Quick Shots - 27/Aug/2016

Balancing Books On The Backs Of The Poor

Scott Morrison is an ideologue, even under the heavy makeup he wears pretending to be pragmatic. Otherwise it's hard to understand the meaning of his speeches and how they connect to what he does as the Treasurer.

Heading into its fourth year in office, the Coalition government is again warning of a complacency in Australian politico-economic discourse, which blithely accepts rolling budget deficits as normal. 

Tilling the soil for a looming budget savings battle when Parliament resumes, Scott Morrison notes that most Australians have not experienced a recession in their adult lives and thus don't appreciate how terrible they can be. 

This insouciance has allowed for long-run operating shortfalls, and worse, an electorate-wide failure to realise that being structurally in the red is no way to go into a sharp global downturn, even if deficit financing is the obvious response once one occurs. 

Reworking Joe Hockey's infamous age of entitlement message with its notorious "lifters and leaners" dichotomy, Morrison believes too many people pay no tax effectively, and that the country is in danger of sleep-walking into economic distress because of a lack of imagination. And past political will.

And to that extent what he will do is start by cutting the dole. This is while the rich end o town still get to keep their superannuation perks. In other words, he is putting the poorest of Australians first into the firing line in a bid to fix the bottom line of the government. It's a novel idea if you don't really understand what that would mean, and it's an absurd idea if you do understand the ramification of such a course of action. Yet, this is the man.

Just as a contrast, the previous Conservative PM of Britain David Cameron - he of the Brexit vote and other calamities such as austerity - once said during the GFC that one thing his government would not do would be to balance the books of the government on the backs of the poor. Whether he meant it or not, or was able to do as he stated or not, I do not know. However, as positioning statements go, it's a lot better than "lifters and leaners" or "Taxed and Taxed-nots". I guess if you're the party that insists on conserving the class system, it pays to show some class sometimes. Seeing that we live in a class-less society according to the blue bloods, it is not that surprising to find conservatives in this country show no class whatsoever.

For whatever it's worth, this pic was doing the rounds from Get Up!:

He Doesn't Understand The Problem

On a related topic, there's this interesting defence of the Prime Minister's $5 for the homeless person.

This week the Prime Minister spoke with a homeless guy in Melbourne and put $5 in his begging cup. Our mainstream media followed accusations that the PM was "stingy". This story – and picture of the Malcolm and the man with his cup – was reported around the country and was even reported in the New York Times. Now I never tell anyone to vote for any political party and I don't mind when people criticise government policy or lack thereof, but to call Malcolm Turnbull "stingy" is an outrage.

I don't know if it is an outrage. His government just cut $4.00 per week of dole money. If you looked at the $5 charity, it's like he's giving one person a one-off compensation for a shitty cut to benefits while he gives the middle finger to the rest. It's not that the Prime Minister is stingy so much as he doesn't understand that he's part of the problem that keeps the man homeless and on the street.

Malcolm has been here many times, sometimes with cameras and many times without. As the Bible says, good deeds should be in secret. 

He's put on an apron or sometimes just sat and spoken with homeless people in our community. Many times since those days when we were on the brink, the Turnbulls have helped us with breathtaking generosity. 

I happen to know that the help we've received is just the tip of their charitable iceberg. "Stingy" is not a word I'd ever use to describe our PM. 

Imagine the story in the media if the PM had put $100 in the cup? Our culture will be crippled and miserable when we become incapable of seeing an act of compassion.

It would still be myopic of the prime Minister tithing he's doing any good. It's pretty simple. He's the Prime Minister - he should be able to devise policy so there is minimal level housing available to the homeless, if people's homelessness really worried him. And if he can't it can only because he's too stupid or too incompetent or too unwilling to do just that; honestly the problem isn't whether the Prime Minister is stingy or not.

Gosh you know what? You never used to see homeless people in Sydney before '96. Certainly not in the numbers we're seeing today. People could be down and out and downright unemployable but the dole was there to make sure they could afford a place to live. It's not surprising that since John Howard won in 1996, Australia has somehow managed to create a class of misery out there all the while enjoying 20-odd years of economic growth. It just doesn't make sense that this is what has become of our nation. This is all a product of Neo-Liberalism. 

'Stranger Things'

80's Nostalgia

You know, it is really strange that I spent the 80's waiting for it to be over. I had a good time, and I was still this miserable son--of-a-so-and-so because the things that were happening didn't seem all that exciting. Maybe it was because on some level the 70's NYC experience was so much more formative than the 80's Sydney experience. All I know is that I've had this feeling of trying to find my way back to a feeling I had when I was younger. A fleeting moment here, a remembered emotion there. We all grow up even when we resist it as hard as us Gen-X have tried; time marches on inexorably and the inevitable crust and barnacle forms on your soul. You forget who you were a long time ago, even when you feel like you haven't changed all that much.

And then you discover other people are trapped by the past as well. The past is haunting. It's never what you remember it to be, and it's even weirder when you see somebody else's fiction about it. 'Stranger Things' is exactly that kind of TV series that evokes a lot and makes you remember the things you once yearned for, but it also reminds you of what is no longer there. It's funny, but it's also deeply tragic.

Spoiler alert, because it would be unfair if I didn't tell you now.


What's Good About It

It's like watching a mash-up of 80s movies. There are moments that come straight out of things like 'Stand By Me' and 'E.T.', while other moments are snatched from 'The Thing' and 'Gremlins' with a deep nod to 'Alien'. The whole thing is made up of fiction piled one on top of the other. The references in the dialogue echo 'Star Wars' and 'The Empire Strikes Back' while the tropes of a sleepy town Sheriff going on a search in to the woods is Stephen King. Somehow it all stays together without spinning out of control.

Indeed, the series is full of homages to films long past. Even 'The Wizard of Oz'. Eleven is Dorothy in a strange Oz and the boys are respectively Tin Man, Scarecrow and the Lion. When they walk along the train tracks in search of the Gate to theVale of Shadows, the quartet echo the quartet of 'Stand By Me', who walked along the rail tracks. When the kids are on the run from government agents' cars, as they ride their bicycles, they are Elliot and E.T. - but instead of them flying over blockades, Eleven flips a government van instead. At one point Sheriff Hopper finds himself in the Vale of Shadows, looking into a going husk of a large egg, a clear visual homage to 'Alien' - and he should know better than to peer in because Alien came out in 1979.

The kid actors are great in this series. There is nothing to top the sense of adventure in adolescence and the domain of the mind. It is a potent combination of intuition and imagination. The entire series of events hinges on the understanding the kids have of otherworldliness. Much like 'Stand By Me' and 'E.T.' before it, the adventure centre around the concept of the world as seen from kids. They're very well cast, not for them are the good looking boys of Will Wheaton, River Phoenix, of 'Stand By Me'. This bunch looks more likely as future candidates of Frank Zappa's band where ugly was not a problem.

David Harbour's Sheriff Hooper is strongly reminiscent of Jack Nicholson's look in 'The Shining', which adds to to the Stephen King thing going on. There are plenty of 80s tropes to pick at and laugh about so it's generally mirthful.

What's Bad About It

I wouldn't say it's bad, but I did wonder about Winona Ryder's performance. She's the lone actor in this series that comes with a high profile even though she's been out of the headlines since her days as the 90s It Girl for creepy movies. You take one look at her and you know it's all a certain kind of fiction, and it makes harder the wilful suspension of disbelief.

I waster so I can spot the anachronism well enough. Most of the production design is spot on but the wardrobe and makeup lapse into problems. Just because it's satin 1983 doesn't mean everything is from 1983, at the same time, the most likely things to be up to date are teen fashion and makeup, and there are some clunkers there. The blue eyeshadow here, the wrong kind of hairdo there, it's the little  things that occasionally poke out as being not quite right.

What's Interesting About It

It's actually quite Proust-ian with a Gen-X makeover. Instead of a madeira cake that evokes a lifetime of memories, it's a lifetime of memories tugged at through the idiosyncratic counterculture of kids. Instead of the whole story strung along on great themes of literature, it's strung up along Dungeons and Dragons. The monster in question comes straight out of the pages of 'the Monster Manual', it is the Demogorgon - and I must add it is one of my favourite monsters in the Manual:

Yes, that's him the Prince of Demons, and while the monster doesn't look like that in this series, it is unmistakably of Dungeons and Dragons. Why does one like certain monsters in the Monster Manual? I know my DM loved Owlbears, the "product of cruel genetic experiments" as per the Monster Manual. The rich Gary Gygax text provides hours of interesting meditation on civilisation. Somehow it is informing the abstract in this series.

