Quick Shots - 30/Dec/2021

Failure Of Politics, Politics of Failing-By-Design 

Far out. We're coming up to the end of 2021 and I feel like we're not far removed from December 2019. That's weird, right? I'd kind of hoped that I could spend more time here writing up some stuff but even with all the time spent at home with lockdowns I didn't get much done here so apologies. 

I've mentioned it before but at some point in the mid-2010s I hit a wall where I felt there was nothing more to be said. I think we have Rupert Murdoch and his media empire to thank for that as  it shared in the triple-threat-triple-heartburn era of a Abbott Government, Brexit, and a Trump Presidency across Australia, UK and the USA. You can't take politics too seriously when people clearly a lot less intelligent than you are wilfully dumb things to curry the bogan/chav/redneck vote. It's enough to make you lose faith in democracy, and I guess that gives us insight into how democracy might have failed so hard in Italy, Germany, Spain, and Japan, roughly 100 years ago. 

Be that as it may, we live on - but that probably is just a matter of luck. 

On 15 December the NSW government removed all restrictions pertaining to the Covid Pandemic. There suits were predictable in that case numbers exploded. People queued up in cars trying to get their drive thru PCR swabs for hours on end. Rapid Antigen Testing kits sold out everywhere and before you knew it, half the city had to self-isolate. If the aim was the throw of the shackles of pandemic controls and let business thrive, it had the unfortunate effect of immediately shuttering businesses because their staff got infected and had to isolate. For 8 days the NSW Government took its hands off the wheel and blindfolded itself. Eventually, an attempt to bring back some semblance of sanity prevailed, and QR code check ins and mask mandates were brought back. Of course by then, the horse had bolted with Pestilence on its back. 

So the same people who irresponsibly did the above, turned around and said everybody had to take 'personal responsibility'. I mean, does it get richer than that? Then they said we would all get infected by Omicron at some point and we may as well learn to live with COVID. I mean... hullo. We wouldn't be in those straits had the same government not wilfully chosen to let things go out of control. 

On the 19th December when the cases started climbing and shit got scary again, I happened to drive down Oxford Street on the way out to Randwick. I'd say a good 2 out of 3 shop fronts were empty with For-Lease signs in them. Two years of the Pandemic really has done a number of businesses, so I get it. There's a tremendous amount of urgency in trying to kick start the economy and have those businesses come back. 

The problem with that mentation is that the businesses can't stay open if people have to self isolate. But I get it. They were trying to privatise the Pandemic, because if there's one thing a Liberal Government hates, it's spending money on things that are the necessities of society. 

Seriously. Fuck these idiots. 

The Return of Boba Fett

I've only watched the 1 available episode, so I don't really know where it's all going but I will say this. This is a retcon nightmare. I like Temuera Morrison and his Django Fett, as well as how the casting made the Kiwi accent the de facto accent of Clone Troopers. But when you watch this Boba Fett carve its way out of the Sarlacc Pit, one is overcome with a weird cognitive dissonance. I always remember Fett's actor to be a dorky white haired English bloke. And come on, that's not a spoiler. Fett had to get out of the Sarlacc Pit to begin with in order for there to be any series.  

I Haven't Seen 'Spider-Man: No Way Home' Yet

Thanks to our idiot government, it suddenly became very un-enticing to sit in a cinema for 3 hours. I put the blame squarely upon the shoulders of Domicron Perottet and Brad Hazzard. It was the one film I was looking forward to all year, and here we are. I'm furiously dodging spoilers but, ...what the hey. 

Didn't See Bond Either

The thing is, it came out while the lockdown was still going. Somebody said "he dies at the end". So I thought "fuck that. That's too depressing to watch." And I may never watch it. I don't care how good it is. 

I guess it's been 60 years since Dr No said "Kill Bond now!" I guess they finally got him. Killed by a sense of obligation to social justice. That's worse than Kirk's death in 'Star Trek: Generations' - another un-asked for character death. The world is full of knowing, smug, fuckwit screenwriters. 

'Dune Part 1' (2021)

Going For The One

I just want to say at the outset I wanted this film to be not just good or excellent, but to be great. I had made allowances in my heart for it to utterly eclipse the 1984 David Lynch version which on the one hand I love, but I have felt much frustration with for many a year. If Denis Villeneuve was going to pull out all his show-stopper moves and make a great film, this one ought to have been it. Alas, as with 'Blade Runner 2049' before it, Villeneuve comes at a very important subject matter for a movie and somehow manages to under-deliver. Is it a good film? Yes. Is it an excellent bit of entertainment? mostly. But is it great? Ah, no. And that's a little unfortunate. 

But it is very thought-provoking so there is that. 

What's Good About It

It's nice to see a rendition of Dune that is closer to what the book describes. I'm not sure about the gender swap of Dr Liet Kynes turning into a woman, but in most part the film looks a lot more like what was described in the book. If you're a purist visionary (I'm not) it's a good thing. The specials effects are up to date, and the action sequences are fluid and succinct. The wardrobe is fabulous, while the surrounding casting is also a little closer to what was described in the book. Because the film only needs to cover the first half of the book, it is paced more evenly than its predecessor. And maybe that's the problem with this film. Everything in it can be scrutinised against the previous entries, whether it be the Lynch entry in 1984 or the Sy-Fy channel TV series which also traversed the sandy terrain across Frank Herbert's pages. 

It's worth mentioning that the casting of Jason Momoa as Duncan Idaho is inspired, especially if they think they can make these films go deep into the world of Dune with sequels. The casting of Rebecca Ferguson as Lady Jessica is also very apt, although it had me wondering if it was as good as casting Francesca Annis for the role in Lynch's movie. It also makes you wonder if Oscar Isaac really is a better bit of casting than Jurgen Prochnow (maybe, maybe not), or whether Timothee Chalamet is a better bit of casting than Kyle MacLachlan (I tend to think not). 

My best joke about the casting is that compared to Lynch's version, everybody looks shorter. 

What's Bad About It

There's nothing outstandingly bad about it that one ought to complain about. It's a well made bit of movie entertainment. Because I've read the book, and Villeneuve has read the book, and the principal actors have all read the book this time, there are no surprises. In fact the film plays out like it's in its own groove, and nothing is out of place or surprising. The performances are archly mannered, and there is no hint of spontaneity in it anywhere. It generally feels portentous without really going anywhere - but then we know all the ground-shattering revelations are in the second part of the book, so we have a way of just accepting all of it as is. The film is not going to pay off with a big action cue. It's a joyless exercise, but then it's not exactly a joyful book. 

For what it is - a blockbuster science fantasy based on a big fat book - it had very few moments of excitement. It also offered absolutely zero insight about what the book had to say about this world in which we live. It may have been the most -non-socially-conscious telling of this story. 

What's Interesting About It

The most interesting thing about it is the comparison to the Lynch version. More often than not, you're watching Villeneuve's choices as opposed to Lynch's choices - and the differences are genuinely interesting. Villeneuve comes to the project as a fan of the book and himself well into his 50s. Lynch came at the project as somebody who hadn't read the book until he was approached to do the project, as his second feature film. For his turn, Lynch got a lot of flack for making a film that was largely incomprehensible and still long at 2 hours 17 minutes. Villeneuve gets the luxury to make 2 films, and the first instalment alone is 2 hours and 35 minutes. 

As an aside, it was reported in the making of Lynch's Dune that the best cut of his film was a 4 hour 40 minute version - which sounds positively worth reviving if they could find all the components and whatnot. It probably won't happen, but it seems if we're really going to compare apples, then it's worth having the whole of the Lynch apple. I do have a 3 hour TV cut somewhere which, interestingly enough, Lynch disowned. Lynch disowning the whole Dune might be because of his distaste when remembering the arduous post-production and politicking. Nobody seems to have talked to him much about Dune, and he probably is shunning those interviews for all sorts of reasons. 

