View From The Couch - 31/Jul/2016

Frontier Gaol For Juvies Goes Guantanamo (And People Wonder Why)

I finally caught up with the Four Corners program about the juvenile detention in Northern Territory. It was as bad as the media has been carrying on about. The footage of youths in 'restraining chairs' looked like something straight out of Abu Ghraib. The images that have been leaked clearly show the full effects of Dr. Phil Zimbardo's experiment prison guards in real life. The Scottish born lawyer in the Four Corners presentation likens the handling to Guantanamo Bay - a kind of torturer's wonderland without much legal oversight. It certainly looks that way from the images we're shown.

What's really surprising is that people think that it would have gone any other way. Even after everything we know in this day and age, you have from our Prime Minister down, human rights people and children's welfare people, all holding public office wondering how on earth this could be happening in our very own 'civilised' country. Yet, lately I've been wondering if the kind prison system we have is anything remotely civilised. Let's not forget this nation was founded as a penal colony. The whole premise of this civilisation was founded on incarceration.

This must be the year for this discussion because I keep watching programs about incarceration one way or another. There's 'Orange Is The New Black' which anatomises the experience of US inmates in minimum security correctional; there's The Stanford Prison Experiment' which shows how guards come to behave the way they do because it is what they imagine the job means; 'Suits' Season 6 where Mike is in a white collar criminal prison and he is still vulnerable to corruption of guards; 'The Boss' where Melissa McCarthy's titular character goes to prison; all of them feature the prison experience well enough. In all of them, it is clear that guards behave badly but have the full backing of the state to do so, and so in a positive feedback of compounding moral hazard, they continue to find ways of behaving badly. And while that is all American content, there is nothing fundamentally different in the working structure of those prisons to ours. Our prisons are mostly doing the same stuff. Ours are equally brutal and overly focused on punishment.

Now, I'm not going to go and become some advocate for prison reform, but it has to be said there's something deeply wrong about the structure of the prison system whereby juvenile detention ends up looking like the Abu Ghraib - and we all know there was nothing right about what went on at Abu Ghraib. It was beyond the pail that Abu Ghraib happened in Iraq under our watch. For the exact same thing to be going on in peacetime Australia, directed at indigenous youths? We're rightfully scandalised, but where is the rational analysis? Why can't our politicians put two and two together?

The Royal Commission that has been announced appears to have very limited terms of reference. It is getting soundly rebuked by the Aboriginal community for its choice of commissioner, and it looks like it won't really do much that might be politically damaging. This suggests that Malcolm Turnbull knows that this isn't an isolated problem - after all, why would he limit the scope to the degree that he has, if he didn't want other things dug up. The obvious answer to that rhetorical question is that the Federal Government itself has children in custody, incarcerated in Nauru and Manus. And anybody with half a brain and education would be well familiar with the ramification of Dr. Philip Zimbardo's findings that more likely than not, the Federal Government has rogue 'prison guards' fully possessed by the jobs they have, bullying and torturing people in the name of the Australian people.

Yet our political ranks fear no hypocrisy when it comes to wagging its fingers at other nations on the planet when it comes to how they run their prisons, whether be Indonesia or Lebanon.
We're the civilised people, we love to claim. You can just tell the Royal Commission is going to do sweet fuck-all to curtail the institutional racism that layers itself over the Northern Territory prison system, nor will it have single suggestion on how to abate the 'prison guard' effect that turns otherwise normal people into institutional sadists. It's not like this is rocket science - it's just practical psychology - but because the Coalition government is socially conservative to the core it won't countenance any notion as to rethink the entire prison system from the top down. What will happen is that there will be a lot of crying testimonies and media carry-on but in a quarter of a century's time be all forgotten.

Brace yourselves for malarkey is coming.

The Bubble That Won't Pop

A couple items popped up this week about the property bubble. The first was over at the ABC where they interviewed Prof. Steve Keen.

"We have borrowed ourselves so much to the hilt that we are now dependent on that continuing to rise over time and it simply won't," he told the ABC's The Business. 

Many believe the Reserve Bank has been a steady guiding hand to the Australian economy in the years since the GFC, but Professor Keen believes it has guided the economy "straight toward the shoals" by encouraging households to borrow with low rates which has led to asset bubbles. 

"They don't know what they're doing," he said. 

"Our debt level according to the Bank of International Settlements, private debt level, has gone from 150 per cent of GDP to 210 per cent of GDP." 

He argued that means a large part of the growth that Australia has enjoyed since the GFC, while many other countries plunged into recession, has been fuelled by a 60 per cent rise in household debt. 

"Ireland did the same thing when they called themselves the Celtic Tiger and they don't call themselves that anymore," he said. 

"Spain was doing the same thing during its housing bubble and we've replicated the same mistakes.

I like the bit where he flat out says the RBA doesn't know what it's doing. He may even be right. If the Private sector debt has blown out to the level as described, it could only have happened under the watch of the RBA which has bee cutting interest rates steadily. And because the RBA is doing so on a mistaken logical principle they will end up at ZIRP, just like other central banks have done in the developed world.

There's an interesting phenomenon about banking that we're seeing whereby in pursuit of yield banks have devised the casino capitalism we see today. In a sense the banks became casinos, betting on houses as it issued mortgage bonds. When the subprime crisis hit American banks, it effectively meant the "bank" was wiped out, in the same ways some people bust casinos. So the US government of the day bailed out the banks using tax payers' money but has pretended that the bank never went bust ever since. In order keep up this facade so thereon't be a run on the banks, the US Fed has printed money by buying up all the bad debt and putting them into a kind of moratorium limbo - an in so doing kit asset prices up.

And that is how Australia's property bubble never quite popped, even during the GFC. The kind of stimulus spending and quantitative easing has nickname in Japan where these methods have been tied for two decades: PKO as in 'Price-Keeping Operation'. The central purpose of a PKO is not to let asset prices drop because that leads to a market rout right across the economy and that way lies the great depression.

And so the RBA, like all the other central banks keeps lining out money for very little interest and most people can't think of anything better to do than to stick it into the real estate market, which brings us to the Crikey article about the property bubble.

The main driver of housing prices remains the taxpayer-backed big four banks, whose balance sheets are so overloaded with housing debt that they have no choice but to keep the charade going as long as possible. Bank executives are paid based on profitability and shareholder return — short-term profitability, that is. The fact that a chunk of the loans being made are based on prices that bear no real semblance to a discounted cash flow valuation is seemingly unimportant. Eventually the music will stop, but by then, bank CEOs will have been paid $50 million and the clueless directors who allowed it all will be frantically checking the terms of the indemnity insurance. 

House prices are no longer a function of value but rather of how much people are prepared to pay. That in turn is determined by how much banks are willing to lend. And that amount continues to rise. Before the current boom started in 1997, the ratio of household debt to GDP was around 40% — it’s now more than 100 percent (it’s the same story for household income to household debt). In short, the banks are lending Australians a whole load of cash, and we’re using that cash to bid up the price of an unproductive asset (established housing).

It's really strange how anybody who looks at the structure of our economy can spot this, but Domain's still printing stories about houses being bought at high prices.
Yet there are people still out there busily buying into the Australian property market as an investment. It's not even making sense as an investment according to the article:

CoreLogic found that Australian dwellings increased in price by 10 percent in the past year. In Sydney and Melbourne the price rises were even more significant, with Sydney increasing by 13% and Melbourne by 13.9%. If the market had any degree of rationality, given the market is already expensive, rentals would have needed to rise by around 20% during the year to justify those price increases. However, CoreLogic also reported that Sydney rents were up a mere 0.4% and Melbourne up by 1.7% (both well below the inflation rate). 

That means if the market was insane a year ago, it’s even worse now. Already overprice property is increasing, in Sydney’s case, 20 times as fast as underlying income.
The problem is no one seems to care what the banks do (least of all the government, even though taxpayers are on the hook if any of the big banks fall over, which if the history of banking is anything to go by is a virtual certainty at some point). Moreover, successive governments’ taxation policies (negative gearing, no capital gains tax, minimal land tax) serve to exacerbate the insanity.

In a way, this massive property bubble is the price of keeping our asset prices up in things like our Superannuation accounts which, by rights should have been wiped out into oblivion in 2008. We all have some assets of some worth, some more than others, all held by banks. The RBA is doing its best to make sure we get to keep our winnings, big and small in the casino of world banking. But it would be crazy to think that the current LIRP environment on the road to ZIRP is anything but kicking the can down the road. One of these days the reckoning is going to come, probably from China having its day of reckoning. We don't even know how the Australian property market would respond in light of a recession because we haven't had one in like 25years. One of these days we'll find out. As Warren Buffett says, when the tide goes out, you get to find out who is not wearing any garments.

From The Pleiades Mailbag

GFC Redux (More Like Reflux)

Here's a goodie! Satyajit Das, one of the few people who had a grip on why the GFC unfolded tells us that we're ripe for another one but we've really not accomplished the damage repair we promised ourselves.

The signs are obvious to all. The World Bank estimates the ratio of non-performing loans to total gross loans in 2015 reached 4.3 per cent. Before the 2009 global financial crisis, they stood at 4.2 per cent. 

If anything, the problem is starker now than then: there are more than $US3 trillion ($4 trillion) in stressed loan assets worldwide, compared to the roughly $US1 trillion of US subprime loans that triggered the 2009 crisis.


