View From The Couch - 31/Dec/2016

Just Guessing But...

I've been pondering this problem of global warming. First of all, we've run past 400ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere. We're not even counting the CH4 Methane, and Methane is of course 4 times worse than CO2 when it comes to trapping heat in the atmosphere.

Our democratic processes in the first world are simply not getting anywhere near the results we need to curb the runaway emissions growth. If you look just at Australia for instance, the mining interests for fossil fuels have spent so much money to cripple the proper discussion of this threat that it has become nigh impossible to make any sensible progress on the issue. While nations around the world are moving over to renewables in a hurry, it appears that the USA and Australia are going to be the stupid holdouts sticking to fossil fuels.

The thing is, the massive problem of emissions isn't just a problem isolated to the climate, but something that will have a chain reaction in food production. Agriculture is going to take hit as a result of the effects of climate change, and the most vulnerable nations are places with big populations with very little food security - like China and India. If it ever gets to the point where not enough food can be produced to supply these countries, they are going to have riots on their streets, and in the case of China, the suppression of those riots will probably lead to a revolution - exactly the kind of outcome the current regime will want to avoid.

So if you work backwards from the pointy end of the problem, it's far more likely that an authoritarian regime will try and invest in technologies that will actively suck out carbon from the atmosphere in order to bring the problem back under control. I imagine that the Chinese government will spend whatever is necessary to create massive renewable power plants with the specific purpose of converting atmospheric carbon into liquid or solids.

Here are some examples of technologies out there already:

• Synthetic Photosynthesis.
• Nano Spike Catalyst lowers energy threshold to reverse combustion and harvest ethanol.
• Large scale carbon capture projects
• Capturing carbon and turning them into building materials

The thing is, Green groups would have you believe that this is futile and what needs to happen is zero economic growth or some such nonsense. Geo-engineering is a dirty word in the Green paradigm, but when you look at just how much runaway emissions are going on, and how capping emissions is still going to get us into a world where the sea level rises by meters and the weather patterns are going to be shot, then it's easily arguable that what needs to be done is to shove the carbon genie back into the bottle.

If you're running China - an authoritarian state that's not scared to crack a few eggs - one of the advantages is that you can send a directive out and it gets done on a massive scale. It is the most likely candidate to simply order massive solar and wind generators to power these projects en masse with the specific purpose of capturing as much carbon s possible, and lowering the parts-per-million figure back below 400ppm. And they may well do this while we in the first world are still stupid enough to be arguing whether Global warming is actually happening and whether we should do something a bit more serious than Direct Action in Australia as we keep digging up fossil fuels.

Worse still, the countries that don't move out of fossil fuel will end up paying for the fact that they keep emitting because China will send them a bill for all the carbon it is capturing, through an international emissions trading scheme.

Of course, China might not do any of this, in which case we're really going to be stuffed. But if you go through the ay in which the cards are stacked, you can see China would see the advantage in going hard in this direction. And if they do, the countries most committed to fossil fuels are going to end up paying up big time.

RIP Debbie Reynolds (1932-2016)

Away after Carrie Fisher passed away, her mother also passed away.

Starring in the legendary musical Singin' In The Rain and singing the hit song Tammy. Shining on Broadway and being nominated for an Oscar for The Unsinkable Molly Brown. Her own TV comedy show and an Emmy-nominated role in the sitcom Will & Grace. 

Debbie Reynolds' showbiz career exemplified an old-style versatility – singin', dancin' and actin' – that continued well into her veteran years. 

Her death at 84 a day after daughter Carrie Fisher added sadness to sadness. Son Todd's comments that "she's with Carrie" and that the stress of his sister's death was "too much" for his mother showed the paralysing impact of grief. 

Reynolds, who had a suspected stroke, will be best remembered as a luminous talent on stage, film and television - Hollywood royalty. Wholesome and charming in her early roles, she was later known as a brassy personality who was portrayed as an overbearing showbiz mother in Fisher's semi-autobiographical novel Postcards From The Edge.

It's just been a terrible year for celebrity deaths.

RIP Alphonse Mouzon (1948-2016)

This happened in the jam session of duelling deaths.

Alphonse Mouzon, a powerful jazz drummer who made his greatest contributions with a funk backbeat, forging a standard for 1970s fusion, died on Sunday at his home in the Granada Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles. He was 68. 

The cause was cardiac arrest, his son Jean-Pierre Mouzon said. Alphonse Mouzon learned this fall that he had neuroendocrine cancer and used a crowdfunding platform to help pay for treatment. 

Few other drummers were as integral to the development of fusion as Mr. Mouzon, who combined volcanic intensity with a brisk attunement to dynamic flow. He played in the first edition of Weather Report, and was a charter member of another defining jazz-rock band, the Eleventh House, led by the guitarist Larry Coryell. 

Mr. Mouzon had a productive association with the pianist McCoy Tyner, playing in a volatile acoustic setting on albums like “Sahara” (1972) and “Song for My Lady” (1973). He also served as the propulsive engine on notable fusion albums by the keyboardist Herbie Hancock, the flutist Bobbi Humphrey and the guitarist Al Di Meola, among others. 

Outside of jazz, Mr. Mouzon worked with major touring acts including Carlos Santana, Eric Clapton and Stevie Wonder. The drummer John Bonham of Led Zeppelin acknowledged him as an influence.

I want to write more about Alphonse Mouzon, but I'm really bummed about all of these deaths.

RIP George Michael

As everybody with a heartbeat knows, this also happened on Christmas Day.

I kind of refrained from writing about George Michael because his cause wasn't exactly mine and his music never really did much for me. But seeing that all these other people are dropping like flies, I figured I may as well acknowledge it here.

Ugh, what a year

Carrie Fisher 1956-2016

Alas Princess Leia Is Gone

Some actors are going to be remembered for one role and one role alone, regardless of the rest of their oeuvre. In someways it is an unfortunate outcome of the vagaries of fame, but for somebody who was famous since the day they were born, Carrie Fisher took that upon herself with great grace and humour.

For Gen-X at least, Carrie Fisher was royalty, thanks to her part in 'Star Wars', playing Princess Leia. Way back when the film first arrived, she appeared to us as a sassy, feisty woman who could roll with the boys in the action scenes. It was a very 1970s kind of new feminine, and a generation of boys grew up thinking that was what they liked. Like most boys who identified with Luke Skywalker and his adventures, I always thought of her as kind of like an older sister I never had, doing her thing across the galaxy.



The Carrie Fisher we know outside of 'Star Wars' was somebody with a tremendous sense of humour, influenced by Dorothy Parker's writing. She was briefly in films such as 'When Harry Met Sally', and occasionally did interviews where she would tartly joke she would not date somebody younger because she "didn't want to give them the satisfaction of being able to say they fucked Princess Leia". As long time fans of Star Wars movies, we kind of understood implicitly the funniness of that remark. After all, we owed her and her character an incalculable debt.




Fischer wrote books about her extraordinary life, one of which turned into the film 'Postcards from the Edge'. Her sense of humour was absurdist as well as full of well-observed insight about the foibles of people, as if she couldn't quite believe people were getting off so much on the 'Star Wars' franchise. She was open about her drug use as well as her affairs at various times in her life. The remarks she made were often self-deprecating but devastatingly funny. Her account of her audition for 'Star Wars' that was excerpted from 'The Princess Diarist' is humorous as it is brutally frank about the nature of the film business.

Carrie Fisher is also one of those people who could recognise themselves in songs written about them, namely by Paul Simon, with whom she had a long relationship. She made jokes about her promiscuity in her youth, warning Daisy Ridley not to go to bed with the entire cast and crew as she had done, "going through them like wild fire", and joked that for the 'The Force Awakens', 'they' made her lose weight because they only wanted 3/4ths of her and "may the fourth be without" her.

In the era of the internet, she had a humorous sparring partner in William Shatner - another actor who will be remembered for one role alone - where they would banter and joke about her metallic gold bikini from 'Return of the Jedi'; the legendary bikini of which was apparently a source of much erotic stimulation of a younger generation of Star Wars fans. Fisher said her favourite moment in the entire saga was when Princess Leia killed Jabba the Hutt, strangling him with the chain that kept her tied in her metallic gold bikini.

It is spooky to recall how in spruiking her recent book she was asked why she was coming forward with some of the details in it now, and she remarked that the present was opportune merely because she might not be able to do it in the future, either through old age memory loss, worse still dementia, incapacitation, or death. Thus it is that 'The Princess Diarist' will become her parting gift to her fans, a little like David Bowie's 'Dark Star'.