The crucial difference seems to be Lynch had a cineaste's vision for the weird and wonderful, while Villeneuve seems to have a Sci-Fi fan-boy's love for the original text combined with an easy facility for shooting a generic high end budget blockbuster. In Villeneuve''s vision, guild navigators are human-looking enough. In Lynch's version, they're disfigured and bloated embryo monsters floating in a tank of spice smoke. Villeneuve doesn't bother showing you folding space while Lynch uses the weird sequence to show us the power of imbibing space for the Guild Navigators. Villeneuve is not interested in pushing those boundaries of the human-weirdness in the way Lynch was in 1984, which is a shame.

Lynch worked very hard to have a heterogeneous sense of production design. Villeneuve's version feels more like a monolithic singular vision for the entirety of future civilisation. Lynch accentuates the contrasts and strangeness of people's affect like a German Expressionist. Villeneuve hones in on very internal feelings against the monolithic setting he places his characters against.  

Paul Muad-Who?

Unlike Lynch's Expressionist take on the raw passions underlying the weird tale, Villeneuve seems more interested in an introverted, almost navel-gazing take on the coming-of-age story. Having seen Kyle MacLachlan's Paul Atreides as looking too old, Villeneuve cast an older Chalamet who manages to play a younger looking Paul. A number of people have told me this fits the book better but I'm not really sold on Chalamet's Emo vibe as a better fit. MacLachlan's Paul comes at you straight, with an aristocratic bearing. Chalamet's Paul slinks along the wall, diffident and strangely disaffected. 

(NB Postscript. I've been corrected. Born in 1959, McLahchlan was also 24 turning 25 when he played Paul Atreides) 

I'm not sure Paul being 14 at the beginning of the book is as important as the tyrannous, commanding figure he becomes at the end of the book. I don't know who is going to play Feyd Rautha in the next film, but it certainly won't be as maniacal as Sting was in the Lynch movie. Ultimately whoever faces Chalamet's Paul is going to have to be menacing as hell and scary as all fuck to make the suspense work - but I fear they won't find such an actor. As somebody joked, whoever it is, they've got a big cod piece to fill. 

Anyway, the point is, when Kyle MacLachlan's Paul got to the end and squared off against Sting's Feyd Rautha, it was a knife fight between men. Watching Chalamet, I'm not convinced he's going to get there, as a man. 

The Baron Vladimir

Is it just me that looks at the name Vladimir these days and thinks of Putin? Psychologically speaking, Putin might be the most Baron Harkonnen-like ruler we've got going, followed by Kim Jong-Un and Chairman Xi.

Kenneth McMillan's portrayal of the Baron as this unhinged, pustular fat man floating around and barking orders seemed like the ultimate in perversity way back when (if only we'd known about the Trump presidency to come back then). It's a performance for the ages. Stellan Skarsgaard is a fine actor and can play all kinds of villains and conks, but I don't think he was anywhere near as chaotic, or threatening as McMillan's Baron. He comes across as more intellectual - even his brand of vileness seems considered. After all, the Baron is a thoughtful villain, but therein lies the problem with Villeneuve's version: This Baron is boringly rational. Everything horrible that flows from him is still rational. He doesn't seem like a man who would get overwhelmed by his own impulses and enthusiasms. 

Certainly, it's arguable that Villeneuve's version is a lot more repressed. Lady Jessica is voluptuous in Lynch's version. My high school friend joked that he wanted to be reincarnated as the inner lining of Lady Jessica's still suit. Rebecca Ferguson is a sexy woman. Somehow all that sexiness gets hidden away and we're treated to her doing a lot of histrionic acting. The Oedipal complex that is inherent to the text is repressed hard and instead we're given a drama that is devoid of base passions. 

In the books, we learn that the Bene Gesserit breeding programme that leads to the Kwisatz Haderach goes through the House Harkonnen. That is to say, Lady Jessica is the daughter of Baron Vladimir Harkonnen - unbeknownst to herself - but this fact eventually manifests itself as a problem through her daughter in 'Children of Dune'. The text is shot through with an embrace as well as anxiety over incest, and somehow Villeneuve's version of Dune is devoid of these psychological problems. Lynch at least had a fine radar for the grotesque. This is why the moment Alia the Abomination confronts the Baron in the last part of his film is so evocative and satisfying. 

The 'White Saviour' Critique

There was this critique going around that the problem with 'Dune' is that it's just another movie about a white saviour. Here's a taste of that line of critique. 

Despite the vision Dune evokes of a foreign invader whom the population welcomes, House Atreides’ purpose for coming to Arrakis remains selfish. Duke Leto knows that by controlling spice, the planet’s natural resource, House Atreides will grow fabulously wealthy and powerful.

The parallels between spice, found only on Arrakis, and oil, are plentiful: in the 1960s when Herbert wrote Dune, most of the world’s oil supply came from the Middle East. Transportation in each context is wholly dependent on spice/oil. By establishing relations with the Fremen, Duke Leto demonstrates a colonizer’s knowledge that he can more easily exploit the planet’s resources if he is on good terms with the population. 

Yeah right. That's like a Year 10 reading of the book. This isn't what makes Dune an interesting story. Cripes. How obtuse is that reading? 

What makes Dune interesting is that the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood set up the myth of the saviour and plants it into primitive cultures. They put them there because at some point in the future, it might help to activate them. And so the Bene Gesserit manipulate the gullible in to thinking they're seeing a messiah. And along comes Paul who activates it in order to survive, but unwittingly unleashes a galaxy-wide jihad.  

In other words, Frank Herbert the author doesn't believe in messiahs. Paul, his main character does not believe in messiahs, even as he rides on the force of myth set loose by the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood. Paul to his horror cannot stop the metaphorical runaway freight train once it leaves the station. The only people who believe in the messiah in the book are the ignorant, pious, and gullible. Yet there are many of them - enough to unleash their own set of horrors. If anything, the book at least is about how untenable the saviour is, white or not.  If you believe in saviours and messiahs, or that Paul's placement in the narrative is that he is a first order Saviour character without any self-awareness or irony, you're not much smarter than the gullible folk in the book who believe in messiahs and saviours. That, is Herbert's very mid-20th century modernist view. 

It amazes me that I have to spell it out, but no, 'Dune' is not in favour of the colonialism inherent in the West's purchase of oil. Herbert's narrative is fully sceptical about the merits of an economy that rests on the back of one commodity. It is not about a white man who goes to be a saviour unto the barbaric towel-heads of the far future (and I mean that with the utmost irony thank-you-very-much!).

The problem I have with Villeneuve's version is that I can't shake the suspicion that he believes in messiahs and saviours. It's the same problem I had with his Blade Runner sequel. 

Visions of Future Past And All That

Having seen 3 iterations of the fall of House Atreides as well as imagined it when reading the book, I can't help but think maybe we've seen too many versions of this story already. I'm not really all that excited about the second part of this rendition. It all feels like a chore to get us to the next bit, which is Dune Messiah, followed by Children of Dune - which all might never happen. The gods of studio filmmaking are worse than fickle, they're like gay people at the Mardi Gras after-party after 3 eckies, but with less propriety. So, there's no guarantee we would get there. 

The thing is, the 1984 Dune sort of ends the way it does because they couldn't really conceive of a sequel. Getting the first book made in that form was an accomplishment an achievement enough. It left not much to the studios to think about. Certainly, the thinking back then was, if a film did well, the sequel can expect to gross about 70% of the first. That means the third instalment would be about 49% of the first and that's probably the limit to the diminishing returns. Lynch's Dune flopped so it had no future with sequels. If I had my druthers, I'd really want to see Lynch give us a 'Dune Messiah' with Kyle MacLachlan playing Paul. Talk about things that never will be. 

