Another great prog rock icon has passed away. Following the demises of John Entwistle, Chris Squire, and Greg Lake, the ranks of the great British bass players of the 1970s is thinning out. As a player, he was actually quite hard to emulate and always seemed to have a trick up his sleeve to surprise you. In some ways he was under-rated as a bass player but that was partly because he was a consummate song writer as well as a charismatic vocalist. In the shuffle of things, his bass playing seemed to get the least praise out of his skill set. Although styles are entirely different, the most comparable kind of musician might be Sting, and he was easily a better bass player than Sting.
John Wetton's turn playing bass and singing for King Crimson might have been the most macho incarnation of King Crimson. His work on 'Larks Tongues in Aspic' through to the live album 'USA' are moments of sheer, muscular playing matched with tremendously ballsy vocals. He certainly had a unique kind of swagger on record as well son stage.
After his turn with King Crimson, he played on a Uriah Heap album, then put out some solo albums, but put together the Prog Rock outfit 'UK' with Eddie Jobson, Bill Bruford, and Allan Holdsworth. The first, eponymous UK album 'UK' is one of the high point of Prog Rock, and even as Holdsworth and Bruford deserted the band, they recruited Terry Bozzio to drum on the follow up 'Danger Money', which is also a remarkable album.
John Wetton's widest fame probably came with the supergroup made up of various Prog Rock alumni, Carl Palmer, Steve Howe, and Geoff Downes, Asia. Asia of course had the big hit 'Heat of the Moment'. It was ironic that these Prog Rock mavens found mainstream success with a bit of radio friendly pop rock, but in the 1980s it made more sense to strip down the ornate arrangements.
Right across his work there is a funny John Wetton persona in his songs that seems to be about some hired hitman or state-assigned assassin or undercover spy, going on dangerous missions and doing violent things. He had the vocal strength and charisma to put over in song, what was series of vignettes from action movies as songs. His songs with Asia ranged from heroic through triumphant melancholy and then bombast. It was a heady mix.
After many incarnations, the band Asia reformed in the late 2000s with John Wetton, as 'Original Asia' and put out a series of studio albums. John Wetton was very active in Facebook, and shared with his fans his daily doings as well as his long fight with cancer. It is not surprising that he passed away given his long course of fighting his illness, but it is still a tremendous sad day for fans of music.
Vale John Wetton, you were the man!
Update: I found this clip. It's not great for clarity, but it is the first incarnation of UK doing their thing:
I don't think the Trump Presidency is going to make it to June. Basically, the problem lies in the fact that having won the election on a dodgy kind of technicality, he's trying to push ahead as if he has a mandate when in reality he is one of the last popular incoming Presidents in the history of modern polling. He's hardly in a position to push for any mandate to do radical stuff. If anything he should be treading very delicately so that he can at least get the lay of the land and get used to a presidential routine. He's in the metaphorical big leagues now, so if we extend the baseball metaphor, it's time he put his game face on and started fielding the routine plays, play each ball on its merits and try to make good contact with the bat. Instead he's gotten to first base on a dropped third strike and proceeded to get picked off. It's not looking like he actually belongs.
Despite being the Republican POTUS, his notions of policy direction bears little relationship to the stated Republican values and objective, and as such a growing number of Republicans are deserting the cause of the President.
Unlike in the various dictatorships Trump admires, the complex skein of constitutional legal and political checks on tyranny in the United States are holding—just barely at times, but they are holding. And the more reckless Trump’s behavior, the stronger become the checks.
Only with his lunatic effort to selectively ban refugees (but not from terrorist-sending countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt where Trump has business interests) has Trump discovered that the American system has courts. It has courts. Imagine that.
The more unhinged he becomes, the less will conservative judges be the toadies to ordinary Republican policies that they too often have been. Anybody want to wager that the Supreme Court will be Trump’s whore?
In the past week, Republicans from Mitch McConnell on down have tripped over each other rejecting his view of Putin. They have ridiculed his screwball claim of massive voter fraud.
They are running for cover on how to kill ObamaCare without killing patients or Republican re-election hopes. This is actually complicated, and nuance is not Trump’s strong suit. Rep Tom McClintock of California spoke for many when he warned:
“We’d better be sure that we’re prepared to live with the market we’ve created” with repeal, said Rep. Tom McClintock. (R-Calif.)
“That’s going to be called Trumpcare. Republicans will own that lock, stock and barrel, and we’ll be judged in the election less than two years away.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham, mocking Trump’s own nutty tweeting habits, sent out a tweet calling a trade war with Mexico “mucho sad.”
Trump’s own senior staff has had to pull him back from his ludicrous crusade against Mexico and Mexicans, where Trump forces the Mexican president to cancel an official visit one day, and spends an hour on the phone kissing up the next day.
Trump proposed to reinstate torture, but key Republican leaders killed that idea. Sen. John Thune (S.D.), the Senate’s third ranking Republican said Wednesday that the ban on torture was settled law and the Republicans in Congress would oppose any reinstatement. Trump’s own defense secretary holds the same view. After blustering out his new torture policy, Trump meekly agreed to defer to his defense advisers.
That looks ominous. Trump's presidency in roughly a working week has careened from reckless to loose, swinging wrecking ball as it has failed to fill positions, sacked ambassadors, and enacted directives that have blown up around the world.
(6) Finally, I want to highlight a story that many people haven’t noticed. On Wednesday, Reuters reported (in great detail) how 19.5% of Rosneft, Russia’s state oil company, has been sold to parties unknown. This was done through a dizzying array of shell companies, so that the most that can be said with certainty now is that the money “paying” for it was originally loaned out to the shell layers by VTB (the government’s official bank), even though it’s highly unclear who, if anyone, would be paying that loan back; and the recipients have been traced as far as some Cayman Islands shell companies.
Why is this interesting? Because the much-maligned Steele Dossier (the one with the golden showers in it) included the statement that Putin had offered Trump 19% of Rosneft if he became president and removed sanctions. The reason this is so interesting is that the dossier said this in July, and the sale didn’t happen until early December. And 19.5% sounds an awful lot like “19% plus a brokerage commission.”
Conclusive? No. But it raises some very interesting questions for journalists to investigate.
Finally, somebody is talking about this in the Anglophone Sphere.
Anyway, the Frankenstein Monster that is the Department of Homeland Security is finally getting up and around creating the havoc its critics predicted years ago when it was conceived in the wake of 9/11:
Note also the most frightening escalation last night was that the DHS made it fairly clear that they did not feel bound to obey any court orders. CBP continued to deny all access to counsel, detain people, and deport them in direct contravention to the court’s order, citing “upper management,” and the DHS made a formal (but confusing) statement that they would continue to follow the President’s orders. (See my updates from yesterday, and the various links there, for details) Significant in today’s updates is any lack of suggestion that the courts’ authority played a role in the decision.
That is to say, the administration is testing the extent to which the DHS (and other executive agencies) can act and ignore orders from the other branches of government. This is as serious as it can possibly get: all of the arguments about whether order X or Y is unconstitutional mean nothing if elements of the government are executing them and the courts are being ignored.
Yeah. So logically, the DHS can ignore courts and exercise its prerogatives, and the ramification of that is the Trump administration really is about the Putin-isation of American politics, concentrating power in the executive office.
You can expect that impeachment call to come in before June is through, but it might not be in time before Donald Trump uses the DHS to cut out the Courts, Congress, and the Senate, and then silences the media and academia. This is looking a lot uglier than people imagined.
The editorial at the SMH is always a bit off-putting. This might be because the editorial team at the Herald are decidedly not on the ball and seem to focus on the stupid problems of the world. Take this one here.
It started in 2011 as the O'Farrell-Baird show. Mike Baird as treasurer did a good job and built enough of a profile that when he rose to Premier it was basically a one-man band. His transport minister then treasurer Gladys Berejiklian did well too, although her public profile was subdued.
Now the state's voters have an even more mysterious double act: Ms Berejiklian as leader alongside right-wing quid pro quo Liberal deputy Dominic Perrottet.
While the Herald supported the factional deal that elevated Mr Perrottet at age 33, the economist-lawyer is hardly known outside his party. Having toiled away in the backrooms of Finance for a few years, he has served his apprenticeship and will be the face of the NSW economy as Treasurer from Monday.
But add in the relatively unknown freshman Nationals leader, Deputy Premier and Regional Minister John Barilaro, and it's a Neville Nobody leadership trio to most NSW voters.
Throw in the absence of old guarders there since 2011 – Mr Baird, Jillian Skinner, Duncan Gay and especially the much-respected Adrian Piccoli – and the nation's key state suddenly has a second-term government on trainer wheels.
Got that? The editorial thinks they were okay with Mr. Perrottet until they realised he was 33 and therefore not even Gen-X, he's a Gen-Y/Millennial. Surprise! We're all getting old here.
Frankly, the problem with these people - Berejiklian, Perrottet and Barilaro isn't their age. It's their political orientation and ideology - but let's leave that for the moment. If we're going to play demographics, then it's worth looking at these people a bit more through the prism of a more contemporary Australia.
