News That's Fit To Punt - 30/Nov/2016

Can't Do Anything Right

It's really strange that it took a Liberal Government to put a light rail link in from scratch. Unsurprisingly, they've done a pretty bad job of it.

The NSW government failed to "effectively plan and procure" Sydney's $2.1 billion inner-city light rail project, resulting in a blowout in costs and reduced benefits. 

In a scathing report released on Wednesday, NSW Auditor-General Margaret Crawford said the government's management of the light rail project "suffered many of the same problems" as found with the $16.8 billion WestConnex motorway and the Albert "Tibby" Cotter bridge at Moore Park."Common problems include tight timeframes without justification, project scope defined too narrowly, underestimated costs and overestimated benefits," her report found.

The 2013 business case for the light rail line from Circular Quay to Randwick and Kensington in the city's east budgeted on the project costing $1.6 billion, but a year later it had blown out to $2.1 billion.

They were in such a hurry to green light major infrastructure, they seem to have literally thrown money at it willy-nilly. As with WasteConnex, they've shot through the budget, but they don't really care. No, no, no. Because when you think about it, all the money wasted goes into the lobby that asked for these infrastructure projects and it's the tax payer who foots the bill. The excesses are simply gravy.

It's amazing how vested interests can control a political party so effectively and the only people complain are those directly impacted. The rest of the polity just lets it happen.

But Do They Have The Balls To Follow Through?

Yes, the Federal government in its time of budget shortfalls finally notices the billions going offshore from Australia in the guise of LNG.

The numbers begged not to be ignored by Canberra. 

LNG revenue was set to mushroom from $5 billion to $60 billion over a decade but PRRT returns would sink from a paltry $1.2 billion to a frankly embarrassing $800 million. 

Currently, the only PRRT payments are coming from mature oil rig operations in Bass Strait. 

Effectively, Australia is giving away 85.5 million tonnes of LNG a year for free. Well, to be sold by fossil fuel companies to Japan, Korea and China. 

It was a dogged group of Tax Justice Network advocates - the same people who launched the corporate tax avoidance research that eventually resulted in the Coalition's diverted profit tax - who saw the scandal in the PRRT. 

TJN spokesman Mark Zirnsak, strategist Anthony Reed and researcher Jason Ward drilled into frightening numbers that contributed to a series of stories acknowledged by shadow treasurer Chris Bowen on Wednesday as having precipitated political action this week. 

Morrison's announcement of a "comprehensive" inquiry led by respected bureaucrat Mike Callaghan was a moment where the fiscal wood has been separated from the trees by Morrison.

So Scott Morrison is going to have a comprehensive inquiry he says. This is the government that killed the Mining Rent Resources Tax, so you wonder how they are going to get their silly little heads around 180 degrees in the opposite direction and actually get revenue from what is rightfully for and of Australia. We'll see how that goes. Lord knows there's enough stupid in Canberra but money is money and this is money just slipping off shore without any discussion, let alone any argument.

Dolly Is Dead

No, not the cloned sheep. It's the printed version of that magazine for young girls that is coming to an end.

In a statement, Bauer said the magazine is "responding to the changing demands of how readers engage with the brand by switching it to an exclusively digital model". 

It said November was the biggest month for online traffic in Dolly's history. 

"It is estimated that Dolly will hit 1.2 million [online] sessions this month," Bauer said. "As a result, Dolly magazine will cease to be published bi-monthly. 

"Dolly.com.au will continue to cover breaking celebrity news, fashion, beauty and lifestyle content, with popular fixtures such as Dolly Doctor."

A number of staff are expected to be impacted.

It's interesting that Bauer are putting out the line that the magazine is going to continue as an on-line entity, but that's a bit like saying people live on after death as ghosts and this is a good thing for seances. The writing is on the wall. Nobody buys magazines any more least of all those born this side of the Sydney Olympics. You can't sell media to people who are used to getting it for free.

It's amazing because if they're ceasing to print, they're giving up the ad revenue as well. It has got to be a sure sign that the rest of the magazine businesses are on death row. If there is a demographic coming through that doesn't buy magazines, you can see that there are a whole bunch of magazines that cater to the older demographic that will succumb to this generation not buying media as they grow older. When you add that tot he people turning off free-to-air TV, the mainstream media as we knew it is in massive retreat. Dolly quitting is indeed the canary in the coal mine of mainstream media.

You wonder if anybody will be able to do media and make money in the next 20 years.
So, yes, I'm calling it as a very significant moment.

BTW people, click on some ads on this page for me will you? I need to make a living too. :)

Some Stuff I've Been Watching

Luke Cage Season 1




I binge watched this while the missus was away. Love how most of the cast is black, and how it is set in Harlem. This is one helluva cool show. The music and cultural orientation is superb. It's America, but not as they like to show it. The master plan from Marvel is to get Luke Cage integrated with the Daredevil and Jessica Jones characters who are also on Netflix, which is going to be pretty darn cool.

What can I say? I'm sold.

'Black Mirror' Seasons 1 & 2




This is a remarkable series. Out of 7 episodes across 2 seasons, there have been a couple lame episodes, but the others are bristling with nihilist contempt that comes from a deeply wounded soul. The writer Charlie Brooker is one scary soul. It's not for the faint-hearted, nor is it for the morally self-righteous. This series works its backside off to make people uncomfortable with their default positions. It's a tour de force of carving up the casual hypocrisy in our po-mo society. Maybe it has arrived a little too late, but it also has a lot of dystopian cyberpunk cool about it as well.

That episode with Jon Hamm was a corker, but there have been several others that have been breath taking. I'll write more about all this once I get through Season 3.

Jason Bourne




This is the fourth instalment with Matt Damon, fifth in the series overall. Everything looks tired in it. The best action bit might be the Vegas car case towards the end. Otherwise, there's really not much to write home about. There are really no new areas to explore with the character or the setting, so the film gets tired really quickly. It's one of those films where you know some characters are good, the others not so good simply by the casting choice. When it gets telegraphed this much, you're all in on the ride for the action bits and there's nearly not enough of that. Unless they radically alter the milieu, this series is looking spent.

