of fruitless wrangling, it may actually be getting to the point where Japan, Norway, Iceland and Russia walk out o the IWC and there would be no agreement whatsoever.
Palmer said he was not confident the opposing sides of the whaling argument could agree on a workable deal, but said it was important they were still talking.

New Zealand Foreign Minister Murray McCully also described a deal as "a long shot" but said it was worth trying.

"All the alternatives to holding these discussions are truly awful," he said.

Australia has taken a harder line, saying it will take Japan to the International Court of Justice if it does not agree by November to stop hunting in Antarctic waters.

New Zealand said it there was a good chance court action would fail, leaving controls on hunting weaker than ever.

That can't be good. Here's another article with some interesting points:
Since there seems to be no way to stop Japan from killing cetaceans (whales, dolphins, and porpoises), the Obama Administration is poised to compromise on commercial whaling in order to secure broader, more effective regulation by the IWC. If Japan chooses to cooperate, that is. Its recent success at thwarting protection for depleted, sashimi-bound Atlantic bluefin tuna during a UN wildlife session does not augur well.

IWC meetings are rancorous affairs at which neither side wins the three-quarters majority needed to change anything. Founded by whaling nations, the IWC was taken over by whaling opponents in the 1980s, since which time Japan has used foreign aid to recruit support from Caribbean and Asian countries. (Dominica dramatically reversed its pro-whaling position last year.)

A three-year effort to reorder the IWC (read the talking points from a recent working session) would create a South Atlantic Sanctuary and beef up conservation efforts to help the world's biggest mammals cope with oceanic pollution, ship strikes, climate change, and sonic disruption. In an historic compromise, countries that hunt whales could do so along their coasts--and Japan could continue to exploit Antarctic waters--but only under an enforceable legal agreement that the U.S. official said must unquestionably cap whaling "at a significant decrease" below the current fatality rate. "Numbers are key."

So that means Mr. Obama AND NZ are both on board with the compromise plan. This is interesting because it means it's up to the UK and Australia to continue with the strident antics at the IWC, but neither seem to have taken into account just what happens after the IWC falls apart.

Sign of the Times - 01/04/10

Stephen Conroy - Recalcitrant Censor

Look I get it that it's very possible somebody's kids might log onto the internet and might find objectionable material. I know of one parent who was supervising his kids in the living room as he read the newspaper. The kids went straight to Google Image Search and typed "big naked bums". You can imagine the rest.

I understand that a certain kind of person would like the problems of the world to simply go away with a wave of a hand or a casting of a magic wand. Clearly Stephen Conroy is one of those people.
In an on-camera interview with Fairfax Media's national Canberra bureau chief, Tim Lester, Senator Conroy dismissed the torrent of criticism directed at his policy as "misleading information" spread by "an organised group in the online world".

Asked what percentage of all of the nasty material on the internet his filters would block, Senator Conroy dodged the question, responding that his filters were "100 per cent accurate - no overblocking, no underblocking and no impact on speeds".

But Mark Newton, an engineer with ISP internode, said: "Censorship will not catch a single pedophile, will not cause a single image to disappear from the internet, will not protect a single child."

Senator Conroy also brushed aside concerns from leading academics and technology companies that the plan to block a blacklist of "refused classification" (RC) websites for all Australians was an attempt to shoe-horn an offline classification model into a vastly different online world.

"Why is the internet special?," he asked, saying the net was "just a communication and distribution platform".

"This argument that the internet is some mystical creation that no laws should apply to, that is a recipe for anarchy and the wild west. I believe in a civil society and in a civil society people behave the same way in the physical world as they behave in the virtual world."

Newton said this was a "gross oversimplification", pointing out that Australia Post and Telstra's telephone network were also distribution platforms but were not censored.

"Why should the internet, a distribution platform for all manner of intangibles, be censored as if it was a movie theatre? It makes no sense, the model doesn't fit," he said.

