View From The Couch - 20/Jul/2022

40.3c In London

It sounds like it was worse than just bad. 

The UK has experienced scorching heat like it never has before, and it is causing all sorts of problems in a country built for cool, drizzly weather.  

For the first time since records began, temperatures reached 40 degrees Celsius in the country, peaking at 40.3C at Coningsby, a small village in England's Midlands.
It is about 1.6 degrees warmer than the last hottest day recorded, 38.7C in Cambridge in July 2019. 

A new record was also set in Wales on Monday when the maximum reached 37.1C, beating a previous high of 35.2C, while Scotland topped its previous hottest temperature of 32.9C set in 2003, by reaching 34.8C at Charterhall on Tuesday.

The place is not built for this kind of heat. The footage of the fires outside London looked every bit as spectacular as the fires during the Black Summer down here in 2019. 

The grim reality of this heat wave is that you can sheet ALL of it to Global Warming, and it happens the way it did because we spent the last three decades voting in leaders who were in the pockets of the fossil fuel lobby. 

And here we are. What can I say but, Told. You. So. 

Shinzo Abe, Bogey Man Even In Death  

Look, I really like Peter Hartcher's reporting and writing for the SMH. But this one had me scratching my head. 

Abe didn’t wait for formal revision of the constitution. He took a series of incremental steps. He increased the budget of Japan’s so-called Self Defence Forces. He broke the longstanding cap that held defence spending below 1 per cent of GDP to today stand at 1.1 per cent. He commissioned the conversion of two warships into aircraft carriers.
He pushed through parliament a law that allows Japan’s military to operate with US forces and those of other allies, including Australia. And he took the lead in the democratic world’s response to Beijing’s aggression with three policy innovations.

Yeah okay. Then Hartcher lists three ways in which Shinzo Abe tried to confront Xi's China, only to admit that Anthony Albanese is about to do the same kinds of things just to keep Australia secure against China's encroachment. 

Abe proposed that Japan consider sharing with the US responsibility for the “nuclear umbrella” that protects US allies. And he said that any “Taiwan crisis” would also be a “Japan crisis”. This was an encouragement to Japan to commit to the defence of Taiwan against any mainland Chinese aggression. 

Prosperity and pacifism seem no longer enough for the Japan of today. Increasingly, Japan is contemplating active defence of liberty and a liberal world order. More than any other Japanese leader, Abe has brought the country to this point. And Japan’s “martial qualities”? The ambitions of Xi Jinping’s China seem likely to test them anew.

I can't come at that closing paragraph. There's been this view that Shinzo Abe's time in power was all about remilitarising. This is hardly the case. Japan lifted its defence budget to over 1% of GDP, all the way up to 1.1%. Shock! Horror! Germany is moving to 2% and nobody's suggesting Germany's going back to the 1940s. It's not like Japan is suddenly capable of  - what, invading China? Bombing Pearl Harbour? Darwin? It couldn't be further from the facts on the ground. 

Shinzo Abe was in power for the longest period for as long as they hav had Prime Ministers in modern Japan going back to 1868. He did not bring a single draft for the rewrite of the constitution to the constitutional review committee, let alone the floor of the Diet for debate. He might have said he wanted to change the Peace Constitution but he hardly ever followed through on anything resembling what people feared he would do - and he had ample time and opportunity to do so but did no such thing. 

Now that the book is closed, I think we should get rid of these notions that Abe was about remilitarising Japan. It makes good copy for the Herald to sell their rag, but it sure sucks as writing about the history that we just lived through.

 

Federal Election Night 2022

And It Finally Ended

Jeez. It took 9 years but this government of miscreants that started with the Idiot Abbott, is finally put out to pasture. Now that he is headed for the door, Scomo sure was a weird Prime Minister, as much as Malcolm Turnbull sandwiched in-between was redundant. It's hard to believe such a government went 3 terms, as clearly it was in turmoil as it had 3 Prime Ministers in 3 terms. That's weird too. 

The rise of the 'teal' candidacy is probably a historic inevitability given how far to the right the Liberals swung and left urbane ideas behind. A bunch of highly educated professional women with Liberal Party pedigrees running as independents in deeply entrenched inner city Liberal seats obviously did the trick. The Sydney North Shore, Northern Beaches together with the Eastern Suburbs has gone 'teal'. Gone are Trent Zimmerman, Jason Falinski, and David Sharma. All I can say is, what took them so long? The great mystery to me has been all these well-educated, well-heeled women toeing the party line against their own personal interests. It's about time they woke up and went their own way. They're not my political friends, but I applaud them for wanting out at long last. It's a divorce that's been a long time coming.