Villeneuve's version is something else. It clearly has an eye of pushing it out to the subsequent books. I don't know if he can get there. Would they be any good if this is the base from which we are working? but then again, Ridley Scott was able to make 2 terrible, horrible, no-good sequels to his 'Alien' on the strength of ... I don't know what, that franchise has been moribund since the late 90s ... so you never know. To that end, I sort of support Villeneuve doing all this. Let's say this: I'd be mighty happy to watch his take on 'The God Emperor of Dune' because boy, as sure as fuck nobody else is going to have that one up on screen in a hurry. So if this film is phase 1 in the plan to shoot entire Dune series, I still give it my thumbs up. 

   

Quick Shots 14 Dec 2021

Yikes It's December Already 

Sorry I've been away. I've been meaning to write about a few things along the way but life has a way of just making you do other stuff than just blog. 

Through the 24months of this Pandemic so far, I've been re-mixing and re-mastering stuff. I'll have a new album of songs coming out in March next year. It's all brand new songs - nothing from the dim dark past or back catalog of stuff. But I've also been going back in time and I've gone through the stuff I did over on iCompositions between 2012 and 2014. It's like 50 tracks I'm sorting through as I do other projects so I've been stupid-busy. 

I Got Asked About Hillary Rodham Clinton

I think HRC must have some book coming out because she's started to surface in the media a bit more. She made some post about the speech she would have given if she had won the Presidency. Look, I get it. It was an awful moment not just for her, but for America and the free world. The Donald Trump Presidency was like a populist enema that collectively gave us the shits non-stop for 4years, culminating in the storming of the US Capitol. The shit, so to speak, has been running long and hard. So believe me as somebody who would have preferred not to go through that said shit that a HRC Presidency would have been much more preferable to the shit-fight we went through. 

Be that as it may I think HRC in 2016 might have been the worst candidate the Dems might have settled upon - orthodoxy or not. I know, that in the end Bernie Sanders is just too weird for the Democratic power brokers and that it really felt like it was her turn. And yet she proceeded to lose the Rust belt to DJT, and that was that. There was an inherent problem in sticking a candidate up whose husband effectively sold out the Rust Belt with NAFTA. She couldn't very well get up there and disown and lambast Bill Clinton's Presidency, could she? And in any other election where the Republicans put up a candidate like a Bob Dole or a John McCain, maybe Hillary might have slid by that issue; but of course she was up against a populist monster who managed to successfully mine that exact resentment against 'the elites' - which undeniably, of whom she was one.

So all in all HRC had to be a case of the right candidate, wrong election. 

The question I got asked was whether I thought HRC was right. Of course she was right. But if the question concerned whether it had to be her to save the day in November 2016, we now know that was not the case. And again, I'm not saying this as a Bernie Sander supporter - I'm saying, of all the candidates in all the Democratic Party machine apparatus, they had to insist on HRC as the candidate in the exact election she was the worst candidate to win back the Rust Belt. She was right about America, but she was wrong about the legitimacy of her candidacy. However, I don't think she'll ever wrap her head around that. Because if she did, she sure as hell won't be coming out with some book now. 

Comic Book Movies

I've decided I'm okay with comic book movies. I know Martin Scorsese spoke up against the And then it was Ridley Scott. And then eventually it was Jane Campion who offered up the critique that she just hates them. Okay, if we had any pride as film makers, it would rankle that that such toy fiction - as finely tuned and amazingly honed as they are - would blow away what serious adults are trying to do in fiction. Then it occurred to me we're still talking movies. Movies are populist. If the crowd loves it, then there's probably something in that. As it is, the corporate entertainment machine is trying to make Star Wars films to make lots of money and none of those recent ones have exactly won over the crowds. So whether it's SciFi or comic book movies or serious drama, there's a certain level at which good, is good. And maybe even that kind of bland ordinary unassuming good, is good enough for the crowd.  

The thing that tipped me off to this conversion in my head wasn't Jane Campion telling us how she "just hates them" and me wincing when I read that. It's the fact that I enjoy them in spite of my general blasé contempt for comic book movies. I know it's only comic book stuff where Spider-Man swings from buildings and stops the bad guy. But if I'm being honest - on a visceral level - I'm probably going to enjoy that spectacle much more than 'The Irishman' or 'The Last Duel' or 'The Power of the Dog'. I can guarantee you that these serious movies don't and won't hit an emotional high mark that Spider-Man likely will. And maybe that makes me really anti-intellectual. But if I'm the anti-intellectual for liking Spider-Man over what Marty, Ridley and Jane have got on offer, I would like to posit that maybe they're just pseudo-intellectuals. After all, as Hitchcock put it so eloquently, "it's only the movies!"

Yes, for fuck's sake. 

Raven Runs

Ever-Grander Fears

Buy now you've heard about this Evergrande situation where this Chinese real estate developer owes USD 305 billion as it starts to default on some of its bonds.Beijing insists that even if it should default, it won't become a contain to affect global markets. A proper cynic would say, "of course they would say that."

There are two things that really worry me in this situation. One is that Evergrande is not going to be bailed out in anyway by the government because the CCP government intends to make an example out of it. It might be unwise to ignore the significance of letting Evergrande fail or implode. We only have to think back to the Bear Stearns moment during the GFC. That led to a bunch of other moments of sheer financial anguish and terror right up to and beyond the Lehman Shock. The point is, Bear Stearns didn't fail alone. When the tide went out, a lot of firms were exposed without their metaphorical pants on. The noises coming out of Beijing seem to indicate they're not thinking about this as a market problem, they're thinking about this as political problem because to the CCP all problems are political problems. 

So that leads me to think Evergrande and its pile of debt isn't out there on its own. There is a whole flotilla of these kinds of companies, each owing way too much money. The total size of this debt in the real estate  sector in China is pegged to be between USD 50-60 Trillion. The China's GDP is USD 16.6 Trillion

In other words, this thing is huge enough to swallow up China's economy. The calming words of China's central bank is no panacea to the pile of risk. With all due respect, it's a big pile. Evergrande might end up being the only company that goes under in this bubble-bursting moment. Something tells me that would be way too optimistic. Chances are better than even the whole sector in China will be on the receiving end of the stick. If there's no contagion to the globe, that's one thing - but there's no assurance there won't be a contagion of sell orders in China. This could become a massive market crash "with Chinese characteristics".  

The second thing that really has me worried is that the Renminbi is pegged to the USD. This is good for China because it will probably stop a currency crisis from blowing up during the debt crisis for which they have lit their fuse to blow up. It's certainly wonderful for them that their astronomical debt is denominated in USD and so, while it is pegged, cannot blow out against the USD. But it also means it commits the test of the world to be dragged in by the unfolding debt crisis. Instead of China's Renminbi collapsing in value, it will stay pegged to the USD - and through the pressure it puts on the USD, we will feel it everywhere on the globe. This isn't Greece with its GDP of USD 200 billion which cause so much heartburn during the last decade. This is China doing the dragging. It's going to weight everybody down. 

Happy days, no? Some think this won't be the Minsky Moment for the globe. Sure, easy to say. Yet here's another thing on top of all the above. The US markets are ready for another 'Taper Tantrum'. The FRB is trying to taper back the stimulus and rate cuts it brought in to bolster the markets during the pandemic. Just as it happened in the wake of the GFC, the markets have sent signals to the effect it does not like the taper. Combine it with the fact that we're in October, the month of crashes - c.f. 1929, 1987, 1989, 2007, and with the last week of October looming (when these crashes tend to happen), you're made to ponder if you're staring at the crest of the giant wave that's about to break. Is this the moment the global property bubble comes unstuck? And what is that going to do to the economy?

The deferred Evergrande coupon payment date from 25 September comes up Monday next week. The tea leaves say they'll probably default. The FRB will meet on 2nd November. In between those 2 dates, there's a solid week for things to go pear-shaped. Hold on to your hats. 

Come Join The Fun!

