More On That Intellectual Bankruptcy

Here's An Example!

Right on cue, here's an article by Tom Switzer that illustrates my point.

It should be obvious to even primary school students that a war criminal is someone who has actually committed a war crime. More to the point, to equate a democratic leader who supported the toppling of a brutal dictatorship with the likes of the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge is a cheapening of moral language. 

One could oppose the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and still believe that Howard, like Tony Blair and George W. Bush, was motivated by good intentions. Saddam Hussein, after all, was a murderous despot who had invaded Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990 and subsequently defied about 17 United Nations resolutions. He also used chemical weapons in the murder of tens of thousands of Kurds in the north and the Shiites of southern Iraq.

Where do you start? Let's do this in order.
When the so-called 'Coalition of the Willing' invaded Iraq in 2003, it did so without a sign off from the UN Security Council. You might recall Collin Powell getting up and showing aerial reconnaissance photographs which purported showing Iraqis shuttling trucks loaded with Weapons of Mass Destruction. The UN did not say, "sure go ahead", they said, "no".

The point is, the 'Coalition of the Willing' invaded Iraq unilaterally, and for that John Howard has to wear the responsibility of co-authoring that disastrous move - a move so disastrous we're still reaping the poisoned fruits of those labours. This side of 1945, we do have an understanding that world leaders who unilaterally invade countries (no matter the goodness of intentions) are up for war crimes.

And as stupid as it is to repeat this here, this is why there is a legitimate argument to be made that George W. Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard are war criminals by the very same ruler we use to measure such diverse people as Herman Goering, Hideki Tojo, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, and whoever else tinpot dictators in Africa we don't like. This accusation is expressly not, "cheapening of moral language" as Switzer argues; merely a logical ramification of the legal logic cast upon these other people like Herman Goering, Hideki Tojo, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic et al. To argue otherwise is an attempt to create one set of rules for the people in history we dislike, and another set of rules for leaders of English speaking nations to suit Tom Switzer's bit of sophistry.

As of the findings of the Chilcott Report earlier this year, it is no longer tenable to give the benefit of the doubt to GeorgeW. Bush and Tony Blair for their so-called "good intentions". To argue that Saddam Hussein had it coming - sans proper trial at the Hague which he did not get - and therefore his misdeeds justified the Iraq War, flies in the face of the principle of having War Criminals. If you think Saddam being Saddam justified the 2003 invasion, you're arguing that any nation can go invade another if it can form its own coalition of willing countries to participate because might and majority make their own right.

Clearly we in the Western World do not go by this thinking, and this is also why the world has such an elaborate institution as the United Nations with its Security Council to forestall such free-for-alls. You just can't have it both ways where Saddam is a War Criminal and George W. Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard are not War Criminals, if you believe in the moral language of having war criminals in the first place. That leaves the legal defence of John Howard to the possibility that he was not part of the criminal conspiracy perpetrated by Bush and Blair, but merely a tag-along. That would make him a dangerous adventurer, which is no more admirable than a "War Criminal".

The thing that gets me is that all of this is simply logic. It's not a philosophical issue at all.It's simply the logic constructed by the types of conservatives in the past - like Winston Churchill - thought up with all this legal logic. The history altering event of 2003 was that the self-appointed leaders of the free world would throw reason together with caution to the wind and go rampaging into Iraq. To pretend otherwise is so intellectually deficient and dishonest it makes you wonder how the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald doesn't balk at it (yes you Darren Goodsir).

Anyway... Switzer decides to give himself a pat on the back - a bit unseemly but what the heck - and then goes on to say:

What Howard failed to recognise, however, was the adage that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Toppling Saddam, as many conservative realists (such as this writer and my friends Owen Harries and John Mearsheimer) warned at the time, was also fraught with the danger of unintended consequences.

Good God. Conservative realists? Really? As opposed to ordinary realists who opposed the war on principle, the Conservative realists who opposed it on the basis of the difficulty of fulfilling the rest of the mission, once begun? If you are going to bang on the morality of language to begin with, you'd think you would argue things on the principle of it, but no. Tom Switzer wants to argue a technicality that the mission itself was difficult, and that's why it was wrong. Switzer is saying if the Iraq War worked out much cleaner, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
He's dead wrong.

On top of which, if that were the case, then he is once again arguing that Saddam had it coming, and that's good enough for him - but heaven forbid those who would argue on principle that the invasion of Iraq was a war crime. That's the height of hypocrisy.

Then there's this bit...

The objectors to the honorary doctorate also claim Howard was a racist. Never mind his post-Tampa asylum-seeker standoff policies boosted public confidence in our immigration and humanitarian refugee agenda. So much so that the rate of legal, non-discriminatory migration from four corners of the world, including Africa, doubled from 2002 to 2007. When Malcolm Turnbull praises Australia as the global role model for border protection, he is paying tribute to Howard (and his successor Tony Abbott).

Look, John Howard landed himself in much trouble in the 1987 Federal election campaign when he said there were too many asian migrants. It took him a long time to rehabilitate his image, but those words were uttered and even in 1987, it was obvious that he was playing race politics to get ahead. That would make John Howard a racialist politician. If he is not one today, it may be because he's grown to be a better man since, but the John Howard of 1987 was rightfully spotted as a racist - and proud of it. These things are not going to get forgotten. If John Howard never wanted to wear the epithet, he should have had the good sense not to stoke those fires for a few votes more. Most famous people who are not racists, never get hung with the epithet. The fact that it landed on Howard speaks volumes.