Losing these women also raises the question where the Liberal Party is going to go. Amazingly, you saw no urgency about this existential threat from the Coalition in the weeks leading up to the vote, and arguably Scomo didn't address any of it in his concession speech. Again, he's a weird guy - but more on that later. He and his cohorts in government had plenty off opportunities to do something, even if just symbols to address the grievances of women in general - but they chose to do nothing. They couldn't possibly wonder how this election resulted in them getting kicked out by people who were once close to them. For now, we can see that the Liberal Party has been deserted by its women-folk, and that's kind of interesting. 

Climate Change As A Priority Issue

Maybe - just maybe - Climate Change (read GLOBAL WARMING) can stop being treated like a back burner as a result of this election. I remember thinking that when Kevin Rudd won, but, no, that didn't work out quite that way. Tony Abbott came storming back on the climate-denial vote. That said if you look at the 11 cross benchers in the lower house, all of whom who ran on Climate as a leading issue, you would expect that perhaps Albo has a shot at getting something concrete done. It would be nice if once and for all if the Coalition could get up to speed and just accept that it's a bloody big issue instead of trying to bury it for political posturing purposes. 

The rise of teal candidates tell you one thing - all the carping from the Murdoch press could not dissuade these electorates from the need to vote out the Liberals and get some action happening on the Global Warming problem.  

Up to now, there's been this weird dynamic where you were often incredulous as to whether the Coalition acted against having any kind of serious climate policies because they just didn't believe it as fact; or didn't want to believe it because of profit motive; or whether they did in fact believe it but were told to act like they didn't to preserve a voting block. If it was the last, then it sure didn't work out for the Coalition at all. If it was the former, two they need to go get an education and get their heads on straight in the coming years because the electorate has pretty much rejected climate change denialism. 

Boutique Retail Politics

You heard the phrase "all politics is local" a lot in the coverage on the ABC. You get the feeling that politicians say this to themselves in order not address the elephant in the room like China's ambitions in the region or the impact of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Instead we're treated to a kind of car-salesman like pitch about costs of living. While costs of living is important, you'd want to vote on more than just that issue alone, and not acknowledging that point as a politician is kind of retrograde. Anybody can argue for self interest. It takes a better candidate to argue for the interest of the community, the area, the state and the nation. 

In light of that the fragmentation of the electorate is a little irksome. The teal candidates are to retail politics what custom made branded goods are to retail goods. There's a hint of neo-liberal personalisation of politics that seems to have happened in the era of social media, and we are given a stronger sense of proximity to our candidates. In turn, the successful candidates are photogenic or long on social-media-savvy. A quick glance at the teal candidates gives you the distinct sense that this is a very personalised kind of body politic expressing itself. 

Is this good? Who knows? Yet it does open the door to the massively populist, lowest common denominator politics. So we should ask in the same breath was, say Trump good? Is Boris Johnson any good? As per the Gillard minority government before it, the new ALP government has its work cut out for it. 

The Old Codgers Died

The other aspect of all this that springs to mind is that the old codgers who were stubbornly conservative passed away between 2019 and 2022. The rich suburbs got inherited by their children, and these children are a lot more worldly than their parochially conservative parents. I mean, it must hurt the pride of those educated and conservative that they had to toe the line that Climate Change wasn't happening, or that we needed to keep doing fossil fuels at the expense of the planet because money talks and bullshit walks, or  simply play dumb like climate change is a non-issue. And if the climate wasn't the only thing where they had to play dumb to be nice, then surely the corruption and pork barrelling was hard to justify and defend and most certainly trying to defend a government that had a total disregard for women's issue must have been galling. 

Given how Queensland went in 2019, it's a bit surprising that the inner city of Brisbane got eaten out by the Greens, and chances are, it wouldn't have happened if the old codgers were still around to vote for the Coalition. There's a message in there for Anastasia Paluszczuk (I have to look up that spelling every single fucking time!). Maybe she can be a bit more confident and tell Adani to fuck off with their coal mine.

The Weirdness of Scomo

Scomo, in his time as PM has shown himself to be an utterly mendacious, lazy, selfish partisan git. But just as how we might describe somebody having a mean streak, I would say Scomo had a weird streak of decency over his mendacious, lazy, selfish, partisan git-tish ways. He stood by the importance of democracy (in spite of undermining its institutions through under-funding them) and he talked a good game for Australia's prospects (which have not diminished, have grown in his time, but has also reduced Australia to a quarry).