You Came Into My Life Too Late

The Luck of Bad Timings

It's like you're at the European roulette table. '0' hasn't come up for like 50 spins. So it's time to place bets on '0'. And it doesn't come up for another 40 spins. What do you do? You double up and keep putting on '0' of course. And you eventually make your money back and come out ahead just a little bit. 2 spins later '0' hits again but you didn't have anything on it because you were looking to see how the luck was going to pan out for 3 spins. At that point you should walk away.  

Sometimes you run into people at the wrong point of your life. That's just the way it goes sometimes. They might have been the love of your life but you're already with somebody going down a different path. What are you going to do?Throw away something perfectly good just to see if the new thing is more exciting? Or you might meet somebody as they're leaving a company as you walk in, or you're leaving university as they come in. These things happen. If you believe in fate, you'd better believe that fate has a cruel sense of humour. Personally, I find it better not to believe in fate at all. 

Whatever the situation, you will always hear that nagging voice in your head asking "what if...?" Considering the kinds of punts one is willing to take at the gambling table, it doesn't seem far-fetched that one might want to bet one's life on the next piece of ass that comes along. Frankly, that kind of lightness of character - that's kind of how you fuck up your own life. If you want to be lucky you've got to know when you're already being lucky. 

Come Join The Fun!

I Tried To Leave You Behind

Apropos Of Nothing...

 I'm getting into my classical music collection lately. I've not really given these CDs a spin in the last few years or so, partly because I'm always looking for new stuff and they get buried behind my newer purchases. And the funny thing about one's music sitting on the shelf is that it's simply a case of out-of-sight-out-of-mind. You're constantly listening to what's at the front and not at the back of shelves. Anyway, what with the pandemic going on, I've decided to re-import all my CDs into my mac as Apple Lossless files - a task that's simply been overdue for years but rivalled in tedium only by playing monopoly and sitting in casinos without gambling. Bye-bye 192kbps, and all that. Theoretically, I shouldn't even need my discs after I've imported them because I'd have them as lossless files sitting at my fingertips on my computer. I should just be able to pack the damn things away and stick them in storage. 

...And I just can't. I've been pondering why that might be the case. I think it's because I am despite my own protestations and denials, just another one of those people who are way too in love with their record spines and CD spines. You see, it's like my autobiography writ large on those spines. The where and when of purchasing some stupid album that was hard to find; The time I was in city 'x' and I happened to come across 'y'; the tortuous quest to find a copy of 'z'. Those kinds of mini-narratives tied in with a weird sense of identity tangled up with an emotional attachment makes it really hard to just say, "you know what? These can go in plastic tubs and sit-in storage now."

So that's pretty much the lot of a media hoarder. 

I don't own valuable stuff. I don't have any gems, jewellery or exotic coins or for that matter bars of gold. I don't own memorabilia and collectibles - I've just got music and movies. Even my sort-of-dress-watch isn't really all that valuable in the watch stakes. A watch repairer tried to sell me a beautiful replacement band once. I had to say no because the band was 5 times what I paid for my watch. I don't even own memorabilia discs like signed copies of CDs and LPs. I just have the regular music stuff, and that's what I can't really leave behind - but collectively I like them. It's a big chunk of my life. How'bout you?

Come Join The Fun!

When I Walk Out Of Here

Terrible Bosses

The late Sam de Brito had a complaint against the ALP's swap of leaders from Kevin Rudd to Julia Gillard. It was often cited that Kevin Rudd was a terrible boss. De Brito wrote in his column we've all had terrible bosses and we've still turned up to work. What excuse has an elected body got in refusing to work for a terrible boss elected by the very people of the land, really? 

Of course it has transpired since then that both sides of politics have seen fit to swap out the leader at semi-regular intervals since the Rudd removal. None of these Prime Ministers have served out a full term and Scomo might be the first one to do so since John Howard. That's a long time between stability - not that stability is any good if the leadership is as rotten as the current Coalition.

This is something you pick up in life along the way but terrible bosses are par for the course. You can do worse than a terrible boss, and that might be a criminal boss. All the same, barring the criminal boss type, chances are most people have a terrible boss. This is because nothing brings out the asshole in somebody than the entitlements of leadership, When I was younger, I found myself at the outpost of a Japanese corporate behemoth. I had a boss to whom I reported, who was a certifiable asshole, but his boss on top of that was an alarmingly incompetent man. This boss was terrible because he was functionally paralysed when it came to making decisions. It was alarming how he was willing to let things just happen by not making a decision. This was because to him, making the wrong decision was worse than the consequences of not making any decisions. It was excruciating to sit through one of those glum meetings the Japanese companies have, waiting for him to make a decision - any damn decision - and not getting anything conclusive out of him beyond an uncomfortable cough-grunt-throat-clearing-noise.

It took me a while to understand that most terrible bosses don't know they're terrible. Some of them are misguided in thinking that they're great bosses. Your average boss, like your average anything, is terrible at their job. This is mostly due to the Peter Principle where people are promoted to the level of their incompetence. Another element that can go into the mix is that your average boss has no empathy. The empathy deficit is usually the blindspot through which all their interpersonal disasters come marching in. Woe betide us if they happen to be disorganised or lazy or not good at solving problems for themselves. It's a lot easier to be a terrible boss than a good one. There's a reason Captain Kirk with all his faults is considered a good captain. It was a show written by ex-navy people who had seen terrible captains. We might laugh at Captain Kirk, but golly there are probably much worse captains in real life commanding real navy ships of the line. 

But even allowing for all that, the little tyrant I worked for, was a particularly terrible, awful, crappy boss from infantile-boss-hell that inspired half an album's worth of songs why I wanted to stop working for him. 

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I Can See A Better Tomorrow

Maybe A Little Optimism

This lockdown in Sydney is dragging on. As much as I don't quite mind pottering around the house Working on tracks, the general absence of fresh stimulus beyond the available news, TV and the MLB season is getting me down. Sometime around early December they think we'll be back to pretending things are normal. Maybe they really would be like the old normal except Anti-vaxxers will get the Delta strain and drop off and die - and maybe to be a little uncharitable, it's one of those Darwin Award moments when people who can't adapt to the new environment are surely going to face a very Darwinian selection pressure.

I do wonder about that. I have a colleague at my day job who is a nice dude but he's a conspiracy theorist and Anti-vaxxer nut-job. He hates the lockdown but he refuses to get any of the vaccines because he thinks they kill people. I've had to explain to him how vaccines work, how these vaccines work differently, and how much research has gone into them prior to the pandemic to allow them to simply come up with these in a matter of months, and how statistically speaking, one would be much safer to just take the vaccine than risk getting COVID-19. No dice. He wants to go without any vaccines. 

Even the medical officer in the office has explained to him the risks and as far as I can tell he's not taken on board any of the medical officer's advice. It's a bit perplexing as well as disturbing - I don't want him to die. But if he were to get sick badly, I would get to say "told ya' so" upon his recovery. Naturally I feel very conflicted about that, and admittedly, that's not how one wants things to turn out. 

Still, I get the optimism going around. 4 months of lockdown this time around has been bleak. It's like we're all in our own Biosphere 2 experiment where we hole up pretending we're on an extended expedition to Mars, and just like with the Biosphere 2 crew we allow ourselves to cheat and so we go out once a week for groceries. But then the whole world seems less tangible when you're living like this. When we first went into any kind of lockdown in March 2020, nobody had the vaccine. Now we're reaching the point where firmly over 50% of people have had 2 doses and over 75% have had at least 1. Things have changed significantly in 18 months. We now have a fighting chance against this lousy pandemic. If we can just get out of here, like in the Paul McCartney song, we might feel anything is possible. Maybe we should be just a little more optimistic.

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This Miserable House

Misery Loves Company, That's Why We Have Relationships

Maybe that's not quite true, but you do see quite a number of people who are together and you have no idea how their dynamic works for them. 