Quick Shots - 27/Nov/2016

Fidel Castro Passes Away

Fidel Castro is dead.

Fidel Castro, the Cuban revolutionary leader who built a communist state on the doorstep of the United States and for five decades defied U.S. efforts to topple him, died on Friday, his younger brother announced to the nation. 

He was 90. 

A towering figure of the second half of the 20th Century,
Castro stayed true to his ideology beyond the collapse of Soviet communism, and retained an aura in parts of the world that had struggled against colonial rule and exploitation.

He had been in poor health since an intestinal ailment nearly killed him in 2006. He formally ceded power to his younger brother two years later. 

Wearing a green military uniform, Cuba's President Raul Castro appeared on state television to announce his brother's death. 

"At 10.29 at night, the chief commander of the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro Ruz, died," he said, without giving a cause of death. 

"Ever onward, to victory," he said, using the slogan of the Cuban revolution.

Tributes poured in from world leaders including Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Venezuela's socialist President Nicolas Maduro, who said "revolutionaries of the world must follow his legacy."

It wasn't exactly unexpected, the man was 90.

Somewhat In Defence Of Populism

The whole Trump winning the election situation has the world-knickers in a giant knot. It is as if the western world's left-leaning thinkers have been given a gigantic wedgie by the Bully-in-Chief. As a consequence, there's really not a whole lot of rational coherence going around, but it has to be said the charges that Trump is a populist and this is bad flies in the face of democracy.

Populism, by its very nature only works if the population get up behind the said candidate. A quick Google gives you this definition on 'popuist':

populistˈpɒpjʊlɪst/
nounnoun: populist; plural noun: populists1.
a member or adherent of a political party seeking to represent the interests of ordinary people.
a person who supports or seeks to appeal to the concerns of ordinary people.
"she is something of a populist—her views on immigration resemble those of the right-wing tabloid press"
adjectiveadjective: populist1.
relating to or characteristic of a populist or populists.
"populist tabloid newspapers"

First off, if you're in a democracy, it's really hard to mount an argument that says it is good for the democracy for the polity to represent the interests of ordinary people. Think about that for a moment. If you want to run a policy counter to the interests of the ordinary people, you are likely an elitist or a revolutionary. Either way, those impulses are anti-democratic.

There seems to be a double-think going on whereby democracy, which is rule by people of the polity is good, but populism which is representing the very same ordinary people is somehow bad. It seems to be an oddity of etymology. Democracy comes from Ancient Greece and especially Athens where they fought to end tyranny. The word Populism derives from Latin, that is to say ancient Rome where the Roman Senate sought to rule over the masses until the Triumvirate came along and neutered the Senate. Julius Caesar, Pompeii and Crassus were all populists - and so in the context of Roman history, populism led to the Imperium, and carries the historic connotation of being against the interests of a proper democracy because it overrode the Senate.

If we do carry with us the Roman legacy of the word populism, then we're effectively standing with the elite who deem themselves to know better than the ordinary man what is good for the state and polity. That is to say, us charging the other as populist underscores their argument that there is a "liberal elite". In a sense our use of the word 'populist' to describe the leader of the 'Deplorables' is the very essence of what gives strength to their accusations of elitism; that somehow we think we know better than they do, and so we look down upon them when they are not just the people, they are the demos that forms the democracy.

It's a bit like saying "we are the courageous, but they are the foolhardy" or "we are flexible, they are without moral fortitude". What is good in our modus operandi shouldn't really be painted as bad in the opponent. It's a bit tricky, but this tension between the words democracy and populism sums up the problematic of a Trump Presidency whereby a silver-spooned rich guy played up to the crowd of 'Deplorables' and won an election. We as the pinko liberals need to get a grip on this lurking vocabulary problem whereby one person's democracy (good) is another persons populism (bad).

Winning The Votes, Losing The Election

The last time this happened was bacon 2000 when Al Gore failed to beat George W. Bush. It was - as it turned out - a crucial election to have lost for the Democrats and by extension, pinko liberals and environmentalists and technocrats everywhere; this was because 'Dubya' led the  world into a series of wars with no discernible goalposts for victory. When you combine that event with Hillary Clinton losing this election even though she has 2 million more popular votes, you can understand why some people want to dismantle the electoral college system.

What's striking about the model of having electoral colleges is that it ends up weighing votes from different states differently. If you are from California, Texas, Florida or New York, your vote is vastly underweight next to a vote from North or South Dakota or for that matter Kentucky or Mississippi. One wonders if this is actually constitutional. This is partly how Hillary Clinton ends up with more votes and still fewer electoral colleges, but also discourages people from actually voting. There probably should be a class action to sue the United Staes of America for not allocating enough weight to votes in those four states.

The degree to which people opted not to vote is quite staggering. 46.9% of the electorate did not vote. This number dwarfs the 25% and 26% respectively of the sport Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton garnered.

For Australia, the other relevant problem is that the Australian Republican Movement wanted to go with this model of Republicanism to select a President. Back when John Howard allowed a referendum took take place, he successfully split the vote of the Republicans between the ARM's position and those who wanted a direct vote, thus stopping the move to a republic dead in its track. It was classic obfuscation whereby people not only had to vote for Republic, but had to overwhelmingly vote for one of two models, and so the entire republican cause suffered. You could say John Howard was  a wiley bastard, but equally it could be said the ARM were indeed the elitists of the variety that had anti-democratic notions which contributed to the ad result. At the time, they blamed the people who wanted a direct election, but really, they only had themselves to blame for being so inflexible.

All of that, is also on Malcolm Turnbull's head.

Quick Shots - 14/Nov/2016

Don't Blame The People Who Voted, Ethan

Ethan Coen of the Coen brothers fame penned a letter lambasting the people who voted for third party candidates.