As it is, his tacit non-condemntion of One Nation in 1996 only entrenched the view that he was still a racist, even after his alleged detente with the Chinese community. There is no way known you could argue John Howard was not a racist politician. Malcolm Turnbull can praise Howard for a multi-cultural Australia all he likes, but he'd be dead wrong too - it simply wasn't the way that historic discussion went. Once again, it is intellectually dishonest for Tom Switzer to present John Howard as this amazing champion of multiculturalism in Australia. He can try it on, but it's called lying.

And this is what we have as conservative commentary. Two bits of sophistry combined with moral outrage about the "moral language" ("egadz!") and an outright attempt to rewrite the track record of a man who was an unpleasant racialist politician, if not an outright racist individual.

John Howard richly deserves the opprobrium heaped upon him. That the University of Sydney with its crappy regressive culture would want to honour John Howard with an honorary doctorate is their business. In my books, nothing is beneath them. If Switzer thinks John Howard is so deserving of this honour, that's also his business. However, complaining about those who would object to this conferring of social capital is a bit rich. The public record is what it is; John Howard knows what he did; Switzer knows what he did; we all know what Howard did. Let's not pretend for a moment that it's not contentious to hand this man an honorary doctorate and praise him. It's this kind of game-playing sophistry and hypocrisy that makes the conservatives look so intellectually vacant in this country. If Tom Switzer is the leading light of these conservative thinkers, then they've really got a problem.

Just saying.

Dr. Z's Insight Into the Meaning Of Architecture

Architecture Starts As Decoration

I was having a conversation with Dr. Z for whom I am doing some work for the next couple of months. The conversation took an interesting turn so I thought I'd write down what I remember of it.

A long time ago, Dr. Z was an architecture student at the University of Sydney - that's where we met.  I was skiving off from lectures at the Med faculty to hang with my old school friend GraGra, and Dr. Z happened to be one of his class mates. At the time, she was struggling mightily with the course because in her own words, the principles of design being preached and the practical application were far from complementary. Thus, as a student, she "struggled mightily" to reconcile the theory, the critiques and the taught practice. Eventually she found herself moving further upstream to understanding the concept of why we even plan cities, and what urban spaces are and how they work; and that's where she ended up with her doctorate, but in the beginning was the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Sydney.

Clearly, the early experience left their scars as well as lasting problematics that she has been pondering about over the years. After years of working in the urban dynamics area and still doing her thinking and reading on architecture, she has hit upon an answer to the age old question that has been bugging her since her days as an undergraduate, "what is the point of architecture?"

And really, she says architecture is the claiming of the right to decorate structures.
So what follows below is a quick retelling of what she told me; but I'm writing it down because it offers some interesting ideas.

In its most primitive instances, decoration, is how architecture begins. In fact, judging from the caves of Lascaux, decoration seems to pre-date our ability to plan, erect and decorate buildings. Every public building built in the ancient world is a representation of that society's ideological framework. If it is the ancient Egyptians, it is built around death and religion. In ancient Greece this was their Pantheon of Gods. The Romans equally built temples, but also public buildings for government, which were adorned with symbols of Roman power.

The point is, in most instances, the powers-that-be got to choose what symbols adorned the building, and the architects made a point of working in those decorations in support of these states. The ability to decide what decorations on the building was the expression of power itself.

Indeed, much of the history of architecture through the ages can be found as the expression of state power, or religious power.  We're interested in common dwellings of the ordinary people from an archaeological or anthropological viewpoint, but architecture is focused on these buildings built by state and religious powers. In turn, most architects in history were faceless servants of the state or religious bodies that sought to build these buildings. This is why we do not know much biographical data about architects of the ancient world. It was much more important that those buildings were built, and that they represented the right values, than who designed them.

All this hit a snag in the late Nineteenth Century with the advent of Art Nouveau. Art Nouveau emphasises ornamentation for its own sake and independent of state power or religious power. People in the burgeoning capitalist world could design their own decorations. Often, we refer to such decorations as kitsch. 'Kitsch' is an important concept here because, what the term does does is it disqualifies the decorations done by people that do not work for the state or for a religious body. The democratisation of artistic expression brings about Art Nouveau - and in turn, this brings about the democratisation of decoration.

Faced with this situation, the rise of Modernism banishes decoration from buildings. This goes hand in hand with modern abstract art, where people and things are no longer depicted with any semblance to reality. Instead the abstraction and abstract art pushes away the decorations giving rise to flat spaces, blank walls, and these spaces become expressly impersonal. The state invests a good deal into Modernism because through Modernism, the state can re-establish its power over the arts. It's a complicated topic at a glance but if you boil things down, the architect, as a hired artist on behalf of the state or the church and more recently the wealthy, can only exercise their skills at the behest of those entities. It is a rare architect who can buck this flow of money. Otherwise, their work is to do the bidding of the money.

This also means that in essence the vast majority of architecture is decorating of sheds, with modernism as an attempt to not decorate at all. The exception to this is Expressionism, whereby large parts of the decoration are given over to the denizens to do for themselves - but this kind of thinking remains largely obscured by the monoliths of Modernism and Classicism.

