'Eye In The Sky'

Ethical Guilt

My good friend GS from my AFTRS days got tickets to see a screening of 'Eye in the Sky'. It came via the Ethics Centre, which is an interesting body that advises the ADF and their personnel ("except the Special Forces", they said cheerily). Naturally it's a movie that covers the ground of the ethics of drone strikes.

Yes, I know, it's a contentious topic and my own views are probably totally counter to those people who want ethics front and centre of military operations. Still, it is an interesting area for the sake of arguing things and pointing at the culpable like it is a game going out of fashion, so the film does intrigue us greatly.

Here is the obligatory spoiler alert.



What's Good About It

It's a pretty simply film and the style doesn't stretch to anything we might call artistic. Stylistically, it is a very meat-and-potatoes sort of film making. It's a little bit like directing by numbers - and believe me, that's not necessarily the good bit, but the unadorned style allowed the story to be told simply. That is good because the topic has layers of complexity that needs explaining and the film does a fairly good job of going through those angles.

The performances are a bit cheesy, but in most part it sort of looks like an ensemble cast. In reality none of the big names have a chance to interact in the same space, so there is an even more disjointed quality to the scenes being cut together. The best that could be said about it is that it sort of hangs together.

What's Bad About It

It's a very hamfisted sort of script. The third or fourth time a minister or a department secretary seeks a higher authority to okay a drone strike, you find yourself losing patience with the due process and due diligence in striking with a drone. It's not exactly a thriller as the film is billed. It's more like an ethics workshop for military and government people.

Also, the headline cast are a bit unbelievable. Helen Mirren - as good as she is - is way too old to be playing a colonel. Alan Rickman sort of resorts to his schtick at several points, and Aaron Paul reprises his teary-eyed acting we're so familiar from 'Breaking Bad'. Because we're overly familiar with these actors, it's hard to see the characters for the actors playing them. It happens with a lot of films anyway, but it's worse in this film because these actors are confined to their spaces for most of the film. It really becomes noticeable that you're watching a very stagey sort of thing instead a work of cinema.

It comes in second best to Season 4 of 'Homeland' which tackles exactly this kind of problem, but they have more time to go into the ins and outs of why they might try a drone strike, and how it is contextualised into the rest of the war on terror. This film really only wants to talk about drone strikes, in the absence of anything else or any other options or parameters for prosecuting a war.

What's Interesting About It

The drone strike issue has been percolating for some time. The most vociferous argument against it is that the collateral damage these strikes creates andengenders the next wave of terror that needs to be fought, so it is uneconomical as well as unethical. The film posits the classical "what about the little girl" argument front and centre to the story so there is no mistaking the filmmakers were champion at the bit to argue something about the ethics of drone strikes. At the end of the film, you're not sure if they've really made a case in favour of them or not. Maybe it's very British, it's quite noncommittal about its subject matter even though the drone strike does happen.

The film would have us believe there are a lot of procedural things they go through to authorise a strike and so many boxes need to be ticked before they can launch a drone strike. It spends a good deal of time going back and forth between different levels of the bureaucracy as well as the elected officials and military hierarchy. In the case presented by the film, it boils down to a fairly utilitarian argument of if it is ever okay to kill a little girl in order to save a hypothetical 80 or 100 other people.

A good deal of hyperventilating argumentation is made about the nature of the utility of striking the target as part of the strategy against terrorism as well as the simply numerical comparison of potential victims. What the film understates is that by the time you have to decide on whether a drone strike is appropriate, you've had to discard all other options to get to that point of consternation.

Consider this chain of possibilities. If you could simply arrest a British citizen, you'd send the police. If they were leaving, you can use customs to stop them. If they are holed up with guns, you'd still send a SWAT team rather than a drone strike. If they were in a foreign country, you might lean on that country to do the arresting. And if they have access to guns to shoot back, you might have to send in the local military. It's really when the high value targets are in one place that is inaccessible to friendly ground forces that a drone strike becomes a necessity.

Avoiding Collateral Damage

Collateral Damage is a recent term. They didn't exactly worry about collateral damage too much in the Vietnam War and not a whole lot of wars were fought by Americans in the 80s except an expedition to Granada and Panama. It was during the Gulf War that the term came into public consciousness as people started to worry about the effects of carpet bombing whole cities.

Yes, carpet bombing was a big feature of American military operations during the Twentieth Century. By 1990, public opinion had shifted greatly towards the innocent civilians who were killed or injured in war, that levelling cities with carpet bombing became less desirable. And so it is on this extension line where the Americans began championing and exhibiting the accuracy of smart bombs. As technology developed, they devised unmanned aviation with smart bombs, controlled remotely, and this is your basic recipe for a drone strike.

The cutting edge of military technology exercised by the greatest state on the planet (at least for military strikes) is capable of dropping a bomb on any part of the planet through remote means. This is an extraordinary capacity. It totally leaves behind the kind of indiscriminate tactic of carpet bombings. It reduces the collateral damage and casualty of bystanders from the order of hundreds thousands to ten or twenty. Yet the film is somehow really worried about the casualty of one.

It's alarming, actually, that the political office holders in the film prevaricate the most. They claim it would hand a propaganda victory to the terrorists if the little girl is killed. One after the other they exhibit a lack of resolve and failure to understand just how they got to where they are. The hypocrisy on display is quite unnerving. One would think that people who climb to high offie would understand that things that come into their purview would be military operations, and military operations would involve death and destruction and collateral damage.

The issue shouldn't be do we not proceed because there is an innocent bystander, but should we really be exercising war machines that make responsibility more vague than what is on a battlefield. It appears, the higher up the chain of command one goes, the lower the intellectual courage to tangle with the meaning of military options becomes. In this film's context, the bravest people are not the ones giving orders but those who carry out the orders entrusting the system to protect them from liability. It's a little like a game of bureaucratic chicken more than a thriller.

The Commitment To Hypocrisy

This then might be the worst aspect of western governments that the film captures. The constant need to be seen to be doing the right thing in the right way outweighs the objectives as defined by the same people. The moral and ethical dilemma presented in the film isn't a product of a difficult choice foisted upon the leadership by the enemy. It is all a result of their own choosing.

When people say asymmetric warfare, they often talk about the terrorists working in dastardly terrorist ways as opposed to proper state militaries that are bound by things like the Geneva Convention and protocols like rules of engagement. What it overlooks is that the people most bound by the Geneva Convention and protocols for rules of engagement are those states with the greatest capacity for military destruction.

It's a bit like the terrorists are marathon runners in a race, front running the race. The Western governments enter the race, but they want to do it in a Formula One car. The self-imposed condition is that they have to start last at the end of the running group, and have to pass all the runners without running anybody over or breaking the speed limit. If you are the front runner, the Formula One car coming up from behind you is a joke. Even with the self-imposed rules that limit it to certain actions and a gross under-utilisation of its true capacity, the competition is asymmetric in the extreme. There is nothing admirable about the self-imposed conditions of the West to the other runners. They're strictly there to make it look a little more like a fair race when it is eminently not. Yet this is the kind of conditional hypocrisy we enjoy so much in the West. And that's where the central drama of this film lies.

The logical, and utilitarian argument for processes is built into the drone strike option. That is to say, the Mr. Spock credo of "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" is built into the entire edifice that allows the drones to operate. We have military organisations and military treaties and coalitions to ensure collective security of most citizens; we have a trained force that can apply state sanctioned violence to this end; we have weapons that an do great damage, but opt to build weapons systems with ever greater accuracy to ensure ever smaller collateral damage; we have unmanned vehicles to limit the damage to our personnel; we have intelligence systems to pinpoint targets as accurately as possible. All along the way, the utilitarian argument has been made and put into use to build the steps that leads to a drone in the sky with a guided missile ready to hit its target. We simply don't get there without a long chain of utilitarian decisions.

To then argue that perhaps utilitarianism isn't the right way to go about things is not only infuriating to watch on screen, it strains credulity. Is it that the writers and directors and producers of this film are somehow ignorant and stupid, or is it an accurate reflection of our political classes, in which case we must ask if we are governed by ignorant idiots? It's vexing and perplexing. Nonetheless it is made worse by the continuous commitment to hypocrisy as the highest calling in western politics.
It's really not thrilling. It's excruciatingly tedious.

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

Taro Aso's Lecture Revisited

I'm a bit amazed to read this in the SMH today.

"There's an acknowledgment, even in the investor community, that monetary policy is kind of running out of ammo," said Thomas Costerg, economist at Standard Chartered Bank in New York. "The focus is now shifting to fiscal policy." 

 That's where it should have been all along, according to Modern Money Theory. The 20-something-year-old doctrine, on the fringes of economic thought, is getting a hearing with an unconventional take on government spending in nations with their own currency.
Such countries, the MMTers argue, face no risk of fiscal crisis. They may owe debts in, say, dollars or yen - but they're also the monopoly creators of dollars or yen, so can always meet their obligations. For the same reason, they don't need to finance spending by collecting taxes, or even selling bonds. 