This isn't 'Hook' where Spielberg condescends to understanding the culture of Gen-X kids - this is how the other kids not Elliott were living 1983.

Government Conspiracies

The show leans heavily on the conspiracy theories, and giving them more credence than one normally would. But here's the thing: Conspiracy Theorists rightly or wrongly get ridiculed. The problem with that is ridiculing Conspiracy Theorists is exactly what the CIA want you to do. The truth is, whether you believe it or not, the US government has always been doing things in secret involving lots of people. That, is the working definition of conspiracy so, it's not surprising it spawns speculation.

One of the more out-there bits of conspiracy theory way back when was that the US Government was secretly manufacturing the LSD that found its way into the West Coast counterculture. This is a claim that was documented at the time, and even Philip K. Dick uses it in 'A Scanner Darkly' as the central plot problem that gets uncovered by protagonist Bob Actor. Of course, it turned out MKULTRA was real, and the CIA were experimenting with LSD on people for purposes mind control.

This a certainly level of discomfort watching the bits to do with the Government agency running crackpot experiments on kids, but at the same time what would the world fiction be without governments doing nefarious experience on people? Information was hard to come by in the 1980s. It was easy for governments to keep people in the dark. The discomfort of watching it was a reminder that when sitcoms to the flow of information, maybe the 80s were closer to the dark ages than the current internet age.

The character of Eleven is far-fetched, but not as far fetched as we might have believed 1983.

Paranoia Has A Name And It Is Lando Calrissian

At the business end of the story when the boys go in hiding from government agents and they are contacted by Sherif Hopper, they immediately suspect the Sheriff has been compromised. They base this on the part of 'The Empire Strikes Back', where Lando Calrissian betrays his friends Han and Leia to Darth Vader. It's an interesting construction because the kids are right to suspect. They quote the Star Wars mantra "I have a bad feeling about this", and then make a leap of faith to trust Sheriff Hopper.

The world around the boys is filled with ambiguity in a way that Dungeons and Dragons eschews. In D&D, the world is divided into alignments, and the alignments dictate one's actions. The strange blurring of Government into what can only be described evil affects not only the boys but even the adults around them. The reference Lando Calrissian then is not just about betrayal, but the undecidability in the face of ambiguity.

The Rule Of Law And The Adventurer's Code

At one point the gang falls apart in dissension. It is the toothless boy Dustin who re-asembles the group by the dint of the adventurer's code and the strict adherence to the code, stating it is the Rule of Law. It's actually a strangely moving moment. Dustin cites the times the party is preyed upon by monsters simply because they did not stick together. Sticking together a the party is how to survive adventures. Splitters perish. The lessons of the game inform Dustin's forceful argument that Mike offer the hand of peace to Lucas. When Mike refuses to countenance, Dustin thunders it is the Rule of Law, that he who draws first blood in conflict must atone for the act first.

What's interesting is that Dungeons of Dragons does provide players with this insight. Carnies should stick together for the same reason parties should stick together. Disunity is, as the ALP found out, death. Certainly Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard and Bill Shorten et al. would have benefited greatly from this wisdom, and tarred and feathered Tony Burke.

If there are two observations to be made about what Dungeons and Dragons offers players is the insight that life is speculative and statistical, while our response to it needs to be tempered impartial as the law dictates. Sticking to party its rules saves lives in the game. Sticking to the impartiality of the rule before law renders possible all the things we hold dear.

It is therefore the crowning moment of the series when the three boys reconcile themselves and with Eleven. It is about as profound as anything in the annals of literature. The party should always stick together.

The Music

Gee y'know? That's exactly the music that made the 80s musically unbearable. Little did I know back then that things were only going to get worse. :)

The faux John Carpenter synth music as the theme however, is nothing but unmitigated coolness.


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A Postscript For A-Rod

The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract Excerpt

Since A-Rod's retirement, I fished out my copy of 'The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract', which has the following write-up on Alex Rodriguez:

17 - Alex Rodriguez
(1994-2000, 70G, 189 595 .309)
 The best seasons ever by a 20-year old player. 

1. Ty Cobb, 1907
2. Silver King, 1888
3. Alex Rodriguez, 1996
4. Dwight Gooden, 1985
5 Mickey Mantle, 1952
6. Bob Feller, 1939
7. Ted Williams, 1939
8. Mel Ott, 1929
9. Al Kaline, 1955
10. Noodles Hahn, 1899

Of the other nine players on the list, six went on to have Hall of Fame careers. The three who failed to do so were all pitchers - Silver King, Doc Gooden and Noodles Hahn

Then right below it, he has a section that goes:

XXX - Nomar Garciaparra and Derek Jeter
It is too early to rate Nomar garciaparra and Derek Jeter; the same is true of A-Rod, of course. I have nothing to add to the constant hype that accompanies all three men, except that I will observe that it seems likely that all three men will rate amongst the Top 20 at the position and that I would regard any stronger statement as speculation. We do not know whether any of these men will eventually have better seasons than they have already had. 

Pretty careful avoidance-of-prognostication there. For the record, the final tally for these guys were:

• Alex Rodriguez: 114.9 oWAR, 9.5dWAR from BRef, and 112.9 WAR from Fangraphs.
• Nomar Garciaparra: 42.6 and 6.0dWAR from BRef and 41.4WAR from Fangrpahs.
• Derek Jeter: 95.5oWAR, -9.5dWAR from BRef and 71.7WAR from Fangraphs.

Baseball Reference seems to think all three were better than what Fangraphs has them pegged as having been.

By our contemporary reckoning and ignoring the PED issue, A-Rod clocks in at about the 14th best player of all time, while Derek Jeter sits at about no.50. If you think about the value to the franchise, A-Rod delivered about 60-odd WAR to the Yankees. That's pretty remarkable lump of performance. Eyeballing the Shortstops in the HOF, and again ignoring the PED issue, A-Rod and Jeter would be a shoe-in for the Hall of Fame, but Nomar falls short (50WAR is about the cut off for HOF consideration for Shortstops).

Ravaged by injuries, Nomar really didn't get to rack up the counting stats. A-Rod moved off Shortstop in favour of Derek Jeter, which is going to be one of those stories they'll be talking about a hundred years from now. So A-Rod's value at Shortstop ceases at 2003; even so A-Rod did rack up 52WAR as a Shortstop to that point in time, so if he dropped dead at the end of 2003 instead of playing for the Yankees, he still did better than Nomar's entire career and still would be worthy of being a Hall of Famer.

As it is, it is most certain that only Jeter will make the Hall of Fame out of these three men. Not something Bill James might have predicted given what was in front of us in 2000. Things played out much more strangely than one might have predicted back then. I was asked his week if I went soft on PED cheats because all these Yankees like A-Rod, Andy Pettitte, Roger Clemens and Jason Giambi got caught. It's most likely true that I did. Taking those drugs sure didn't make those teams win the World Series more. For all the personal records and even the numbers in the seasonal win columns, the Yankee dynasty after 2001 was more notable for how fruitless it was given how much money was being invested. A-Rod was the poster boy even for that.

Yet if it really gets down to the brass tacks, A-Rod was trying to win each year. I'm not going to fault him for something like that given that half of professional sports is about the entertainment value. The numbers might be tainted by PEDs, but at the end of the day there's only the championships and flags fly forever. We were mightily entertained by A-Rod, and that's the truth. I can't fault him for trying to entertain us more. Pretending that simple relationship doesn't exist in spectator sports is exactly what makes lesser sports boring.

News That's Fit To Punt - 17/Aug/2016

You Gotta Laugh

This hung Parliament thing is going to be 'fun'. The ALP have basically promised to return the favour from the 2010 Hung Parliament where they won't grant a 'pair'. Naturally, the Coalition is unhappy about it.

In 2011, the Coalition threatened to not grant a pair to controversial Labor backbencher Craig Thomson when his wife was due to give birth during heated debate on the Labor government's carbon pricing legislation. 

