Are We Headed To Zero Interest Rate Policy?
I wonder when Australia's RBA would be forced to run a ZIRP of its own. To date, the RBA has been trying to jawbone the AUD down and it has lost around 15% this year since its peak at US$0.95. That being said 70% of the money in the Australian equities comes from overseas, and you'd have to think that was in pursuit of yield. This is helping our blue-chip stocks keep very high valuations as they pay out their dividends, but it is also showing up as the property bubble. Simply put, the very quantity of foreign investment sloshing around in our markets is not reflective of how exactly our country is going.
Still, with commodity prices collapsing and national revenue dwindling, it's worth asking how exactly this government sees Australia in the years to come. One has the suspicion that perhaps there hasn't been much thought put in to this question by our current government, moreover this is not the kind government to consider these kinds of problems as problems. Just listen to Joe Hockey - he thinks growth would be a good thing to strive for, for the G20 nations. Who would'a thunk that?
Let's say for the moment that what we've been witnessing as the new reality, post GFC - where growth is anaemic and debt is crippling in the developed world - is indeed the way things will continue as a general economic setting, then it would seem Australia will inevitably have to cut rates to match the Zero Interest Rate regimen that is currently in place in the USA and Japan. With the recovery under way, the USA might raise interest rates in 2015, but this might be a kind of idle speculation in as mutes nobodies certain the recovery under way really is meaningful.
If the USA can't raise rates and Japan can't raise rates, and the Euro zone running extremely low rates, there's an argument to be made whether it is feasible for Australia to have interest rates that are significantly higher. The drop in the AUD means the international investors are pricing in the likely drop in interest rates to come. If the Australian economy keeps losing momentum, it won't be long before there will be a recession here before there is a rate rise over in the USA. Naturally the RBA will cut rates and we will be closer in line with ZIRP nations.
What nobody seems to have figured out is how to actually get out of ZIRP. As it is we're being sucked down the drain towards ZIRP. We maybe talking about a very different kind of economy in only a matter of years from now.
And now for some short movie crits...
'Expendables 3'
If the second one was getting long in the tooth, the third one is a bit like the current New York Yankees roster: filled with aged veterans who were great a long time ago, and a bunch of kids we know nothing about just yet. The ageing stars include Sly, Mel, Arnie, Harrison, Jet, Dolph, Terry, Wesley and Antonio. In their heyday a movie like this would have cost $200million above the line just to assemble the line up, but because they're all far from and on the wrong end of heir peak fame they can be picked for a song.
Mel as the bad guy is fun and gets the best lines and because he's the most proper actor amongst this bunch, he makes it look the most like he means his lines. Everybody else is just phoning in their schtick. The Wesley Snipes quip about being in prison for Tax Evasion; Arnie's line about not really having retired; Harrison Ford's quip that Bruce Willis is "not in the picture" and so on makes the script like a parody of a parody of a parody. There's a lot of eye-ball rolling when you watch this film. I can't believe it was so long ago tat Jet Li kicked Mel's ass in 'Lethal Weapon IV'. This time it's Sylvester ... and Mel's stunt double has a good bit of Kung Fu left in him, but it's mostly pantomime-for-the-punters. Oh how the mighty have fallen. We grow old, we grow old, the universe indeed ends with a whimper.
They will probably make more of these. If they do I'll probably keep watching them. I really don't know why. I hope the new Terminator movie kicks ass next year.
'Chef'
Jon Favreau plays a chef who regains his self respect. It's the actors in the cameo roles that make this one amazing: Scarlet Johansson as the sommelier; Sophia Vergara as the ex-wife; Robert Downey Jr. as the ex-husband of the ex-wife; and Dustin Hoffman makes an appearance as the restauranteur. It's weird casting.
Seems to me, if you looked like Jon Favreau and your ex-wife was Sophia Vergara, you'd commit suicide because it is indeed the end of your life. You wouldn't be doing this stuff in this movie.
The film gets a pretty good rating on rotten tomatoes but it's hard to argue the film is anything more than feel good fluff.
'The Boiler Room'
A true blast from the past which I missed way back when. Maybe was good that I did.
I hadn't watched this when it first came out because it seemed a bit staid, but it's based on the story of one of the guys who worked for the Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort. Its shooting style and look have dated a bit but it's a great companion piece to 'The Wolf of Wall Street'. The stand out scene might be the scene where all the 'traders' (its hard to call people pushing penny-stocks 'traders' but yes) can recite the lines from 'Wall Street' as they watch it.
Because the film is couched as a morality tale the film is far less charming than the picaresque of 'The Wolf of Wall Street'. That being said, it has a certain angle of realism that sheds light on what kind of idiot went and worked for Jordan Belfort. Vin Diesel is also in this film, who is amongst other things, playing a guy with hair.
Ben Affleck is also in it as a kind guy like Alec Baldwin's sales boss in 'Glengarry Glen Ross'. During his big speech, his character of course promptly invokes Alec Baldwin and his character in 'Glenngary Glen Ross' which illustrates the very low artistic ambitions of this film.
"Do you know the bad guy from that film? I'm him!"
Yeah, we get it, we get it.
A Gen-X View of the Universe.
"The Issue Isn't Pussy, It's Monkey" - from The Right Stuff
Film, Cinema, Movies, TV, Music, Rock
2014/12/31
2014/12/29
'Dallas Buyers Club'
Look Back With Sorrow
Occasionally I meet young people who tell me how much they love the 80s - the movies, the music, the fashion. They tell me it was great. Sure makes one fellow. :)
It's a bit hard to put across to them how oppressive the Cold War and AIDS were and what a relief it was when at least the former came to an end in 1989. AIDS, on the other hand was just this dark shadow that took all the gains of the 70's sexual revolution and flushed it down the toilet. It wasn't a decade that could get you killed violently like the 60's and early 70's did with the Vietnam War, but it was a decade that was going to kill you with a nuclear flash or a strange incurable disease, depending nohow Ronald Reagan was feeling that day, or where you placed your unprotected genitals.
So a movie about AIDS patients is like the wrong kind of nostalgia. That's why it's taken me this long to come around to watching this highly acclaimed film. That's the thing about nostalgia for your won era - you certainly know what was wrong with that era.
What's Good About It
The single most compelling thing about this film is how it has the paranoia and homophobia nailed to a tee. The anxiety of AIDS and how it was for a long time a gay ghetto disease is captured with assiduous, prosaic detail. It's not a film about being gay or being gay with AIDS, it's a film about having AIDS and trying not to die. The focus is searing and that lends itself to some pretty dramatic story-telling.
Mathew McConaughey is doing his extreme actor thing having lost a lot of weight to play Ron Woodroof, and while we never quite can shake it's the A-List actor fro our minds, he is sufficiently committed to give us the character, fully rendered. It's a largely unsentimental portrait with moments of genuine awkward compassion.
The shooting style is raw-boned and documentary-like. Better still, it's devoid of the pretti-fication that usually accompanies turning real life stories into Hollywood fodder. It doesn't pull punches and conveys the full anxiety about AIDS and death. I'm always a bit scared of social realism but this film is quite a good one in that genre.
What's Bad About It
It's hard to say. I can't think of anything I didn't think was good. Maybe the music is entirely forgettable.
It does have a couple of ideological problems that are interesting.
What's Interesting About It
The first thing that sprang to mind were all the people I knew who dropped dead of AIDS. Plus the famous names like Freddie Mercury and Stuart Challender. I thought about the time I was arguing with John Hargreaves and didn't know he was dying from AIDS. There was the production designer at film school who passed away from AIDS. He knew his time was coming and then he was gone. The desperation and despair was hard to watch and even harder to be around at a high pressure workplace.
I recalled sitting in medical lectures in the mid-80s where lecturers would come in and declare that they won't be able to find a cure for AIDS in a generation. 30years hence, that much has been true, but somewhere in the mid-point people stopped dying in droves. That has been a relief. Maybe it's a fake sense of security but back in the late 80's and early 90's, this whole nexus was not only grim but also dehumanising.
I think the politics of LGBT population was headed for normalisation through the 1970s, going into the early 80's when AIDS broke open. The whole AIDS thing and the stigma attached to it and by association, the whole Gay community probably delay the normalisation of the LGBT by a good fifteen years or so. In other words, AIDS prolonged the condition of social and institutional homophobia for that extended time. When I think about that time, I think the whole thing is worse than regrettable. The film is a terrifying reminder of the distance that had tone travelled.
AZT As The Problem Drug
The film makes a wild sort of claim that AZT is toxic and therefore won't work as a treatment for AIDS. This flies in the face of not only the conventional understanding of how the drug works, but also the history of how the drug came tone used to control the HIV virus. The film finishes with a note that gives some credit to AZT at the end, but structurally the film effectively argues against the validity of the drug itself. And one wonders if this is something we should be accepting at face value. It certainly strikes me as the kind of stupidity expressed by anti-vaxers.
The proof in the AZT pudding is that Magic Johnson is still alive with us today thanks to combination therapy and AZT is one of the drugs in the mix that is part of the treatment.
The FDA As The Villain
This is where the film drifts off to a more conspiracy-theory-laden-observation that Big Pharma wants to push this one drug AZT and so it bribes the FDA to let it pass its drug to the exclusion of other treatments. It might have looked that way from Ron Woodroof's position but the reality is that many drugs were pushed through testing stage to get it to the market and all those drugs together form the combination therapy we use today. If it were one drug, the virus becomes resistant to the drug. By combining multiple drugs, it creates too many obstacles for the virus to replicate and pass annoy mutations that might allow it to resist.
The more likely story is that the FDA did resist the wildcat selling of untested drugs because quite frankly it's a little scary that somebody is out there trying to devise therapies on the fly, unqualified, untested, un-reviewed. The films very soft on that problematic as it portrays the FDA as a bunch of statist idiots.
There are days where I might be tempted to do the same, but in the instance of AIDS cure research, I'm not so sure the FDA were such an impediment as they are portrayed this film. The film needs an antagonist, but I'm not sure that painting the FDA like a bunch of corrupt dunces is accurate or fair.
Occasionally I meet young people who tell me how much they love the 80s - the movies, the music, the fashion. They tell me it was great. Sure makes one fellow. :)
It's a bit hard to put across to them how oppressive the Cold War and AIDS were and what a relief it was when at least the former came to an end in 1989. AIDS, on the other hand was just this dark shadow that took all the gains of the 70's sexual revolution and flushed it down the toilet. It wasn't a decade that could get you killed violently like the 60's and early 70's did with the Vietnam War, but it was a decade that was going to kill you with a nuclear flash or a strange incurable disease, depending nohow Ronald Reagan was feeling that day, or where you placed your unprotected genitals.
So a movie about AIDS patients is like the wrong kind of nostalgia. That's why it's taken me this long to come around to watching this highly acclaimed film. That's the thing about nostalgia for your won era - you certainly know what was wrong with that era.
What's Good About It
The single most compelling thing about this film is how it has the paranoia and homophobia nailed to a tee. The anxiety of AIDS and how it was for a long time a gay ghetto disease is captured with assiduous, prosaic detail. It's not a film about being gay or being gay with AIDS, it's a film about having AIDS and trying not to die. The focus is searing and that lends itself to some pretty dramatic story-telling.
Mathew McConaughey is doing his extreme actor thing having lost a lot of weight to play Ron Woodroof, and while we never quite can shake it's the A-List actor fro our minds, he is sufficiently committed to give us the character, fully rendered. It's a largely unsentimental portrait with moments of genuine awkward compassion.
The shooting style is raw-boned and documentary-like. Better still, it's devoid of the pretti-fication that usually accompanies turning real life stories into Hollywood fodder. It doesn't pull punches and conveys the full anxiety about AIDS and death. I'm always a bit scared of social realism but this film is quite a good one in that genre.
What's Bad About It
It's hard to say. I can't think of anything I didn't think was good. Maybe the music is entirely forgettable.
It does have a couple of ideological problems that are interesting.
What's Interesting About It
The first thing that sprang to mind were all the people I knew who dropped dead of AIDS. Plus the famous names like Freddie Mercury and Stuart Challender. I thought about the time I was arguing with John Hargreaves and didn't know he was dying from AIDS. There was the production designer at film school who passed away from AIDS. He knew his time was coming and then he was gone. The desperation and despair was hard to watch and even harder to be around at a high pressure workplace.
I recalled sitting in medical lectures in the mid-80s where lecturers would come in and declare that they won't be able to find a cure for AIDS in a generation. 30years hence, that much has been true, but somewhere in the mid-point people stopped dying in droves. That has been a relief. Maybe it's a fake sense of security but back in the late 80's and early 90's, this whole nexus was not only grim but also dehumanising.
I think the politics of LGBT population was headed for normalisation through the 1970s, going into the early 80's when AIDS broke open. The whole AIDS thing and the stigma attached to it and by association, the whole Gay community probably delay the normalisation of the LGBT by a good fifteen years or so. In other words, AIDS prolonged the condition of social and institutional homophobia for that extended time. When I think about that time, I think the whole thing is worse than regrettable. The film is a terrifying reminder of the distance that had tone travelled.
AZT As The Problem Drug
The film makes a wild sort of claim that AZT is toxic and therefore won't work as a treatment for AIDS. This flies in the face of not only the conventional understanding of how the drug works, but also the history of how the drug came tone used to control the HIV virus. The film finishes with a note that gives some credit to AZT at the end, but structurally the film effectively argues against the validity of the drug itself. And one wonders if this is something we should be accepting at face value. It certainly strikes me as the kind of stupidity expressed by anti-vaxers.
The proof in the AZT pudding is that Magic Johnson is still alive with us today thanks to combination therapy and AZT is one of the drugs in the mix that is part of the treatment.
The FDA As The Villain
This is where the film drifts off to a more conspiracy-theory-laden-observation that Big Pharma wants to push this one drug AZT and so it bribes the FDA to let it pass its drug to the exclusion of other treatments. It might have looked that way from Ron Woodroof's position but the reality is that many drugs were pushed through testing stage to get it to the market and all those drugs together form the combination therapy we use today. If it were one drug, the virus becomes resistant to the drug. By combining multiple drugs, it creates too many obstacles for the virus to replicate and pass annoy mutations that might allow it to resist.