1. Jill Stein voters: You helped elect a man who pledges that he will, in his first hundred days, cancel contributions to United Nations programs to fight climate change. If your vote for Ms. Stein did not end up advancing your green agenda, it did allow you to feel morally superior to all the compromising schmoes who voted for Hillary Clinton. And your feelings about your vote are more important than the consequences of your vote. So — thank you! 

2. Gary Johnson voters: Thank you, for similar reasons. You, too, may now reward yourselves with feelings of warm self-approval, and your libertarian agenda will now be advanced (or not) by someone who admires the governance of Vladimir Putin. And to Mr. Johnson himself: Not only can no one blame you for this outcome — we’re all free agents, man! — but you can stop looking for Aleppo.

Democracy's a funny thing. You can't really be getting angry at the people who voted for somebody else when they're actually participating in democracy just like you. The people who didn't bother are the people you ought to be angry at.

I know this whole Trump thing sucks, but only a tiny portion of people voted for these candidates. The problem is 46.9% of the registered electorate didn't bother to turn up. Really, if you're going to lambast anybody, they're the people who deserve a swift pen to the eyeball.

'The Expanse' - Season 1

I guess this is as hard a Science FictionTV series you could make without it costing the earth. It's a pretty cool series set in the near future where humanity is colonising the solar system and planetary governments are somewhat in conflict. None of it is unimaginable, and in most part things look nice and gritty,ratherthan white, plastic and NASA. It's long way from '2001: A Space Odyssey' or its stunted cousin 'Space: 1999'.

Without spoiling anything, it's kind of interesting how the interplanetary trips are portrayed, as well as what a space battle might look like. I'm inclined to think they set up a lot here that could be interesting to explore but it never even gets through half of its problem. I'm kind of glad there's another season coming, because Season 1 really only scratches the surface of the problem.

'Ascension'

This mini-series goes 6 episodes and literally goes nowhere. And then some important characters die and there isn't a cathartic moment. It ends like it's meant to continue on, but apparently this one didn't get renewed, so there will be no more.

The idea of a generation ship as a setting is good; combining it with the irony that they never left and they're sitting in a huge silo on earth is better. Yet, it never reaches the cathartic moment when the crew find out they've been living in this phoney environment for 50years.
It'a bit of  shame it won't continue to that logical conclusion. As it is leaves way too many loose ends which were obviously set up for a longer run.

Also, I know this came earlier than 'Stranger Things', but this business of an esper girl feels really tired. Right down to the bit where the supernatural powers are unleashed when she gets angry.

'ARQ'

Surprising cool little 'Groundhog Day' ripoff. Very suspenseful and well contained in a very small location. Very tight writing, except they wrote themselves into a corner. Some will enjoy, some will complain, that's the nature with these kinds stories. '22.11.63' comets mind as the more recent iteration apart from this one. Considering '22.11.63' was such an elaborate, grand 'Groundhog Day' derived concept, this one looks positively punchy by comparison.

All Hail Stupid, Long Live The Reign Of King Stupid

The Media Bubble

Michael Moore observed early on that Trump was on a wining track. He did that by simply traveling around the Mid-West of the USA, and found that many people were simply disillusioned with both parties, but also if the Democratic Party could think of no better than to put up Hillary Clinton as their candidate, they had no choice but to vote for the other guy, warts and all. Somehow it got discounted in the mix of things because polls said Hillary was winning.

Well, polls have had their comeuppance. Just as the pollsters completely missed Brexit in the UK, their US counterparts completely missed Trump's support on pretty much the same methodology. Dare I say the pollsters in Australia missed the support for Tony Abbott, both in 2010 AND 2013; and if you look at a number of other elections, it's been clear for about a decade that polls have been far less reliable. Had they been reliable, Nate Silver would not have shot to fame in 2008.

What's surprising and interesting to dissect in the aftermath of Trump's win is just how much the media convinced itself that Clinton would win, and just how much America's heartland disagreed. It is in stark contrast to how they actually voted. White people voted for Trump and there were enough of them spread out through the country to swing the Electoral Colleges. Hillary Clinton may have won the popular vote, but she won them predominantly in urban areas. She won big with the base and utterly failed to persuade Michael Moore country.

Now, it could be argued that these people are racists for voting for Trump who was endorsed by the KKK and various other neo-Nazi groups and white supremacists and 'Deplorables', but it actually flies in the face of the two terms won by Barack Obama. The demographic narrative that came out of the Obama victories was how the demographic was changing in such a way that a coalition could be built around various groups to beat the white majority vote. The fact that the Mid-West support Obama could count on, collapsed for Clinton has to be sheeted home to the candidate, and not the white people in the Mid-West who decided to vote against her.

Perhaps it's no coincidence - no make that, perhaps it was bloody pertinent - that the Sanders campaign offered more to those people than Hillary Clinton did, and the fact that she was carrying the baggage of Bill Clinton's presidency which effectively sold them down the river made it nigh impossible to win over those people. Thus combined, we have a situation where a bad candidate was sent out to win seats she wasn't going to win while the pollsters failed to understand this fundamental dynamic as they gathered numbers that obscured this fundamental problem, and the media reported those poll figures as if it paints the entire picture because it had a big investment in ignoring the underlying conflict, and they felt comfortable in doing this because the DNC assured them this was okay. This kind of circularity essentially led to the Media Bubble that formed around the narrative that Clinton was going to win, and this same Media Bubble got exported to the world.

No wonder the world is in shock.

"President Pussygrabber"

I know this sounds terrible, but if it does sound terrible, today is the day you should check your privileges in being able to think it's terrible - everybody has been way too keen to label Donald Trump with the expletives of the Post-Modern era. He's a sexist, misogynist, racist, entitled white male oligarch. And while all of that is true, it simply didn't matter to the wider electorate. And - again this is probably hard to bear but - those things not mattering is the normal condition of humanity and history. Also, there's a lot more to politics than identity politics, and so we ought not be jumping up an down over whether Donald Trump identifies himself as a sexist misogynist racist entitled white male oligarch - or not.