It's kind of nice that both Berejiklian and Barilaro are second generation Australians with migrant parents, even though they come form the conservative wing of politics. It's also nice that they're not Baby Boomers trying to preserve some imaginary status quo from the 1950s and 1960s. Imagine Perrottet to be the kind of Liberal that make you want to throw up - sort of like Tony Abbott - but to be honest I don't know anything about him except he's from the Right faction which generally means, anti-science, anti-progress, anti-intellectual, pro-stupid-development, pro-fossil-fuels, pro-stupid, in the pockets of Mac Bank and likely a career plutocrat. And that's a problem. The fact that he's 33years old, seems much, much less of a problem than the ossified neo-liberal econo-babble he's going to bring to the table in a bid to privatise everything that isn't nailed down; but the SMH editorial is worried about his relative youth. *Ugh*.
Go figure.
What No Quid Pro Quo Looks Like
This TPP business is kind of strange. You wouldn't want it the way it was phrased, and based on what was leaked via Wikileaks, you really wouldn't want a bar of it if you're a sovereign state. There must have been a huge carrot in it for the non-USA countries that signed on for it, but alas Donald Trump has put the big kibosh on the thing and it's dead; dead in Washington DC, dead in Tokyo, and dead in the water in the middle of the Pacific as a result.
The Japanese government had even gone to the trouble ratifying it, which is more than can be said of Australia; they had to talk down to their own big agricultural lobby in order to get it through, which is a bit like the National Party whacking the interests of the Australian farmers in order to get it through in Australia. It's hard to imagine, but that's kind of what it took.
Mr Turnbull on Tuesday said he had spoken to the leaders of Japan, New Zealand and Singapore about how their nations could "maintain this momentum towards open markets and free trade".
Japan was "not thinking about an action with 11 countries" at the present time, Mr Hagiuda reportedly said at a press conference.
It's hard to see what was in the TPP that made it viable only if the USA was in it, but apparently that is the case from Tokyo's perspective. Of course, the first thing that came to my mind was how Turnbull's government absolutely shafted Abe's government over the submarine thing, and it was just a sitter to swing at the dead TPP's head and kill it, if Turnbull asked to keep it. In other words, "how are them French subs working out for you Malcolm?"
Malcolm Turnbull's not going to get any favours out of Shinzo Abe, and Abe's popular enough to outlast Turnbull. Turnbull might want to avoid talking to Abe at the next G-20, and that's if he lasts that long.
This is something generational and likely going to freak some people out, but the ageing population situation in Tokyo is creating holes in the urban landscape. As old people pass away, they leave behind apartments in which they dwelled, and because of the age of the buildings, have little resale value. This is creating a problem because the buildings start accelerating in their decrepitude as more people die and fewer people are there to support the body corporate sinking funds.
The thing about this is that a lifetime is spent paying off loans for a box in space and then the box loses value. That's the first problem. The second problem is that there is no real way to redevelop these buildings without public monies. It's beginning to turn into a spiral in Tokyo. This is instructive about what happens when a property bubble keeps out a generation of people from buying in and having kids. In a sense, the collapse of a younger population in Tokyo is a direct reflection of the property Bubble of the 1980s.
Not to say this is whites going happen to Australia's major cities. For one, our cities are not built to such densities, and for another, majority of the high density apartments are relatively new and so will not be spiralling down so soon. It takes a good 50 years for that to take place and that would be four decades away. The more problematic area might be that the ageing population will mean a higher burden on the fewer working generation who will be working from outside the major city centres while the inner city becomes predominantly grey.
It's weird but you can see it already in Sydney, where the people buying into the higher density closer to the city aren't first time buyers because they can't afford it. it's older couples downsizing or investing, and Sydney's urban metropolitan heart is already looking kind of grey.
The Harbour City's eye-watering house prices were trumped by only Hong Kong in the Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey, which examined more than 400 cities in nine countries including the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and Canada.
The report ranked middle-income housing affordability using a "median multiple" score, which is calculated by dividing the average house price by the average household income.
Anything with a score of 5.1 and over is dubbed "severely unaffordable", so let's break it down:
Rank: Least affordable City - Median multiple
Hong Kong ..................18.1
Sydney, NSW ..............12.2
Vancouver, Canada ......11.8
Santa Cruz, USA .........11.6
Santa Barbara, USA.....11.3
Auckland, NZ ..............10
Wingcaribbee, NSW .....9.8
Tweed Heads, NSW .....9.7
San Jose, USA ..............9.6
Melbourne, VIC ...........9.5
Hmmm. That looks far more insane than any chart I've seen up to this point. We know Hong Kong is nuts because it's essentially an island and a point and lots of land reclamation going on in the attempt to make more Hong Kong than God intended (so to speak). But Sydney to be leading the second pack of cities with multiples at roughly12 is pretty gaudy when London, New York, Tokyo, Paris, Rome and Berlin are entirely missing in the top 10. That's some list. The fact that Wingcaribbee and Tweed Heads makes the list tells you that something stupid is going on.
Our banks are lending money to people who want to have these multiples, just to live in these places. It has no bearing to the reality of any other real estate market on the planet except maybe Hong Kong,and so you have to say that Australian property owners and investors are collectively bidding up the numbers with no concern of the downside to the market, - which of course is a sign of a bubble.
Of course, Mark Latham has a radical plan to deal with this issue. He says, cut immigration.
“[Housing affordability] is all about supply and demand. It’s not rocket science. The problem with extra supply in Sydney is the urban sprawl, the lack of infrastructure, the wretched traffic jams a million miles from the city centre, people struggling to get anywhere near for their schools, shops their employment. So, supply has the problem of sprawl”.
“[But] you’ve got to do something about demand. And whether we like it or not – and the two parties have got consensus about a Big Australia – the driver of housing demand in Sydney is immigration. The 200,000 a year plus immigration program – add to that the refugee program – that’s the driver of demand. And unless you address that, you can have all of the housing bonds, press conferences and forums that you like – and sort of puffy stuff in the media – and you won’t get a solution. So, break the consensus about Big Australia, slash the immigration program, drive down demand, and finally you will have a sensible solution to housing affordability”.
“You won’t have to spend as much on infrastructure funding because the place is not sprawling as much. And the other benefit you get is environmental sustainability. It’s something The Greens used to talk about, but now they talk about 50,000 to 100,000 refugees – they are Big Australia as well”.
“So, there is real room here for a sensible solution based on cuts to immigration”.
That sounds like an oversimplification, but it's certainly one different view to add to the mix.
Anyway, I just thought all that was interesting in light of yesterday's Berejiklian notion that supply would fix housing affordability. It most likely won't, and the longer they leave it, the worse the problem is going to be down the track.
To Un-Fuck The Goat Brexit
Things are getting a little convoluted with this Brexit thing. The Supreme court in the UK has just told the UK Government that Article 50 definitely can't be started by the government alone, it has to be put to the vote both houses.
Lord Neuberger said the judgment was not about the referendum result or a comment on the merits of leaving or staying in the EU.
"The referendum is of great political significance, but the Act of Parliament authorising it did not say what would happen afterwards," Lord Neuberger said, meaning any action taken now must be in keeping with the UK’s constitution. The Independent reported today that ministers are likely to be ready to publish the Bill that MPs will vote on by the end of the week.
After the judgement, Attorney General Jeremy Wright said the Government was "disappointed" by the final decision in its historic battle over who has the right to authorise the start of Brexit.
He added: "The Government will comply with the judgement of the court and do all that is necessary to implement it."
It is unclear what would happen legally if MPs vote against such a bill, as much of the constitutional law related to Brexit remains as yet untested, although Jeremy Corbyn has "asked" his MPs to vote not to obstruct it.
The judges' ruling is a victory for Gina Miller, a philanthropist and banker, who brought the case against the Government. She was also backed by a crowd-funded group called The Peoples' Challenge, who described themselves as a group of "concerned EU citizens".
Although the Government lost the challenge, the justices unanimously ruled that there was need to consult with the devolved powers in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. In a statement released immediately after the ruling, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said his party would not "frustrate the process for invoking Article 50" but would seek to amend the Government.
Well that's a surprise and a half. Last we knew, 70% of MPs didn't want a Brexit, so this actually offers them a second bite at the cherry. Now, Jeremy Corbyn says he won't frustrate the government over invoking Article 50, but what if enough MPs banded together block it in the House of Commons? Or even if it passes there, what happens if the House of Lords shoots it down?
After the referendum, it sure didn't look like there was an opening for overturning the result, but suddenly there's a puncher's chance of Brexit getting de-railed in Parliament. And if it did, well, would that really be a bad thing after all the sloppy lies that got it over the line?
It would be rather interesting should things come to pass that Brexit couldn't get up because Article 50 couldn't be triggered? They'll laugh in Europe; they'll probably even swear. David Cameron sure would. Of course, the MPs may well rubber stamp the thing to just let it through and out of their hair. after all who would want the furore that would follow a scuttled Brexit?