The long-run implication of that approach has many economists worried.
"I have no problem with deficit spending," said Aneta Markowska, chief US economist at Societe Generale in New York. "But this idea of the government printing money - unlimited amounts of money - and running unlimited, infinite deficits, that could become unhinged pretty quickly." 

To which MMT replies: No one's saying there are no limits. Real resources can be a constraint - how much labor is available to build that road? Taxes are an essential tool, to ensure demand for the currency and cool the economy if it overheats. But the MMTers argue there's plenty of room to spend without triggering inflation. 

The US did dramatically loosen the purse strings after the 2008 crisis, posting a deficit of more than 10 percent of gross domestic product the next year. That's since been trimmed to 2.6 per cent of GDP, or $US439 billion, last year. 

The Congressional Budget Office expects the gap to widen in the coming decade, as retiring baby-boomers saddle the government with higher social security and health-care costs. That's the risk often cited by fiscal hawks. 

Mainstream doves accept the long-term caveat. But they point to record-low bond yields and say investors aren't worried about deficits right now, so why not spend?

Pretty amazing how that is seen as 'radical' economics but that's the same argument Taro Aso was mounting. The Sydney Morning Herald is way behind the curve on this notion - heck they're even behind this blog.

The article also makes the point that conflating household debt and government debt leads to much confusion - like it did with Tony Abbott's garbled wagon government debt when the real debt problem in Australia lies with the private sector debt.

Temperature Spike 

This is not good news.

Global temperatures leapt in February, lifting warming from pre-industrial levels to beyond 1.5 degrees, and stoking concerns about a "climate emergency".
Unusual warmth in waters off northern Australia also prompted an alert by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Authority about the risk of widespread coral bleaching. 

According to NASA analysis, average temperatures last month were 1.35 degrees above the norm for the 1951-1980 period.

They smashed the previous biggest departure from the average - set only in the previous month - by 0.21 degrees. 

"This is really quite stunning ... it's completely unprecedented," said Stefan Rahmstorf, from Germany's Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research and a visiting professorial fellow at the University of NSW, noting the NASA data as reported by the Wunderground blog.

So it appears we've run out of headroom for the denial. The rest of the article doesn't offer much good news either.

Nobody's Talking About North Korea

Philip K. Dick said reality is that which won't go away when you close your eyes. When you think about that, most things reality that would qualify would be not-so-nice things. Like North Korea. The rogue nation has basically announced it can build nukes the size small enough to mount on a missile - and seeing that their Rodong missies can get out to the Pacific, it puts South Korea and Japan well within its range. This has resulted in Japan and South Korea calling in anti-missile armaments from the USA, but it has also ratcheted up the tension with North Korea.

So... there's that reality that gets under-reported here in Australia. In that light, here's a bit of interesting analysis here.

Now, after repeated and renewed provocations by the North, the gig is up for Abe and his two-track approach with the North. Last month, Japan imposed retaliatory sanctions on the North following its missile test - staged as "satellite launch".

Pyongyang responded by terminating the inquiry on the abductions, effectively cutting the lifeline Abe had worked so hard to establish. The hostility between the two sides has increased even more after the subsequent imposition of new UNSC sanctions and the attention-seeking news release by the North highlighting their advances on miniaturisation.

In retrospect, it was not too hard to see this end - as both tracks of Japan's policy on North Korea consistently overlapped despite Tokyo's attempts to decouple them.
In fact, Tokyo previously pushed for this intersection as evidenced by the inclusion of abduction discussions on the sidelines of the now moribund Six Party Talks.

With denuclearisation talks effectively dead, the Abe government gambled with a more risky two-track approach to North Korea, by hedging between a hawkish line on Pyongyang's missile and weapons of mass destruction programmes and a more dove-ish approach on the abductions.

This gamble has failed. As tensions continue to increase on the Korean peninsula, it is time now for Abe to cut his losses - at least for the time being - and maintain a united front alongside the US and South Korea in deterring the Kim Jong-un regime.

It looks like it was a complete and utter waste of time talking to North Korea about anything. The Six Party talks through the 2000s and now the independent lines of diplomacy out of Tokyo and Seoul has ended up with the worst case scenario. The North Koreans have got the nukes they can put on missiles, and neither Japan nor South Korea got their kidnapped people back. The UN Security Council is pushing for harder sanctions, but of course China won't be completely cornering North Korea.

Oh and meanwhile some idiot has gone and blown up the toilets at there Yasukuni Shrine. The man wanted for the bombing is a South Korean national. That's going to be another bone of contention between Tokyo and Seoul, making it harder to coordinate policy against North Korea. It's a mess. It's a worse mess than the usual mess too.

View From The Couch - 13/Mar/2016

Robotics' Horizon of Death

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, there was a kind of fiction to do with robots which pre-dated the fiction to do with androids. It was the kind of fiction that predated notions of 'the uncanny valley' and went straight to positioning robots as heroic. If you think 'Astroboy', then you're certainly there. Instead of an anxiety about a technological Frankenstein, the fiction to do with robots had us thinking of them going into situations where robots would tread where humans fear. The hope was robots could accomplish things human couldn't.

In that light, I bring depressing news with the fifth anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster. The radiation leak in Fukushima is so bad it's killing robots sent in to repair it.

Five years after Fukushima, the exclusion zone is in better shape, but still a mess. The area around its once functional nuclear reactors are by far the most inhospitable. So much so that the radiation even managed to kill robots that had been sent in to help clean up.

Five robots that have gone into the reactor in order to help remove spent fuel rods have failed to return, reports Reuters. The issue? The radiation levels are so high that the robot's internals just melt. We've seen this happen before.

Naohiro Masuda, Tepco's head of decommissioning, explained the difficulties the company faces in an interview. Not only do the robots tend to fail do to the failure of their wiring, but it's also not easy to get replacements. These aren't just off-the-shelf bots; they have to be designed specifically for the challenges of the particular building they enter, and that takes about two years of design.

If you go to the link on "we've seen this happen before", you'll see another article showing what one of the earlier robots saw before it went down.

It's a terrible thing that the Fukushima plants still in the state that it is, but moreover it is terrible that the limits of robotics got shown in the high radiation environment.

When You're This Bad At Remembering Things

The Hillary Clinton campaign is slightly gaffe prone. Earlier in the week she praised Nancy Reagan for raising AIDS awareness - which was not the way I remember the 1980s and the AIDS crisis. By 1983, everybody on the planet was freaking about AIDS except the White House.

“It may be hard for your viewers to remember how difficult it was for people to talk about HIV/AIDS back in the 1980s,” Mrs. Clinton, who was attending Mrs. Reagan’s funeral in Simi Valley, California, told MSNBC.

“And because of both President and Mrs. Reagan — in particular, Mrs. Reagan — we started a national conversation, when before nobody would talk about it. Nobody wanted anything to do with it,” she said. 

The former Secretary of State said she appreciated Mrs. Reagan’s “low-key advocacy” on HIV/AIDS, saying “it penetrated the public conscience, and people began to say, ‘Hey, we have to do something about this.’ “ 

Her comments prompted major backlash online, where gay men and LGBT groups were quick to point out that the Reagans kept quiet on the AIDS crisis for most of their administration, despite desperate pleas for help and thousands of deaths.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention first identified the disease in 1981, but former President Ronald Reagan did not publicly acknowledge the disease until 1985 and he didn’t give a speech about the crisis until 1987.

Just about anybody with a memory could remember this turn of events. So of course this ended up with Hillary Clinton offering an apology.

“While the Reagans were strong advocates for stem cell research and finding a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, I misspoke about their record on HIV and AIDS,” she said in a statement about two hours after her interview had been shown on MSNBC. “For that, I’m sorry.”

The worse gaffe this week was her claim that she didn't know where Bernie Sanders was back in '93 and '94 when she tried to put a Health Care plan through.

A picture speaks a thousand words. Surely she would have remembered the Senator helping her with her bill. Which leads me to wonder just what in the world is going on inside the Clinton campaign office.

Keith Emerson (1944 - 2016)

Last Fanfare For The Maestro

Keith Emerson was a titan. He was a polyglot of the keyboard styes as well as a pioneer of the synthesiser. He was equal parts a modernist composer for piano, a jazz pianist, and rock organist of prodigious dexterity. He was a show man and entertainer as well as a deeply studied artist. He was a player who could seemingly vamp forever on conventional chords while exploding across the range in search of melodies and ideas:



As with lots of other musical 'greats' if you sliced up Keith Emerson in to various aspects of his musical persona, there would still be a tremendous player in each and every category - Emerson the composer was just as formidable as the jazz pianist as was the rock organist and early adopter of the Moog synthesiser. If you listen to Emerson's playing, he opens up doorways into other players, and  Composers. They are as diverse as Dave Brubeck, Thelonious Monk, and Glenn Gould. He was a style collector that fused elements of these players in his own style, but you can hear them in short bursts; He had snippets of their touch and vernacular tucked away in his playing. He was hip but also very well versed in piano music in all of its forms.