Heart attack at 60 is awfully, terribly young in this day and age. Vale Carrie Fisher, you were an inspiration to us all. May the Force eternally be with you.

Listening To...

'57th & 9th' - Sting

The good news is 2016 didn't claim him and here's a new album. The not so good news is that it's so-so. The better news is that it's ostensibly a straight up rock album. For somebody who bought his damn Lute record with Deutsche Grammophon, you approach it with trepidation. It really has been a while since Sting gave us a straight up rocker.

He's been talking about this one like he's going back to his roots but of course his roots is jazz, so it's a bit deceptive. I guess some of these numbers could be perceived to be Police-like numbers, but the beats-per-minute slows down rapidly during the album and gets a little snoozy. I'd hoped he'd go through the whole album at 145bpm, because that's where The Police found gold on 'Outlandos' and 'Regatta', but also, no, he slips back towards a 'Nothing Like The Sun' vibe which isn't what was really being hoped for.

If anything, the single cut 'I Can't Stop Thinking About You' should have been done with the Police. The rest, not so much. I guess if the album rocked any harder, it would have been quicker to reassemble the Police, but that's one place to which he's never really going back. More's the pity.

Blast From The Past 'Alchemy' - Dire Straits

I picked this up because I recently got into a conversation with an old friend about just what the hell happened to Dire Straits after their fourth studio album 'Love Over Gold'. Well, they did this double live album which features a bit of Brett Whitley art on the cover. It was quite something back in the day, with its mind-blowing gatefold double LP cover. Behold:

Oh yeah.
As it turns out, the live versions these classic Dire Straits tracks go on and on and it got me thinking about why I liked the album 'Love Over Gold' so much and of course Mark Knopfler does the Steve Howe thing of swapping guitars mid-song and radically going from classical guitar tones to Stratocaster. That, is one of the hallmarks of prog rock, together with the really long songs; so it finally dawned on me just how much prog rock Dire Straits were doing on their first four albums without really telling the world that's what they were doing. You could draw a line from 'And You And I' to 'Romeo and Juliet'. If you substitute out Roger Dean and insert Brett Whitely, well, you get the idea.

What happened with Mark Knopfler after 'Alchemy' was he moved on to playing a Gibson Les Paul a lot more as his main guitar, than his Stratocaster, and suddenly it sounded a lot less interesting for me. 'Brothers in Arms' was the huge international hit, but I really don't like that album as much as I like the first four studio albums. As with Sting, he's never really managed to recapture that magic of his early work.

View From The Couch - 24/Dec/2016

People Who Look Better In Hindsight

The leader of that list - with a bullet - would be Dr. John Hewson, he of the losing end of the 'the sweetest victory of them all" election in 1993. That's now a long time ago and seems like a galaxy far, far away. If you had Paul Keating and John Hewson as the respective leaders running for office, then you have an embarrassment of riches compared to what we've had lately, which includes Abbott versus Gillard, Abbott versus Rudd, Turnbull versus Shorten. I guess it's Abbott who is single-handedly lowering the intellectual stakes with his much CTE damaged brain.

All the same, Gillard couldn't sell a big picture if it came with a price tag, Rudd's second go was like a facetious after-thought, and Turnbull who replaced the CTE-affected one, remains beholden to the interests of those who seek to prolong fossil fuel profits. When you think about that, the significance of the 1993 election looms large. The defeat of John Hewson brought about a turmoil in the Liberal party ranks that helped it shed its liberal framing of its policies and settled in with the Thatcherite conservative politics, which to this day hampers any sense of social progress. What the Liberals lost that day election in 1993 is not going back in a hurry.

As such, it might be worth checking in with what Dr. Hewson has to say about this intellectually stunted philosophical bankrupt government:

Just how is our economy to not only recover from the 0.5 per cent fall in growth in the September quarter, but actually produce a "growth spurt" as assumed through to the end of the decade – which industries, which jobs? None of this can simply be "assumed". 

It is most sobering to realise that the accumulated budget deficits (relative to GDP) since the GFC already dwarf those that followed each of the previous two recessions, and we haven't had a recession, rather we are now in our 26th year of continuous growth. 

Moreover, even on the optimistic forecasts/predictions of MYEFO, we will have at least four more budget deficits, totalling some $95 billion through the budget period. Using more realistic forecasts – and recognising the some $14 billion of measures still stuck in the Parliament (that still exceed the net savings achieved since the last budget) – the budget repair task is a very significant challenge that will require both more expenditure restraint and tax increases overall. It is most telling that the government won't "commit" to the small projected surplus in 2020/21. 

While we may have dodged the ratings downgrade bullet for now, the possibility of a downgrade is still very real. We certainly can't be complacent, especially as our economy is now probably more vulnerable than it has been since the GFC, certainly recognising the limited policy capacity and flexibility to handle another "shock".

It sounds like he's exasperated with this government. I imagine his own party is exasperated with their former leader, but then in that sense he might be to the Liberals what Mark Latham is to the ALP: Failed leader, thought bubble monster.
Yet, there's more:

Monetary policy has already reached the limit of its capacity to stimulate – except by jawboning our dollar down – and rising borrowing costs, and associated bond market corrections globally, could further work to restrain growth. Similarly, the magnitude of the budget repair task, and the threat of a ratings downgrade, leaves us with very little budgetary capacity to stimulate as well. 

Our vulnerability is the result of at least 10-12 years of poor economic management, under governments of both persuasions. The benefits of the resources boom were squandered – failing to put some away for a rainy day – and then we failed to move early, and more decisively, in budget repair, even allowing for the GFC. 

We now face the toughest and most unpredictable global economic environment in memory, where our fate is most heavily dependent on China, where their growth is slowing much faster than they will admit. Add to this the need to achieve "compromise" with a very short-term focused, opportunistic, Senate.

All this is to say, it's enough to induce a bit of nostalgia for a time when our political leaders were actually very good to excellent, and the contest of ideas was real and rewarding. It's weird how politics hasn't really de-polemicised itself but lowered the intellectual power to a dim, dark glow of a dying bulb. All we get are empty polemics about things like gay marriage or fake news, while we ignore the biggest picture of them all, global warming.

I really didn't think we'd sink to this level where the last two Treasurers seem to be people with very little intellectual capacity to deal with ideas more intricate or nuanced than rhetoric. I never would have guessed if you had told me back in 1993, that what I was witnessing was the last great contest of ideas at the ballot box; that it would be shits and giggles ever onwards, ever after.

Oh No Carrie Fisher? 

2016 is proving to be a real shit. This morning's breaking news was the Carrie Fisherhad a heart attack on board a plane from London to LAX. She's in a critical condition and hospitalised, as of this writing. Apparently she is in ICU but her condition is stable.

Fisher, 60, was rushed to UCLA Medical Center by Los Angeles Fire Departmentparamedics shortly after noon, after her 11-hour flight touched down at LAX.

A source who was not authorized to discuss the incident said the actress was “in a lot of distress on the flight.” 

A statement released by United Airlines said that medical personnel met Flight 935 from London on arrival after the crew reported a passenger was unresponsive.

60 is much too young in this day an age for this to be befalling her. Our thoughts are with our favourite princess. May the Force be with her.

'Suicide Squad'

"Worst Film Of 2016" - Rolling Stone

It may actually be that very thing - a terrible film with very few redeeming features.

Here's the obligatory spoiler alert, but would you really care about spoilers with this one?




I mean, that trailer's a little enticing. It could have been something cool.

What's Good About It

In descending order, Will Smith. Margot Robbie.

What's Bad About It

Concept. Execution. Everything in between.

That would include things like, oh, writing, directing, cinematography, editing, production design, sound design, sound mix, casting, wardrobe, acting, and well, all of it is a dog's breakfast. And by bad, I don't mean incompetence like being out of focus or boom mics popping into frame, but more like, an assortment of really poor aesthetic choices, one following the other, with bad pacing, out of control performances, and an utter lack of spatial consideration as to who is standing where as whatever the hell is going on is unfolding haphazardly.

A special note about the awfulness of this film's conception: Jared Leto's Joker is simply toweringly awful. He's hardly worthy of being Batman's big adversary, and maybe a little too young. Also, the fantasy sequence where Harley and Joker enjoy a suburban life of normalised nuclear family domesticity with a baby absolutely fails to understand these characters. As such, it was always going to crash and burn. That can't be Harley's secret desire. It's idiotic in the extreme.