It's really easy to denigrate Donald Trump. He's been on the media as a caricature of himself for a very long time, so much so we don't even know how serious he is when he says the stuff that he says. And while it's most likely true that he sexually assaulted all those women who have come out to sue him, that's still not the entirety of the man. It might behoove us to keep in mind that the parts of the man that isn't the Pussygrabber is going be making decisions about who to drone-strike or not as the case mat be.

I know that sounds awful, but you have to get this into some kind of historic perspective. I remember when Ronald Reagan won. It was meant to be a disaster, but Reagan, combined with Bush Snr. (and a dose of Alzheimer) didn't exactly destroy the world through nuclear war. Equally, John F. Kennedy who is held in high esteem by the Democrats was a philandering sex-addict on the prowl for pussy. Nobody's seriously judging his presidency on the back of Kennedy's sexual adventurism.

While I wouldn't forgive Trump his peccadillos and sexual transgressions, the office of the President of the United States of America is going to demand much more of the man; and as long as the office is what it is, he's going to have to live up to it. He's most likely not going to be grabbing pussy. This kind of name calling isn't going to help us one bit, going forwards if we are to fight what is coming down the pike. The stupids have won, they are going to have their day. All Hail Stupid, Long Live the Reign of King Stupid.

The Gap Between What Is And What Ought To Be

Naturally, the media want to disown any claim that maybe they were part of the problem in how they couched the Trump candidacy. Politico had this editorial piece.

All that digging by the press corps meant a lot, and its message hit home. As the Cook Report notes today, newspaper investigations cemented into the public mind the preexisting image of Donald Trump as a bad person, as exit polls showed that 60 percent of voters viewed him unfavorably. But that didn’t keep 15 percent of those who thought he was deplorable from voting for him. Likewise, 63 percent of voters believe Trump lacked the right “temperament” to be president. But of those respondents, 20 percent said what the hell and voted for him anyway. And 60 percent of voters said he wasn’t qualified to be president—and you can guess the rest: 18 percent of them voted for him.

The election of Trump, then, can’t be reduced to a “failure” of the “broken” press—to lean on two worn-out descriptions of the craft. Nobody would ever say the American electorate “failed” or proved itself “broken” because it voted in numbers large enough to place a political monster in the White House. So the election of Trump doesn’t render the many journalistic findings published during the campaign worthless. Journalism at its best can only provide a set of traffic advisories. It is not and it can’t be an autopilot for life’s trip. Voters are free to read or ignore the press corps’ findings and even, as the Cook Report points out, absorb and agree with those reports and then cast ballots that contradict what’s been reported and what they believe. Being stupid is an inalienable right in a representative democracy.

There you have it. The media did a fine job in exposing what a terrible human being Donald Trump was; it's just that people were stupid in not taking the media's heed. It seems a little self-congratulatory as well as self-serving. It is easy to argue what people ought to have done so given the plethora of information uncovered by the media. It overlooks the fundamental problem that what *is* does not give rise to an *ought*. To that extent the Trump candidacy is incredibly instructive in that the terrible phenomena of who and what Donald Trump is, did not necessarily dictate to people they ought to vote against him. It didn't happen because on some basic level, the Trump candidacy was not based on some points system of ticking off correct answers to questions posed by the media, rather, it was made up of a stronger desire to tell the media to go fuck itself for asking such questions. The Deplorables know they are some kind of something that the elite in the media do not like; some might have even looked up the word deplorable; but ultimately they would have worn the term as a badge of honour as they voted for Trump. In that process, the media did an adverse job, simply because it allowed itself to be the insulters in chief.

There's a line in the Batman movie where Alfred offers to Bruce Wayne that some men do despicable things, because they just want to watch the world burn. What this election shows is that it's not just some men, it's roughly about half the American population.

Trump Wins! (The World Loses!)

If The Cubs Can Win, Anybody Can Win This Year

And by anybody we mean even the much reviled Donald Trump.

Where do you start? I guess we start by the inordinate amount of uncertainty that went into the election day itself this year. Contrary to the two previous elections, FiveThirtyEight led by Nate Silver was incredibly mealymouthed with his prognostication. He cited just how many people were 'undecided', and that the distribution of Hillary Clinton's votes were too concentrated in urban areas, leaving the rural electorates wide open for speculation. This view stood in stark contrast to the definitive pronouncement he was able to make going into the two Obama elections, and so therein we could see ample ground for the kind of seismic shift we saw.

The way things turned out, all those 'undecided' people were in fact Trump supporters. They were just too embarrassed to tell the pollsters they were actually going to vote for Trump, and therein lies the clue to understanding what the hell just happened. The media collectively created an environment where it was shameful to support Donald Trump by stigmatising him with everything from racism through to sexual assaults (hey, count me in on the guilty side there), and they did such a good job of it, the people who agreed with key planks of his platform felt ashamed to say they supported a man who was allegedly all these terrible things.

Now, let's not get too carried away. There is nothing sensible about most of Trump's policy platform. But it was very direct and very simple; clearly simple enough that the lefthand side of Bell curve could understand. And just as it happened with the Brexit vote in the UK, all it took was enough from the right hand side of the Bell curve to defect to the stupid side for catastrophic electoral consequences to unfold. In that light, it's amazing how the media convinced itself Hillary Clinton was actually a good candidate.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, A Candidate From Hell

I was a Hillary Clinton backer back in 2008. Obama blew her away in June that year and the rest is history. One of the frustrating things about Hillary in that campaign was how she couldn't articulate a position that transcended bits of policy positions cobbled together. She might have been great with details, but she had no way to present the big picture. It stood in stark contrast, not only with Obama who came in with a big picture vision of hope, but also her husband an ex-President Bill who was marvellous at presenting a picture of where he wanted to go.

After that election, I browned off from the idea of Hillary Clinton as presidential candidate. This year's run was always on the cards since that defeat in July, but you never really saw that she became a better candidate in the intervening 8years. The public office record of Hillary Clinton is actually much shorter than her public profile. In 2002 she became a Senator for New York state, and ran for POTUS in 2008, after which she managed to get a seat at the cabinet table for four years. During which time she presided over rather hawkish events in Libya as well as Syria with a dose of shooting Osama bin Laden. So, really she had 10years as a public official, added on to which she was First lady for 8years, but that's really not a political office so much as a ceremonial seat. She was short on experience, on top of being a not very good salesperson for her policy position.