Dr. Z's great consternation is that because at its core, architecture is merely an extension of the state or the church or the wealthy to play elitist games through choosing the manner of decoration, architects have to be cultural elitists. The bone of contention for Dr. Z back in her architecture student days comes back to the simple fact that all of the course was tacitly supporting a culturally elitist position, denigrating the masses and what people might choose for themselves.

More pointedly, architecture really can be reduced to "decorated sheds" and "ducks". The vast majority of office buildings you see in any city are "decorated sheds", boxes containing functions but with different facades and presentation. Alternatively there are the less functional buildings that advertise their social importance through their appearance, which are "ducks". The Sydney Opera House is a prime example of a duck, where its form - for all its talk - is really not that conducive to it being an actual opera house, but carries with it great social import. In most part, the Modernist architectural dictum of "Form Follows Function" is a utilitarian wet dream, unfounded in the reality of the vast majority of buildings.
So why all the -isms?

All the -isms and the need to know them and to handle them as vernacular of aesthetics itself is actually cultural elitism in action. Thus Dr. Z surmises, architects trained by such institutions are doomed to be cultural elitists with a strong slant towards fascism. In turn, the great intellectual pretension of the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Sydney, is that it is somehow culturally important, but it can't hide its role as purveyors of ugly cultural prejudices. No wonder what they preached and what they taught as practice could not be reconciled, according to Dr. Z.

The flip side of this is giving over the power to decorate, back to the people. The denunciation of 'kitsch' is always done by those who resist the democratisation of taste and aesthetics. The true underlying contempt for 'kitsch' reveals a cultural prejudice that, should people opt to decorate things for themselves, it couldn't possibly be as valid as the decorations and ornamentations chosen by the state/church/wealthy. It totally ignores what the individual wants because the state/church/wealthy seek authority over people. It is by its very nature, imperative that the powerful discredit the democratised aesthetic found in small things.

The real reason why everybody's decorations gets dismissed is because the state (or church or the wealthy) didn't sanction it. To the vested powers, it's just a wildcat attempt at decoration. Such contempt directed at decorations done by people is everywhere. A woman in America decorates her house with medieval trappings imported from Europe. The photos draw comments from the self-appointed taste elite saying she has no taste, even though she exercised every bit of discernment in collecting the medieval fittings. It's deemed bad taste because she is no royalty to be appointing her abode with the trappings of European aristocracy from the middle ages, no matter how accurate and studied her attempts. The very quibbles we might have about taste, is actually a power play to control the extent of decorations. The people who criticise, implicitly understand that decorating one's house like a European castle is an appropriation of decorative authority that used to belong to kings and queens. This is why taste, contains the kind of fascism we see in 'The Devil Wears Prada'. It turns out that Fashion and Fascism really were conjoined twins.

And so Dr. Z sides with Expressionism, where at least the people immediately have a say in the decoration. The participation and contribution made by the people living in a space builds a narrative and thus meaning that is independent of the state, yet fully democratised. It also eliminates the commercial imperatives and lays open the expression of people's genuine aesthetic that is not imposed by the State or the Church or the wealthy.

At her work, Dr. Z has taken to the Expressionist idea of letting the inhabitants of the space decide. A certain wall is painted red, another purple, and another orange and so on. People bring in ornaments and objects with colours to match, and slowly but surely a wall section builds up with a narrative of people participating in the decoration. It is quite the project. Dr. Z laughs and says there is an architecture graduate at the same workplace, who puts it down to Dr. Z's nesting instinct gone awry, but in fact would have all the walls painted white. As a product of the same faculty Dr. Z understands all too well, the architecture graduate is voicing her opinion in support of an imaginary Modernist State, sanctioning her own aesthetics of blank, white walls without any decorations whatsoever.

So the next time you're at a party and an architect goes on about taste, and 'kitsch' and how terrible things are with one building or another, be sure to tell them their tastes built from education at some architecture faculty, is a Statist bit of fascism.

Degrees For Sale

What Happens When You Price Education Too Specifically

Yes, it's one of those Schadenfreude moments when you find out that there's been a solid trade in essay-writing for overseas students to pass courses. The problem runs in all sorts of directions so there is no wonder that the universities that have only just found out that the problem is endemic are not making any public comments. I can't imagine the University of Sydney would be up to offering any kind of insightful or helpful remarks - it's just not in its nature (like the scorpion in that story involving a frog and a scorpion)

Central to the problem is that if you sell a course for 'X' Dollars, then you've effectively made a commitment to give the buyer something in exchange for the price tag. The assumption in all this is that what is being sold is "an education".  The absurdity this is notion is brought forward when the said student then has to pass exams to prove they have learnt what was allegedly taught by the educators. It's clearly not like selling an object.

Worse still, the universities offering the course are biased, if not outright incentivised, towards failing students. If the student fails, then the university stands to gain even more money because the student has to pay again to do the course and try to pass. University admins in this country like to make friendly noises but it would be hard to navigate the alleged support being offered for foreign students. If one were a foreign student with little life skills and experience, the admin may be more intimidating than a source of assistance.

Worse still, the universities charge double what they charge Australian students for the privilege of studying in Australia. You can read that as the universities are raking it in, but you can also read that as the universities are selling out their reputations in exchange for money. This is pretty well understood by the students themselves; both Australian and overseas students know that the overseas students are specifically paying double because they're getting the name of the institution. I was told once by a local Law student that he welcomed this because the worse english writing skills of the foreign students pushed up his position in the assessments.

