News That's Fit To Punt 28/Mar/2012

Please Explain, Rupert

It's been an ugly few months for the Murdoch media empire, but this might be the moment when they finally take one on the chin without being able to duck. Of course, earlier in the day it was revealed that News Corporation had basically paid hackers to crack their opponents security and then made the hack available to people on pirate sites in order to cripple their competitors. I think Stephen Conroy is right. It's time to call the police. This isn't some regular bit of dastardly act that passes for corporate cunning to get ahead. This is a publicly listed company instigating and promoting piracy in order to destroy their competition so as to establish a monopoly.

The main news item can be surveyed here from the AFR who have made it available to the wider public. A really interesting tidbit is in this article:

The Panorama program aired emails that apparently showed that the codes of ONdigital were first cracked by a hacker named Oliver Koermmerling. He told the program he had been hired by NDS's head of UK security, Ray Adams.

Panorama alleged the codes were publicised by the world's biggest pirate website, the House of Ill Compute (THOIC).

Lee Gibling, who ran THOIC, said Mr Adams sent him the ONdigital codes so other pirates could use them to make thousands of counterfeit smartcards.
He said he was being paid £60,000 a year by Mr Adams and was given thousands more to buy computer equipment. The site had sent people update codes: ''We wanted them to stay and keep on with ONdigital, flogging it until it broke.''

ONdigital, later renamed ITV Digital, lost more than a £1 billion, and 1500 staff lost their jobs when it collapsed in 2002.

Mr Gibling said he and another employee later destroyed much of the computer evidence by smashing hard drives with a sledgehammer.

News Corp's lawyers, Allen & Overy, denied the claims even before the program was aired. They told media organisations that the claims NDS ''has been involved in illegal activities designed to cause the collapse of a business rival'' would be false and libellous and demanded they not be repeated.

NDS also issued emphatic denials: ''It is simply not true that NDS used the THOIC website to sabotage the commercial interests of ONdigital/ITV digital or, indeed, any rival.''

The company admitted Mr Gibling was in its pay but says it was using THOIC as a legitimate undercover device: ''NDS paid Lee Gibling for his expertise so information from THOIC could be used to trap and catch hackers and pirates.''

Uh, yeah, right. isn't it schoolyard logic that "He who denied it supplied it"? These denials are looking pretty daft. Let's say for the moment we let it stand that NDS paid Gibling for his expertise and information. Just what expertise and information would Lee Gibling be offering NDS but hacking information? And what were NDS going to do with this hacking information they paid Lee Gibling for?

The funniest thing today might have been News.com.au which didn't have a single article on this explosive scandal now embroiling the Murdoch media empire.

This leads me to this item sent to me from Pleiades, penned by Stephen Mayne.

 While there have always been plenty of competitors and journalists who take pot-shots at News Corp, the key to its power has been an ability to keep compliant regulators and politicians on side. That all changed in the UK when everyone turned on News Corp over phone hacking. News of the World was closed, scores of employees have been arrested, the BSkyB mop-up takeover was abandoned and there are now serious prospects the company will be kicked out of Britain in disgrace.

Amazingly, News Corp’s share price has soared ever higher in recent months and jumped another 10c to $19.48 this morning, valuing the company at $US51 billion. The Murdoch family has a debt-free $6.5 billion stake in News Corp and appear to be financially unscathed from the British scandal.

But the family’s biggest single earner over the years has been US programming pumped out through the world’s most lucrative global pay-TV distribution channels. Thanks to Chenoweth’s revelations, there are now serious questions being asked as to whether these have been ill-gotten gains.

As for what happens now, I reckon Chenoweth’s package — there’s more to come — will pick up the Gold Walkley in 2012. The Murdochs will be kicked out of Britain, Foxtel won’t be allowed to buy Austar and Sir Rod Eddington, lead independent director of News Corp, will finally develop some spine and intervene to reduce this notorious family’s control over its unethical media empire.

This stuff makes the hacking scandal look like child's play. Charges should be laid. They need to arrest these people.

Drive

I'll Never Understand Critics

I ended up watching 'Drive' because I'd seen all these reviews saying how great it was. Having watched it, I'm largely unmoved by it. In recent days I have found it frustrating that 'John Carter' gets dismissive reviews while a tedious bit of crime fiction gets such rave reviews. What is going on out there in critic land? Don't they see enough movies like this? Or is their appetite for petty crime movies so great it is an insatiable hunger?

Or maybe it's all the gritty realism and the understated naturalism that borders on autism? At least the film isn't filled with fetish objects, but it is emotionally stilted as they come.

What's Good About It

There's always something good in any film. I'm having trouble saying what it is in this film, off the top of my head.

That's it, ...speaking of head. The scene where Ryan Gosling kicks a gangster to death, in the lift - and he's so angry he keeps stomping on the head until the skull caves in with a nice squelchy sound effect. That was good. I felt his fury in that scene. That bit of sadism felt good.

It's also good to see a film just show LA in the most ordinary light for a change. No glamour, just streets and streets and streets.

What's Bad About It

The idea. That's right. This is yet another film that has an angle on the idea that the perfect crim would be to steal money that is already stolen. This seems to be a meme that is doing the rounds in Hollywood because it's the core idea of 'Deception' starring Ewen McGregor and Hugh Jackman for instance, and the central plank of the Ocean's 11-13 movies with Brad Pitt and George Clooney.

The idea has the only two benefits of making the victims of the heist deserving, and the cops don't get involved. But in most instances, it always gets ugly and this film spends a good deal of time exploring that ugliness.

The other bad thing is the directing. It's way too self conscious in looking for a style and yet lacks tempo and all the odd angles don't really contribute to the narrative. The performances are strange. It's hard to tell what these people are thinking or whether it's just one of those odd moments engineered by odd camera angles to cover a two-hander.  I'm sure the director and the cinematographer thought they were doing ground-breaking work. I kind of wish they'd just gone with the basics. It would've made the movie go by quicker.

I don't usually think in a way that gives films stars but I'll make an exception for this one - 1/5.

What's Interesting About It

That it garners such good reviews.

Oh I don't know. It's not the worst film I've seen, but it's pretty ordinary and tedious for me. That so many people find it compelling surprises me. But then, I can imagine people said the same thing about 'Star Wars' or 'The Maltese Falcon'  so I'm totally aware that I'm in the minority with this film.

What may be the most interesting thing about this film is just how uninteresting these characters are. The film sets out to show us what a hero-driver he is in the first act and then promptly abandons the importance of this plot point in pursuit of the petty criminal misadventure. The girl next door is literally the girl next door with seemingly little interests. She seems to be a nice person, but that's about it. Her husband is a convicted criminal who comes out of jail just in time to be a plot complication and before we know it, he's dead. The bad guy boss played by Ron Perlman seems to be just another movie bad guy. The kid is just this kid; nothing special or endearing or charming.

It's as if the writers of the screenplay sort of squeezed these characters out from the last end of a toothpaste tube from where these kinds of characters are produced. The story is like 10 pot devices looking to hook up together. If that sort of thing interests you, then this might be your movie too.

News That's Fit To Punt - 23/Mar/2012

Shrinking Birthrates, Aging Populations

One of the big issues in Japan is the collapse in fertility rates against the background of an aging population. Obviously, in the absence of immigration, a population will remain flat if the  fertility rate is 2. Anything less than that, and the population curve will head toward an aging population.

Here's a quick link to the Word Bank's figures.

In Japan, the fertility rate is 1.4 - and there is substantial debate about how to shore this up because of the looming problems in the pension plans of the near future. Hong Kong is at 1.0; South Korea is at 1.1; Singapore is at 1.2; Chine is at 1.6; and Australia is at 1.9.

The Japanese experience of the post-Bubble has been pretty dire, but it has to be said the bad economic climate contributed greatly to the decline in fertility rates in Japan. A sensible family won't go into having children in a modernised economy if they can't afford it, and it's hard to afford things in a long term recession that kicked off with a property market bubble popping, leaving behind much negative equity in its wake.

I thought it was pertinent to bring all this up right now because the drop in fertility rates can and will affect future growth. As we speak, there's an increasing amount of properties with negative equity in them according to this link sent in from Skarp.

"Since late 2010, the Australian housing market has been quite weak with home values falling by 5.5 per cent across the combined capital cities since the market peaked," the report said. "Buyers who purchased a home since this time have in many instances seen the value of their home move below their contract price."

The Reserve Bank warned last month that falling home prices tend to increase the rate of late payments on mortgages, especially in a recession with rising unemployment. The RBA also urged lenders to maintain high lending criteria to avoid a US-style housing bust.

Home prices in Australia tracked lower through 2011 as interest rate uncertainty, economic jitters and the unwillingness by many households to take on more debt sapped demand.

RP Data showed that Far North Queensland had the highest proportion of mortgages in negative equity, at 22 per cent, followed by Gold Coast, with 19.4 per cent in the quarter.

That's pretty bad. If this trend continues, it will contribute to fertility rates dropping in Australia, even with the baby bonus.  The more property prices fall, the more it eats into the Federal Government's tax revenue on Capital Gains Tax. If the Gillard government sticks to its guns on getting back into surplus, then there will have to be some cuts made to the budget in the coming years, and that's going to have an even more negative impact on asset prices and therefore government revenues.