I used to know this girl who went through life hating on just about everything. She was a pretty redhead with curls, well-liked, and even quite popular amongst her peers; but if you caught her in private she would share with you the most vile gossip, and let her contempt flow. Even as a third year university student going through my own emotional chaos on campus, I found it a bit much how she would dissect the foibles of the people around her. It was merciless and two-faced, and in part hid a deep anguish.  

Anyway, it turned out she had a very troubled upbringing up in a provincial centre and had problems adjusting to Sydney. Her mother had told her to aim high, while her estranged father had told her she wouldn't ever amount to anything. Deep underneath all the eviscerating critique was this general sense of dissonance with dissatisfaction and annoyance at life together with a singular wish to tear everything down. She was bitter but funny, or perhaps she was just funny because she was so bitter.  As a friend, she was a mean teaser and prankster. 

The thing is we hung out because we were both miserable. I was kind of used to it - it as in being miserable, so I hardly noticed the depth of her misery. I'd had a run of girlfriends who had a way of making me feel miserable, so I thought it was normal. Misery had become second nature to me. Some would say it was my first nature. And the one thing through all that which has stuck with me to this day is that miserable people can be very funny but they have a way of making everyday life seem really trying. 

It's not like everyday life should be trying as a university student, but that's the nature of misery - it inflicts a sense of grave dissatisfaction on those around the miserable. It was a strained friendship though a bizarre round of varsity parties and drinks. We talked, she held court, we laughed, she got drunk and nasty - but we'd do it all again within days. Eventually at the end of Trinity semester in her second year, she abruptly quit university and went home to her provincial town without an explanation. 

Just once - about a month after her sudden departure - she sent an ironic postcard from her home town. It read "everywhere I go, there's me. And if there's one thing I can't stand, it's me." 

There was no return address. 

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Ain't No Use

When Things Fall Apart

I knew this guy Ron who broke up with his wife. It was a very bad breakup - the kind that involved being blindsided by betrayals and much backstabbing. It poisoned his circle of friends because his wife had run off with his best friend. In the aftermath his now ex-friend and ex-wife spread gossip about him and it left you wondering how Ron could be so blind to have chosen these people to be in his life to begin with. 

Ron was a nice guy but he was a terrible judge of character. That sounds incredibly old fashioned to say so, but you had to look where he was in the wake of that messy split. And yet because Ron was an oddly cheerful guy, he somehow internalised all of it like it was his fault that these people were pushed into doing these terrible things to him because he had been an awful person to them. That led to some bizarre conversations. Nonetheless, Rob was clearly the aggrieved party. He just didn't want to be that. That's some complicated mental gymnastics to arrive there.  

For my part, when break ups happen I tend to be a lot more definitive about who did what and who was to blame. I kind of feel people should take ownership of stuff they do that hurts other people. Doing terrible things to another person is one thing, but pretending you didn't do them or shifting that blame on to the victim makes things worse. People do as they must do. If you have to get out of a situation then, that's what you have to do. If you have to have an affair; if you have to betray the confidence of somebody in order to do something; if you have to fuck up somebody's life to just do your thing; these are the kinds of things you have to own. You did this because you wanted to, and it was shitty a thing to do but you did it anyway. You have to own that shit. Otherwise you are not a proper adult. 

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Too Many Words

We've Said Too Much Already

When Pharmakeus was fresh out of University with his Arts degree, he used to pontificate a lot on a whole bunch of subjects. He would talk at great length about the ins and out of Post Modernism as it was unfolding, or how fractals defined the very shape of life, the universe and everything. He was full of this kind of intellectual excitement. One day as we sat in a park bench he made the joke that a person only had a certain words in the that they could utter in a lifetime. His girlfriend of that time quipped "I'd better prepare your funeral for tonight then?" 

He didn't die that night - in fact he is still alive and well. Yet these days he communicates in brusque utterances of monosyllabic grunts. Maybe he did run out of words. 

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What Am I Doing?

A Spotty Record 

I don't know about life, but certainly work, is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans. 

It's hard to get everything in a job. The kinds of casual jobs I had in my teens were relatively low pressure but low pay. It was interesting when I worked at the music shop in Chatswood, but that paid very little. It paid a little better to move tubs of groceries around the parcel pickup service at Grace Brothers. The bosses were kind of dumb and the work itself was unrelenting tedium, but it paid something. Coming out of my teens and in my early 20s, I lucked out and got to work at the ABC. The ABC was great - I had a great boss and the boss above her was great. There was a bit of pressure and responsibility, and there were lots of interesting bits of gear with which to play. And you learned a lot just being there. After that job I went back to study and when I came out the other end, we were slap bang in Paul Keating's recession-that-we-had-to-have. So I was back to being more, in-and-out-of unemployment for some time. After a series of interesting gigs I landed a steady job making educational videos. It was interesting work and my colleagues were great but my boss was grumpy and the pay was low. I was sort of okay with my boss but then he hired an EP specifically to bully me - he told me so - so that was pretty bad. But then the EP quit once I told the whole office about that situation. After which my boss sold the company and retired early. I've often thought he probably did that just to see the back of me.

After that I ended up at a production house making corporates. It didn't pay well, the work was soul destroying and my colleagues were shit. Just seriously smug, petty, shitty people. The experience kind of burned a hole in my soul. After going freelance and bumming around again going gig-to-gig, I ended up working for an events production company with that little tyrant. The work was okay considering it wasn't my area, the pay was okay, job security was not, and I kind of knew it was going to blow up one day - not because I hated the job or anything, but because the emotional immaturity of the little tyrant made it inevitable that everybody ended on bad terms with him and left. It was just a matter of time. Considering all that, I think I lasted a good little while there. The life lesson there is that I don't have issues working with assholes, but assholes are always going to be assholes. I can control how I feel about working for assholes, but I can't control asshole bosses. 

All this is to day it's hard to get much work satisfaction when you don't work in your area; and it's hard to get a lot of money when you do work in your area and like doing what you do, because they know it, and low ball you. As a result I've decided I can handle boredom but not stress, especially if I'm not going to work in my area. Chances are if you do something boring, it will pay a bit better than if you do something interesting.  

 What you're doing then, is making rent. 

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Come Back To Me

A Classic Tale Of Broken Relationships

When I was a teen I read 'Le Morte D'Arthur' by Sir Thomas Malory. The Penguin Classic edition then came in two volumes and the print was rather small and dense. I read it in the school library, and then I read it again when I was in first year at Med School. Eventually I lent my two volumes to somebody and they never came back. Went some years without it and it felt like such a hole on my bookshelf. Subsequently I ended top with a hard cover edition. 

Historically speaking, this book is a bit of a landmark. William Caxton, who brought the printing press to the UK, published 'Le Morte D'Arthur' in 1485. By the time Caxton came to publishing it, he had already been a publisher of  a number of books on the topic of knights and romances. You could say he was middlebrow from the beginning of publishing. He was a businessman who knew what his readership wanted, and it wasn't the Bible. Somehow this is the book that outlasted the rest of Caxton's catalogue. The book itself reads quite a bit like passages of Tolkien in his more terse moods - more Silmarillion and less Lord of the Rings with Tom Bombadil. Of course, it was hard to read it without Monty Python voices going on in my head, even though Malory is about as funny as a haemorrhoid. 

In the main, the book is a longwinded account of how King Arthur's court fails, and at the centre of it is that romantic triangle: King Arthur, his wife Guinevere, and his best night Sir Lancelot are in love. The latter two's affair essentially tears down the dignity of Arthur. Arthur's kinsmen are outraged, and so eventually this pits one half of the knights of the round table against the other half. The passions described are primal and wild. And all through this mess, King Arthur just wants his wife to come home. He doesn't seem to judge, he only laments the sate of affairs. It's not entirely clear what good Arthur does as king (or what his fiscal policy settings are, for instance), but it is accepted that he's a good king. The weird thing is just how much energy is spent on the affair in the book. On one level the book is an extensive exploration of the simple phenomenon that women are not for men to own - they have their own volition and they will do as they see fit. On another, it's a laundry list of feats by knights. And if they had a hint of James Brown in them, they would understand that it all means nothing without a woman.