"What's not to like? They get to be Sydney Uni grads and I get to look better in my future job application," he grinned. That was 10years ago and he's done well for himself, she as proven correct.
The point is, the overseas students aren't meant to be the good students the universities build their reputations upon. They're meant to be the cash cows.

Imagine your lot then as a foreign student from a country where English is not the first language. You're over the barrel for a lot of money; if you fail, you're up for even more money when you try to re-take the course; and the university course wants you to write a bloody essay in English no less. While I don't condone cheating, you can see why there would be a demand for somebody to write the essay for these students.

Given all that, I don't see how the universities can be too loud about the fact that foreign students pay for help to get their assignments in. It certainly doesn't look like it's supposed to work any other way. No wonder they haven't discussed it out in the open and kept a lid on the topic for years.

"You Gotta Pass Me, I Paid For This"

The flip-side for students in courses paying expensive fees an going into debt is the expectation that they should get something for their money. The unfortunate consequence of that at a certain university in Canberra is that nobody fails. Nobody fails because if an academic should fail somebody, they open themselves to being queried by the student "but I paid for this. You have to pass me." This would lead to a lot of embarrassment for the institution, so nobody dares fail anybody in the context of fee paying students. Things sure were different back when fees were low. Students took your lumps in accordance with their efforts, and it was a lot more honest.

You sort of wonder how institutions really feel about handing out passes to students whose efforts would have not made the grade in a more honest marking context. You sort of wonder how long the institutions can maintain their reputations if they keep pushing out subpar graduates because they took their money. People are rabbiting on about how the commercialised cheating service of essay-writing is a problem but deeper down, the institutions have a lot to ask of themselves as to how they got into this mess. One would imagine the honest conversations are fairly strained and pained.

Then again, I'm happy it's not my immediate problem. Certainly the prospect of raising fees for tertiary education is not going to help alleviate the problem.

The Cost Of Stupid Life Decisions

For People Trying To Talk Down Free Education 

Life's weird in the tricks it plays. I got free education at tertiary for a time. I did two and a half years of med school and quit, back in the mid-80s. I realised half way through my first clinical year that I wasn't exactly cut out to help people; I also realised I was ideologically at odds with my colleagues, and refused to change my views. It was enough to drive me out the school. Because med school in those days really crammed their hours, in the two and a half years I was there, I would've spent about as much time as a normal Bachelor of science in those days. I have nothing to show for those days except that which I retained from things I learned. That's the way it goes with most education, I guess.

Still, I don't regret quitting because if you have anything else to do in life, you probably should pick that over being a doctor. Medicine, more than any other profession I've observed, should be practiced by those who cannot - and will not - do anything else. Conversely, if there's a choice to do anything other than being a doctor, you should do it because doctor-ing requires a certain single-mindedness and an understanding of that single-mindedness that allows one to be a good doctor. All of which is to say, if you're not a good doctor, then there's no point being a doctor.

When it came to quitting, I had to go talk to the student officer, who was alarmed and appalled because it took him completely by surprise that somebody would quit half way through the course. Most people who quit, quit early. Nobody waited until third year in the dead middle of the course. What he didn't know was that I had considerable parental pressure to be there. He didn't exactly make it easy. He berated and insulted me, and he resorted to putting a money value on it. He told me my time had cost the government $300,000, and I was pissing that down the drain.

I still remember the look on his face, flushed red, practically yelling at me. He was in his forties, horn-rimmed glasses and white shirt and dark blue tie. He looked like a character straight out of the early seasons of 'Mad Men'. I remember thinking, "What has that $300,000 to do with with me now?"

It was the faculty's 'opportunity cost' in investing in me instead of another candidate who might have wanted to really be there. For me, it was an expensive bill I ran up on some tab for having to figure out what I wasn't cut out to do. He was trying to pin it on to me as a reason for guilt and the need to stay. I wonder if he'd thought through the ramification - that even if I'd stayed, I wouldn't practice medicine, so the next $300,000 the faculty would spend on me would be good money after bad, one huge sunk cost. I didn't exactly think about things in those terms then, but I recall thinking, "how's it going to help anybody - me, him or the faculty - if I stayed on?"

I imagine that he didn't get free education under Whitlam's reforms. So he was appalled that I would walk out. I didn't get it at the time, because I was an entitled little shit; but it was a lot more complicated than that. I was failing. I was failing because I missed time from an ankle injury; I then had a bad bout of flu and missed exams, and then got penalised. The faculty seemed to delight in telling me I had blown it. I had just had a bad breakup and was totally messed up. I was not interested in the career let alone in helping sick people, I had discovered in the hospital wards. If I had to repeat the year, I was going to drop into the year that was doing a 6 year Medical course, which would mean I would be at the faculty for 7 years. That was 7 years for a degree that I knew I wasn't going to use. If I were going to get out, then I just had to get out right then and not 5 years further down the track, just for the piece of paper. (and I look back and shudder because in the end I'd finished my 3year AFTRS degree roughly around the time I would have graduated, with a 1year stint at the ABC as well).