The point of all this is to say, 1) how can the government be turning away anybody who wants to come live and work in Australia? and 2) What is the point of sticking to this arbitrary return-to-surplus plan when it is actually not helping the economy? Is that really good government?

The RBA is also sticking to its guns - but what worries me about the RBA is that maybe they don't have a wider picture of the economy in context to the GFC which is still playing out.It is worth asking if Australia really is on the right course.

 

 

Tron Legacy

Tron Truancy

I keep meaning to put this post up but I keep getting overtaken by other things. it's a bit like how I avoided this film for a long time. There's something not quite compelling about this movie at first glance.

I know we do computer graphics much better now than in 1982, but did we really need to revisit the grid after 'The Matrix' movies sort of ate and spat out the whole of cyberpunk?

I don't think I even liked the old 'Tron' all that much back in the day either. It was one of those movies that looked a lot better than it played. It had a look all of its own that somehow managed not to tell its story well. Looking back on the DVD of the earlier film, it seems getting the look right was just too much and the action sequences seem disjointed. Perhaps it was overdue for the contemporary cutting edge computer graphics treatment, but I resisted the allure of flashy graphics. After all, how much story could there be? And so it took me a long while to get to it, but I got there in the end and I'm glad I did.

The updated sequel is a surprising film in many aspects.

What's Good About It

It's hard to get nostalgic about a movie you didn't enjoy way back when, but the design in this film extends upon the designs in such a way as to evoke nostalgia for the old film. Now, that's pretty good. This iteration of the world of the Grid is a lot more sultry, dripping with post-Blade Runner style and infused with a dash of Matrix hi-jinx. It's the Grid as it should have been back in 1984, but wasn't.

The graphics are splendid and the image is gorgeous.

What's Bad About It

In the 21st Century, retconn-ing story-lines is all the rage, so there is elaborate exposition going on at various points in the film, and they are all boring. Getting Jeff Bridges and Bruce Boxleitner back to reprise their roles reinforces the link back to the original film, which is a good thing, but then it works against itself by having to explain how this film connects to the earlier film. This leads to the Hollywood standard absent Daddy narrative which is boring as dried out day-old white toast.

Also, Jeff Bridge's original character Kevin Flynn rabbits on about Zen as if he's still playing The Dude from 'The Big Lebowski' and Bill Django from 'Men Who Stare At Goats'. I know it's the current Jeff Bridges persona that bleeds from one film to another - sometimes successfully as it was for 'Men Who Stare At Goats' - but it doesn't really fit too well in this one; and that's even if they did write it in pretty hard.

What's Interesting About It

Cyberpunk and the Matrix movies owe a great deal to the original 'Tron' and its abstracted computer graphic spaces. Of course aspects of 'Tron' owed a great deal to the second last sequence in '2001: A Space Odyssey' with the rushing landscape as Dave Bowen enters into the world of the Black Monolith. This film, therefore quotes the room from the final sequence of '2001' as if to make a point. The living quarters where Kevin Flynn has been living for 20 odd years turns out to be a lift of the room Dave Bowen finds himself in, at the end of '2001'. It's a weird kind of circular connection back to the source and is also a weird kind of quoting of Stanley Kubrick but remarkably, it makes an odd kind of sense.

The Grid And The Internet

The Grid is of course the abstract space of computers, as transposed by a laser. For years we've had the internet and we've assumed that what the original film meant to indicate was the internet, but clearly this is incorrect. The Grid seems to be a definite space that happens inside of computers as a function of computer programs and gaming becoming anthropomorphised.

The grid greatly informs the descriptions of the net in William Gibson's early work, which at least got the bit about the net becoming a jumble of advertising. Visualising the network to come back in the 1980s was the main business of science fiction; there were some interesting visions of this abstract cybernetic space but it all sort of got packaged up with virtual reality and you had the Matrix movies rounding up a rather banal vision of a Grid that is at once virtual reality, networked, abstract, computerised and brimming with game-like action.

Still, the Internet we've ended up with is nothing like the Grid, and we may never approach the grandeur of the Grid unless we hit Ray Kurzweil's Singularity or something like it. In revisiting the Grid as being separate and totally unlike the internet frees up the possibility for the narrative of an abstracted space. The internet is always a present tense sort of development. Science Fiction demands the future (or an outrageous, hidden past). Seeing the updated vision of the Grid therefore opened the door again to a more genuine cyberpunk vision than with what 'The Matrix' left us.

Computer Consciousness

In a lot of Science Fiction stories, we find computers that go Frankenstein. It's like one of those set pieces in early Star Trek for instance, where Captain Kirk and crew arrive to find a planet that's under the control of a computer and they have to free the people by making the computer calculate 'pi'. The computer is out of control in so many of these narrartives, from HAL in '2001' to Wintermute in 'Neuromancer' through to whatever the hell it is that goes on in the world of The Matrix. In the original Tron, it was 'Master Controller' that tried to usurp the Users (humans).

The most interesting development in this film might be notion that there are already native sentients in the Grid, awaiting contact with humanity. The film could have played out this idea more, but it didn't probably because the theme is too big. We live in a kind of fear of  the computer taking control but we never seem to ask what the computer wants and whether it really would want to take over from us. All these questions bear asking and pondering.

Still, it's also quite banal in this film: The 'other' lurks in the abstract space of The Grid, but the only way Hollywood can put handles on the idea is to turn into a pretty girl in a tight black suit.

The Abstracted Space

One thing the film and its earlier film really do point at is an abstracted space dominated by thoughts, senses, intuition and emotions. It's not entirely without merit, although the mechanics of telling an action story detract from the importance of this space. For instance what kind of mind space are we in when we play computer games? I know the traditional description is that we zone out like zombies to play games, but the subjective experience of computer games is a lot more far-reaching and searching.

Clearly the players are in an abstract space of thoughts and intuition and senses; but you would be surprised to know how difficult it is to put the abstract on the screen. A good example of this might be that you can put lots of bad guys in a movie, but you can't really put an abstraction of evil in a movie; you can only point at it through ciphers of actions and characterisations. The apparent banality of film development often revolve around these very kinds of problems.

The Tron movies might be the only films that offer up the abstract space as a visible space. Certainly it has had far-reaching influence over how we have pictured what the world of sentient computers might look like. On the one hand the internet has turned out to be quite unlike the Grid, but it is possible Technological Singularity might turn out to be quite like the Grid, if only we could experience it.

Aftermath Of Abu Ghraib Awfulness

Still Can't Get A Date She Says

If there was one aspect of the Iraq War that stood out as awful, it had to be those photos of Lynndie England holding the leash of Iraqi prisoners who were being humiliated and tortured. The subsequent outcry and trial basically worked out as pinning all the blame on Lynndie England, and in a totally predictable way the US Army tried to make out Lynndie England was the lone-nut/bad-apple of that unit.

It's hard to believe 8years have passed since then, so it took me by surprise that somebody went and found her and interviewed her. Just as predictably with the Army, her responses are mind-numbingly ornery.

"I think about it all the time—indirect deaths that were my fault," England told the Daily's M.L. Nestel in an interview Monday from her hometown of Fort Ashby, West Virginia. "Losing people on our side because of me coming out on a picture."
England makes no apologies, however, to the Iraqis she and ten other U.S. soldiers were accused of abusing at the prison.

Photographs of England smiling with a "thumbs up" gesture in front of a pyramid of naked Iraqi detainees and pulling an Iraqi man by a leash caused international outrage and came to symbolize the ill-fated 2003 U.S. invasion as Iraq plunged into bloody insurgency in 2004. "They weren't innocent," England told Nestel of the Iraqi prisoners. "They're trying to kill us, and you want me to apologize to them? It's like saying sorry to the enemy."
"They got the better end of the deal," she said.

She also, unsurprisingly, is finding it hard to date, telling Nestel: "It's gone on eight years now since I left Iraq, since I've really been out with a guy."

Not that we expect a great deal from this woman who was once described as being borderline retarded by her former teachers; and yet she sort of shows she's stayed the same simple, village idiot of the US reserves. Somehow it seems to make the issue worse by pinning it all on to this silly woman; but with 8years gone and a prison sentence served and a dishonorable discharge later, who's really asking? None of this was edifying when it was going on, but the more time goes on, the more it seems like the real culprits got away and are laughing at us all from wherever they are.

As stupid as she is, we're the bigger idiots for accepting the verdict that says this woman was responsible for all of it.

Politics Of Weird

When The Going Gets Weird, The Weird Turn Pro

That's of course according to the late Hunter S. Thompson. Today, billionaire coal magnate Clive Palmer accused the Greens and Greenpeace of being funded by the CIA via the Rockefeller Foundation.

While brandishing a copy of the report this afternoon, Mr Palmer said it was the result of a CIA conspiracy involving the US-based Rockefeller Foundation.
"This is funded by the CIA," he said.
"You only have to go back and read ... the report to the US Congress that sets up the Rockefeller Foundation as a conduit of CIA funding.
"You only have to look at the secret budget which was passed by Congress last year - bigger than our whole national economy - with the CIA to ensure that.
"You only have to read the reports to US Congress where the CIA reported to the president that their role was to ensure the US competitive advantage - that's how you know it's funded by the CIA."

The Greens and Greenpeace both denied these outlandish allegations vigorously. Let's face it, you wouldn't credit it all given that it's coming from Clive Palmer's paranoid little mind, but they had to defend it because well, Clive's sort of in politics advising Campbell Newman. One imagines that is a bit like being advised by your paranoid conspiracy theorist super-wealthy uncle. And Queensland is looking like it's going to elect this Newman-led LNP, so all I can say is good luck with that boys & girls of Queensland!