The more likely story is that the FDA did resist the wildcat selling of untested drugs because quite frankly it's a little scary that somebody is out there trying to devise therapies on the fly, unqualified, untested, un-reviewed. The films very soft on that problematic as it portrays the FDA as a bunch of statist idiots.
There are days where I might be tempted to do the same, but in the instance of AIDS cure research, I'm not so sure the FDA were such an impediment as they are portrayed this film. The film needs an antagonist, but I'm not sure that painting the FDA like a bunch of corrupt dunces is accurate or fair.
'Space Station 76'
The Way We Weren't
I guess there's always going to be some part of us that's going to be a sucker for nostalgia. This film is one of the more obscure kind of nostalgia piece with a dash of social commentary; although it's hard to say if we really need to be socially commentary-ised so heavy handedly.
Here's the trailer:
That snappy dialogue in there? This film is not quite like that.
Oh, obligatory spoiler warning just in case.
What's Good About It
The ironic production design is nice. Yes, once upon a decade there were these shows that seemed to indicate we'd be going out to space with our 1970s decor and furniture intact. Somewhere between Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey' and 'Star Wars was a vision of space living that was production designed by the weirdest furniture catalogue available in the 1970s. The wardrobe and uniforms in this thing are also filled with the sensibility of 1970s air travel more than space travel, but then people didn't have a lot to go on except what NASA had shown us and that was way too bulky.
The buttons light up with incandescent bulbs behind them, the graphics on the screen are decidedly wire-frame and chunky; the fonts and typefaces are meticulously of the 70s and of the genre. The white corridors with he curved edges, combined with the backlit panels and white robots rounds out the look.
The whole thing is cheesy and when it dedicates itself to the style of cheesiness, the film sustains itself nicely. The casting is subtle in that the sound track blares Todd Rundgren and it's his step daughter Liv Tyler on screen playing the main character. Patrick Wilson plays the captain of the station and he carries the baggage of being a Trek universe alumnus. He pays like a careerist space worker who has found himself in a career cul de sac and that works very nicely.
What's Bad About It
If it's a comedy it could've had a few more laughs. As a comedy of manners, it was basically ribbing 1970s cultural mores which is only vaguely funny if you grew up watching comedy from the 1970s, commenting on the 1970s as they were unfolding.
The concerns were pretty unfocused and in many ways naff. The threat turns out to be not as serious and the denouement essentially argues against consumerism. There is no wonder about being in space for any of the characters, so you wonder what the point was in setting it in space except to do the production design gags.
Other people's nostalgia is fun, but mostly because you have no skin in the game,so to speak. I can enjoy the nostalgia of say, 'Boardwalk Empire' or 'Mad Men' precisely because I wasn't there and I can choose to invest myself in any of the characters in the way I choose. The problem with this film for me is that 1970s Science Fiction is something in which I'm really heavily invested. So unless it's going somewhere interesting, it's not going to surprise me. This was unsurprising in the bad way.
But at least there's a cameo by Keir Dullea (a.k.a Dave Bowman).
What's Interesting About It
I guess there's always going to be some part of us that's going to be a sucker for nostalgia. This film is one of the more obscure kind of nostalgia piece with a dash of social commentary; although it's hard to say if we really need to be socially commentary-ised so heavy handedly.
Here's the trailer:
That snappy dialogue in there? This film is not quite like that.
Oh, obligatory spoiler warning just in case.
What's Good About It
The ironic production design is nice. Yes, once upon a decade there were these shows that seemed to indicate we'd be going out to space with our 1970s decor and furniture intact. Somewhere between Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey' and 'Star Wars was a vision of space living that was production designed by the weirdest furniture catalogue available in the 1970s. The wardrobe and uniforms in this thing are also filled with the sensibility of 1970s air travel more than space travel, but then people didn't have a lot to go on except what NASA had shown us and that was way too bulky.
The buttons light up with incandescent bulbs behind them, the graphics on the screen are decidedly wire-frame and chunky; the fonts and typefaces are meticulously of the 70s and of the genre. The white corridors with he curved edges, combined with the backlit panels and white robots rounds out the look.
The whole thing is cheesy and when it dedicates itself to the style of cheesiness, the film sustains itself nicely. The casting is subtle in that the sound track blares Todd Rundgren and it's his step daughter Liv Tyler on screen playing the main character. Patrick Wilson plays the captain of the station and he carries the baggage of being a Trek universe alumnus. He pays like a careerist space worker who has found himself in a career cul de sac and that works very nicely.
What's Bad About It
If it's a comedy it could've had a few more laughs. As a comedy of manners, it was basically ribbing 1970s cultural mores which is only vaguely funny if you grew up watching comedy from the 1970s, commenting on the 1970s as they were unfolding.
The concerns were pretty unfocused and in many ways naff. The threat turns out to be not as serious and the denouement essentially argues against consumerism. There is no wonder about being in space for any of the characters, so you wonder what the point was in setting it in space except to do the production design gags.
Other people's nostalgia is fun, but mostly because you have no skin in the game,so to speak. I can enjoy the nostalgia of say, 'Boardwalk Empire' or 'Mad Men' precisely because I wasn't there and I can choose to invest myself in any of the characters in the way I choose. The problem with this film for me is that 1970s Science Fiction is something in which I'm really heavily invested. So unless it's going somewhere interesting, it's not going to surprise me. This was unsurprising in the bad way.
But at least there's a cameo by Keir Dullea (a.k.a Dave Bowman).
What's Interesting About It
Just as it is in 'Mad Men', the blatant sexism of the male characters in this little romp are saddled with the kind of male chauvinism that makes you want to crawl in hole. I just happened to catch an episode of M*A*S*H* where this kind of sexism was brought up and of course they were making it out that it was a 1950s sort of problem. It's enough to make you wonder if this sort of stuff has actually been put to rest at all.
The same thing applies with the gay issue. There was plenty of LGBT activism in the 1970s, certainly by 1976. So it seems rather incongruous that the gay character of the future of 1976 is so conflicted about coming out of the closet. It's a year before the debut of the Village People.
All this goes to to show what 1976 was like in pop culture and social norms and concerns is slipping from consciousness. Gender politics in cinema hasn't gotten sharper in the intervening years. They've only become more entrenched and nuanced.
The same thing applies with the gay issue. There was plenty of LGBT activism in the 1970s, certainly by 1976. So it seems rather incongruous that the gay character of the future of 1976 is so conflicted about coming out of the closet. It's a year before the debut of the Village People.
All this goes to to show what 1976 was like in pop culture and social norms and concerns is slipping from consciousness. Gender politics in cinema hasn't gotten sharper in the intervening years. They've only become more entrenched and nuanced.
Boredom In Space
Space was still exciting in the 1970s. The Apollo missions were still going on in the early part, and the next big thing was going to be the Space Shuttle. If that wasn't exciting enough, there were plenty of movies set in space and with any luck it seemed all the kids would grow up and go toward in space. One thing Space wasn't was boring.
In this film, space is so mundane and humdrum, it has been reduced to a place of monotony and boredom. The film's main problem is that these characters are bored with so little to distract them. In that sense it has more in common with Chekhov's plays like 'The Seagull', where characters are always complaining about how boring things are, than say 'Star Wars', which represented the vocational-future-of-choice for most kids of the 1970s.
Space was still exciting in the 1970s. The Apollo missions were still going on in the early part, and the next big thing was going to be the Space Shuttle. If that wasn't exciting enough, there were plenty of movies set in space and with any luck it seemed all the kids would grow up and go toward in space. One thing Space wasn't was boring.
In this film, space is so mundane and humdrum, it has been reduced to a place of monotony and boredom. The film's main problem is that these characters are bored with so little to distract them. In that sense it has more in common with Chekhov's plays like 'The Seagull', where characters are always complaining about how boring things are, than say 'Star Wars', which represented the vocational-future-of-choice for most kids of the 1970s.
It did make me wonder whether we were so over space we just didn't care about space being space any more.
If You Really Must Know
In case you've forgotten what a 1970s Science Fiction TV series really looked like, here's a random episode of 'Space 1999':
Yes, it's got the same damn look but the point is, it's a lot snappier. This one pre-empted 'Star Trek: The Motion Picture' by 3 years, with an episode about the return of the Voyager probe.
To be honest, the title sequence alone has me in stitches with laughter. I mean, just check out the funk wah-pedal guitars in the theme song. Oh yeah, like 1999 was going to be so funky.
It's somehow a lot funnier watching it straight today than the artificial cheese of this new film that's trying to poke fun at it.
To be honest, the title sequence alone has me in stitches with laughter. I mean, just check out the funk wah-pedal guitars in the theme song. Oh yeah, like 1999 was going to be so funky.
It's somehow a lot funnier watching it straight today than the artificial cheese of this new film that's trying to poke fun at it.
2014/12/23
News That's Fit To Punt - 23/Dec/2014
Zero Dark'n' Dirty
I didn't want to bang on about politics this week, what with 2 days to go to Christmas, but I figured it's worth bring up this stuff because I still think we're all collectively numbed to the notion that troops and agents representing our government and therefore by extension us, are doing torture. We're so inured to this fact that we consume movies like 'Zero Dark Thirty' without really challenging the premise that torture got us the information that led to finding where Osama bin Laden was holed up.
Anyway, this week saw the cover blown on the agent upon whom the character Maya was based. Yes, the agent who allegedly tracked down Osama bin Laden's whereabout was also known as the Queen of Torture, and her name is now out in public.
I'm not going to name the officer here because frankly I don't know where that puts me legally. But you can find out her name if you follow that link.
What's interesting is that amongst other things she:
She sounds like a real piece of work. She sounds like a sadistic psychopath who has found her dream job. The Intercept is leaking her name because it says otherwise the wider community won't be able to put 2 and 2 together to understand just want is going on and who is doing it. Sounds like she's the CIA torture mistress of your BDSM nightmares.
Get Dorky
The New York Times is saying the USA should prosecute the likes of Dick Cheney and the others the GW Bush administration who condoned torture.
I didn't want to bang on about politics this week, what with 2 days to go to Christmas, but I figured it's worth bring up this stuff because I still think we're all collectively numbed to the notion that troops and agents representing our government and therefore by extension us, are doing torture. We're so inured to this fact that we consume movies like 'Zero Dark Thirty' without really challenging the premise that torture got us the information that led to finding where Osama bin Laden was holed up.
Anyway, this week saw the cover blown on the agent upon whom the character Maya was based. Yes, the agent who allegedly tracked down Osama bin Laden's whereabout was also known as the Queen of Torture, and her name is now out in public.
I'm not going to name the officer here because frankly I don't know where that puts me legally. But you can find out her name if you follow that link.
What's interesting is that amongst other things she:
- was amongst other things, responsible for missing the 9/11 threat, bungling the sharing of information.
- misled congress about the Agency's use of torture.
- participated in the torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
- witnessed the waterboarding of terror suspect Abu Zubaydah
- misrepresented intelligence in such as ways to send the agency on a wild goose chase in Montana
- over saw a three month rendition of another detainee whose detention was case of mistaken identity.
She sounds like a real piece of work. She sounds like a sadistic psychopath who has found her dream job. The Intercept is leaking her name because it says otherwise the wider community won't be able to put 2 and 2 together to understand just want is going on and who is doing it. Sounds like she's the CIA torture mistress of your BDSM nightmares.
Get Dorky
The New York Times is saying the USA should prosecute the likes of Dick Cheney and the others the GW Bush administration who condoned torture.
Americans have known about many of these acts for years, but the 524-page executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report erases any lingering doubt about their depravity and illegality: In addition to new revelations of sadistic tactics like “rectal feeding,” scores of detainees were waterboarded, hung by their wrists, confined in coffins, sleep-deprived, threatened with death or brutally beaten. In November 2002, one detainee who was chained to a concrete floor died of “suspected hypothermia.”
These are, simply, crimes. They are prohibited by federal law, which defines torture as the intentional infliction of “severe physical or mental pain or suffering.” They are also banned by the Convention Against Torture, the international treaty that the United States ratified in 1994 and that requires prosecution of any acts of torture.
So it is no wonder that today’s blinkered apologists are desperate to call these acts anything but torture, which they clearly were. As the report reveals, these claims fail for a simple reason: C.I.A. officials admitted at the time that what they intended to do was illegal.
In July 2002, C.I.A. lawyers told the Justice Department that the agency needed to use “more aggressive methods” of interrogation that would “otherwise be prohibited by the torture statute.” They asked the department to promise not to prosecute those who used these methods. When the department refused, they shopped around for the answer they wanted. They got it from the ideologically driven lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel, who wrote memos fabricating a legal foundation for the methods. Government officials now rely on the memos as proof that they sought and received legal clearance for their actions. But the report changes the game: We now know that this reliance was not made in good faith.
No amount of legal pretzel logic can justify the behavior detailed in the report. Indeed, it is impossible to read it and conclude that no one can be held accountable. At the very least, Mr. Obama needs to authorize a full and independent criminal investigation.
Amen to that. Now we'll see if they have the balls to follow through. They need to get Cheney in the dock. It's nice that all this stuff is out there for once and not covered by official secrecy acts and the such.
Spiritual Alzheimers
In other more delightful news, the Pope of Rome took the Curia to task for being greedy scheming careerists with 'Spiritual Alzheimers'. I don't quite know how that disease works, but it sounds pretty bad. The affairs of the Catholic Church are really none of my business but this is the sort of thing that makes you take up and notice. This Pope is trying to make a difference. In the scheme of things, it's not totally insignificant that he wants to effect a change of culture within the Church. After all, there's still too much Alexander VI and the Borgias about the Vatican and its politics.
Still, it wasn't what the Curia were expecting. That's pretty impressive to go off script and put the boot in that hard.
John Robertson Falls On His Sword
Never has there been an ALP politician so happily seen off since, ...oh I don't know..., Kristina Kenneally? Anyway, it turned out John Robertson signed some document for Man Haron Monis. And that was all (s)he wrote, so to speak. Is this bad luck? Is this bad judgment? Is this a bad break? Is it just good fortune that John Robertson managed to crash his career on the name of the man who carried out the Martin Place Siege? Really, who'd a' thunk it?