European banks are saddled with $US1.3 trillion in non-performing loans, nearly $US400 billion of them in Italy. The IMF estimates that risky loans in China also total $US1.3 trillion, although private forecasts are higher. India's stressed loans top $US150 billion. 

Once again, banks in the US, Canada, UK, several European countries, Asia, Australia and New Zealand are heavily exposed to property markets, which are overvalued by historical measures. 

In addition, banks have significant exposure to the troubled resource sector: lending to the energy sector alone totals around $US3 trillion globally.

It sure doesn't get any better. For all the talk about fixing balance sheets and prudential lending and all the excess printing of money to reflate assets, we're not really in better straits than at the peak of the GFC. QE bought time, but instead of using that time to really fix things up, the banks have gone with business as usual.

The asset price issue is probably the elephant in the room. The asset price slide brought about the bubble burst of the subprime mortgage bonds. To shore up the banks, the asset price drop had to be stopped, and so the massive amounts money printed was injected into banks as liquidity, essentially to keep the music going in the musical chairs. While the music keeps playing we don't have to find out just who it is that is without the chair.

It's kind of funny because Australia being so far away from the centre of this mess, our own property bubble was barely touched by the GFC. Everybody who was in property has essentially been able to keep their asset price, and even with more ridiculous gains. It's easily arguable that for all the storm clouds over the horizon, the GFC didn't hit Australia at all - thanks even to Kevin Rudd. It's one thing to have nice asset prices but if it's being held up by tricky central banking, you might want to think about what prices might look like if theydroppes around 30-40%.

Oh, and wonder about the fundamental cogitation going on when the RBA looks to be cutting interest rates again soon. Maybe what it's doing is exactly what they say they're not doing, which is pandering to the interests of the banks who want more asset price rises in the housing sector.

The French Are Asking Questions

It turns out the guy who went and slit the throat of the priest in Normandy was known to the French authorities and yet was left free to roam free and do as he did. Now questions are being asked.

A Mass at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, reserved for the most solemn state occasions, was held Wednesday evening in memory of Father Hamel, 85, whose attackers forced him to kneel before killing him in the old stone church of St.-Étienne-du-Rouvray in Normandy. Much of the government and two of France’s three living former presidents attended.

At the same time, a new feeling of helplessness was setting in. One of the attackers, Adel Kermiche, 19, had tried twice to go to Syria. On Wednesday, the Islamic State released a video that it said was recorded before the attack by him and his accomplice in which they pledged allegiance to the group.

Mr. Kermiche, like the Nice attacker, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, had a documented history of psychiatric troubles, according to the newspaper Le Monde, which leaked his judicial files in Wednesday’s editions and whose report was confirmed by the Paris prosecutor’s office, which leads terrorism investigations.

But unlike Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel, Mr. Kermiche was also already in the government’s books as a terrorist threat.

Indeed, barely four months ago a judge released him from detention, convinced by the young Franco-Algerian’s arguments that he was ready for a normal life and no longer wanted to become a jihadist. 

At the time, the Paris terrorism prosecutor’s office appealed the judge’s decision, arguing that Mr. Kermiche should stay behind bars.

The prosecutor was contemptuous of the judge’s arguments for limited surveillance, calling them “perfectly illusory, given the context,” according to the documents quoted in Le Monde. “He’s claiming a mistake, and arguing for a second chance. But there’s a very big risk.”

Once before, in 2015, after his first failed effort to go to Syria, Mr. Kermiche had been allowed to go free but was required to check in with the police and probation authorities. He violated that order within about six weeks trying a second time to go to Syria. This time he made it as far as Turkey where authorities arrested him.

When he was caught the second time, he was put in preventive detention until March 18 of this year, when he came before the judge who ultimately let him go.

This time he was fitted with an electronic ankle bracelet, forbidden to leave his local department of Seine-Maritime and made to report to a probation officer at the police station once a week, and ordered to live in his parents’ house, where he was allowed to leave only between 8:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m on weekdays.

You can't make this stuff up. They had him. Twice. And they fitted an electronic tracking device on the guy. They knew he was dangerous. They denied him access to Syria. They gave him curfew to follow. He violated his probation, twice, which put him behind bars for a little while but the same judge that freed him the first time let him go again. And of course this happens while the whole country is under 'heightened security' thanks to the Nice truck driving bastard. You'd think somebody somewhere would have done something about this guy. But they didn't, and so we have yet another instance of state incompetence in apprehending a terror perp.

Get your head around that one. The French at least are trying and they're finding it awfully hard. I don't blame them; I find it hard.

It may even be that we're getting the whole thing wrong. The cross over between the spree-killing and terror act is really quite small. Many of these people around he world doing these spree-killings are probably adding on an ideological dimension to what is simply an act of mass violence. After all, it is a very fine distinction between killing 50 people in a spree killing and killing 50 people in an act of terror. The latter merely appears to have a plausible motive. What if this were an illusion?

What if what was really going on was simply spree-killings giving themselves the cover of ideology? Then it would be easier to understand the danger of crazy people walking around on the streets, and in some countries, being able to purchase weapons of tremendous destructive power. It suits the government far more to have narrative where a crime can be made out to be a political problem than a medical problem. Consider for a moment a lot of spree-killings are done by people who struggle to find meaning in their lives. Whether that be Wade Frankum in Strathfield or Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold in Columbine. Ideology offers an ad hoc assignment of meaning to such acts. This offer politics a tremendous amount of leeway to then enact things that maybe need-not-ought to be enacted.

Back in the 90s, - way before 9/11 made terrorism a front line issue - with the cases of Wade Frankum in Sydney and the Columbine boys in Colorado, the state had no such recourse. Thus back in their day, the governments respectively went after things like 'American Psycho' by Brett Easton-Ellis and violent computer games while completely ignoring the problem having weapons readily available to the general population - something the USA under the threat of the NRA is still insisting upon to this day. At the moment the discourse has turned availability of weapons in America, but all the same it misses half the point.

It is laughable to think 'American Psycho' or 'Crime and Punishment' caused somebody to go on a killing spree. It is equally laughable to think the problem in Columbine was computer games or the Rap music the boys listened to. In the same way, it is laughable to think the attacks in Nice and Normandy were because of the Koran. These acts of 'terror' in Nice and Normandy were done by people who were willing to exchange their meaningless lives for a sliver of metaphysical meaning. That's desperate, violent and crazy, but not driven by ideology first.

There are a lot of desperate people walking around this planet without much meaning in their lives. Some of them are mentally ill, and filled with violent mentation. Demonising an ideology merely offers these people an excuse in an otherwise meaningless, lacking life. If the state thinks it is getting closer to the ideological problem through anti-terror laws and going after radicalised people, they're missing the point because they release the mentally unstable ones back into the public. As the cases in Nice and Normandy amply demonstrate, it is the crazy people who are willing to do this stuff. This can be corroborated with Man Monis of the Lindt Cafe siege who also fell off the AFP watch list exactly because he was deemed crazy.

I'm sure the politicians don't want to hear it but the real problem is mental illness, not ideology. That would be because they've been cutting mental health budgets to support budgets for 'Anti-Terror' for a good decade and a half.  Nobody wins elections advocating for sanity; they only seem to win on the basis of being tough on other people. They need an army of mental health workers, not guys with guns and bulletproof vests.

Midnight In The Garden of Democracy And Failure

Sign O' The Times

It didn't take long...

Hey, it's a new day. 

The obits are coming in for Bernie Sanders' campaign. This one here is worth the read, even though it hails from Rolling Stone.

Democratic voters tried to express these frustrations through the Sanders campaign, but the party leaders have been and probably will continue to be too dense to listen. Instead, they'll convince themselves that, as Hohmann's Post article put it, Hillary's latest victories mean any "pressure" they might have felt to change has now been "ameliorated." 

The maddening thing about the Democrats is that they refuse to see how easy they could have it. If the party threw its weight behind a truly populist platform, if it stood behind unions and prosecuted Wall Street criminals and stopped taking giant gobs of cash from every crooked transnational bank and job-exporting manufacturer in the world, they would win every election season in a landslide. 

This is especially the case now that the Republican Party has collapsed under the weight of its own nativist lunacy. It's exactly the moment when the Democrats should feel free to become a real party of ordinary working people.
But they won't do that, because they don't see what just happened this year as a message rising up from millions of voters. 

Politicians are so used to viewing the electorate as a giant thing to be manipulated that no matter what happens at the ballot, they usually can only focus on the Washington-based characters they perceive to be pulling the strings. Through this lens, the uprising among Democratic voters this year wasn't an organic expression of mass disgust, but wholly the fault of Bernie Sanders, who within the Beltway is viewed as an oddball amateur and radical who jumped the line. 

Nobody saw his campaign as an honest effort to restore power to voters, because nobody in the capital even knows what that is. In the rules of palace intrigue, Sanders only made sense as a kind of self-centered huckster who made a failed play for power. And the narrative will be that with him out of the picture, the crisis is over. No person, no problem.

Yep, it'll go by like it was on skates. The Democrats don't want to deal with this because dealing with it  will turn the party inside out an if you're on the inside, it's always better to stay there. The way it is with most institutions is that the institutional culture is preserved at the expense of the mission statement. The Democratic Party is clearly exhibiting signs of a thoroughly ossified institution. It is going hand in hand with the Republicans who are also ossified to the point of immobility, and so cannot catch out a rogue insurgent candidate like Donald Trump. American democracy is deeply in the poo.

We're not exactly too behind in Australia if this year's Federal election is anything to go by.