Gladys Berejiklian is our new Premier in NSW. The most interesting thing she said today might have been the fact that she considers housing affordability to be her top priority but she's not willing to consider replacing Stamp Duty with a Land Tax, and that her principle method of making housing more affordable was to increase supply. It sounded like somebody insisting that flapping their arms harder will accomplish flight.
The best thing about Berejiklian becoming Premier might be that Alan Jones didn't want it "in a million light years". I guess that's already happened twelve parsecs ago.
More On (Moron?) Housing Affordability
SWTE Scott Morrison is off to London of all places to see what he can learn about making housing affordable. It's a bit like a heroin addict visiting a crack addict how to beat addiction.
Asking the Liberal Party to tackle this problem is a little like asking arsonists to join the fire department because they understand fires really well. The Liberal Party represents the investor class more than anybody else, and so they're hardly likely going to be able to bring themselves to do anything that would put the investors at a disadvantage. For the same reason Gladys Berejiklian won't look at replacing the Stamp Duty with a Land Tax, Scott Morrison isn't going to wind back Negative Gearing.
It's all very strange how this is likely to turn out because it's already slowing down comic growth because people can't spend money on anything other than their mortgages and rent. The rent-seeking in the real estate market has basically maxed out to capacity and nobody seems able to claw back down from the stand-off.
In the mean time, there is all this private sector debt that's waiting to go off like a time bomb and the Treasurer is more worried about finding bandaid solutions.
Russia's parliament is this week expected to take a step closer toward decriminalising domestic violence that falls short of serious bodily harm or rape.
Battery is a criminal offence in Russia, but nearly 20 per cent of Russians openly say they think it is sometimes OK to hit a spouse or a child.
In a bid to accommodate conservative voters, deputies in the lower house of parliament have given initial approval to a bill eliminating criminal liability for such violence.
If the measure passes its second reading in the Duma on Wednesday, when the draft can be changed, approval in the third and final reading would be a foregone conclusion.
It's hard to imagine it anywhere else but Russia. I guess that partially answers Sting's rhetorical question in his lyric whether the Russians love their children too. It appears yes they do, but not quite as much as we do.
"Alternative Facts"
Great scot, it's only been three days of Trump in da White House and it's been a non-stop parade ridiculous assertions and factually challenged statements. Kellyanne Conway has come forward with an eyebrow-raising explanation that the Trump Administration is in possession of "alternative facts".
Still more chilling was when the White House senior adviser Kellyanne Conway appeared on “Meet the Press” on Sunday to assert that Mr. Spicer’s falsehoods were simply “alternative facts.”
Ms. Conway made no bones about what she thought of the news media’s ability to debunk those “alternative facts” in a way Americans — especially Trump-loving Americans — would believe.
“You want to talk provable facts?” she said to the moderator, Chuck Todd. “Look — you’ve got a 14 percent approval rating in the media, that you’ve earned. You want to push back on us?” (She appeared to be referring to a Gallup poll figure related to Republicans’ views.)
And really, there it was: an apparent animating principle of Mr. Trump’s news media strategy since he first began campaigning. That strategy has consistently presumed that low public opinion of mainstream journalism (which Mr. Trump has been only too happy to help stoke) creates an opening to sell the Trump version of reality, no matter its adherence to the facts.
As Mr. Trump and his supporters regularly note, whatever he did during the campaign, it was successful: He won. His most ardent supporters loved the news media bashing. And the complaints and aggressive fact-checking by the news media played right into his hands. He portrayed it as just so much whining and opposition from yet another overprivileged constituency of the Washington establishment.
But will tactics that worked in the campaign work in the White House? History is littered with examples of new administrations that quickly found that the techniques that served them well in campaigns did not work well in government.
And if they do work, what are the long-term costs to government credibility from tactical “wins” that are achieved through the aggressive use of falsehoods? Whatever they are, Mr. Trump should realize that it could hurt his agenda more than anything else.
In the wake of the 'OA', I then moved on to watching this Netflix series. Somebody said 'OA' was Philip K. Dick-ian, but actually this series is a lot more Philip K. Dick.
There's also a very special girl whose nose bleeds.
Pithy observations aside, it has some cool characters doing cool stuff. The notion of the consciousness transmigrating through time and quantum entanglement is pretty cool. Put it this way, I wanted know what happens next right from the start to the end of season 1. It's laudable that Netflix i pumping out this much original content that's actually interesting.
'Inferno'
Dan Brown's Professor Robert Langdon rides again. Somehow I don't think they'll be making many more of these. It's really straining credulity with the premise and the action sequences are lame, while the repeated premise of solving puzzles is looking very tired in this film. In fact they're not even solving the puzzle of embedded into an old text with this one; they're solving some puzzles left behind by a guy who vandalised Renaissance Art.
Otherwise it's the same old Tom Hanks who is essentially doing more Tom Hanks acting: Solid and maybe a little boring. Felicity Jones, star rising with 'Rogue One' adds a dose of cheese. I don't know that she's such a great actress.
'Designated 'Survivor' - Season 1
So I started watching this thing on the day Donald Trump got inaugurated and it got me thinking that maybe this is a kind of accidental critique.
So far I'm through 4 episodes. The impression I'm getting is that it's a bit of a Democrat's dream where all the crappy politicians get killed in one fell swoop and there's one decent guy in government who happens to survive.
Political legitimacy rears its ugly head as the issue du jour, and the inevitable situation room thing where the President has to dig in hard against a gun ho general. The cliches are all there, but it's interesting because the White House is currently occupied by a bloke who has even less of an idea than Kiefer Sutherland's character. At least Tom Kirkman was a cabinet secretary. The Donald has never held any public office. The series reminds us that it was never truer to say "I've got a bad feeling about this."
Nothing about a world given over to billionaires is all that comforting or comfortable. We underestimate just much the 0.1% enrol the wealth of the world and by extension the media and information flow. In most instances we choose not to look into it because in most cases a misguided sense of modesty forbids us to compare ourselves to the stupendously wealthy. but then of course Donald Trump comes along an pecan't but help compare our commons sense against the man and find him wanting. And so it is with his choices for education secretary and chief of EPA and so on. The amazing thing is that the trump Presidency hasn't yet begun as of this writing and already it is feeling like a tired, failed administration.
In that spirit, I'd like to show you a small paper trail on the internet that's been bothering me for the last fortnight.
Here's the first link, sent to me by somebody who reads Russian. I know it's all in Russian, but one can resort to Google Translate and thesis what we get:
Взятка на 10,5 млрд. евро? Путин и Сечин подарили Трампу 19,5% акций «Роснефти»?
Google Translate: Bribe to 10.5 billion. Euro? Putin and Sechin gave Trump 19.5% of shares of "Rosneft"?
The other entries go:
Доклад отдела разведки, 2016/134, 18 октября 2016, с. 30: 2. Что касается содержания разговоров, то помощник СЕЧИНа сообщил, что президент «Роснефти» настолько заинтересован в снятии западных личных и корпоративных санкций, наложенных на компанию, что он предложил помощникам ПЕЙДЖа/ТРАМПа в обмен брокеридж на 19 процентов (приватизированного) пакета акций в Роснефти. ПЕЙДЖ выразил интерес и подтвердил, что если ТРАМП будет избран президентом США, то тогда антироссийские санкции будут сняты.
Google Translate: The report of the Intelligence Department, 2016/134, 18 October 2016, p. thirty: 2. With regard to the content of conversations, the assistant Sechin said that the president of "Rosneft" is so interested in the removal of personal and corporate Western sanctions imposed on the company, he suggested assistants Paige / Trump exchange brokerage by 19 percent (privatized) stake in Rosneft. PAGE expressed interest and confirmed that if TRUMP will be elected president of the United States, then the anti-Russian sanctions are lifted.
Company Intelligence Report 2016/134, 18 October 2016, p.30: 2. In terms of the substance of their discussions, SECHIN’s associate said that the Rosneft president was so keen to lift personal and corporate western sanctions imposed on the company, that he offered PAGE/TRUMP’s associates the brokerage of up to a 19 per cent (privatised) stake in Rosneft in return. PAGE has expressed interest and confirmed that were TRUMP elected US president, then sanctions on Russia would be lifted.