And yet, this is the person the Democratic National Committee chose to line up behind, and to the extent that they gerrymandered their own system so well (i.e. by hobbling Bernie Sanders' legitimate campaign), the DNC in fact set the whole world up for this marvellous bit of political failure we see today.

The DNC has a lot to answer for. Yet, it's clear Hillary was the Regressive Left's candidate from day one, and here we are, watching that project burned down to the ground. I'm just wondering if any of these Regressive Left types are going to take note, let alone understand the significance.

Because Bernie Would've Beaten Trump

This was one of the crucial things about the Bernie Sanders candidacy - as an outsider, he was in position to take a sledgehammer to the machine that made so many voters unhappy and outside. Of course, that would have meant the DNC would lose out on its vested interests as well, so they decided the safer candidate was Hillary Clinton. It overlooked the fact that the electorate was looking for a big change. Theft that the electorate was looking for a big change probably goes to the heart of what's wrong with the DNC. If you ask the DNC, they would tell you that the 8 years of Obama's presidency were an outright success. If Obama's presidency were such a success, why are there so many people unhappy and on the outside?

Obama's presidency was a massive attempt to shore up the status quo in the wake of the GFC. If you lost your life savings the GFC, and then never recovered it during the anaemic growth of the last8 years, then you might not be so positively disposed towards President Obama. Combine that with being called a racist any time you object to any of his policies, and maybe you start getting a picture of how vast swathes of white flyover-land might have decided they wanted a big change. As an encore to the Obama administration, the DNC managed to pick the candidate who promised in no uncertain terms that she was for more of the same.

As for Bernie, he was addressing the grassroots and they were responding. It is not hard to believe that those same people might have voted Trump to punish the DNC, or simply stayed home. The DNC will want to blame them, but they would be wrong. They had a candidate who could make inroads into the real plight of the American people, and they decided they wanted the pre-fab apparatchik. They've only got themselves to blame.

End Of The Clinton Dynastic Politics

I write the subheading, mostly in hope. Just as we don't need more Bushes, we don't need more Clintons running for high office. Age would suggest it would be unlikely that Hillary would run for office again. I guess Bill would want Chelsea to run for President one day, but that's exactly the problem, the dynastic politics begets the kind of corruption that hobbled Bernie Sanders' campaign, which in turn hobbled the Democratic Party. You don't get something for nothing in the world of politics.

The election machine of the Clintons would likely stay in place, and maybe somebody can ride upon it to challenge Trump next time; that's entirely conceivable, for it's hard to imagine the Clintons bowing out of politics completely, or for them to abandon the apparatus that so efficiently delivered Hillary to the doorstop o theWhite House this time. Yet in all honesty, we're sick of the dynastic politics and the American electorate is showing signs it wants to move on.

It's Not One Thing

There's this vein of critique doing the rounds that the Trump victory proves that America is one racist nation, or that it is one sexist nation. I would warn people from trying to compress the entire meaning of the Trump victory into a trite one-liner.

I confess I do find it a little amusing that the women who are shocked by this are saying this like this:

Many women in the empty Javits Center concluded that the country was sexist and rejected Clinton in a large part because she was a woman -- and was now headed backwards when it came to women’s rights.

“If Hillary Clinton were a man, tonight would be a much different night,” said Dana Nicolette, who manages a wellness center on Martha’s Vineyard. “Do people not know what autonomy over our own body means? They haven’t read history books? I have no words. I have no idea. I don’t know how as a woman, you could vote for that person who I don’t even want to say their name right now.”

Maybe the electorate simply don't buy any of your discourse? I know, it's hard to believe, but maybe the brand of academic feminism that places such an importance on Hillary being a woman is exactly the wrong kind of intellectual tool to understand what people didn't vote for her. My two cents would be to suggest that it's not that these people don't value these things, it's that they value other things more - and a vote for one or the other candidate is an incredibly un-nuanced tool to dissect thought.

Not even the KKK are voting Trump on just the race issue alone. They are likely voting on a whole range of issues. Similarly, there are non-racists voting for Trump and for that matter non-sexists, non-misogynists and non-capitalists even. The above kind of academic feminist discourse attempts to label-and-shame these people when it is exactly what foments their resentment towards the 'elite' who push Hillary Clinton their way.

Indeed, the label-them-and shame-them routine that has become the staple of the internet era radical feminism is in essence driving more people away from their candidate than it attracts them. The reductio ad absurdum of such electorate support is 100% of the women vote, but 0% of men vote. You'd still only get to a split result with 50% of the population; and frankly presidential politics has to be much bigger than that.

Equally it can be observed that if Trump's support truly were white, male, and old, he shouldn't have enough of a constituency to get to 25%. The fact that he got over 50% in enough electorates clearly demonstrates he wasn't a candidate that could be boxed into this kind of discourse. It's not like Trump is some Mens' Rights Activist either.

Making Trains Run On Time

Before Mussolini tagged up with Hitler, he had along run presiding over a growing Italian economy. The fascist playbook of state and corporate interests looking for synergies while marching a lot of people around actually did okay. Could have done better? Possibly - but there were real reasons why Fascism found adherents around the globe, as a competing ideology to communism. Of course, Mussolini's better moments have been summarised as "he made the trained run on time," so we should all take it with a grain of salt.

Now, I'm NOT a fan of fascism, but in President Donald Trump, we have to understand that his policies are fascist, and so we have to parse how this might play out. If we're lucky, he won't appoint himself dictator, and when he does leave office, he just might have presided over some economic growth. That wouldn't be something to sniff at; but to get to that point, he's going have to break some eggs in the classic fascist playbook. One imagines Wall Street is in for a surprise.

I'm also not being hopeful; instead I'm offering up the tiny possibility that Trump's time in power is not going to be a total and utter loss.