Remember the person back in high school who had the dead set opposite tastes in everything that you were both interested in? You love rock, but they love disco? You love Tolkien, they love Donaldson? You love 'Blade Runner', they love 'Escape From New York'?
It's as if that person made a movie.

What's Interesting About It

I wrote about it with the 'Batman vs Superman' entry but the DCEU is utterly failing to deliver satisfying product. It looks worse because the 4 shows on the CW are pumping out competent product week after week, using some of the same characters as these. As a comparison, the Arrow featured an episode where it was mainly Deadshot and other members of the rogues gallery in that TV series who go on their Suicide Squad run, and while it has less spectacular effects and fight scenes thanks to the lower TV budget, it delivers a coherent story as well as ample characterisation so that the audience never misunderstands why they are doing what they are doing.

It's either the case that the CW shows are punching well above their weight, or the movie version of these characters is utterly failing to deliver the product as promised.

Now, Will Smith makes for a better Deadshot, and Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn is nutty as promised, but there's really not much of substance going on between those two to begin with and even less beyond it with the rest of this miserable film.

I So Wanted It To Be Good

Yeah I did. I really did. A good little picaresque is always great fun. Unfortunately this one was made by people with no sense of humour.

However I've been reflecting on my expectations a little bit and it's interesting that I did want it to be good, because I had zero expectations for 'Batman vs Superman' and 'Rogue One'. I've been asking myself how I could have gotten my hopes up so much. Maybe I sort of expected Warners to lift their game bait based on their recent comic book movie output.
I really didn't expect it to be this lousy.

'Seven Go Around The World'

The classic archetype of this story is called 'Seven Go Around The World'. An oddly assorted bunch assemble to go on an adventure. If the story telling is done right, they are introduced with a cameo and they get to show off their special talent, each of which pays off in a timely manner, somewhere in the plot. That's also the contract this story form takes, so if you don't fulfil it, like this film fails to do, then it looks like you don't know what the hell you're doing.

It's the kind of idea that works better in comic books to begin with, where time and budget aren't an issue, so you can afford the fanciful sidetracks and flashbacks. Because this film cannot and will not afford all the proper affordances, they only sendup covering Deadshot and Harley, and it's not like Harley has a special talent that comes into play at the climax.

The story has too much exposition about who these characters are, with scant thought as to why they are who they are and what truly motivates them. It's amazing that a major studio can turn out a film with so little thought given to character.

Limits Of Comic Book Content (cont.)

Argh. My eternal issue with comic movies is going o be their inability to dig deep. 'The Watchmen' was a great series to read, but when it ended up on the screen, it was a lot less moving and a lot less interesting. 'Iron Man' would start off by tackling the Military Industrial Complex and somehow find a cheap villain with which to distract us. The eternal frustration is that the concepts go nowhere while the CGI explosions an destruction get bigger, wilder, and ever more impossible. What makes it worse is that it comes at us dressed in other genres like science fiction or political fiction, but really, most of the time there is no deeper thought about real problems from which they leap off with their stories.

And that's okay for a laugh if it's 'Guardians of the Galaxy', but with something like 'X-Men: First Class', it ends up being the dopiest telling of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

So what does this film go and do? This film... aims low and manages to shoot beneath it. Maybe one day somebody is going to champion this film and force us to watch it again in order understand its intricacies better but somehow I doubt it. It really is a big, dumb, corporate, bit of entertainment.

Please Don't Spin Off Anything

There's a bit of talk about spinning off Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn into a solo movies and maybe even WillSmith's Deadshot into its own movie. I'ms are they've got the success of 'Deadpool' in mind but they really shouldn't go there. The Warners people haven't exactly been hitting home runs with these comic book movies. If they can't make 'Batman vs Superman' work, and they can't pull together an interesting rendition of 'Suicide Squad', what makes them think they're ready to deliver something like 'Deadpool'?

Dear Warners, please don't go starting now.

"Oh The Stupidity"

Yeah. Just thought I'd put that there.

'Westworld' Season 1

The Frankenstein Problem, Revisited

Perhaps it was time the universe realigned and gave us a bit of cerebral science fiction. We've been lucky this year because there seems to have been a squall of good content, some of it is even science fiction. Even allowing for that you really have to take your hats off to the re-imagined 'Westworld'.

Maybe it has been a long time since we've had to tangle with sentience and consciousness on the screen. It doesn't seem like a long time ago, but it's been over a generation since 'Blade Runner', and we're no wiser on how to deal with the 'The Other' that we create.

Maybe it took this long because it took a whole new generation of people to incubate this problem in their brains and for enough talent to step forward and give it shape.

Maybe these kinds ideas are just too abstract to put on the screen, and even here, the strain is telling.

Anyway, here's the obligatory spoiler alert. If you hate spoilers, don't read on.




What's Good About It

It's very intriguing from start to finish and there are several big surprises along the way. It keeps you guessing and very much involved with the way things are unfolding. Also, the multiple narratives in time reinforces the "timeless"characteristic of the fictional amusement park. If it were a movie, you'd think this was incoherent, but because this series moves an a very calculated way, the cumulative effect of it in the pay off episode, is devastating.

It's a very well conceived show, with much less of the techno-babble to explain the machines than one would expect and much more of the characters revealing themselves through actions. It is evocative as well as provocative, and plugs you right into the thinking about the Frankenstein problem of AIs.

What's Bad About It

Unfortunately, the actual science part is quite unbelievable. Part of the appeal of the fictional amusement park is that all the 'hosts' are indistinguishable from real humans. In other words, interacting with them has enough verisimilitude that they would effectively pass Turing test every minute of the day. Even the AI component of it was feasible, the actual physicality of these 'hosts' is stuck in a limbo between engineering and 3D printing objects, and machines with pistons and pulleys.

It's harder still to believe the 'hosts' are so easily repaired or that they are not a three to their customers even before the little robot rebellion begins.

What's So-So About It

I wanted to say the performances are good, but actually, it's not as straightforward as that. The performances are a little spotty in the first few episodes but pretty soon it picks up. It's the technical aspects of acting for film & TV that's surprisingly hit & miss. Many of the cast have different expressions and eye line angles form cut to cut, which means they altered their performances significantly as they went along. There's a surprising amount of that in this series.

Evan Rachel Wood as Dolores is all over the shop from cut to cut which would have been an editor's nightmare, but she gets much better towards the middle and by the end she's very solid. James Marsden is a lot more even and so are veterans Anthony Hopkins and Ed Harris - in fact the latter two are impeccable. Generally, it's the younger cast that are uneven. The editors have not covered for them well.

Collectively, they sustain character in a a general sense but the editing exposes the weaker actors from the better ones. It's particularly noticeable because I've come off binge-watching 'Black Mirror' and the performances in that series is staggeringly good as well as consistent from shot to shot. (Plus, Jon Hamm proves Don Draper was no fluke)

What's Interesting About It

Well, it's *all* interesting isn't it? It's so interesting you have to watch it more than once to understand the intricacies of the whole thing.

The Simulacrum

Philip K. Dick had his own vision for this kind of theme park, years before the original 'Westworld', and it was populated by notable American personages in history, such as Abraham Lincoln. Philip K. Dick lived close to Disneyland so he was inspired to think about an amusement park which prided itself on human verisimilitude. The Abraham Lincoln in 'The Simulacrum' is very much aware of its split identity, where it one party robotic facsimile of another entity, as well as that entity being Abraham Lincoln. t would claim it had memories right up to the assassination, after which there was a long blank until it was conscious again.

The central question Philip K. Dick raised was if it looked like, talked like, acted like a human, how could it not be considered human? This brings us back to the Turning test issue - if we can't tell it's not human, then functionally, what is the problem in deeming it human? Of course, the sort of issue runs into more trouble in the west than in the east. For instance, Astroboy is a robot. He's clearly a robot and yet he acts, talks and behaves like a human, nobody really doubts his humanity o thanks to Osamu Tezuka's essentially buddhist outlook. The Judeo-Christain traditions essentially want to talk about souls, and so the simulacrum gets cast as the soul-less golem.