Москва, Кремль, 7 декабря 2016 г., 22:00: В.Путин: Игорь Иванович, хочу Вас поздравить с завершением приватизационной сделки по реализации крупного пакета нашей ведущей нефтегазовой компании «Роснефть» – 19,5 процента. Сделка совершена на восходящем тренде стоимости нефти, соответственно, это отражается на стоимости самой компании. В этом смысле время очень удачное, да и общий объём сделки значительный – 10,5 миллиарда евро. ...это крупнейшая приватизационная сделка, крупнейшая продажа и приобретение в нефтегазовом секторе в мире за уходящий, 2016 год. Очень рассчитываю на то, что приход новых инвесторов... приход в органы управления будет улучшать корпоративные процедуры, прозрачность компании и, соответственно, в конечном итоге будет приводить к росту капитализации. В целом это очень хороший результат. Хочу вас всех, ваших коллег, которые работали по этому направлению, поздравить с этим результатом… Мы с Вами знаем, что у компании «Роснефтегаз», которая в конечном итоге и должна перечислять деньги в бюджет, есть значительные ресурсы в рублях. В.Путин: И наших инвесторов, новых участников и акционеров компании «Роснефть», пригласите в Россию, мы их примем на высоком правительственном уровне. <…> http://www.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/53431
Google Translate: The Kremlin, Moscow, December 7, 2016 22:00: Vladimir Putin: Mr Sechin, I want to congratulate you on the completion of the privatization process for the implementation of a large block of our leading oil and gas company "Rosneft" - 19.5 percent. The transaction was executed on the upward trend in oil prices, respectively, is reflected in the value of the company. In this sense, time is very good, and the total amount of the transaction significantly - to 10.5 billion euros. ... It is the largest privatization deal, the largest sale and purchase of oil and gas sector in the world in the outgoing year 2016. I very much hope that the arrival of new investors in the coming ... controls will improve corporate procedures, transparency of the company and, accordingly, will ultimately lead to an increase in capitalization. In general this is a very good result. I want all of you, your colleagues, who have worked in this area, congratulations with this result ... We both know that the company "Rosneftegas", which ultimately must transfer the money to the budget, there are significant resources in rubles. Vladimir Putin: And our investors, new members and shareholders of the company "Rosneft", was invited to Russia, we will take them to the highest levels of government. <...> http://www.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/53431
Anyway, the fragments are leaks from inside the Kremlin according to this journalist Andrey Illarionov:
On 3 January 2005 Illarionov resigned from his position as presidential representative to the G8.[2] On 21 December 2005, Illarionov declared "This year Russia has become a different country. It is no longer a democratic country. It is no longer a free country". The Washington Post reported that he had cited a recent report by the U.S.-based and government sponsored Freedom House.[3] On 27 December 2005, Illarionov offered his resignation in protest against the government course, saying that Russia was no longer politically free, but ran by an authoritarian elite. "It is one thing to work in a country that is partly free. It is another thing when the political system has changed, and the country has stopped being free and democratic," he said.[4] He also claimed that he had no more ability to influence the government's course and that Kremlin put limits on him expressing his point of view. Illarionov was openly critical to such elements of the Russian economic policy as the Yukosaffair, increasing influence of government officials on large companies such as Gazprom and Rosneft, and at last the Russia-Ukraine gas dispute and the energy policy of Russia in general.[1] Illarionov has also been a proponent of secession of Chechnya.[5]
You get the feeling he's trying to get all this stuff out. According to the original person who sent me the Russian link, Illarionov's contention is that based on the leaks, the Kremlin has had Donald Trump as an asset going back 5 years. It may not have been purely Donald Trump's sea to run for President, and that the 19.5% stake in Rosneft is ear-marked for the Trump family business should he succeed in lifting sanctions on Russia - a sanction designed to hit Putin and his cronies.
Since the new year, this business Trump's dossier has grown, but what seems to have gathered the most traction is not that Trump might be in the control of the Kremlin but that he is being blackmailed by a bit of video showing him participating in Golden showers with Russian prostitutes. Vladimir Putin himself has dismissed the dossier (and also told us that Russian prostitutes are undoubtedly the best in the world) which further muddies the already murky puddle.
All the same, there's a carrot (10.5billion euros from the 19.5% sale of Rosneft); there's stick (the KGB have something on Donald Trump); and the likely cui bono of Putin getting his sanctions lifted. In other words, this is serious boys and girls. Now, maybe Trump was coerced into running, but didn't want to win -which would explain the bizarre flip flops on all the things that would have killed other candidates' chances like the support of the KKK or denigrating a disabled journalist on nationwide TV. They're not things a candidate wants to win goes about doing. but the purpose was not to win, then it makes more sense.
I ran all of the above past somebody else who has Russian links, and they came back with this link which is a compendium of various links that seems to point at shady dealings surrounding Rosneft.
Even with all the conflict of interests going on and the likelihood of early impeachment (what an amazing phrase to be typing I tell you!) Donald Trump may go full steam ahead with lifting sanctions on Putin and his mates in order to collect that 10.5billion euros, just waiting to be paid into Trump Corporation's Swiss bank accounts or wherever he has a tax haven bank account.
I'm telling you, we've never seen anything like this. The world will not end with a bang but amidst laughter from all the gallows humour this man will beget.
Did you know, there were more A class war criminals found guilty and hung at the Tokyo Trials than at Nuremberg? Yeah, there were like 7 who were found guilty of all that Nazi atrocity and hung but there were 20 who got done for the A-class war crimes in Tokyo. The comparison may be vexing - it might even be odious for some - and in many ways it's one of those moments in history where people wanted apples and oranges to be the same thing when they were clearly dealing with apples and oranges. And that's a vexing thought.
This show doesn't really go into the ins and outs of the trial itself, rather, it explores the judges who presided over the trials and the inner conflict amongst the members of the tribunal. I guess it's one tack for tackling the rather uncomfortable problems of the Tokyo Trials. I've read a fair bit about the Tokyo Trials so this wasn't exactly going to be news but you always wonder how other people would characterise the same material that you've read.
What's Good About It
At least somebody wanted to do a show about it. It's hard getting this kind of content made anywhere on any screen. Some of the stuff in it is still contentious, so the show puts on a brave face and tries to wade into some of the murkier bits.
Some of the legal problems with running the tribunal in Tokyo gets an airing, and to that extent you have to say it does the turn of events some justice.
What's Bad About It
It loses heart pretty quickly when it comes to the details and points contention. It wants to explore the personalities of the judges and just exactly what legal points with which they were wrestling.
It's really uninterested in the people on the stand, and as such you don't get a nuanced look at just what the problem is with the format of the trials. Instead, historical footage of the real people on the stand are cut in against the actors playing the multinational judges. There's something quite hokey about the whole production.
What's Interesting About It
The Tokyo Trial was an attempt to put a legal framework around the war in the Pacific and then "get the bastards". They keep coming back to the charter which tells the judges that getting the bastards is the whole point, and yet they keep finding there are real gaps in the legal frameworks to even be trying the bastards at all. They are also working with the precedent of the Nuremberg Trials and quickly run into the same problem the Nuremberg trials ran into in terms just whose authority under which such a court works. Worse still, the possibility of not being able to cleanly put the bastards away might jeopardise the very fragile veil of legitimacy placed upon the Nuremberg Trials.
In essence, the judges are working, knowing they have massive problems, but in a classic "maintain the fiction" modus operandi, they press on to get the results they want; which invites the question, how impartial were these proceedings anyway? That is to say if the judge is out to get you, how can that be an impartial trial?
That brings me to...
Sir William Webb
Jonathan Hyde plays Judge William Webb. It's a thankless kind of role in as much as Webb had a pretty awful job of corralling justices from very different kinds of judicial cultures. There are two lines of thought with Webb in everything else I've read. One is that he was a very politically minded sort of justice, the sort where political considerations were equally valuable as purely legal considerations. As such, it is not surprising that he was friendly with Douglas MacArthur in his time Australia, and that somehow translated into his appointment as the President of the Military Tribunal. Unsurprisingly he was also a High Court judge, so he knew his way around politics quite well.
The other thing about Webb is that he was a Queenslander, home of the White Australia policy (and One Nation too), so it's actually hard to imagine even for a moment that he was impartial as he says he was. In many ways he would have been the most parochially minded of the eleven judges presiding over the tribunals. In terms of performances, I think Hyde's portrayal of Judge Webb is the standout in this series. He captures the peculiar cultural stink of a Brisbane Judge that vaulted to the top of the Tribunal, really well.
In many ways it was very astute of MacArthur to place Webb at the centre because they wanted a certain kind of verdict and Webb was certainly a judge who could drive at that verdict while maintaining the facade of impartiality. I don't know if one looks upon a man like Judge Webb as an ideal, but as political appointments go, it was superb. If you have a distaste for hypocrisy, then Sir William Webb was the worst appointment. That being said, the most interesting aspect of Webb's character might be that he was against the death penalty for any of the accused. You recognise the fundamental Australian-ness in that sentiment., and that part is at least a little edifying.
The Shadow Of Nuremberg
The eleven justices essentially labour under the influence of the events at the Nuremberg Trials. The entire legitimacy of the trials hangs upon Nuremberg, precisely because there were so few laws upon which to frame the proceedings. The palpable risk for the judges is that they can't look to be any more lenient than the judges at Nuremberg. The problem for them is that the men in the dock weren't quite the same calibre of suspects as the top Nazis. All the same, the Tokyo trials found guilty for 20 A class war criminals, as opposed to the 7 found guilty by Nuremberg.
The crux of the show is what constitutes an A class war crime, and the prosecution run it up the flag that the war of aggression is what is being tried. The judges have to then scramble to find legal precedent in trying heads of government and come up short-handed, so they decide to band together and run the gauntlet. It's not the most edifying bit of legal drama we've seen. It's very hard to be seen as impartial when you know you're working toward a guilty verdict from the justice's bench.