Yowza.

Just for kicks I googled the document Mr. Palmer was brandishing and got this one.  I guess if one were a coal mining magnate, one would feel fear and loathing with a good dose of fury at reading it, but I just can't find the bit where it says Rockefeller Foundation. And I sure as heck don't know how he got the CIA out of the un-mentioned Rockefeller Foundation so colour me sceptical.As far as theories go, there are too many plausible deniability stops along the way.
Still, I found it interesting that Clive Palmer came across as so paranoid and nutty. The more he speaks in public, the more he comes across as sort of unhinged.

 

News That's Fit To Punt - 19/Mar/2012

The Capital Gains Revenue And The Property Bubble

I wrote about the problems of vested interests leading to the disasters in Japan, several times. In Australia we're at this smug point of history where our government debt ratio to GDP is low and the current ALP government is aiming for a surplus by 2013. That being said, there seem to be some serious miscalculations that are going to make it very hard according to this article in the SMH.

Parkinson said that since the global financial crisis, federal tax revenue had fallen by the equivalent of 4 percentage points of gross domestic product [about $60 billion a year] and was ''not expected to recover to its pre-crisis level for many years to come''.

This had made the task of maintaining medium-term budgetary sustainability harder for both the Commonwealth and the states. ''For both levels of government, surpluses are likely to remain razor-thin without deliberate efforts to significantly increase revenue or reduce expenditure,'' he warned.

The most obvious (and least consequential) implication of this news is its threat to Julia Gillard's resolve to return the budget to surplus next financial year without fail.

But Gillard's problems pale in comparison to Tony Abbott's, with his oddly ideological and populist commitment to rescind both Labor's carbon tax and its mining tax without rescinding all the tax cuts and spending increases the taxes will pay for.
There seems little doubt Abbott's term in office would either be marked by an orgy of broken promises or be consumed by agonising over what spending to cut, with eternal lobbying both before and after the fact. Probably a fair bit of both.

Parkinson is telling us there's now a disconnect in the established relationship between the rate of growth in the economy and the rate of growth in tax collections. The economy can be growing at a reasonable rate without that meaning tax collections are growing strongly.
It will be a lot harder in future for politicians of either side to keep the budget in surplus. What was a doddle in the noughties will now require unremitting discipline and political courage.

That's interesting news. Basically, under the Howard government, government coffers were filled by the GST as well as the Capital Gains Tax. So, in feeding and growing the property bubble, the Federal Government under John Howard and then the ALP Rudd government up until the GFC, benefited mightily from the capital gains on the properties that changed hands. Now that the GFC has put a dent in that bubble (and the bubble has not blown - yet...), the government revenue has been hit.

Now that growth in government income has stopped, and has started to slide back, the government is going to have to either cut spending drastically (austerity anybody?)  raise taxes to fill the shortfalls somehow ("God forbid" say the right wing ideologues).

The thing about this particular problem is that as Ross Gittins points out:

Keeping the budget in ''razor-thin surplus'' will be hard enough; eliminating net debt will be very much harder - especially since the potential-privatisations cupboard is now almost bare.
It would be the easiest thing in the world for our pollies on both sides to catch a dose of the North Atlantic disease and let deficits and debts roll on.
Should this happen, it will be because they possess neither the bloody-mindedness to live up to their professed smaller government ideal nor the courage to make and defend explicit tax increases. As in the North Atlantic economies, it will be the path of least resistance.

If I sound like a broken record, bear with me but this is exactly where Japan went off the rails in the 1990s and into the 2000s, inclusive of the Koizumi government that was so popular and so lacking in intellectual rigor. They just kept racking up debt to fund white elephants to buy votes in obscure rural electorates, and putting off the big problems into the future. The thing is, applied to Australia and politics being the way it is with the electorate mood being what it is, it's hard to imagine either of the major parties having a lot of gumption in making the tough calls, so you can easily see the same thing being played out over here.

And there's the problem. If the government won't bear down and make the tough calls, that is going to be the very recipe by which our government deficit will grow. If and when the property bubble pops, then the Federal and State governments are both going to be in big trouble because revenue from both capital gains tax and stamp duty will take a giant hit. Inevitably, the governments of either persuasion are going to have to look at raising income tax and company tax.

I just thought it was pertinent that we point out why the Federal government might want the bubble to keep going a bit longer and might be willing to spend its savings to do so. It explains why Kevin Rudd spent the money on the First Home Owner's Grant instead of trying to reform the markets. The last thing the government wanted was for asset prices to fall. Doubtless, we'll be in for a hell of a time when it eventually does fall.

Anonymous

Shakespeare In Hell

For a long time there's been a strand of Shakespeare scholarship that contends William Shakespeare didn't write plays credited to William Shakespeare. It might seem novel to those who do not know it, but it's actually an argument that raged for quite some time dating back to the mid 19th century. I tangled with the topic back in the day when I had to produce educational videos about Shakespeare's plays and slap bang ran into the problematic in the course of researching the man himself.

My own conclusion from that little side track was that if he were the author of all those plays and sonnets, then he seems to have written a lot of plays and sonnets but left very little of himself in writing otherwise. Many a notable figure has lent support to the theory that it was Edward de Vere earl of Oxford who actually penned the plays including, Mark Twain, Henry James, Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles. Even Derek Jacobi who appears in this film is attributed as being a supporter of the Oxford theory.

So it is against this background that the controversial film was released and just as you would guess, it promptly disappeared off people's radars.

What's Good About It

I never feel like I'm a big fan of Shakespeare's canon, but here I am banging on about the bard - or a movie about the bard - so it must be true that I am some kind of culture vulture at least and maybe even a literary elitist. I loved 'Shakespeare in Love', contrary to all the people who point to it as an undeserving Oscar winner and even if this film totally flies in the face of the jaunty, feel-good prior film, this is some gripping, suspenseful stuff.

The fact that we know little about Shakespeare plays into a weird advantage with this film because we're not really interested in him - We're much more interested in the guy who ostensibly wrote the plays (in this narrative, anyway) who turns out to be a fascinating character. The story and its issues are gripping and compelling, and the sweep of the narrative totally sucks you in from start to finish.

Even if everything in this film were an utter crock of shit, it's a really entertaining crock of shit if you have the right turn of mind and temperament. I happen to, so this film was a corker.

What's Bad About It

Rhys Ifans as the 17th Earl of Oxford is great. The younger dude who plays him as a young man, Jamie Campbell Bower,  is not so much. The gap between them is just too big. Joely Richardson as the young Queen Elizabeth puts in a much better performance, but it somehow doesn't line up well with Vanessa Redgrave's portrayal of the aging Queen Elizabeth. The casting idea is great, but it doesn't work out as well as one would hope.

The directing is a little naff. The sweeping camera moves are not as compelling as the closeups. There's nothing special here except the performers doing their thing, but it just feels disjointed as if all these good actors are just doing their thing with very little centripetal pull on the narrative. I blame Roland Emmerich - Mr Independence Day - for his relative lack of subtlety and fine control. This thing would have been better in the hands of John Madden who did Shakespeare in Love or Tom Stoppard himself but I imagine it takes a kind of cantankerous director to get behind this project.

It's a shame because there's actually so much good going for this film, but the directing is just a little unfocused.

What's Interesting About It

First and foremost, this film is about the controversy and for the sake of telling a ripping yarn it does its own arguments a great deal of disservice. All the same it's a film that shows it is worth reconsidering who may have written the collective works of William Shakespeare. Even if the subject might be complete and utter balderdash, it's actually a particularly dashing dose of balderdash. I mean, is there really a problem in fiction being an utter lie? It's not as if Dr.Henry"Indiana" Jones is a real personage.

The problem with the controversy starts in assuming that Shakespeare's work is not only good, it's too good to have been written by somebody of William Shakespeare's background. In many ways, the crux of the biscuit falls on this little problematic. But it's only a problematic if you assign a ton of value to Shakespeare's work as being good beyond anything else of his contemporary era.  It's a little like arguing that Don Bradman didn't really score all those runs because how could somebody from Bowral with so little education have perfected his biomechanics to hit 3 standard deviations above the pack? It's a kind of post factum argument - probably made worse because there is no basis for any kind of sensible comparison ("It's literature, yo!").

Against this is the seeming absence of concrete evidence, but plenty of contemporaries accepted that William Shakespeare, the actor from Stratford-upon-Avon was the author of the Shakespeare canon. If I were being a little boring, I might even suggest that the only reason the Oxfordian idea holds any appeal is because it would be inherently more interesting and supports an elitist bias. (I might also point out the first person to seriously put forward the theory in favour of the 17th Earl of Oxford was a school teacher by the name of Thomas Looney).

The confusion and chaos of the various theories find their echoes in this film, even as it twists some historic facts to make the story for the screen go. You have the Earl of Southampton, you have Kit Marlowe and Ben Johnson, you have Philip Henslowe and The Globe theatre; it's all a very heady brew of characters.

All of this is enough to savor for hours after watching the film, pondering the fates of men.