He is also, Australia's first Generation-X Prime Minister and goes into his post-political career at the tender age of 54. He was an MP for a mere 12 years before becoming PM, 15 years total to date. It is a meteoric career in once sense, that also came with controversies and a certain obliviousness to the nuances of anything. He was a stick-in-the-mud middle class dufus from Sutherland Shire. He characterised himself as a bulldozer towards the end of this campaign, but he was more bull-in-a-china-shop. He moved fast and broke things much as the motto goes at Facebook/Meta - it is not a good motto. 

As we go back to a Babyboomer PM in Anthony Albanese, the sheer anomalousness of Scomo's time in the Lodge sticks out. One certainly wouldn't have expected the Coalition to move to a Gen-X leader faster than the progressives. At this stage the ALP front bench looks like deeper veterans than the outgoing Prime Minister. 

I guess the circumstances of his rise to the office was weird as well. The Liberals had the choice of Julie Bishop, Peter Dutton, and Scott Morrison. For some reason only known to the deepest darkest recesses of the sexist collective mind of the Liberal party room, Julie Bishop in spite of all her experience was rejected in favour of Peter Dutton and Scott Morrison. Having disposed of their one credible female leadership candidate, the Liberals decided Peter Dutton was a bit too gauche and rightwing, so they they picked Scomo as a compromise. That turn of events is so weird it is not likely to be duplicated in future. 

All this has led to the incoming Albo Government to look almost nondescript and plain vanilla. I guess when you consider the abject anti-intellectualism of Tony Abbott at the start of the 3 terms, maybe it is not surprising that it ends with this chaotic, mendacious, lazy, whimper.   

There's No Money II

No Time Left, Not Enough Money

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Barnaby's A Bit Slow II

Here We Are Again...

Barnaby Joyce is awful. That is all. 

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Scomo Goes To Hawaii II

 He's Not The One Holding The Hose, Mate

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

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

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

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

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Screams Of Burning Koalas II

"What Is This Shit?"

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

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

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

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

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

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Gladys The Koala Killer II

What Does It Take To Cut Emissions Here?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            <...> 

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

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

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

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

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

Most households buy a new car about every 10 years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Lucky Country II

What Happened To Them?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This Is The Shit You Voted For II

The Shit For Which You Voted, Part 2

If you've been a long time reader of this blog, you know I'm staunchly in favour of liberal democracy over fascism or communism or abject anarchy. So what I'm about to write next needs that stated before proceeding because I don't want this to be interpreted as a fascist screed railing against populism. 

One of the vexing things about democracy is that the majority gets their way even if it's a bad idea. That's kind of it. It's a natural derivative of the decision making chain, but the way it works out for big policy items is terrible. Global Warming has been on the agenda since the late 1980s. Since then I've watched as successive Australian governments mostly tried to put off doing anything about Global Warming. The early list of recalcitrants include Bob Hawke, Paul Keating, and John Howard. John Howard was particularly bad in that he kept pushing off the discussion, striking the pose of a reasonable sceptic. Maybe the scientists were wrong, he argued. Like, all of them? Really? 

Kevin Rudd was the only Prime Minister who went to election claiming Global Warming was indeed a priority issue, and thanks to a drought at the time he was able to drive that point home and win. He went to Copenhagen to negotiate something tangible and as Copenhagen talks failed, he expended his political capital. Then, of course Rudd was undone by Julia Gillard who promptly went to election promising not to do anything about Global Warming (and was forced to the table to negotiate with the Greens who made her do something-not-nothing). Tony Abbott used that back-up to get into government with the promise to undo what the Gillard/ALP-Green government had done. He had no intention of doing anything about Global Warming. Malcolm Turnbull who replaced him ostensibly did want to do something about it, but his denialist party hamstring him enough that he could not do anything - but that is of course like a dog eating his homework. He was then unseated by our current imbecile Prime Minister Scomo who is aspirational about zero emissions by 2050. Will he do anything about it? Not if his new deputy PM and erstwhile denialist nut job Barnaby Joyce has anything to say - and of course Joyce has a lot of dumb things to say about climate. 