Julia, Hillary, And The Things That Maybe Don't Matter Like Legitimacy

I mentioned Hillary's candidacy in relationship to Julia Gillard's prime ministership yesterday and had some more thoughts about all this. I'll be honest, I didn't think Julia Gillard really established her  legitimacy with the electorate as evinced by the hung parliament of 2010- very much like how Malcolm Turnbull has failed to establish legitimacy for his government.

Generally speaking politicians and legitimacy is a funny thing. It's even harder in a democracy where leaders come to power on vote and not by the sword. Consider Machiavelli's take on legitimacy.


So who comes to mind as not having solved the legitimacy problem in a democracy? Kristina Keneally as NSW Premier was a fraught figure because she too always had the problem of legitimacy in the eyes of the public. I've been told by those who worked the Department of the Premier how on top of her brief Keneally was and how sharp she was in negotiations with Kevin Rudd (something which Kevin Rudd himself conceded), and even then I never warmed to the premier who got the nod on the back of failed Premiers and backroom deals. But then again Nathan Rees and Morris Iemma weren't exactly people who sparkled with legitimacy. That entire musical-Premier-chairs phase of the NSW Labor Government was strange and demented, infested as it was with Morbid Obeidity to boot. Yes Eddie Obeid had a marvellous way of subtracting from the sum total of legitimacy right across the board.

In that light, and while we're talking about female politicians  I do want to say I liked Anna Bligh a lot. I wish she'd run for Federal office. I liked Joan Kirner - I think she got a raw deal. And going back a fair way, I liked Janine Haines; I was indifferent to Dr. Carmen Lawrence (I sure didn't dislike her but the Easton Affair was troubling); and well, Cheryl Kernot was great until she jumped ship to the ALP - again legitimacy was an issue there. The Anna Bligh thing was interesting because at the hight of the Brisbane flood waters, Anna Bligh looked so much more the states-person than the visiting PM, Julia Gillard. In fact it made Julia Gillard look so bad, it probably wasn't worth her while standing next to Bligh in the big press conference, which was surprising.

The point is, regardless of gender, it's important to look like you got your office fair and square and in the right way. You could be an utter dickhead like Campbell Newman, but at least you have to hand it to the dickhead that he stormed to office on an agenda that was voted in in a landslide. He was eminently despicable, but while he was in office, legitimacy wasn't an issue. It's deeply ironic, isn't it?

Which brings me back to Hillary Clinton who basically has a legitimacy issue not unlike the one Julia Gillard carried through her tenure as PM. Now that it's out in the open that the DNC manipulated the system to Hillary's advantage and did its best to bury Bernie Sanders, she's never going to escape the lack of legitimacy this 'win' gives her. Now, legitimacy is one of those iffy things where it's hard to pin it to a person or an office, but when the role is head of government, you sort of need that thing to beat over the heads of your opponents both domestic and foreign. Indeed, Barack Obama does an excellent job of wielding his legitimacy to beat up on the GOP.

Things worked out the way they did because clearly the Clintons own the Democratic Party and the party owes the Clintons too much not to give Hillary the nod. To that end it burnt its own constituents as well as the youth vote, condescending and patronising them as they disenfranchised them. Legitimacy is in short supply now. She might be the world's best candidate, but we've seen what happens to a head of government who struggles to establish legitimacy. To that end, it's just like the Rolling Stone article linked above says, the Democrats have poisoned themselves, just to deliver the nomination to Hillary Clinton. We'll see if the poison ends up killing them.

Wall Street And The Dems

Wall Street told Hillary Clinton that she couldn't pick Elizabeth Warren as her running mate.

NEW YORK — Big Wall Street donors have a message for Hillary Clinton: Keep Elizabeth Warren off the ticket or risk losing millions of dollars in contributions.
In a dozen interviews, major Democratic donors in the financial services industry said they saw little chance that Clinton would pick the liberal firebrand as her vice presidential nominee. These donors despise Warren’s attacks on the financial industry. 

But they also think her selection would be damaging to the economy. And they warned that if Clinton surprises them and taps Warren, big donations from the industry could vanish. 

“If Clinton picked Warren, her whole base on Wall Street would leave her,” said one top Democratic donor who has helped raise millions for Clinton. “They would literally just say, ‘We have no qualms with you moving left, we understand all the things you’ve had to do because of Bernie Sanders, but if you are going there with Warren, we just can’t trust you, you’ve killed it.’” 

Most big donors don’t want Warren on the ticket because she is the most accomplished anti-Wall Street populist in the Democratic Party. But many also think her presence would drive a potential Clinton administration too far to the left, poison relations with the private sector from the start and ultimately be damaging to the economy.

And so it came to pass that Elizabeth Warren wasn't the VP nominee and running partner to Hillary Clinton. I'm sure it's some kind of pragmatism but this is the very kind of deal that browns off people  from the Clintons. Then some person tells you it's because you're a misogynist. How can you be a misogynist if you want a woman to be a VP to go with the female POTUS candidate?! 

More importantly, the fact that Hillary couldn't run it past Wall Street tells you just how much Wall Street has it all over the politicians. Wall Street got TARP and the bail out in 2008 because it was Wall Street. Did you get a bail out? No? See what I mean? Jokes aside, all this proves that there's too much money in US politics as well as outline the unlikelihood of Bernie anders getting up as the nominee. If people really want the political revolution, we're all going have to dig in a lot harder to dig out these banksters.

Weirder By The Day

A Plea To Russia (To Hack And To Love)

There's been an undercurrent of extreme strangeness to Donald Trump's candidacy running for the office of POTUS. Even so, this takes the cake:

Philadelphia: Just as experts are studying whether the hacking of the Democratic National Committee's computers represent a genuine national security threat, Republican candidate Donald Trump behaves like the political version of a child left to play with a pistol in a sandpit – so we watch in horror as Trump urges Vladimir Putin to keep up the good work. 

Confirming an oft-stated criticism that he lacks any capacity to consider complex issues beyond a crude "what's in it for me", Trump's response to what cyber security analysts say is an unprecedented Russian intrusion amounted to a would-be president sanctioning espionage by a foreign power on a secretary of state and the political party she represents. 

Asked on NBC if he had any qualms about a foreign country such as Russia engaging hackers to exploit Hillary Clinton's emails, Trump responded simply and categorically: "No." 

Conflating the June hacking of the DNC computers, which led to a politically embarrassing leak of 20,000 internal emails on the eve of the Democratic convention, and the ongoing saga of Clinton's controversial email habits while serving as secretary of state, Trump used a press conference in Florida to speak across the world: "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing - I think you'll probably be rewarded mightily by our press."

If that's not at the darkest end of the Fifty-Shades-of-Weird that is Donald Trump's campaign, I don't know what is. Contrary to other opinions, I don't think we've seen a candidate like this before. 

It's all been so weird there are people thinking it must be something like this thing here from Jimmy Kimmel Live.

View From The Couch - 28/Jul/2016

What Need For Terror Laws?

Since 9/11, all the western societies have seen a steady erosion of privacy and rights as governments have sought more powers to contain the terror threat. Each time a bill has come up, more rights have been curtailed and more powers given to the security forces of the western world. At this juncture, it is worth asking if these powers are actually helping at all.

Consider Man Monis, our very own terrorist dickhead. The AFP had him on their watchlist and he fell off. Then he acquired a gun and did what he did at the Lindt Cafe in Martin Place, Sydney. The argy-bargy to do with the Lindt Cafe Siege has been going for a number of weeks now, and nobody exactly has explained how Monis slipped off the AFP's watch list and nobody has reported just how Monis got hold of a weapon.

This is notable because since 2007's APEC in Sydney, there have been APEC Anti-Terror laws in place without a sunset clause. We're all still in danger of being arrested without charge on alleged suspicions of terror links and being refused a lawyer - because hey, we don't have Miranda Rights in this country, and that's all okay by our state governments as well as Federal Government.

And yet with all this great power (and as follows Spiderman "comes great responsibility"), the AFP completely missed Monis. The NSW police had no chance as it went around looking for drugs at festivals rather then round up Monis with its great powers.

The same goes for the bastard who shot up the gay bar in Orlando, the truck driving bastard in Nice, the neck-slitting bastard in Normandy, and all the bastards who participate in the big Paris terror attack. Each and every one of them it turned out was on the radar of the authorities and somehow slipped the net togged through and do their dastardly bastardly deeds.

So today, we must ask, what good are these powers given to our police? What good is us citizenry giving up our privacy and rights to these governments whose security apparatuses still fail to stop these bastards anyway? Ed Snowden tells us the governments of the world are listening into everything we say on the phone, everything we write on emails an so on. With all this omniscience, you'd think they'd be doing a better job of stopping these bastards.

There's even a school of thought out there that they want these attacks to happen so they can justify their vast power and surveillance budgets. It's looking more believable by the day as more anymore terror attacks happen, only be revealed the perp was on some watch list but dropped out.

I say, we need a drastic re-think of these terror laws because they seem to be doing sweet fuck all. really. The bastards keep getting through. I am not fearful, I am angry at the rights of mine they are curtailing.

Privatisation Killed The Economic Growth

Pleiades alerted me to this one. The ACCC thinks privatisation kills economic growth.

Selling public assets has created unregulated monopolies that hurt productivity and damage the economy, according to Australia's consumer and competition tsar, who says he is on the verge of becoming a privatisation opponent.  