"I think that a party, whose principles around looking after people in the workplace ... it's a really sad day when they say if someone's having a baby they're not going to allow them a pair, if someone's sick they're not going to allow them a pair," he said. 

"I don't think it was ever as savage as that [during the 43rd Parliament when Julia Gillard was prime minister]. If they ever say that someone, by reason of infirmity, is not going to be allowed a pair then that doesn't say much about a party that prides itself on looking after the worker."

Yes, yes it was. It's like these people have neither memory nor conscience! At the time, Tony Abbott took a no-holds-barred approach to his running of the Opposition and only grudgingly gave a pair for Michelle Rowland. Yes, this extract is from those ugly days:

Mr Entsch says he refused the pair on the basis there was no sense of urgency.
He has now issued a statement saying if Ms Rowland's "child is sick then she should leave the Parliament immediately and a pair will be granted". 

Speaking to The World Today, Mr Entsch said he granted Ms Rowland leave when he read about the matter in this morning's paper, but labelled her leave request "a stunt".
"The issue of backbench pairs was raised with me first at a meeting I had with the new chief Government whip on Monday," he said. 

"Included in that was a request for Mike Kelly. He sought a pairing for a family medical matter, and I said to him at that time, send it over to me but there's not a lot of detail there, I'll need more than that to be able to approve it. 

"There was also a request there from Michelle Rowland where she said due to her child being unwell that she'd be grateful if she could return home on Thursday night.
"My comment to Chris [Hayes] at the time was that if the child is unwell, she shouldn't be down here, she should be with her child. 

"It seems rather bizarre to be putting in a request on Monday or Tuesday asking for a leave on Thursday night because a child is unwell.
"If it's unwell now, she should be with it. 

"No other information was available to me and on the basis of that I said look, I can't approve it on the basis of the information that's been provided to me.

If it had been me and it had been my sick child, I would have been sitting with my sick child. I wouldn't have been spending a week in the Parliament.

"Now later on [Mr Hayes] came back to me and he said to me that Mike Kelly's wife was sick. She'd been in hospital for a couple of weeks and he needed to sit with her. On that basis I changed my position and approved that. 

"At no point from that discussion until I read about it in the paper on Thursday morning had there been any further discussion to me or my office in regards to Michelle Rowland.
"If it had been me and it had been my sick child, I would have been sitting with my sick child. I wouldn't have been spending a week in the Parliament.

Classy! 

Anyway. Joyce thinks that was wrong, and so two wrongs won't make a right. The answer to that is you should've thought of that before you let the precedent cat loose. Once you set a precedent, it's really hard to get the precedent cat back into the bag, so to speak. 

He said Mr Abbott and manager of opposition business Christopher Pyne were wrong to take the hardline approach against Ms Rowland. 

"If those decisions were made, then I think those decisions were also wrong ... and so I don't think two wrongs are ever going to make a right." 

Mr Joyce said the government should be "realistic and decent" in operating the Parliament. 

Speaking on ABC radio, Ms O'Dwyer said the dispute was a demonstration of unnecessary partisanship. 

"It would be turning about 50 years of convention on its head," she said. 

"Frankly I think the Australian people are very sick of party political games. 

"We want more women in the Parliament, we want people who have got parental responsibilities putting their hand up for Parliament. 

"For Labor to turn around and say, where you've got family emergences you are not going to be able to leave ... I think they need to explain why they've made that decision," she said.

*Ugh*. Spew.
The rank hypocrisy of these people. Really, if Ms O'Dwyer thinks 50years of convention means something now, she be well advised she certainly didn't behave that way back in 2013, because that was her and her party turning 47years of convention on its he'd when it suited them for absolutely short term political gain. Now that the shoe is on the other foot and it's about to be firmly lodged in their butt cracks, Joyce is asking for realism and decency. If he wants realism, he can recant his stupid climate change denials and if he wants decency he can argue in favour of doing something about Manus and Nauru detention centres. 

For crying out loud... 

It's Gold, Gold, Gold! (As The ABS Shoots Own Goal)

Pleiades sent me a Bernard Keane article, and in it is a little discussion about Olympic funding:

And more than a third of voters think we spend too much money on Olympic sports: 36% of voters say we spend too much money — with little difference between voters of different parties — while just 11% say we don’t spend enough; 34% say we spend about enough. Fifty-one per cent of voters say it’s very important or quite important that we win gold medals in Rio; 43% say it’s not important. Greens voters are the most underwhelmed by gold medals — just 29% say it’s important, compared to 63% of Liberal voters. Men — 56% — are more likely to think gold medals are important than women (47%), while older voters are less inclined to view them as important than younger voters. But there are fewer differences between people on overall interest in the Olympics — 19% say they have a lot of interest (21% men, 16% women) and 17% say no interest — although Coalition voters are the least likely to say they have no interest, and women are more likely than men — 20% to 15%.

I mean, we're just grumpy on the Left, okay? If we weren't grumpy, we probably won't be on the Left. 

Worth Flying For

Victorian Police are looking to fly to the Vatican to interview Cardinal Pell over allegations that he was a pederast too. 

In a statement, Victoria Police confirmed it has received advice from the Department of Public Prosecutions in relation to allegations of historical sexual assaults committed in Ballarat East between 1976 and 1980, and East Melbourne between 1996 and 2001. 

"We have received advice from the DPP and will now take the time to consider it," A Victoria Police spokeswoman said.

I say go ahead, make our day. Pell spent years being the ornery conservative wowser making people's lives a misery. He should be served a bit of his own medicine.

View From The Couch - 16/Aug/2016

'Eddie The Eagle'

Goodness, the Olympics are on and what do I end up watching? I watch a movie about a guy who barely made the cut and did pretty badly to make a spectacle of himself. I've really not followed the Olympics this time and I feel a secret guilt about it, but there's only so much Beach Volleyball and Swimming I can take. I've seen snippets of other events but I'm just finding it hard to get into it this time around.

'Eddie The Eagle' is a feel-good comedy that is built from the template of 'Cool Runnings'. Eddie the Eagle himself has said he likes the film but only 5% of what happened in it are true. So, it's basically 95% a crock, and it plays like that too. The cool coach that teaches Eddie just enough to get in to the competition played by Hugh Jackman? complete bollocks. The backstory of the coach? Complete bollocks. Otherwise the story is a beat-by-beat re-run of 'Cool Runnings' except it's a hopeless Englishman instead of 4 Jamaicans in the snow, and Eddie finishes his event but he's utterly below standard so even the moral victory of it is suspect.

Now, the Olympics have changed the rules so there won't ever be an Eddie The Eagles style competitor. It raises the question as to whether that is still in the spirit of Coubertin's original ideas about Olympic Games. Today it is undeniably an exercise in elitism so it's hard to say to the common person in any given country they should be enthused about all this sport. In a sense, Eddie The Eagle himself and the rule he spawned combined, is the reductio ad absurdum of Coubertin's ideal that the point wasn't winning or losing but the struggle. The modern Games as we know them certainly puts a lie to that one. It is about elite athletes winning and losing.

Of course, it was bleeding obvious by the way our media carries on about our swimmers.

Sports Nationalism Is Actually Boring

This business of spending taxpayers' money on athletes to bring back gold medals is a bit on the nose. There's a certain level whereby if an athlete wants to become elite and perform at the Olympics, they're really doing it for themselves. They're not doing it for their country, really. Certainly not in the same way that soldiers go and fight under a flag do it. Is all this fuss really necessary? Is there any reason on God' Green Earth that Australia needs even one more medal of any colour?

When I think about the summer Olympic gold medals won by Australia, the two that pop into mind are old ones. John Sieben snuck by for gold in LA '84. That same year Dean Lukin won a gold in weight lifting - mainly because the Soviets boycotted the LA Games, and so his major rivals were entirely absent. Both of them sort of were serendipitous, which underlies the notion that Olympic Gold medals are thus precious because fate is so random. When it gets down to Winter Games gold medals, the mot memorable will always be Steve Bradbury, mainly because his win illustrates exactly how fickle and wanton fortunes of the Games can be.