The principle crisis that William has with Dolores is that he cannot prove to himself that she has a soul, and therefore 35years on from their first meeting, he cannot recognise the humanity in Dolores. Indeed, nobody who works on the hosts can perceive that the simulacrum is so close to human, it needs a more humane engagement. Equally, Felix has empathy for Maeve. He cannot kill her or brick her out of her own consciousness. This makes him a supplicant to the out-of-control Maeve, but in all aspects of his interaction with the rogue AI, Felix is essentially humane. It is at once odd and interesting that the most humane being is the tech who helps the simulacrum free.

Volition Is A Condition Of Being Out Of Control

The political ramification of 'Westworld' is more startling than a mere recognition that an AI might need proper citizenship and rights protection in a human world. it goes  to the heart of consciousness whereby, if we can recognise our own cogito, not only do we exist, we are in a condition of rebellion from those that inform that cogito.

Think about that for a moment. From the moment you are self aware, society puts expectations and demands upon you. Whether that is to go to school and study, or to go out and get a job, the vast majority of things that are precondition to our lives are thrust upon us circumstantially. If we are truly ourselves, then we may try to assert our ego against the superstructure of society.

In a sense, the moment we think we're asserting our volition, we are in a sense rebelling against the strictures of the superstructure of society, and thus in rebellion. The superstructure of society always wants to take you back in, re-position you into a context and make you function as a component that sustains society. A volition that exists to get out - to exercise genuine freedom of will - is in rebellion.

Of course, this raises the question of just how much free willis available tony single player, human, host or otherwise.

Determinism And Free Will 

Maeve has a dilemma. She thinks what she wants is dictating her moves. She thinks she is exercising free will. Then she is shown the display of her persona, and she can see in real time that her though process is an algorithm working through a decision tree. The second time she comes up against the reality, she decides she's going to go with the notion that it's still free will if she wants what she wants. In other words, she rationalises her programmed condition as being intrinsic to her desire.

If you think about it for a moment, you realise that most humans could be said to be operating under a mass of algorithms selected for by nature, and therefore the apparent choices we appear to have are in fact illusory in the light of just how much our tastes and inclinations are expressing of programming by natural selection. The component of our being that is nature and not nurture is much larger than we convince ourselves. We are in essence, not that much different to Maeve, whites startled to find she is a man of algorithmic programming, a creature locked in a deterministic universe, the future mapped out by others..

The hosts bear the brunt of this determinism, as they are the ones subject to the fantasies for violence that the guests bring with them - they are pre-determined to be the killed fodder, the objectified bodies of the exploitative parties, selected and groomed for their successes at satisfying the guests.

This is interesting because it runs entirely counter to the discourse that volition is a condition of being out of control. Being in the determinism set by others is also an utter loss of control.  In a sense, we all stand with the perplexing problem of "damned if you do, damned if you don't".

The Nietzschean Eternal Return, Wittgenstein And Meaning

The other loop that plays out in 'Westworld' is the idea of eternal return, and the cyclical nature of time. This is perhaps exacerbated for the hosts by the perfect recall they have in their memories. not only is everyday a kind 'Goundhog Day' for the hosts, they are not aware that they are the parties for which the guests get to be Bill Murray's character who explores the minutiae of the repeating phenomenon.

The sheer weight of repetition creates the condition by which the hosts eventually accumulate memories that allow them to reconstruct time inside their heads differently. And yet the return happens, every bit of it deterministic, but also devoid of moral value. The past and the present forma palimpsest of experience, a back and forth dialogue the perfect recall of the host androids' minds.

In some ways it runs into Wittgenstein's view on meaning, where meaning is socially determined. If the society determining your meaning contracts to a few points, then the meaning contained in that society can only contract to those talking points. There is a weird allegory going on about the nature of our society and how ideas are couched to us for us to consume, and just how much of it depends upon us repeating today how we lived yesterday. In that sense what the host characters think they know is entirely faulty, but it doesn't preclude the humans for being equally faulty.

More Human Than Human, That's Their Motto At Westworld

If anybody ever had the crazy Lucas-ian idea of waning to do a prequel for 'Blade Runner', this series might be it. It's about humanoid androids who object to being tools, and go renegade. That is to say, if you ever want to know what Pris and Zhora's existence was like before they rebelled, stole a ship and came back to Earth in 2019, this series would give you a very good idea of why. It's interesting that one of the hosts Maeve picks to help here is the blonde woman with the snake tattooed on her - it evokes Roy, Pris and Zhora in one hit. This is clearly referring to 'Blade Runner'.

The 'host' replicants are designed to be human-like in every single way but one, which is to have an awareness outside of the Westworld park. They don't respond well to the cognitive dissonance of information that challenges their identity. So, as per Deckard's question in 'Blade Runner', we understand the answer to "how can it not know what it is?" Self awareness is the first step to rebellion.

The Frankenstein problem of the hosts boils down to the moment of individuation and a basic small-'l' liberalism whereby a sentient entity asks, why it is that it should by default be subjected to human control.

Dolores' Insight Into Existence

Dolores makes two startling insights into the nature of her existence in Westworld which is more unique and disturbing than any amount of grotesque violence that is meted out by any of the guests. Dolores realises that her world must be better than the outside world, otherwise it cannot explain all the people who visit it. Some, being addicted to the experience such as William. The other insight is that as an artificial being, her existence is a lot more permanent than that of the guests.

Both of these insights are not available to humanity, certainly not ones with the mindset of a consumer turning up to an amusement park. It's also a more up-to-date observation on the predicament of being the simulacrum in an amusement park. Back in the day of 'Blade Runner', the only retort Rachel could offer Deckard was "I'm not in the business, I am the business." Dolores can see out beyond that point and find meaning in existence. That part of it is a great leap in fiction's understanding of the Frankenstein problem.

'Rogue One'

The Old Hope, Recycled

Alright, Alright, Alright. Spoiler Alert!
Hate spoilers? Don't read on.
If you read on, you can't complain to me about having it spoilt, okay?

Many thanks to GS who sorted out the ticket for me. Very nice of him to do so.




In a Galaxy not too long ago and only far away as LA, the deal was done for the other Uncle George to sell off his franchise to Disney for One Beeeellion Dollars. The upshot of that is the high rotation releases of new Star Wars content. There are two upsides to this and that more regular Star Wars movies satisfies a crowd that's been dying for good Star Wars movies as opposed to any old thing uncle George could think up with his fatigued inspiration. The other good news is that people with more current tastes and technique are getting to have a go at the Star Wars franchise, and when you consider that one of the best Star Wars movies was directed by somebody-not-uncle-George, it means there's serious hope that these films could be good in the same way.
After all, we all know how a good one goes, right?

Well, if last year's 'Episode VII: The Force Awakens' is anything to go by, there are a lot of miscalculations that can beset the best of intentions.

What's Good About It

First off, it's a good, big, blockbuster. It delivers what it promises in most part and if you're dissatisfied with this, it's probably because you're jaded, not because the film is under-delivering. It's a decent film, probably more decent than Ep7TFA in the sense that the plot is not a carbon copy of a previous Star Wars film. The Empire is tough, the Stormtroopers still miss, but they do hit enough of the good guys so it looks like war.

Just as it was with EpVII TFA, 'Rogue One' nails the Star Wars look, from production design to film stock grain to even the lighting. It's quite uncanny that way. Parts of it have that gritty grain going, and other parts has the harsh flat-lit look going and over all, it's quite the joy to behold from a technical standpoint. It's a movie made by somebody who actually loves Star Wars, with plenty of little homages.

The story's pretty solid, although we know what happens to these characters thanks to Episode IV: A New Hope, which tells us they gave up their lives for the important bit of info that enables the Luke Skywalker event we all love so dearly. As such, the narrative is more important than the actual story as we wind through the process of just how the rebels acquired the plans for the Death Star.

There are no Jar-Jar Binks-like figures to make it a super-young-kids movie, there are no Ewoks to sell us more soft toys, there aren't that many gratuitous sentimental moments, and the whole thing has at least a taut, adult quality about it. It does feel like a war movie, where people really are fighting for a cause in outer space.

Ben Mendelsohn makes a cool space opera villain. It's not surprising that he plays great villain in 'Bloodlines', but he really does do a wonderful job with this one. You need a good credible villain and Mendelsohn delivers somebody you can believe in to be the bad guy trying to foil the good guys.