In a blistering attack on decades of common government practice, Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chairman Rod Sims said the sale of ports and electricity infrastructure and the opening of vocational education to private companies had caused him and the public to lose faith in privatisation and deregulation.

"I've been a very strong advocate of privatisation for probably 30 years; I believe it enhances economic efficiency," Mr Sims told the Melbourne Economic Forum on Tuesday.

"I'm now almost at the point of opposing privatisation because it's been done to boost proceeds, it's been done to boost asset sales and I think it's severely damaging our economy." 

Mr Sims said privatising ports, including Port Botany and Port Kembla in NSW, which were privatised together, and the Port of Melbourne, which came with conditions restricting competition from other ports, were examples where monopolies had been created without suitable regulation to control how much they could then charge users.

"Of course you get these lovely headlines in the Financial Review saying 'Gosh, what a successful sale, look at the multiple they achieved'," Mr Sims said.
"Well of course they bloody well did: the owners factored in very large price rises because there's no regulation on how they set the price of a monopoly. How dopey is that?"

Nice to see it told straight out for once. The question is will anybody listen? Or is the greed factor just too good to let go?

No Country For Old Warhorses

Here's something on Kim Carr.

In 2006 Carr cultivated an alliance between Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd, convincing them they should join forces to depose Beazley. 

In government he supported Gillard's leadership challenge before later becoming a leading agitator for Rudd. 

"Shorten is the first leader he hasn't ratted on," a colleague says.
Gillard dumped Carr from cabinet after many colleagues concluded he had been leaking damaging stories to the media. Carr, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has denied this charge. 

Carr's rivalry with Albanese deepened during his leadership battle with Shorten in 2013. After winning the vote among Labor members, Albanese would have become leader if left-wing MPs locked in behind him. 

A furious Albanese has told colleagues Carr promised him his support only to vote for Shorten and encourage his allies to do the same. Carr denies reneging on any deal.
Laurie Ferguson, a left-wing Labor MP who retired at at this election, says the move against Carr was clear "payback" from Albanese and his allies.

It's probably not right to say this from a clinical perspective because I'm not qualified (educated yes, but not qualified) and Kim Carr is not my patient but I'll say it anyway. That prone-to-dramas thing is a dead giveaway for a personality disorder. It is conceivable that the schizo-genic nature of the ALP in the past two decades could be a function of this guy being an influence broker.

Speaking of this kind of thing...

No Country For Old Female Politicians

Okay, a bit distasteful, but only because it's in reference to the sexism referred to here.

At the Republican Convention last week, attendees had the chance to wear their sexist derision for Hillary Clinton with pride. Just outside, hawkers sold T-shirts emblazoned with "Trump vs Tramp", bumper stickers proclaiming "Life's a bitch, don't vote for one," and the badges printed with "KFC Hillary Special: 2 fat thighs, 2 small breasts, one left wing". 

If that last one sounds familiar, it should. Almost exactly the same "joke" was made at the expense of Australia's first female prime minister in a menu at a fundraiser for Liberal MP Mal Brough: "Julia Gillard Kentucky Fried Quail - Small Breasts, Huge Thighs & A Big Red Box".

That 'menu incident' was about as low as 'politics' in this country got. It's one thing to dislike the Prime Minster because you disagreed with her position on policy. It's another thing to go ad hominem and liken people to poultry as a sex joke - that's all kinds of wrong and it was about as much disrespect as one could take.  And let's not forget, the Opposition that presided over that kind of sexism is now our government to this day.

Anyway, Julia Gillard is backing Hillary Clinton. No surprises there. To give Ms Gillard her due, I should quote this bit, which is important and something I agree with greatly. More people should have called out the rank sexism for what it was. Not doing so robbed the moral authority from the genuine criticism of her office.

No one called for my execution by firing squad, as a supporter of Donald Trump did for Mrs. Clinton, but a radio talk-show host did say I should be put in a bag and dropped in the sea. Witches can’t be drowned, I cynically joked. 

I have often reflected how powerful it would have been if, at that moment, a male business leader, especially one who opposed my policies, said, “I may not support the prime minister politically, but Australia must not conduct its democratic debates this way.” 

Unfortunately, that never happened. 

To my dismay, some of the young women who chat with me are not asking for political insights. Instead, they tell me that, having seen how I was treated, they have decided politics is too punishing for them. I always try to talk them out of this position. Sometimes I succeed. 

In 2016, I hope there are many brave voices naming and shaming any sexism in the presidential contest. The next generation of potential female leaders is watching.

I guess in Hillary's case, she didn't exactly knife Obama to get into her current spot, but she did do her damnedest to hobble Bernie Sanders' campaign, and with it shred the credibility of the Democratic Party. That would definitely get Hillary Clinton into the same hot-seat as Julia Gillard's time in office, which is kind of where she is in Philly right now. They have more than one thing in common.

No Country For Old Perverts

Cardinal George Pell is getting investigated after all.

The ABC's 7.30 program has revealed that Taskforce Sano has been examining allegations from complainants in Ballarat, Torquay and Melbourne for more than a year, and is looking into incidents that allegedly happened during Cardinal Pell's time as Archbishop of Melbourne in the 1990s. 

The program has obtained eight police statements from complainants, witnesses and family members who are helping the taskforce with its investigation. The allegations were repeated on 7.30 on Wednesday night, and include: 

• that Cardinal Pell would touch the genitals of children while swimming in a public pool in Ballarat in the late '70s
• that he was naked in the change rooms on a regular basis in front of children
• that he exposed himself to three young children in another change room, at the Torquay Surf Club in 1986 or 1987.

Cardinal Pell vehemently denied the allegations, with his office saying he "emphatically and unequivocally rejects any allegations of sexual abuse against him".

This is going to get good.

View From The Couch - 28/Jul/2016

What Need For Terror Laws?

Since 9/11, all the western societies have seen a steady erosion of privacy and rights as governments have sought more powers to contain the terror threat. Each time a bill has come up, more rights have been curtailed and more powers given to the security forces of the western world. At this juncture, it is worth asking if these powers are actually helping at all.

Consider Man Monis, our very own terrorist dickhead. The AFP had him on their watchlist and he fell off. Then he acquired a gun and did what he did at the Lindt Cafe in Martin Place, Sydney. The argy-bargy to do with the Lindt Cafe Siege has been going for a number of weeks now, and nobody exactly has explained how Monis slipped off the AFP's watch list and nobody has reported just how Monis got hold of a weapon.

This is notable because since 2007's APEC in Sydney, there have been APEC Anti-Terror laws in place without a sunset clause. We're all still in danger of being arrested without charge on alleged suspicions of terror links and being refused a lawyer - because hey, we don't have Miranda Rights in this country, and that's all okay by our state governments as well as Federal Government.

And yet with all this great power (and as follows Spiderman "comes great responsibility"), the AFP completely missed Monis. The NSW police had no chance as it went around looking for drugs at festivals rather then round up Monis with its great powers.

The same goes for the bastard who shot up the gay bar in Orlando, the truck driving bastard in Nice, the neck-slitting bastard in Normandy, and all the bastards who participate in the big Paris terror attack. Each and every one of them it turned out was on the radar of the authorities and somehow slipped the net togged through and do their dastardly bastardly deeds.

So today, we must ask, what good are these powers given to our police? What good is us citizenry giving up our privacy and rights to these governments whose security apparatuses still fail to stop these bastards anyway? Ed Snowden tells us the governments of the world are listening into everything we say on the phone, everything we write on emails an so on. With all this omniscience, you'd think they'd be doing a better job of stopping these bastards.

There's even a school of thought out there that they want these attacks to happen so they can justify their vast power and surveillance budgets. It's looking more believable by the day as more anymore terror attacks happen, only be revealed the perp was on some watch list but dropped out.

I say, we need a drastic re-think of these terror laws because they seem to be doing sweet fuck all. really. The bastards keep getting through. I am not fearful, I am angry at the rights of mine they are curtailing.

Privatisation Killed The Economic Growth

Pleiades alerted me to this one. The ACCC thinks privatisation kills economic growth.

Selling public assets has created unregulated monopolies that hurt productivity and damage the economy, according to Australia's consumer and competition tsar, who says he is on the verge of becoming a privatisation opponent.  

In a blistering attack on decades of common government practice, Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chairman Rod Sims said the sale of ports and electricity infrastructure and the opening of vocational education to private companies had caused him and the public to lose faith in privatisation and deregulation.

"I've been a very strong advocate of privatisation for probably 30 years; I believe it enhances economic efficiency," Mr Sims told the Melbourne Economic Forum on Tuesday.

"I'm now almost at the point of opposing privatisation because it's been done to boost proceeds, it's been done to boost asset sales and I think it's severely damaging our economy." 

Mr Sims said privatising ports, including Port Botany and Port Kembla in NSW, which were privatised together, and the Port of Melbourne, which came with conditions restricting competition from other ports, were examples where monopolies had been created without suitable regulation to control how much they could then charge users.

"Of course you get these lovely headlines in the Financial Review saying 'Gosh, what a successful sale, look at the multiple they achieved'," Mr Sims said.
"Well of course they bloody well did: the owners factored in very large price rises because there's no regulation on how they set the price of a monopoly. How dopey is that?"

Nice to see it told straight out for once. The question is will anybody listen? Or is the greed factor just too good to let go?

No Country For Old Warhorses

Here's something on Kim Carr.

In 2006 Carr cultivated an alliance between Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd, convincing them they should join forces to depose Beazley. 