He was in many ways a musical misfit because he was too open to popular music to walk the straight and narrow path of classical music, while he was probably too aggressive and experimental with tone  and rhythm to stay comfortably in jazz, and ultimately too sophisticated a musician to simply be plying his trade as a rock star. Of all the keyboard players in rock, Emerson alone had the breadth of vision for music that stretched way beyond the confines of genres, and that was his appeal. In a world where 99% of pop music works off conventional chord progressions long established by the hit writers of long ago, Emerson's tracks defied such small pools of ideas.

One of his most famous pieces Tarkus sounds nothing like a conventional rock song. It is impenetrable unless you know it well or you have a really good ear for deconstructing music. This is simply not rock the way Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd are rock. Much like his contemporary Frank Zappa, Keith Emerson was a mid-Twentieth century composer masquerading as a rock star.



The best representation of his playing can be found on the first five ELP albums. Across those five albums, he lays out a total vision of a manic keyboard player mapping out the possibilities of fusing the various vernaculars of rock, bebop jazz, and classical music. Each and every one of those albums is a wild ride through diverse styles and ideas about how to approach the keyboard. Increasingly he evolved his playing towards a more percussive style; and on 'Brain Salad Surgery', it amalgamates into the most phantasmagoric soundscape conceived by any rock band in the 1970s - or perhaps, ever.

While the plaintive band name 'Emerson Lake & Palmer' presented us a vision of three equal partners, the albums belied the reality that the dominant musical vision belonged to Keith Emerson who was singlehanded rewriting what music could be. At times, their music took odd grandiose turns but he always found a way of putting across the essential beauty of the pieces he played.

Perhaps he will be best remembered for this bit of bombast and glory:



...but there was so much more to his playing than big synth horns and Hammond B-III organs being rocked and stabbed. If I were playing fantasy rock band producer and I had to draft a keyboard player to form the greatest band on earth, I'd start with Keith Emerson, and there's really nobody close for second.

Vale Keith Emerson. Oh what a lucky man you were.

The Curse of PED Shaming

More On The Maria Sharapova PED Positive Test Thing

I've been following the headlines for a couple of days since Maria Sharapova hit us with her bombshell about testing positive. I have to say other people are far more condemning of Sharapova than I was, so maybe I'm the one with the out-of-step view. Although, I find it hard to understand how all these people who follow sport can't get their heads around certain notions. Sometimes I think the visceral hatred directed at offending athletes is bolstered by fairly unreconstructed nationalist fervour more than anything reasoned. That is to say, the condemnation is in proportion to the resentment felt about athletes who lost, who might have lost to PEDs.but I guess she's fair game right now.

Way back in the 1970s when the Olympics were a lot less money-covered, the sport was still firmly amateur and hostile to professional sports. Baseball, Tennis, Soccer and Basketball were nowhere near the five rings every four years. Arguably, the only thing the athletes were competing for was national pride. The Olympic Games as they stand are terribly nationalistic affairs, and taking pride in one's countrymen and women winning gold out there is a kind of proxy war but without violence. During the Cold War, the Eastern Bloc saw fit to juice athletes wholesale and try and grab as many medals as they could. It also coincided with an era when Australia's medal tally dried up, and this was a painful outcome for our national psyche - so much so it gave birth to the Australian Institute of Sport.

Australia has been one of the most vocal countries in combating PEDs, and one suspects it comes from this deep psychological trauma of the 1970s when the East Germans romped home with medals having smashed records which then took three decades to match. Sharapova being Russian by nationality probably scratches at this scar more than Lance Armstrong's efforts. After all, it's been a long time since Australia has produced a female Grand Slam winner. We also produced Shane Warne who tested positive to a PED and he got off with a 1 year ban. So we're certainly a lot more flexible about this topic than our headlines indicate.

The Olympics certainly went weird in the late 1980s, specifically around the time of the Seoul Olympics. This requires a bit of a background too. The Olympic Games were a high prestige but money-losing proposition for some time. A brief back of the envelope digest of the Summer Olympics from the 70s goes - '72 Munich which had a terror attack; '76 Montreal which left Montreal broke; '80 in Moscow which got boycotted by the West because of the USSR's invasion of Afghanistan; '84 in LA which got counter-boycotted by the Eastern Bloc as retaliation for the Moscow boycott. That takes us to '88 Seoul where some of the Professional sports were brought into the tent. These were specifically Tennis, followed by Basketball, Baseball and Soccer.

The absence of professional sport until that moment was the hallmark of the Olympic Games as a brand. You couldn't really make a tonne of money out of winning the Olympics. Consider the big names of the '76 Montreal Olympics: Bruce Jenner (way before becoming Caitlyn) did okay for his Decathlon Gold medal doing the talk circuit, but he was very active in marketing himself. Dorothy Hamill sort of made some money being in ads, but in most part Gold medalists didn't make a tonne of money out of their success. Nadia Comaneci, who scored a perfect 10.00 went home to Romania where she was courted and abused by the son of the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu - not much money in that. In most part these amateur athletes did it for the love of the sport.

The inclusion of professional sport opened the door for more corporate sponsorship, and that meant more money for the athletes as well as the IOC. So it is no coincidence then that Ben Johnson famously tested positive for steroids after beating Carl Lewis in the 100m dash. He wast trying to win so he could get sponsorship money. It was also the moment that blew the door open for PEDs to be a major problem, roughly 16years after the East Germans cleaned up at '72 Munich. It's almost bad luck, really that the moment the Olympics redefined its business model so it could make more money, this horrible little complication burst open on to the scene. There's something deeply ironic that at the Olympics where the IOC figured out how to make money, an athlete cheated and got busted trying to earn sponsorship dollars.


Nice bit of Bruce McAvaney commentary there.
The Ben Johnson bust was a terrible thing. I've spent years since then pondering his race, his win, and then the positive test which disqualified him. He ran the 100m in 9.79 seconds. It was more memorable than just about anything else that happened at '88 Seoul, and then he was stripped of his medal. The IOC established WADA and they test hundred of thousands of athletes a year... and Dick Pound thinks they're not really serious about catching them because catching cheats and exposing them is a scandal with only downside for the relevant sport.

Six out of the eight men who raced in that race were later found to have had ties to doping. Ben Johnson maintains till today that doping is widespread, the drugs are now better, and also harder to detect. For all the people getting busted - which is about 2% of the sample, plenty more are flying under the radar. None of these sports are cleaner than they were in 1988. None. And so we're really left with the results to argue over and people will argue just how much the records are tainted.

Here's the thing: all records are tainted, and nobody will ever know to what degree. If you're a sport fan with any amount of brains, you just have to accept that fact and deal with it. Even if Ben Johnson was disqualified because of PEDs, he did run 100m in 9.79. Carl Lewis got the Gold Medal that day, but he didn't exactly come in first. And this is the same of all these records. They ended up stripping Lance Armstrong of his 7 Tour de France titles, but the man did win them. They haven't handed over his titles to the people who came second because they can't be certain they weren't on PEDs. Rewriting the record books is an undignified response of the anal pedant. Reality is what doesn't go away when you close your eyes.

Perhaps the most significant records to fall in numbers were in Major League Baseball. MLB ran right into the storm with their eyes closed. As a professional sport with 30 teams and 162 games to be played in a schedule per team, putting product on the field for paying audiences meant turning a blind eye to PEDs. Pretty soon hitters bulked up, the batting side of the sport exploded in numbers, and some long-standing records began to tumble. It took until 2004 for MLB to start putting in regulations about PEDs. Until then, it was a seeming free-for-all, as an astounding number of players reached milestones with great ease. 500 homers used to mean something. Players like Rafael Palmeiro and Gary Sheffield who were linked to PEDs made it mean much, much less than it did ten years before. Condemn them as much as you like, the reality is still that these homers were hit and baked into the record books.

As I pointed out previously in the previous post about PEDs, the bigger threat for professional sport isn't a single player trying to get ahead by doing unnaturally better, it's the threat of players tanking and manipulating results for gambling money. To this end, the lessons of the 1919 Back Sox remain with us today with Pete Rose, the sad addendum. Next to Pete Rose, Barry Bonds is ... just not so bad - and there are apologists even for Pete Rose, wanting to reinstate him into baseball and putting him into the Hall of Fame.

So naturally I've come to view all this bicker/banter/brouhaha/balderdash/ballyhoo about PEDs with a more disdainful eye. It seems the moral scales we have for judging players has the sophistication of a comic book's sensibility for moral justice (and perhaps less) while the whole enterprise of sport as business, and sport as entertainment, and sport as this object of fetishistic attachments demands we have an adult, nuanced understanding of the context in which these things happen. Maria Sharapova taking for ten years, a substance that ended up on the banned list is not the worst thing to happen in the world, in sports in general, or even Tennis in particular. It's not. Even the likelihood of Sharapova being a "bad role model" in inspiring younger athletes to take PEDs is actually no higher than if this positive test and press conference had never take place. Besides which, ten years on Maria Sharapova seems to be perfectly in good health in spite of taking this substance - which weakens the argument that the side effects of PEDs can ruin your health; and it's not like the agent would turn another, regular-run-of-the-mill top 50 player into a Maria Sharapova. The indignant condemnations are media hyperbole in a world that has lost perspective.