To this day it remains one of the most important decisions of my life. Because of that decision, I got the most important life education in the things that followed. It is unfortunate that it took the faculty $300,000 to find out I wasn't going to be any kind of doctor. It reminds me of 'Moneyball' when they signed Billy Beane as a top draft pick and it didn't work out, although the faculty would be a bit too dense in understanding that analogy (and I would be praising myself too much in likening myself to Billy Beane). A good mark in the HSC is not 'due diligence' enough in selecting candidates for Med School. If the system is deluded in thinking this is sufficient, it gets everything it deserves.

The faculty did very badly out of it, if indeed the cost was $300,000. But they did do me over. Instead of putting me down as "withdrawn without fail" as agreed, they put me down as 'fail' - which removed any chance I would have returning to study anything else at the tertiary level under the UCAC system at the time. So the life lesson there is, "don't piss off the powerful". Since then I have been very suspicious of universities in this country as a result. I sure as hell don't buy into the self-allocated esteem these institutions hand themselves. I am still largely hostile in sentiment towards the University of Sydney and its Faculty of Medicine (may they all rot in hell). If the place was on fire, I wouldn't cross Missenden Rd to piss on it.
And even then, and even after my terrible experience at the University of Sydney, I stand for free education. Think on that for a moment!

Studying at Med School for me, was a big mistake. The mooted sum of $300,000 for that bad decision was a costly mistake, but I don't think that sum rests entirely with me. And in that sense I would posit that saddling enormous student debts is a very bad thing for society. I didn't arrive at my $300,000 decision lightly. I suffered and agonised greatly and it was in the final count that I had to push forward with it. And if the faculty punished me for it, well, that's life too. But if students are shouldered with this debt on the front end, they won't be able to make the decision I made; and I would contend it is important that people make ethical decisions when it comes to important things like this.

I have no doubt that I would have made critical errors as an uncaring, unmotivated, lousy doctor; I have no doubt I might have let somebody die on my watch by mistake or incompetence. I have no doubt that the craptacular efforts of my endeavours in medicine would have cost somebody much more than $300,000. People ought to be able to make decisions about their lives - important decisions - without getting penalised with money or encumbered with ridiculous debt. Those are the decisions that are going to contribute positively to society. No matter what the man in the horn-rimmed glasses says, you can't put a price on that. In turn, one should be very frightened of the doctor who is only there because he couldn't get out because the money was too much. I can tell you from first hand experience that most doctors are social idiots, but they are well-motivated social idiots. You wouldn't want to put your lives in the hands of anybody worse than a well-motivated social idiot.

News That's Fit To Punt - 15/Sep/2012

Q.E 3 - Infinity

The biggest news of the week for me wasn't the storming of the US Embassy in Libya but Ben Bernanke saying he's just going to leave the tap on until stuff gets better. Indefinitely.

''We are trying to create more employment … the tools we have involve affecting financial asset prices,'' Bernanke said at a press conference after the Fed's announcement. Companies felt there was not enough demand for their products, and if the value of homes, shares and other assets improved, Americans would be ''more willing to go out and provide the demand'', he said.

The open-ended nature of the stimulus is one measure of how hard the Fed is now pushing. Another is the fact that it has softened a focus on containing inflation that has dominated central bank thinking for decades.

Bernanke insisted yesterday that the Fed was not intentionally trying to raise inflation to a point where it more aggressively depreciated America's daunting $US16 trillion debt load, an option that has been there from the moment the global crisis began.

It was, however, ''not going to [be] premature in removing policy accommodation'', he said, adding: ''Even after the economy starts to recover more quickly, even after the unemployment rate begins to move down more decisively, we're not going to rush to begin to tighten policy. We're going to give it some time to make sure the recovery is well established.''

The success or failure of the ''do what it takes'' quantitative easing strategy that is being rolled out on either side of the Atlantic depends on whether companies and individuals respond. In the US at least, the capacity to do so has been demonstrated before.

That's some pretty drastic tap turning. They're already at 0% interests rates, and committed to that for a long time to come. now they're going to spend 40billion a month buying crap paper, printing money to do it. Tea Party types are going to have a stroke. Gold investors are going to have jism-spasms.  Commodities are going to rise again and save Twggy Forrest.

I've had a little l think about what all this means because since the GFC, central bankers and treasury officials from around the world have done this thing of trying to stimulate the economy. This includes things like the TARP bail outs as well as the Rudd Government's big stimulus package which staved off a nose dive into a depression (and the more time goes on, we have to give him credit for that decision lone).

The problem is, at this point we're having to wonder about the 'moral hazard' that was decried at the time by certain people who felt that bailing out bankers was one thing but bailing out everybody was a terrible thing because they might just keep doing what they were doing that got us all into the mess. Note, they weren't as hard on the bankers as they were on socialist governments that just gave out the money for people to pay down their credit card debts.

But 4 years removed from that chaotic time, the great danger seems to have been the possibility (or even probability) that asset prices might go into reverse and we have a deflationary spiral. The big fear, as it were, seems to be that if everybody ends up being foreclosed upon by their banks and are forced to sell their houses, then there would be all these homeless families who owe more money to the banks even after being forced out of their homes. And this seems to be the scenario everybody is furiously trying to avoid, both over in the USA and over here in Australia.