The publishing date of the book is of course closer to the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine where the idea of romance was nurtured, than the first suffragettes to challenge patriarchy; so it's hardly a feminist critique of masculinity in the dark ages. The story does explore the problems of pushing for romantic love in the context of inherently political beings. It's one thing for the baker's wife to be secretly in love with  the blacksmith, it is a lot more problematic when they are kings, queens, and generals. As much time as the story spends on Guinevere in the arms of Sir Lancelot away from Camelot, it really centres on the plaintive wish of King Arthur that Guinevere changes her mind and comes home to him. It is not clear whether King Arthur's love for his queen is of the romantic variety, or because he's just meant to love her for the sake of status or the narrative itself.  

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There's No Money II

No Time Left, Not Enough Money

The most shameful thing in the aftermath - and there were many shameful things about and during the Black Summer fires - is how the government played their usual bureaucratic games to avoid paying out the money it promised. 

There has been little transparency over the funds, the Per Capita report commissioned by GetUp found, with some allegedly delivered based on political opportunity over community need. Report author Matt Lloyd-Cape noted there were few checks on how state governments spent the allocated funds.

"We spent around three months tracking down data for this project, when really the government should be ensuring that the general public, and more importantly bushfire survivors, know exactly what is happening with the funds allocated to the recovery," Mr Lloyd Cape said.

Only 42 per cent of the $565 million emergency payments have been paid to communities burned out by the fires. A year on, too many families are still waiting for support, says GetUp national director Paul Oosting.

"Scott Morrison must explain to the families still living in tents and caravans, a year after losing their homes, his government's painstakingly slow response," Mr Oosting said.

"There is clear evidence of multiple process failures to allocate funds directly to survivors."

I don't know if it's a conservative person thing to suspect everybody who comes to the government for money is somehow a freeloader to be despised or some shonky charlatan. It's something I noticed way back when I would go to try and get funding for projects, and the government would put up form after form to be filled and then deflect your request int a bottomless pit of other requests that were not met. Even this business of getting a vaccination certificate from MyGov is fraught with this kind of going around in circles of links across umpteen webpages. This government knows how to frustrate people in such a way as to deny them their needs. 

The desire for small government is such that it makes it nearly impossible to pin the government down on its responsibilities - but it's happy to chase you around for yours. Heck they chase people around for imaginary debts with robocalls. It's enough to drive people to the areas of conspiracist nut jobs. 

And it's proud of it too, this government. Which is pretty freaking awful. 

Anyway, I really feel for the people who are now in the second year after their houses burned down, still trying to get some help from the government. It's pretty fucking shameful is what it is. You would not want to be in their shoes.  

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Barnaby's A Bit Slow II

Here We Are Again...

Barnaby Joyce is awful. That is all. 

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Scomo Goes To Hawaii II

 He's Not The One Holding The Hose, Mate

When Greta Thunberg went to the UN and told the leaders their houses were on fire, Morrison's response was to patronise and downplay the fear of the young. The fact that he thought that was the appropriate response beggars belief. Couldn't he see it from the young person's side? That they're going to inherit a planet largely fucked up by people who refused to let anybody fix things? 

It sort of amazes me just how much of an empathy deficit Scott Morrison possesses and somehow still managed to become leader of the Liberal Party, let alone Prime Minster of this country. It is like that expression about blind squirrels getting lucky once in a while in finding a nut. In his case he was surrounded by even more demented sociopaths like Peter Dutton and Angus Taylor - he was the least objectionable sociopath in the room after they all decided to stab Turnbull in the back lest he do something about the climate.

I do wonder if Scott Morrison wonders about how the planet will be in say, 10 years' time when his daughters will be pushing out babies. I imagine his daughters are so brainwashed that they would do all kinds of mental gymnastics to push out of their minds that their father - once the Prime Minister of Australia - opted to wave a lump of coal around Parliament and make like Global Warming wasn't a thing. They're beyond hope, in all likelihood. But maybe the arrival of grandkids might make him think just a little bit about where things went so wrong and his part in making sure it went wrong. I wonder, as the prognosis towards 2050 worsens significantly, whether he might ever have just a twinge of regret that he spent his time in government as a minister selling down the future of his grandkids just so he could get votes in the 2010s. I mean, that's what the exchange that he made, right there. The rest of us voting chumps were powerless once he was in office. Nobody forced him to be this awful. He simply volunteered himself for the task. 

It is terrible enough that his government goes from rape scandal to AG-is-a-rapist-scandal, then failure to disaster to catastrophe, but this has been going for nearly a decade. Every minute spent by the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison Government denying Global Warming was an issue, stole something from the future.  Things might have been better if he'd just stayed in Hawai and never come back. 

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Justice For Lewis II

Democracy, When Everybody Suffers

I'm still bummed about just how many animals lost their lives in the Black Summer bushfires. 

I've tried a few times to come at it here but I end up writing ever more of the same kind of denunciation of the current government. It's hard to denounce tis government in new ways given that the way in which they are profoundly so fucked is so singular. At a certain point we have to swallow our discontent and reservations and say it is what it is. 

Still, I can't help but wonder if I had any control over the events; and about the only control I had was to vote against this government who had basically jettisoned any idea of proper emissions control back in 2014. I've voted against theme every time, and still they kept winning the hearts and minds of arseholes who think emissions control shouldn't happen or should cost them nothing. A lot of them claim to be patriots which is laughable because how could you claim to love this land if you're willing to let whole ecosystems go up in smoke? Those people have no credibility. We should be incredulous. 

And still they are in power, letting bad shit happen and claiming not to "hold the hose". It's that kind of hands-off-the-wheel impression this government gives off about anything to do with Global Warming that gets my goat. If they had listened to the professional advice, they would have acted accordingly and put some money aside for the necessary equipment and labour for the fire season ahead. Instead they cut those budgets and spent it on pork barrelling sports rorts instead. After they won their 'miraculous' election (pardon me while I go vomit), they were bewildered to find they still held office and had pressing responsibilities. 

It's not that the fires came from nowhere - the government was warned by experts. For them to pretend that things were out of control because this was all 'acts fo God' was ridiculous to the extreme. On some level we can say we brought this on ourselves for having voted in this mendacious government. Except the animals that perished in the fires didn't get a vote - They for one didn't vote for this shitty government. They didn't ask for this mess. What happened to them was totally tragic.  

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On The 20th Anniversary of 9/11

How Did We Get Here?

I've written this before. I thought the 1990s were great. It was great in the wake of the end of the Cold War and many things seemed possible. Movies were fun, rock was resurgent, new things were going on in music, books were fun and interesting. It was like a flowering of ideas after a very long repression. I used to wonder how is this beautiful era going to end? I guess we found out with two things. The first was the election of Dubya, aka George W Bush as President. It was a cliff hanger that went to the supreme court and somehow the Republican lawyers wrested the outcome from Al Gore. It was the moment the Republicans allowed themselves to overtly break the rules and law to have their way. It would turn out to be an appetiser for the kind of shenanigans to follow. 

The second thing was 9/11. After the Twin Towers came down, all bets were off. The world changed overnight and suddenly we were 'at war' with 'terror'. A flood of rhetoric washed out from the White House that led to things like the war in Afghanistan (probably legit) and the Marin Iraq *definitely not legit) as well as a slew of anti-terror laws and overreach by surveillance. The last two decades continue to be marred by the responses to 9/11 which were more often than not over-reactions. Yes, nearly 4000 people died and a whole slew of system failures were exposed as well as giving birth to the internet conspiracy theory culture, but it has to be said the trillions spent on prosecuting the foreign wars and surveilling the domestic population is a ridiculously expensive price to pay. 