96% of the polls on the SMH say the internet is not a special case. 96% polled also do not support the government's internet filtering plan.  This leads me to conclude that 96% of SMH's web readership don't think *any* kind o censorship is acceptable. So Stephen Conroy has a really difficult sell here.

It's not that I don't accept the merits of the argument that maybe if there were  a targeted block done by the government, then it reduces the risk of the accidental discovery of nasty material by children. The bit I don't get is how Stephen Conroy refuses to see the overwhelming objection from a wide variety of parties as pretty much representative of the entire community.

What's fascinating in this whole non-debate is how Mr. Conroy seems so certain that his solution is going to a) work b) be accepted c) not circumvented by the highly motivated. Dare I say it, his position is so committed and inflexible, you wonder if he can ever come back from the far-out-on-a-limb position he has staked out.

I guess we'll wait and see, but Kevin Rudd is crazy letting this keen censor run with this idiotic, unpopular, irrational project.

Say Hello To My Little Friends

Then there's this article.
The two-minute clip begins with an exchange between a pint-sized Tony Montana and his, ah, young wife, on a set that includes a toy tiger, inflatable palm trees and a table covered with popcorn, not cocaine.

"Can't you stop saying 'fudge' all the time? It's boring, Tony," she tells him. "You deal coke and you kill people. That's 'wonderful', Tony."

Responds Montana: "I've got a fudging junkie for a wife."

"You son of a bee!" she retorts. "I'm leaving you, motherfudger."

The clip reaches its violent climax with a recreation of the final scene of Brian de Palma's 1983 gangster epic, where Montana, played by Al Pacino, pictured, falls face-first into a swimming pool after being shot. Or into a paddling pool filled with paper after he is hit in the back by a foam toy gun.

Many viewers expressed outrage at the post, while others - correctly - suspected the clip was not genuine. Its creator, Marc Klasfeld, a commercial and music video director, told CNN the video aimed to illustrate the pervasiveness of sex and violence in the media confronting children daily.

"What's interesting to me and my wife is that the video is shocking, yet every day we have to guard what our children view from television commercials or video game violence," said Klasfeld, an admitted fan of viral videos.

The thing is, like, as if the kids don't understand what's going on.

Here's the original video on Youtube. It's actually quite brilliant. It also goes to show just how infantile the dialogue was in that film, because it's working really well here. :)

So the question is, what exactly is Stephen Controy's net-nanny-filter going to do about this one?

RAM, Baby!

Something was wrong with my mac pro's RAM. I was only seeing the pair of 1 GB slots and not the other 3GB.2GB is the scraping the minimum for RAM when it comes to running Logic Pro and Final Cut Studio, therefore it was a real problem.

So I went and bought 2 sticks of 2GB to replace the faulty sticks and shoved them into the remaining 2 slots. I switched on the machine and what do you know? It now reads the missing 3, plus the 4 new gigs making the total... 9Gigabytes of RAM! Woohoo.

I think the 'A' tray the RAM sits on got knocked loose when I moved the current tower.

2010/04/01

Shutter Island

Not A Dog

I shouldn't read reviews. Especially those in the SMH giving it 3 stars. I can't remember the last time Martin Scorsese made a dog a of a film, even taking into consideration 'The Departed', so I really shouldn't have just bypassed this movie. It's surprisingly good.

Then again, it seems the SMH readers give this film 2 stars, so what hope is there really?

What's Good About It

It's good to see Martin Scorsese go back to a more kinetic style of shooting, with more modeled lights and cinematography. He was further away from his hallmark style in 'The Departed' with much flatter lighting in that one. This film is much more interesting to watch from a technical point of view as well as an artistic point of view.

The performances are generally good, but you expect that from a cast that includes Leonardo DiCaprio, Mike Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley and Max Von Sydow. These guys aren't exactly chopped liver. It's good to see Max Von Sydow not phone in his performance in this one. The full Max is quite impressive but there's not enough of him.

Ben Kingsley looks quite like Freud except without the grey hair. He has the head shape and goatee, but the wrong glasses. Max Von Sydow supplies the white hair and the glasses.