I don't know how long they will suspend Sharapova. They will likely pick a length which would be arbitrary as any sentence-without-trial. The bottom line is, it's just another aspect to sport that is a media circus. Mistaking it for morality or ethics would be pretty sad.

Quick Shots - 10/Mar/2016

TV Drama Heaven

I've been doing some research and watching a raft of programmes lately. It's interesting how TV eats up content and ideas. It's partly because the format allows for only so much investigation of ideas and so those have to go on the slow burner while the action parts have to come to the front. The other interesting thin about TV writing at the moment is that right across the board on so many shows, the past definitely informs the present, so we're regaled with vast exposition of what happened before the story. Backstory is king in TV in a way that normal cinema never has the time to cover. It's a little like the 'Lord of the Rings' book where every character comes into the story with a boat load of backstory.

Anyway... If in doubt, introduce a relative and a random bad guy because this complicates what the protagonist can do. That's the other rule.

'Arrow' - Season 1 & 2

This is an interesting series based on comic book content. Normally this stuff sits with me uncomfortably because the stories never get close to the deeper issues of beating up on bad guys. This show actually marches right into there, as well as continuously run a back story as a growing narrative. It looks pretty much the way the other shows in the CW stable look, and as the first cab off the rank, has established the tropes for 'The Flash' and 'Legends of Tomorrow'. As comic book content goes, it's pretty adult in its exploration of the ethics of beating up on bad guys.

The problem with these CW stable of shows is that somehow even when some people die, they keep finding a way for them to come back. The internal rationale for it happening makes some sense but people not dying tends to take the risk out of the adventure.

'Broadchurch' - Season 2

I imagine this second season wraps it all up. although there are some new threads hanging loose. It's very well directed - I can see the care and attention to detail that's been put into each and every shot of this series. It's very good work. I don't know if I like the characters all that much and there are moments where the murder mystery aspect of the show veers into more pulp British murder mystery fare but overall it comes together nicely. You could do a lot worse than this show.

'From Dusk Till Dawn' - Pilot Episode

This is a tight little caper. It sort of leans into the part just before the movie begins so it's all about the Gecko brothers on the run. Back with the original film, it always struck me that the mode change from being about gangsters on the run into a splatter horror vampire pic was rather dissatisfying. Episode 1 at least sticks with the gangsters on the run and it's really tight.

I'll probably end up watching more of this series.

'Shadow Hunters' - Pilot Episode

Actually I only watched 1 episode of this one and stopped. It's not terribly appealing. It must have some interesting idea about demons on the loose in the material world that have to be hunted, but there's something juvenile and shallow about this one. I'm probably not going to watch more of this show.

'House of Cards' - Season 4

I'm working my way through this one a bit more slowly than previous years. It's funny how the 2016 election in Frank Underwood's world is unfolding at the same time as our Preselection in 2016. It underscores that Frank Underwood's universe is a parallel universe to ours - and Earth 2, if you will. In fact, who you accept it that way, it makes for more interesting viewing as to what exactly is going on in this alternative universe outside of the main story.

Here are some interesting, anomalous events that marks their alternative universe from ours.
- They seem not to have had the GFC in Earth 2, certainly not as badly as we've had it. It's amazing how politics in Frank's world is devoid of Donald Trump or Occupy Wall Street.
- They have a 'G-7' summit that is not a G-8 like ours. This is weirdly interesting because this G-7 of theirs includes China AND Russia. Our G-8 used to be a G-7 summit consisting of USA, UK, France,   Italy, Germany, Canada, and Japan. Russia got added after the Cold War ended to make it G-8.
- they seem to be having an Oil Shock Mk III in Earth 2. This indicates that there is no Shale Oil and fracking in Frank Underwood's universe. That would be sort of consistent with the no GFC universe.  It flies totally contrary to the collapsed commodity prices of our universe, so it's kind of cool.
Or it could just be scriptwriters not knowing their topic very well.

Generation Politics

Baby Boomers Versus Millennials

A couple of articles wanted to talk about the generational demographics and their impact on the economy so I think we'll have a look at them today.

The first was in the SMH which characterised the future as a conflict between Baby Boomer interests and Millennials.

Millennials have eclipsed baby boomers in the US, in terms of raw population numbers, but not yet on spending power. At some point this imbalance between these two generations is going to correct itself. 

Yet some investors aren't sitting around waiting for that to happen. Like Denver-based Marsico Capital. On a recent visit to Australia, Marsico portfolio manager Brandon Geisler named the demographic shift that will see millennials rise and baby boomers reach the "backend of their spending curve" as a significant theme underpinning his investing.

"If you think back to the 1990s, what was growth? Growth was technology [stocks], but it was also retail and banking, because you basically followed this demographic and you rode them up. The baby boomers, they levered up, they bought a bigger house, they bought two cars. And now the reality is ... they are downsizing," he told Fairfax Media.

The boomers are still spending of course, but on things like healthcare and travel. That has prompted Marsico, which owns a significant position in ASX-listed Dominos Pizza, to buy into stocks like Norwegian Cruise Line, biotech company Amgen and robotic equipment maker Intuitive Surgical.

"Similarly, we ask ourselves all the time what is that [under-35] demographic really interested in? Because that's going to be the next wave," Geisler says.

It's well documented that millennials prefer to buy experiences rather than things: whether that is reflection of their comparatively paltry spending power or not, they are far less interested in brands and material possessions than their forebears. They spend a lot of time on Facebook (one of Geisler's biggest bets) and love travel (which helps explain a stake in UK budget airline Ryanair).

It's kind of curious that this refrain keeps coming up that Millennials prefer to buy more experiences than things. I know this is anecdotal but the Millennials I know don't seem to be all that more biased towards experiences over things, any more than Baby Boomers I know disavow experiences in favour of things. I've known plenty of Baby Boomers who have disavowed materialism so it's hard to imagine the difference is clear cut. 

I might posit that the apparent preference that comes up in surveys that says Millennials prefer to spend money on experiences than things is a protest at the fact that Millennials have much less money to spend on things, and given the options, they end up with the stated preference of buying experiences. Certainly, if you are making investment choices, you might look at service providers than goods manufacturers in the future, but there are plenty of problems even with that characterisation. 

The second was over at Zero Hedge where there's always a whiff of paranoia. Still, it's probably more pertinent to have the Millennials describe their situation to get a better grip on what motivates them, and what this means.

In sum, millennials’ inflationary basket isn’t as simple as weighting goods within large standard components like food, housing, transportation, and entertainment. Student loans, obviously not directly in the Consumer Price Index, account for one of our largest monthly payments. We therefore can’t afford a house, and a lot of us live with our parents as rental costs continue to climb. Many also can’t afford a car, in which Uber proves especially helpful. That’s why we depend on services that provide access to goods without requiring ownership. This keeps expenses low and convenience high. We care about what our friends think and have serious FOMO (fear of missing out), so we’re less reluctant to save and more inclined to travel or buy new clothes when we can. Fortunately, however, technology and startups continue to bring costs down as we benefit from each other’s contributions online and in the sharing economy. In this sense, we are more privy to the deflationary impact of technology and services, in contrast to our parents’ experience with inflation of physical goods, such as food and gasoline.

The gist of the article at Zero Hedge is that the Millennials are, through restricted choice, embracing deflation. So.... are the demographics really at stark conflict?

The most interesting way this is playing out is in the current democratic campaign. Hillary Clinton is the choice of the establishment and beats Bernie Sanders in the above-50 age category, which happens to be the lower limit of the Baby Boomers. Sanders is dominating the under-50 set, which means he's winning the Gen-X and Gen-Y/Millennial vote, and this trend becomes more pronounced as the age group nears 21. This Democratic preselection is the very generational conflict in close-up.

It's interesting that it is not a Gen-X or Gen-Y politician who is garnering these younger votes. Instead it's a man who is a veteran of the 1960s civil rights movement and other long-forgotten battlefields of political activism. Hillary Clinton is still the poster child of the Baby Boomer generation, just as her husband ushered in the generational change of Baby Boomer impact on politic back in 1992. Their constituents are necessarily who they are. Given that the Millennials outnumber Baby Boomers and if you add in Gen-X, it would seem Hillary Clinton's candidacy is in great trouble. This might be the last US Presidential election where the Baby Boomer voice carries the election, and it might not even work out that well given the numbers.

In that light, Michigan going to Sanders today might be a sign of things to come. Yes, Hillary Clinton is about 200 delegates ahead, but because all the Southern states are done, it also means her big guns have fired. From here on in, the advantage goes further towards Bernie Sanders' support territory as well as demographics. We'll see if that 200 delegate lead really holds up. The coming months may well show it's just not enough. And should Sanders go all the way on the back of his support, it's probably curtains for the Baby Boomer block vote holding massive sway over American politics. 

Maria Sharapova Tests Positive

Maria Sharapova's PED Infringement

Maria Sharapova got pinged for taking PEDs. The only catch with this one is that she was taking a medication that was legal until 1st of January this year, and then tested positive during the Australian Open.

The ITF said in a statement that "Sharapova will be provisionally suspended with effect from [March 12], pending determination of the case".