If the series is trying to make an appeal to exonerate the A class war criminals, it makes a pretty poor case. If it is trying to ask questions about the validity of the Military Tribunal itself, it does manage to hit its target.
Nanking Massacre What?
It's kind of contentious in Japan what people mean by the Nanking Massacre. The Nanking Massacre that the Tokyo Trial trial talks about is not what the Chinese propaganda machine loves to talk about. Namely, there was an incident where the Chinese POWs were taken down to the river's edge where they mounted a desperate resistance and were gunned down. Yes, it's an atrocity, but a) it wasn't planned that way b) it's not what the current day Chinese are claiming happened in the city of Nanking.
This portion of the trial is glossed over, but infamously, the Chinese were only only able to cobble together two witnesses for the entire trial, and both presented hearsay. The show then glosses over what exactly the nature of the atrocity was, and moves on to other topics, which is an interesting choice.
Just as an aside, to this day, the Chinese government - the Communist one in Beijing - will not release the alleged documentary evidence of the big massacre that they claim took place and none of which was presented at the Tokyo Trials. To be fair, the Chinese delegation at the Tribunal was from the Nationalists who did fight the Japanese. The Communists merely triggered the Marco Polo Bridge Incident by firing first and provoking return fire from the Japanese. For this, Justice Mei of China demanded Koki Hirota pay with his life. It's a bit rich, when you think about it, but then the whole Tokyo Trial has that problem.
Radhabinod Pal's Dissenting Judgment
The most crucial fallout from the process may have been Judge Pal's dissenting findings. If you go to the Wikipedia link there, you'll find that Pal's findings allegedly opens the door for right wing nationalists in Japan to question the legal foundation of the Tokyo Trials. As long as I've read about the trials, I haven't really found a reason to disagree with Pal's findings and I'm not exactly a right wing nationalist.
The real turning point in the Japanese decision-making leading up to the war was essentially the Hull Note. Pal rightly cites that document as being critical to the process that led to the war and places the culpability of the USA in that process of decisions. I imagine that would have been rather galling for the anglophones sitting with Pal, wanting to do a Nuremberg Trial to burnish their historic reputations.
As the world moves away from the colonialist history and into something we call post-colonial, Pal's dissent is going to take on a deeper meaning. The historians trying to talk down his dissent are going to have a harder time of it.
Henri Bernard's Dissent
Henri Bernard of France had a weirder cultural axe to grind. He thought the Showa Emperor should have stood trial, and the people in the dock in front of him were mere accomplices. He also thought colonialism was okay and so Japan had certain rights to prosecute her wars to protect her colonies. It's a mindset that sort of died hard with the French, in Dien Bien Phu Vietnam and Algeria, later on.
More interestingly, he claims that if the Emperor is getting off scot free without a trial, then hanging his subjects for their roles is clearly excessive. It's an interesting kind of judicial logic that only the French might conjure up; he also argues that conspiracy is an Anglo-American legal construct and no such thing exists under French law so he can't abide punishing Shigenori Togo for his part in the Tojo cabinet as conspiracy.
It's also interesting because not being the English-speaking ally and not having had French troops fighting the Japanese in the Pacific, Bernard was relatively free of the kind of mindset that saw the Japanese as enemies - which was in stark contrast to the English speakers, Patrick, Webb, Northcroft, Higgins, (and later Cramer who replaced Higgins) and MacDougall. As a voice of dissent goes, it's more like a dummy spit than a consideration in that, Bernard wants France to be able to do what France does, which is preside over colonies and spread French culture; and to that extent he can't really condemn the Japanese leadership for wanting to do the same.
Bert Rohling's Dissent
The miniseries is built around Bert Rolling's road to a dissenting opinion. It is a better argued dissent than Bernard's which is steeped in the culture from which it emerges. It is also not as perspicacious as Pal's dissent which squarely argues against the legal authority by which the Tribunal can even proceed. The most important judgements he dissented with were the civilian politicians, namely Kido, Hirota, Shigemitsu, and Togo. He also dissented on Field Marshall Shunroku Hata, which is a very nuanced kind of judgement. Hata's resignation in the Yonai cabinet brought about the Tojo cabinet that led to war. At the same time, Hata was instrumental in bringing the war to an end.
The name that really sticks out on Rohling's list is Koki Hirota who was Prime Minster at the time Japan went to war with China. The tribunal pretty much hung him on the statement he made that Chang Kai-Shek could not be negotiated with. He meant that in exasperation as Chang made it impossible to come to any terms to end hostilities, not because Hirota saw Chang as unworthy of negotiation. He was also lumped with the responsibility of the Kwantung Army going out on its own, crossing the Marco Polo Bridge. It is a bit much to be hung by the allies for that turn of events.
Anyway, the way Rohling saw it was that you couldn't be trying these people with post factum laws, but you could try them for their misinterpreting their job descriptions, part of which was to not start wars. That is to say, these subjects could be tried and found guilty for fucking up their job briefs. That's certainly a much better way to have approached the Trials, but of course he failed to persuade the Anglophone justices because the Anglophone justices really wanted revenge (and they just don't bother hiding it all that much).
The Anglophone judges really believed the charter they had was waterproof in its legality. Rohling disagreed necessarily because he was at least a proper scholar of legal arguments and their limits.
Did It Do Any Good?
If the fruits of the Tokyo Trials is the Hague and the International Court, then perhaps it was worth the effort. Personally, I am a contrarian on this topic, simply because if human rights are a real thing there should have been more people from the allied side in a dock somewhere getting prosecuted. The fact that didn't happen makes the Tokyo Trials pretty much a victor's justice. It's been argued elsewhere that bombing cities wasn't illegal so the allied command should not be tried. With logic like that, you sort of wonder how anybody can sit through hours of the Tokyo Trials taking seriously as a trial. What was, and what was not up for discussion - let alone trial - was actually quite messy:
However, in respect to Pal and Röling's statement about the conduct of air attacks, there was no positive or specific customaryinternational humanitarian law with respect to aerial warfare before and during World War II. Ben Bruce Blakeney, an American defense consul for Japanese defendants, argued that "[i]f the killing of Admiral Kidd by the bombing of Pearl Harbor is murder, we know the name of the very man who[se] hands loosed the atomic bomb on Hiroshima", even though Pearl Harbor was classified as a war crime under the 1907 Hague Convention, as it happened without a declaration of war and without a just cause for self-defense. Similarly, the indiscriminate bombing of Chinese cities by Japanese Imperial Forces was never raised in the Tokyo Trials in fear of America being accused the same thing for its air attacks on Japanese cities. As a result, Japanese pilots and officers escaped prosecution for their aerial raids on Pearl Harbor and cities in China and other Asian countries.[21]
Yeah right. Lots of people escaped prosecutions, full stop. (You should see the doco about the 'Einsatzgruppen' on Netflix. It's frightening how few got prosecuted for anything.) The whole point of Pal's dissent and Rohling's as well, is that the allies didn't have a legal reference from which to prosecute the Class A war criminals as they saw them. So, the absence of laws applies equally to the Axis as well as Allied command. You can't try some of them selectively from the losing side and pretend this isn't victor's justice. Not if you want it to look impartial and universal.
It troubles me to this day that the people who end up at the Hague are tinpot dictators from Africa, or Bosnian Serb leaders who, like the Axis powers, were on the shitty end of the war and got lumped with their trials. Although I found those leaders odious, I still feel uncomfortable with the whole trials they went through. It reeked of being victor's justice from day 1 and the case hasn't exactly been made that it wasn't. Then there was the trial of Saddam Hussein in the wake of the Gulf War which looked more or less like a kangaroo court. These things keep discrediting themselves.
All the same, going forwards, if the Tokyo Trials contributed the notion that all nations have rules by which they must abide, even in war, then maybe it was worth going through with the charade. It's probably going to save somebody's life, somewhere in the future. Judging by the history since the Tribunals, it's hard to say the deterrent is working.
We kind of knew way back in 2010 that the current crop of Liberal and National Party MPs running for government were intellectually deficient. If that seems like a big claim, then you really need to go back and reread the headline after the same mob got into office after 2013, because it's been gaffe city and the outer-suburbs of loonyville ever since. The most symbolic bit of rhetoric might have been WTE - that's Worst Treasurer Ever! - Joe Hockey made the remark that the age of entitlement was over, and proceeded to cut welfare. In an era when wealth inequality was increasing at an ever accelerating rate and when the well-heeled scions - the most entitled people with the most entitlements society confers upon them - start cutting at welfare in the name of ending entitlement, no amount of double-think is going to get you over the line of acceptability. Accept that, and you may as we'll get a lobotomy.
On the whole, it is unsurprising then that Tony Abbott's time in the Lodge was shorter even than Julia Gillard or Kevin Rudd, and that Joe Hockey would be dispatched right out of Parliament in the dumpster fire purge that followed. We should pay attention to The Hon. WTE Joe Hockey because now, he's the ambassador to Washington as well as pulling down his MP superannuation. Entitlements and double-dipping much Joe? This mentality of sticking their hands deep into the public purse for personal gain seems to be ingrained in the Coalition MPs.