London 1600

I was thinking this film might best be watched back to back with 'Shakespeare in Love', but I also thought it might be a lot of fun to watch this film back to back with the 'Elizabeth'  movies starring Cate Blanchett. It's certainly interesting watching scenes in the theatre as well as the layout of streets and inns in London. It's also fun to bask ad soak in the scenes from London in 1600, as well as all those moments set in the Tower of London. It's not as if Elizabethan England hasn't been shot and done, but every time I see it, it fills me with a weird, "Oh yeah, that's right, and there's that bit on the east side where they chopped off heads..." sort of moment.

The London of 1600 in this film is particularly grim and filthy, but it has a marvelous, vibrant, lived in quality. The Rose Theatre and the Globe Theatre look a lot smaller than the current replica gracing the Southbank of the Thames. Still, it's nice to see how the whole industry of theatre feeds into the movies and tourism and generates a field of "Culture" that the English have (and we don't have) and forms a kind of gravitational centre.

Hello, A Baraband?

There's a stuffed Baraband on Edward de Vere's desk. Yes, I had a good look. I didn't need to; alas Horatio, I know them well, they're parrots of infinite jest! A couple of things  I just want to note:

No.1 They're native to Australia and shouldn't be discovered yet in 1600, let alone stuffed and shoved on a desk. Deduct the pay of the props master!

No.2 It's an endangered species. What's a stuffed one doing in the movies in England?!

John Carter

It's Barsoom, With A Bloom

It's taken a long time for the original pulp space opera to make it to the big screen. To be fair, the spectacle of 15foot tall green aliens with extra limbs called Tharks was going to be a technical challenge and most part of cinema history, there hasn't been enough technology or gumption to bring this original tale from Edgar Rice Burroughs to the big screen. It might have just been over on Mars, but he painted a very big picture.

To be even fairer, most attempts at space opera have been dogs, except for Star Wars movies and even then there is great agitation and angst about the latter 3 entries into the canon. (By the way I'm still undecided after all these years as to how I feel about those films - which is a terribly long time to sit on the fence, but there's just so much undecidable about the newer Star Wars movies.) Other than that we have the rather turgid 'Flash Gordon' and the enigmatic 'Dune' by David Lynch. The trend in science fiction movies has been away from the fanciful to a weird kind of 'gritty' industrial realism as seen in the Alien series and Terminator movies.

No wonder then that the studio to bring it to the screen with all the bells and whistles it deserves, should be Disney. I sat the watching the opening wondering when the last time it was that I saw a Disney header at the cinemas. It's been a long time.

What's Good About It

There's a lot of good things about this film installment. It's got a breezy ease to the story telling, and the action is stupendous if  bordering on the manic. The film has a weird digital clarity to all the manic action and yet the Mars it portrays retains a deeply romantic feel. The effects are good, the directing snappy, and the design is as sumptuous as you'd want it. Considering it is a kind of Tarzan in space, you got the feeling that Barsoom was quite warm, as people went about in loin cloths and minimal clothing. I don't know if that counts as 'good', but at least the vision had a unity to it that made the narrative convincing. It's not just Princess Dejah Thoris in the space bikini get up.

In most part it is like the book, even though it's not plot-perfect. The tone of the adventure doesn't vary, and yet it doesn't get monotonous. There's always something happening or something that needs beating. It's a jolly good ride in most part.

What's Bad About It

The biggest issue I have with it is the casting.

I like Mark Strong, but I'm sick of seeing him play the same kinds of menacing bad guys. It's getting to the point where you see him, you peg him as the bad guy, and there's no need for any nuance. He's mean, vicious and bad. He's better than that and so should the casting director making these calls.

Similarly with Dominic West who is never going to shake his time as McNulty in 'The Wire' is just too silly. To cast him as the bad guy who wants Dejah Thoris' hand in marriage is a little too easy and again subtracted from something that could have had a lot more nuance. Considering how little known the lead actors were, they could have taken bigger chances.

What's Interesting About It

What I don't get is why the New York Times is trying to bury the reputation of this movie. That link came from Walk-Off HBP on the Monday after it opened. I won't bother quoting it, but the NYT kicks off their hatchet job by likening the picture to 'Ishtar' and then 'Heaven's Gate'. But let's get a couple of things straight.

This is no 'Ishtar' - it's not a star's vanity project.

This is no 'Heaven's Gate' - it's not a film being held hostage by a director on a distant location.

We know the price tag on this film was around $250million, and so deserves scrutiny, but considering that other films that had similar price tags are 'Titanic' and 'Avatar' and 'Spiderman 3', maybe the film deserves a better comparison. And while the marketplace has changed significantly n the last 3 years or so since 'Avatar', a lot of people who have stopped going to the cinema are going to see this spectacle. So why is the NYT trying to make out this is a flop and a bad movie before all the numbers are in?

Taylor Kitsch?

The funniest thing in this film might have been the name of its leading man. It kind of described the the pleasures of the film - tailor-made kitsch for the great unwashed.

Dejah Thoris

It was great to see Dejah Thoris on the screen. Any movie about John Carter was inevitably going to turn to the Princess of Mars herself. You could say the point of making the movie is for the world to see Dejah Thoris. I think Lyn Collins did a fine job of playing the feisty princess.

What Colour Is The Sky On Mars?

One of the things that popped into my eyes that had me thinking was the colour of the sky over Barsoom. It was blue. What are the colours coming back from the rovers telling us? They tell us Mars is red. This might be so, or it might not. While the atmosphere of Mars is thinner than that of Earth, it still receives the light of the Sun, which should have the same composition of light frequency and colour temperature as what falls on Earth. So the colour temperature of sun light hitting Mars would be the same 5600 kelvin, hitting earth because it is the same source.

So... one would think the sky on Mars on a sunny day is blue and not red.

"What?!" I hear you ask.

If you've read 'Dark Mission' by Richard Hoagland, you would be familiar with this tidbit of conspiracy theory - that NASA deliberately winds up the Chroma of the red in the images coming from Mars rovers. Why they do that is a mystery, but apparently, they do.

Anyway, just for kicks, I grabbed some images of Mars from NASA and loaded it into Photoshop, and hit 'Auto Colour'. I saw blue skies on Mars.

Oddly enough, that looks more like Barsoom than Mars.

UPDATE: Many people are searching for colour corrected photos of Mars. You might want to check out this gallery here.

Fukushima, One Year On

Aren't They Angry Yet In Japan?

It's been a year since the Greater East Japan Earthquake, the Tsunami and the Nuclear disaster at Fukushima. I thought I would have a better picture of how Japan would recover from the triple punch, but inevitably it is taking time. If one thing is clear, the entire sequence of events exposed how the system was beyond the control of the government executive. Reading of the events that took place in the days after the events, it is clear that incorrect information was presented to the executive branch of the Japanese government, and this delayed and confused the response no end. In other words, it looked like there was a functioning system until it got blown to bits by the sequence of events, and what was left was just totally inadequate.

The most notable of these misinforming of Prime Minster Naoto Kan was the Nuclear Energy Agency of Japan not telling him there had been multiple meltdowns at the Fukushima plant. In fact radioactive Caesium had been found outside of the plant as early as the 13th of March 2011, and the only conclusion that could be drawn from this was that the reactors must have exploded. By the time the Prime Minister got his facts straight - that there had been meltdowns, there were already people in place on the assumption that the meltdowns had not happened.

The institutional resistance of both the bureaucrats and TEPCO executives was also a factor in making things worse. And the irony of all things is that Naoto Kan had made his name fighting such bureaucratic complacency and the kind of injustices that come from these; now that he was Prime Minister, he had no way of dealing with these people who viewed him with an institutionalised suspicion. The vested interests all stuck together - from the bureaucrats to the TEPCO brass to even the media and essentially chased Naoto Kan into resignation through their intransigence. To illustrate just how awful the vested interests were, the media lined up to criticise Kan for yelling at the TEPCO brass who came to tell him they wanted to pull out. It is clear that Prime Minister Kan did the right thing by making TEPCO hold their ground. He might have made many a mistake  in other aspects of dealing with the enormous chaos that ensued the triple-disaster, but he got one decision right.

Indeed, if TEPCO personnel weren't going to stay on, just who was going to go in and shut down the reactors?

For me, it was absolutely logical and de rigeur of a condition of his Prime Ministership that he had to yell at them to make them stay. The media in Japan reported it as Naoto Kan losing decorum and therefore being unfit for his office. It was infuriating.

As I read news-sites from Japan, the overwhelming and prevailing position mounted by the old newspaper bodies is that the current DPJ government in its incompetence has made everything an insurmountable problem. It strikes me that this is self-serving balderdash dished out by a Japanese media that has a relationship that can only be described as being too cozy with the bureaucrats. In my view, the problems that brought about the triple disaster finds itself in the absence of the sense of responsibility,  the further you go up authority structures in Japan. What really depresses me about is that this might actually be something cultural.

The media are trying to characterise the triple disaster as the "second time" of losing a war. That is to say, the collective failure of government and industry and "The System" that parallels the leadership that led Japan to lose World War II. If indeed that is the case, then I would posit that the kind of absentee leadership endemic in Japan got played out in exactly the same way as the way they worked out in World War II. The British used to laugh at the Imperial Japanese Army for their predictable strategems, but they rated the NCOs of Japan very highly for their ability to make tactical decisions stick - Even the bad ones.