The five-times grand slam champion said: "For the past 10 years I have been given a medicine called Mildronate by my doctor, my family doctor and a few days ago after I received the letter I found out that it also has another name of Meldonium which I did not know". 

Sharapova said she received an email from the World Anti-Doping Agency in December that noted changes to tennis' program for 2016. She said that the email including a link to a list of banned substances, but that she did not look at it.

Meldonium is used to treat diabetes and low magnesium and improve blood flow, among other things. 

"It's very important for you to understand that for 10 years this medicine was not on WADA's banned list and I had been legally taking the medicine for the past 10 years," Sharapova said. 

"But on January 1st the rules had changed and Meldonium became a prohibited substance which I had not known."

So now, there's speculation that she can't continue playing if she has to be on this drug, thus spelling the end of her career.  Nike, Porsche, and TAG Heuer promptly dumped her.  Very classy... not. It's not as if she's suddenly turned out to be a big white Russian female Tiger Woods type sex fiend; and last I checked owning a Porsche and a TAG Heuer were great performance enhancers for pulling chicks so I don't see how they have the moral high ground here. After all, Porsche and TAG Heuer stuck photos of Maria Sharapova on their ads with the intent of subliminally telling their target market that if they buy their product, they might have a chance with Maria Sharapova. Yeah, real classy, right there.

Jokes aside, there are some really grey areas developing in the world of sport and drug testing, and this case would be one of those. Tennis is a fully professional sport. The big break with amateurism that happened in the 1960s left great scars on the sport, but in a nutshell, it is one of the sports where the players make money in direct proportion to their performance. While it is customary to argue taking PEDs is cheating, there's an aspect to tennis that indicates the effect of PEDs might not be so dramatic.

For instance if a male player took PEDs for better endurance, there would be an advantage in the fifth set at a grand slam tournament, which happens about 1 in 6 matches across 4 tournaments a year with 127 matches each. Even if the PEDs added a 10% boost performance, its arguable it is not going to be reflected in a 10% winning rate. It is totally unlike Olympic running or sprinting where by a 1%boost in endurance could reflect itself as 10% more chance of winning. In women's tennis, they don't play these 5 set matches at all - ALL of these female tennis athletes have enough endurance to play the 2hours on court through a 3 set match that goes deep into the third set.

This is from the same sport that allowed their racquets to develop, grow, and become totally unlike the wooden racquets that were standard in the 1960s. They've been perfectly happy to let these modern racquets completely change the sport (and in the process make it rather boring) and suddenly they're worried about Maria Sharapova's meds.

As for Meldonium, it is highly suspect as to whether taking it would enhance performance enough to make an ordinary Top 50 player into a player with Maria Sharapova's record. This also goes without saying but the results of tennis matches are more likely to be manipulated by match fixing than PEDs At least the player on PEDs is trying to win. The player tanking sets and matches because of match fixing are far more detrimental than the incremental advantage of PEDs.

I get it that PEDs are open to abuse and might have terrible side effects. Especially steroids of all kinds. And if Maria Sharapova were forced into retirement because of this drug, I probably won't be one to miss her al that much. But it does seem to me that people are overestimating the impact of PEDs on a professional sport where other influences are far more likely to impact on the fairness or legitimacy of match outcomes. You'd have to be blind Freddy not to see that PEDs like this one, pertaining to tennis is firmly in the middle of the 18% grey card.

Of course, Jennifer Capriati doesn't see it that way.

"I had to lose my career and never opted to cheat no matter what. I had to throw in the towel and suffer," she wrote. 

"I didn't have the high priced team of [doctors] that found a way for me to cheat and get around the system and wait for science to catch up".

"What's the point of someone taking a heart medicine that helps your heart recover faster unless you have a heart condition? Is that accurate," she asked. 

"In my opinion [if] its all true every title should be stripped. This is other people's lives as well."

Well yeah, but as Navratilova pointed out somewhere, what Sharapova took was legal until 1st of January this year. Besides, this stripping offenders of medals and trophies is starting to look crazy after Lance Armstrong had his 7 Tour de France titles taken from him. Sports organisations can do that to humiliate the offender but it hardly changes what happened - somebody on PEDs beat the field. It's not like Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds didn't hit all those homers during the years when MLB didn't look too deeply into PEDs. It's not like Sharapova didn't win those 5 Grand Slam tournaments. In the context of professional sport, it's actually hard to argue against an athlete who tries to get better by taking PEDs, especially when his pay is dependent on the outcome. 

So here we are again, in this moral purgatory of Performance Enhancing Drugs. We're none the wiser, none the better and probably more huffed up with self-righteous indignation over something oh so grey.

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

A Snapshot Of Sweden And Refugees

Here's a rather scary article about how Sweden is doing with its refugees. What's scary about it is that it flies in the face of the picture of tolerance and open-mindedness as being the absolute norm in Sweden. The demographic breakdown in the article goes into some depth, but I found this little bit of the interview a little startling:

ET: So why is all this happening? We have seen this dire situation unfold over many years, and yet the government seems intent in doubling down, bringing in even more immigration in recent years. The majority of the Swedish population even seems to be supportive of this policy.

TS: That’s actually not true. We have a biased media here that likes to portray the situation as you described, but we have serious scientific polls that clearly state that the majority or plurality of Swedes support reducing refugee immigration, even going back as far as the 1980s. There has always been more saying that Sweden should take in less refugees and this number has probably skyrocketed in recent months.
One recent poll I have seen, and it excludes the past months, shows very high opposition: only 8% said we are not taking enough immigrants, where 58% said we are taking too many. It’s the elite opinion that forms the consensus that Sweden should take many more immigrants – it’s almost like a religion, but it is not the popular view. 

ET: But that consensus correlates with election voting right? There is only one party that is openly against immigration and they scored very low in the last election. 

TS: Yes, it’s because that party has its roots in racism and it was taboo to vote for them. Despite that they went from 3% around ten years ago to perhaps 20% now. What’s also happening in the last few months is that the right wing moderate party, the Swedish “Tories” if you like, has shifted to the right on immigration very rapidly. You know in Sweden things shift very rapidly, it’s a consensus society. Now they are saying close the borders, deport a large number of migrants, very vociferously. The Liberals and the Christian Democrats are following suit. And even the Social Democrats, the ruling party, closed the borders in the end.

The picture we get from this interaction is that Swedish society reached some kind of saturation point whereby immigration policy overwhelmed the social capacity for Sweden to take in the refugees. Correspondingly, the vote for the far right leapt from 3% to 20% tells us that this issue is adding fuel to the rise of the far right. The tide the discourse has overwhelmed the polity to the point that Sweden has all but closed its borders to refugees. For the Swedes, as it is the case in Australia, the incredulity became, "what are they coming all the way to Sweden?"

ET: There is a huge number of male migrants that went to Sweden last year, vastly more than women. We read that the demographic imbalance in Sweden is now even worse than China. Is this correct? 

TS: Maybe in some age group, but not in overall terms of course. Some 92% of those unaccompanied migrants were male last year… 

ET: … Wait a minute, 92% of them are male? 

TS: Yes, there is definitely something strange going on. More than half of the world’s refugees are women. In World War II, when Sweden took refugees from Finland, they were children and 90% were below the age of 10. But now almost all of them are late teenagers – supposedly; we know many are older for a fact. When other countries age test it turns out that the majority are not children. And when there are crimes committed and the age is investigated, often we get these absurd reports where some of these guys are older than 30 and yet the government puts them with other real minors in schools or housing, and this is creating a lot of anger now. The media created this taboo where because they are officially supposed to be children we can’t question it, and you are fascist if you do. Yet most people can see that many are adults.
Now I’m not moralizing this. If you have an open door policy and you are incentivizing Afghans to take advantage of the system, can you really blame them? But it is an idiocy to equate anyone who questions the claim of being a minor with being a fascist.
You know, it’s really funny that the tale about the emperor having no clothes is a Scandinavian tale. Everybody can see many are not children, but then the political and media consensus will fire or at the very least censor the people who point out this plainly obvious fact. Because how can you question children running from war, using circular reasoning that anyone who claims to be a child escaping war is one and cannot be questioned. You know, a self-reported 70% are not even coming from Afghanistan but safer countries like Iran, seeking a better life.

And there you have it, the gnawing suspicion by Swedes that Sweden's good nature is being taken advantage thereof. I dare say these 92% male asylum seekers who are actually economic migrants are hoping to catch on with some nice Swedish blonde and live happily ever after on Swedish social security. I mean, heck, if I'd got thrown out of my country and had nowhere to go on the planet, I'd probably want to claim asylum in Scandinavia - it's not that hard to imagine why that number is skewed the way it is. 

In a way, it was easy for Sweden to be tolerant and preach tolerance because Sweden was - for quite some time - mostly homogenous in culture. The sorts of problems that arise from intolerance were geographically distant. It was easy for Swedish society to be progressive in the context of its own population being homogenous because it never had to be tested. The moment it became overwhelming, the society shut its doors. When confronted with the reality of what that tolerance actually meant in the wider world, the country had second thoughts. 