Anyway, the man variously described in the most negative ways by his own party - and given the leadership after the landslide election defeat because they couldn't stand him and wanted him to fail - has miraculously crashed out of being the Opposition Leader in NSW with only 3months to go to an election. Was this fair? He might even ask that himself but one thing's for certain in NSW politics: fair's got nothing to do with it (an invective otherwise known as "Suck Shit And Die").
The ALP in NSW have a long l-o-o-o-ong way back from the depths of reputation damage inflicted by Morbid Obeidity, and Joe Tripodi and the rest of the Terigals. The brand value of NSW ALP is about as good as Nickelback (maybe even worse). Finally being rid of Robertson at the helm might be the first step in rehabilitation.
2014/12/22
Quick Shots - 22/Dec/2014
Screw Politics, It's Extended Video Time!
Watched a lot of videos. I can't take talking about politics this week.
Outcast
This one's weird.
You want weird? This one is definitely weird. Nicolas Cage and Hayden Christensen play Crusaders who get jaded and end up in China where they do some sword-fighting heroics. Hayden Christensen still has some of his moves from Star Wars episodes 2-3 going. Now that it's been 10years on he's matured bit and quite a bit more believable as a sword-wileding dude. Natalie Portman was saying playing Padme in the Star Wars movies nearly killed her career, but that could be more true of Hayden Christensen. Anyway, he plays the swashbuckling lead and it's quite okay. I can sort of see what George Lucas originally saw in him. He'd be a more credible Anakin now, by dint of age. I guess it's not to be.
Nicolas Cage is just plain-vanilla-odd in this movie. All of it.
Predestination
An Australian production starring Ethan Hawke. Hey, it's really quite good. A time-travel mind-fuck movie without any real 'Australian content' going on. Don't know how Screen Australia came to funding it, but it's a step in the right direction. And you know me and this blog - I never say nice things about Australian films these days. It's pretty damn good.
Recently when I was down in Melbourne I got to be talking to the critic Richard Haridy and he mentioned 'Predestination' as a great Australian film and mentioned was hardly getting audience traction exactly because it was Australian. It's a shame the brand of Australian cinema has sunk so low that when a good film finally comes along it can't earn its keep.
Fading Gigolo
There's this old story: People would pitch projects in LA saying they wanted to do a Woody Allen sort of movie and get rejected because they would get told only Woody Allen can do a Woody Allen sort of movie. This is John Turturro's Woody Allen sort of movie and to his credit, he has Woody Allen in it - and it's Woody as his specialty-funny-character in this one.
Sharon Stone is also in it which is wonderful because she made her acting debut in 'Stardust Memories'. She's in the amazing Fellini parody opening scene of 'Stardust Memories':
Yes, that's Shazza in the other train inviting Woody.
Anyway, she's been around the block a few times since 1981 and we know her from undie-less legs crossing and her Oscar-winning turn in 'Casino' and what have you, but here she is doing her thing in a film with Woody Allen. She even unleashes her trademark "I'm-having-the-best-sex-in-the-universe!" acting intertwined with barbs. They don't exactly share screen time - they just talk over the phone together - which is a shame.
John Turturro is very good as this dufus who falls into being a gigolo. It's a superb bit of film making. (Yay for the adults and no transforming robots or massive explosions and CGI.) Oh, and Bob Balaban is in it too as an inappropriately frank Jewish lawyer.
Hollywood Ending
Anyway, all this Woody Allen watching recently got me looking up this oldie, from just before Woody Allen stopped making films in Manhattan. It's almost a confessional.
It's about a director who directs a $60million blockbuster while being blind. He's really bagging out Hollywood so it's pretty cutting how he handles the studio executive characters played by George Hamilton, Treat Williams and Tea Leoni (my eternal fave!). It's not a great Woody Allen film, but it does have its moments of gut-busting laughs.
Speaking of which, Tea Leoni is sadly under-utilised in this film. She's a tremendous comic actress and yet she's given the strictly straight role against Woody's motormouth psychosomatic-nightmare patter. It's funny, but it could've been a lot funnier if he'd bothered to write some funny stuff for her to do. Bit of a waste of a good resource.
Watched a lot of videos. I can't take talking about politics this week.
Outcast
This one's weird.
You want weird? This one is definitely weird. Nicolas Cage and Hayden Christensen play Crusaders who get jaded and end up in China where they do some sword-fighting heroics. Hayden Christensen still has some of his moves from Star Wars episodes 2-3 going. Now that it's been 10years on he's matured bit and quite a bit more believable as a sword-wileding dude. Natalie Portman was saying playing Padme in the Star Wars movies nearly killed her career, but that could be more true of Hayden Christensen. Anyway, he plays the swashbuckling lead and it's quite okay. I can sort of see what George Lucas originally saw in him. He'd be a more credible Anakin now, by dint of age. I guess it's not to be.
Nicolas Cage is just plain-vanilla-odd in this movie. All of it.
Predestination
An Australian production starring Ethan Hawke. Hey, it's really quite good. A time-travel mind-fuck movie without any real 'Australian content' going on. Don't know how Screen Australia came to funding it, but it's a step in the right direction. And you know me and this blog - I never say nice things about Australian films these days. It's pretty damn good.
Recently when I was down in Melbourne I got to be talking to the critic Richard Haridy and he mentioned 'Predestination' as a great Australian film and mentioned was hardly getting audience traction exactly because it was Australian. It's a shame the brand of Australian cinema has sunk so low that when a good film finally comes along it can't earn its keep.
Fading Gigolo
There's this old story: People would pitch projects in LA saying they wanted to do a Woody Allen sort of movie and get rejected because they would get told only Woody Allen can do a Woody Allen sort of movie. This is John Turturro's Woody Allen sort of movie and to his credit, he has Woody Allen in it - and it's Woody as his specialty-funny-character in this one.
Sharon Stone is also in it which is wonderful because she made her acting debut in 'Stardust Memories'. She's in the amazing Fellini parody opening scene of 'Stardust Memories':
Yes, that's Shazza in the other train inviting Woody.
Anyway, she's been around the block a few times since 1981 and we know her from undie-less legs crossing and her Oscar-winning turn in 'Casino' and what have you, but here she is doing her thing in a film with Woody Allen. She even unleashes her trademark "I'm-having-the-best-sex-in-the-universe!" acting intertwined with barbs. They don't exactly share screen time - they just talk over the phone together - which is a shame.
John Turturro is very good as this dufus who falls into being a gigolo. It's a superb bit of film making. (Yay for the adults and no transforming robots or massive explosions and CGI.) Oh, and Bob Balaban is in it too as an inappropriately frank Jewish lawyer.
Hollywood Ending
Anyway, all this Woody Allen watching recently got me looking up this oldie, from just before Woody Allen stopped making films in Manhattan. It's almost a confessional.
It's about a director who directs a $60million blockbuster while being blind. He's really bagging out Hollywood so it's pretty cutting how he handles the studio executive characters played by George Hamilton, Treat Williams and Tea Leoni (my eternal fave!). It's not a great Woody Allen film, but it does have its moments of gut-busting laughs.
Speaking of which, Tea Leoni is sadly under-utilised in this film. She's a tremendous comic actress and yet she's given the strictly straight role against Woody's motormouth psychosomatic-nightmare patter. It's funny, but it could've been a lot funnier if he'd bothered to write some funny stuff for her to do. Bit of a waste of a good resource.
2014/12/20
'Magic In The Moonlight'
"I Don't Mean To Be Didactic Or Facetious Or Anything But..."
You gotta take your hat off to Woody Allen. He keeps churning out these witty films filled with bon mots and clever observations. Veering towards the sardonic at times, nonetheless Woody Allen may be one of the great romantic auteurs of them all. Nobody keeps dedicating themselves to drama and love the way he does. He is to romantic comedy what Michael Bay is to multiple explosions with transforming robots. When you grow out of transforming robots and the opposite sex begins to interest you, then maybe Woody Allen's oeuvre is finally for you. The way cinema is going there seems to be more of transforming robots and much less of witty chamber pieces.
At this point in time, every Woody Allen film is a gift. the man is nearing 80 and while he may never retire he's much closer to the finish line than even the middle. There aren't too many of these left and once he's gone, there really won't be any more. You may suspect that he is somewhat shadowed by his own mortality, letting his thoughts be clouded by the ever growing sense of doom. Judging from this film, he really doesn't give a shit about dying - he's busy making films.
What's Good About It
Having exiled himself from Manhattan, the more recent series of Allen films are set across Europe where he can get money to make his films. Paris, London, Rome, Barcelona and now the south of France have become the backdrop for his films. In each instance the different location has offset the native New Yorker concerns and in some films they have not worked too well. In this one he manages to strike a perfect balance as he portrays a group of expats living it up in the South of France in the 1920s.
Colin Firth puts in a monumental performance where he digests he Woody Allen vernacular but spits it out in his own British clipped delivery, with an excellent assurance. He plays a man who believes in his own patter really well. It does not evoke Woody Allen's own voice or mannerisms, and yet conveys the full, brutal verbal gymnastics of the script. It's a remarkable performance by Firth - even greater than his turn as the stuttering King George VI for which he won awards. Well, he's even better in this movie.
The script is taut and yet filled with insults, sarcasm and irony that tickle the brain. The central conflict of appearance versus realty is deftly played and Emma Stone is pretty good as the seance leading psychic.
What's Bad About It
Sometimes Colin Firth's character Stanley gets a little too strident with his cutting remarks. The "too much" element creeps in and makes you think "well, if you said that in real life they'd never speak to you again so how could the story continue?" Some of the remarks are too funny that they make you lose sight of the story as it barrels on.
"Being too funny is a strange problem to have," Allen once said in an interview. "It's a bit like being too rich." Sometimes the jokes are a little too rich at the expense of the narrative. maybe it's a good problem to have.
Also... I normally don't notice this sort of thing too much but this is the rare film where continuity isn't quite right and the performances don't match well from wide shot to closer shots. Emma Stone is a big offender here which is surprising. She's normally very good. It suggests the filming was happening so quickly she wasn't getting her performances down and solidified fast enough.
It sort of makes the edits very bumpy.
As well as these technical things the glaring problem is the age gap between Firth and Stone as love interests. It is like Woody and Soon-yi Previn. It might be alright for them, but it looks a bit yuck on screen.
What's Interesting About It
I think Woody Allen's films number somewhere around 50 - I haven't counted and Wikipedia doesn't give you a straight answer. IMDB says it's 50. There are some heavily recurring motifs and types across those films, an they are in play in this film as well. The magician with tricks is one, as is the song ingenue; the concern with money, society, and frauds; tricks deception and subterfuge; snobbery and education, breeding and class; they are all aspects that Allen has used in previous films but they make an appearance as standard elements he uses to short cut his way to the themes he wants to got at.
The magician trope is interesting because it is central to the plot of 'Oedipus Wrecks' and Woody appears as a magician in 'Scoop'. This time it is Firth who plays a magician that reminds us of recent great films 'The Prestige' and 'The Illusionist' but somehow the plot never really comes back to the magic trick thing. There's no reason for Firth's character to be a magician any more than simply be a sceptical scientist. The problem is that a sceptical scientist might not have enough of a visual impact so instead it is the magician with lots of visual appeal.The appeal is nice, but you get the feeling that Woody is just winging it by making the character a magician.
Similarly, his preoccupation with the stars and the universe makes an appearance. In 'Annie Hall', the universe is expanding and one day will explode into nothing-ness. In this film, it is meaning to the young Stanley. The stars and universe are always there to give perspective that the affairs of human beings are largely insignificant in the scope of things. While it may be true, it's interesting that Allen continues to resort to variations of this motif.
Even the psychic is a recurring character. As recently as 'You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger' (one of his great misanthropic masterpieces), the plot revolved around a psychic and her crappy advice. Woody Allen is scathing about the kinds of people who peddle spiritualism as a token but he is oddly enamoured of featuring such people in his films - not always as villains or negative side characters - and then launching into meditations about the possibility of the metaphysical.
If you make enough things you worry about repeating yourself, but evidently Woody Allen isn't too worried about that issue. He simply redresses the figures like he would with cast members and shoves the recycled elements anew. It reminds us of Hitchcock and his tropes with psychiatrists and policemen.
A Comedy Classicist
'Appearance versus Reality' is one of those comedy tropes that go right back to Shakespeare. A good deal of classical drama and comedy is built with this trope. Moliere's plays are built on people with odd disguises or people pretending to be what they are not. A typical gag might be built on "A man dresses up as ____ in order to win the heart of a woman."
Depending on the blank and how big the gap is, you can gauge the kind of comedy big written. If you said doctor, you have Moliere - or a Robin Williams movie. If you said Woman, then you definitely have a Robin Williams movie.
In this film it is a woman who pretends to be a psychic and a magician who pretends to be an ordinary businessman. It's enough fodder for Allen to spin a good 98minute film. It's so solid and complete, you marvel at how he gets it all done in the time. It's masterful.
He holds back on slapstick in this film and instead lets the structural elements and character comedy play out. Freed of having to play his own 'Woody Allen nebbish persona', Allen is able to direct a more interesting comedy. One can imagine how the film might have played out if a young Allen had played the magician and if Dianne Keaton had played the psychic. This film is much better for not being held by such trappings and expectations. This is making Woody Allen's late movies a lot more varied and far-ranging.
That being said, I really miss the Woody Allen who completely bollocked the establishment with 'Deconstructing Harry'. That was some seriously badass comedy writing.
You gotta take your hat off to Woody Allen. He keeps churning out these witty films filled with bon mots and clever observations. Veering towards the sardonic at times, nonetheless Woody Allen may be one of the great romantic auteurs of them all. Nobody keeps dedicating themselves to drama and love the way he does. He is to romantic comedy what Michael Bay is to multiple explosions with transforming robots. When you grow out of transforming robots and the opposite sex begins to interest you, then maybe Woody Allen's oeuvre is finally for you. The way cinema is going there seems to be more of transforming robots and much less of witty chamber pieces.