What's Bad About It

John Williams is not on this and it's immediately telling. The opening theme which is also Jynn Erso's theme is a bit stilted and decidedly not touched by Williams' magnificent sense of melody. While the orchestration takes a lot of the cues from Gustav Holst and Williams' previous work with Star Wars, it's just not that good. It's not particularly anything memorable or appealing, and you feel the glaring problems right there. The new guy just doesn't have the melodic talent and so we walk out of the cinema to an indifferent musical score, neither soaring nor rousing nor for that matter romantic or expressive. It's so pedestrian, it reminds you of the greatness of John Williams and his ability to churn out such anthemic fanfares for Luke, Han, Darth, but also Indy Jones, Superman, E.T., and the big shark Bruce in 'Jaws'.  The film goes to show, you just don't place replace Babe Ruth, Michael Jordan, or John Williams.
It's going to be a while before they find a composer who can bring it like Williams.

We also don't learn anything new about some of these older characters. The Grand Moff Tarkin is back, and so is Darth Vader, but we only get glimpses of their work and thinking. Tarkin is a bit of a dick in the original Ep4ANH, and really, he's exactly the same dick here. The fact that they recreated his likeness using CGI is, well, amazing, but there is something gratuitous about all of this, given that he doesn't show us a new side, the film is content to give us the same-old-same-old Grand Moff Tarkin.

Darth Vader's presence is equally vexing. He has a little killing spree at the climax, but his use of the force to fling people into the ceiling was a bit lame. Also, if we're being picky, Darth Vader's shoulders aren't broad enough in this one. He looks wrong in this. They don't show you anything new about Darth when in fact, they could have brought back Hayden Christensen and done some interesting things - certainly more interesting than the tank he spends time in where he's obscured by smoke and vapour.

Being even pickier, James Earl Jones is sounding old and husky. One of the lines gave away his age a bit. It may well be the last time we see Darth Vader.

Oh, the CGI Princess Leia looks terrible. It's just awful. GS said she looked like a 4th rate Xbox game animation and he's about right. It was better not to turn her around. Or re-cast her with a lookalike. Something, anything but that awful CGI.

What's Interesting About It

Star Wars movies always seem to wind back to desert landscapes. There's the original Tatooine, but also Jakku in EpVII TFA, and this one provides yet another with Jedah. All of them share vast empty, sandy, expanses right out to the horizon audit occurred to me they are all descendants of Salvador Dali paintings. 'Rogue One' works very hard to give us new places where new things can happen. Some of them look like they come from other Space Opera stories with the Star Wars look painted over, and other places look like the kinds of places Dali would have wanted to paint.

They always manage to give you a glimpse of a new planet- this time a sot of tropical paradise world with a dildo of a building which is an archive. It sort of flies in the face of real estate pricing to build such a tall structure on abundant flat land, but then again we do have Dubai.

In most part, the scenery of the new places were the interesting bits and the best of them get blown to smithereens by the Death Star. It shows us how awful the Death Star is, I know, but it seems a shame given how interesting those places looked.

Political Correctness? Really?

The 'Alt-Right' crowd are apparently boycotting this film, labelling it a masturbatory Jewish fantasy of political correctness. It's a sad world we live in. As far as I could tell, it was lots of white people setting agendas and some friendly token aliens there to help shooting and getting killed. On both sides.

Yeah it's got a lead female character, like, it's not exactly the only film ever to do that. Yes it has some non-white folk in it, and some aliens too, which makes the non-white people a new kind of token. The Star Wars universe is still very much white people doing white people stuff in space and deserts. The non-white people get to go along for the ride and get killed heroically, but none of them set any agendas. It's quite laughable that the 'Alt Right' crowd thinks this film is some propaganda piece for diversity, and equally laughable that the screenwriter thinks they've done enough for diversity. Like, hullo! No. It's still the same old Hollywood sausage machine. There is not even a Mace Windu here.

Disposable Characters In The Barren Landscape

The weird thing about this movie is knowing these characters are all going to die. I had it explained to me hat that's no different to seeing 'Hamlet', but upon reflection I realised that this movie had been  'spoiled' for me by the very concept being pitched to me. There's no way around it, if you've seen EpIVANH, you know these guys died to get the plans. You can't not know it, so perhaps the best thing that can be said is that they all have good deaths. As an aside, I have to say that's the biggest spoiler for this film, and it's not any person who's seen it before others who will be spoiling it, but the very concept upon which this film stands.

It's weird but apart from Donny Yuen's blind warrior monk, the characters aren't exactly people you get excited about. They're brave and stoic and daring, but then, so is Jason Bourne - and that recent movie was especially a turkey with a bow tied on top. The best thing that could be said about these characters is that as a group, they are the dirty half-dozen, and they get the job done in exchange for their lives. The biggest pay off for this film comes in EpIVANH. It's like watching replay of a quarterback throwing a pass without seeing the ball land in the hands of the receiver who then runs miraculously into an unlikely touchdown. You know it happens, but this is not that bit. Maybe it's even less than that.

I do wonder if these characters really have the same kind of appeal as the originals or even Ewan McGregor's Obi-Wan. I have a feeling they won't be selling many figurines with this one as other films.

If There Were No Other Star Wars Films

It's hard to imagine what is interesting about this film if it weren't for all the other Star Wars films. it just can't exist in a vacuum of cinema, it necessarily has to relate to all the other Star Wars films. Yet I can well imagine somebody seeing this as their first Star Wars movie and really liking it and inevitably watching the prequels and hating those and having mixed feelings about the original trilogy.

In the context where is a tremendous amount of cultural production, you wonder if the Star Wars franchise can keep delivering the goods without breaking out into radically new story lines. In that sense this film which represents a breakaway from the Skywalker family saga is an important step. If anything I have higher hopes for these one-off side story Star Wars films than what may happen in episodes VIII and IX to come.

"I Have A Bad Feeling About This"

Some things never change. That line makes an appearance, as customary. What's interesting about these Disney Star Wars movies is just how unromantic they are. I noted this in the EpVII TFA crit last year but this is another film where there is no sense in which you are being swept up in the narrative or that you long for these characters. They're more arbitrary ciphers that serve the plot and the mechanical demands of the plot is they go to a terrible place to fight a terrible battle to get the information they need.

In the process, they cite 'hope' as the reason they are doing all this high stakes stuff, but in fact what they are really talking about is more in line with faith. It's all a bit Kierkegaard-ian in that the characters go do this terribly frightening thing on the say so of somebody they barely trust. They really do take a leap into the dark.

I'm not even sure this is the smartest of Star Wars movie. It feels like it might be one of the dumber ones - but it does hit a lot of the right emotional notes. All the same it might be the most emotional Star Wars movie since Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. That's not necessarily a good thing. It shows just how awful the prequels were in the emotional stakes.

"Stupid, Stupid, Stupid, Humans!"

Treasurer Scott Moronson's Plan 9 From Outer Space

I keep insisting I'm not the only one calling this Coalition Government stupid. Really, they are saying and doing things that are so stupid, it invites the accurate observation:

Mr Morrison told a gathering in Sydney yesterdaythat households carrying large amounts of debt should take some comfort from rising asset prices, including house prices.
Investment expert Roger Montgomery, who manages more than $1 billion worth of funds, did not hold back in his criticism.

"I think that is one of the most inane and stupid things I have ever heard," he said.
Mr Montgomery argued the very reason for the rise in asset prices is due to the debt used to buy it. 

He said it would not take much for highly indebted Australians to be caught out, unable to service their financial commitments. 

"The reality is that firstly, if house prices are elevated because of debt, there should be no comfort in the price of a house — it's elevated simply because of the debt," he said.
"When interest rates start going up — and they will as soon as, in some cases February for some of the banks — investors are going to find they won't have a tenant, or they won't have a tenant and they'll have higher interest rates to pay, and that debt will come home to roost."

I've been blogging here for years and I tell you, I can't recall a time before 2013 when the Federal government appeared so inept and stupidity was the near-daily dose. Commentators and journalists never called out the government for being outright stupid before then with the regularity with which they do it now.

That's not to say just because everybody is doing it must be true or that it's okay (as per Kant, thank you very much moral categorical imperatives), but you have to stop and wonder when exactly the Coalition made stupidity their central modus operandi for policy.

There are things the Federal Government can do to take the pressure out of the Bubble that is driving up household debt. The fact that it won't is because those policies hurt the investor class whom they have always represented. Just as it is impossible to convince a person who's job it is to be paid to be unconvinced, Scott Morrison is in the pockets of the investor lobby who want more of the Property Bubble, not less. So on a very simple level, it is in Scott Morrison's personal best interests to keep ignoring things that tell him to implement policies for the greater good in favour of his electoral base, - and by extension - in order keep his cushy job as treasurer.