In that time America watered down its education and health to move money to its military industrial complex, and essentially created a generation of under-educated idiots susceptible to conspiracy theories on the internet. The worst aspects of that as blowback could be seen in the storming of the US Capitol earlier this year. 

Let's say that is all by-the-by. 9/11 happened because of a string of incompetent decisions as well and lack of leadership to act on reports. The FBI had reports it didn't follow up. The CIA delivered reports to the White House that the White House did not follow up. It was so slack entire areas of conspiracy theories have grown up around them but the essential truth is that the government of the day, the Bush Jr Administration, was largely asleep at the wheel. And when the dust settled, the republican administration used it as an opportunity to overreach on surveillance and expand powers. They say in politics one should never let a good crisis go to waste, but that sort of cynicism was exactly what characterised the events that followed. To protect democracy, they decided to circumvent democracy. We are still living with the consequences of those terrible decisions. 

My God What Have We Done?

There is a leader of Islamist thought Aga Khan IV who believes that 9/11 is a direct result of the world community ignoring the plight of the human tragedy of Afghanistan at the time. It is hard to argue with it if you remember what Afghanistan under the Taliban the first time around was like. It was repressive, regressive, iconoclastic, and most certainly toxic and misogynistic in a way that is off the scales for contemporary people living civilised society. 

Throughout the 1990s we sort of let all of that slide. They were very much on the nose but we had a way of pretending it was too far away to matter. I am certain that we will fall into that mindset again soon enough, but for the record most people didn't know where Kabul was on the map until the Americans finally sent troops.   

I think about that indifference a lot. In stark contrast to the globalised congeniality of the 1990s, there were plenty of people suffering under terrible regimes. We were very casual about the plight of people in the islamic world, partly because we didn't want to tell them how to run their governments. The world was celebrating and partying to the end of the Cold War. Bad Islamist governance in Kabul was like a distant problem we really didn't want to know about. 

There is a very telling episode of 'Seinfeld' from the 1990s that illustrates this point. It's the episode titled 'The Visa'.  It aired in January 1993 which feels like yesterday in some weird way; at least a lot closer to 9/11 than where we are today.  

George meets a lawyer named Cheryl (Maggie Han) who thinks he's very funny. When he tells Jerry and Elaine, they enthusiastically plan a double date, much to George's dismay, as he imagines himself being upstaged by Jerry. At the restaurant, Elaine asks Cheryl for advice on dealing with the lawsuit from Ping, the Chinese food delivery boy whom Elaine injured in "The Virgin". Cheryl reveals that she is the prosecuting attorney in the case, as Ping is her cousin. Jerry and Elaine joke about this coincidence, making Cheryl laugh hysterically. While she is away, George makes them promise not to be funny around her. Jerry overdoes it, making comments that are so morbid that Cheryl is depressed by the end of the date.

At Jerry's apartment, Kramer returns early from baseball fantasy camp, where he accidentally punched Mickey Mantle. Elaine sees Cheryl with George and thanks her for persuading Ping to drop the case. She says that she did that because they all seemed like such nice people. As Elaine is giving Jerry the mail that she has been holding for him while he was out of town, Babu Bhatt, the Pakistani who Jerry tried to help in "The Cafe", is hauled off by the INS. Jerry had helped him get a job and the apartment down the hall. Jerry and Elaine discover Babu's Visa renewal form in Jerry's belated mail; it had been delivered to Jerry's address by mistake. They go to the jail where Babu is being held. When they tell him what happened he becomes angry. Jerry promises to straighten things out.

Jerry has lunch with Cheryl, where he continues his morose façade, so that he can ask her to solve Babu's problems with the INS. When she sees George, she confesses that she is attracted to Jerry's dark, disturbed personality. George, realizing his scheme has backfired, tells her the truth. Stunned at this revelation, she gets up and leaves.

At Jerry's apartment, Elaine sees Ping and thanks him for dropping the case. He sneers and tells her the case is back on because they all made Cheryl mad due to Jerry's deception. Babu's brother enters and says Babu has been deported, since Cheryl neglected to follow through on the favor after George's revelation. Back in Pakistan, Babu swears eternal vengeance against Jerry.

Ouch. At the time I watched this episode, I really felt for Babu. I laughed - but I knew Babu's problems were very real, as opposed to the decidedly trivial preoccupations and obsessions of all of the characters in 'Seinfeld'. The reality gap as it were, was what made it very black humour. It turned out to be very prescient. When 9/11 happened, Babu came to mind. 9/11 was Babu exacting vengeance upon us for our indifference. 

How Did We End Up There?  

We may ask ourselves how it is we were still stationing troops in Afghanistan all these years later, until last month. The protracted history of bad decisions goes a long way back, but it may point to the funding and arming of Mujihadeen resistance fighters against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. By training those people and arming them, and then beating the Soviets out of Afghanistan they decided that the West could be beaten. And in abandoning Afghanistan to its own devices in the 1990s led to a Taliban government which saw fit to harbour Osama bin Laden and other terrorists. Without going into the various theories - conspiracy and otherwise - about whether Al Qaeda was really a thing or merely a designation/conflagration by the CIA, it is true that Afghanistan as a state went rogue and allowed itself to sponsor terrorism abroad, and it was this lack of judgement that led to 9/11 and the subsequent war and occupation of Afghanistan. 

That's all on one side. The other side is the utter lack of judgement on the side of the what became known as the Coalition of the Willing. That was the countries led by the USA that was happy to march into both Afghanistan and Iraq. Australia's part in it is pretty sorry. We sent our best troops and as they stayed and stayed, they became psychopaths on safari, committing acts that can only be described as war crimes. Nobody thought we would be there for so long, but without judgment there was no way of pulling out of Afghanistan without pulling down the state of Afghanistan we set up in the wake of the Taliban. 

It took a President even worse than George W Bush to get the USA out of Afghanistan and his solution was simply to give up Afghanistan to the very same Taliban the USA ousted in 2002. The mind boggles. It's as if Donald Trump slept through 9/11 and missed it completely. Or didn't really care. Maybe he did us all a favour in ending a forever war, and we are all looking that gift horse in the mouth. Maybe Afghanistan is better off under the Taliban, as a beacon of intolerance and religious extremism and medieval legalism. After all, why should we spend money on a place that doesn't want to conform to a civilised world? Maybe we can enjoy a decade of no wars; because I feel like we should maybe party a little bit like it's 1999, once this pandemic lifts. 

There are people in Afghanistan who are angry the West left, and let them in that terrible Dark Ages limbo. Yet it is easily arguable that we shouldn't have been there at all for as long as we were. At some point we can't fight the geopolitical gravity forever. Whatever goes up to Afghanistan must come down. 

So Will It Happen Again?

With any luck, with all the civil liberties we have given up, and all the compromises to our democracy, the one thing that won't happen again is a 9/11. Is it a high price to pay? Probably in as much as it still doesn't guarantee it won't happen again - but it is highly unlikely. Bitter lessons were learnt at all levels of government everywhere. 

As of that day, governments have given licences to themselves to compromise your privacy in exchange for security, and maybe we're all safer for it, but we are definitely not better for it. And I for one believe it when military people say we will be back in Afghanistan soon enough. It's just a terrible enough situation to draw us in. With any luck it will be the Chinese who end up trying to sort out that mess instead of us. That, would be a better outcome. Let somebody else suffer Afghanistan instead. 

Screams Of Burning Koalas II

"What Is This Shit?"

Thanks to this lousy pandemic 2 years has felt like a long time. We're all sitting around for things to get back to normal even though that might not really be on the cards. All the same, 2019 feels like a long way back. There was that lousy election that Scomo won in May that year, weird recriminations about the ALP losing the unlosable election and then there were the Black Summer bushfires. 

In late 2019 I was working on a bunch of songs where I was experimenting with modes and hiding the key centre. As usual I was struggling for material for, lyrics so I was writing them off headlines of news articles - when in doubt, 3 act story across 3 verses, chorus to bang home the main sentiment, a bridge to offer commentary, stick in the obligatory guitar solo for kicks - Bob's your song-writing uncle. 