At this point in time, every Woody Allen film is a gift. the man is nearing 80 and while he may never retire he's much closer to the finish line than even the middle. There aren't too many of these left and once he's gone, there really won't be any more. You may suspect that he is somewhat shadowed by his own mortality, letting his thoughts be clouded by the ever growing sense of doom. Judging from this film, he really doesn't give a shit about dying - he's busy making films.
What's Good About It
Having exiled himself from Manhattan, the more recent series of Allen films are set across Europe where he can get money to make his films. Paris, London, Rome, Barcelona and now the south of France have become the backdrop for his films. In each instance the different location has offset the native New Yorker concerns and in some films they have not worked too well. In this one he manages to strike a perfect balance as he portrays a group of expats living it up in the South of France in the 1920s.
Colin Firth puts in a monumental performance where he digests he Woody Allen vernacular but spits it out in his own British clipped delivery, with an excellent assurance. He plays a man who believes in his own patter really well. It does not evoke Woody Allen's own voice or mannerisms, and yet conveys the full, brutal verbal gymnastics of the script. It's a remarkable performance by Firth - even greater than his turn as the stuttering King George VI for which he won awards. Well, he's even better in this movie.
The script is taut and yet filled with insults, sarcasm and irony that tickle the brain. The central conflict of appearance versus realty is deftly played and Emma Stone is pretty good as the seance leading psychic.
What's Bad About It
Sometimes Colin Firth's character Stanley gets a little too strident with his cutting remarks. The "too much" element creeps in and makes you think "well, if you said that in real life they'd never speak to you again so how could the story continue?" Some of the remarks are too funny that they make you lose sight of the story as it barrels on.
"Being too funny is a strange problem to have," Allen once said in an interview. "It's a bit like being too rich." Sometimes the jokes are a little too rich at the expense of the narrative. maybe it's a good problem to have.
Also... I normally don't notice this sort of thing too much but this is the rare film where continuity isn't quite right and the performances don't match well from wide shot to closer shots. Emma Stone is a big offender here which is surprising. She's normally very good. It suggests the filming was happening so quickly she wasn't getting her performances down and solidified fast enough.
It sort of makes the edits very bumpy.
As well as these technical things the glaring problem is the age gap between Firth and Stone as love interests. It is like Woody and Soon-yi Previn. It might be alright for them, but it looks a bit yuck on screen.
What's Interesting About It
I think Woody Allen's films number somewhere around 50 - I haven't counted and Wikipedia doesn't give you a straight answer. IMDB says it's 50. There are some heavily recurring motifs and types across those films, an they are in play in this film as well. The magician with tricks is one, as is the song ingenue; the concern with money, society, and frauds; tricks deception and subterfuge; snobbery and education, breeding and class; they are all aspects that Allen has used in previous films but they make an appearance as standard elements he uses to short cut his way to the themes he wants to got at.
The magician trope is interesting because it is central to the plot of 'Oedipus Wrecks' and Woody appears as a magician in 'Scoop'. This time it is Firth who plays a magician that reminds us of recent great films 'The Prestige' and 'The Illusionist' but somehow the plot never really comes back to the magic trick thing. There's no reason for Firth's character to be a magician any more than simply be a sceptical scientist. The problem is that a sceptical scientist might not have enough of a visual impact so instead it is the magician with lots of visual appeal.The appeal is nice, but you get the feeling that Woody is just winging it by making the character a magician.
Similarly, his preoccupation with the stars and the universe makes an appearance. In 'Annie Hall', the universe is expanding and one day will explode into nothing-ness. In this film, it is meaning to the young Stanley. The stars and universe are always there to give perspective that the affairs of human beings are largely insignificant in the scope of things. While it may be true, it's interesting that Allen continues to resort to variations of this motif.
Even the psychic is a recurring character. As recently as 'You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger' (one of his great misanthropic masterpieces), the plot revolved around a psychic and her crappy advice. Woody Allen is scathing about the kinds of people who peddle spiritualism as a token but he is oddly enamoured of featuring such people in his films - not always as villains or negative side characters - and then launching into meditations about the possibility of the metaphysical.
If you make enough things you worry about repeating yourself, but evidently Woody Allen isn't too worried about that issue. He simply redresses the figures like he would with cast members and shoves the recycled elements anew. It reminds us of Hitchcock and his tropes with psychiatrists and policemen.
A Comedy Classicist
'Appearance versus Reality' is one of those comedy tropes that go right back to Shakespeare. A good deal of classical drama and comedy is built with this trope. Moliere's plays are built on people with odd disguises or people pretending to be what they are not. A typical gag might be built on "A man dresses up as ____ in order to win the heart of a woman."
Depending on the blank and how big the gap is, you can gauge the kind of comedy big written. If you said doctor, you have Moliere - or a Robin Williams movie. If you said Woman, then you definitely have a Robin Williams movie.
In this film it is a woman who pretends to be a psychic and a magician who pretends to be an ordinary businessman. It's enough fodder for Allen to spin a good 98minute film. It's so solid and complete, you marvel at how he gets it all done in the time. It's masterful.
He holds back on slapstick in this film and instead lets the structural elements and character comedy play out. Freed of having to play his own 'Woody Allen nebbish persona', Allen is able to direct a more interesting comedy. One can imagine how the film might have played out if a young Allen had played the magician and if Dianne Keaton had played the psychic. This film is much better for not being held by such trappings and expectations. This is making Woody Allen's late movies a lot more varied and far-ranging.
That being said, I really miss the Woody Allen who completely bollocked the establishment with 'Deconstructing Harry'. That was some seriously badass comedy writing.
2014/12/17
Hollowed Out
The Unbearable Lightness Of All Being
I'm still reeling from the Martin Place siege. I didn't write about it yesterday, but I am specifically distraught about one of the victims Katrina Dawson. Sydney is a small enough that there are people around me whose lives intersected with hers and her family. It's like 2 degrees of separation, sometimes 3. Above all, her life and career to date reads like an exemplary human being we would all want to spire to or at least have our kids grow into. I'm sure she had her foibles but it's rare you find a life that reads like a perfect record.
She was by all accounts a remarkable human being. Topped her school, topped her state in graduating; topped the law faculty at Sydney University; got a masters at UNSW; topped the class in her bar entrance exam; a loving, admired mother of three; by all accounts she was the best of the best - and her life came to an abrupt end at the hands of a malicious jerk. To tell you the truth I'm aghast at this turn of events for her and her young family.
I'm doubly aghast because her death seems to open up a void, a nihilistic space of nothingness that stares back, absent of meaning. The religious sermon delivered does not fill it; philosophy can only abstract it, but it cannot fill it; it just feels like if you wanted conclusive proof that nothing in this life has any profound meaning, you could point to this siege and her death. The violence that befell her didn't come looking for her specifically - she had not made an enemy of this man. There really was no rhyme nor reason to the violence that felled both Katrina Dawson and Tori Johnson. The allegedly political stance taken by Monis was hardly credible, legitimate, or real - it was just some bullshit he came up with in order to try and give some meaning to his senseless stupid life. But if there's one thing that's certain, his life was devoid of any serious meaning. He sure made sure of that one by ending on a note of gratuitous violence.
Our own liberalism offers very little help in all of this mess. Officials from Iran claimed that they asked to extradite this Monis back to Iran and they said our government refused. Our government presumably refused because having issued political asylum to this man it must have assumed that a return to Iran would be giving him up for political reasons and therefore against our sense of freedom (or whatever liberal principle we might have had). After all what could possibly happen to the man? Probably torture, so they said 'no'. Our government probably didn't look too deeply into the possibility that the Iranians genuinely/legitimately wanted this man for fraud.
So we held on to him in Australia because giving him up to Iranian authorities would mean we were giving up on our liberal principles. He wrote disgusting letters to the family of dead servicemen. He was convicted of harassment but his sentence was only 300hours of community service. Rather than just do the community service, he fought the sentence al the way to the high court (and lost). He had his wife killed and set alight. He pretended to be a healer and sexually assaulted women. Each time he found himself in front a of a judge he got the benefit of the doubt and got bail. At each and every turn where this man might have been taken off the streets, our very liberal principles put him back onto the street.
Hence you'll have to forgive me if I feel a little shirty about my own small-'l-liberalism just for this week. We effectively fight for the rights of the very people who would kill us senselessly. It sure makes you want to embrace fascism and looser gun laws, even if only temporarily. There is no meaning to any of this. Nothing bloody well matters.
I don't envy the task of her widower husband who must explain mummy's death to three kids. I can't possibly imagine how he's going to frame it with any kind of meaning when he explains what happened. In my humble opinion, there is not a sensible conversation to be had there. If it is just tears and embraces, that would make more sense than any words that can be uttered. There's nothing but the meaningless void.
We should all be nice to each other a lot more. Life's really short.
I'm still reeling from the Martin Place siege. I didn't write about it yesterday, but I am specifically distraught about one of the victims Katrina Dawson. Sydney is a small enough that there are people around me whose lives intersected with hers and her family. It's like 2 degrees of separation, sometimes 3. Above all, her life and career to date reads like an exemplary human being we would all want to spire to or at least have our kids grow into. I'm sure she had her foibles but it's rare you find a life that reads like a perfect record.
She was by all accounts a remarkable human being. Topped her school, topped her state in graduating; topped the law faculty at Sydney University; got a masters at UNSW; topped the class in her bar entrance exam; a loving, admired mother of three; by all accounts she was the best of the best - and her life came to an abrupt end at the hands of a malicious jerk. To tell you the truth I'm aghast at this turn of events for her and her young family.
I'm doubly aghast because her death seems to open up a void, a nihilistic space of nothingness that stares back, absent of meaning. The religious sermon delivered does not fill it; philosophy can only abstract it, but it cannot fill it; it just feels like if you wanted conclusive proof that nothing in this life has any profound meaning, you could point to this siege and her death. The violence that befell her didn't come looking for her specifically - she had not made an enemy of this man. There really was no rhyme nor reason to the violence that felled both Katrina Dawson and Tori Johnson. The allegedly political stance taken by Monis was hardly credible, legitimate, or real - it was just some bullshit he came up with in order to try and give some meaning to his senseless stupid life. But if there's one thing that's certain, his life was devoid of any serious meaning. He sure made sure of that one by ending on a note of gratuitous violence.
Our own liberalism offers very little help in all of this mess. Officials from Iran claimed that they asked to extradite this Monis back to Iran and they said our government refused. Our government presumably refused because having issued political asylum to this man it must have assumed that a return to Iran would be giving him up for political reasons and therefore against our sense of freedom (or whatever liberal principle we might have had). After all what could possibly happen to the man? Probably torture, so they said 'no'. Our government probably didn't look too deeply into the possibility that the Iranians genuinely/legitimately wanted this man for fraud.
So we held on to him in Australia because giving him up to Iranian authorities would mean we were giving up on our liberal principles. He wrote disgusting letters to the family of dead servicemen. He was convicted of harassment but his sentence was only 300hours of community service. Rather than just do the community service, he fought the sentence al the way to the high court (and lost). He had his wife killed and set alight. He pretended to be a healer and sexually assaulted women. Each time he found himself in front a of a judge he got the benefit of the doubt and got bail. At each and every turn where this man might have been taken off the streets, our very liberal principles put him back onto the street.
Hence you'll have to forgive me if I feel a little shirty about my own small-'l-liberalism just for this week. We effectively fight for the rights of the very people who would kill us senselessly. It sure makes you want to embrace fascism and looser gun laws, even if only temporarily. There is no meaning to any of this. Nothing bloody well matters.
I don't envy the task of her widower husband who must explain mummy's death to three kids. I can't possibly imagine how he's going to frame it with any kind of meaning when he explains what happened. In my humble opinion, there is not a sensible conversation to be had there. If it is just tears and embraces, that would make more sense than any words that can be uttered. There's nothing but the meaningless void.
We should all be nice to each other a lot more. Life's really short.
2014/12/16
The Martin Place Siege
Wog Day Afternoon
Yes, I'm being rude because I'm incensed. I'm particularly hating on the identity politics being drawn out like one of those outlines they draw on corpses in old American movies. If this is allowed to become an identity politics issue, we'll see it feed in to the asylum seeker issue, and no good is ever going to come of it.
As the dust and gun smoke settles on the dramatic siege, we now understand that the culprit was a misfit with a gun and the wrong song in his heart. He wanted to have us frame his hostage-taking as a political act, but it seems it was the desperate final act of a cornered man.
I have to say the way things unfolded seemed very strange and disjointed, what with the media embargo and the self-censorship by the mainstream media. But at its heart was the burning question was "What kind of idiot walks into a cafe and turns it into a siege?"
The Lindt Cafe, was across the street from some major banking headquarters as well as the Reserve Bank of Australia. It was also in the vicinity of the consulate generals for the USA and Japan. It was a target rich environment and the man opted to take hostages in the Lindt Cafe. Clearly this wasn't an act of terror, it was a cry for help -but he waved the black flag with the arabic squiggles on it and the media all went, "oh that must be ISIL."
It's only the day after that we're learning the whole thing was ad hoc; he took the wrong flag to his own hostage taking; he wasn't really all that together to begin with; and maybe perhaps should've been behind bars and not out on bail. It's not like I have any special analysis that somebody else isn't hurling around - I'm just jotting down my own outrage at the whole media circus.
It seems incredibly pathetic to me that for the better part of the day while it was unfolding that we were led to believe that it was a political act. It was only political if you take the view that the personal is ipso facto political - the way that Carol Hanisch said it, but applying identity politics to Islam instead of gender. It's kind of stupid to take a bloated subjective sense of one self and seeing in it the universal-political. In the same sense that it's hard to buy this Man Haron Monis' own views about his own political importance, it is hard to buy into the notion that a black flag with arabic writing on it is ergo Terrorism-with-a-capital-'T'. It was more terrifying because it was so gratuitous, so ridiculous in the end-analysis and so bloody stupid. This was not 9/11.