Now, it appears it is all coming to light. Susan Ley this month is the first casualty of the war in Turnbull's cabinet. Bronwyn Bishop - she of helicopter-gate notoriety - blamed to socialists, which garnered her a new round of ridicule, and today Julie Bishop is being scrutinised for her polo trip on the public purse.
The thing that is striking about all this is that they really don't care how this looks to the world. Whether it is Susan Ley or Bronwyn Bishop, they put up a front saying they're allowed to be spending public money on expensive personal jaunts, and as such the scrutiny itself is unwarranted. It's staggering how they can't put the two together and see how bad they look. You wonder how we got to this point, but maybe it was simply always thus. But it doesn't help to have such stupid people fronting for the government.
The Dearth Of Thinking Talent
I know I keep writing about this, but not a week goes by without making itself apparent in the public discourse, so here I go again...
One of the problems with any long running group is that it get sclerotic. The most notable feature of the current LNP Coalition government lineup is just how lacking in intellectual firepower they are. There is not a single one of them who won't come out with some neo-liberal ideological cant as their substitute for actual thinking. It used to serve them well until the GFC happened, but the GFC has opened up a problem for the neo-liberal ideology that it has proven itself to be entirely self-serving for the wealthy investor classes. Worse still, many of the current problems arise out of the long pursuit of neo-liberalism since John Hewson's manifesto Fightback. Doing more of the same is clearly not going to solve those very same problems.
As I pointed out a couple days ago, the verdict is in and this government isn't very good at managing anything. If Tony Abbott's time did anything, it was to put the Australian economy in full reverse. When you add up all the information out there, you get the picture that this government actually hasn't got the faintest clue as to what to do. Worse still, they don't exactly have the next John Hewson to give them a blueprint. What they have is more of the same guff being generated from the IPA, which in turn is just reciting article of the neo-liberal faith.
There's simply nobody doing proper thinking worth spit on the conservative side of politics. Worse still, because they don't do any thinking, they enter the arena without much thought, and are incapable of creating the kind of solutions to problems that don't first kowtow to ideology. We are at the point in history where whatever worked for Reagan and Thatcher and by extension Howard, Blair and Clinton are not going to work any more. Yet there is simply a dearth of thinking that actually is going to serve the greater good, coming form the right. Instead it's the usual user-pay, trickle-down, privatise-the-lot, tax less, cut-welfare, - see how it has become a self-parody? - policies they trot out as if that is some kind of panacea. As if the problem with the ALP government under Rudd and Gillard was that they couldn't do neo-liberalist economics properly.
You wish politics hadn't become so idiotic, and surely the Left have made their own contributions to the general stupidity going around, but it is surely the intellectual failings of the Right that have turned our economy around from surprising success to doldrum failures. And there's only more of the same to come from whence that came.
I Didn't Expect This
This is utter hearsay but here goes...
Years ago, somebody told me they once had dealings with Malcolm Turnbull, and they came to the conclusion that he was a crook. I don't know on what basis this was said to me, or what Malcolm Turnbull might have done to earn such scorn, but basically, the advice being offered was, "if you have a choice to vote for Malcolm Turnbull to be Prime Minister, don't".
He lamented on the day Malcolm Turnbull became opposition leader the first time and said, if Australia ever elected Malcolm Turnbull, it would rue the day. And then the Godwin Grech thing happened and this person was relieved that Malcolm Turnbull would leave politics. Of course subsequent events have gone entirely in the opposite direction and he is now our Prime Minster, has been for a year and we still don't know what the hell he stands for.
We think he stands for Malcolm Turnbull being Prime Minister and not much else. I know it's hard having a Parliament with a 1 seat majority, but it's not like the Turnbull Government is setting the place on fire, getting stuff done, or for that matter passing sensible legislation. It's not as if he's doing anything that he hinted he might want to do, should he ever become Prime Minister; it's more like he just sits around basking in the warm glow of the office of Prime Minister, swanning around going to the cricket or whatever. It sure doesn't look like a government with a solid agenda, certainly no more than the "Jobs & Growth" slogan it took to the election, and even allowing for the alarming banality of that slogan which it is underperforming immensely, his government doesn't even seem to be even about that. (Judging by his cabinet ministers it seems to be about shoving public monies into their purses as quickly as possible)
I think Turnbull is just going to try to ride out as long as possible, and then when they do finally oust him, he's going to enjoy the reckoning that the Liberals have nobody with a brain with whom they will replace him. If people had high expectations for Malcolm Turnbull, he's sure not living up to them, but more to the point, he's incredibly pleased and satisfied that he does't have to live up to expectations. He is Prime Minister. He will always have been a Prime Minister, an exclusive club that he can forever flaunt to his dying day. He will be in the history books forever, his name is immortal.
It's a pity the rest of us are the ones who have to pay for such indulgences.
Maybe we should take solace in the fact that he's not completely fucking up the very institutions our country while he swans about being Prime Minister of Malcolm-ness. Maybe this is all there is to the man, and the most important thing about him is still, that he is not Tony Abbott.
Some of these Netflix original content shows are tremendous. Some of them, not so much. This one falls into the latter unfortunately.
Spoiler Alert. I mean, I'll try not to spoil it, but in some ways I don't know what would spoil it. It's pretty idiosyncratic.
What's Good About It
Not really sure. No, honestly, it's a weird one and I can't point to any one thing that I think is good in the traditional sense. It keeps you watching, but I realise now it's because I kept waiting for it to get more interesting or better. Not sure that moment ever came. I dunno. I'm not looking forward to season 2 of this thing if they ever make it. There's enough good content going right now that I can't say for sure this deserves another season's viewing. If 'Ascension' didn't get a second season, I don't see how this thing should. At least that show was interesting. This one is just vague.
What's Bad About It
It really comes over as self indulgent on the part of Brit Marling, who Co-produced, Co-executive produced, Co-wrote and stars in this piece. That's Orson Welles terrain and there's nowhere near enough of that kind of fireworks in this thing. Instead you're treated to almost whimsical coverage of the star-producer-writer-director.
A lot more coherent story telling would have helped. As it is, there's a lot of sitting around in half-built house talking about stuff.
It's also told from the wrong character's point of view. It's the evil doctor who is doing the interesting, active, motivated stuff of researching and finding people with near-death experiences, kidnapping them and sticking them in his dungeon do he can do these experiments on them. It's completely in the realm of Joseph Fritzl, but at the same time, he's the one who is doing the most motivated stuff. The rest of it is just fluff. And that makes the show really ill-conceived and misbegotten - but you can see it's like that because the produce-writer-star is so keen to focus on the wrong character. It could have been a lot more energetic and interesting, but it wasn't to be.
On the whole it's way too fanciful, way too winsome, way too ambiguous and largely un-engaging.
What's Interesting About It
Here we go, here's another series featuring a girl who has a special ability and when the ability happens, her nose bleeds. Let me just say right now, Eleven is much cooler than Prairie; in fact Prairie is simply not a very cool character. And that right there is the problem. I don't want to know what happened to Prairie during her 7 years away. Finding out what happened feels like it is forced down my throat.
I know I'm being a little dismissive, but the thing is, it's hard to defend a show that teases and teases and teases, but then doesn't deliver. Then again, I found 'The X-Files' in its original incarnation to have the same problem of endless teasing, no revelation worth spit.
They Do A Little Dance
Okay, this is the spoiler so don't read this bit if you hate spoilers.
At the climax season 1, a gunman turns up to shoot up the cafe. In that tense moment, 5 people get up to do a dance routine in the face of the gunman, who gets taken down by a charging canteen staff member. The whole thing is this really weird elaborate way of making us watch bad contemporary dance.
Of course, there is a little more to the dance than just that. The series is very concerned with the afterlife and notions of moving into other dimensions through near death experiences. It is sort of interesting that a show about miraculations would tie it to dance exactly because there were ancients who believed in this kind of thing too. There are ancient rites in many a religion that involve elaborate gestures, and let's not forget magic involves gestures and incantations. There's also brands of yoga as well as esoteric buddhism that believes in gestural magic, so it's not exactly out of the ordinary.
What is more interesting about that aspect is that it's a bunch of white suburbanites wish casting an alternative reality, trying to invent for itself a kind of magic through contemporary dance. On the whole that part of it is interesting because it's the bit that fits the least well in this rather clumsily assembled narrative.
A Fiction Of Ambiguity?
One of the scourges of post-modernism has been this thing where the text is narrated by an unreliable narrator who is found out to have been lying all along, that not only is fiction a lie, the story is a lie within the narrative of a liar. Films like 'Atonement' have led the way in putting that brand of literary theory to the test and they end up with a largely dissatisfying tale of meaninglessness that insults the viewer. When a story disembowels itself in front of you, it doesn't add meaning to the text or for that matter the world - it merely creates another moment of meaninglessness that need not ought to have been created with such budgets and effort.