So we come back to the moral hazard bit. Just as a token of understanding, RBA boss Glenn Stevens was saying earlier in the year that it wasn't acceptable for people to be assuming that property only goes up; and yet we have governments around the world totally invested in making sure they never come down. You'd be stupid not to buy into the Property Ponzi scheme that gets bailed at the first sign of a crack. Nobody is willing to give up their houses. Should they be made to by market forces? It seems the Federal reserve in the USA says no and, - this is the amazing bit - What they're saying is that they're going to take the value off the house by stripping the value out of the price tag on your house.

Yes, you can still keep your $700,000 price tag on your house; you won' be foreclosed; but that $700,000 won't be worth the $700,000 you bought it at, because we're printing money to destroy the value faster than before. And it won't show up in inflation figures because people won't sell their houses often enough to make it matter.

In the long run, the property bubble in the first world racked up a certain sum of unrealistic prices, which has to be wound back. Rather than let the deflation give back those prices, they're going to switch on inflation so that the dollar value diminishes to match the real value.the point is, going forwards, there is nothing to say that Real Estate is a better investment than shares or bonds because they're going to inflate away any gains you make beyond the market. It's probably a good thing if it blunts property speculation, but judging from the news this week, overseas investors are piling into Sydney Real Estate, most likely because of the moral hazard or actual lack thereof.

Somewhere Steven Keane is laughing and crying.

Eying The Charging Bull

Are things really that bad in America right now? Don't look now but the Dow Jones finished at 13,593.57, marking a 5 year high. by which we mean, it's the highest it's been since the GFC started 5 years ago.

US stocks rose for a fourth straight session on Friday to close out the week at nearly five-year highs after the Federal Reserve took bold action to spur the economy, a move that could keep equities buoyed in the coming months.
Shares of Apple Inc, the largest US company by market value, ended at an all-time peak, and Exxon Mobil , the second biggest, hit a four-year high.

Equities are in a run-up that has pushed the S&P 500 to end higher for four consecutive months. The extended advance has come mainily from actions by Europe's and the United States' central banks to keep interest rates low and stimulate their struggling economies.

The Fed said Thursday that it would keep up its aggressive bond-buying until unemployment falls. Chairman Ben Bernanke said he wanted to see a convincing improvement in the economy that could deliver sustainable job creation.
Bernanke's comments are "going to create an artificial floor on the market, meaning that we could see higher prices over time," said Paul Nolte, managing director at Dearborn Partners in Chicago. "Any correction that we get will be no more than a few per centage points."

The Dow and the S&P 500 both closed at their highest levels since December 2007, while the Nasdaq ended at the highest since November 2000. The small-cap Russell 2000 index closed at the highest since April 2011.

The Dow Jones industrial average ended up 53.51 points, or 0.40 per cent, to 13,593.37. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index closed up 5.78 points, or 0.40 per cent, to 1,465.77. The Nasdaq Composite Index gained 28.12 points, or 0.89 per cent, to 3,183.95.

For the week, the Dow rose 2.2 per cent, the S&P climbed 1.9 per cent and the Nasdaq added 1.5 per cent.
The S&P is now just 6 per cent below its all-time closing high of 1,565.15 despite a relatively weak economy and economic risks around the world.

The Dow might set an all time high by the end of the year. The same thing goes with all the other American indices. This might all be 'irrational exuberance' as Alan Greenspan called the 2009 rally, but he doesn't seem to be saying it now.

I know there's a 'Fiscal cliff' coming later this year, but that is why Bernanke opened the sluice gates and let it rip. When it crashes over the all time highs, this is likely the start of a new bull run in US equities.

Lining Up For A Beating
Back  here in Australia, there's been another bit of Rudd-pronouncements and a round of "is-he-won't-he". This time Simon Crean managed not to go out there and slander Kevin Rudd. The election last weekend yielded some interesting results, all food for thought and the main dish on the food-for-thought degustation is that the ALP is likely to get bollocked hard in NSW at the next Federal election.

A second backbencher from western Sydney, John Murphy, spoke up. Murphy is especially vulnerable. He holds his seat of Reid by a margin of 2.6 per cent.

He agreed with Swan that the ALP performance had been ''patchy'' and cited two contrasting local experiences. The Labor mayor of Canada Bay council, Angelo Tsirekas, managed to win a 10 per cent swing in his favour.

But in Auburn, where Labor had long held an unassailable dominance, the party had been outpolled by the Liberals by a margin of two to one.
If that's not an alarm, Murphy said, I don't know what is. We've got to take notice and get into these communities, he urged. Canada Bay and Auburn fall within Murphy's federal electoral boundaries.

Swan offered a reassurance that things would turn around but again offered no strategy. A third MP, Stephen Jones, echoed the concerns of Hayes and Murphy.

It was a moment of ironic tang for some in the room. Some caucus members remembered hearing Julia Gillard justify her coup against Kevin Rudd by saying that she was not so much troubled by the Rudd government's difficulties but by the fact that he seemed to have no plan to get out of difficulty.

Well, that would be painful in the caucus room, but really, this moment was going to come on the back of February's big leadership spill that was supposed to put paid to Kevin Rudd and allow Julia Gillard to win the electorate. Except the electorate isn't listening. I don't mean any disrespect, but I will continue to say that I won't vote for Julia Gillard because basically if the ALP was happy to risk the future of Australia in the hands of Tony Abbott, then I am not doing anything worse by taking the exact same risk, by donkey voting for the Lower House at the next Federal Elections (I'm voting for the Australian Sex Party in the Senate).