The truth is a lot more easily understood as the random violent undertaking by the unhinged - and more's the pity that two people had to die in all the unleashed chaos. The politicians are making a field day out of this, what with flags flying at half mast and praising the NSW police for their expertise, courage and dutifulness. Look, I don't mean to be the party pooper but it was one middle-aged guy with a shotgun holding hostages in a downtown cafe. It wasn't exactly the public beheading on YouTube of the American journalist somewhere in Syria. Whatever this was, it was not that.
He was just this angry, misplaced future-shocked human being who was looking for an out - an elaborate dramatic - sensationalist even - plot for an assisted suicide. His hostage taking venture was about as stupid as 'Dog Day Afternoon' and went about as well.
What Kind Of Man Reads
Still, we must ask ourselves what kind of manner stupid we were dealing with.
Some years ago there was a dickhead writing letters to the family of dead Australian soldiers castigating them. That was this guy Man Haron Monis.
Some months ago it was reported that some sheikh was offering 'spiritual healing' but turned out he was sexually molesting his customers. That was also this guy Man Haron Monis.
Sometime last year it was reported that some religious dude had stabbed his wife to death and set the corpse on fire. That was this same guy again, Man Haron Monis.
Do you see a pattern emerging where neither the law nor media draws a line to connect these things? This guy was disturbed.
Now the same guy somehow gets bail from his 40 charges of sexual assault and being an accomplice to murder, and goes and does this shitty little thing. I think we're entitled to ask, just what the hell happened inside the system that failed us so badly? The community outrage is going to centre on this issue and the governments - both Federal and NSW - had better have some good answers. So far the indication is pretty cruddy.
Showdown In The Lindt Cafe
Turns out, ASIO knew about this guy and he wasn't on the Terror watch list.
Speaking in Sydney on Tuesday after laying flowers at a spontaneous memorial for the victims at Martin Place, Mr Abbott said Monis was well known to federal and NSW police and ASIO, but "I don't believe that he was on a terror watch list".
"If I can be candid with you, that is the question that we were asking ourselves around the national security committee of the cabinet today," Mr Abbott said.
"How can someone who has had such a long and chequered history, not be on the appropriate watch lists, and how can someone like that be entirely at large in the community?"
He said the federal government had acted upon hearing "terrorist chatter of acts of random violence against Australian citizens", such as upgrading security at Parliament House in Canberra and raising the terror alert.
"But … we do have to ask ourselves the question, could [the Martin Place incident] have been been prevented?"The answer is, you can't. Unless you're like the Woody Allen joke where he fails a metaphysics exam because he looked into the soul of the student next to him.
More to the point, there's every indication this guy was mentally ill, but nobody diagnosed him.
Short of that, what could they have done? Picked him up on the street and tortured him until he confessed to plot when he himself had no idea what he was going to do until 3 days before? The unknowable is the unknowable for a reason.
A Side Note On Torturing Terrorists
Look, it's not about the Martin Place siege but more about the CIA report, which has been bugging me all week and then this siege happened. We in the wider community know what's right and what's wrong. And we know it right into the heart of democracy. Then suddenly, once in power, these politicians condone the unthinkable. It's such a weird phenomenon.
I found this on YouTube which is tangential, but has something important to say about this stuff:
You tell'em Denzel because they sure didn't listen to the real people who objected after 9/11. After a near-deacde of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I think by 2011 we'd descended into this kind of fiction:
We're really not in a good spot in the moral high ground stakes here.
'A Most Wanted Man'
Saying Farewell To Philip Seymour Hoffman
The last films Philip Seymour Hoffman worked on were the Hunger Games Mocking-jay pictures,, but just before he left this world and the filming of the young adult confection, he finished this film which is bit of a tour de force performance. Because the entire marketing of films has become so centred around youth there was nary a whimper or whisper as this film came and went at the cinemas. It's a sombre film with very stark, quite unflattering lighting, but the story is the star with this one and it really is a bit of a gem.
Spoiler alert, just in case I let something out of the bag.
What's Good About It
It's a film with a very understated style and the performances are very controlled, adding to the tension and emotional claustrophobia. The first 10 minutes are a little disorienting because you spend a bit of time piecing together just who you are watching and why. The film features some interesting character actors apart from Hoffman and Rachel McAdam does a pretty good job of playing the liberal-leaning lawyer who gets to be thereat in the sandwich.
A lot of the plot is subtle and the problematic seems to exist on a very abstract level. This is a good thing because all too often we get regaled with plots so heavily delineated that it leaves nothing to the imagination. Teethings left unsaid are as important as the things said in this film and so the performances matter greatly. It's a very satisfying film that way.
Hamburg as a city sets an interesting backdrop, and the staged scenes that result have a very distinct look. It's nice to get away from the usual spy movie fare of CIA in Virginia and a deliberately dusty, miserable Beirut or some messy Middle-Eastern urban landscape.
What's Bad About It
It's not so much what's bad about it, but more what is dissatisfying about it, is the niggling sense that we've watched something to do with events of absolutely zero consequence. That, after the film is over and you ponder the meaning of the characters and the plot, you get the feeling that the futility seeps right out and infects the entire enterprise.
Maybe that's the point of the film. That we employ a large intelligence and counter-terrorism force to keep people employed, and not much else. Of course, things do have a way of happening.
What's Interesting About It
The day after I watched this film, there was the hostage incident in Martin Place. It appears the radicals are a lot harder to track in real life. The expert proficiency with which the team isolate and together targets is somewhat contrary to how these things seem to unfold in real life. We give our government institutions too much credit when our fiction portrays them as such paragons of efficiency.
The really blurry area of intelligence and counter-terrorism is the human element and the capacity of human beings to commit to tasks. In that sense the film over-ascribes to people's will power, capability and commitment. The schema of the predictable behaviour in humans is actually a bit of a furphy in these sorts of spy films. If the motive is so obscure we have to guess at it, then it is likely not going to sustain the narrative drive in a visceral way. The film at times becomes very abstract in parts.
If one had to conjecture, the guy who held the Lindt cafe in Martin Place, would probably have had solid, material motivation for doing what he did. It wouldn't have been terribly obscure or hard to describe.
The Assumption of Torture
Part of the narrative progresses with the implicit understanding and solid assumption that state organs torture their captive terror suspects in order to gather information. Atlas in this fictional space, there is no deeper discussion about how the Russians or CIA do their business of getting intelligence from uncooperative people.
We live in a certain kind of world where we doublethink our way around the fact that these agencies do things that we in our middle class moralism would find objectionable. The film paints this as 'the real world' and while we don't see it, it is accepted as part of the real world that prisoners in the war against terror get tortured. It's Orwell's '1984', but with brighter colours. The recent report on the CIA ostensibly blows a lid on this kind of thing but ultimately our world seems to accept this collateral damage to our conscience. We don't get deeper into a mechanism for peace because it would demand we totally re-engineer our politics, but there are too many vested interests in politics staying the way it is.
The character Gunther played byPhilip Seymour Hoffman is searching for that door, but he cannot articulate it, much less communicate it to the CIA representative. The State apparatus cannot move towards a live-and-let-live position. So we are left with the frustrating denouement.
The Grubbiness Of Adulthood
Part of the real world in which Gunther inhabits is a world of moral ambiguities and even ambiguities in professional and private affections. Philip Seymour Hoffman does an amazing job of portraying a man who is on a mission trying to preserve some semblance of propriety in a business devoid of propriety. He is in the business of saving lives while baking some lives; but he is tired of the destruction the business brings. It's a masterful performance.
Rachel McAdam plays a rather down-beat lawyer that matches up in dourness, but is much too innocent and naive to see the war on terror as a gigantic state machine that would dwarf individuals. Hoffman's Gunther offers a portrait of the unthinkable working through the problem - on a limited budget no less - and navigating the very grey areas of ethics and policy. Duty and futility sit side by side as he convinces the young lawyer that the world of politics demands the world of espionage. The more one knows, the more one becomes an adult in the real world, and the more grubby our souls become. The option of staying idealistic simply does not work. The film is a towering work of pessimism, held together by Hoffman's finely nuanced performance, and that is where the viewing pleasure lies.
In that sense it is a very mature, adult kind of film - sort of rare in this day and age of super hero comic book movies and Hasbro toys movies. As swan songs go, this is a mighty effort from Philip Seymour Hoffman.
The last films Philip Seymour Hoffman worked on were the Hunger Games Mocking-jay pictures,, but just before he left this world and the filming of the young adult confection, he finished this film which is bit of a tour de force performance. Because the entire marketing of films has become so centred around youth there was nary a whimper or whisper as this film came and went at the cinemas. It's a sombre film with very stark, quite unflattering lighting, but the story is the star with this one and it really is a bit of a gem.
Spoiler alert, just in case I let something out of the bag.
What's Good About It
It's a film with a very understated style and the performances are very controlled, adding to the tension and emotional claustrophobia. The first 10 minutes are a little disorienting because you spend a bit of time piecing together just who you are watching and why. The film features some interesting character actors apart from Hoffman and Rachel McAdam does a pretty good job of playing the liberal-leaning lawyer who gets to be thereat in the sandwich.
A lot of the plot is subtle and the problematic seems to exist on a very abstract level. This is a good thing because all too often we get regaled with plots so heavily delineated that it leaves nothing to the imagination. Teethings left unsaid are as important as the things said in this film and so the performances matter greatly. It's a very satisfying film that way.
Hamburg as a city sets an interesting backdrop, and the staged scenes that result have a very distinct look. It's nice to get away from the usual spy movie fare of CIA in Virginia and a deliberately dusty, miserable Beirut or some messy Middle-Eastern urban landscape.
What's Bad About It
It's not so much what's bad about it, but more what is dissatisfying about it, is the niggling sense that we've watched something to do with events of absolutely zero consequence. That, after the film is over and you ponder the meaning of the characters and the plot, you get the feeling that the futility seeps right out and infects the entire enterprise.
Maybe that's the point of the film. That we employ a large intelligence and counter-terrorism force to keep people employed, and not much else. Of course, things do have a way of happening.
What's Interesting About It
The day after I watched this film, there was the hostage incident in Martin Place. It appears the radicals are a lot harder to track in real life. The expert proficiency with which the team isolate and together targets is somewhat contrary to how these things seem to unfold in real life. We give our government institutions too much credit when our fiction portrays them as such paragons of efficiency.
The really blurry area of intelligence and counter-terrorism is the human element and the capacity of human beings to commit to tasks. In that sense the film over-ascribes to people's will power, capability and commitment. The schema of the predictable behaviour in humans is actually a bit of a furphy in these sorts of spy films. If the motive is so obscure we have to guess at it, then it is likely not going to sustain the narrative drive in a visceral way. The film at times becomes very abstract in parts.
If one had to conjecture, the guy who held the Lindt cafe in Martin Place, would probably have had solid, material motivation for doing what he did. It wouldn't have been terribly obscure or hard to describe.
The Assumption of Torture
Part of the narrative progresses with the implicit understanding and solid assumption that state organs torture their captive terror suspects in order to gather information. Atlas in this fictional space, there is no deeper discussion about how the Russians or CIA do their business of getting intelligence from uncooperative people.
We live in a certain kind of world where we doublethink our way around the fact that these agencies do things that we in our middle class moralism would find objectionable. The film paints this as 'the real world' and while we don't see it, it is accepted as part of the real world that prisoners in the war against terror get tortured. It's Orwell's '1984', but with brighter colours. The recent report on the CIA ostensibly blows a lid on this kind of thing but ultimately our world seems to accept this collateral damage to our conscience. We don't get deeper into a mechanism for peace because it would demand we totally re-engineer our politics, but there are too many vested interests in politics staying the way it is.
The character Gunther played byPhilip Seymour Hoffman is searching for that door, but he cannot articulate it, much less communicate it to the CIA representative. The State apparatus cannot move towards a live-and-let-live position. So we are left with the frustrating denouement.
The Grubbiness Of Adulthood
Part of the real world in which Gunther inhabits is a world of moral ambiguities and even ambiguities in professional and private affections. Philip Seymour Hoffman does an amazing job of portraying a man who is on a mission trying to preserve some semblance of propriety in a business devoid of propriety. He is in the business of saving lives while baking some lives; but he is tired of the destruction the business brings. It's a masterful performance.
Rachel McAdam plays a rather down-beat lawyer that matches up in dourness, but is much too innocent and naive to see the war on terror as a gigantic state machine that would dwarf individuals. Hoffman's Gunther offers a portrait of the unthinkable working through the problem - on a limited budget no less - and navigating the very grey areas of ethics and policy. Duty and futility sit side by side as he convinces the young lawyer that the world of politics demands the world of espionage. The more one knows, the more one becomes an adult in the real world, and the more grubby our souls become. The option of staying idealistic simply does not work. The film is a towering work of pessimism, held together by Hoffman's finely nuanced performance, and that is where the viewing pleasure lies.
In that sense it is a very mature, adult kind of film - sort of rare in this day and age of super hero comic book movies and Hasbro toys movies. As swan songs go, this is a mighty effort from Philip Seymour Hoffman.
2014/12/13
The CIA And Its Torture Record
Where Does The Buck Stop With Torture?
It's always bothered me that the Abu Ghraib prison mess ended up with Lynndie England going to prison and the CIA handlers of the torture got away scot free. If you can't remember, Lynndie England was the poor sod left holding the leash in the photo of some Iraqi prisoner being tortured in Abu Ghraib prison. The way the trial concluded, it essentially placed all the culpability on a PFC with less than average intelligence. As if it was all her idea.
The hypocrisy of the US Army and government satisfying itself with this outcome and shoving the whole issue under the carpet was one of the horrible little spectacles of the 2000s. Now we're finding out that the US government is atlas willing to form a commission to say the truth - that the CIA regularly tortured people, that the torture did not yield significant information and people responsible for these crimes against humanity have essentially walked free. Rank Hath Its Privileges and all that operating from top to bottom, which dovetails with the way PFC England's trial went.
Even the legal loophole that placed the Guantanamo Bay prisoners out of reach of US civilian courts, or the way 'renditions' were carried out so that the torture took place on foreign soil where torture was accepted indicates a a kind of ethical vacuum where hypocrisy played fast and loose papered over scrutiny and objection. Even now, republican politicians are saying the 'enhanced interrogations' were fruitful and necessary, and that the report is 'hooey'. Is 'hooey' even a proper refutation of anything?