In exactly the same manner, the top brass of TEPCO turned out to be predictably incompetent, but the actual people on the ground exhibited incredible courage, endurance and guile to bring the reactors back under control. Old men who had once worked at the site but retired, came out of the woodwork to offer themselves up to the dangerous task. The people on the ground made the best of a bad situation through typical Japanese valor and dedication and self-sacrifice. Sort of like the incredible selflessness of the Kamikaze pilots who gave their lives on the orders of an incompetent command group.

To see this pattern repeated brought nothing but a numbing, glum, dark, disgust.

Maybe because I have a firsthand feel for how things are couched and how things are decided and how things are done in Japan that I can't help but see problems not only with the elites who come from top universities, but the system that decided these ethical midgets, these moral cowards, these mandarins of no personal responsibility were the people to promote.

The worst thing is that these bureaucrats as a block, form a massive vested interest in how the government of Japan works and how it is run. And the only prime minster in the last 50years who had a shot at changing things had to be buried by the triple disaster, and then the bad advice of these 'elites'.

It's an awful business that shows no sign of getting better.

News That's Fit To Punt - 12/Mar/2012

All The Best Cowboys Have Their Eyes on China

The GFC story keeps spreading and spreading and the many headlines it has spawned are like the snake heads on Medusa's head. This one comes from Pleiades. We all ought to be a bit more discerning about what the economic picture coming out of China looks like.  Of course it's easier said than done and everybody has a fragmented picture of what this could mean.

The reality is that a part of China's growth has been an illusion. Since 2008, China’s headline growth of 8-10 per cent has been driven by new lending averaging around 30-40 per cent of GDP. Given that (up to) 20-25 per cent of these loans may prove to be non-performing, amounting to losses of 6-10 per cent of GDP. If these losses are deducted, Chinese growth is much lower.

The China economic debate is focused on the alternatives of a soft or hard landing. Both scenarios assume a slowdown in growth and transition to a troubled maturity.

The case for the soft landing assumes that the investment and property bubbles are less serious than thought. Beijing has sufficient financial capacity to boost growth by loosening monetary policy and bank lending, while adjusting specific policies, such as lifting restrictions on housing sales to prop up prices. China is able to boost domestic consumption, replacing investment as the key driver of its economy. Excess capacity is gradually absorbed as the world economy recovers.

Growth comes down gradually, without causing social and political disruptions.

The case for the hard landing assumes the rapid and destructive unwinding of asset price bubbles and problems within the Chinese banking system. A poor external environment and losses on foreign investment exacerbates the problem. Growth collapses triggering massive social unrest and political tensions.

The end of a cycle of debt and investment driven growth is typically disruptive. Japan's experience, which China has drawn on in shaping its economic model, is salutary. Japan grew by 10 per cent in the 1960s, 5 per cent in the 1970s, 4 per cent in the 1980s, and has remained stagnant since, adjusting to the deflation of its debt fuelled bubble.

A bit reductionist, but you get the picture. China's taken on a whole heap of debt and shoved it into infrastructure that is not needed immediately in order to stimulate the economy. If and when those debts come home to roost, then China's going to have a big credit crunch all of its own making. But let's say for the moment that is abject pessimism. What are we looking at right now?

The latest SMH headline on China has this article saying:

"The point is to make sure there are smooth liquidity conditions that are supportive to growth, but not necessarily a very aggressive easing that would invite future inflation risks," HSBC China economist, Sun Junwei, told Reuters.

In other words, a decision to ease monetary policy is not necessarily about having snuffed out inflation risks at all. Indeed, those risks start to loom larger barely six months from now, and grow even more intense when inflation is viewed as an expression of economic constraint - too little supply relative to demand - rather than expansion.

China has a shrinking labour force, mandated double digit wage hikes, an export sector losing its competitive cost advantage and an insatiable thirst for raw material imports.

"With China's working-age population set to decline steadily from 2012 onward due to retirement, the notion that a minimum of 8 percent GDP growth is necessary to sustain full employment and preserve social stability is now outdated," analysts at Nomura said in a note to clients.

It also means that inflation pressure will build at a much lower rate of growth going forward, a fact unlikely to be lost on China's leadership, which has seen periods of high inflation often coincide with protests and social unrest.

That actually doesn't sound as neutral as it is written. Reading it in the context of other articles, a picture emerges where China's economy could actually stall, if not tank.

Coincidentally Skarp sent in this article which has this tidbit:

But sooner or later there has to be a reckoning. Australian real estate prices have grown out of line with the rest of the world and, more importantly, ahead of even the strong growth in Australian income.

If China has a medium-to-hard landing – and the China boom is not likely to extend past the next few years in its current form – the bloom will come off the Australian economy.

If people start losing their jobs, and are unable to pay their mortgages, it will start creating problems in Australia’s credit markets. That, in turn, could begin the process of finally rectifying the growing imbalance of debt to income in the Australian economy.

Yes, the writing's on the wall. China probably can't continue its boom in its current form, which means at some point it's going to have to have some kind of landing - and knowing they've never tried one of these landings before it will likely be a hard one. Should that happen, Australia will be in for all sorts of fun and joy.

Now, it has to be said that whatever is going on right now is not some sustainable 'new normal'. We're effectively living in an insulated bubble but one that is destined to pop.

Japan, In The Headlights

Just before the last little bit in that link from Skarp, there's a discussion on Japan I also want to touch upon briefly.

One other thing that has provided stability in Japan and solace for investors in Japanese bonds has been Japan's consistent current account surplus. However beginning before, but obviously accelerating after the earthquake, tsunami and accident at Fukushima, Japan has seen its trade balance decline sharply. The reactor meltdowns and subsequent closure of the vast majority of nuclear plants has forced Japan to aggressively shift away from nuclear base load power. But that has meant it has had to pay a lot for LNG, oil and coal for its power generators.

Last year, Japan’s ran a full-year trade deficit for the first time since 1980. The just released data for January show that Japan also ran the largest single month full current account deficit (in unadjusted terms) since the oil shocks of the 1970's. In addition preliminary data show Japan on track for another trade deficit in February, despite it being traditionally the strongest month for trade performance.

Now, one of the things that the market relies on for Japan is that it is a net saver because it runs a current account surplus – take that support away and the market's sentiment on Japanese debt sustainability could change very quickly and very aggressively.

We think a Japanese crisis is going to happen – there are some clear warning signs. And we think it will happen sooner rather than later. At present, the market view is that a Japanese crisis as an impossibility because there is so much committed capital that relies on stability that there is a cognitive bias and willful blindness to the risk that it will blow up in their faces.

If that Japanese Crisis mentioned towards the end happens, it will trigger big problems for China, because China holds a lot of Japanese bonds as well.  So all the things people are living in fear of about China, will be on the cards. So the question about Japan is when is this going to happen? Some people are saying 18 months but if Noda calls an election, it might be in 6months that the crisis will be in full bloom because basically, Noda doesn't have a mandate to be raising the consumption tax and he knows it; but the electorate is dying to dispatch the DPJ, so all of this year's policy agenda in Japan is looking unstable, if not outright impossible.

If they're forced to the polls and it produces another LDP led government, things could get really bad up north.

A year on from the Tsunami and Fukushima nuclear disaster, we're looking at a serious maelstrom brewing.

News That's Fit To Punt - 08/March/2012

Thought We Were In The Clear Did We?

One of the mysteries of the GFCs and the stupendous amount of mass debt that we as a civilization accrued, and brought down Lehman Brothers, Bears Stearns Northern Rock and all of Iceland amongst other things, is what happened to all those CFDs and CDOs. It turns out a lot of municipal councils bought them exactly because they were rubber-stamped AAA by the ratings agencies. And yes, those would be the very same ratings agencies suddenly handing out very tough marks to governments of the world here and there; but once upon a time before the GFC blew things up, they would rubber stamp AAA on to all kinds of things at the behest of the banks.
Today's lovely article then is this one here about Ku-ring-gai Council, and how it is hounding the one councilor who dared to ask what the huge hole in the accounts were and why these CDOs were blowing these holes into their accounts.

His interest in the matter of CDOs was first aroused in 2007 when he noticed a $1 million loss in Ku-ring-gai Council's investment portfolio.

“All councillors have a duty under the NSW Trustees Act 1925 to investigate finances,” he told BusinessDay. Although, he didn't actually know at the time what a CDO was, he began asking questions of the then Mayor and the council's Director Finance.

“They wouldn't admit that they had bought derivatives. But then, who would know what a derivative was?” As far as Hall and his fellow councillors knew, the councils were just supposed to buy AAA-rated investments. He has some sympathy for the original investments, just not with the way it had been handled since.

“Well-backed investments, was what we were told. CDO lines such as Oasis and Black Rock. Both of those are gone now. Maple Hill was another. That's still alive.”
Ku-ring-gai also bought the deadly Rembrandt CPDO's from the local arm of Dutch bank ABN. These were even more poisonous than a regular CDO and are subject of the above-mentioned court battle.
When Ku-ring-gai was approached to join the action, it found it owned a different issued note (no2) .

“The Rembrandt No.3 note lost 90 per cent of their value within one year,” says Hall. “With the No 3 note suffering a 96 per cent loss, ABN came back to my Council and said, we can save yours if you put in another 200 per cent of your original investment and we will capital guarantee your product with quarterly paid interest, to maturity in 2016”.

Lehman had struck similar deals, one by one with its various council clients whose investment values were plummeting. “Restructuring” it was called and it often involved buying more of the same product but with the promise of greater security. Hall said it was another form of gambling but using public money.