In none of these cases were our national profile raised any higher, none of these cases really added to GDP or contributed to the betterment of mankind. It had about a couple days' worth of good feeling and that was it. The wins - watched from afar - were more akin to going to a really good rock concert. The buzz wears off pretty quickly and memories of Olympics past are pretty ordinary things next to other televised-memory-merchandise. We spend millions on it and then divide up the spending with numbers medals won. I'm here to tell you it's just not doing it for me. I'd really rather they spent that money on health and education. Really. If it's so damn important to our society, sports funding is one area of the government I'd be entirely happy to privatise. Sport is important, but no that important. There's something truly demented about where we've come to with our engagement with sport.

Madness Masquerading As Politics

This has got to be the theme of 2016 - and I'm not talking about Donald Trump. It's our own Senator Malcolm Roberts, he of the second One Nation ticket into the senate.

We've elected Norman Gunston to the Senate.
How did it come to this? We're not a nation of complete nongs. We're a nation who made a hero, across several generations of children, of a physicist who's trademark line was a four-word advertisement for science.

"Why is it so?" Julius Sumner Miller would ask, and we relied on science to provide the answer. Even Mrs Marsh tapped the boffin in us, with her chalk dipped in dye celebrating the benefits of fluoride. "It does get in!" said the kids, believing the evidence of their own eyes. 

Oh no it doesn't, would be Malcolm Roberts' reply, perhaps with a triumphant assertion that teeth aren't made of chalk. And to the question "Why is it so?", he might reply, as he did on Q&A: it's a NASA stitch-up. 

Roberts: "First of all, that the data has been corrupted and we know…"
Cox: "What do you mean by 'corrupted'? What do you mean?"
Roberts: "Been manipulated…"
Cox: "By who?"
Roberts: "By NASA."
Cox: "NASA?!" 

The audience erupted in laughter, as Cox pressed: "This is quite serious" - before Jones tried to restore decorum.

"We have to hear what is being said here," Jones admonished. "It is all very well to laugh but we have to hear what is being said." 

Actually, it was hearing what was said that was the problem, as panellist Lily Serna, a mathematician, noted: "First of all, I cannot believe we're having this conversation." Discussing the scientific consensus on climate change, she told Roberts: "You don't ask your architect to read your medical charts just as you don't ask your accountant to perform surgery on you."

Good Grief Charlie Brown. I guess it's important to expose the man for exactly what he is, a wilful  nutjob who indulges in conspiracy theories in order not to face reality. That we have elected such a fantasist to the Parliament is truly astounding. As if a portion of the population - 77 votes, apparently - is infected by a particularly powerful strain of stupid, and somehow their views had to be reflected in the polity.

And The Dynasty Finally Ended

Goodbye A-Rod, 

It's been a while since I wrote an entry about the New York Yankees, but hey, when some big time players announce their up upcoming retirements, it's time to have a look. The last time I wrote anything about the Yankees was when Derek Jeter retired at the end of 2014. While 2015 had its own little pleasant surprises, the nub of the problem was that the remaining players beyond what was once the 'Core Four' were getting older, and the other players were merely role players. The Dynasty has been receding from its historic peak for years.

I'll always be an A-Rod fan. At the end of the day I always appreciated his hitting. The whole PED issue has stepped back in importance for me when I look at his career. Sure, he took PEDs and possibly hit more than his fair share. Maybe he did it his entire career? May be he did it as a teen and that's how he became the A-Rod we know in the first place? One can think of the worst of him and come up with ever more theories about the relative merits of his career. I opt to put those things to the side for the simple reason that those homers and hits are real enough.

It is wilfully putting my head in the sand, I guess, for the world of sport screams out loud against "drug cheats".  The thing is, it's nothing like match-fixing. The athlete taking drugs to win, is going exactly in the direction everybody wants to them to go: to excel in performance like no other mortal human being. So, I've decided no, I'm not going to hold the steroids against the steroids era players. It's silly. MLB tacitly allowed this to happen under their watch and then belatedly hunted out players and made examples of them. It's not right, it's not a two-way street, it was a witch hunt concocted by Bud Selig so that he wouldn't have to look bad for having presided over the steroids era.

The truth is, it shouldn't be about the PEDs, the steroids, the allegations, the suspensions. It should be about the guy who was possibly the most talented player of all time. Win or lose, hit or miss, A-Rod provided a mountain load of entertainment for 23years. Twenty-three years! He was the heel, he was feared, he was outrageous, he was hilarious, he was the guy that always compared worse to Derek Jeter in the eyes of the New York Media, but had better numbers. He was all those things, rolled into one, and a once-in-a lifetime player like you will never see again. When I put it under the rationality light, I for one don't really fault the amazing trade that Brian Cashman swung to land A-Rod in 2003. The Yankees got well over a decade of something special from the guy.

We'd be chumps to pretend that didn't happen, or that it didn't mean anything. It meant the world.

Goodbye Tex

As for Mark Teixeira, he too reached the end of the road this year. The injuries caught up to him. He was making noises during Spring training that he'd like to go another 5 years after this season but obviously he said those things before the injuries got out of hand.

Out of eight seasons, Tex had 3 excellent seasons, 2 good seasons, 2 injury-curtailed seasons, and this one where he simply failed to provide any value at all for three months. All the same, it's a pretty good outcome for an 8year contract. As with A-Rod, there's no point complaining about the end being what it is. The Yankees signed him to a long contract just to land him in 2009, and they won the World Series on the back of that signing.

Tex isn't going to make the Hall of Fame, but he is in the imaginary Hall of the Very Good. The amazing thing about Teixeira for me is that I can remember the year he was drafted by the Rangers. The Cubs drafted Mark Prior, and they both made their debut in 2003. It doesn't seem all that long ago. Especially because A-Rod was already in his prime and in his last year as a Texas Ranger that year Teixeira came up into the big leagues. Arguably, the Rangers had the infield of the future in Teixeira, A-Rod, Hank Blalock, Michael Young, and Ivan Rodriguez behind the plate. It's a weird kind of twist of fate that brought half that infield to the Yankees by 2009, only 6 years later.

Amazingly, Tex's tenure at 1B for the Yankees follows in the footsteps of long tenures before him. There have only been five 1B since Mattingly won his spot as a regular in 1984. He went 12 seasons to '95; Tino Martinez went 6 seasons from '96 to '01; Jason Giambi wen from '02 to '08, and that brings us to Teixeira. For the first time since 1983, the Yankees will go into a season without knowing  who will be playing 1B.

The New Kids On The On-Deck Circle

It wasn't just A-Rod and Tex announcing retirements. Brain Cashman also traded away Aroldis Chapman, Andrew Miller, and Carlos Beltran to load up the farm system. The real story in a sense has been how decisively the Yankees have gone about re-casting their future and the talent they acquired to shape that future.

The Yankees have, for once, collected a lot of talent in their farm system. They have depth at just about every position. In fact they have the most depth at SS which is the hardest to fill. They go 6 deep at SS, starting with Gregorius at the Big League level, Tyler Wade in AA, Gleyber Torres and Jorge Mateo at High A, Hoy Jun Park and Kyle Holder in Low-A. That's a lot of depth. Even first base will have a competition next year with Greg Bird coming back from injury and Tyler Austin graduating the farm this year. They also have a packed outfield with recent additions Clint Frazier and Bill McKinney as well as Aaron Judge.

Not all of these guys will make it, but the Yankees potentially have one of the younger rosters in the AL  next season. It really is a re-boot of the team, right from the ground up. I don't think I've seen anything like this in the Yankees since 1995. Chances are, the young core to emerge out of all these young players won't win a World Series until 2020, but depending on the way things break, this group might peak earlier than expected, just as the aged veterans were forced out sooner than they had hoped.

I can recall back in 2009 when the Yankees wont World Series that the window had closed on that team. The 2009 win was the last win possible with the Core Four. A quick survey of the farm system at the time revealed that the Yankees would project to being a pitching and defence sort of team by 2016-2017. Judging from the makeup of the current team, it's something that has come to fruition, if a little less effectively than hoped. Yet the new kids projecting forward seem to provide an ample horizon where the Yankees will once again be The Bronx Bombers.
That's one sure thing about Baseball - hope always does spring eternal.

'Concussion'

A Serious Topic

I've never been great with collision sports. I never wanted to play them because I'm well-attuned to my own pain thank you very much. Some kids love it, but I never wanted to do it. Yeah, I'm wimpy that way - but I'll have you know my brain is intact.