In government he supported Gillard's leadership challenge before later becoming a leading agitator for Rudd. 

"Shorten is the first leader he hasn't ratted on," a colleague says.
Gillard dumped Carr from cabinet after many colleagues concluded he had been leaking damaging stories to the media. Carr, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has denied this charge. 

Carr's rivalry with Albanese deepened during his leadership battle with Shorten in 2013. After winning the vote among Labor members, Albanese would have become leader if left-wing MPs locked in behind him. 

A furious Albanese has told colleagues Carr promised him his support only to vote for Shorten and encourage his allies to do the same. Carr denies reneging on any deal.
Laurie Ferguson, a left-wing Labor MP who retired at at this election, says the move against Carr was clear "payback" from Albanese and his allies.

It's probably not right to say this from a clinical perspective because I'm not qualified (educated yes, but not qualified) and Kim Carr is not my patient but I'll say it anyway. That prone-to-dramas thing is a dead giveaway for a personality disorder. It is conceivable that the schizo-genic nature of the ALP in the past two decades could be a function of this guy being an influence broker.

Speaking of this kind of thing...

No Country For Old Female Politicians

Okay, a bit distasteful, but only because it's in reference to the sexism referred to here.

At the Republican Convention last week, attendees had the chance to wear their sexist derision for Hillary Clinton with pride. Just outside, hawkers sold T-shirts emblazoned with "Trump vs Tramp", bumper stickers proclaiming "Life's a bitch, don't vote for one," and the badges printed with "KFC Hillary Special: 2 fat thighs, 2 small breasts, one left wing". 

If that last one sounds familiar, it should. Almost exactly the same "joke" was made at the expense of Australia's first female prime minister in a menu at a fundraiser for Liberal MP Mal Brough: "Julia Gillard Kentucky Fried Quail - Small Breasts, Huge Thighs & A Big Red Box".

That 'menu incident' was about as low as 'politics' in this country got. It's one thing to dislike the Prime Minster because you disagreed with her position on policy. It's another thing to go ad hominem and liken people to poultry as a sex joke - that's all kinds of wrong and it was about as much disrespect as one could take.  And let's not forget, the Opposition that presided over that kind of sexism is now our government to this day.

Anyway, Julia Gillard is backing Hillary Clinton. No surprises there. To give Ms Gillard her due, I should quote this bit, which is important and something I agree with greatly. More people should have called out the rank sexism for what it was. Not doing so robbed the moral authority from the genuine criticism of her office.

No one called for my execution by firing squad, as a supporter of Donald Trump did for Mrs. Clinton, but a radio talk-show host did say I should be put in a bag and dropped in the sea. Witches can’t be drowned, I cynically joked. 

I have often reflected how powerful it would have been if, at that moment, a male business leader, especially one who opposed my policies, said, “I may not support the prime minister politically, but Australia must not conduct its democratic debates this way.” 

Unfortunately, that never happened. 

To my dismay, some of the young women who chat with me are not asking for political insights. Instead, they tell me that, having seen how I was treated, they have decided politics is too punishing for them. I always try to talk them out of this position. Sometimes I succeed. 

In 2016, I hope there are many brave voices naming and shaming any sexism in the presidential contest. The next generation of potential female leaders is watching.

I guess in Hillary's case, she didn't exactly knife Obama to get into her current spot, but she did do her damnedest to hobble Bernie Sanders' campaign, and with it shred the credibility of the Democratic Party. That would definitely get Hillary Clinton into the same hot-seat as Julia Gillard's time in office, which is kind of where she is in Philly right now. They have more than one thing in common.

No Country For Old Perverts

Cardinal George Pell is getting investigated after all.

The ABC's 7.30 program has revealed that Taskforce Sano has been examining allegations from complainants in Ballarat, Torquay and Melbourne for more than a year, and is looking into incidents that allegedly happened during Cardinal Pell's time as Archbishop of Melbourne in the 1990s. 

The program has obtained eight police statements from complainants, witnesses and family members who are helping the taskforce with its investigation. The allegations were repeated on 7.30 on Wednesday night, and include: 

• that Cardinal Pell would touch the genitals of children while swimming in a public pool in Ballarat in the late '70s
• that he was naked in the change rooms on a regular basis in front of children
• that he exposed himself to three young children in another change room, at the Torquay Surf Club in 1986 or 1987.

Cardinal Pell vehemently denied the allegations, with his office saying he "emphatically and unequivocally rejects any allegations of sexual abuse against him".

This is going to get good.

Democracy Is Deeply Wounded

The Deep Blue Sea

For some days I've been trying to write something sensible about the end of Bernie Sanders' Presidential campaign and how Hillary Clinton is now the last standing hope in stopping Donald Trump from becoming POTUS. The thing is, if Donald Trump is the devil, then Hillary Clinton surely is the deep blue sea, and so one cannot in good conscience say that the latter is a better candidate because they are the lesser of two evils.

This is not to be childish and scream Bernie-or-Bust, but more a long distance sketch of how things stand. In many ways it reminds me of the 2013 Australian Federal Election whereby PM Julia Gillard mired in bad polls would point at Tony Abbott as the terrible threat coming our way. In the end she was ousted by her own party and worse sill, the electorate voted in the dreaded Tony Abbott and Australia has had a basket case government ever since. It has the same quality of a not very popular person pointing at a terrifying opponent saying they are the only person who can stop the unspeakably awful from happening. We in Australia have been here, and continue to live through the horror of government by oligarchical interests with scant attention for good public policy. There's not much advice we can offer Americans in how to survive this horror.

Of course in that likening, I do Julia Gillard an immense disservice, for as unpopular as she was, she was not wrapped up in some strange twilight zone of corruption and coverups that is the hallmark of the Clintons. There was Whitewater, there was Mena Arkansas and the gun-running, the Vince Foster thing, the Monica Lewinsky affair (and the distraction of Operation Desert Fox), and above all else the strange charity that is the Clinton Foundation which takes money from dodgy oligarchs to create access in very strange places while the Foundation itself accepts colossal sums of money in exchange for the influence of the Clintons. It's nuts. It really is. That's not a few skeletons rattling around in the closet, it's like a mass grave after a genocide hiding in their closet. It's so bad that when Wikileaks leaks more and more emails from Clinton's past revealing terrible deeds and judgment, the world greets it with an indifferent shrug because we are so inured to the Clintons being scandal-prone.

It goes without saying hat Donald Trump is a terrible candidate. He is such a bad candidate that people really think it's some kind of elaborate hoax or joke. And yet the opposite number American democracy has managed to throw up against him is Hillary Clinton, the dodgiest nominee since maybe Richard Nixon. Talk about your wildest nightmares. If democracy really was just a popularity contest, it's amazing the two finalists are two of the most disliked candidates out of a field of dregs. They've scraped the bottom of the barrel and found there was shit down there - and they must really love shit because they're waving it around like a trophy.

The End Of Bernie's Run

It all came out in the leaked emails how the DNC were far from impartial and went out of their way to hobble Bernie Sanders' campaign. In the end, Bernie Sanders ended up being the only sane candidate with a decent plan and policy platform that withstood rational scrutiny out of a large field of candidates. He's still more popular than Hillary when polled and more importantly far more popular than Donald Trump. And yet the DNC is hellbent on going with their gal Clinton, so it's anybody's guess what's going to happen to the Democratic Party after this election.

It tok more than a generation since Robert F Kennedy's ill fated campaign in 1968 to Bernie Sanders' campaign in 2016 to bring the properly progressive agenda back to the Democratic Party. 48years is a long time between drinks. Maybe the good news is that the Progressive bas that supported Bernie is young, and so the future belongs to them to push forwards. Things can still change in the future, but for now the progressive push back into the Democratic Party platform is stalled. The flip side of the constituency dialogue is that the Baby Boomers are not yet the minority and with the help of a few dirty tricks can keep the Boomer candidate in Hillary Clinton going.

This may not work out the same way in say 2020. The youngest Boomer will be 55 then. One would imagine it would be harder to wage the kind generational demographic war the Boomers of the DNC waged this time around. They would have fewer numbers and less of an influence. Whatever happens in the next 4 years, Bernie sure won't be back to run again next time, and that is the shame of it.

In the mean time, the sensible people are asked to get behind the corrupt candidate to beat the unthinkably awful candidate. The DNC created this mess by insisting on the corrupt candidate - surely they will rue the turn of events they fomented by trying to manipulate the democratic process.

Movie Doubles - 'Hail Caesar' & Mortdecai'

Flabby Comedy Double

This was an underwhelming duo of films. Perhaps they indicate that the talent that brought some of these people are waning in power if not prominence.  'Hail Caesar' is lacking the in the Coen Brothers' usual biting wit; instead it wanders a lazy terrain of banter and production design wonders. It's a lot nicer to watch than to actually enjoy what is going on. That's already a bad sign. As for Johnny Depp's turn as a mincing, puncy, English aristocrat art dealer, it made you wonder if Depp had actually lost his radar back to reality.

Even so, there were things worth noting with both films so here we are. Spoiler alert as usual. I'll try not to ruin whatever cool gags there are in these films.




Star-Spangled Unfunny Comedy Is A Problem

Both of these films are short on laughs but are billed as comedy. To be  fair, 'Hail Caesar' has a couple of genuinely funny moments but they're mostly already in the several trailers this film got. The ribbing jokes about Hollywood-being-Hollywood are a bit stale at this point in time. 'Mortdecai' has moments of genuinely witty banter but it's just not a belly-laugh kind of movie - more of a  knowing chuckle at all the jabs about the English aristocratic mores. You would genuinely expect more from both films given the talent that turns up in them.