Tony Hall didn't see this as much of a deal. After all, ABN was later bought by Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) which was bought by the UK government and whose ownership may soon change hands again soon. “The prospect of having such a commitment honoured seemed to be a risk”.

The article then goes on to describe the council turned on Mr. Hall even though he was trying to bring to light just how exposed the council was to the GFC. Unfortunately, there are $300million dollars of these CDOs still waiting to blow up , owned by assorted councils. When they do blow up, these councils are going to be incredibly distressed all of a sudden. Which would be a rather interesting sight to behold but only if you like watching slow motion train wrecks.

Tony Hall is proposing a debt swap with the NSW Government to get the councils out of the mess but one wonders if the current NSW Government is philosophically capable of seeing the merits of the argument when the remedy essentially amounts to what conservatives called a moral hazard back in 2008 when the GFC was kicking in.

Whatever the case, you know it's going to be the tax payers who will pay for these losses through raised rates by councils or heavier duties imposed by the state government. Of course it will have knock-on effects as asset prices will have to fall in the wake of such payments. If you thought we dodged the GFC bullet, perhaps we only kicked the can down the road. The ramification of these CDOs blowing up in the faces of our councils is going to be very expensive for our country. It goes to show the GFC really hasn't played itself out at all.

The article is worth a read, if you can stomach the scary nature of it.

In Case You Were Wondering, Greece May Yet Default Totally

The ugliness that is the Greek situation rolls on. Today is the day the debt swap deal has to take place. The problem is that the deal set in place months ago back in December may still topple over if not enough of the creditors sign up for the deal.

So this is it. After three years of high drama, the European Union is staring at its first ever sovereign default and, ironically, unlike every other deadline so far, this one looks set to be adhered to.
At 8pm GMT tonight (7am, AEDT, Friday morning), the authorities will know - or have a very good idea - how many of Greece’s international creditors have accepted its 206 billion euro ($256 billion) bond-swap offer.
The results will probably take a few days to come out - Athens has to put its decisions through Brussels’ sluggish decision making processes - but this time it isn’t up to the politicians so the possible outcomes are clearer.

So if more than 86% don't sign up for the deal, it could all fall apart. It's hard to understand what that *means* because as Bill Clinton famously observed, "that would depend on what you mean by 'mean'". If it's short of 86% who sign on for the miserable debt swap that socks 69% of value off the bonds, then there is no deal and Greece defaults 'totally'. Banks immediately go into crisis, global credit seizes up, the clock of financial sectors hits midnight and everything turns into a pumpkin. Which is fine, because you can take that pumpkin, issue a derivative against the pumpkin maturing and on-sell it in debt parcels...

Anyway, jokes aside, the Greek government is pretty adamant about the "this deal or no deal" stance. You can hardly blame them. After two years of being told what nincompoops they are for not being able to manage their finances (and, yes they are the said nincompoops), and having the deal thrust at them from the 'The Troika' of the IMF, World Bank and the ECB, and having to push through hideous austerity measures one after the other (against the will of their own people) to attempt to meet these demands, just to get a cash float, it would be hard to imagine the same crew of people would be sympathetic to stragglers who want a better deal. Everybody wants a better deal, but in these circumstances, nobody's going to get one. Would you be open to separate side deals if you had to live through the torment and insults of the Greek leaders for the lats two years?

So, there you have it. Debt swapping, even if agreed upon is this aggravating. Can Ku-ring-gai and other councils even stomach a single directive from the NSW Government if they had to undergo a debt swap deal? One wonders.

Where Did All This Water Come From?

Jeez that was a lot of water.

Sydney has suffered its heaviest rainfall in five years, bringing the city's transport system to a halt and causing hundreds of rescues and evacuations.
About 120 millimetres of rain fell on parts of the CBD this morning, with the Bureau of Meteorology's Observatory Hill weather station recording its highest daily rainfall total since 2007.
In the city's west, 146mm fell on Merrylands.

There's a La Nina going on at the moment so we're bound to get a lot of rain. but parts of NSW are seeing rain that hasn't been seen in 160 years. As anomalous weather events go, citing 160 years is pretty wild. You shouldn't really expect to see weather events that happen in that scale of time in one's lifetime. We've seen worst in 30year events followed by worst in 60 year events. now we're hitting once in 160 years. It's worth pondering if this is even statistically normal in a lifetime to witness so many events that smash record books. Either that or the weather is on steroids, competing for something.

What nobody is saying is that all this water is now in the system thanks to global caps melting. There are a bunch of idiots who still want to argue that there is no such thing as man-made climate change, but this mad rainfall event can serve as an extra data point.

Planet Terror Compendium

Replacement Level Parts, Playable Strat

Last year when I built Sexcalibur from parts, I have to say it was a pretty deluxe kind of operation. If there was a wonderful thing I could throw at, I wouldn't hesitate to grab it and stick it in. To date, it is the most elaborate electric guitar I own. It may get even more elaborate if I decide one day to put in the super-switch to replace the current 5 way switch. Sexcalibur was supposed to be the electric guitar to end all electric guitars for me, and it sort of was until after I finished, I got the bug to simply put together more projects because the assembly process was such fun.

This of course led me to the Moby Rick Rickenbacker 4001 re-conditioning project that ate my brain, and then a kit guitar and fixing my friends multiple guitars... In all of this frenzy I came up with the concept of doing a project where I would source third party guitar parts and create what is known as a Parts-caster. And being a bit of a sometime baseball stats nerd, I thought it might be fun to source particular parts; that is to say, source parts that were the least expensive but still reliable. In short, a Parts-caster made up of replacement level parts.

Working The Problem

There are some things in a guitar that demand a higher standard than other parts. The canoe jack plate should look good, but the variance in function between a cheap Chinese steel one and a nice chrome one from North America is not much.

The place where you cannot give up any performance on a guitar equipped with a tremolo is in fact the tuners. There are a lot of dodgy tuners available  out there for joke-like prices for Chinese tuners, but you want something that either locks or is geared at a high ratio, if not both. Fortunately Wilkinson make such a tuner. These babies have thumb wheel locks, much like the Spertzels on the real US Fender Stratocasters. The saving is only $20 compared to a set of Fender locking tuners, but this is the bit you just can't compromise.

The search for a neck was interesting. There are quite a few third party makers for guitar necks, but it's actually hard to find the right price for the right neck. I guess that's the nature of most markets, but careful parsing of all the necks available yield a a Squier Fender neck from the 1980s or 1990s. It is a fairly thick neck with minimal camber. It is maple with a rosewood fretboard, and a badly done black paint job on the front of the headstock. All the same, the frets were impeccable and the rosewood fretboard was actually one of the best I'd ever felt. Rather ironic for a piece that as being sold for a give-away price.

The body also took me on a wild goose chase. the first body I tried was made of Paulownia, but it turned out the neck pocket was out of alignment an incorrectly routed. It was a shame because it promised to sound very good. This led me to a alder body out of a supplier in HK who sells these for an ungodly cheap price of $45. This one fit the neck like a glove. However, it is very heavy.

The other part I should mention is that there are quite a few manufacturers out there doing interesting things. They sport their own little brand names such as 'Guitarheads' and 'Diesel'. While I haven't fully explored their wares properly, I will vouch for their hot rail pickups. they're very gritty and have a healthy output with plenty of articulation.

The Parts, Costed


The neck was $50.

The body was $45.

Tuners are from Wilkinson.  $35

I got a pair of roller string trees. $5.

The Tremolo comes from Canada. It's the old style 6 screw version. $20.

The Knobs are from Japan. I got a full set of 3 pot knobs and 1 knob for the 5 way switch.  $15

The harness is some kind of Korean or Chinese Strat harness. The pots were in metric. It saved me a load of hassle, so it was worth just grabbing a whole harness. $20.

I pulled off the ceramic capacitors and put in a paper oil capacitor I got for $6.

The 'Planet Terror' Scratchplate and Backplate came in from Canada as well. $45

The pickups are generic Hot Rails. I don't know where they are made, but they're dirt cheap and actually sound really good. They even come with 4 wire config which means I could theoretically coil tap; for the life of me I can't bring myself to do it. Set of 3: $45.

That comes to about $286. Having assembled it and played it, I can tell you it's much better than anything you can buy for that price; it plays like something at least twice as expensive.

The Yumi Stynes Furor

They Just Got It In For Ya

Dear Yumi Stynes,

I don't really know you at all, in fact I didn't even know of our existence until this recent fracas. Colour me ignorant, I'm not a big watcher of the idiot box unless it's the news; and that's kind of how I glommed on to the fact that you said a few things that you regret and have since apologised for - twice - and you're still getting hostile notes and threats from an angered public. I even understand that you have been in touch with the ADF person who you implied was bad in bed and he's forgiven you, so I'm not really writing to you about that.

I'm writing to you more for the fact that you're probably thinking "why me? why have they got it so in for me?"

I mean, let's face it, Kyle Sandilands has said much more hostile, aggravating, obnoxious things than about conjectures about people's sexual prowess (or the absence thereof) - and yes, he too has had sponsors walk away from him.

The short answer I have for you is that no matter how Australian you might feel, having been born and raised here, when the stakes matter the most your half Japanese ancestry singles you out as Australia's favourtie object of hatred and scorn. I know this might strike you as odd and even counter to the ideological framework that an upbringing in multicultural Australia might have provided for you, but this is just the simple truth of it.