"I declare your augment 'hooey'"
"Well good sir, I guess you got me a good one. Your call of 'hooey' renders all the facts and evidence presented before us meaningless now."
I don't think so Dick.
In light of all that, it's refreshing to see people want those in the highest offices be held accountable for those acts. It would be hard to see the likes of GW Bush, Dick Cheney, Condy Rice and Donald Rumsfeld brought to account for their part in this horrifying chapter in the War Against Terror. The problem is that it is aways so hard to wage a War Against Error. If there were any justice in any of this, the Bush Administration cabal of politicians would land in the dock for their part in presiding over this stuff. The cynic in me doubts it would happen. President Obama is speaking in a neutral tone trying to douse that flame. I guess he's got drone strikes on his record to worry about.
The Euphemisms Suck
Speaking of which... 'Enhanced Interrogation' is one of these euphemisms that make you wonder how much people are willing to screw with words in order to hide meaning. Calling torture 'Enhanced Interrogation' is like describing rape as 'Enhanced Seduction'. The impulse to substitute Latinate words over old Anglo-Saxon ones goes a long way towards making things sound more official and legitimate.
They do this in Asia too, whereby if you want something to sound more official, you dig up ever more obscure Chinese characters to describe things. So it's not a phenomenon unique to English. As a writer of some experience, it's easy to spot that the same trick is being used exactly to enhance authority and enhance legitimacy on something that is at its deepest core dodgy and suspect.
David Hicks Rears His Ugly Head
It didn't take long before the Guantanamo Bay returnee piped up and made himself visible as the victim of torture at Gitmo. After all these years I still find it difficult to be sympathetic, but I do take his point that if they wanted to know if people got tortured by the CIA, they need not have looked too much further than the inmates at Guantanamo Bay base. I didn't believe him when he said he was an accidental bystander, but I did believe him when he said they tortured him and others down in Gitmo.
I've been pondering from where this belief came, and I have to say it seemed obvious that the US Marines might not take too kindly to enemy captives who were suspected terrorists, in the wake of 9/11. It seemed far more unbelievable that such captives wouldn't be tortured in Gitmo. I would even posit and say the least surprising thing is to find confirmation that the CIA used renditions to torture prisoners in third-party nations, during the years straight after 9/11.
All the same I have mixed emotions about David Hicks turning up to confront the world with his experience of torture. Yes torture is bad and never justified, so I'm not going to say he deserved the torture he got but there's still a cloud over how and why Hicks ended up in a war zone with the Taliban to begin with. Most of us who witnessed the Twin Towers come down that day still went to work and we did our thing, discharged our duties and lived proper civilised lives. He - feeling inspired - went to fight with the Taliban (a fact he has tried to downplay since his return).
The disquiet I've always felt with David Hicks is that he won't come clean about that bit, so it's really hard for me to give him a whole lot of moral high ground just because he got captured, sent to Guantanamo Bay and got tortured. Sure torture is a terrible thing and it sucks that it happened to him. Be that as it may, there's a very good reason the vast majority of humanity didn't end up in Camp X-Ray with him - what ever it was that he did that led him to Gitmo, it was an asshole thing to do; and I am a cynic, doing my best not to get fooled again.
It's always bothered me that the Abu Ghraib prison mess ended up with Lynndie England going to prison and the CIA handlers of the torture got away scot free. If you can't remember, Lynndie England was the poor sod left holding the leash in the photo of some Iraqi prisoner being tortured in Abu Ghraib prison. The way the trial concluded, it essentially placed all the culpability on a PFC with less than average intelligence. As if it was all her idea.
The hypocrisy of the US Army and government satisfying itself with this outcome and shoving the whole issue under the carpet was one of the horrible little spectacles of the 2000s. Now we're finding out that the US government is atlas willing to form a commission to say the truth - that the CIA regularly tortured people, that the torture did not yield significant information and people responsible for these crimes against humanity have essentially walked free. Rank Hath Its Privileges and all that operating from top to bottom, which dovetails with the way PFC England's trial went.
Even the legal loophole that placed the Guantanamo Bay prisoners out of reach of US civilian courts, or the way 'renditions' were carried out so that the torture took place on foreign soil where torture was accepted indicates a a kind of ethical vacuum where hypocrisy played fast and loose papered over scrutiny and objection. Even now, republican politicians are saying the 'enhanced interrogations' were fruitful and necessary, and that the report is 'hooey'. Is 'hooey' even a proper refutation of anything?
"I declare your augment 'hooey'"
"Well good sir, I guess you got me a good one. Your call of 'hooey' renders all the facts and evidence presented before us meaningless now."
I don't think so Dick.
In light of all that, it's refreshing to see people want those in the highest offices be held accountable for those acts. It would be hard to see the likes of GW Bush, Dick Cheney, Condy Rice and Donald Rumsfeld brought to account for their part in this horrifying chapter in the War Against Terror. The problem is that it is aways so hard to wage a War Against Error. If there were any justice in any of this, the Bush Administration cabal of politicians would land in the dock for their part in presiding over this stuff. The cynic in me doubts it would happen. President Obama is speaking in a neutral tone trying to douse that flame. I guess he's got drone strikes on his record to worry about.
The Euphemisms Suck
Speaking of which... 'Enhanced Interrogation' is one of these euphemisms that make you wonder how much people are willing to screw with words in order to hide meaning. Calling torture 'Enhanced Interrogation' is like describing rape as 'Enhanced Seduction'. The impulse to substitute Latinate words over old Anglo-Saxon ones goes a long way towards making things sound more official and legitimate.
They do this in Asia too, whereby if you want something to sound more official, you dig up ever more obscure Chinese characters to describe things. So it's not a phenomenon unique to English. As a writer of some experience, it's easy to spot that the same trick is being used exactly to enhance authority and enhance legitimacy on something that is at its deepest core dodgy and suspect.
David Hicks Rears His Ugly Head
It didn't take long before the Guantanamo Bay returnee piped up and made himself visible as the victim of torture at Gitmo. After all these years I still find it difficult to be sympathetic, but I do take his point that if they wanted to know if people got tortured by the CIA, they need not have looked too much further than the inmates at Guantanamo Bay base. I didn't believe him when he said he was an accidental bystander, but I did believe him when he said they tortured him and others down in Gitmo.
I've been pondering from where this belief came, and I have to say it seemed obvious that the US Marines might not take too kindly to enemy captives who were suspected terrorists, in the wake of 9/11. It seemed far more unbelievable that such captives wouldn't be tortured in Gitmo. I would even posit and say the least surprising thing is to find confirmation that the CIA used renditions to torture prisoners in third-party nations, during the years straight after 9/11.
All the same I have mixed emotions about David Hicks turning up to confront the world with his experience of torture. Yes torture is bad and never justified, so I'm not going to say he deserved the torture he got but there's still a cloud over how and why Hicks ended up in a war zone with the Taliban to begin with. Most of us who witnessed the Twin Towers come down that day still went to work and we did our thing, discharged our duties and lived proper civilised lives. He - feeling inspired - went to fight with the Taliban (a fact he has tried to downplay since his return).
The disquiet I've always felt with David Hicks is that he won't come clean about that bit, so it's really hard for me to give him a whole lot of moral high ground just because he got captured, sent to Guantanamo Bay and got tortured. Sure torture is a terrible thing and it sucks that it happened to him. Be that as it may, there's a very good reason the vast majority of humanity didn't end up in Camp X-Ray with him - what ever it was that he did that led him to Gitmo, it was an asshole thing to do; and I am a cynic, doing my best not to get fooled again.
2014/12/11
Pathetic In Parliament
Pyne Begs Abbott
It turns out Christopher Pyne wasn't running some deep Machiavellian plot when he ran a petition to save the ABC production facility in Adelaide. Now we learn he's begging the Prime Minister for a rethink. All because he is not polling well in his own electorate and if he had to explain how he lost the production facility from Adelaide, it's hard to see how he doesn't get humiliated at every doorstep in his electorate. That's the funny thing about democracy - your constituent's opinions count for something some of the time.
To save the bit on his turf, Christopher Pyne is arguing that the ABC should be made to spend some of the money in regional production, which would save Adelaide's production facility. In other words, he's arguing for jobs protections for his constituency as being an exception. You'd think he was - god forbid - in favour of regulation as opposed to the rampant deregulation for things in his own portfolio.
Quite apart from the total departure from the regular Liberal Party economic rationalist patter, he wants to save his turf at the expense of somebody else's turf. As you can see it's unprincipled on at least three levels but I guess you try anything when it comes to trying to save your own skin.
Malcolm Fraser Thinks They Suck
Live long enough, you see lots of strange things. Perhaps principle amongst my list of strange things is the sight of Malcolm Fraser attacking the Liberal Party from the outside over the asylum seeker issue.
All the same, it's a very vexed topic where there is much electoral support to punish the asylum seekers. It's a weird thing, this impulse to punish the asylum seekers, but there are some clues as to the thinking out there.
A long while back, Sam told me about his qualms about asylum seekers arriving in boats. "It's a bit like if I tried to drown myself in a swimming pool in the Eastern Suburbs and they rescue me. And I tell them that people are trying to kill me in the Western Suburbs so I had to come to Vaucluse; and the only way I could think of making you take me in was if I tried to drown myself in your swimming pool. Now you have to let me live in your house."
Now, just to be clear, Sam was joking.
Sam went on to say that of course Australia is much nicer than wherever the hell the people come from, much as Vaucluse is much nicer than say, St. Marys. So if you're picking and choosing, you would pick Vaucluse as the place to pull your stunt rather than anywhere in between. Once you decide you don't want to live where you live, then it's time to shop and people are shopping for Australia as a destination. If we all had the choice, maybe we'd all choose to live in Vaucluse, in which case who would be left to live in the poor suburbs to work as garbage collectors and plumbers?
But if you're a resident of Vaucluse, should you take this choice seriously? Isn't it obvious that the people in Vaucluse would ring the police and have the intruder removed or arrested for trespassing? And that is essentially what Manus and Nauru and Christmas Island detention Islands are - prisons for trespassing. Naturally the people who believe in Manus and Naura (or Cambodia!) as a 'solution' believe that the prison system is a fine deterrent to crime. If you bought that, Sam also had a boat ticket for you to buy.
And so the analogy went. It was all a bit 'Down And Out In Beverly Hills'.
I can see one aspect to the fear is that Australia is in the middle of a housing bubble that is pricing lots of people out of the property market. There is a lot of mortgage stress even if you can get a piece of it. It's not an environment conducive to being generous to the needy when people are seriously worried about keeping their own roofs and backyards. Scott Morrison is obviously playing to this pathetic anxiety, which in turn is at the very core of this pathetic kind of politics we're witnessing in Canberra. However, on a deeper level, people are wanting to reject the asylum seekers because they see the boat-and-drown asylum seekers as gaming the system - and nobody wants to be a schmuck.
The sad thing is that people out there in voter land genuinely don't want to see people on boats drowning on our doorsteps. Their preference is that the charade stops altogether, and the problem simply went away; but that would entail the dispossessed stop picking the metaphorical Vaucluse as the destination. Vaucluse is kind of nice if it weren't for the people. But it's those people who are saying piss off, don't care what your story is, just go back to St Marys.
I'm pretty sure Malcolm Fraser would be unhappy with this characterisation. It really is pathetic that Tony Abbott counts stopping the boats as an achievement. It would be an achievement if they went home because their homeland improved with our help. The deeper truth is that as a nation, we really don't give a shit about that part of the equation, and that makes us all just as pathetic as the politicians in Parliament.
It turns out Christopher Pyne wasn't running some deep Machiavellian plot when he ran a petition to save the ABC production facility in Adelaide. Now we learn he's begging the Prime Minister for a rethink. All because he is not polling well in his own electorate and if he had to explain how he lost the production facility from Adelaide, it's hard to see how he doesn't get humiliated at every doorstep in his electorate. That's the funny thing about democracy - your constituent's opinions count for something some of the time.
To save the bit on his turf, Christopher Pyne is arguing that the ABC should be made to spend some of the money in regional production, which would save Adelaide's production facility. In other words, he's arguing for jobs protections for his constituency as being an exception. You'd think he was - god forbid - in favour of regulation as opposed to the rampant deregulation for things in his own portfolio.
Quite apart from the total departure from the regular Liberal Party economic rationalist patter, he wants to save his turf at the expense of somebody else's turf. As you can see it's unprincipled on at least three levels but I guess you try anything when it comes to trying to save your own skin.
Malcolm Fraser Thinks They Suck
Live long enough, you see lots of strange things. Perhaps principle amongst my list of strange things is the sight of Malcolm Fraser attacking the Liberal Party from the outside over the asylum seeker issue.
Mr Fraser says migration legislation passed last week has given Immigration Minister Scott Morrison "dictatorial, tyrannical powers" over the lives of asylum seekers and "destroyed the rule of law as we know it".
He has accused the crossbench senators who supported the legislation, on the basis of concessions they negotiated with Mr Morrison, of committing "a political error of fundamental proportions".Well Mr Fraser, we are talking about Scott Morrison here. You can't expect much better from that man on the best of days.
All the same, it's a very vexed topic where there is much electoral support to punish the asylum seekers. It's a weird thing, this impulse to punish the asylum seekers, but there are some clues as to the thinking out there.
A long while back, Sam told me about his qualms about asylum seekers arriving in boats. "It's a bit like if I tried to drown myself in a swimming pool in the Eastern Suburbs and they rescue me. And I tell them that people are trying to kill me in the Western Suburbs so I had to come to Vaucluse; and the only way I could think of making you take me in was if I tried to drown myself in your swimming pool. Now you have to let me live in your house."
Now, just to be clear, Sam was joking.
Sam went on to say that of course Australia is much nicer than wherever the hell the people come from, much as Vaucluse is much nicer than say, St. Marys. So if you're picking and choosing, you would pick Vaucluse as the place to pull your stunt rather than anywhere in between. Once you decide you don't want to live where you live, then it's time to shop and people are shopping for Australia as a destination. If we all had the choice, maybe we'd all choose to live in Vaucluse, in which case who would be left to live in the poor suburbs to work as garbage collectors and plumbers?