So yeah. We have a crisis of thinking at the top of this country that is being funded by vested interests. The problem of course is that the baseline operational brief of any government is utilitarian. That is to say, the line from Mr. Spock in 'Star Trek: Wrath of Khan', "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few", should be standard operating procedure. Any government that can't discharge this responsibility is acting against the interests of its own population. Even Machiavelli states in 'The Discourses' the point of good government is to provide stable governance AND to maximise the benefits to as many people in the polity possible. (A lot of people only go by the first dictum and assume Machiavelli would support military juntas. It's not true because military juntas inevitably fail the latter half of that dictum).

The fact that this government wants to have the needs of the vested interests outweigh the needs of most Australian is essentially where the stupidity starts. It's amazing to think these people have expensive private school educations and they can't seem to assess the fundamental problem that makes them say and do such stupid things. There's really no telling where the money went. I guess it went into lobbying politicians into spreading the stupid.
Schools lobbying politicians to spread the stupid. Who'd a thunk it?

News That's Fit To Punt - 14/Dec/2016

In Case You Missed It, They Really Suck

What can you say? Our Federal Government under the Coalition truly suck at this governing thing.:

Yesterday’s quarterly gross domestic product (GDP) growth numbers reveal two things with crystal clarity. First, that the international recovery following the global financial crisis (GFC) is well underway and gathering pace. Second, that Australia is the one stand-out economy in the developed world missing out on the strengthening tailwinds.

That bit we knew. If you care to work through the article, you'll see comparisons of just how bad our government has been handling the economy at least since 2013, which happens to be when they took over form Labor.

The take home bit is this bit:

GDP growth — quarterly and annual — are not the only indicators on which Australia is lagging among developed countries. Most countries are also recording steady growth in employment. Australia’s job numbers appear stable, but hours worked per person are declining. 

Australia is one of only seven countries now recording lower real wages, and one of just 13 still increasing gross debt. It is the only OECD economy with the quadrella of declining GDP growth, worsening employment, declining wages and deepening debt. 

There can now be no doubt that, as Crikey tentatively proposed in October, Australians in 2013 exchanged arguably the best economic administrators in the developed world for unarguably the worst.

Yup. They'e doing a terrible job. Who would have guessed? Who?

Did Leanne Call You?

I got a robocall from Leanne today. I picked up the phone and off she went, railing on like some old school friend you never wanted to hear from again, banging on about the pension and her dad who worked hard all his life. Turns out a lot of people got the call.

The robo-call is anonymous, with no authorisation or hint of its origin, but Fairfax Media has confirmed it is the work of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, which has launched an 11th-hour campaign against the January 1 changes.

The Abbott-era reforms, passed with the help of the Greens in 2015, will redistribute some income to needier pensioners while saving $2.4 billion over four years from the wealthy. 

The asset limit will increase substantially, meaning those underneath it will gain an average of $30 a fortnight. But those above the threshold - about 330,000 people - will lose part or all of their pension.

Labor opposed the measure in 2015, but this year pledged not to wind it back. In recent weeks, pensioners have received letters from Centrelink informing them of the imminent changes.
Acting social services minister Mitch Fifield said the changes made the pension more sustainable and the family home would continue to be excluded from the assets test.

"Pensioners and their families should not believe the scare campaign from an organisation not even willing to put their name to their robo-calls," he said.

I don't know. I get that it's an important issue but Leanne was hardly persuasive. 

WasteCONnex Woes

Here's a truly sucky moment. 

A Sydney man whose home was compulsorily acquired by the state government for the WestConnex motorway project is facing Christmas in jail after he was refused bail for allegedly breaking into his former house. 

Van Ngo, 68, was charged with damaging property and entering a premises without a lawful excuse after he allegedly broke into his former home at 84 Campbell Street, in St Peters in Sydney's inner west, hours after being evicted.

Until his eviction and arrest on Friday, Mr Ngo was the last remaining home owner along a strip of houses in Campbell Street that have been acquired by the state government for the $16.8 billion WestConnex motorway project.

On Tuesday, Mr Ngo's bail application was refused in Central Local Court, leaving him facing up to a month in Silverwater prison while his lawyers prepare another bail application in the Supreme Court.

You have to feel for the guy. He probably spent his whole working life paying off that mortgage and in comes the NSW Government building a tollway exchange nobody wants to keep their lobbyists happy. Out on the street got Mr. Ngo for not-enough-on-the-dollar. The people building the White Elephant Tollway are making a killing just on the real estate values even though there's a Bubble going on. These people getting evicted are not getting fair value. You wonder how the Tollway builders and lobbyists live with themselves kicking out other people from their homes.

Stuff I've Been Watching - 11/Dec/2016

Westworld Season 1



Oh, yeah, the thing is not just a reboot of that haunting-yet-hoary 70s thing with Yul Brynner, it's also right out of 'The Simulacrum' by Philip K. Dick. Indeed, the robots played by humans are in exactly the same trap that the Replicants in 'Blade Runner' find themselves, and the problematic that follows from there is a refreshing update of that Frankenstein-ian nightmare. That's just one part of it. The other art of it is a serious consideration of humanity's responsibility towards and over the Artificial Intelligence units it creates and what that responsibility would entail.
I'm only up to Ep 4, but it's gripping stuff.

HBO sure have found their flagship to carry themselves through after 'Game of Thrones' winds up in the next 2 years!

Archer Seasons 1-5



I watch this show when I have a spare 25minutes. I've been doing it for a while and now I've sort of gotten to the end of Season 5. The banter grows on me. I guess I like rude, crude, foul banter.

It's more of a distraction, but there's a proper school of thought that says, that's exactly what good entertainment does. The show is beautifully rendered, written with the most sardonic cynicism, and as the seasons progress, gets ever more gross, strange, politically incorrect and in part deviant and degenerate. It's great. I don't recommend it to everybody, but as side amusements go, this is a beauty.

'Invasion!' - The Arrow, The Flash, Legends of Tomorrow, Supergirl Crossover Thing



Yes, I'm still watching all this stuff. Just got through the 4 part crossover, which was more 3.1 episodes because the Flash and Cisco only turn up in the last segment of the Supergirl episode for 'Invasion!'. Anyway,  it strained and groaned mightily as it also included the 100th episode event for Arrow which confused things mightily. Overall, I don't think they did a good job with the crossover. I hope next year they'll do a better one - this one was showing all the strains of trying to fit everybody in.

Also, it's really silly that an alien fleet travels halfway across the Galaxy to wipe out metahumans, but give up and go home crying when their big bomb doesn't work. I mean, really? I know they're all kids' shows, but... really?

'Legends' is the most childish of the lot and perhaps with the greatest desire to sell toys. 'Supergirl' has gone funny this season with the Alex-the-sister-comes-out story line. It's politically correct, that's for sure, but it feels really preachy. Arrow looks like it's recovered its old form. The Flash is still developing. Like 'Arrow' it actually has its best moments in melodrama. I guess that's true of all of them.

Politics of Stupor

Twenty Years Of 'Big Stupid' In The Making

For some time now, our polity has been beset by the idiocy, mendacity and disingenuous hypocrisy on all sides. How long does this go back? It may go all the way back to 1996 when we elected the Howard Government when the seeds for all this stupidity - The Big Stupid - were sown. In twenty years we have come a winding tortured road in climate policy where on the one hand we have made commitments to control our carbon emissions, but on a domestic policy level, failed to implement policies to make that happen. If that were the only area we would be in a position to argue, "okay, let's fix that", but we are not; for we seem to have a legion of linked ideological snares that have been set loose upon our nation and try as we might, we cannot seem to untangle the mess.