'Hail Caesar' is ostensibly built around Josh Brolin's studio exec character and George Clooney's movie star but also sports turns by Scarlet Johansson in an exquisite aquatic choreography segment, Channing Tatum in a better than expected dance routine evoking Gene Kelly; and Jonah Hill as "a person".

'Mortdecai' has Gwyneth Paltrow playing the titular character's spouse, Ewen McGregor playing a MI5 agent, Paul Bethany as Jock the man servant, Olivia Munn as an evil agent and Jeff Goldblum as her father. It's not exactly short on talent but it seems quite intent on wasting it in arbitrary plotting and   lack of urgency in the action. It's not even clear what exactly is at stake and why these characters should care.

Both films are aiming for a kind of screwball sensibility but those films died out in the 60s for a very good reason. It takes a lot of delicate balancing of tone and plot to keep varying talents consistently funny, anreven then there are people who simply don't like the omnibus approach. While neither of these films load their cast up like 'It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World' or the 1960s 'Casino Royale', they both work through their cast as guests on an elaborate joke premise. The problems of executions are in effect problems of conception. They both could have been a lot funnier.

Are These Vanity Projects?

The Coen Brothers have had a number of hits along the way this century so they can be forgiven for the odd bad one. I recall Vincent d'Onofrio visiting AFTRS in the early 90s shortly after he had worked on 'The Player' by Robert Altman (who made a habit loading up his films with many interesting actors and let them run free) and he sad he was glad to have been in a good Altman film as opposed to a bad one. Considering Altman's stature it was a surprising remark at the time, but as time wears on, the wisdom of that insight has become more apparent. Sometimes great directors make not so great films and 'Hail Caesar' would fall into that category of a not good Coen Brothers movie.

Characteristically, the bad films of good directors come about because they make films that are a little easy on the material (I'looking at you Ridley Scott!), and 'Hail Caesar' has all the qualities of a film that was lovingly made but without the critical hardness to make the material stand up for itself. It is dripping with the homage rooted in the sentiment that goes "yeah I always wanted to do bit of 'Quo Vadis' and a bit of 'An American In Paris' and a bit of  'Million Dollar Mermaid' ..." It's even understandable that one wants to get it out of one's system but you wish they dug deeper into the plot for 'Hail Caesar'. I just don't understand why they wanted to do a 1950s Western after accomplishing the great remake of 'True Grit'.

Equally, 'Mortdecai' is perplexing because it gives us a seeming picaresque with absolutely no dig. There really isn't anything thrilling about Mortdecai the character, nor does all the talk of artworks being stolen culminate into an exciting or funny art heist. It spends an awful lot of screen time chewing through dialogue that is a loose knock-off of Noel Coward plays. It's even weirder because the three main characters are played by Deep, Paltrow and McGregor - none of whom speak like that in real life. It's an interesting display but it kills any tension as it highlights how 'acted' the whole thing is. our demands for the modicum realism makes this so obsolete before it begins.

'Mortdecai' unfortunately has the most in common with another ill-fated vanity project 'Hudson Hawk'. Right down to the subject matter of high art, hidden codes, art theft and the black market, the strange ambitions of billionaires and the strong-arming of state agents. 'Hudson Hawk' - universally reviled by critics as it is - is a witty film. 'Mortdecai' is witty in parts but nowhere near exciting or as absurd. It falls flat because it doesn't follow through on its promise.

Look you know me, I love screwball comedies and 'Hudson Hawk' but even then both these pics were really, underwhelming.

Where Was Caesar Going Anyway?

Josh Brolin is a tremendous talent. He plays the younger version of the Tommy Lee Jones character in MIB III, with perfect delivery. That doesn't mean he makes a great comedy leading man. The deadpan seriousness of everything he does isn't really all that funny given the material around him. You wait around forever for 'Hail Caesar' to deliver on its trailer's promise of belly laughs.

The subplot involving Brolin's character Eddy Mannix getting approached by a headhunter from Lockheed doesn't do too much for the story. It adds a tiny bit of distraction to the proceedings and a window into his married life, but because the story goes nowhere, it doesn't exactly add to the laughs or the tension. Not enough happens to Eddy in this story - a lot else happens in his work environment - and so he himself is neither challenged nor humiliated by events. That's not a good backbone for a comedy. Eddy most certainly is not a victim of circumstance; he's more of a lucky beneficiary enjoying exactly what he's doing, so the subplot about his career anxiety is on the whole shallow and boring.

Channing Tatum's turn as the dancer-actor who defects to the Soviet Union is largely without dialogue or significant input into the development of the story. Rather, he is revealed as having been instrumental in the plot assembled by the writers who are put out by the Hollywood system's disdain for writers. The Coen brothers covered this a lot better in 'Barton Fink'. Equally, George Clooney's turn as movie star Baird Whitlock is a little boring. He doesn't quite plumb the character depth of his facetious comedy figures like Everett in 'O Brother Where Art Thou'. The opportunities for genuine comedy were plentiful. For some reason the Coen Brothers opted not to pursue any of them.

Johnny Depp In The Sargasso

The last few films I've watched with Johnny Depp have been less than stellar turns. 'Mortdecai' adds on to a run of ordinary films with Depp putting on weird manners. 'Transcendence' and 'Black Mass' weren't exactly great films while 'The Lone Ranger' and 'Dark Shadows' were showcases for Depp playing oddballs. He hasn't exactly knocked one out of the park in a while. Heck, he's even playing Donald Trump in a satire of Donald Trump's book 'The Art Of The Deal'.

He's also getting to be one of those actors whereby you know you're going to get a heavily mannered character of one description or another, and nothing resembling normative realism. While this has been his calling card, it's sort of trying that every time you sit down to watch a film with Johnny Depp in it, there he is making everything look unreal. It's getting to the point where we ask whether he can provide anything of internal depth that doesn't depend on the extrinsic, elaborate procession of costumes and makeup.

Of course this is a minor quibble next to his co-star...

Gwyneth Paltrow Please Pick Up Your Game

Back int he late 1990s, Gwyneth Paltrow seemed to be everywhere. She was all of a sudden the acting "it" girl and dominated the box office. She was so over-exposed that David Stratton once complained that he'd seen quite well enough of her. The run eventually culminated in her edging out Cate Blanchett for an Oscar gong, playing Lady Viola in 'Shakespeare in Love'. It was tour de force performance that still looks remarkable nearly 20years later. Since then she became Mrs. Chris Martin and had kids, had that 'conscious uncoupling', as well as started Goop.com, becoming eminently un-actorly and more of a celebrity curio in the process.

Indeed, she has become the laughable curator of consumerism herself, pimping for products and services as diverse as facial treatment bowls to vagina steamers. If anything, this film would have had more laughs going into it had Paltrow played the daffy art dealer based on her own experience of 'curating' things, with Depp playing the sensible spouse who goes about figuring what's really going on.

Instead of doing good work, we've seen her playing Pepper Potts in the 'Iron Man' movies, but in most part she's been absent. Maybe this is how she wants it, now that she's won an Oscar and she's climbed that mountain - what more could she possibly want from the world actin? It just seems like a colossal waste of talent when one looks back at the actress that did 'Shakespeare in Love' and 'Great Expectations' and 'Se7en' and 'Sliding Doors'. Now she plays second bananas that anybody else might have done well enough.

It all just seems a colossal waste of talent, as if a mid-career Ken Griffey Jr. decided what he really wanted to do was quit hitting home runs and become a travel agent or a makeup salesperson.

View From The Couch - 26/Jul/2016

Runaway Trump

Since confirming his nomination as GOP nominee for the POTUS elections, the critiques, the attacks and brickbats have mounted against Donald Trump. It's game on for everybody to have a hack.

First cab off the rank was Michael Moore who pessimistically prognosticated a Trump win.

I can see what you’re doing right now. You’re shaking your head wildly – “No, Mike, this won’t happen!” Unfortunately, you are living in a bubble that comes with an adjoining echo chamber where you and your friends are convinced the American people are not going to elect an idiot for president. You alternate between being appalled at him and laughing at him because of his latest crazy comment or his embarrassingly narcissistic stance on everything because everything is about him. And then you listen to Hillary and you behold our very first female president, someone the world respects, someone who is whip-smart and cares about kids, who will continue the Obama legacy because that is what the American people clearly want! Yes! Four more years of this! 

You need to exit that bubble right now. You need to stop living in denial and face the truth which you know deep down is very, very real. Trying to soothe yourself with the facts – “77% of the electorate are women, people of color, young adults under 35 and Trump cant win a majority of any of them!” – or logic – “people aren’t going to vote for a buffoon or against their own best interests!” – is your brain’s way of trying to protect you from trauma. Like when you hear a loud noise on the street and you think, “oh, a tire just blew out,” or, “wow, who’s playing with firecrackers?” because you don’t want to think you just heard someone being shot with a gun. It’s the same reason why all the initial news and eyewitness reports on 9/11 said “a small planeaccidentally flew into the World Trade Center.” We want to – we need to – hope for the best because, frankly, life is already a shit show and it’s hard enough struggling to get by from paycheck to paycheck. We can’t handle much more bad news. So our mental state goes to default when something scary is actually, truly happening. The first people plowed down by the truck in Nice spent their final moments on earth waving at the driver whom they thought had simply lost control of his truck, trying to tell him that he jumped the curb: “Watch out!,” they shouted. “There are people on the sidewalk!” 