Having to go through Mussolini's track record to find some hope is a tough call, I admit.

News That's Fit To Punt - 08/Nov/2016

On Political Correctness

Don Watson was on Q&A and summed up what the majority of intelligent people think.

Of political correctness, Watson said: "I hate political correctness. I hate anti-political correctness more, though, and I'm much more suspicious of it. It's nearly always an agenda underneath it. So it is the quintessential vexed question and the reason I gave up dinner parties."

This is pretty much it. Unfortunately the solution with dealing with political correctness isn't the kind of harsh reactionary bullshit peddled by those who declare themselves to be anti-political-correctness, but to take it case by case and use discernment and judgment - which is a lot more tedious and boring a task, and hence the retreat from dinner parties.

I don't think the advocates of political correctness correctly understand how idiotic it is to push a one-size-fits-all language experiment as if it deals with the nuances of the world. I don't think the anti-political-correctness groups understand how they too ignore the nuances of what they say. It is like two tone deaf parties trying to shout out competing songs, neither of which are well written but the yelling part seems over-rehearsed.

While we're sort of on the topic, this IPA thing is turning into bit of a joke. Their alumnus-turned-Senator James Paterson is the same idiot who mused about selling off 'Blue Poles' because it wasn't Australian enough, and the other IPA flunky Georgina Downer aren't exactly what you might call scintillating intellects. The IPA clearly is a bastion of neo-liberalist rhetoric practitioners, more than actual *thinking* as advertised by its self identification as a think-tank. This is evinced by just how predictable and monotonous are the entreaties that emerge from the IPA grandees. It has to be some kind of rort that such non-thinking can disguise itself as actual thinking and earn airtime on Q&A. It makes you wonder just how far the Right has sunk in terms of being unable to offer up a principled argument, whether it be economic or sociological. It's the same downward trend that led America to Tea Parties and Trump. Our misery it seems is to deepen further than a mere Abbott Government - the stupid is readily being embraced by the Right, all over the world. it's going to get worse before there's any recovery.

Here's the rest of it from Mr. Watson about political correctness and its strident opponents:

And of the Turnbull government's contortions over the Racial Discrimination Act and the right or otherwise to cause offence, he confessed to a confusion that seems common even to the cause of it: George Brandis.

"Brandis said everyone had a right to be a bigot and everyone has a right to be a fool. On the other hand, it's funny, because in Brandis's workplace, the mildest slur, let alone a religious or a racist slur, would have the president of the Senate pulling that person into order and ruling it out of order. He works in the safest workplace possible. I'm not sure the parliament should have other rights the rest of us don't."

That sounds about right.

George Christensen Is Still Stupid (And Fat!)

Speaking of safe work places...

Victorian Liberal Russell Broadbent used a speech to Parliament on Monday to express regret for not immediately criticising a speech Mr Christensen made in September, calling it a "diatribe about the rise of Islam" and accusing the Queensland National MP of "cuddling up to Hansonite rhetoric". 

"The issues swirling in our multicultural nation are for me public and passionate, but for me they are not personal," Mr Broadbent said.

"The truth is I didn't act as I should have because I am not Muslim, Chinese, Afghan or Greek looking. Not Italian, Sri Lankan or Sudanese. Not Aboriginal."

That's not all that surprising. It's all classic conservative-speak in line with Winston Churchill and all that guff. It's nothing new; this is exactly what somebody in the Liberal Party should be saying if they want to go around calling themselves the Liberal Party. While I myself am a pinko,  I'm inclined to accept an argument from a Liberal Party member citing liberal principles at face value. That should be par for the course.

Of course, George Christensen's response is as predictable as it is (pardon the pun) fatuous.

Mr Christensen hit back on Tuesday, saying Mr Broadbent was like other "politically correct hand wringers" in Parliament.

"Mr Broadbent is part of the elitist set here in Canberra that we find on all sides of politics," he wrote on Facebook.


"This is confirmed by the fact he told Parliament last night that MPs shouldn't reflect the concerns of their electors but instead should be 'leading' them.
"The last time I checked I sat in the House of REPRESENTATIVES not the House of Lords.

"This is why many people are coming to the conclusion that politics is broken: MPs of all political persuasions don't listen much at all to the public's concerns and they hardly ever act upon them." 

Mr Christen said his critics did not hear the word "radical" when he speaks against perceived threats from "radical Islam". 

"Islam is a religion and we have freedom of religion in this country. Radical Islam or Islamism is an ideology and a dangerous one at that.

"Nowhere in the speech Mr Broadbent has criticised me for will anyone find any criticism of Islam," he said.

It's astounding to see a MP talk Parliament like it's a schoolyard with bullies. Here's poor little George Christensen trying to represent his electorate of xenophobic homophobic reactionaries as he imagines all good Australians ought to be, being picked on by the big city politically correct brigade. I know philosophically - as per David Hume - an *is* does not give rise to an *ought*, but in his case we should make an exception and say he ought to give up and go home and the LNP find a better candidate, because he is a truly fatuous moron.

As I wrote above, the problem for the Liberal Party is that their future belongs to the Christensens of this world and not the Broadbents.

The Future Is Not Only Here, It Too Is Stupid

They've started counting the votes overrun the USA. It's looking like Clinton is maintaining her edge in the polls into the voting booths. I myself can't believe that too many women would want to vote for a man as contemptuous of women as Donald Trump, so that's like 50% of the vote right there! You can tell Nate Silver won't be asking me to join his team at FiveThirtyEight anytime soon.

Just how will things turn out after this irascible, execrable, awful US election? Here's a glimpse:

Politico magazine sets out a troubling scenario: "Suppose on Election Night, Pennsylvania's secretary of state announces that Clinton has won the state, and with it the presidency, but Trump says, 'Prove it.' The secretary of state responds, 'That's what the machines tell us'. Trump responds, 'Well, how do I know that the machines weren't hacked?' What is the secretary of state supposed to say then? 