What's Bad About It

Michelle Williams is not good in this film. I just didn't much like what she brought to this film. Considering she's an understated sort of actress, she comes across as tentative and fringey.

Also, the Holocaust references were a bit gratuitous. Yes, we know the greatest horror humanity has visited upon other humans is the death camps under the NAZIs, but they don't exactly have a monopoly on those stakes. To see the old trotted out to portray Dachau were a bit of thematic overkill. Especially when you find out that what's really ailing the main character has nothing to do with NAZIs and concentration camps. This is just gratuitous Holocaust-porn whereby a film maker or fiction writer just waves around the Holocaust in order to signify horror as if there's nothing else that's ever been horrifying before or since.  It's disingenuous.

What's Interesting About It

I don't think trick endings work. A lot of people fail to grasp the trick ending. The worst kind of trick ending is where you find out it was all a dream. If it's all a dream of a mad person, then you always wonder if it was all that worthwhile going for a ride, watching the film. The best comparison I could think for this film was 'Identity' (which coincidentally starred John Cusack and Amanda Peet who I mentioned in the previous post on Apocalypse movies). 'Identity' is a film that looks like a modern re-imaging of 'Psycho' which turns out to be all a story inside the mind of a psychotic serial killer.

The notion that all the irrational things shown to us on the screen is justified on the grounds of psychosis is, to be honest, a bit weak as narratives go. Where 'Identity' succeeded was in having all the seemingly irrational elements tie into a rational explanation of why they had to be the way they were.That tying together process doesn't exactly take place in this film, so we're left wondering if the insanity is real - and given the narrator's already lied to you, you don't feel like you should take on board the new narrative reality. It's awkward.

Those Damn NAZIs!

The film Leonardo DiCaprio did coming in to Shutter Island was 'Revolutionary Road' and you all know what I had to say about the presentation of the war experience in that film. Well, unfortunately Leo DiCaprio is wandering around a World War II terrain that leads into Dachau in this film and he looks awful serious as he watches the NAZI commandant die. Well a quick look at the Wikipedia entry on Dachau shows the commandant fled, so that clearly didn't happen but the Dachau massacre of German guards did happen.

In the film you see the gate that says in German 'Arbeit Macht Frei'/'Freedom Through Work', but of course that gate belonged to Auschwitz and not Dachau*. I mean, if you're going to go to the trouble of working in the Holocaust into a story, you might want to get this stuff right, even if you're Martin Scorsese (or perhaps especially if you are Martin Scorsese).

It's really no dispute to say the circumstances of Dachau's fall to the Americans is worthy of some kind of cinematic treatment, and the story of the Dachau massacre is even worthy of a cinematic treatment, but in this instance, they're reduced to sideshows in a film about the inside the head of a crazy American guy. He may as well have survived the Titanic in his childhood or something, but it doesn't add more significance to the main beef of the story.

The Operation Paperclip Legacy

At one point before the big reveal that the main character is insane, he touches on a few possibilities about Shutter Island's purpose. One of the things he imagines in a cave is that Shutter Island is indeed like Dachau where unspeakable experiments are being carried out on the insane. The presence of Max Von Sydow's character as some kind of NAZI scientist who was brought over to the USA after World War II adds some credibility to this notion as it is explained by a woman who is presumably a figment of the main character's imagination.

When the film is all said and done, it may have been more interesting if the film concerned itself with that possibility rather than the conclusion it staggers to at the end. After all, it would be brave to start dissecting the wild possibilities of the evil science that may have been brought to America by these ex-NAZI scientists. Like, say, Werner von Braun. It seems it's easier to write such episodes of history off as us being crazy for being suspicious, rather than perhaps there lurking some awful truth in there somewhere. I guess that would make us paranoid - but that's just how plausible deniability works, isn't it?

* CORRECTION:

I was wrong. They did have the 'Arbeit Macht Frei' sign at Dachau. It's just not sitting above the gate as it does at Auschwitz. Those NAZIs were decidedly sick.

Blog Archive