It's amazing how collision sports forms the backbone of national identity in anglophone countries. There's Rugby in the UK with its component nations, South Africa, New Zealand, and then there's Australia where there are two varieties and Australian Rules. There are the two north American varieties of "Football" which are nothing like the beautiful game, both of which feature helmets and protectors and people colliding at great speed. If you speak English, you're in for a sport where people crash into one another over a bit of inflated pigskin.

Perhaps then it took a total outsider to the anglophone culture to pierce the veil of denial surrounding collision sports. This film shows what it all looks like from an outsider's eyes.




What's Good About It

For quite an explosive topic, the film is very stately and careful. It goes a long way towards telling the story of the doctor who discovered CTE, and not going for the sensational angle in the spotlight. The ramifications of the findings are frightening enough, so the film leads you through the chain of events that led to the discovery and disclosure.

It's nice watching a straight up drama. Nobody pulls a gun, nobody drives like a maniac through traffic lights, nobody ducks and takes cover in a hail of bullets, nobody goes to court to make a big speech, nobody leaps into action to do something impossible. It'll told in a very direct, human dimension, and you're grateful for it when you watch it. Will Smith, Alec Baldwin and the rest of the cast put in very controlled, subtle performances.

It's a good film; It's not a great work of cinema, but it's an important film that communicates the discovery of the problem.

What's Bad About It

It's so understated that it gets a little like a telemovie in parts. We get that Dr. Bennet Omalu's private life and professionalize found themselves at a complex juncture, but some of it just eats screen time and doesn't tell us how the NFL is responding.

It's probably the choice of the director not to go too much into the NFL's response to the findings, but it feels a little too balanced towards Dr. Omalu's life. It's a big story so they could have gone for just how large the story is. Instead there's a muted quality to that critical interaction.
It's not bad as such but it is dissatisfying in the context of a very well made film.

What's Interesting About It

The most interesting aspect of the film remains its central subject matter, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. Perhaps it's better to have the real doctor discuss this.

Omalu told Fairfax he has watched AFL and NRL on satellite television: "My impression? Those sports remind me of the gladiatorial sports in ancient Rome." Given heavy body contact is a feature of both codes, he categorises them similarly to American football. 

Omalu's opinion is that no one under the age of 18 should play games without rules that forbid all manner of heavy knocks that can culminate, over time, in brain damage. His position is based on the scientifically proven fact that brains remain unformed until that age. 

"Papers that came out this month alone, scientific papers, have shown that if you suffer one concussion, just one, as a child, that you are about 16 times more likely to commit suicide as an adult," he said. 

"Papers that have come out last year have shown that, as a child, the younger you are when you begin to suffer exposure to brain trauma – with or without concussions – the greater the likelihood that you cannot attain your God-given intellectual capacity."
CTE is described as having a strangling effect on the human brain. A by-product of repeated head and body blows, it is caused by a build-up of a protein named tau that essentially overtakes healthy cells.

So that's probably where the discussion should start.
If you look at these collision sports with a fresh eye, it's actually quite disturbing how often you see full-paced collision with people's heads being flung in all kinds of directions. We've known about boxers getting brain degenerative diseases after retirement for many years, perhaps headlined by Muhammed Ali and his Parkinson's Disease. It stands to reason that if you are taking concussion damage on a regular basis for many years, it manifests itself as brain disease.

The most important image might the avocado stone in a glass jar sloshing around in water that Will Smith's Dr. Omalu uses to show us what a brain is, under concussion. He shakes it hard to show the avocado stone slosh and smash into the jar at both ends. It may actually be the world's least surprising diagnosis.

The Joy Of Biff (In The English Speaking World)

The thing is, these collision sports hold such a sacred spot in the culture the anglophone world. It's a real badge honour to have played these games growing up. If you keep playing them as an adult, it's sort of like an extra badge of manhood and masculinity. We judge certain players negatively if we perceive them to be "tackle-shy", which only underlines how much value we place in taking part in the collision aspect of these games.

We value the contact, we love gratuitous bouts of "the biff", we admire the tough men who can run around for 80-odd minutes and inflict this as much as they can take it. If the Super Bowl is the highest rating television event in the USA, it is mirrored by the NRL State of Origin in Australia, and the Rugby World Cup is certainly a festival of hard collisions on the field. It's ingrained into our culture, like some baked-in ingredient of our worldview. Speak English? Expect to understand the beauty of collision sports.

Against that context, this doctor sure has thrown a cultural bomb. As much as I find identity politics passé, it's hard to imagine an anglophone culture denied of its collision sports, or certainly what remains of the the collision sport if the collisions were taken out. It isn't just the football fields of the world that is going to be affected by this understanding.

The CTE diagnosis and spreading understanding has moved to other sports. Major League Baseball changed the rules to do with catchers covering home plate - collisions are to be avoided, and there are now strict rules on where a catcher can position himself. Jorge Posada was moved off from catching in his last season because it was deemed he hashed one too many concussion episodes colliding at home plate. Concussion is turning out to be a serious complication in the administration over collision and contact sports.

This is a far cry from Rivaldo taking a dive clutching his face. And we hold Rivaldo and soccer players who dive in contempt exactly because it's so ingrained in us that players of these collision sports are so damn tough.

You can understand why the NFL resisted the findings as much as it is portrayed in the film. Subsequent studies are finding the phenomenon is quite widespread. 96% of former NFL players have CTE. It's not going to "get better". If one plays a collision sport, one is putting oneself directly at risk of getting brain trauma injury; and that being the case, there really isn't good future with these sports. The NRL's position on CTE for instance is guarded and defensive. Some think the clubs are in denial. Not surprising given the amount of mirth the sport enjoyed around Mario Fenech getting concussed during his career.

The AFL isn't doing much better. The ARU is noticeably silent on the issue. Elsewhere, they're finding the same problems with retired NHL hockey players. Even soccer players are coming to light with their header plays, as being significantly at risk. The diagnosis of Lou Gehrig having had ALS (a.k.a "Lou Gehrig's Disease") is beginning to look doubtful. People have conjectured that it might have been the multiple concussions Gehrig received playing in the days without a batting helmet.

Given what we know today, if I had kids, I wouldn't let them near collision sports, except as a spectator. If enough people - and parents at that - took my view, the future of these sports is doomed.

News That's Fit To Punt - 05/Aug/2016

BOE Set Interest Rates At Lowest Rates Ever

We live in interesting times. If you see things that are once in a generation, then live long enough you might see it twice. There are people who presumably experienced the Great Depression firsthand, and are now experiencing the GFC audits aftermath. Yet, even they would never have witnessed the Bank of England settler interest rates this low.  That would be because it's the lowest 322 years.

The central bank's Monetary Policy Committee voted unanimously to lower its benchmark interest rate to 0.25 per cent, the lowest level in the bank's 322 years. The rate had been at 0.5 per cent since March 2009.

further this year, but he ruled out the possibility of negative interest rates. The committee's next meeting is set for November.

The bank also said that it would introduce a series of additional measures to support the economy, predicting that there would be little growth in the second half of this year and that economic growth would decline sharply next year compared with its earlier forecast for 2017.

What we're seeing, is the Bank of England moving to the point where it no longer has any means of adding stimulus to a moribund economy.  

The Bank of Japan has been doing this for over 20years. There's a whole generation of people in Japan who grew up under low interest rates and low inflation that they cannot imagine a world with 6%-8% interest rates and 5-9% inflation. You wouldn't be saying it too loud, but it appears the British economy has entered a similar twilight zone where no amount of interest rate cutting and stimulus spending can reflate the economy. 

It's a strange state of affairs, when you think about it. The central banks are virtually giving money away to banks so they can lend into capital investment. The place where most of the money ends up is in fixed assets, namely housing, and businesses just hoard cash instead. The consumer expects prices to drop in the future so they too hold on to cash; and together they form an environment where demand is low. The rest of the heartache and sorrow, about which you know, so I won't go into it today. I just thought it was worth noting that if you see an institution doing something it hasn't in 322years, you're seeing something very extraordinary; something they'll be talking about in a thousand years' time.

The question I want answered is how do we get to the other side of this malaise without wars and revolutions and killing each other? Because that's what usually happened in the past. 