But if you're a resident of Vaucluse, should you take this choice seriously? Isn't it obvious that the people in Vaucluse would ring the police and have the intruder removed or arrested for trespassing? And that is essentially what Manus and Nauru and Christmas Island detention Islands are - prisons for trespassing. Naturally the people who believe in Manus and Naura (or Cambodia!) as a 'solution' believe that the prison system is a fine deterrent to crime. If you bought that, Sam also had a boat ticket for you to buy.
And so the analogy went. It was all a bit 'Down And Out In Beverly Hills'.
I can see one aspect to the fear is that Australia is in the middle of a housing bubble that is pricing lots of people out of the property market. There is a lot of mortgage stress even if you can get a piece of it. It's not an environment conducive to being generous to the needy when people are seriously worried about keeping their own roofs and backyards. Scott Morrison is obviously playing to this pathetic anxiety, which in turn is at the very core of this pathetic kind of politics we're witnessing in Canberra. However, on a deeper level, people are wanting to reject the asylum seekers because they see the boat-and-drown asylum seekers as gaming the system - and nobody wants to be a schmuck.
The sad thing is that people out there in voter land genuinely don't want to see people on boats drowning on our doorsteps. Their preference is that the charade stops altogether, and the problem simply went away; but that would entail the dispossessed stop picking the metaphorical Vaucluse as the destination. Vaucluse is kind of nice if it weren't for the people. But it's those people who are saying piss off, don't care what your story is, just go back to St Marys.
I'm pretty sure Malcolm Fraser would be unhappy with this characterisation. It really is pathetic that Tony Abbott counts stopping the boats as an achievement. It would be an achievement if they went home because their homeland improved with our help. The deeper truth is that as a nation, we really don't give a shit about that part of the equation, and that makes us all just as pathetic as the politicians in Parliament.
2014/12/10
'Guardians Of The Galaxy'
Because The Galaxy Needs Guarding
Months late, I'm coming at this year's big Marvel blockbuster.
The dripping irony of the title is a giveaway that the film is going to work with cheesiness. After all, if you were going to put together a crack squad of people to guard the Galaxy, you sure as hell wouldn't start with a Wolfing human, a green assassin, a wrestler, a talking raccoon and an Ent. Then again, it's an action film where the said characters acquit themselves very well, so maybe there is no irony at all.
The comic-book slickness of the narrative covers up a lot of strange things as it moves towards the inevitable climax. It's that kind of film and if you expect anything otherwise, you're looking for the wrong film.
The cast is brimming with energy as the film races through the story with nary a pitstop in the land of expositions. There are bad guys, there are many of them, and there's a lot at stake. Now hit play.
What's Good About It
Rocket Raccoon and Groot are the standout characters in this one. On some level it's all about the glory of portraying the angst-ridden trigger happy raccoon voiced by Bradley Cooper and the empathic plant-giant Groot voiced by Vin Diesel. Next to that, Star-Lord seems like the narrative centre without much to offer except the sentimental backstory.
CGI has come a long way. Back in the days of the first 'Toy Story', hair and fur was considered the distant future challenge. In this one, the fur on Rocket Raccoon is seamless. Groot is materially made of wood, and the crisscrossing spacecraft and aircraft have tremendous verisimilitude, even though we've never really seen a real life spacecraft of the sort.
What's Bad About It
Some times the mode of story telling switches gear too much. It doesn't takes it self seriously in certain parts which deflates tension, while it takes itself too seriously towards the end that you wonder how they ever got to make a talking raccoon such an integral character to the plot.
It's an otherwise lovely film that deserves a sequel, but it struggles with tone in quite a number of places. It was pretty disappointing because the trailers were so good at pitching the film with the right kind snazzy irony. The film isn't always hitting on that cylinder.
What's Interesting About It
The film is on the whole far less polemical about the universe than 'the Avengers' and the related solo movies around Iron Man, Thor and Captain America. In its stead, there is something a lot more psycho-sexual and internalised going on. The state of the Galaxy and the characters' place in it is ironic. What we're made to investigate is the the nature of these misfits, and asked to extend our tolerance for 'the other'. Star-Lord's companions are very metonymic - much like Dorothy's companions in the Wizard of Oz. There is the animal, the plant, the un-ironic and destructive masculine and a green-skin woman who is an assassin.
The villains of the film are either nondescript drone-like warriors who are easily felled or preening white men with coloured skin makeup.
The Afterlife Of The Lonely
There's nothing more saddening than the thought that the whole movie you are watching is a kind of dream state before death. While that might not exactly be true, there's a quality to the setup of this film that suggests everything that happens is a kind of dream that happens in a coma. It occurred to me that the social realist rendition of the film sees the young Peter run out of the hospital and gets hit by a truck, rather than get picked up by a band of space brigands. The rest of the events in the film would merely be a dream state before he drifts offing the sleep of death where his mother awaits.
Of course, the film is not that at all, but it's weird how the effect of the dream-like good humour has is that it makes one very suspicious of the narrative space. After all, how many talking raccoons appear in social-realist films? None. Raccoons don't talk.
Still, the underlying sadness of Peter Quill /Star-Lord is such that you never really shake the beginning of the film as you watch his adventures through space. His attachments to the things he brings with him from earth - the Sony Walkman and cassettes - give away the deep sense of nostalgia for the absence of things, including his mother. The character is doused with this deeply oedipalised sense of distress and loneliness.
From Uhura To Green Chick
Zoe Saldana plays Gamora, the green skin assassin. Of course the green skinned chicks are the ones Captain Kirk seduces in the rebooted Star Trek, so it's kind of weird to see the actress who plays Uhura don the green-skin. I'm not even convinced this is politically correct or incorrect casting but seeing that Star-Lord is a decidedly white heterosexual anglo male, it's safe to say the tolerance implied in the film might be entirely bogus. Maybe there's something of a tokenism thing going on. Maybe not.
Maybe America hasn't moved on much form the Kirk & Uhura kiss from the original series, but I don't recall Star-Lord kissing Gamora. This might have been the case because Marvel simply didn't want to go there - but then neither did the TV Network when it came to Kirk and Uhura kissing. Is inter-racial relationships that difficult to take - even after the 'multiracial' (what an awful word) Derek Jeter and his twenty year career of doing starlets of all races and varieties? Is this still a problem for America? For the world? Maybe - just maybe - it is. In which case I plant my face firmly in my palms.
I have to say I hate this kind of covert-racism-dressed-up-as-problematic. There is no problem. There is no problematic. Just get on with it if you have the bravura good sense to cast Zoe Saldana as the leading woman.
The Injustices Of The Universe
Some characters are simply an expression of the childish refusal to accept the injustices of the universe as being fair. Rocket Raccoon asks, "what if somebody has something and I wanted it more. Can't I just take it?"
He is told it is criminal to take it. "But you're not understanding me. What if *I* wanted it more?"
It almost sounds like a legitimate question coming from the angry raccoon.
While Bradley Cooper may have voiced Rocket Raccoon, it may have equally been voiced by Danny DeVito. Racked with the mismatch between desire and identity, Rocket Raccoon is the most vexing of anti-heroes on the screen. The palpable self-loathing and the impatience with other living beings that talk evokes some of the most complicated and conflicted figures in fiction. As creations go, Rocket Raccoon is a kind of masterpiece of emotional complication. We never really find out too much about his back story but we can guess there's trauma-aplenty in there.
In the mean time we have this unique character wandering the universe, getting into adventures and stuff. The bizarreness aside, he's a pretty kick-ass kind of creation.
Months late, I'm coming at this year's big Marvel blockbuster.
The dripping irony of the title is a giveaway that the film is going to work with cheesiness. After all, if you were going to put together a crack squad of people to guard the Galaxy, you sure as hell wouldn't start with a Wolfing human, a green assassin, a wrestler, a talking raccoon and an Ent. Then again, it's an action film where the said characters acquit themselves very well, so maybe there is no irony at all.
The comic-book slickness of the narrative covers up a lot of strange things as it moves towards the inevitable climax. It's that kind of film and if you expect anything otherwise, you're looking for the wrong film.
The cast is brimming with energy as the film races through the story with nary a pitstop in the land of expositions. There are bad guys, there are many of them, and there's a lot at stake. Now hit play.
What's Good About It
Rocket Raccoon and Groot are the standout characters in this one. On some level it's all about the glory of portraying the angst-ridden trigger happy raccoon voiced by Bradley Cooper and the empathic plant-giant Groot voiced by Vin Diesel. Next to that, Star-Lord seems like the narrative centre without much to offer except the sentimental backstory.
CGI has come a long way. Back in the days of the first 'Toy Story', hair and fur was considered the distant future challenge. In this one, the fur on Rocket Raccoon is seamless. Groot is materially made of wood, and the crisscrossing spacecraft and aircraft have tremendous verisimilitude, even though we've never really seen a real life spacecraft of the sort.
What's Bad About It
Some times the mode of story telling switches gear too much. It doesn't takes it self seriously in certain parts which deflates tension, while it takes itself too seriously towards the end that you wonder how they ever got to make a talking raccoon such an integral character to the plot.
It's an otherwise lovely film that deserves a sequel, but it struggles with tone in quite a number of places. It was pretty disappointing because the trailers were so good at pitching the film with the right kind snazzy irony. The film isn't always hitting on that cylinder.
What's Interesting About It
The film is on the whole far less polemical about the universe than 'the Avengers' and the related solo movies around Iron Man, Thor and Captain America. In its stead, there is something a lot more psycho-sexual and internalised going on. The state of the Galaxy and the characters' place in it is ironic. What we're made to investigate is the the nature of these misfits, and asked to extend our tolerance for 'the other'. Star-Lord's companions are very metonymic - much like Dorothy's companions in the Wizard of Oz. There is the animal, the plant, the un-ironic and destructive masculine and a green-skin woman who is an assassin.
The villains of the film are either nondescript drone-like warriors who are easily felled or preening white men with coloured skin makeup.
The Afterlife Of The Lonely
There's nothing more saddening than the thought that the whole movie you are watching is a kind of dream state before death. While that might not exactly be true, there's a quality to the setup of this film that suggests everything that happens is a kind of dream that happens in a coma. It occurred to me that the social realist rendition of the film sees the young Peter run out of the hospital and gets hit by a truck, rather than get picked up by a band of space brigands. The rest of the events in the film would merely be a dream state before he drifts offing the sleep of death where his mother awaits.
Of course, the film is not that at all, but it's weird how the effect of the dream-like good humour has is that it makes one very suspicious of the narrative space. After all, how many talking raccoons appear in social-realist films? None. Raccoons don't talk.
Still, the underlying sadness of Peter Quill /Star-Lord is such that you never really shake the beginning of the film as you watch his adventures through space. His attachments to the things he brings with him from earth - the Sony Walkman and cassettes - give away the deep sense of nostalgia for the absence of things, including his mother. The character is doused with this deeply oedipalised sense of distress and loneliness.
From Uhura To Green Chick
Zoe Saldana plays Gamora, the green skin assassin. Of course the green skinned chicks are the ones Captain Kirk seduces in the rebooted Star Trek, so it's kind of weird to see the actress who plays Uhura don the green-skin. I'm not even convinced this is politically correct or incorrect casting but seeing that Star-Lord is a decidedly white heterosexual anglo male, it's safe to say the tolerance implied in the film might be entirely bogus. Maybe there's something of a tokenism thing going on. Maybe not.
Maybe America hasn't moved on much form the Kirk & Uhura kiss from the original series, but I don't recall Star-Lord kissing Gamora. This might have been the case because Marvel simply didn't want to go there - but then neither did the TV Network when it came to Kirk and Uhura kissing. Is inter-racial relationships that difficult to take - even after the 'multiracial' (what an awful word) Derek Jeter and his twenty year career of doing starlets of all races and varieties? Is this still a problem for America? For the world? Maybe - just maybe - it is. In which case I plant my face firmly in my palms.
I have to say I hate this kind of covert-racism-dressed-up-as-problematic. There is no problem. There is no problematic. Just get on with it if you have the bravura good sense to cast Zoe Saldana as the leading woman.
The Injustices Of The Universe
Some characters are simply an expression of the childish refusal to accept the injustices of the universe as being fair. Rocket Raccoon asks, "what if somebody has something and I wanted it more. Can't I just take it?"
He is told it is criminal to take it. "But you're not understanding me. What if *I* wanted it more?"
It almost sounds like a legitimate question coming from the angry raccoon.
While Bradley Cooper may have voiced Rocket Raccoon, it may have equally been voiced by Danny DeVito. Racked with the mismatch between desire and identity, Rocket Raccoon is the most vexing of anti-heroes on the screen. The palpable self-loathing and the impatience with other living beings that talk evokes some of the most complicated and conflicted figures in fiction. As creations go, Rocket Raccoon is a kind of masterpiece of emotional complication. We never really find out too much about his back story but we can guess there's trauma-aplenty in there.
In the mean time we have this unique character wandering the universe, getting into adventures and stuff. The bizarreness aside, he's a pretty kick-ass kind of creation.
2014/12/09
Miscreants On A Mission
The Predictable Drive In To The Ditch
The news this week is that Tony Abbott's poll figures suck more than ever. Hands up if you find his surprising? No? Didn't think so.
The really interesting bit in all of the commentary is how Tony Abbott is trying to characterise his first year and a bit in government by saying there are accomplishments a plenty to go with the things they couldn't get done. In the list are things like the repeal of the Carbon Tax and the Mining tax. He doesn't seem to understand that these taxes weren't some idle notions dreamt up by the Left to destroy conservative Australia, but fairly important planks of public policy, in as much as revenue raising for the government was concerned.
For a guy who came to power banging on about deficits, Tony Abbott sure has't helped himself as Prime Minster if he thought the high points of his government were abolishing taxes that were paying for useful things. It also ignores the great retreat of car manufacturing out of Australia, a sequence of events precipitated by TonyAbbott's own government. The point being, all the accomplishments he lists are things that probably need not ought to have been done, while all the things for which he is receiving blame and rancorous criticism and - let's face it - hollered insults are things also he shouldn't have undertaken especially because they are his ideological projects.