It doesn't matter what Julia Gillard has done since February or will do on to the next election. The reasons for me not voting for her have been writ in history. The ALP can't unfuck that goat.

Speaking Of Terrible Tony...

Student politics on campus is an often silly, shitty, horrible, bizarre thing. You always wonder what the storm in a teacup is, but it's always nice to know that it can have real life repercussions, for 35 years one from some SRC arguy-bargy at the University of Sydney's SRC, we've been hearing what a prick and a hostile misogynist  Tony Abbott was at university.

Barbara Ramjan beat him hands down. She was of the left but her work as the SRC's welfare officer made her a popular figure on the campus. The night her victory was declared, the SRC offices saw wild scenes of bad-boy behaviour: flashing, mooning, jeering and abuse. Abbott watched all this. His loss was a very public disappointment. He approached Ramjan. She thought he was coming over to congratulate her. "But no, that's not what he wanted," she recalls. "He came up to within an inch of my nose and punched the wall on either side of my head." Thirty-five years later she recalls with cold disdain what he did. "It was done to intimi­date." Abbott tells me he has no recollection of the incident: "It would be profoundly out of character had it occurred."

Pure ugliness of his character on full display. Anyway, in the wake of that publication, we've seen a few other people pop up and corroborate the account and Christopher Pyne - the evil leprechaun of the right - say it's all water under the bridge and not important enough to be talking about.

It took Tony Abbott a full week to hide from the mushroom cloud, after which he emerged and denied it. Well it is a well known rule of blame-assignation that "he who denied it supplied it" so it must have been him to cause that stink on campus back in 1977. Then he finally emerged and  said a Labor dirt unit dug it up.

Fronting the media yesterday for the first time in almost a week, Mr Abbott sought to reconcile his previous statements that he could not recollect the incident and that it never happened. ''How can you recall something that never happened?'' he said.
He did admit to another allegation - that after Ms Ramjan became the SRC chairman and asked to be known as chairperson, he called her ''chairthing''.
''There were lots of silly, embarrassing, childish things done in student politics and I wasn't immune to that,'' he said.
Mr Abbott denied the wall-punching allegation and claimed the matter had been dredged up by a Labor dirt unit. ''There is a Labor dirt unit and it's feeding information to people left, right and centre,'' he said.
Ms Ramjan, who has been telling the story for years, told the Herald it was ''absolutely'' true and she rejected outright that Labor put her up to it. ''I have never been a member of a political party in my life,'' she said. ''He's a bully.''

I don't doubt that he is a bully for a moment. It's nice to know that student politics is of some consequence, when it comes back to bite Tony Abbott in the metaphorical arse - yes, the very same one he was hedging on offering Tony Windsor in exchange for being Prime Minister.

News That's Fit To Punt

About Time The Wider Public Knew About This

I have a friend who is in the business of consulting for governments and their urban planning. Over the years my friend has lamented that the best policy advice on the table by various parties to the government would get overlooked in favor of the policies that led to more and more private toll roads. My friend has told me that quite often, the business interests of such corporations as Macquarie Infrastructure Group would simply trump the sensible options. They would do this by inflating forecasts of just how much the public is likely to use such roads, and essentially lie and cheat to get their way.

The failures of the Cross-City Tunnel and Lane Cove Tunnel as businesses then, have come as no surprise whatsoever to my friend, and in turn I haven't been surprised by them in the least bit either. In fact I have taken some glee in seeing the absolute 'fucked-upt-itude' (how else do we describe such ineptitude of titanic proportions?) of these endeavors. Now, the SMH has this piece - It's worth reading all of it.

Three years ago, a 75 year-old academic from Sydney University, Dr John Goldberg, issued a paper claiming Australia's toll road companies were unsustainable unless the Government continued to prop them up with subsidies under its infrastructure bond scheme.

Goldberg was rubbished by the operators Transurban and Macquarie. How could all the broking analysts, institutional investors and other experts be wrong, and this bloke right? PricewaterhouseCoopers, auditor and consultant to most of the stapled infrastructure structures, was also wheeled out as an expert to debunk Goldberg's contention that the toll road model was flawed.

It got worse for Goldberg. Without telling him, the University of Sydney's Vice Chancellor Gavin Brown caved in to a demand from Macquarie to disassociate the University from Goldberg's work.

Documents obtained under Freedom of Information laws show a request to Brown from the former bank's lobbyist and Federal MP Warwick Smith: ''We request that the University of Sydney publicly disassociate itself from Dr Goldberg's paper and the grossly irresponsible remarks he made on the ABC's 7.30 Report on October 20, 2005''.

Brown duly issued a release putting distance between the uni and its academic, an honorary associate in the School of Architecture, Design Science and Planning on the grounds that he was honorary and not on salary any more.

Goldberg pressed on with his papers, predicting Sydney's Cross City Tunnel and the Lane Cove Tunnel projects would implode. They have. Overly bullish traffic forecasts and extreme debt loads were to blame, as Goldberg had forecast.

His thesis was that the projects' traffic forecasts were structured to fit with the financial model, not the other way around.