This is a scenario that will likely repeat itself in the rest of Scandinavia. it may well repeat itself in Germany as Merkel's policy of taking in 800,000 asylum seekers turns into a kind of social demographic bomb. The argument that the first world can afford to take on any number of refugees is never really put under the scrutiny. 

This is going to be rather unpopular to even question this but I've often wondered about the validity of somebody who makes their way to Scandinavia or Australia hoping for asylum when there actually are other safe countries along the way. If you ran from Syria to Turkey and Turkey gives you safe asylum, is it really valid to then travel to Scandinavia (or Australia) in hopes of a better deal? Understandably, everybody wants the better deal, but does that make it into a human right? 

Peter Costello - Tax And Spend Liberal

Here's something for you to ponder. Peter Costello thinks he should have taxed the internet. 

I'm not quite sure how he would have done it. 

Speaking to Fairfax Media in his new role as chairman of free-to-air broadcaster Nine Entertainment Co, Mr Costello recalled sitting in his Parliamentary office in the 1990s in the early days of the web, and pondering the vast future revenue such a levy could generate.

"I was Treasurer at the time. It would have been the easiest thing in the world, by the way, for governments around the world to have put a charge on the internet. It wouldn't have had to be very big but it would have raised a motza," said Mr Costello. 

"Governments would all have to agree together to do it, and the OECD was looking it at the time. It would have been hard to police but once (former US President) Bill Clinton came out and said the internet would be free that was it. Once the Americans said the internet was going to be free, the rest of the world was going to follow suit." 

Mr Costello, Australia's longest-serving treasurer, who went on to introduce the goods and services tax with then-prime minister John Howard, said an internet access tax "could have been a fraction of a cent a year and it would have raised governments' unbelievable amounts of money".

We've got to be happy that crappy plan never came to fruition.

When Even Peter Reith Calls You Out

Peter Reith was an awful minister in the Howard Government. He had the charm of a dyspeptic shark and the compassion of a broken bottle of single malt scotch. All teeth-gnashing and ideological gumboots and all. Since his retirement from Federal politics, he's turned into a sometime columnist for the SMH, and forms a rather unappealing Tory-Tag-Team duo with Amanda Vanstone. I've noted before Amanda Vanstone has written a piece telling Tony Abbott to go disappear into the night. Now Peter Reith has penned his own version.

The next election is just around the corner. Abbott is not about to win back the leadership. The only issue now is who wins the next election. And one big issue is whether the Coalition can erase Labor's claim that the Coalition lacks unity. 

The first thing Abbott has to do is to shut down his handful of supporters in the Parliament and the Turnbull haters in the media. And, by the way, it wouldn't do any harm for Turnbull to try talking to Hadley, Jones and Bolt, just to even up the conversation. 

If Abbott cannot or will not stop the destabilisation, it could be a bad result for the Coalition and more importantly very bad for Australia if Labor were able to return to the government benches.
The only other option is for Abbott to leave Parliament before the election, and to stay out of the campaign.

What I don't understand is why some people who were exasperated by Abbott's paid parental leave and its new tax, his support for changes to the Constitution, his captain's picks and many other shocking decisions now want him back, with Credlin and all.

It's because they're stupid, Peter, but then that would be a concept you would not countenance. Unfortunately for Peter Reith, this brand of stupid is particularly pervasive in the Coalition ranks. It's the special brand of stupid that forms from the fermentation of entitlement & smugness.

View From The Couch - 04/Mar/2016

Conservatives Infighting

It has come to this. Donald Trump swept Super Tuesday and has put himself firmly on the map to become the Republican nominee for US President.  This has put the Republicans into turmoil. Id imagine it would be hard to countenance Donald Trump as any kind of Republican candidate based on previously professed Republican positions. He has flip-flopped on abortion and gun laws, he's from New York and doesn't look to be terribly religious, he's on to his third wife, the third wife once posed nude in a magazine, and so his 'family' credentials are beyond tarnished, they're atomised. About the only thing he has in common with the Republican establishment might be that he inherited money and he's a white guy playing what he think is a 'white' identity card - which of course works out to be racist. On that last point, he's even garnered support from David Duke, formerly of the KKK, and the current incarnation of the KKK have also endorsed Trump. So by default Trump is not only the Republican front runner, he's the racists' front runner as well.

The enthusiastic endorsement of Trump is quite disturbing because it essentially proves what liberals in America have accused the Republicans all along, that they harbour racists and lend them an air of credibility. It's been going on for some time, but the fact that Trump is their frontrunner candidate reveals that the charges laid by the small-l liberal set are indeed true.

Conservatives remain loath to acknowledge the obvious, but the liberal critique of their politics is correct, and it took the Donald Trump juggernaut to wake them up to it. Indeed, the fact that liberals had a more accurate read on conservative politics than most professional conservatives seems to bother many conservatives more than the substance of the critique itself.

“It would be terrible to think that the left was right about the right all these years,” Bret Stephens wrote on Monday at the Wall Street Journal. “Nativist bigotries must not be allowed to become the animating spirit of the Republican Party. If Donald Trump becomes the candidate, he will not win the presidency, but he will help vindicate the left’s ugly indictment.”

So it's that moment once more where the Centre Right has to confront the Far Right, and the question is whether it has it within it to do this and make it decisive for a generation.

The funny thing about conservatism is that you'd think they have fewer and fewer places to plant their flag. From issues ranging to economics through trade, industry, the environment and foreign policy, they don't have a lot of positions based on facts, but rather positions based on vested interests donating a lot of money to their super PACs. And this has been going on for some time. The Republican Party's been peddling the lie that their policies are good for the heartland when in fact they have been aggressive globalists, effectively exposing jobs out of the country. Now that the base has found out it has been sold down the river they're lining up to vote for Trump as a protest vote. 

The problem is, 'they' (as in the Establishment) might have more moral authority in confronting the populist fascism of Donald Trump had they not sold their constituents down the river., because those people are really angry now and voting for Trump to make a point. 

Will This Happen In Australia?

It's arguable that it has already taken place in Australia. If there is a figure like Trump in Australia, it has to be Clive Palmer. Palmer's rise to the Lower House was funded out of his company's pockets. (I'd like to have written his own pockets but this has been shown to be not true), in a populist move that split the conservative vote. Certainly a clever electioneer, Palmer managed to get three Senators, and a loose alliance with Ricky Muir to ostensibly grab the balance of power. Since then of course, two of his Senators have abandoned him and Muir has proven himself to be much more of an independent with policy views not too far from the ALP, but notwithstanding, Clive Palmer represents the same move inside the conservative politics to go populist.

Even the climate change topic has surely split the Nationals Party from its roots. The farming heartland that used to vote for the Nationals is seeing their livelihoods put to increasing risk because of climate change. The drought of the early 2000s really knocked the stuffing out of them after the big El Nino droughts of the 1990s. There are plenty of people in the traditional national Party constituency that can see the ideological opposition to doing anything to deal with climate change is being opposed. The grassroots of the Nationals Party had every reason to run to Palmer United Party just to send a message.

Perhaps the more bitter struggle is going on inside the Liberal Party where Malcolm Turnbull ousted Tony Abbott, who was backed by the 'far right' faction in the Libera; Party - yes, those people with the rather illiberal views on Gay Marriage and safe schools and the such, and also challenge Climate Change as a scientific finding. There are some irreconcilable differences going on in there, and this is leading to policy paralysis of the Coalition government. Malcolm Turnbull's popularity is only as high as the expectation that he will deal with things. The party room that doesn't allow him to do those things might be winning the cultural wars but is going to lose the election.

It's one thing to elevate Malcolm Turnbull because he personally polls much better than Tony Abbott; it's another thing entirely for those very same people to repudiate the retrograde delinquents of their own party like Abbott and Cory Bernardi. Clearly they can't. At the moment the Australian electorate is ambivalent because it fears the turmoil of the ALP in the last government, but at the same time does not like the kinds of changes the Coalition government has proposed one after the other. Malcolm Turnbull may well call that double dissolution election but he is in no way a shoe-in to win. 

The point is, the infighting between the Centre-Right and the Far Right is inevitable even in Australia. Until now, the Far-Right has not been given much grounds for legitimacy. Yet, as discussions move closer to things that the Far Right just won't countenance, they are going to increasingly try and sabotage the middle. Tony Abbott may have only been the beginning.

The Minds That Hate

I caught this week's Q&A by accident. I try not to watch it because it's too infuriating, and that seems to be its chief purpose: to rile people into being active viewers. The bit I specifically caught was the bit where a woman asked whether gay marriage and the adoption of children by married gay couples will lead to a situation like the Stolen Generation where a government will have to apologise. It was the sort of rhetoric that attempts to mount a position whereby it posits that children adopted by gay couples would be 'taken' from some mother and therefore stand in the same situation as aboriginal children taken into custody by the state. It's a spurious construction likening two totally unlike things.