In short he may well claim the glass is half full but it's no good if the fluid in the glass is urine.
The Tricky Submarine Situation
Not a lot of people are standing up to point out the problem with the ASC. It's a shame that the person making the most sense is Paul Sheehan. Maybe it's like a broken clock being correct twice a day, but after he pens his usual poisonous character assassinations of the ALP politicians, he points out something that needs to be pointed out (God knows I hate quoting this man):
Yet this very monopoly has led to the notion that Australia should buy ready-made subs off the shelf from Japan, which is causing a lot of heartburn in the ranks of the white Australian sentimentalists. After all, how could we fight them in Kokoda and Darwin and wherever else and suffer the indignities of the Burma railway; and then buy their bloody submarines? Why indeed? The noises coming out of Tokyo and in particular the Maritime Self Defence Service is the mirror opposite where they would rather not part with hard won know-how of how to run proper submarine fleets, just for mere filthy lucre. Why indeed? (And I say, with allies like that, who needs the Chinese?)
It is a rational and sensible idea to buy the submarines from Japan. However it is obvious as daylight that it won't be happening. It's a bit like the high speed railway thing - If they ever decided to do it, they'd have to ask the Japanese to help, and of course, rural Australia would have a fit. It's about as likely as buying Space Rockets from Japan, Fighter Jets from Japan, Helicopter carriers from Japan, Tanks from Japan, small arms from Japan, communication devices from Japan... You get the picture. Cultural sensitivities being what they are, it's going to be "No Jap Sub, No Jap Anything."
And this is before we mention the problem of not having our own industry to build our own defensive wares. Bob Katter knows all about that one.
This leaves the Abbott Government squirming and Defence Minister Johnston twisting in the wind because they don't want to keep throwing money at the ASC. But they need to keep throwing money at the ASC because it's pork-barrelling that has to be done. And while I am a decidedly pinko leftist social democrat sort of dude, I have to say the ALP argument that buying subs from Japan is bad because of job losses in South Australia, seems too much of an endorsement of pork-barrelling.
So what can they do? They ought to split up ASC vertical into three companies and make them compete for tenders for contracts. It's the only way: Break up the monopoly. It's one thing they should be looking at privatising. But you know they won't - and more's the pity.
A Decade Of Pain To Come
This one's from Walk-Off HBP who is probably rightfully worried that things can get worse than merely having a government of miscreants and nincompoops. Yes, it seems if things don't look bad enough now, they can get a whole lot worse.
The news this week is that Tony Abbott's poll figures suck more than ever. Hands up if you find his surprising? No? Didn't think so.
The really interesting bit in all of the commentary is how Tony Abbott is trying to characterise his first year and a bit in government by saying there are accomplishments a plenty to go with the things they couldn't get done. In the list are things like the repeal of the Carbon Tax and the Mining tax. He doesn't seem to understand that these taxes weren't some idle notions dreamt up by the Left to destroy conservative Australia, but fairly important planks of public policy, in as much as revenue raising for the government was concerned.
For a guy who came to power banging on about deficits, Tony Abbott sure has't helped himself as Prime Minster if he thought the high points of his government were abolishing taxes that were paying for useful things. It also ignores the great retreat of car manufacturing out of Australia, a sequence of events precipitated by TonyAbbott's own government. The point being, all the accomplishments he lists are things that probably need not ought to have been done, while all the things for which he is receiving blame and rancorous criticism and - let's face it - hollered insults are things also he shouldn't have undertaken especially because they are his ideological projects.
In short he may well claim the glass is half full but it's no good if the fluid in the glass is urine.
The Tricky Submarine Situation
Not a lot of people are standing up to point out the problem with the ASC. It's a shame that the person making the most sense is Paul Sheehan. Maybe it's like a broken clock being correct twice a day, but after he pens his usual poisonous character assassinations of the ALP politicians, he points out something that needs to be pointed out (God knows I hate quoting this man):
"ASC was delivering no submarines in 2009 for $1 billion. They have not improved their output … They are $350 million over budget on three air-warfare destroyer builds. I am being conservative. It is probably more than $600 million but because the data is so bad I cannot tell you. You wonder why I am worried about ASC and what they are delivering to the Australian taxpayer. Do you wonder why I wouldn't trust them to build a canoe?"
At last the truth about this from a defence minister. Billions of dollars have been poured down the drain by both sides of politics on this giant pork barrel for South Australia. The ASC could build a canoe, but it would cost a million dollars and spend more time in repairs than on the water.
The ASC has accumulated an abominable record of cost over-runs and should never have been awarded the air warfare destroyer contract. Johnston's refreshing candour was an admission that the ASC has been a financial sinkhole for decades. It is more a strategic liability than a strategic asset.
Senator Johnston is also the first Defence Minister in a hundred years to seriously confront the bullying sub-culture in the Australian military, which has a recorded history of rationalising these practices dating back to 1913.And there's the crux of the biscuit. The ASC has been going for some time chomping up money at a greater rate than desired while delivering sub-standard product (pun unintended). There is no competition for the ASC, so if the Australian government dreams up a product it needs, the ASC is there to take the money and waste it until it delivers a poor product that roughly approximates the brief. It's a happy little monopoly where there is no need to cut costs or make savings.
Yet this very monopoly has led to the notion that Australia should buy ready-made subs off the shelf from Japan, which is causing a lot of heartburn in the ranks of the white Australian sentimentalists. After all, how could we fight them in Kokoda and Darwin and wherever else and suffer the indignities of the Burma railway; and then buy their bloody submarines? Why indeed? The noises coming out of Tokyo and in particular the Maritime Self Defence Service is the mirror opposite where they would rather not part with hard won know-how of how to run proper submarine fleets, just for mere filthy lucre. Why indeed? (And I say, with allies like that, who needs the Chinese?)
It is a rational and sensible idea to buy the submarines from Japan. However it is obvious as daylight that it won't be happening. It's a bit like the high speed railway thing - If they ever decided to do it, they'd have to ask the Japanese to help, and of course, rural Australia would have a fit. It's about as likely as buying Space Rockets from Japan, Fighter Jets from Japan, Helicopter carriers from Japan, Tanks from Japan, small arms from Japan, communication devices from Japan... You get the picture. Cultural sensitivities being what they are, it's going to be "No Jap Sub, No Jap Anything."
And this is before we mention the problem of not having our own industry to build our own defensive wares. Bob Katter knows all about that one.
This leaves the Abbott Government squirming and Defence Minister Johnston twisting in the wind because they don't want to keep throwing money at the ASC. But they need to keep throwing money at the ASC because it's pork-barrelling that has to be done. And while I am a decidedly pinko leftist social democrat sort of dude, I have to say the ALP argument that buying subs from Japan is bad because of job losses in South Australia, seems too much of an endorsement of pork-barrelling.
So what can they do? They ought to split up ASC vertical into three companies and make them compete for tenders for contracts. It's the only way: Break up the monopoly. It's one thing they should be looking at privatising. But you know they won't - and more's the pity.
A Decade Of Pain To Come
This one's from Walk-Off HBP who is probably rightfully worried that things can get worse than merely having a government of miscreants and nincompoops. Yes, it seems if things don't look bad enough now, they can get a whole lot worse.
My worry has more to do with Abbott's economic priorities, which ignore how rapidly the world is changing around the Lucky Country. Although Abbott has talked about diversifying the economy away from its dependence on China, his policies have effectively done the opposite.
Where the previous government moved to tax outsized mining profits to fund investment in education and infrastructure, Abbott has changed incentives so that commodities and mining companies become a bigger share of the economy and have an even bigger voice in politics. Scrapping plans for a carbon tax, and resisting any serious limits on emissions, has made the economy more vulnerable to international shocks and made Australia a punch line at this week's global climate talks in Lima, Peru.
Instead of undertaking painful and costly restructuring, Abbott has prodded the central bank to loosen monetary policy more and more. Whether all that easy money is pushing Australia toward a subprime-loan crisis has now become a matter of serious debate.
Over the last year, anytime a journalist asked Abbott or Treasurer Joe Hockey about frothy real-estate prices, they were dismissed as nervous nellies. When I probed Hockey myself in September in Sydney, he derided such views as "rather lazy analysis".
Yet in an interim report in July, David Murray, the former head of Commonwealth Bank of Australia, called the surge in housing debt since 1997 and banks' exposure to mortgages a significant risk. Since that time, Murray's panel said, "household leverage has almost doubled," and "higher household indebtedness and the greater proportion of mortgages on bank balance sheets mean that an extreme event in the housing market would have significant implications for financial stability and economic growth."
On Sunday, in the final report to emerge from his yearlong inquiry, Murray urged specific reforms, including cuts in much-loved housing tax breaks. The report called for "unquestionably strong" capital levels, which could force the four biggest banks to keep another $25 billion on hand for a rainy day.It's a bit long but then, the list of things the miscreants and nincompoops are doing is long. What can I do? Some times I think we must look like idiots to the world. Here we are donning the hair shirt of unnecessary austerity and going around pretending that Global Warming isn't real. It's not exactly a government of integrity and clear-thinking that we've voted in for ourselves.
Clearly we're idiots.
2014/12/03
Quick Shots 03/Dec/2014
'A Short History Of Stupid'
I picked up this book when I was in Melbourne:
It's pretty cool. There are moments where I feel they've been reading my blog. :)
If you want arguments more coherent and in better depth than what I write here on this blog as to why our public discourse has given way to so much stupidity, then this book is for you!
They cover a lot of ground in Traditional and Modern philosophy as well as TV shows from the 1990s, exclusive for the express purpose of damning the stupidity of the public discourse - not with faint praise but - with surgical precision. You hope the US drones strike this well where it hurts.
Of course the problem with Stupid is no brain, no pain. Abuse as they might, the people who need to be abused by this book are not getting the message. 'Twas ever thus.
'Transformers: Age of Extinction'
This franchise gets sillier each time out. Even without the redoubtably silly Shia Leboeuf, the antics in this film is firmly in the silly camp. Except they're dead serious when they show you cars turning into robots and robots turning into dinosaur-inspired robots. There are CIA black ops, there are aliens, there are wonderful moments from Stanley Tucci who plays a kind of a crooked Steve Jobs type; but mostly it's fluff and guff.
Michael Bay is a strange film maker who is obviously very talented but allows himself to be slack with the heavy-handed in-jokes and not quite precise with story logic. But there's a lot of flash and thunder and CGI marvels to make up for any shortfalls so the thing tends to fly along even if it is a colossal 2hours and 40 minutes. (Yes, it's like a 'Lord of the Rings' movie but with much less emotional finesse).
We know he can be great from films like 'Armageddon', 'The Island' and 'Pain and Gain'. It amazes me that he can stand lobotomising his higher talents and go and apply himself to the task of making movies with Hasbro toys as the defining concept. He could be sculpting marble with the best but he wants to play with play-dough. It might be exquisite work with plasticine but is it art?
'22 Jump Street'
You know what's not art? This film.
Yes, I did laugh. No, it's not profound in any way shape or form. But there's nothing wrong with that. The most novel thing about this film might be that the number that gives away a sequel is at the start of the title and not the end. Other than that, it's Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum playing a pair of idiots.
2014/12/02
Is Public Debt Worse Than Private Debt?
Stupid Is As ... Stupid Governs
Tony Abbott ran into flack with his interview with Karl Stefanovic. You'd think an interview with Karl would be mostly soft-toss fluff balls in the morning, but no. Karl sent a question right at Tony Abbott's head, pointing out that the ALP is being about as obstructionist as he was when he was in opposition. If it worked for Tony and the Coalition, why wouldn't Bill Shorten do the same?
Of course, in the dissembling that followed, Tony Abbott said that the mission of his government was to reduce the deficit so future generations would not have to live under the burden of debt. Now, this is a very curious construction because to cut back on the deficit, his own government is proposing deregulating the tertiary education sector, whites predicted to raise student debt substantially. In other words, the Coalition are under the delusion that if the debt doesn't show up on the government's ledger as public debt, this is somehow greatly beneficial to the people who will be saddled with the debt.
What Tony Abbott is proposing is to privatise the debt right back onto the future generations. With minimal public debt, subsequent governments would look great for future politicians, but individuals would be saddled with massive private debt incurred for getting an education.
Now, I'm not suggesting public debt isn't a problem - especially if it is massive like Japan's debt. That being said one wonders if Tony Abbott has taken a closer look at the ballooning private sector debt in Australia, the repayments for which are slowing down the economy. It makes no sense adding even more on to this pile, just so the government can pretend to be doing something important through washing its hands of education funding. Clearly it's a crock.
Tony Abbott ran into flack with his interview with Karl Stefanovic. You'd think an interview with Karl would be mostly soft-toss fluff balls in the morning, but no. Karl sent a question right at Tony Abbott's head, pointing out that the ALP is being about as obstructionist as he was when he was in opposition. If it worked for Tony and the Coalition, why wouldn't Bill Shorten do the same?
Of course, in the dissembling that followed, Tony Abbott said that the mission of his government was to reduce the deficit so future generations would not have to live under the burden of debt. Now, this is a very curious construction because to cut back on the deficit, his own government is proposing deregulating the tertiary education sector, whites predicted to raise student debt substantially. In other words, the Coalition are under the delusion that if the debt doesn't show up on the government's ledger as public debt, this is somehow greatly beneficial to the people who will be saddled with the debt.
What Tony Abbott is proposing is to privatise the debt right back onto the future generations. With minimal public debt, subsequent governments would look great for future politicians, but individuals would be saddled with massive private debt incurred for getting an education.
Now, I'm not suggesting public debt isn't a problem - especially if it is massive like Japan's debt. That being said one wonders if Tony Abbott has taken a closer look at the ballooning private sector debt in Australia, the repayments for which are slowing down the economy. It makes no sense adding even more on to this pile, just so the government can pretend to be doing something important through washing its hands of education funding. Clearly it's a crock.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)