I don't know Dr. John Goldberg. He sounds like a fair and scientific minded man. It also seems like he is a man of proper convictions. It pains me to read that the person who presented the honest truth of how badly constructed these projections were, then got shafted by the University of Sydney through what can only be described as corporate interference is disgusting - but "Sydney U", is not exactly above it. More on that later. There's more:

And how's this for a response on oil price as a variable to consider over the next five decades?: "Oil price assumptions make up part of vehicle operating cost assumptions. Vehicle operating costs include many factors, such as tyres, servicing, fuel, depreciation and debt servicing etc - oil prices are not a separable assumption.

"That is a departure from the other operators whose line is, yes, oil price assumptions were factored into our traffic model but, no, we won't be revealing to the public what our oil price assumptions are because they don't matter. The price of petrol, you see, doesn't have much of an effect on motorists' behaviour and therefore toll revenues. ''Inelastic,'' apparently.

MIG in the cross-hairs
Nobody appears to have told investment bank Goldman Sachs, though, as a piece of research from last Friday on Macquarie Infrastructure Group's latest traffic numbers downgraded its recommendation thanks to ``the impact of higher petrol prices ... (and) a slowing economy''.

''Even the jewel in MIG's crown, H407, has felt the impact of higher petrol, prices having now recorded two consecutive months of negative traffic growth (-2.2% and -3.4% respectively), '' said the report.

The Toronto 407 is reputed to be the best infrastructure asset in the world, a massive highway with no regulatory constraints on raising tolls.

In its report on the same data, ''Breaking the Myth'', Citigroup wrote

''The recent under-performance from MIG's assets has broken the myth that toll-roads are largely immune to economic slowdowns.''

Macquarie Equities research too talked about the impact of ``price elasticity''. Most of the tolls had been jacked up and motorists, hit by the petrol price too, were apparently fed up.

The oil price is now $US100 above its level of three years ago. It is time the operators and Governments come out and say what their oil price assumptions are. We are talking about long-term leases here. In the case of Brisconnections, which floats in a few weeks, the concession lasts for 45 years.

In the absence of full disclosure it is tempting to suspect that a government could play fast and loose with taxpayers and ignore the long-term consequences by getting an infrastructure project up and defraying the costs to future generations.

That last bit has happened already, according to my friend. The oil price factors are not the only part of the total bogus projections used to nudge governments into making dodgy , shonky, lousy decisions. The projections of just how many cars *could* travel on the Cross-City Tunnel - what is known s 'Tunnel Capcity' - seemed to fall on deaf ears.

My friend said, "Look Art, it's like they just don't understand the notion of 'Tunnel Capacity'. Either that, or they actively don't want to hear about it. How do you explain this to the minister?"

I replied, "You tell him, 'Imagine you're naked on your bed, with your wife. And she's naked too. You have an erect penis, she has a wet vagina. You're both raring ready to have sex, but there's a problem: there's another naked guy in the room and he wants to place his erect penis into her vagina too. But she only has one vagina. Do you understand Tunnel Capacity now?'"
Anyway... I doubt my friend used that line of analogy on the minister.

What nobody in the press seems to have twigged to and my friend has been telling anybody and everybody who would listen for like 15 years now, is that those 800million to 1.2 billion dollar budgets could have/should have been spent on public transportation infrastructure. Instead, it was spent on making Macquarie Bank executives rich.

And now that oil prices have suddenly shot up to levels that these idiots did not predict and people are suddenly streaming towards Public Transport, they're saying they have a crisis. Of course they're having a crisis: they were always going to have a crisis given how faulty their reasoning had been when they went ahead with all these dumb, white-elephant roads.

And just how did they get here? By ignoring people like Dr. John Goldberg, and people like my friend. So much for common sense in this state.

More On Sydney 'Pond Scum' University
Now that we know that the University of Sydney prostitutes its good name... uh.., make that just 'name', we find that there's another article on just how crooked and greedy the Slut School of the Southern Hemisphere actually is:

Sydney Uni, meanwhile, has 50 per cent more students, four times as much building space, 10 times the campus space, half a dozen ovals (instead of none) and exponentially more gardenia bushes than UTS will ever have. Not to mention the adjoining park and pool. With it goes all the confidence (and perhaps pitfalls) of old money compared with new.

It also has several new buildings - IT, law and the catchily named Jane Foss Russell student centre (be thankful it's not her married name, Barff) with its clunky, pea-green footbridge. Not bad buildings, but guaranteed, once the new native-nazi landscape is complete, to feel more exurban office park than dreaming spires - the global campus look du jour, a bland-leading-the-bland, death-by-vanillacide catering to kids whose primary world experience is screen-mediated.

And so to Sydney's campus cravings. Apart from its main campus, it already has eight others, from Camden to downtown. But it wants more. Eveleigh, where it proposes 160,000 sqm of built space up to 18 storeys; Harold Park, if and when; Callan Park, slated for 100,000 sqm in four precincts - plus another three ovals.

This is already agreed. But the Callan Park Act bans building outside existing footprints and any for-profit education. To amend it, the argument is crucial. It hinges on Sydney's "demonstrated record, expertise and interest in heritage conservation". A year ago, maybe. But to see those fabulous sandstone gothics now, stripped of their evocative ivy-league habitat, left naked among the pitiless eucalypts, makes you wonder. How far will higher learning go to prove it is really just business?

Fucking hell, it's nauseating.