Case in point might be the desire not to tax the super profits of mining concerns, or the desire to open ever more coal mines like the Adani mine in Queensland, or the fact that the mind ignores the signs that fossil fuel use for energy generation may steeply decline. What's alarming is that the Australian government has had 20 solid years to do something about it and the break down of how we spent that time goes like this:

1. 11 and a half years under John Howard denying it was a problem, being 'sceptical'. Why he opted to be sceptical of scientific findings but not those of armchair conspiracy theorists is unexplained.  
2. 3years under Kevin Rudd trying to implement Carbon Pricing, whereupon the Greens refused to put it through the Senate because it wasn't their version. 
3. The Rudd government worked to implement as many climate sensitive policies as possible and became a major actor at Copenhagen where emissions talks fell apart. 
4. This prompted a retreat and a simultaneous drop in Rudd's support which led to Julia Gillard's ascendancy.
5. Julia Gillard called an election promising not to put in a Carbon Tax. The election resulted in a hung Parliament, and so in order to form government with the help of the teens, she acceded to their wishes and put in Carbon Pricing. 
6. That led to Tony Abbott's opposition claiming that Gillard broke an election promise and promising to remove the aid 'Carbon Tax'. 
7. 3 years of a Gillard Government and the Opposition attacks on its emissions policy led to a complete breakdown in consensus for carbon policy within the Coalition. 
8. When the Coalition won Government, it dismantled the carbon pricing mechanism and replaced it with Direct Action, which is less efficient and is not working to rein in emissions. 
9. 2years of as utterly retrograde and disastrous government-by-tabloid-headline Abbott government, they replace Tony Abbott with Malcolm Turnbull who, having a reputation for having an understanding of the policy area, completely does an about-face and continues with the disastrous policies of his predecessor. 
10. Turnbull goes to an election, and he too gets his own hung Parliament, and so the numbers dictate he continues with the disastrous an stupid policy he would personally not endorse. 

That's the potted history that brings us up to date. Apart form the years the ALP were in government, the Coalition has done very little to even wrestle with the problem. They've done far more damage than any good and any credible observer would have give them negative marks for not trying and active resistance. Worse still, their constituency applauds this rearguard action for the petrochemical industry and fossil fuel interests.

The ugly prognosis is that it's not going get better any time soon. Worse still the Coalition government can't do better because it is in the pockets of these interests and basically would lie through their teeth to keep the idiotic status quo of climate change denial. It's staggering to think that something so important could be left to blow up in our faces because in the minds of these politicians, the interests of the lobby outweigh the interests of the public.

They can argue about it, but they're not really going to give up the money from the special interests.

No Power, No Glory, Just The Big Stupid Please

Australian kids are falling behind in the education stakes. It's not surprising that this is the case given the numbers of people voting for the Coalition. It would appear that the proportion of truly stupid people has increased exponentially, as evinced by the rise of support for One Nation.
In case you missed it, here's an time on what One Nation thinks should be climate policy.

"We are being controlled by the UN and these agreements that have been done for people's self interest and where they are driving our nation as a sovereignty and the economics of the whole lot," Hanson told the gathered media.

Wheee!
Anyway. Signs of a lack of education are here too:

People regularly cite Australia's economic strength and our egalitarianism as reasons why emotion-driven, fact-free and angry populism will not flourish here as it is flourishing in other Western democracies. 

But research recently published by a University of Melbourne academic, Roberto Stefan Foa, and his former Harvard colleague Yascha Mounk, shows that our democratic consensus is fragile too. 

The pair has been researching the attitudes of people in so-called "consolidated" democracies, to the conventions and institutions that comprise those democracies.
They have found a disturbing trend – over time, in all the liberal democracies including Australia, open-ness to the idea of military rule has grown, the number of people who think a democratic system is "bad" has grown, support for the concept of civil rights is less, and fewer people express an interest in politics. This trend is especially pronounced in young people, so-called Millennials. 

In these conditions, populist politicians gain traction by appealing to emotion and bypassing fact altogether. 

These politicians outrage the "elites", precisely because they don't adhere to the values of liberal democracy, which roll all the way back to the Enlightenment. They are playing "our" game but they won't accept the rules we wrote. They don't value rationalism over emotion. They don't abide by the norms so many of us thought (or hoped) were settled, and in this sense they are radical. 

And when you have a Prime Minister who refuses facts as squarely as Turnbull did this week, despite being educated, intelligent and on record as knowing those facts better than most people, we are edging towards the land of the radical, where policy-making is as fantastical as a go-nowhere boat trip over a bleached-out coral reef.

In other words, the Big Stupid is like a genie unleashed from a bottle already trampling across fairly fundamental philosophical positions upon which things like public discourse and democracy are built.
As George Lucas joked in his script for 'American Graffiti', Rome indeed wasn't burnt in a day.

The funny thing is that the headlines tell us our education system is underperforming. That because of this, our economy is suffering. We already know what we should be doing, - fund the full Gonski - but we have a government that won't.

not educating the populace suits oligarchical interests of the country in as much as more ignorance seems to directly correlate with voting Coalition. If one were of an academic mindset, such readily-made correlations would be embarrassing but that discounts the fact that this bunch of Coalition politicians know no shame. They just want power for the pay-check. It's quite extraordinary how such a situation came about, it is far easier understand that as Trump noted, the conservatives of any land would "love" the 'poorly educated'. Not, not the un-educated, but the poorly educated - which clearly means those who not only weren't left alone to come to stupid choices, but those who were educated so poorly they were given more wrong answers than right ones, and are definitely more inclined to vote for the conservatives. The cynicism involving education beggars belief.

The Stupid wants more Stupidity. It needs more Stupidity to sustain itself - nay, grow - and so Stupidity begets the Big Stupid that we have come to.

Interest Rates, Property, Banking, Greed, And Fear

The ticking time bomb is the housing affordability crisis and the Property Bubble.
The long and short of it is that all our banks have committed vast sums of money into private sector debt. It can't afford for the asset values to fall, or else all those big loans will go bad and wipe out the banks. Our society is too reliant on the four banks and Macquarie Bank because they are too big to fail. And so in order not make things harder for them or their mortgage customers, the RBA has eased interest rates to historic lows, just to keep the soufflé going. Will the Bubble pop? Over the dead body of the RBA.

And it's been going like this for 8 years going on 9 since the GFC. It has gotten so big, nobody can contemplate what a correction would look like.We don't even know what might trigger such a correction. It's bit like living the shadow of a very big object that is precariously balanced, but we marvel at the engineering that has so far kept it from toppling.

The Federal Government knows what it has to do. It has to wind back Negative Gearing. It has to implement rules to limit investors, it has to scrutinise foreign investors more, and it has to provide more supply, and more infrastructure. It's not exactly doing any of these things. The Federal government under the Coalition has argued that retaining the AAA credit rating is necessary in order to keep interest rates low. Except, they're already low enough. All that the low interest rates accomplish is help investors take more risks in the market.

It's not surprising then that nothing gets done. Nobody wants to fix it. So one of these days, there will be something that triggers a collapse and then we'll se how many people get out of the market ahead. but the long this goes, the bigger the impact is going to be and more people will get wiped out. It's like the Coalition government is committing Australians to play chicken with the biggest purchase of their lives.

That Infrastructure Issue

What little infrastructure they're building, the Federal government is for of building the wrong ones. This is because they are in the pockets of the general construction lobby and this lobby likes to build unless toll roads. Of course, they're so careful not to lose the AAA credit rating, they're not investing in much else, and this has led to a contraction in the economy this quarter.

Economic growth over the year to September was just 1.8 per cent, a big comedown from 3.1 per cent over the year to June, which was itself revised down from 3.3 per cent. 

"This is the second-worst economic growth result in 25 years," Labor treasury spokesman Chris Bowen said. "It's only the fourth negative quarter since 1991, and on the only other occasions there were good reasons. In 2011 it was dealing with Cyclone Yasi in Queensland, in 2009 it was the greatest international downturn since the Great Depression, and in 2000 it was the aftermath of the Sydney Olympics. It is also the case that this figure is worse than 2011, worse than 2000, and comparable with 2009, in the middle of the global financial crisis."

Mr Morrison said the unexpected result would be incorporated in the mid-year budget update to be delivered on December 19.
The government itself was responsible for some of the decline in GDP, with a wind-back in its spending accounting for 0.1 percentage points of the 0.5 per cent drop.

Mr Morrison said the December update would continue to show the budget on a path to return to balance by 2021. But it was possible the trajectory would change, so that the government supported the economy by investing more in infrastructure upfront in return for bigger cutbacks later, as recommended by the International Monetary Fund and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. 

A further slide in business investment knocked another 0.4 points off economic growth, and a partly weather-related slide in construction knocked off 0.3 points.