About Those Jobs In America That Were Lost To Free Trade

I caught this during the week and it's an interesting little article because it shows we might be overstating the extent to which globalisation is eating up manufacturing jobs. If you go through to the Op Ed it is citing, you get this:

The number of manufacturing jobs in the United States has indeed been in a long decline since the late 1970s, but that disguises the true story of American manufacturing. Nostalgia for a bygone era blinds politicians and voters alike to the reality of a revitalized sector of the American economy that is thriving in a global market.

American factories and American workers are making a greater volume of stuff than ever — high-tech, high-value products that are competitive in markets around the world. In the last 20 years, which include enactment of the North American Free Trade Agreement and China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, real, inflation-adjusted U.S. manufacturing output has increased by almost 40%. Annual value added by U.S. factories has reached a record $2.4 trillion.

What has changed in recent decades is what our factories produce. Americans today make fewer shirts, shoes, toys and tables than we did 30 years ago. Instead, America’s 21stcentury manufacturing sector is dominated by petroleum refining, pharmaceuticals, plastics, fabricated metals, machinery, computers and other electronics, motor vehicles and other transportation equipment, and aircraft and aerospace equipment. 

We produce more manufacturing value with fewer employees than in years past because today’s workers are so much more productive. They are better educated, equipped with more sophisticated capital machinery and turn out more valuable products than their parents’ generation. And as a result they are better paid, with total manufacturing payrolls rising during the last decade even as the number of workers declined.

The article in a nutshell says it's technological progress that has eaten the jobs, not trade. I'd imagine that this is true in Australia as well. There are good trade deals and bad ones (like theTPP they keep trying to pass), but in most part the economy has had rational players when it comes to manufacturing goods. 

I've had a number of discussions with people about this very phenomenon. It has been argued by empirical economists in the past that technological development does not kill jobs, it more than creates more jobs. That when the car came about, the horse-drawn buggy makers went out of business but lots of people found employment making cars; and so when the Australian automotive industry closes, those people will inevitably find employment in areas of higher technology. It makes sense that this has happened, but it seems unlikely that re-training auto-manufacturing workers into high tech workers of unspecified industries is the same as retraining buggy makers into auto-manufacturing workers. 

Similarly, the past performance is no predictor of future performance, and so we cannot simply subscribe to the view that it will happen again because it happened before. The implication being derived out of the empirical numbers, seem to be technological progress is happening in such as way as to cut the rate at which future jobs are created. We're now on the incline where each new development will likely destroy more job than they create, which is a new phenomenon.

The Rudd Revenge Is Just Beginning

Here we go!

"What I don't respect is, having pursued this campaign for United Nations secretary-general for such a long period of time in abso­lute good faith, to then see that good faith dishonoured and trust broken,"Mr Rudd told The Australian.

Arguing he had no interest in pursuing a "quixotic venture", Mr Rudd claimed his continued campaign to be the next secretary-general was based on assurances and underlying assumptions of support from both the Prime Minister and Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop.

For his part, Mr Turnbull has again insisted that he told his predecessor that it was a decision for cabinet and warned him in May that the chances of his nomination going ahead were not good.

Oh, I dunno what to say. This Parliament hasn't even sat yet and they've managed to make a problem out of a trifle.

Being Where?

Maybe We Need To Talk About The Donald (Some More)

One of the more interesting narratives developing is the notion that Donald Trump isn't all there. It's hard to pick up all the strands of this story because a lot of people are now discussing it in earnest, but the best strand might be Martin Amis' take in Harper's.

Our psychological exam cries out for hard evidence. Now, the written word is always hard evidence; and I have before me “two books by Donald Trump.” That phrase is offered advisedly, particularly the preposition “by.” But we can be confident that Trump had something to do with their compilation: it very quickly emerges that he is one of nature’s “reluctant” micromanagers, having discovered (oh, long, long ago) that every single decision will hugely benefit from his omnicompetence. “By” is tentative, and even the epithet “books” is open to question, because Trump always calls his books his “bestsellers.” Anyway, almost three decades separate The Art of the Deal (1987) and Crippled America (2015). I suppose a careful study of the intervening bestsellers — among them Surviving at the Top (1990), How to Get Rich (2004), Think Like a Billionaire (2004), The Best Golf Advice I Ever Received (2005), and Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life (2007) — might have softened the blow. As it is, I can report that in the past thirty years Trump, both cognitively and humanly, has undergone an atrocious decline.

It's a delightful skewering of a pompous ass. A tremendous read, really, written by a man who knows how to demolish any character worth calling a character, and by Amis' estimation there's really not that much character to demolish.

Harper’s readers will now have to adjust themselves to a peculiar experiment with the declarative English sentence. Trump’s written sentences are not like his spoken sentences, nearly all of which have eight or nine things wrong with them. His written, or dictated, sentences, while grammatically stolid enough, attempt something cannier: very often indeed, they lack the ingredient known as content. In this company, “I am what I am” and “What I say is what I say” seem relatively rich. At first, you marvel at the people who think it worth saying — that what they say is what they say. But at least an attitude is being communicated, a subtext that reads, Take me for all in all. Incidentally, this attitude is exclusively male. You have heard Chris Christie say it; but can you hear a woman say, in confident self-extenuation, that she is what she is? 

Fascinating. And maybe there’s some legible sedimentary interest in “Donald Trump is for real.” Or maybe not. As well as being “for real,” Trump has “no problem telling it like it is.” To put it slightly differently, “I don’t think many people would disagree that I tell it like it is.” He has already claimed that he looks like a very nice guy, on page ix, but on page xiv he elaborates with “I’m a really nice guy,” and on page 89 he doubles down with “I’m a nice guy. I really am.” “I’m not afraid to say exactly what I believe.” “The fact is I give people what they need and deserve to hear . . . and that is The Truth.” See if you can find anything other than baseless assertion in this extract from the chapter “Our Infrastructure Is Crumbling”:

In Washington, D.C., I’m converting the Old Post Office Building on Pennsylvania Avenue into one of the world’s greatest hotels. I got the building from the General Services Administration (GSA). Many people wanted to buy it, but the GSA wanted to make sure whoever they sold it to had the ability to turn it into something special, so they sold it to me. I got it for four reasons. Number one — we’re really good. Number two — we had a really great plan. Number three — we had a great financial statement. Number four — we’re EXCELLENT, not just very good, at fulfilling or even exceeding our agreements. The GSA, who are true professionals, saw that from the beginning. 

That’s the way the country should be run. 

Before we turn to the naked manifestations of advanced paranoia, we had better tick off the ascertainable planks in Trump’s national platform; they are not policies, quite, more a jumble of positions and intentions. On climate change: he would instantly desist from any preventive action, which is “just an expensive way of making tree-huggers feel good.” On immigration: he tries to soften the edges, but the nativist battle cry is intact and entire (“Construction of the wall needs to start as soon as possible. And Mexico has to pay for it”). On health care: he would stoke up interstate competition among insurers, and let the market sort it all out. On governmental style: he would restore “a sense of dignity to the White House,” bringing back the old “pomp and circumstance.” On religion: “In business, I don’t actively make decisions based on my religious beliefs,” he writes, almost comatose with insincerity, “but those beliefs are there — big-time.” On gun control: here, Trump quotes that famously controversial line about the necessity of “well regulated militias,” and then appends the one-word paragraph, “Period.”

And there in that bit Amis nails down the cognitive degeneration, very apparent in the texts separated by time. If Donald Trump wasn't all too polished as an intellect way back when, he's since degenerated considerably. He is having trouble singing sentences together in speeches. Amis, as a professional at reading into text, certainly as any capable novelist is, can parse out the degeneration of cognitive function. 

It's an important idea because we tend towards seeing people in continuity and not as changeable personae. We assume that the people we know and meet maintain a consistent personality and persona over the vast time of a lifetime. I assume my friends are consistent with who they were five years ago, ten years ago, maybe even twenty or thirty. We assume that this consistency applies to people all around me. This is why it so hard for relatives to spot the onset of degenerative cognitive diseases like Alzheimers. 

Now, it turns out somebody in Salon floated the observation that the Donald might not be all there, back in April.

We have become so accustomed to these sorts of ramblings that we don’t really register them as anything more than standard nonsensical Trump-speak—a pattern of speech we have seen crop up across the GOP in recent years, most notably in Palin’s gibberish. But I urge you to re-read the exchange above and register the range of nonsense—the lack of basic grammar, the odd syntax, the abrupt shift in topic, the disconnect from reality, the paranoia, and the seeming inability to even grasp the question. 