"So who will resolve the conflict if Trump loses Pennsylvania and insists on seeing proof, and the state can't provide it? The Pennsylvania Supreme Court, despite being dominated by Democrats? The US Supreme Court, despite being hamstrung by a vacancy and thus at risk of a 4-4 split? Congress, paralysed by partisan gridlock?"
The extent to which the GOP establishment backs any trump challenge will be the first post-election measure of how seriously the GOP establishment will be in fighting to regain control of the Republican Party. 

A natural segue from a Trump challenge to the result would be for him to assume a leader-of-the-opposition role, to become a freewheeling face and voice of all opposition to the Clinton presidency – its existence and all that she might do. 

When Trump was not running his "rigged" argument in the last days of the campaign, he was crying "constitutional crisis" – warning of back-to-back congressional committees investigating Clinton and likely efforts to impeach her. Loser Trump will be deeply conflicted – wait for the Twitter storm.

Or you know, Donald Trump could suck it up and declare himself a loser. Likely, he won't. And if he starts insisting on these kinds of recounts it's going to be more of the same hell, with no end in sight. 

I guess this is the bit where I join the chorus and say how amazing it is that American politics has come this point of immense stupor, but I don't want to go there. The Republicans had all the opportunity in the world to reform themselves with a coherent policy platform after Mitt Romney's defeat in 2012. In fact, the writing on that wall was there after Obama defeated McCain in 2008. Instead dealing with it as an anomaly, they should have engaged with the challenge as a demographic shift. That they didn't and doubled down twice (call it quadrupled down, I guess) on pretending none of it was real, has resulted in the Republican party identifying itself as the party of racists, fascists, misogynists, rapists, and disgruntled white people without a clue or an education, which is kind of sad.

Of course, this kind of politics is well on our horizon as well. The stupid is heading our way like a wayward iceberg, ready to sink our little ship Democracy.

Twilight Zone Of Politics

We're So Screwed It's Not Funny

Just check out this list:

• The first day of the new sitting week began with a government MP calling for Labor leader Bill Shorten to resign if Donald Trump is elected US president.
• One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts then released a 42-page document claiming the CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology corrupted climate data and that global warming is an international scam.
• Roberts was flanked by fellow climate science deniers, Tony Heller (left) and Tim Ball. The latter claimed the ~global climate conspiracy~ was all the fault of a group of elites called the “Club of Rome” and an international businessman named “Maurice Strong”.
• It was later discovered that Tony Heller blogs under the pseudonym Steve Goddard and has written conspiracy theories about the events surrounding the Sandy Hook massacre.
• When journalists at the event started asking questions about fellow One Nation senator Rod Culleton, party adviser James Ashby yelled at the media and the press conference was shut down.
• The Senate spent most of the morning discussing the plebiscite on same-sex marriage. But with Labor, the Greens, the Nick Xenophon Team and Derryn Hinch all pledging to vote against the bill, it’s going to fail.
• During that debate, David Leyonhjelm dismissed the argument that the plebiscite will be hurtful to LGBTI people, comparing it to Martin Luther King halting his advocacy for fear of hurting “psychologically fragile Negroes”.
• OK, back to the House of Representatives… government MP (and former whip) Scott Buchholz accidentally seconded a motion criticising his own government for “short-changing pensioners”.
• Then One Nation senator Rod Culleton got up in the Senate and delivered a bizarre speech defending himself from claims he’s actually ineligible to serve as a senator because of a previous conviction (since overturned) for stealing a truck key.

And if you go to the link, there's more!

Like, uh, what the fuck has happened to our polity to throw up such idiots into seats of power and high office of this land? This is the like the Peak Stupid, the Apotheosis of Climactic Idiocy, The Apocalypse of Dumb, the Twilight of the Idles, the Dance the Sugarplum Morons... you get the picture. If you had a competition to see how much stupid you could fit in a Volkswagen and replaced the venerable wagon with Parliament House, well then you'd get what we seem to have right now running our nation. Really, never has the fine line between *running* and *ruining* been so fine.

It's Coming To An End

We can almost see the finish line. It'll be about 36hours from now before we'll know who is going to be the next POTUS. At this point the smart money - and I do emphasise the smart bit - is on Hillary Clinton. The dumb, deplorable, miserable, crass, ill-educated money is on her opponent Donald Trump, from whom if we never heard anything ever again after this election, would be too soon. 

The FBI have now cleared Hillary. This has been one of those issues that make you scratch your head; especially the zombie movie like second life this idiotic email server business got in the wake of James Comes announcing that there might be something in Anthony Weiner's laptop that might pertain to Hillary. Well of course there *might*, seeing that Weiner is the rare talent who combined his name into his behaviour and managed a political career of some description while doing so and -let's face it- being so. If anybody's computer could possibly connect dick pics with blown covers on classified information, it would be Anthony Weiner's laptop. 

I have to say it's a brave officer who wants to even touch said machine. 

Anyway, what surprises me about the FBI is that they want to search through that stack of emails in search of something upon which to indict Hillary Clinton. The better stack would be the stream of emails that Wikileaks are releasing. 

JOHN PILGER: In terms of the foreign policy of the United States, that’s where the emails are most revealing, where they show the direct connection between Hillary Clinton and the foundation of jihadism, of ISIL, in the Middle East. Can you talk about how the emails demonstrate the connection between those who are meant to be fighting the jihadists of ISIL, are actually those who have helped create it. 

JULIAN ASSANGE: There’s an early 2014 email from Hillary Clinton, not so long after she left the State Department, to her campaign manager John Podesta that states ISIL is funded by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Now this is the most significant email in the whole collection, and perhaps because Saudi and Qatari money is spread all over the Clinton Foundation. Even the U.S. government agrees that some Saudi figures have been supporting ISIL, or ISIS. But the dodge has always been that, well it’s just some rogue Princes, using their cut of the oil money to do whatever they like, but actually the government disapproves.
But that email says that no, it is the governments of Saudi and Qatar that have been funding ISIS. 