What really vexes me is that the brazen rhetorical travesty is put out there by some idiot religious woman with a straight face and then the panel has to take it seriously because it has been put to them with a straight face. Worse still, we had to sit through a mealy-mouthed defence of this idiotic position by Lyle Shelton of the Christian Lobby as if the position had any merit. Dr. Keryn Phelps was hyper aggressive in trying to justify the LGBTQ position while Anna Burke argued a legalist line; but really, somebody should have just said, "madam, that is an offensive construction that only you could conjure because you want to offend while trying to look reasonable. It is not reasonable, it is simply offensive."

But no. Tony Jones doesn't say it, nobody says it and instead they go on and on trying not to offend this woman who clearly came to offend with her question. I know, I know. If I don't like it, just turn it off. I did, because I couldn't take it anymore.

Quick Shots - 02/Mar/2016

Cardinal Pell And The Australian Inquisition

Jeez Louise, Cardinal George Pell, he o the moral high horse has been grilled about what he knew o the Ballarat Pedophile priests in his time at Ballarat and East Melbourne. We're learning more of the kind of moral fibre this man possesses in the last two few days and it's proving all the prejudicial views people might have had against him, to be quite true. He is at heart, a gormless little petty bureaucrat in the service of his career with the Roman Catholic Church.

During Rafferty's time, after Sleeman had resigned, a delegation went to Pell to complain about Searson, but Rafferty said their concerns were dismissed. 

Pell told the Royal Commission that was because he was deceived by Archbishop Little and the education office, the latter perhaps because they wanted to keep a lid on matters and were scared he would ask "inconvenient" questions. 

Furness summarised: so Pell was deceived by Bishop Mulkearns and one or more consultors in Ballarat, Archbishop Frank Little and the Catholic Education Office in Melbourne? "That is correct," the cardinal replied. 

Furness: "That's an extraordinary position, Cardinal!" 

Pell: "It was an extraordinary world of crime and cover ups and people not wanting the status quo disturbed. When I became Archbishop [in 1996] I turned the situation right around so that the Melbourne Response procedures were light years ahead of all this obfuscation and prevarication and deception."

You gotta laugh only if it weren't so grim, sad, and evil. It sure doesn't look good to be the high priest of an organ that spent considerable energy ignoring the obvious cries for help. How can we ever take this man seriously ever again?

'Selma'

A historic recreation pic about the troubles in Selma Alabama in 1965, and Dr. Martin Luther King's part in making sure black people got to register to vote. Good performances but terrible directing. The pacers all over the place and frankly, the exposition gets so long an boring I nodded off for a few minutes. It could have been handled lot better than what's on screen here. Very disappointed because the crits and Rotten Tomatoes rated it so highly.

'South Park' Season 19

Sort of amazing that this show keeps going. The usual foul language and inappropriate humour is here but strangely restrained. The pastiche of bad taste is not quite translating into belly-laughs, but more of a muted chuckle. They've targeted political correctness and are going after it hard, but there's something a bit amiss in their scatter gun approach.

News That's Fit To Punt - 27/Feb/2016

The Rich Avoiding Taxes

I missed getting around to this earlier but this came in from Pleiades about how the globalised super wealthy avoid paying tax. It's from behind the pay wall at the Australian Financial Review so I can't go and post the entire thing, but it is a really interesting read.

Gabriel Zucman, who teaches at the University of California at Berkeley, has two goals in his new book, The Hidden Wealth of Nations: to specify the costs of tax havens, and to figure out how to reduce those costs. While much of his analysis is technical, he writes with moral passion, even outrage; he sees tax havens as a "scourge". His figures are arresting. About 8 per cent of the world's wealth, or $7.6 trillion, is held in tax havens. In 2015, Switzerland alone held $2.3 trillion in foreign wealth. As a result of fraud from unreported foreign accounts, governments around the world lose about $200 billion in tax revenue each year. Most of this amount comes from the evasion of taxes on investment income, but a significant chunk comes from fraud on inheritances. In the United States, the annual tax loss is $35 billion; in Europe, it is $78 billion. In African nations, it is $14 billion. 

The fractions of wealth held abroad are highly variable. In Europe, it is about 10 per cent. In African and Latin countries, it is much higher, between 20 per cent and 30 percent. In Russia, it is a whopping 52 percent. It follows that while tax havens hit wealthy nations hardest in absolute terms, they can have especially destructive effects on poorer or developing countries, because such a high percentage of their money is offshore. Zucman does not explain why this is so, but it is possible to speculate that one reason is rampant corruption within both the public and private sectors. The extraordinarily high figure for Russia might be best understood as involving money corruptly acquired or invested, which suggests an important point: All uses of tax havens are not the same. Sometimes government officials are the ones who are evading taxes, and they do not want to stop that evasion. 

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, you might expect that there would be an international crackdown on the use of tax havens, and, as we shall see, international attention is indeed growing. But the numbers demonstrate that no crackdown has occurred. In Luxembourg, offshore wealth actually increased from 2008 to 2012 (by 20 per cent). In Switzerland, the increase has been comparable; foreign holdings are now close to an all-time high. Disturbingly, the new wealth is coming mostly from developing countries, which poses a serious problem in light of the severe strains on their limited budgets. 

Zucman is the first economist to produce specific numbers of this kind, and, to do so, he had to undertake some creative detective work. In order to identify hidden wealth, he focuses on "anomalies" – situations in which international balance sheets show, in aggregate, more liabilities than assets. To see the importance of that inquiry, Zucman asks readers to imagine that a citizen of the United Kingdom holds an American security – say, stock in Google – in a bank account in Switzerland. In the United States, statisticians estimating U.S. wealth overall will record a liability, because a foreigner owns U.S. equities. But in Switzerland, statisticians will see nothing, and for a good reason: Google stock held in Switzerland by a U.K. resident will be, for Switzerland, neither an asset nor a liability. In the U.K. too, nothing will be registered, but for a bad reason: The UK has no way of knowing that one of its citizens owns Google stock in Switzerland. From this example, we can see the anomaly: On the global level, liabilities will be recorded as exceeding assets. 

Zucman puts it this way: "As far back as statistics go, there is a 'hole'; if we look at the world balance sheet, more financial assets are recorded as liabilities than as assets, as if planet Earth were in part held by Mars." For the purpose of producing an accounting of hidden wealth, that is actually helpful, because "money doesn't evaporate randomly into the ether, but instead follows a precise pattern of tax evasion". In 2015, for example, the nations of the world reported $2 trillion as mutual fund holdings in Luxembourg; this is the total of recorded liabilities. But Luxembourg's own statisticians calculated that worldwide, $3.5 trillion in mutual fund holdings were kept in Luxembourg; that is the total of recorded assets. What happened to the missing $1.5 trillion? In global statistics, that amount had no owners. For Zucman's purposes, the anomaly is a revealing one: The amount by which assets exceed liabilities is a measure of wealth hidden in offshore accounts

That is a lot of money leaking out of the system, avoiding tax.  The article goes on to discuss how these rich people might get taxed, but the overarching information is just how much money escapes taxation.

It's galling to think that the government of the wealthy by the wealthy for the wealthy - a.k.a.the Coalition government, wants to re-jig taxation in a way that increases the tax burden on the poor while giving more tax breaks to the rich.

A Different View On The Property Bubble

It would be unfair of me if I didn't put up an article arguing against the Property Bubble being an immediate problem. Here it is in a nutshell:

But the report also caused howls of outrage from local experts, who variously described Tepper's claims as "fanciful" (Australian Bankers' Association CEO Steven Munchenberg) and "as insightful as another work of fiction, Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" (Mortgage Choice chief executive John Flavell). Sure, there may be some vested interests there, but economists point out several reasons why they think Tepper's claims are over the top. The main one is that for a slide of that magnitude to occur, Australia would need to experience a sharp downturn in the economy, causing a spike in unemployment. That's currently not expected. But there are other signs the housing market isn't about to hit reverse, for example credit growth - seen as a key ingredient of a bubble. While housing credit has picked up, it is still a long way from previous highs.

Hmmm. If you go to the linked article, you'll find that average home loan payments look manageable; mortgage buffers are up;  Credit growth is not extreme; mortgage arrears are low; Low-Doc loans have fallen by proportion; and the Sydney marketing particular was merely playing catch up.

Now here's the thing: none of those charts address the fact that Australia's got the highest private sector debt per capita in the world. Just because on average we're managing this debt and not falling into arrears does not mean there isn't a whole bunch of debt money loaded into the system. As with all dynamic systems, the apparent equilibrium being maintained for now does not indicate the equilibrium is going to hold indefinitely into the future. It's hard to imagine what is going to rock the boat, but should something come along that rocks this boat, it is going to be very susceptible to capsizing.

But then one imagines the government will bail out the banks in order bail out the Mum & Dad investors who put their investment money into housing.

Gerry Harvey Thought It Was Nuts Too

More on the Dick Smith stores closing... Gerry Harvey also thought the AnchorageCapital's float of Dick Smith in 2013 was a bit of a joke.

Retail billionaire Gerry Harvey said he thought the "world had gone mad" when investors paid up in the $520 million float of the now-defunct Dick Smith business.
Dick Smith's receiver, Ferrier Hodgson, announced on Thursday that it was closing the electronics retailer's doors, putting about 3000 staff out of work. 