Well, folks, this isn’t an accident. It is happening. And if you believe Hillary Clinton is going to beat Trump with facts and smarts and logic, then you obviously missed the past year of 56 primaries and caucuses where 16 Republican candidates tried that and every kitchen sink they could throw at Trump and nothing could stop his juggernaut. As of today, as things stand now, I believe this is going to happen – and in order to deal with it, I need you first to acknowledge it, and then maybe, just maybe, we can find a way out of the mess we’re in.

It's not a happy thought, and he's right in assuming we're all in denial that this is going on.

The more urgent hit came from the Washington Post, famous as the home of the guys who brought down Richard Nixon. This time it appears they're not taking any chances.

DONALD J. TRUMP, until now a Republican problem, thisweek became a challenge the nation must confront and overcome. The real estate tycoon is uniquely unqualified to serve as president, in experience and temperament. He is mounting a campaign of snarl and sneer, not substance. To the extent he has views, they are wrong in their diagnosis of America’s problems and dangerous in their proposed solutions. Mr. Trump’s politics of denigration and division could strain the bonds that have held a diverse nation together. His contempt for constitutional norms might reveal the nation’s two-century-old experiment in checks and balances to be more fragile than we knew. 

Any one of these characteristics would be disqualifying; together, they make Mr. Trump a peril. We recognize that this is not the usual moment to make such a statement. In an ordinary election year, we would acknowledge the Republican nominee, move on to the Democratic convention and spend the following months, like other voters, evaluating the candidates’ performance in debates, on the stump and in position papers. This year we will follow the campaign as always, offering honest views on all the candidates. But we cannot salute the Republican nominee or pretend that we might endorse him this fall. A Trump presidency would be dangerous for the nation and the world.

And on it goes, right down to the end where they say:

The party’s failure of judgment leaves the nation’s future where it belongs, in the hands of voters. Many Americans do not like either candidate this year . We have criticized the presumptive Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, in the past and will do so again when warranted. But we do not believe that she (or the Libertarian and Green party candidates, for that matter) represents a threat to the Constitution. Mr. Trump is a unique and present danger.

Look, I don't know about you, but the candidacy of Donald Trump and the surprising Brexit vote and even the election of Tony Abbott indicates a world where democracy seems to have one to mean much less than it used to. We seem to be voting in favour of less tolerant less meaningful, less nuanced, less informed, less intelligent positions in spite of ourselves. A little like how we seem to like to cut off our noses to spite our own faces or cut off our dicks to spite our balls. We should know better than to be voting in the likes of Abbott or Turnbull, or listening to demagogues lie Farage, Gove and Boris Johnson, or for that matter making one Donald J. Trump a serious candidate for the Presidency of the most powerful nation on the planet on nothing but a promise to make that land great again (whatevertjhe hell that means). There are a lot of asshole voters giving into their inner fascist assholes in the first world.
I don't exactly relate to that mentality.

In that light, it is perhaps valuable to assay the catastrophes of the past that we as humans inflicted upon ourselves.

So zooming out, we humans have a habit of going into phases of mass destruction, generally self imposed to some extent or another. This handy list shows all the wars over time. Wars are actually the norm for humans, but every now and then something big comes along. I am interested in the Black Death, which devastated Europe. The opening of Boccaccio’s Decameron describes Florence in the grips of the Plague. It is as beyond imagination as the Somme, Hiroshima, or the Holocaust. I mean, you quite literally can’t put yourself there and imagine what it was like. For those in the midst of the Plague it must have felt like the end of the world. 

But a defining feature of humans is their resilience. To us now it seems obvious that we survived the Plague, but to people at the time it must have seemed incredible that their society continued afterwards. Indeed, many takes on the effects of the Black Death are that it had a positive impact in the long term. Well summed up here: “By targeting frail people of all ages, and killing them by the hundreds of thousands within an extremely short period of time, the Black Death might have represented a strong force of natural selection and removed the weakest individuals on a very broad scale within Europe,“ …In addition, the Black Death significantly changed the social structure of some European regions. Tragic depopulation created the shortage of working people. This shortage caused wages to rise. Products prices fell too. Consequently, standards of living increased. For instance, people started to consume more food of higher quality.” 

But for the people living through it, as with the World Wars, Soviet Famines, Holocaust, it must have felt inconceivable that humans could rise up from it. The collapse of the Roman Empire, Black Death, Spanish Inquisition, Thirty Years War, War of the Roses, English Civil War… it’s a long list. Events of massive destruction from which humanity recovered and move on, often in better shape. 

At a local level in time people think things are fine, then things rapidly spiral out of control until they become unstoppable, and we wreak massive destruction on ourselves. For the people living in the midst of this it is hard to see happening and hard to understand. To historians later it all makes sense and we see clearly how one thing led to another. During the Centenary of the Battle of the Somme I was struck that it was a direct outcome of the assassination of an Austrian Arch Duke in Bosnia. I very much doubt anyone at the time thought the killing of a minor European royal would lead to the death of 17 million people. 

My point is that this is a cycle. It happens again and again, but as most people only have a 50–100 year historical perspective they don’t see that it’s happening again. As the events that led to the First World War unfolded, there were a few brilliant minds who started to warn that something big was wrong, that the web of treaties across Europe could lead to a war, but they were dismissed as hysterical, mad, or fools, as is always the way, and as people who worry about Putin, Brexit, and Trump are dismissed now.

It makes for some sobering reading. The rest of it is no less somber and sobering. History tells us we're heading in for some self-destructive times. We'd better take note.

Meanwhile The Arseholes We Have Down Here

It's no secret Kevin Rudd wants to be the Secretary General of the UN. He has two problems on that front. One is that the Australian government hats officially endorse him as the Australian candidate. The other is that Helen Clarke is also running. While none of this is fresh news, the Australian Government has prevaricated mightily over Kevin Rudd's candidacy. In short, they don't want to give him the nod in cabinet. Why? Partisan politics.

Except John Key over in New Zealand's quite happy to endorse Helen Clark, who was the NZ Labour Prime Minister.

Mr Key, who hails from the conservative National Party in New Zealand, is barracking hard for his former Labour party rival Ms Clark to become the UN Secretary-General.
It marks a curious contrast with his Australian counterpart, Malcolm Turnbull, still struggling to decide whether his government will do the same for Mr Rudd. 

Mr Key also revealed he had spoken to Mr Turnbull about the race and was quizzed about whether he'd asked him not to support Mr Rudd. 

"I've had a couple of chats with him about it," Mr Key told breakfast television in New Zealand, but was coy about details. 

"All I'd say is if any person wants to be in the race, be in the race … You've got to get either your host country, preferably, or a country, to nominate you. At the moment, he [Mr Rudd] doesn't have a country nominating him. 

"I still think anyway, if it's a drag race between Kevin Rudd and Helen Clark, New Zealanders - and I reckon a hell of a lot of Australians - know who the best candidate is, and it's not Kevin Rudd."

It's all bit academic really, because the man in the lead is Antonio Guterres from Portugal. All the same, it's worth pointing out that Kevin Rudd was quite nice to departing Coalition politicians. The least they could do is return the damn favour. The fact that they don't immediately say yes says tons about these people. 

IOC Takes A Stand Against Doping And Passes The Buck

Nobody really has spine. 

It seemed a mere formality that the entire Russian team would be rubbed out, saving the Olympics any more of the embarrassment that the host city keeps heaping on itself with incomplete facilities. 

There was an expectation – not a mere desire – that Russia would be excluded.
Instead, the Olympic Committee's executive board has displayed the type of leadership that allows doping to flourish: it passes the buck and instructs individual sporting federations to decide which Russian athletes can compete in Rio. 

In other words, it has been left to sporting federations to wade through a legal minefield … in 12 days. 

Some of these sporting federations are loyal to Russia and the bottomless money it provides. Some are too scared. Some are complicit to doping themselves, turning a blind eye to the poison in their own sport and yes, cycling, we are looking at you. 

The IOC has had an appalling bet each-way. Foremost, it is a slap in the face for WADA, which has again been undermined. 

"WADA is disappointed that the IOC did not heed WADA's Executive Committee recommendations that were based on the outcomes of the McLaren investigation and would have ensured a straight-forward, strong and harmonised approach," WADA president Sir Craig Reedie said. "The McLaren Report exposed, beyond a reasonable doubt, a state-run doping program in Russia that seriously undermines the principles of clean sport embodied within the World Anti-Doping Code." 

That's not a few rogue athletes. That's not even a rogue sport. That's a rogue country. If the same happened here, we'd be calling for Royal Commissions, lifetime bans and jail time for those responsible.

Oh the outrage blahblahblah. As I asked - rhetorically - in my previous entry, are we done with this PED hysteria yet? We really need a new approach to the problem especially if the body that allegedly is in most favour of the current method of shaming athletes and banning them, won't back itself to carry out its policies. Go figure.  

We live in a world where haters are gonna hate and cheaters are gonna cheat. It's just the way it goes when sport is anachronistically wrapped up in nationalism of 200-odd nations,some of whom have no shot at any medal, but more importantly some of whom whose national pride depends upon it. Like Russia and Australia. The dumbest thing about the Olympics is how somebody from some nation wins a gold medal and the whole nation gets to thump their chest over that win. This idiotic bit of identification is bolstered by nationalist sentiment and misplaced identity politics. These are really 19th century kinds of modes of thinking, unbecoming of the 21st century. Yet here we are again at another Olympic Games ready urge our boys and girls on to medals. 