In my experience, the Australia can cope with the black fella and the wog and the Jew and the chink and the Vietnam boatperson and perhaps even a burqua-clad muslim doing 'alright' in our society, unfortunately the Japanese remain the unforgiven. This is ever so true in the history of this nation. If you were taught that it was the Chinese during the gold rush that brought about the declaration at the Eureka Stockade that Australia should stay white, then you are wrong. It was in fact the vast number of Japanese divers and crew working in the pearl diving business at the end of the 19th century up at the top end that prompted the actual implementation of the policy.it was the fear of the Japanese.

This policy was defended vigorously at the Paris Peace Conference by Billy Hughes, as he fought to keep a line about universal equality of mankind kept out of ay declaration for the Treaty of Versaille after World War I. Of course World War II didn't help either, in cementing the deep-seated (and officially sanctioned) hatred and dislike of the Japanese. I guess things like Changi POW camp didn't help either because Australians delight in telling the injustices that befell "their people" at Changi as if it were an isolated event in the history of mankind. "Brutal," they say. When I've pointed them in the direction of brutalities carried out by the allies in World War II, they've told me invariably the Japanese deserved it. No two way street there.

It's been a good 70 years since World War II, but the passion invested on hating on the Japanese is pretty intense out there. 70 years is a long time. It's longer than the length of time between the US Civil War and World War I; but the heat is still out there. You sure as heck don't hear the same kinds of things about Koreans or Malaysians or Vietnamese or Indonesians in East Timor, even though Australians went to some kind of war with them as well since the time they fought the Japanese. We don't even get the same level of visceral dislike about the Iraqis with whom we were so recently at war, or the Afghans with whom we are still at war. Bruce Ruxton used to famously bang on about the Japanese being a 'treacherous race'. (Thanks Bruce, I hope your fresh grave gives you all the comfort you need.)

Even from my own experience of growing up in Australia during the 1980s when multiculturalism was actively promoted, I would have to say that being Japanese was a separate kettle of prejudicial fish. That people would say quite openly they could handle black fellas, Wogs, Jews, Chinks and Lebs, they drew the line at the Japs. Indeed, while there were always pockets of places welcoming the Japanese, for the better part of the Twentieth Century the Japanese were the objects of scorn, ridicule, fear and hatred; which, incidentally are the very four things being directed at your way right now as you are vilified.

It continues even today. When you read the comments on news sites to do with whaling, one comes to understand that most of that passionate defense of the whale is the flipside of having a need to vilify the Japanese; it helps to have a justification as to why they are allowed to keep vilifying the Japanese.  "Oh look," they seem to say "the Japanese are all whalers. I like whales. All Japanese are my enemies!" Sea Shepherd supporters have a disgusting way of tucking their racism behind a vocal support for an extremist group. And the Australian government never really says anything to dissuade its own public of these kinds of ugly sentiments because, well, votes are nice to have in politics. If the  majority get such a kick out of Japan-bashing, why take it away from them?

I'm afraid this is the general level of cultural understanding that is out there in the Australian public of Japan. Do not be deceived by the inroads made by luminaries such as Tetsuya or Japanese cuisine in general; or even the kids who are really into anime and Pokemon. The reality is, when it comes to prejudice, the Japanese have a special place in the hearts of prejudicial Australians. And the only way to face this is with as much steel as you can muster and tell them they are the inadequate, the insufficient, the improper, the ugly, and the under-developed.

As somebody who is Japanese by blood, but Australian by nationality, I cannot begin to express my deep empathy for your situation right now. I do not even know if you feel any pride or affinity for your heritage seeing that you were born here and grew up here (and I won't conjecture or presume to know); But in case you were wondering why the baying public were going after you much harder than Kyle Sandilands or George Negus, well, it's because you are by birth eminently hate-able to the wider, prejudiced parts of the Australian public. Especially the types who think the ADF can do no wrong. Deep down, they don't like you because you're half Japanese. God forbid if you were fully Japanese, they'll demand a Senate inquiry into the media for putting you on screen.

It's a shame there's not much of a choice in it for you. It would be one thing to be properly criticised, only for the things you did. The ugly truth is that you are being criticised for being who you are for which you had no choice. The hypocrisy of the media going on about feigning surprise as if this is an exceptional case is breathtaking. I will quote something here from the article linked above:

Associate Professor Scott McQuire, from the University of Melbourne's school of Culture and Communication, said online forums such as Twitter and Facebook encouraged participation in public debate from a broad range of people with differing views.

"If you spend a lot of time online you see there is a group of people who will have particular political diatribes, a group of people who will respond in offensive manners and very dismissive manners," Associate Professor McQuire said.

"But there are other people who engage in much more thoughtful, compassionate, reasoned debates at times. We don't want to throw that bit out because of the fear that can come around through this kind of amplified extremities.

"The way in which these things comes to people's attention is through mainstream media. One of the responsibilities of the media is to think about what parts of the debate we fan."

That, is a crock of shit. It merely tells you the people have the means to express their fucked up opinions. The fact of the matter is, these views are out there, in our very own community, harboured by people who can fire them off like a drive by shooting. All you've done is given them an opening, a reason to express these ugly, fucked up opinions of absolute no merit.

The negative things the public are saying to you and about you are unwarranted, evil, nasty, small-minded and wrong. So while I don't know you from a bar of soap, and am merely a blogger in the wilderness of idiotic discourse, I just wanted to express my support for you, and solidarity with you, as is warranted.

Yours Faithfully,

Art

The Help

Are We Sure America's Come A Long Way?

Any time Hollywood makes a movie about the civil rights movement or things that happened in the Mississippi in the 50's and 60s, you know you're getting a snow job. No matter how badly they portray the way things were, you know it had to be worse. Over the years I've come to see these films with more and more scepticism, for it is obvious to the outside viewer that they are partly to assuage white guilt and partly to pretend things have moved on by making a period picture.

And really, by dint of time rolling on, the 1960s is more or less a historic epoch of the mid last century, more than it is a connected cultural terrain. And therein lies the deceptive shift that by couching these things in the past, the audience can pretend the conflict is over and done.

Anyway, when I sat down to watch 'The Help', it gave me nothing but dread for the onslaught of political correctness hypocrisy and a dose of revisionism. You see, I have my own prejudices about movies about racial prejudice.

What's Good About It

Viola David and Octavia Spencer turn in great performances in this film. Viola David had that standout scene in 'Doubt' when she played a tough scene opposite Meryl Streep.Octavia Spencer of course won a best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role and it is a very deserving accolade for the performance she turned in. Emma Stone (who was in 'Superbad' as the vague love interest only a few years ago) turns in a surprisingly full performance as well. The directing is pretty ordinary for camera but the work with actors is obviously good.

it's solid work that doesn't try to reinvent the wheel - but then how could you be that kind of director with this kind of material? It was hardly going to be Tree of Life.

What's Bad About It

I can't tell who the main character is supposed to be, and so I can't tell which is the main conflict. Is Abilene the main character because she is the narrator? Or is it Skeeter who is doing the documenting. Similarly I'm not sure about the authorship of the fictional book in the fictional universe. When it says on the cover 'Anonymous', does it mean the author is left unsaid because the central conflict as to who owns the narrative is undecided even in the movie that surrounds it?

Because the film is bookended by Abilene's narration, we are led to believe she believes she wrote the book. But what we've seen is Skeeter do all the writerly business of making notes, typing up the manuscript, calling the publisher and seeing through the publication. By any stretch of the definition, Skeeter wrote that book and Abilene was the subject.

This confusion is a terrible thing because it means that the film tries to tell us the issue of ownership over the narrative is settled, when in fact the film itself shows it is dead opposite, it is left in confusion and ready to be contested. There's no point in talking about black people getting emancipated and getting ownership of their lives through ownership of their narrative when the authorial voice is presenting it as otherwise.

What's Interesting About it

All of the above leads me to wonder if the original author of 'The Help' has really untangled this mess herself. If I were a prying person, I'd imagine some of the stuff in this film has deep factual roots, right down to the shit-in-the -pie episode. In fact, the shit-in-the-pie episode essentially holds together the film as an essential truth of the South in Jackson Mississippi. Having denigrated and stomped all over the aspirations of black people after their emancipation, they live in abject fear of the comeuppance. The shit in the pie is more than just symbolic of the fear of retribution, it is the structure of their society.

The white people in this film's universe have lost the ability to cook for themselves and raise their own children and have become totally dependent on their black maids. All the while they live in abject fear that the black people are spreading diseases and putting shit in their pies. Which, is essentially the thesis of this film and everything else that goes around it is an elaborate charade to pretend there is something more profound than the threat of the shit-in-the-pie.

There's an old joke from the Wild West where a cowboy says to his Chinese servant, "Hey Chink, this soup is really good. You make me this soup every day and it's always good. I've decided I'll stop calling you 'Chink'."

His servant replies, "Thanks boss. I'll stop peeing in your soup everyday too."

And that's your movie right there and there.

Isn't This Film Worse Than A Cliche?

This is a 'worthy' film that comes along once in a while and browbeats people into saying it is good. but it has to be said, without such films, where else would Viola Davis or Octavia Spencer find such juicy roles?

Right now there's debate in Australia as to whether the TV shows in this country are divers enough and many saying it is not. The producers argue it is because there aren't enough good actors in the non-mainstream white groupings. It doesn't occur to them this is chicken or the egg because if you weren't white in Australia, what chance have you got as an actor? Why would you choose to be an actor unless you were totally driven by the craft? And if you do, you may never see the light of day.