I know I sound curmudgeonly, but anybody who thinks this kind of fiction is the way forward is probably a psychopath. We turn to fiction to enter into a meaningful transaction with the author. Not to be let down and cast adrift on a sea of meaninglessness. As such, I just can't bring myself to like this series that makes moves towards this kind of abdication of authorial intent, disguising its move as ambiguity. Really, they shouldn't be wasting our time like this.
Yeah I know it sounds totally gratuitous to say that the government totally sucks, but hey, we actually have a government that's stinking it up pretty badly.
Here's something from Pleiades as a followup, coming off the pages of Crikey:
The latest global economic news is mostly excellent, though better for some countries. We now have figures on most of the world’s economies for the last quarter of the 2015-16 financial year. This enables comparisons with earlier periods, including Australia’s last three years (almost) of Coalition rule with the previous administration.
For the entire period 2009 to 2013 Australia’s economy was the best performed in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Alone in that club of 34 wealthy democracies, Australia maintained positive growth, kept most workers employed and increased productivity, incomes and wealth. Australia was the toast of the economic world.
Three years later, Australia is the stand-out economy again, but for the opposite reason. Australia is the only OECD member not to record improvement over the last three years in any of the six key indicators of economic health.
And the article tells us our jobs are down; our wages are rising the weakest of the group; our trade is in a disastrous slump thanks to the commodities tanking; the budget deficit is ballooning; our gross debt is climbing when other nations are cutting theirs; and our GDP growth is merely okay.
That leads us to this bit:
Of the 34 developed OECD countries, no fewer than seven have advanced on all six variables. Leading the pack are Germany, Ireland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland, the Netherlands and New Zealand. Another six have gained in five areas — Denmark, Iceland, Luxembourg, Sweden, Italy and, surprisingly, Greece. Seventeen economies have improved in three or four areas, bringing to 30 the countries enjoying the fruits of the current sturdy global recovery.
That leaves just four laggers. Three nations have advanced on only two of the six variables — Chile, Finland and, perhaps another surprise, Canada. Just one country — Australia — has failed to advance on any indicator, keeping GDP growth steady and declining in the other five.
The conclusion thus seems highly probable: Australians have swapped the best economic administrators in the developed world for the worst.
Perhaps the one success the Coalition can claim is that the mainstream media has no desire to report what is actually happening.
So when I say the government sucks, I actually mean, the idiots in power who brought about this dismal, pathetic turn of performance. We always knew this bunch of conservatives were talentless, unprincipled hacks, but when you see their handiwork in numbers, it sure puts the bleak future into sharper focus.
Bromancing The Oil
When it gets down to the cui bono of the alleged Russian tampering of the US elections, and the subsequent good will between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, you would have to say Vladimir got his man, because his man Trump is the most likely to ignore climate science and give Putin's Russia a break from all the sanctions.
Let's face it, Russia's main export is oil. Without it, there's really just arms exports with Russia, something President Obama pointed to. These sanctions are hurting Russia, and so one shouldn't underestimate the motivation to get out from under these sanctions. A Trump Presidency essentially puts it on the table.
It's a scary thought because if Trump lifts the sanctions, then Russia effectively gets away with the Crimea annexation as well as the odd bit of military adventurism into Ukraine. Whatever one thinks of those places, it remains true that Russia simply grabbed hold of those places without contest. If Trump sells out the sanctions, he's effectively selling out NATO - and this would be disturbing in the extreme because it would mean he's at least rolling back America's commitment to keeping security in Europe.
One can indeed conjecture a whole lot about how all this plays out in say, eastern Europe, but the more compelling point might be that for Trump, it's all about money. Effectively the United States has just elected a President who may be willing to sell out on its most important strategic positions - gained over decades of hardworking and sacrifice - just to enrich his own billionaire coffers. It's actually a sick kind of joke that things have turned out the way they have. So, uh, their government is going to totally suck as well.
Turchin — a professor at the University of Connecticut — is the driving force behind a field called “cliodynamics,” where scientists and mathematicians analyze history in the hopes of finding patterns they can then use to predict the future. It’s named after Clio, the Greek muse of history.
These academics have the same goals as other historians — “We start with questions that historians have asked for all of history,” Turchin says. “For example: Why do civilizations collapse?” — but they seek to answer these questions quite differently. They use math rather than mere language, and according to Turchin, the prognosis isn’t that far removed from the empire-crushing predictions laid down by Hari Seldon in the Foundation saga. Unless something changes, he says, we’re due for a wave of widespread violence in about 2020, including riots and terrorism.
You could'a fooled me. Cyclical theories of history are interesting heuristics that come and go. I think the one I read recently - and this is a decade ago - was by a guy called Harry S. Dent Jr. who wrote an extensive book about how the market behaves in different cycles of economic expansion and debt accumulation. In as much as it was empirical in that a whole lot of data went into it, you still had to take it with a grain of salt because even as Dent was predicting all kinds of things, there was the calamitous GFC going on. You could easily argue the events of 2007-2008 were a cyclical thing or a total breakdown of an old system or a restructuring we had to have.
So in that light, let's have a look at what Turchin is offering:
In the simplest of terms, Turchin and his colleagues will build a mathematical model using one data set and then test that model against other historical data sets they’re unfamiliar with. That way, they can see if the model holds. This isn’t exactly the psychohistory described by Isaac Asimov. “For the most part, we don’t predict the future. It’s too far. We can’t wait 200 years to see if something’s right,” Turchin says. “I’m not a prophet.” But cliodynamics moves in that direction — and it’s not science fiction. Though traditional historians are often wary of the practice, others very much see the value.
“It’s very important to do. It should force traditional historians to respond,” says Yale historian Joseph Manning. “Most people in my field just publish documents and don’t go behind them.” What Turchin and his colleagues have found is a pattern of social instability. It applies to all agrarian states for which records are available, including Ancient Rome, Dynastic China, Medieval England, France, Russia, and, yes, the United States. Basically, the data shows 100 year waves of instability, and superimposed on each wave — which Turchin calls the “Secular Cycle” — there’s typically an additional 50-year cycle of widespread political violence. The 50-year cycles aren’t universal — they don’t appear in China, for instance. But they do appear in the United States.
The 100-year Secular Cycles, Turchin believes, are caused by longer-term demographic trends. They occur when a population grows beyond its capacity to be productive, resulting in falling wages, a disproportionately large number of young people in the population, and increased state spending deficits. But there’s a more important factor, one that better predicts instability than population growth. Turchin calls it “elite overproduction.” This refers to a growing class of elites who are competing for a limited number of elite positions, such as political appointments. These conflicts, Turchin says, can destabilize the state.
Many of these issues persist in industrial societies. Although population growth is no longer likely to result in mass starvation, it can push the supply of labor beyond demand, leading to increased unemployment.
And there you have it - the kind of conclusion Harry S. Dent Jr. came up with, which leaves you going, "yeah sure mate". I'm not sure how predictive these kinds of heuristics can be, given the kinds of parameters being lined up. Also, it does seem to have a deterministic underpinning that utterly fails to explain why the 1970 peak was so low, for instance. And while terrorism is indeed way up, lynchings are way down, so you wonder if lynchings is even a relevant term to be including in such an analysis.
One of the best ideas to come out of quantitative analysis of baseball was the notion of "replacement level". That is to say, if you state that something is good, or bad the natural question is "compared to what?" And that leads to the notion of an arbitrary mathematical straw man we can call the replacement level player. In a sense if we're going to put up stats and give them qualitative assertions, we need to at least have a framework of comparison - are 100 murders/riots/terror acts a year good or bad? Compared to what? It's this kind of benchmarking that is completely lacking in these numbers.
Still, I thought some people might be interested in this stuff.
Here's a little essay about Standing Rock. The writer likens the stand off to a moment from an imagined Zombie Apocalypse. You can just see that analogy right? Of course, how could those officers lined up to intimidate the Native Americans be so impervious to their own inhumanity? They must be some kind of cultural zombie, right?
At the head of the gathering army of the dead will be a man who brags about his lack of compassion and is so hollowed out by his punishing narcissism that he must compulsively eat our minds with tweets and outrageous behavior so as to fill his emptiness with our attention. His appetite for selfish self-regard seems immense enough to swallow the planet. It’s the appetite the Native-Americans witnessed as the European invasion crossed the continent. Hoisting the false flag of energy independence, our new zombie-in-chief promises a nationwide effort to extract coal, oil and gas offshore and in every natural environment. More pipelines, more strip mines, more deadly warming, more sacrifice zones.
With Donald Trump a zombie apocalypse arrives, and the Indians at Standing Rock are on the front lines.
The true origin of this zombie pandemic is of course us, we and the darker angels of our American culture. We are the culture that inspired the world with the ideal of human equality and self-governance. But we are also a culture motivated by fear. It is at work everywhere: in workplace competition, in our paranoia about immigrants, terrorists, ‘liberals,’ the ‘alt-right,’ even and perhaps especially in the pop up ads and blaring commercials that compel us to buy products by making us afraid that we’re lacking something, missing out, not part of the ‘winners.’ Our culture extols the supreme value of the self and is spellbound by narcissists and celebrities, justifies greed as good. Our consumerism, our sense of entitlement and exceptionalism have become part and parcel of the American dream, which in its grossest but most popular form is the dream of a better life filled with ever more comforts, conveniences, frivolous distractions, ersatz privilege (extra legroom on the airplane) and mountainous material possessions, most of them headed for the nearest landfill, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, or entangled in a sea bird’s stomach.