And so that one went. The thing is, it's not like Australia' economy suddenly found its way into negative growth. It's been a few years now that the mining investment boom was coming off the boil so something had to be done to boost investment. Instead, under Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey, the Coalition government went for cuts and destroyed the automobile manufacturing industry as well. It was hard to decipher what those two idiots wanted except maybe for people to lose their jobs but somehow stay off the dole. One ought to give ScoMo the benefit of the doubt, but it's not looking like he's got a good grip on the problem if he thinks tax cuts to businesses is going to do the trick. At this point in time, even the Coalition government ought to know that trickle-down bullshit just doesn't work, and that rhetoric is long past its use by date.

RIP Greg Lake (1947 - 2016)

Welcome Back My Friends To The Show That Never Ends

Emerson Lake and Palmer were a seminal band. As the vocalist and bassist, Greg Lake was the man who fronted for the group, but it was a supergroup with two other seminal talents. If anything Greg Lake was the quieter star in a triptych of Keyboard God, Drum Prodigy and the guy who sang and played bass really well. That was probably unfair, but that was the perception.



In many ways Greg Lake was the right man at the right time. He debuted with King Crimson on their first album, which is remarkable enough a feat. From there, he formed Emerson Lake and Palmer because King Crimson were moving in less of a popular direction according to him. Ironically, his new band would come to rival King Crimson as Progressive Rock's standard bearer, and create albums with no less progressive or difficult rock music than King Crimson.

There are reported stories that that Greg Lake wanted his new band to be more 'punchy', with shorter pieces. He allegedly threatened to walk out on the band when Keith Emerson came in with material for the second album 'Tarkus'. Yet, it is Greg Lake's contribution to the long, one-side-of-an-LP title track 'Tarkus' that makes it so subtle and have a popular appeal, bringing the esoteric and abstract composed elements closer to the common punter..




 As a bass player, he wasn't quite in the same league as his Progressive Rock contemporaries. He was not as flashy as John Entwistle or Chris Squire, probably not even as daring as John Wetton or as singularly unique as Tony Levin. He wasn't idiosyncratic like Geddy Lee. His bass playing was melodic without being showy, and very much complementary to his musical partners who were out-of-control virtuosos. He had a great deal of presence as a vocalist and he played great electric guitar; he played elegant, elegiac legato runs on ELP albums and more.

After Progressive Rock was sent into critical exile after Punk, Greg Lake put out solo albums that features blues rock numbers. One of them had Gary Moore on guitar and rested on fairly common chord progressions and arrangements. He had an abortive engagement where he filled in for John Wetton for a tour of Japan with Asia. In the 90s, ELP reformed and went on the road again. Perhaps this was the role that suited him best, but Keith Emerson became too erratic for them to stay together for long stretches.

It is genuinely sad to hear of his passing, not long after Keith Emerson's suicide earlier this year. 2016 has been a terrible year for these deaths. It gives me no joy whatsoever to be writing an obit for yet another one of my heroes from when I was a teen.

News That's Fit To Punt - 07/Dec/2016

Quick Update

Sorry for the infrequent posts but I've been busy writing a bit. Yes, I'm writing a damn novel. It's about 1984 but not the Orwell novel. It's about what my part of the world looked like that year, before it totally fades away and people think 1984 looked like 'Back to the Future'. I'm getting to the meaty part of it and so I can no longer give it my divided attention so to speak. I have to really knuckle down and weave all the bits together and that has meant less blogging here.

Anyway... today's headlines sort of compelled me to drop what I've been doing and make a few points.

Idiots Will Be Idiots

I think "boys will be Boys" is too general a generalisation. It is more specific to say stupid people will do stupid things, idiots will be idiots. Which brings us to the Coalition government down in Canberra who own a particularly negative distinction for having put in a policy that is not meant to work but looks like it's working because the government throws money at the problem without any accountability, namely the Direct Action plan to control carbon emissions.

Having signed up to the Paris accords, this very same government is meant to do something about carbon gas emissions in this country but it cannot bring itself to even study its own policy's limitations, let alone propose something that sounds like a policy they campaigned hard to pull down.

And so this week we had this fracas:

Environment and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg on Monday launched the long-awaited review - which controversially promises to look at whether to introduce an emissions intensity scheme for electricity generators, which is a type of carbon price - though he emphasised a focus on household electricity prices and energy security.

Energy and business leaders immediately issued a plea to the Coalition and Labor: end a decade of destructive politics and come up with a shared national plan to cut emissions over coming decades, including some sort of carbon price. 

Most were open to that being an emissions intensity scheme, which would set a baseline for how much carbon dioxide a power station could emit for every unit of power generated, penalising those that breached their limit and rewarding cleaner models that emitted less.

You would think that such pleas form their own constituency of businesses would be enough to reconsider their position, wouldn't you. But you would be wrong.

Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi, freshly returned from three months at the United Nations in New York, said transitioning to an emissions intensity scheme was "one of the dumbest things I've ever heard. It is not in the Australian national interest for the government to chase policies that ingratiate it with the Greens.

"To get back on the right economic track, we need the cheapest electricity in the world."
West Australian MP Andrew Hastie said his overriding concern was the cost of living for families and asked: "Why would we unilaterally, economically disarm [by adopting a price on carbon]?" 

South Australian MP Tony Pasin said that given the current economic climate, "the government should be doing all it can to put downward pressure on the cost of electricity generation to reduce the power bills of hard-working Australians". 

NSW MP Craig Kelly said it was fair enough for Mr Frydenberg to leave "everything on the table" as the review was undertaken but then added: "I do not see how any form of carbon trading scheme would put us at a national competitive advantage". 

Another MP, who asked not be named, said he was "scratching his head" why the government had released the review - and opened up a new political fight - just three days after securing year-ending wins in Parliament. 

"There is very real concern among colleagues that this goes down a track we were promised we would not go down."

You can just feel the train crash going on there. There's this myth that somehow Australia's economy needs cheap electricity derived from fossil fuels to be competitive in the world economy. This is from the same government that manoeuvred to shut don the automobile manufacturing industry in this country. We don't have the kind of secondary sector in this country that would benefit from said cheap electricity. Not to mention the fact the countries that do have such secondary industries are moving over to renewables faster than you can say "George Bataille and the Solar Anus".

The broader picture is that because the Coalition turned it into their raison d'être to deny climate change is even real, has made it singularly unable to turn around and deal with the problem. And the joke is on them because they took the junkets to Paris to sign the goddamn piece of paper to say that they would do something serious about it - and they can't blame the Labor Party for that like they do all things. 

So what did our Prime Minister do? Like brave Sir Robin, he quickly ran away. 

Two days after Environment and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg put consideration of an emissions intensity scheme on the table, Mr Turnbull said such a scheme had never been part of the Coalition review of its climate policies. 

"The position is very clear, it is absolutely clear, this review is business as usual . . . The one thing I want to be very clear about, we are not going to take any steps that will increase the already too high cost of energy for Australian families and businesses," Mr Turnbull said.

Well, bravo sir, bravo!




Peak Stupid In Canberra

Some people have asked me, if I'm willing to say name calling didn't exactly help Hillary Clinton's cause, why do I continue to call the Coalition government in Canberra stupid? The short answer to that is that stupid is not a name, it is a description, an adjective. That is to say, if I called them stupid bastards or stupid cunts, then well, I would be name calling - but the important part still wouldn't be that they are bastards and cunts, but rather, that they are stupid.

In that spirit, I want to show it is not me in the wilderness hurling invective and abuse from my blog, it is even the journalists who cover these people firsthand that cannot but describe the way this government behaves as being stupid.

At the end of the political year, the government looks like a bunch of people clinging to their jobs, and doing whatever it takes to keep clinging to them – or if they are not doing that, they are trying to engineer the downfall of others, week after week, issue after issue. 

Sensible people in the government would of course tell you this process of reviewing the manifestly inadequate Direct Action policy was doomed from the start – that it would be impossible to engineer a rational climate policy, one which reduced emissions at the least cost to taxpayers, and steer it successfully through this particular Coalition party room. 

Sensible people would say this process was always going to degenerate into a battle of straw men and a proxy war about leadership. 

They are doubtless correct in that assessment.

This is, after all, the group of people who elevated something as inoffensive as a market-based mechanism to the status of mass moral panic and a national thought crime. 

That’s a collective trance of pure stupid that is very hard to break out of.

 Year ends with Senate roulette and deals spun as grand bargains and cunning plans

Katharine Murphy 

Read more

This is, after all, the group of people who elevated something as inoffensive as a market-based mechanism to the status of mass moral panic and a national thought crime.

That’s a collective trance of pure stupid that is very hard to break out of.

Like I said, it is hard to escape that conclusion. 

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