Go you beautiful Aussies as you swim through the raw sewerage waters of Rio! Do we relate to this experience? Really?  

PED Offences And Russian Sport

The Olympic Games And Their Dwindling Appeal

With every passing year the Olympics loses its lustre and allure. Maybe I'm saying that because we've had ours in Sydney and it's fading into memory and history every year. Yeah 2000 was grand but every Olympic since has made you wonder if it's really right or worth it. 2004 Athens and the Greeks who ended up with the GFC and austerity?; 2008 Beijing and the self-congratulatory navel-gazing?; 2012 London which was okay, but then it's London so it's hard to go wrong; and now Rio with all the reported problems that make you not want to fall in to the water at all. As for the Winter Games? There's been Sochi with guards beating up on Pussy Riot and all the other unmemorable events, and if you're an Aussie it's hard to take the Winter Games as seriously anyway, seeing that we'll never stage one.

Now that I think about it Baseball got kicked out of the Olympic Games because of the doping scandals in the mid 2000s. They kicked out Softball with it, which was a bit like punishing Table Tennis because Maria Sharapova tested positive. And they added Golf and none of the top players in Golf are going to play at Rio because... Zika virus, apparently. I guess golfers are susceptible to acephalic medical conditions. All of which makes you wonder if the Olympics actually have relevance to the rest of the world of sport. Think of all the sports that aren't contested at the Games and they now include Baseball, Softball, Cricket, and Rugby. But hey, they have Volleyball AND Beach Volleyball as separate, discrete sports. Sports we don't watch unless it's on because of the Olympics.

Quite simply, the Olympic Games is like a bundle package of obscure sports we only want to watch once every 4 years. The sports that aren't there are the staple sports we like to watch regularly. It's a big gap. Baseball, Cricket and Rugby don't need to be at the Olympics at all and can sustain their global audiences quite nicely. It's sports like Track and Field and Swimming that need to be at the Olympics, and probably Table Tennis too. Golf and Tennis? Clearly not so much. Basketball of course started the joke of inviting highly professionalised sport into what used to be the pinnacle of amateur sports. 1992 USA vs. Angola Basketball game was 'fun' (if you enjoy a team of professionals smash through country amateurs), but totally not in the Olympic spirit.

Anyway, all of these things have made me reconsider how I feel about the Olympic Games, and I have to say I'm less enamoured of them today than I was in 2000.

So, here's the news that Russia's Track and Field athletes are out for Rio.

Russia's Whole Track And Field Team Is Out For Rio

It's quite disturbing really.

The Court of Arbitration for Sport said on Thursday it had rejected Russia's appeal against the exclusion of its track and field athletes from the Rio Games starting on August 5, opening the door to a full ban on Russian athletes from the Olympics.
"CAS rejects the claims/appeal of the Russian Olympic Committee and 68 Russian athletes," CAS said in a statement. 

The ruling by the CAS, sport's highest tribunal, will be taken into consideration by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) as it ponders whether to impose a blanket ban on Russia from all sports. 

The affair has triggered a crisis in world sport, with Russian President Vladimir Putin speaking of the risk of a split in the Olympic movement. 

Russian track and field athletes were banned from international competition in November after an independent commission set up by the World Anti-Doping Agency found rampant state-sponsored doping in Russian athletics. 

The ban was imposed by the IAAF, the global governing body for athletics, which reconfirmed it last month, saying there were still considerable problems with anti-doping in Russia. 

The appeal was launched by the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) and 68 Russian athletes who said they were being punished despite not having failed drugs tests, and that they should be eligible to compete in Rio.

Thus, if you're an innocent little schlub whose only talent is chucking a spear and you've never done any PEDs, you're still out thanks to those who did in your country and got caught which includes your whole nation's sport administrative institutions. The problem is you don't choose to which country you are born. There is no point at which the innocent go unpunished in this WADA regimen.
Clearly it's unfair on the innocent, there's no presumption of innocence that would happen in a court of law, and this was the appeals court that just cited precedent to punish the innocent with the guilty. Way to go guys. I can really feel the righteous burn of justice right there... not.

This isn't like the 1919 Black Sox where knowing about the match-fixing and not blowing the whistle got Buck Weaver banned for life from organised Baseball by Kennesaw Mountain Landis. That was done to send message forever eternal that match-fixing threatened the integrity of the game and won't be tolerated. That's kind of a worthy sacrifice. What this is, is like punishing Svetlana Kuznetsova because Maria Sharapova got banned for a failed drug test - even though Kuznetsova had no idea about Sharapova's doping let alone anything to do with it. I'm amazed they're doing this with a straight face.

That's not to say the Russian sports federation doesn't have major issues with doping. Clearly they do.  But 28 years after Ben Johnson, and with what we know today, you'd think the thinking about PEDs might have moved on from the ban-everybody-in-sight routine they've been trotting out forever. There's got to be a better way of dealing with PEDs than what WADA is doing.

Honestly, I've long lost faith that this approach has much merit. I know it's the minority view, but I think we're coming to the point in history where the War on Drugs has failed and we'd better take stock of what that means, right across the pharmaceutical board. That would include admitting PEDs might not be all unilaterally harmful.

Amphetamines, Ephedrine, Pseudoephedrine, Phenylephrine

Once upon a time, Amphetamines were legal over the counter, and they were also PEDs. MLB players took them a lot in the 50s and 60s from what we can gather, until the whole drug abuse thing became such a legal anathema they made amphetamines illegal. Which, I think is an over-reaction.

My ex-friend KJ (we fell out badly but that's another story) had high-powered academics as parents. One of them was even a professor of Pharmacology. They said that when they were doing exams in the 60s, they'd bolster their cramming with Amphetamines. And they didn't turn into crazed drug abusers or mentally compromised brain-disease cases. The worst they would have experienced would have been come-down after the exams, which they also related. The Amphetamines were sold as flu medication to stop nasal congestion.

By the time KJ and I were cramming for our exams at Med School, the Amphetamines were replaced with Ephedrine. Yes you could get Ephedrine over the counter in the 80's and they were really quite good as nasal decongestants. They used to have this ad where you could 'soldier on with Codral', With Ephedrine, you really could sit through days of 3hour exams even with a ringing flu. Then you crashed for a couple of days - but it worked. Even so KJ's parents said it wasn't quite as good as Amphetamines in terms of efficacy.

Of course, Bikie gangs discovered that they could convert Ephedrine into Methamphetamine, a methylated analog of Amphetamine, so they went out and bought up big on Ephedrine in order to produce their Methamphetamine,and sell it as 'Speed'. This led to legislation banning Ephedrine, and so the pharmaceutical companies came out wiht Pseudoephedrine, which once again was not anywhere near as good as its predecessor as a nasal decongestant. It sort of worked, as opposed to really working.

Years went by, and bikie gangs figured out how to make Crystal Meth, otherwise known as 'Ice' out of Pseudophedrine. 'Ice' is by all accounts, a much worse drug than its predecessor 'Speed', which was a worse drug than straight up Amphetamines. Now, the 'Ice Epidemic' has forced Pseudoephedrine off the shelves, replacing it with Phenylepinephrine, which hardly works at all as a nasal decongestant. If things keep going the way they go, the bikies will probably figure out how to make an even worse drug out of Phenylepinephrine than 'Ice' or 'Speed' before it. This will inevitably lead to an even less effective medication replacing Phenylepinephrine; and whatever that medication is, the Bikies will then turn that into an even worse drug than whatever they'll do with Phenylephrine.

The point is, it is the War on Drugs that is enabling this gradual degradation in the quality of medication available to the ordinary innocent consumer, all to stop some people abusing it to get a buzz. That's it. To that end, the Bikies work harder and harder to make worse and worse drugs. Had it just stayed at Amphetamines, and the government not banned it being sold over the counter, it probably would have stayed mundane with some kids giving themselves a buzz. Instead, it's the highly ineffectual Phenylepinephrine that's available over the counter (they might as well be selling placebos) while the Bikies are busy cooking up Crystal Meth like Walter White. It's tremendously difficult to argue we're in a better place for all of this "fighting drugs" business. We're getting all the problems of prohibition without the joy of jazz or speakeasies.

Here's the thing. Lots of these drugs that are banned are actually useful pharmacological substances. Even Heroin has uses as an anaesthetic. When they banned heroin, it took a grea tool out of the hands of Anaesthetists, and any Anaesthetist would be all too happy to tell you that their work is like having a hand tied behind their backs because they had to work with opiate analogs and derivatives when in fact what would really do the trick was Heroin. Yet instead of regulating it like they do with Morphine, they ban it, and the Anaesthetists have to work pretending they don't know about it.

The point of all this is to say, in banning more and more substances for being PEDs, it's driving people into trying more dangerous pharmacological concoctions. Maybe plain old Testosterone might not be so bad in comparison to some of these synthetic drugs that are being created just to pass WADA's tests.

There's just got to be a better way. Certainly there's got to be a better way than punishing the innocent on the presumption of guilt. The first step is admitting there's a problem. We've had 28years trying the prohibition model and predictably, it's not working. There needs to be a total rethink on what drugs are, and what even "performance-enhancing" means.