Like it or not, American culture in its current form destines our spirits to a disconnection from the Earth. Nature has become something we work to own a piece of in the middle class suburbs, or enjoy on our vacations. Many of us, possibly even most of us, feel helpless pangs when we see evidence of the ecological devastation our ravenous culture is wreaking, but even at our most pained we don’t feel wounds inflicted on the Earth as the Indigenous peoples do. During the three presidential debates no question was asked the candidates about environmental issues, and we Americans accepted that as okay. We have become deadened, zombie-fied. Now, as a country, we have chosen to elect a president pledged to perpetrate a conspiracy theory, a grand delusion reality show denying that any environmental crisis even exists. Whisked from their busy human bodies, more spirits will go missing, “lost.” The zombie apocalypse will spread.
Standing Rock, together with the Adani mine in Australia are the two big fossil fuel projects that need to be stopped.
Venezuela Is About To Blow
Venezuela is a troubling nation. Under Hugo Chavez, it was one part populist bullshit as politics, one part military junta-ism, and one part incoherent cult of personality around Hugo Chavez. And while Hugo Chavez himself was kind funky in some small, personal ways - he played a Stratocaster, - as head of government of Venzuela, he sort of ran the country right at financial ruin, a bit like driving the Titanic right at the ice berg. Now, it's looking like crunch time is upon them.
There are, I might add, shades of Gough Whitlam too in what Chavez was able to join his lifetime:
Chavez was intent on utilizing Venezuela’s oil wealth to transform the lives of the masses of the people, instead of allowing it to remain in the hands of the nation’s oligarchs, who used it to fund exorbitant lifestyles redolent of Miami Beach, Monaco, and Beverly Hills. The Venezuelan president undoubtedly kept his word, as over the next decade a social transformation took place in the country, measured in vast improvements in literacy, healthcare, housing, and the overall share of the nation’s wealth redistributed to the poor. Social spending doubled under Chavez from 11.3 percent of GDP in 1998 to 22.8 percent of GDP in 2011. The Gini coefficient, measuring income inequality, improved from one of the highest to one of the lowest in the region.
These achievements should be considered in the context of a relentless attempt by the forces of the right in Venezuela – the oligarchs in control of the private media, big business, and other economic interests – to block, derail, and even overturn the country’s democracy with an attempted coup in 2002, followed by a politically orchestrated strike within the oil industry in 2002-03.
Of course, this was all well and good when oil was fetching US$100 a barrel. What has made Venezuela come unstuck was how the oil prices plunged in the last 18months - pretty much because the Saudi Arabians wanted to kill off the shale oil industry in America.
And that brings us sort of to today.
For good or bad, oil was the economic foundations of the Bolivarian Revolution inspired and led by Hugo Chavez. It is a commodity whose price is so volatile that it can only leave economies dependent on it vulnerable to global factors outwith their control. But this oil dependency cannot be laid at the door of either Chavez or his successor Nicolas Maduro. The country’s underdevelopment had taken root long before they arrived on the scene, a consequence of generations of Venezuela’s unofficial status as US neo colony controlled by a small clique of oligarchs who benefited from this state of affairs.
Those oligarchs and vested interests never went away. On the contrary, exploiting Chavez’s determination to uphold the most advanced example of mass participatory democracy Latin America has seen, the right in Venezuela has been hyperactive over many years in its efforts to undermine, oppose, and ultimately end everything to do with Chavez and Chavism. In this they have enjoyed Washington’s unflinching support.
It is capitalism not socialism that has failed the people of Venezuela. However it is socialism that is carrying the can. Consequently, as things now stand, the Bolivarian Revolution is teetering on the brink.
It reminds us of Australia and its economic fortunes being tied so closely to coal. The rest of the world is moving on to renewable energy and here we are peddling our fossil fuels to keep our housing bubble going (and really, that's what it's come down to). We might go on about the integrity of our democracy, but structurally speaking, we're not that different to Venezuela. One of these days we might even vote in a hard left leader akin to Gough and you watch how quickly the vested interests and the 1% will manoeuvre to rid us of such a leader. You really can't discount the dynamics of the people who want to keep our country on a losing wicket.
Still, keep thatVenezuela thing in mind...
The Veil Of Niceties Fails Big
How awful were the 2016 US elections? Here's the explanation of the double-bind by which many sensible voters found themselves trapped:
Bernie Sanders put his 12 million primary voters and other supporters in a double-bind. For Sanders supporters, Hillary Clinton epitomized what they despised. Clinton has been: heavily supported by Wall Street and arms dealers; repeatedly pro-war from Iraq to Libya; a friend and admirer of Henry Kissinger, who for Sanders supporters is one of the greatest war criminals in world history; a former board member of the anti-labor union Wal-Mart Board of Directors; a co-sponsor of the Flag-Protection Act of 2005, which included prison terms for those who destroy the flag; and has had an otherwise despicable and untrustworthy history for progressives.
Bernie Sanders’ choice was to either support someone that his supporters despise and distrust or don’t support Clinton and Trump wins, and the Democratic Party and its media operatives politically assassinate Sanders as was done with Ralph Nader post-2000 election. Sanders’ public reaction was to choose what he had many reasons to believe was a false reality—that Clinton was not going to betray her new-found progressivism. Given Clinton’s history, Sanders had good reason to believe that Clinton as president would likely betray campaign progressive promises and simply blame failure on the Republicans. But rather than choosing Nader’s path, Sanders suppressed the reality of Clinton, and asked his supporters to do the same.
Many Sanders supporters could not shed the reality of Hillary Clinton’s anti-progressive history and that the Democratic Party establishment had sabotaged Sanders (who the polls had shown had a much better chance than Clinton of beating Trump); and these supporters lost faith in both Sanders and the electoral process and did not vote—a political-self psychotic break of sorts for people who had ardently believed in voting.
Other Sanders supporters followed Sanders’ direction and voted for Clinton, only to find themselves now assaulted by the reality that Sanders had instructed them to support a corrupt political process that resulted in Trump winning anyway.
If you thought the Sanders supporters got it bad, well, maybe you should spare a thought for the Basket of Deplorables after all.
How about Trump supporters? Millions of Trump supporters, even before his inauguration, began having their political-self psychotic break, recognizing that they had been “played,” that Trump had no intention of keeping his campaign promises, and used them to gain power and attention.
A major issue for Trump supporters was “crony capitalism,” but even before Trump was inaugurated, he orchestrated the Carrier deal of tax breaks for jobs, which was so obviously a betrayal that even Sara Palin decried it calling it “crony capitalism.” That has not been Trump’s only pre-inauguration betrayal.
Trump repeatedly promised to “drain the swamp.” The epitome of the “swamp” is the revolving door between the U.S. government and Goldman Sachs, yet Trump’s nominees for his administration include former Goldman Sachs employees Steve Mnuchin for Treasury Secretary and Gary Cohn for National Economic Council. It’s now become increasingly clear that Trump appears to be well on his way to creating the most putrid swamp ever, as he nominated for cabinet positions six of his top donors, as well as several establishment politicians (for example, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s wife Elain Chao as Transportation Secretary; 20-year U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions for Attorney General, and others).
Trump promised his supporters an “anti-politician,” and they received a caricature of a politician who didn’t even wait until he was inaugurated to betray his promises.
It could be worse. It's hard to fathom how, but it well may could be worse. But the important thing is that the message is out for once - "average Americans have no fucking influence on government policy". That's probably true of our own democracy down under in Australia as well. You could easily argue the veil-falling-off moment was when Julia Gillard ousted Kevin Rudd and called an early election to face Tony Abbott who had replaced Malcolm Turnbull as leader of the opposition. Now, it is easily argued that Ms. Gillard was trying to save us from the iniquities of the rule by the Deplorables, after all Tony Abbott represents the absolute naked nadir of intellectual ambition amongst leaders in this country. Even so, she was not successful, and by extension we can see how little control the citizens had over the outcomes.
Some of it reads like fairly reasonable bets. Try the China one for instance:
An ever-present risk for Australia is the economic health of its dominant trading partner.
China's
private debt is up there with Australia's as one of the world's
highest, with its loosely regulated "shadow banking" sector seen as a
key risk for financial crises.
Beyond a full-scale financial meltdown, there are indications the Chinese Government is planning to renew its economic shift away from heavy industry and construction towards services.
Last year, China boosted commodity prices through increasing infrastructure spending and relaxing restrictions on real estate investment, as well as cutting its own coal production.
Even moderate moves to limit growth in those sectors, plus a return to higher Chinese coal output, could see much of last year's commodity price gains unwind and, along with them, the boost to Australia's national income.
I mean, well, yeah. None of those on their own are likely, but there's an element where some of these risks are stacked like dominos. Plus, who knows what happens to Venezuela, and the fallout that would follow that one.