Then I had a 2 week bout of some weird bowel infection. Maybe it was salmonella from bad chicken. I don't know. I think I was on the can more or less for 2 straight weeks. It was so bad I couldn't sleep at night because I had to get up and sit on the can and let the brown liquid pour out of my backside. The trickle never seemed to end. The bushfires that went totally out of control were already flooding Sydney with this orange smoke. As I sat late nights/early morning on the toilet with the window open, breathing in the fumes of my own diarrhoea and the smoke from the worst bushfire I had seen, wondering if I was just going to die on the toilet seat... something snapped. I couldn't take it any more. 

New Years came and went. The Pandemic was starting up in China with suspicions that it had already snuck into Sydney. And then I saw the images of just what the people of Mallacoota had endured. It was beyond alarming and utterly appalling. People had spent the night in the ocean off the pier looking up at the burning night skies. Ash fell like snowflakes from the angry red skies. Their homes went up in the hellfire. From the treetops they could hear the screams of burning koalas. That account left me devastated. What were my problems with breathing in the smoke fumes and suffering from that 2 week diarrhoea next to their suffering?

So the next thing I knew, I abandoned that project I had been working on, and did these songs about the bushfires and global warming and how colossally, irredeemably, comprehensively, stupide are our political leaders. 

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Gladys The Koala Killer II

What Does It Take To Cut Emissions Here?

One of the things that the people-against-doing-anything-about-Global-Warming complain about is the cost of cutting emissions. What's it going to cost? What's it going to cost me? It's the general line of questioning they trot out like somehow the costs of Global Warming are insignificant. If there's one thing that's become evident in the pandemic it's that there are a whole cabal of people who think any social restriction or imposition on their lifestyle in order to preserve the society in which we want to live, is just too much. Masks? No. Social distancing? No. Restricting movements? Hell no. Vaccines? No way. And on and on it goes. Let's face it, they're literally sociopaths. 

Let us then subtract the sociopathic out of the discussion and address the reasonable question of cost - i.e. what's it going to take to seriously cut down emissions in Australia? Turns out, not a whole lot. 

The general idea is to replace technologies that still run on combustion with alternatives that run on renewable electricity: swap petrol cars for electric vehicles (EVs) and gas heaters with reverse-cycle air conditioners.

By electrifying everything that can be electrified, Australia could cut its emissions by 80 per cent by 2035, according to credible estimates.

And it wouldn't need to invent any new technology to do this.

"It is an easy slam dunk," Dr Griffith said.

"It's not even particularly invasive to our quality of life.

"For every other country, including America, it's much harder and the economics are not as good."

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Dr Griffith estimates the acquisitions would cost about $100,000 per household.

Multiplying that by Australia's 10 million households equals $ 1 trillion.

But a lot of this is money that households would have spent anyway to replace cars, heaters and so on, Dr Griffith points out.

The only difference is they're buying an electrical version.

"We need to make sure that the next time every one of those machines is replaced, it's replaced with a better electric," he said.

Most households buy a new car about every 10 years.

Big appliances like hot water heaters can last 20-30 years, but households may be encouraged to switch earlier by considering the savings generated by using cheaper electricity over gas.

"If you started replacing those machines in 10 million houses and you took until 2030 to do it — so roughly a million houses a year — by about 2024, every household that's done that will be saving a few thousand dollars a year," Dr Griffith said.

"By 2030, 100 per cent of homes would be saving [$5,000 or $6,000) a year on their current costs of owning cars and powering their house."

The one country that could just reap the benefits of lots of sunshine and wind is refusing to make the transition because the fossil fuel lobby donates so much money to the political establishment, making out this transition is much too onerous. I guess they're desperately defending their meal ticket but come on, we don't want to feed them at the expense of our lives. 

Here's the thing: We don't even need to move over to hydrogen fuels stored in Ammonia and Magnesium Hydrides. We just plug ourselves into the naturally abundant renewables. It's not onerous at all. Australia is uniquely well placed to just electrify stuff and reap tremendous emission control dividends. 

You could say it's a no-brainer but of course our political leaders are without brains. They want a gas-led transition. You can't make up this stuff. The writing is on the wall and these idiots are claiming there are hidden messages in that writing saying gas is a good idea. 

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Lucky Country II

What Happened To Them?

So the big news this week is that Murdoch Media outlets are going to start pushing for zero emissions.  

The owner of some of the nation’s most-read newspapers, including the Herald Sun, The Daily Telegraph, The Australian and 24-hour news channel Sky News Australia will from mid-October begin a company-wide campaign promoting the benefits of a carbon-neutral economy as world leaders prepare for a critical climate summit in Glasgow later this year. 

Rupert Murdoch’s global media empire has faced growing international condemnation and pressure from advertisers over its editorial stance on climate change, which has long cast doubt over the science behind global warming and has since 2007 attacked various federal government efforts to reduce emissions. 

The unrelenting negative publicity peaked in global outlets such as The New York Times and Financial Times during Australia’s deadly bushfires almost two years ago, which triggered a comment from Murdoch’s youngest son, James Murdoch, who publicly denounced the outlets’ “ongoing denial” of climate change. Mr Murdoch quit the News Corp board last August, citing concerns about its editorial stance.

I don't know how that is going to work in practical terms. It's a global organisation that's dedicated itself to denying the simple reality of Global Warming, applying as much pressure as it can on conservatives and progressives alike so as not to enact any policies for mitigating the effects of Global Warming. By the time they were behind Tony Abbott calling the Emissions Trading Scheme a 'tax on carbon' you knew they weren't even market rationalists. They were just deranged. It's almost as if they wanted Global Warming to have its full impact so they would never run out of headlines about natural disasters. But now they're changing their tune, they say. 

As the contemporary internet meme-parlance like to spell it, "wut?"

I imagine it's a bit like the Pope pushing for birth control and priests having to toe that line or US police force unions donating money to BLM from now on and promising to pay to raise the orphans created by their police brutality or something. It's a bit like a wild fox promising not to stalk the henhouse and will now bring the chooks their daily feed - they are Fox News after all. Yeah right. I guess we're going to have to see it to believe it.

The switch in editorial position will likely attract global attention, particularly in America, where Murdoch’s media outlets, such as Fox News, have also been accused by Republican politicians of undermining global efforts on climate change. Mr Murdoch, now 90, also remains an influential figure in British politics, mainly through his newspapers, The Sun and The Times. But his eldest son, Lachlan Murdoch, who is the co-executive chairman of News Corp, is more involved in the newspaper business than his father.

The article goes on to claim the shift is because of the big powwow wherein Australia is pretty much going to have its arm twisted by other OECD nations and as such it would hurt the Coalition brand if it ended up being attacked by News Corp as well as the ALP as they go headlong into the next election. Frankly, it's not like News Corp don't know on which side the bread is buttered. If they hamstring the Coalition so much that they cannot enact any policies on emissions, there might come a day when the Coalition might be un-electable (Dare I say they ought to be considered un-electable today but heck they've won the last 3 Federal elections on no climate policy so who am I to judge?).   

It might sound a bit cynical even to suggest this - not that News Corp is anything but cynical themselves - but the likely tone they will take on all this is that we should mitigate our response to the climate threat. Which is to say they will likely weasel-word their way into a position that says "yes, Global Warming is here but maybe we don't have to do the hysterical maximum to combat its effect. What we need to do is the reasonable minimum so we don't harm the economy." Which would still very much be a denial stance - just one that seems to barely accomodate the reality of Global Warming. A bit like acknowledging a dancing drunk elephant in a tiny room. 

Eesh. That's going to be just as spew-worthy as what they're doing today and of no help whatsoever. Let's just say unlike a leopard, a fox can't change its spots because it never had spots to begin with. 

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