As we scratch our heads and wonder how someone who says and does such things can still be a frontrunner, I want to throw out a concern. What if Trump isn’t “crazy” but is actually not well instead? To put it differently: what if his campaign isn’t a sign of a savvy politician channeling Tea Party political rhetoric and reality TV sound bites? What if it’s an example of someone who doesn’t have full command of his faculties? 

We’ve watched both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton come under fire for potentially being unfit medically to run, but have we wondered enough about Trump? There is far more media coverage about Clinton’s health at 68 than Trump’s at 69. 

There could be a good reason why. At times it can be very hard to distinguish between extreme right-wing politics and symptoms of dementia. The Alzheimer’s Association tells us that if two of the following core mental functions seem impaired then it is time to seek medical help: Memory, communication and language, ability to focus and pay attention, reasoning and judgment, visual perception. Alzheimer’s carries other symptoms besides memory loss including difficulty remembering newly learned information, disorientation, mood and behavior changes; deepening confusion about events, time and place; unfounded suspicions about family, friends and professional caregivers; more serious memory loss and behavior changes. 

Scholars of the recent trends in GOP politics point to some of the very same tendencies happening across the extreme right-wing faction of the party. (See thisand this for example.) 

Much to the chagrin of the reasonable conservatives who wonder what has happened to their party, it is now often difficult to distinguish Republican rhetoric from the ravings of someone suffering from diminished mental capacity.

She has a point. In Donald Trump, we might be having the closest candidate to Chauncey Gardner.

UPDATE:
Wait, there's more! Moments after I put out the post, this one came in:

Trump’s shortage of empathy can be seen clearly by his stances on topics like immigration. Instead of recognizing that the data shows that most Mexican immigrants are not violent, but instead people simply looking for a place where actual opportunity exists, with a broad brush he claims that they are “criminals, drug dealers, rapists, etc.” In a similar vein, Trump has vowed to ban all Muslims from entering the country should he be elected. It appears that his lack of empathy has distorted his mind’s ability to grasp the fact that the refugees he speaks of are actually seeking safety from the same murderous maniacs that he wants to keep out. Perhaps if Trump had relatives in countries like Syria and Iraq, he might understand the constant fear that most live under, and in turn become more willing to welcome them with open arms rather than leaving them to be slaughtered. 

But a lack of empathy is just one part of narcissistic personality disorder. Just beneath the surface layer of overwhelming arrogance lies a delicate self-esteem that is easily injured by any form of criticism. We have all seen Trump unjustifiably lash out at a number of people with harsh and often extremely odd personal attacks. When he thought he had been treated unfairly by Fox News host and Republican debate moderator Megyn Kelly, he responded by calling her a “bimbo” and later saying that she had “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.” In response to the strange, misogynistic comments Kelly said that she “may have overestimated his anger management skills.” If the news host would have pegged him as a bona fide narcissist from the beginning she might have expected such shamelessly flagrant behavior.

He's rather unwell. He needs care. Not the president's chair.

Developments From A Developing Nation

Outrage And Abuse

The news making the rounds this week is the reign of vigilante enablement in the Philippines under President Rodrigo Duterte. He's been in power 3 months and in that time he's unleashed vigilantes to go and hunt and kill drug addicts and pushers.

Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Philippines, won an electoral landslide in May after pledging to fill funeral parlours with drug dealers. He told Filipinos on the day of his inauguration last month: “If you know of any addicts, go ahead and kill them yourself as getting their parents to do it would be too painful.” 

Since 10 May – the day Duterte was announced the winner of the presidential poll– at least 704 people have been killed because they were suspected to have been involved with drugs, according to monitoring by journalists at ABS CBN News, a Filipino news network.

One influential Philippine senator has called for an investigation into the killings. In a speech before the senate, Leila de Lima, a former justice minister, said: “We cannot wage the war against drugs with blood. We will only be trading drug addiction with another more malevolent kind of addiction. This is the compulsion for more killing.”
De Lima, who has also headed the Philippines’ national human rights body, said police were summarily killing even innocent people, using the anti-drugs campaign as an excuse.

A statement issued last week by the citizens’ council for human rights accused Duterte and his officials of abandoning due process and human rights in their zeal to fight the war on drugs. “Units of the Philippine national police, under the command of his close associate General Ronald “Bato” de la Rosa, have turned many low-income neighbourhoods in the country into free-fire zones,” it said. 

“The bloody encounters taking place daily have polarised the country between those who support the president’s quick and dirty methods of dealing with drugs and crime, and those who regard them as illegal, immoral, and self-defeating.”
The killings appear to have been carried out by police, who attribute the violence to suspects who “resisted arrest and shot at police officers”, and vigilante groups emboldened by Duterte’s promises of impunity.

That's some seriously fucked up shit right there. It's like something straight out of 'Judge Dredd' where the 'Judges' are also jury and executioner. Except that was meant to be a satirical comic book. The Philippines is a real country, so the freak out is real. The murder-spree by state and vigilantes is way beyond the fascist dreams of the most right wing crazies in most developed countries. It's the kind of thing you would expect in the 'developing' world. The question being, what the hell is it developing into?

The reductio ad absurdum of the 'zero tolerance' approach may well be this policy of unleashing police as judge jury and executioner, the rule of law be damned. I imagine he'd argue that it's not worth the state spending money housing drug pushers in prison - it's cheaper to just shoot them. The mathematics of it don't lie but, dude... human rights? It's weird how this crude populism crosses over into the classic asiatic barbarism of utter disrespect for life. You expect this kind of stuff from say, communist China, not a democratic Philippines. Still, he seems like the man on a mission:

Before he was elected president, Duterte was a lawyer who earned a reputation as an authoritarian figure while he mayor of the southern city of Davao. His campaign pledges included the reintroduction of the death penalty by hanging, as well as offering bounties for the bodies of drug dealers. 

During the campaign, Duterte said 100,000 people would die in his crackdown, with so many dead bodies dumped in Manila Bay that fish there would grow fat from feeding on them. After his election win, Duterte also launched a seemingly unprovoked attack against the UN. 

“Fuck you UN, you can’t even solve the Middle East carnage ... couldn’t even lift a finger in Africa [with the] butchering [of] the black people. Shut up all of you,” he said.

And we're worried Kevin Rudd might fuck up the world as UN Secretary General. The world is laughable sometimes. 

News That's Fit To Punt - 01/Aug/2016

The Rudd Rejection

It's already a fiasco, but this business of the Coalition Government not nominating Kevin Rudd to run for Ban-Ki Moon's office of Secretary General of the UN is already spinning wayward.

Kevin Rudd says he was told he had Malcolm Turnbull's strong support for his bid for the top job at the United Nations before the Prime Minister suddenly reneged on that commitment, according to private letters from Mr Rudd to Mr Turnbull, obtained by Fairfax Media.

In an explosive new development in the aftermath of the Turnbull government's official rejection of Mr Rudd's request for endorsement to run for the post of secretary-general of the United Nations, Mr Rudd has released letters, which, while only showing one side, suggest that agreements had been reached to support the Rudd bid, but that this support was suddenly withdrawn on May 1, just days before the election was called.

This is quite awkward.
Over the weekend, Peter Garrett was heard this first concert since returning to being a vocalist, that the world dodged a bullet when Malcolm Turnbull refused to back Kevin Rudd as a candidate. It's a bit cruel but I guess there's no love lost between Rudd and Garrett*.

It's not exactly a great move by Turnbull. Now he'll have a vindictive Rudd on his case and god only knows how that will play out. After all Kevin Rudd can be a spectacular media tart and if he signs up for something like Sunrise again to prefer his political opinions on a regular basis, it mightn't be long before he will actively say things to sway public opinion against the government. Rudd was always going to be better for everybody concerned, outside of Australia.

Anyway, Pleiades tells me this won't be the end of it because Rudd doesn't know how to quit. Not only that he has significant recourse with his international friends. Dr. Geoff Raby has an article in the AFR today that illustrates possible path back for Kevin Rudd. If the election/selection for the UN Secretary General does not conclude before the US election and if Hillary Clinton should win,therein every chance that a President Hillary Clinton might back Kevin Rudd for the job. At which point it's going to be an uneasy phone call for Malcolm Turnbull.