Mr Harvey said Dick Smith's profits evaporated years ago, prompting then-owner Woolworths to sell the business on the cheap to private equity firm Anchorage Capital in 2012. 

"Then five minutes later this bloke [Anchorage Capital] dresses it up and sells it for $500 million [in 2013], and I'm looking at this and saying 'I don't believe this, this business is stuffed'... I'm thinking I wouldn't buy these shares for 10¢, let alone $2," he said.
"I'm looking at all this and thinking to myself: the world has gone mad."

You would, wouldn't you? 

View From The Couch - 26/Feb/2016

This Isn't Working

There are days where I think Malcolm Turnbull might be smart, lucky and rich, but maybe - just maybe - he's not very good at this politics thing. It's a weird thing to say about a guy who is immensely popular and managed to become Prime Minister of this country but... there are moments where it looks a lot less certain, a lot less solid. For instance, he now has a coterie of backbenchers who are holding his policy platform to ransom.

It comes as Mr Turnbull and his Finance Minister, Mathias Cormann, continue to discuss the unorthodox move of bringing forward appropriation bills in Parliament to before the May budget in order to keep a double-dissolution election option open without risk of the government running out of money to pay public servants.

Fairfax Media reported earlier that informal discussions had been held about bringing forward budget day, but the latest thinking is believed to favour the early introduction of the appropriations - also called supply bills - which would clear the way for a snap poll to be called either before the budget or immediately after. 

Proponents say there is no legal problem with appropriating funds prior to the budget but admit the move would be tantamount to admitting an early election call was imminent.
The $15 billion figure is a similar amount of money that would have been available to spend after a GST rise to 15 per cent, which would raise about $35 billion, and the payment of compensation to low-income earners. 

The group of Liberal economic dries are, in particular, determined to kill any change by the Coalition - such as a dollar limit on the amount that can be deducted - to negative gearing because in the words of one MP, "why would we attack Mum and Dad investors?"

Which is all very weird. We appear to have a Prime Minister with very little authority over his own party in spite of his high personal polls.

The quick answer to the rhetorical question why the Liberal Party might attack the Mum and Dad investor might be because they're way in over their heads and need to back out before the shit hits the fan. In fact, not doing so is a kind of moral hazard situation that the conservatives and economic dry types hate so much. Making matters worse, negative gearing as it stands is kind of the wrong economic incentive that encourages the very same moral hazard that conservatives hate so much. 

Put more bluntly, the very same Mum and Dad investors are now the most indebted people on the face of this earth. Yes, Australia has the highest per capita private sector debt and the majority of it is locked up in mortgages. The whole point of winding back negative gearing is to take the wrong incentives out of the system, so the same Mum and Dad investors can make a more rational decision, based on a more rational economic policy. 

I'm pretty sure this is not lost on Malcolm Turnbull. It's just that he seems incapable of explaining this to his own side and making them shut the hell up. You'd think a conservative PM could explain traditional conservative economic policy to his own side. Of course, it might be that these backbenchers aren't conservatives at all but simply just "greedy cunts" as Paul Keating would have characterised them. Turnbull is letting these people hold his office to ransom too much. He should be playing hard ball with his side if he wants to get anything serious done. A leader is only good as his willingness to whack his own side to make the deal stick. Even I know that - why doesn't the prime Minister? 

I Hate It When Things Close

Some years ago at the height of the GFC, Starbucks closed a slew of their stores in Australia. They had picked the wrong moment to expand with their stores when all of a sudden, carrying debt became a dirty word. I was walking through Martin Place on the day they announced the mass closures, and I could see they were having a staff meeting about it in their store. It just looked terrible, witnessing all these people losing their jobs in a very public place. I didn't particularly like their offerings, but it was just terrible to see them in that situation. 

Anyway, Dick Smith stores are closing and 3000 people are about to lose their jobs. 

Dick Smith's debts total about $400 million including $140 million to its banks, National Australia Bank and HSBC. 

Dick Smith staff will now have to liquidate the remaining stock, which is understood to have a book value of about $200 million. 

It's the second fire sale in three months for the chain, which launched a desperate pre-Christmas clearance in a bid to prop up sagging sales.

One Dick Smith worker said the sale was likely to kick off as early as Friday.
The store manager said it was an anxious time for staff even though they knew the end was nigh. 

"There was a false sense of community for a while with everyone trying to look on the bright side and then there was the news about a potential buyer from China," he said.
"But we have an update this morning, saying no more customer orders and we thought uh oh!" 

"Then when we got told about a national conference call . . . and we knew that this was probably going to be bad news, not good."

It has to be said, Dick Smith stores were terrible. They didn't offer up a big range of stuff, they didn't offer up a good range of stuff, they weren't price competitive and they never really had up to date stuff. It was kind of the electrical doodad shop you went to when you couldn't get to any other electrical doodad shop. You couldn't decipher what the selling proposition was, when compared to its competitors, let alone if it even had a unique selling proposition at all. You just couldn't understand how it was supposed to operate, let alone compete with JB HiFi. As it turns out, neither could they.

A long time ago, this kind of something-nothing shop sort of blundered on in the market place. Grace Brothers which turned into Myers, was for years operating like this where you could get second tier goods for second tier prices guaranteed to leave you somewhat dissatisfied. Not surprisingly, Myers has been on the ropes for the last decade because it simply has no edge whatsoever in the modern retail marketplace (and never really had anyway). In many ways it's not surprising at all that Dick Smith stores hit the wall. 

Nonetheless I really do feel for the employees in the stores. It's terrible watching a long time going concern close down. Working through the process is even worse. Some of these private equity people that brought about the debt-laden IPO need to be investigated. 

The Meaning Of Bernie In The US Presidential Elections

It's 56 years since John F. Kennedy was elected President. There have been equal years with Republicans and Democrats in the White House since 1960: Nixon with 6; Ford with 2; Reagan with 8, George Bush Snr. with 4; and Dubya with 8 making 28. Kennedy with 3; Johnson with 5; Carter with 4; Clinton with 8 and Obama with 8 including this year also makes 28. It's surprising because it feels like there have been more years under Republicans and crazy ones at that: Nixon, Reagan and Dubya make you want to reach for the American Psychiatric Association's DSM. It was also a long time between Kennedy who was a Northern Democrat and Obama who is from Chicago. 

The years since Kennedy's assassination have been quite depressing from a progressive point of view, up until Barack Obama. If we cast our minds back to the 2008 election, Obama's campaign essentially ambushed and derailed Hillary Clinton's campaign, largely on building from the grassroots, and this in turn delivered the first Northern democrat President since JFK. Which goes to show it hasn't been easy for a Northern Democrat to get up. Just think of Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis and their terrible campaigns in 1984 and 1988 respectively. And while Bill Clinton's two terms gave some respite, he was decidedly a Southern Democrat who wooed back the Southern vote. Thus the rise of Obama in 2008 signals a new direction for American politics. All of a sudden, the Northern Democrats are a big force, thanks to a progressive grassroots. 

It's enough to make one sort of wonder if Hillary Clinton's problem is that next to Bernie Sanders, she's not Northern Democrat enough. She may even not be Southern Democrat enough. Bernie Sanders is of course, espousing a lot more progressive politics. There was at one time great expectation for Elizabeth Warren running, because she too is more progressive than the Clinton camp. There are strong indications that the younger demographic is radically slanted towards the progressive end of the spectrum. 

The more historic view I take on the Sanders campaign is that it is the first time since Robert F. Kennedy was gunned down in 1968 that a Democrat is running with a very progressive platform. It's the first time in 48 years we're seeing the kind of galvanising force assembling a strong youth vote turn out, in favour of the Progressive cause. Sanders' platform - much more than Obama's platform - inherits the legacy of the1960s activism and builds upon it until it finally reaches the middle of American politics. It's the moment the protest songs and the hippies and the activists and the New Left finally arrive, decades late - but better late than never. 

It's funny because back in 1992, Bill Clinton fooled us all into thinking *he* was that guy. The fact that he wasn't is demonstrated by his presidency, by the things he was not able to achieve in office. It's actually the kind of baggage that really weighs down Hillary Clinton's campaign. 2016 is 24 years beyond 1992. There's a whole generation of kids who grew into adults, not believing in the Clinton name, and they'll be out there not voting for her. Should Sanders get up over Clinton, there are going to be a lot of 'Regressive Left' types who are going to be upset. But then they were upset when Obama got up over Hillary in 2008 and that didn't exactly change anything for them. The Clinton supporters are essentially Baby Boomers who are still fooled by the Clinton name. 

As for Bernie Sanders, in a certain way, the most impressive thing about him is how long he's been fighting for equality. He has been 'on message' since before Generation X was even born. The photos that have emerged from his activism in the early 1960s are heartening. They give us great strength and let us understand that it is possible to fight the power for a lifetime and make it count. If the defining characteristic of leadership is to inspire people into being their best, then certainly Bernie Sanders has that quality in spades.

That's him right there during some sit in in 1962. It could have been you, it could have been me in another time and place; but as it turned out, it was him all along. If people really think the 1960s activism meant something more than just what people did to kill boredom, they really ought to look into Bernie Sanders.