The personally alarming thing about that sequence of bad-for-the-environment Australian Governments is that it covers 30 years and only the 3 years with Kevin Rudd marked a moment of leadership on Global Warming. 90% of the time, our governments put other things as their priority. Now, I'm not crazy, I understand things like Mabo, tighter gun laws, Post-9/11-war-on-terror, disability insurance, and budget deficits are kind of important. Be that as it may, we all live on this planet and if we fuck it all up, there's no point having surpluses on budgets or Aboriginal Native Titles on a scorched Earth. I'm sorry but that's just the pragmatic reality. I was about to include the GFC on that list but amazingly Kevin Rudd's government was dealing with that while still putting Global Warming front and centre. He had his faults but his priorities were not one of them. In fact, with hindsight his time in government looks much better than the press of the time described. 

The really disappointing thing is that through that 30 years - and more before even then - I have been voting for people who put Global Warming as something that needs to be addressed; and what that has amounted to is a lot of lost elections for my votes. Understand this: my conscience on the issue of Global Warming is clear. I might have had the dubious moment where I voted for Mark Latham's ALP when he was in charge, but to be fair, he had a better policy platform on Global Warming than John Howard who poo-poo-ed the notion at that election. For all my time voting on the issue, I've got bupkis for it. Nada. The debate has remained fixed along idiotic lines with nary a policy worth shit.  

It's enough to make you wonder if Democracy has failed itself. Consider the extent to which China with its authoritarian Communism with paranoid characteristics, has managed to swing towards renewables. It's a little like how Fascist governments were able to massively industrialise at the drop of the hat back in the early 1930s. It's enough to draw in some kind of approval from the rest of the world. Here we are in Australia with one of he most robust democracies in the world, and somehow we can't get our shit together to deal with Global Warming. Meanwhile there's paranoid authoritarian China doing its part to stave off the calamity. It makes you wonder about democracy itself, no? Just why is it that we somehow can't deal with the Big Picture ticket item when we put things to a vote? 

The answer is of course the strident Murdoch media outlets with their hectoring, bulling, irrational hostility towards anybody who wants to do anything about it, but the big bill will be coming their way just as it will come to you and I. Murdoch with his money and influence, kept winning while I kept losing out. The way I see it, they have more houses that can't be insured ready to be burnt down by firestorms or washed away by mega-storms or just generally more crap to lose in Global Warming. So we'll see who's laughing when their part of the world goes up in smoke is or is washed away in storm waters. Me? I don't have kids who will inherit this sorry Earth ruined by rapacious capitalism and industrialisation. I don't have a house, I don't have any serious assets vulnerable to Global Warming. I might lose my car in flash floods, that's about it. 

I think there should be a clause in democracy that says if you keep getting out-voted and your interests just aren't met over a prolonged period, you should be able to withhold paying taxes. I mean let's face it, I didn't vote for this shit. They did. Why the hell should I be lumped with the costs of their bad decisions? 

This is exactly the shit they voted for.

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Annastacia's Coal Mine II

Speaking Of Coal Mines... Who's Going To Pay For The Damages?

There's a fellow over at Extinction Rebellion who has an important post that I want to quote from. No, I didn't get his permission, but I'm sure he'd like his thoughts spread far and wide so, I imagine he'd be okay with it. Besides which I make no money here on this blog. If he wants a percentage, he can ask for whatever percentage of nothing. I'm sorry  - but we're all in this together so, let's unpack this...

One of key reasons why XR is being unsuccessful is because it refuses to communicate accurately and concretely in everyday language what is going to happen in the next two decades. This can be summed up in six words: the fiscal crisis of the state. Forget dolphins, whales and icesheets – there is only one reality here and it is what the state does when it runs out of money. This has very little to do with politics or values – it’s much deeper than that. The first principle of the state is to maintain itself. And when it experiences extreme economic stress it raids society to get cash. This means it takes money from unproductive parts of the society to pay for the parts that are productive. So, for instance, in World War Two the UK government raided the assets of the rich to pay for the war. This was done by Tory MPs – it was not a matter of politics but national survival. So you know what is going happen in a decade or so when western countries are having to pay for the massive cost of electrifying their economies, retro fitting their entire housing stock, and dealing with “defence” costs of social breakdown in the sub tropics: it’s going to raid the pensions of my generation. The brutal reality is that the interests of the retired won’t matter.

And that right there should be grabbing the attention of politicians right now. If they leave Global Warming off the priority to-do list, the bill is going to come in sooner than you think, and it's going to be bigger than you think, and society is going to suffer greatly to pay that bill. So who will governments raid to pay for that bill? 