A lot of this goes hand in hand with the very slow process of getting over the race issue. The truth is, nowhere on the planet is over race, because no group on the planet can get over itself. It's a shame, but it is what it is. So I guess I should applaud the 'worthy' film, even though I am acutely aware of its  deep flaws and faults.

But really, this is a frustrating movie to watch.

Fixing The Mess

Julia Gets Her Way

And amazingly, Bob Carr is now a Senator replacing Mark Arbib, and Foreign Minister to boot. One marvels at how this deal got done, but it did.

Just hours before this morning's announcement, one minister, who like everybody else, was in the dark that Carr was back in the game, said: "She looks like she's lied and has no authority.
"This is not good for her; it's not good for us.
"I despair, I really do."
The truth is that, by Tuesday, the prospect of Carr coming to Canberra was over.
Gillard, stung by the criticism, rang Carr yesterday and put the offer to him again.
Carr accepted and, once more, Smith took one for the team.
Gillard ends the week as she began it - her leadership ascendant.

I guess it's a case of crash or crash through. You'd hate to be Stephen Smith, but them's the breaks.

The way I figure it, this doesn't really do much to add back credibility to the Federal ALP in as much as they had recruit a retired politician from the State ranks. Makes it look like the ALP in NSW really is short of talent. I probably shouldn't keep bagging Julia Gillard because this is a big victory on her part, but it says a lot that this is a big victory for her. Unfortunately I've made up my mind and i won't be voting for her; doubly unfortunate is the fact that Bob Carr isn't really in my good books so this leaves me cold; triply unfortunate is that I don't really care about her accomplishments in technical aspects of politics. She can be deft, so what?

All of this sort of explains why Kevin Rudd came out smiling from the caucus meeting in which he only got 31 votes. It's all a set up including Simon Crean smoking out the Rudd supporters to the brazen hypocrisy of Arbib claiming he's quitting politics for family to the yes-no-yes drafting of Bob Carr. how could one not laugh?

All it takes is for a couple of backbenchers on the Rudd side to call it quits and it's back to a hung parliament and they'd better damn well call an election - but  Julia Gillard would lose that too if polls are to be believed. I short, this is just shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic. The Federal ALP government is as lame as any lame duck government has been.

Colour me unimpressed.

ALP Hanging Itself Out To Dry

A Turd By Any Other Name Is...

This isn't meant to be a blog about politics. It just goes that way because it's stuff from which I can't run away in the news cycle. believe me it's more fun watching movies and listening to rock albums. Still, the recent debacle is the gift that keeps giving.

I'm trying to keep a straight face as I try and decipher what allegedly happened last week coming into this week, including this odd business of Bob Carr. What we've gleaned so far is that Bob Carr got tapped to fill in for Mark Arbib's Senate seat at about the same time Simon Crean started mouthing off about Kevin Rudd not being a team player (while Kevin Rudd was in Washington DC). Bob Carr's condition for going to Canberra was that he would get the Foreign Ministry portfolio.

Of course, Kevin Rudd resigned the Foreign Minister role on Thursday going on to Friday in Australia time, so this means Julia Gillard tapped Bob Carr for the job before they'd ousted Kevin Rudd. So whatever was going on in caucus, it was decided early last week that Kevin had to go back to the backbench, Mark Arbib had to go, and Bob Carr would parachute himself into Kevin Rudd's job AND Mark Arbib's job in one fell swoop - but somehow this wouldn't look like typical ALP machinations where something inherently undemocratic was going on.

What a facepalm moment.

Didn't Paul Keating call the Senate 'unrepresentative swill'? I think such a move would have reinforced that notion. Come on peeps, get your act together...

But it gets worse than that. It turns out Stephen Smith wanted the Foreign Minister job he vacated for Kevin Rudd back and put the Kaibosh on the Bob Carr move. Bob Carr was already at the airport waiting for a plane when told there were objections and he wouldn't get what he wanted - so he went home. It turns out, everyone wants something more for their loyalty for Julia Gillard when in fact it's a zero sum game because it's not like she's going to create more ministries in order to have more ministers to please her backers.

Anyway...

I got some sound rebuking by some ALP friends about the way I was stumping for Kevin Rudd (with the humiliating reminder "that this is Australia where we are still under the Westminster system and we don't elect Presidents" - as if I don't know...) who told me that Julia Gillard was the superior politician, and therefore the superior prospect "going forward". The ins and out of it were how hard the ALP works and secures the future of workers and how all these ructions are not playthings for the commentariat - "and fucking bloggers at that!" - but momentous decisions undertaken by the party - and that Kevin Rudd really wasn't a good Labor man at all. In short, if I truly were a progressive, then I was way out of line for writing the things I'd written here and worse, the outbursts I'd written over on Facebook. No matter how sharp my criticisms were, I wasn't actually in the party having to do the things the party does to make things right for the working families of Australia. Yikes.

And it's true, I've been rather flippantly cruel and most unkind about the members of caucus who would not and did not vote for Kevin Rudd. And it's true I won't go join a party to hand out leaflets at polling booths, just so I can be closer to the faceless men in the vain hopes of influencing them. Who am I really to critique the mighty ALP? "Pull your fucking head in" they said (most undemocratically, I might add).

Nonetheless the fact remains, only 24hours after the triumphant moment where Julia Gillard's told us she's going to do a better job, here we are with this fiasco. As one Rudd supporter quipped, "you can't blame this on Kevin too."

Ain't that the truth?

A Different Kind Of Truth

The Old Is Not The New, It's Just Good

Van Halen came out with a new album about three weeks ago. I rushed out and got it at Utopia records in town. May as well do these things the old way. I know people are downloading these things but being a fetishist (as Rob Gordon would have it) I need to own plastic. I don't know, if I ever wanted Lady Gaga, I might download that, but a new Van Halen album deserves my full purchasing commitment. The point is to not give into the ravages of time; not surrender to the seduction of the new. If you truly love rock music, there's no way you're not going to fork out the money for the CD. Mine even came with a free poster, so suck on that iTunes!

What's Good About it

The word out there is that these aren't even new-new songs but re-arranged and re-written old songs, some of which were on that legendary demo tape to Warner Brothers. From the first note to the last, the Van Halen you hear sounds as bristling and energetic as any and all of the early Van Halen records that featured David Lee Roth. And really, that's what we expect, and that's what they deliver.

The playing is superb, the engineering is great, the mix is lively, and it just plain rocks. At the heart of it is Eddie Van Halen, still doing his remarkable guitar playing that changed the landscape for guitarists for a generation. The whole package might not sound fresh to music critics, but it sounds real, and lived in. You know, being 'good' is fresh enough for me.

What's Bad About It

Are you kidding me? Uh... It's not a double album?.

What's Interesting About It

Well, that's an interesting title for a start, that poses some epistemological questions. I don't know how philosophical a bent David Lee Roth has developed - judging from his solo works, maybe not much - but the line evokes two discussions about knowledge. One is whether we can ascertain truth and one is whether truth is multiple and that there can be conflicting, contradictory but simultaneous truth. The song 'Bullethead' suggests that reality might be a bit more vague than any definition we give it.

I'm sure the guys in the band aren't thinking about this sort of thing to much, and yet you get the feeling from the record that fame and success actually wore on them a lot more than they admitted. truth, as they found out was a socially determined construct, so they want to throw it back on us saying absolutes are questionable.

The long absence between '1984' and this album for David Lee Roth is the stuff of rock legends so I won't go into it here, but it has to be said, he's slipped right back into the soundscape like he had never left. It makes you think, if it's so damn easy, what took you guys so long to get back? The answer to that might be the GFC wherein a lot of bands have hit the road again in order to scare up some cash after investments were burnt in the GFC.

At least this is the silver lining on that very black cloud - and it shines too.

Going Black And White

I've noticed over the years that when bands want to hit the reset button, they come out with black and white video clips. 'Tattoo' and the other bits of video that's been released are all in black and white. Unfortunately it reminds me of the time The Who took on Kenny Jones to replace the deceased Keith Moon and came out with 'You Better You Bet'; The time the Police came out with 'Every Breath You Take'; and the time U2 went all bluesy and did 'Rattle ad Hum', half in black and white. I don't know if it really means anything but the black and white thing always seems like a statement, but ends up being something else.

The band is resetting in the sense that they haven't had an album out since 1998, and they're doing this one with David Lee Roth so it stands to reason. The problem is that the Who only really had one more album in them and then stopped putting out material for along time, and the Police really only had the 1986 remix of 'Don't Stand So Close To Me' left in them. It's really not a good sign. Speaking for myself, I haven't done anything since I worked in black and white, so... I'm just saying.

"Can He Still Do The Splits?"

I've had a few people ask this question of David Lee Roth. Because the question never crossed my mind, it kind of took me by surprise that quite a number of people are asking this question. I don't understand how this comes to the forefront of people's minds when it comes to David Lee Roth rejoining the band, seeing that my own consciousness of the band totally revolves around Eddie' guitar playing. I mean, it's like asking if Dennis Rodman still has weird hair when the subject of the Michael Jordan era Chicago Bulls comes up. I mean, yeah, no, maybe, but were you watching what that team did at all? David Lee Roth's splits? Come on, this is Eddie's band. :)