JOHN PILGER: The Saudis, the Qataris, the Moroccans, the Bahrainis, particularly the Saudis and the Qataris, are giving all this money to the Clinton Foundation while Hilary Clinton is Secretary of State and the State Department is approving massive arms sales, particularly to Saudi Arabia. 

JULIAN ASSANGE: Under Hillary Clinton, the world’s largest ever arms deal was made with Saudi Arabia, [worth]more than $80 billion. In fact, during her tenure as Secretary of State, total arms exports from the United States in terms of the dollar value, doubled. 

JOHN PILGER: Of course the consequence of that is that the notorious terrorist group called ISIL or ISIS is created largely with money from the very people who are giving money to the Clinton Foundation. 

JULIAN ASSANGE: Yes. 

JOHN PILGER: That’s extraordinary. 

JULIAN ASSANGE: I actually feel quite sorry for Hillary Clinton as a person because I see someone who is eaten alive by their ambitions, tormented literally to the point where they become sick; they faint as a result of [the reaction]to their ambitions.
She represents a whole network of people and a network of relationships with particular states. The question is how does Hilary Clinton fit in this broader network? She’s a centralising cog. You’ve got a lot of different gears in operation from the big banks like Goldman Sachs and major elements of Wall Street, and Intelligence and people in the State Department and the Saudis. 

She’s the centraliser that inter-connects all these different cogs. She’s the smooth central representation of all that, and ‘all that’ is more or less what is in power now in the United States. It’s what we call the establishment or the DC consensus. One of the more significant Podesta emails that we released was about how the Obama cabinet was formed and how half the Obama cabinet was basically nominated by a representative from City Bank. This is quite amazing.

So yes, that would be the person who is most likely going to be the next POTUS. Amazingly, the FBI won't be investigating this stack of emails because it wants to busy itself with the other emails. Unbelievable. 

I sure as hell don't want to be on the side of Trump, but honest to goodness, Hillary Clinton is a really tough sell as the 'good' alternative to the 'bad' choice of Donald Trump.

Quick Shots - 06/Nov/2016

Tatsuo Miyajima At The MCA

I've spent the last week interpreting for Tatsuo Miyajima at the MCA. I've mostly been covering his speeches, lecture and Q&A sessions with the public as well as interviews with journalists.

It's quite an elaborate contemporary art exhibition as yo'd likely  to see and it is the most comprehensive retrospective of an artist who has been working around the world for 30years. I had the good fortune of being able to spend some time with him and  learn a whole lot about his practice as well as get a feel for his concepts. If you know where he's coming from, he is theist perspicacious artist as you will ever come across. He is not obscure and hard to understand, his work really does speak to his thinking, which is amazingly crystal clear.

The stand out works are the installation rooms 'Arrow of Time' and 'Mega Death'. You have to experience the extraordinary moment when all the lights go out in the latter to feel what Obi Wan Kenobi felt inStar Wars when Alderaan got blown up by the Death Star.
It's that amazing.

I recommend everybody to go check it out. I know there's a sticker price of $22 for the ticket, but it's well worth it. It's an tremendously broad retrospective of an artist who has been at the cutting edge of contemporary art for three decades. Do yourselves a favour and check it out.

'Hacker'

A little film about big ideas. There have been a number of films and TV shows connecting banking as targets of hacking. It stands to reason that if you want to change the status quo, the first thing you might consider is destroying banking. Of course, no amount of bank robberies in America's colourful past has exactly accomplished anything along those goals, so it's hard to really get on board with this notion that somehow, hacking banks and destroying the basis of the financial system might lead to a more egalitarian world. Short that, hacking in this context remains the provenance of cybercriminals

Somewhere behind all the fantasies lies the truth that cybercriminals out there are making a lot of money skimming off unsuspecting credit card users. It's a little bleak that the affairs of humanities can come down to movements of money, but on some level that's what has become of our lives, and so if money as a system can be hacked, our lives can equally be hacked, and so there is only a kind of anomie and anarchy that gets ushered in. It's very strange picaresque of a movie.

The main character is hard to like. The mistakes he makes along the way are annoying. As potboilers go, it's pretty ordinary.

World Series Game 7

The Cubs Win

An epic game that smacked of the inevitable as well as a strange kind of baseball melodrama. The Indians refused to go away and the Cubs refused to relinquish the game; the curses of both teams seemed to refuse to give up trying to make their team lose, and at parity in the 9th inning, it started to rain.

Cubs winning for the first time in 108 years is surreal to say the least. One would think that a big market team like the Cubs would have had their way far more often than not, but it seems they have been - historically speaking - rather bad for most part of major league history. Far from any wining culture, cut away from forming any traditions, the Cubs seemingly drifted through the Twentieth Century, contending only on small stretches.

'Back To the Future II' was off by one year - it was supposed to be 2015 when the Cubs won, but they did get the 1997 Marlins right.

The Indians Lose

The Indians were also dighting their own 68year hoodoo and it wasn't to be. It's already time to say "wait until next year", and they might indeed be even better next year than this year. They will have Michael Brantley back, as well as having their core of young stars grow another year. Francisco Lindor gets a lot of love being a 5-6win player but the man I'm really impressed with is Jose Ramirez. Then, there are the injured pitchers Carasco and Salazar, who together with Kluber will likely dominate the AL Central. Chances are very good they'll contend and make the playoffs, and if they can keep the players healthy, they'll be as big a threat next year as they were this year.

While the Indians lost, they didn't exactly fold or give it away. They stood their ground and made a fantastic showing right through.

A Game For The Ages

That was some Game 7. You could see both Andrew Miller and Aroldis Chapman were at the end of their effectiveness. There was no running away with it behind a powerful closer. The Cubs weren't exactly the '98 Yankees, and the Indians weren't exactly the '60 Pirates.

Anyway, it was a game with so many memorable moments, I'm pretty sure people will be talking about it forever; how the Indians were very, very good, but the Cubs had just an abundance of talent that got hot at the right time, when pushed to the brink.

The weird thing about the Cubs is that they'll no longer be the loveable losers, they'll be just like any other team. Except maybe the Padres.

Anyway, what a game that was.