In a matrix of fifty-fifty coil flips, there's a 25% chance Turnbull doesn't have to revisit this issue, 50% chance that the issue remains irrelevant, but a 25% chance that he's going to have to eat crow.   That 25% however is looming larger when you think through the fact that the next Secretary General is being selected in sync with the next US President. The US will moe than likely delay the selection until after the election, and that Donald Trump is (for al his blather) unelectable. That means there is a great probability Malcolm Turnbull will be asked to revise this topic.


* - As a side note, I've been pondering for long time why as a fellow leftist Peter Garrett's stance on things have bothered me over the years. My old working theory was that he was a prat, but that seemed too simplistic. The most accurate representation of his position might be that he is a regressive leftist. Once you understand that about Peter Garrett, the rest of it is rather easy to decode. 

One Seat Majority

The last seat in the Lower House fell to the ALP, which means the Coalition have only a seat majority. One would surmise then that Malcolm Turnbull has no margin for error.

No Coalition MP will be able to cross the floor. Even an abstention would force the Speaker to cast a tie-break vote, creating the appearance of party weakness. Coalition discipline will need to be watertight. 

2212`1`12Coalition figures have been fond of saying that a narrow majority will enforce its own discipline. That's true in the sense that it forces the party to stick together like glue. But on whose terms will it stick together? 

Mr Turnbull's challenge of managing his right flank becomes that bit harder because the handful of lower house MPs who might actually take the rare step of defying party discipline at the point of voting in Parliament will need to be placated down to the last man or woman. 

Those passionate outliers within the party will be empowered by knowing Mr Turnbull cannot afford to lose a single vote.

Well... one would imagine that's a two way street. If the fringy-crazy want to threaten to cross the floor, it would be over a policy that the ALP may actually want, and would a fringy-crazy rightwing nut job MP want to cross the floor just to spite their moderate PM? There can't be that many bills that satisfy both the ALP and the Greens and the fringy-crazy right wing of the Coalition. Not even Bob Katter would cross the floor to do that. It's hard to image that fringy-crazy rightwing MP of the Coalition would be going that far as well, no matter how unhappy they are with Malcolm Turnbull.  

Of course Bob Katter's not happy Malcolm Turnbull hobbled Katter's friend Kevin Rudd's aspirations so maybe therein a scenario where Bob Katter crosses the floor (Katter's already signalled he's not going with the ABCC legislation).

Didn't Last The Week

In the last post I pointed out how untenable the Royal Commission that was announced was, having Brian Martin heading up the Royal Commission, and surely enough he's resigned.

Former Supreme Court judge Brian Martin has resigned as the head of the royal commission into the NT juvenile detention just days after being appointed. 

His replacements have been announced as former Queensland Supreme Court judge Margaret White and, following calls for an Indigenous co-commissioner, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner Mick Gooda.

Citing the need for public and stakeholder confidence in the joint Commonwealth-NT inquiry, Mr Martin said that criticisms of him had been "disingenuous" and ill-informed.
"However, notwithstanding the nature of the commentary, it has become apparent that, rightly or wrongly, in this role I would not have the full confidence of sections of the Indigenous community which has a vital interest in this inquiry," he told media in Canberra.

As teens like to say, "sure, whatevs". You have to love people putting up defences of their positions that fly in the face of reality. If it were exactly as he said it was, he wouldn't be quoting, would he? Both things cannot stand and one thing we know for sure is he's not doing this Royal Commission any more. You can't put a man in charge to investigate himself.

The Downside Of Identity Politics

Here's something about a statue going up in Ashfield.

It's the peace statue that is dividing Korean and Japanese community groups, with legal threats issued to a church minister and complaints escalated as high as the Minister for Multicultural Affairs. 

At the centre of the dispute is a statue commemorating the "comfort women" of World War II - the women and girls who were forced into sexual servitude for Japanese troops - which has been imported from Korea by a local Korean community group.

The group - called the Peace Statue Establishing Committee - plans to unveil the statue, which they describe as a "peace monument", at a traditional welcoming ceremony to be held at the Korean Community Hall in Croydon Park on Saturday. 

The statue, which cost $35,000 and was donated by a Korean benefactor, is about 1.5 metres high and depicts a Korean comfort woman sitting beside an empty chair, as a symbol of the victims who have since died.

And so it is that we come to the Comfort Women issue, exploding on the streets of Sydney. Really, we ought to ask, should this issue be played out in Australia? Should it be played out in Sydney?

Now, this statue was meant for Strathfield but was soundly beaten back by a presentation by the Japanese community. The main plank of the rebuttal, so to speak, was that there actually is no mythical girl who was forcibly taken away by the Japanese Army to be a sex slave prostitute. Except this is accepted as fact thanks to the Yoshida Testimony of 1982, as published in Asahi Shimbun. Since then there has been much research on this area to corroborate the Yoshida Testimony, and nobody has been able to corroborate any of it. There has even been a US Senate enquiry into it and the the US Senate recognised that there was no truth to the Yoshida Testimony. Seiji Yoshida himself made statements before his death to the effect that he had made it all up.

Last August Asahi Shimbun finally retracted the Testimony as false, which has led to a class action against Asahi Shimbun for insisting on its provenance for 34 years, providing ammunition for the claims that the comfort women were forcibly taken away by the Japanese government orders. It's been such effective bullshit that people in the west are refusing to give up that talking point, now that Asahi Shimbun has retracted the claim. The new of its retraction and what it means has been very slow in getting around the globe.

So yes, the statue is inflammatory. That's the whole point. It's primarily being put there to offend while proclaiming peace and remembrance or whatever. The people who want to put it up want to do so to stick it to Japan over stuff that happened in World War II. The people who don't want it put up are fed up with South Korea trying to stick it to Japan for an apology and an extra pay out.

Except as of 28th December 2015, there has been a new apology and an agreement to pay the claimants. The terms of the agreement stipulate several things including, this is the last discussion to be had on the topic of comfort women, their recompense, their status and as a bargaining point between South Korea and Japan. Part of the agreement was for the government of South Korea to work with the activist group to remove the original statue placed in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul.

Now, it should be noted that it is against international convention to stick a protest statue in front of another country's embassy, regardless of the cause. We don't do it, the Americans don't do it, nobody in Europe or Africa or the Subcontinent does it, Japan certainly does not do it in retaliation, not even Israel does it to the German embassy.

If the agreement of 28th December 2015 is to stand, the South Korean government has to remove the original of the statue. That's what they agreed and signed upon, and eight months later they're yet to do it. It is therefore in incredibly bad faith (and bad taste) to be sticking a replica of that very same statue in the streets of Sydney proclaiming it to be an act of peace. It's extremely disingenuous of this Reverend Bill Crews to be talking about apologies an peace.

Be that as it may, it should be asked of the Korean community if an equivalent statue ought to be erected in tribute to the Vietnamese comfort women the South Korean Army procured for itself during the Vietnam War.

During the Vietnam War (late 1960’s – early 1970’s) South Korea sent troops to Vietnam in an attempt to keep South Vietnam free from communism. It was reported later that many South Korean troops raped Vietnamese women and committed atrocities such as massacring farmers and aged people, and many others were forced into working as prostitutes for the South Korean soldiers. Many of these women would then later become pregnant and after these mixed Korean-Vietnamese children were born they were shunned by Vietnamese society and their soldier fathers returned to South Korea never to be seen or heard from again. The plight of these women was lost to history and not discussed until the late 1990’s when many of the victims began to speak out against the Vietnam and South Korean governments and demand recognition and compensation. To date the South Korean government has done little to acknowledge the issue but has continued to pursue further financial compensation from Japan for their own comfort women survivors and some say that their actions have become hypocritical and they are using the issue as their own political tool. In fact, South Korea orchestrated with Korean-American’s politically-driven campaign in the U.S. continent against Japan.

Yes, that's right.

I'd be okay with the statue going up in Ashfield if the Korean Community acknowledge what their troops did in Vietnam and build a plaque next to it, mentioning it. I doubt they would - it's all about bullshit nationalist fervour. So unfortunately for the Reverend Bill Crews, there's not much moral high ground going around there.

It's kind of pathetic people are still fighting over this terrain, seventy-one years after the conclusion of World War II, but that's what happens when identity politics is given full rein.