Well just consider that our children and their children will have no motivation to act any differently than us. Payback time is coming. It could be merely structural. The younger generation will come to power and the logic of the state, as mentioned, will lead to the rapid impoverishment of my generation, presently in our 40’s and 50’s as we get into our 60’s and 70’s. But more likely there will be a visceral contempt: you created this shit and so you can pay for it. Polluters pay and all that. We are not heading into some ecological steady state circular economy new civilisation. Much more likely we are heading into a time when people over 60 will be spat at as they walk down the street, and be literally left to die in urine stinking death homes.

It gets very frank:

If you want to speak with some effectiveness about the actual reality of the climate crisis to the public, this is what you have to start talking about. <edit> In 2021 our governments are locking in this horrendous social stress because my generation of adults are refusing to go into civil resistance to stop it. It’s as simple as that. This is our war, but we are refusing to fight it.

Unsurprisingly this part of the talk along with the other “tell the truth” sections were taken out by the middle class liberal “let’s not upset people” regime that soon took over XR. But taking things out of talks which upset you does not stop then from happening: that is the post modernist conceit.

That much I can agree with wholeheartedly. The mere substitution of 'Climate Change' for 'Global Warming' was one of the most dishonest swicheroos pulled exactly because governments didn't want people to panic. Truth be known, Greta Thunberg is right: we all need to panic like our houses are on fire, because, they are. 

If you're into scary truths - and you ought to be - you can find his lecture here:

O what joy that was. 

Consider too that video was from 2018. 3 years on, I'd say we're even firmly deeper into the shit than we were then, and still the Australian Government is in denial mode. Last I checked, the Carmichael Mine is celebrating for striking first load in June this year. 

I mean, seriously, how fucked are we? 

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Fuck You Adani II

The Physical Limits To Growth 

If there's one thing the current pandemic shows us is that we're in some kind of weird hiatus from civilisation as we struggle to find a way back to business-as-usual. The very pandemic and its murky origins tells us that we've reached some limit to our economic growth, but there are the usual insane Murdoch-media-influence denials of this very simple fact. 

The Coronavirus has been around for many a millennia. It has been living in the part of the ecosystem involving either bats or pangolins, which is distant to the part of the ecosystem involving homo sapiens. It is only through our unnecessary intrusion into the bat/pangolin inhabited parts of the ecosystem that has brought about this massive invasion from this virus. 

The virus for its part has been involved with whatever host animal for a long time, as it seems to have evolved interesting mechanisms to bypass the immune system mammals. This is in turn limiting the effectiveness of our vaccine as the virus evolves further means to evade our immune systems. We may never know from which group this virus emerged because the communist party leadership in China will continue to resist any probe to determine its origins, but one thing is certain - we wouldn't have come across this thing if we didn't push into places we didn't need to go. We just can't be eating bat soup and pangolin pies. 

And that in a nutshell of our modern global economy hitting a physical limit. Global Warming is another. If we keep on digging up fossil fuels to be burnt for energy, we will fuck up the atmosphere so much it will be like we moved to Venus. Heck, maybe there used to be Venusians. And the Venusians had their own civilisation and culture and industries and entertainment and diversions, only for it to produce too much greenhouse gasses. Maybe they even had a Venusian Murdoch Press that tried to deny it all. In any case the way Venus is today is exactly where we're headed if we don't change how we go about things with our civilisation. You can stick that into your objectivity pipe and smoke it. 

It's daft to be opening up a coal mine in this part of world history.

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No More Time II

2 Years On From The Fires

One thing that is encouraging is the news that there actually is a similar level of support for climate policy action in rural Australia as there is in urban areas. For years there has been a gap, and the Nationals have been able to make mileage from that gap claiming Green policies were some kind of urban fantasy that does not suit the needs of the bush. Of course as I have wondered out loud for years on this very blog, you wonder when the rural electorate comes to the reckoning that Global Warming is indeed coming for them, and may impact their wallets harder than the latte-sipping-trendy-lefties dwelling in the cities. After all, your farm could go up in flames but it's hard for bushfires to burn down a 2 bedroom flat in the inner city. 

With the IPCC report that came out, governments around the world have been served notice that we are simply on the last stretch. The Coalition government might try to dress up its language to assuage the denialists amongst their own constituency, but not taking significant action is no longer an option. If the Australian government does not do something serious to mitigate Australia's emissions, the governments around the world will take the opportunity to tax Australian exports at the border. In other words, we will be paying for somebody else's carbon tax coffers rather than our own. And if that simple I-Me-Mine sort of sentiment does not persuade the Coalition, perhaps the recent sceneries of flooding in NYC in the wake of Hurricane Ida might persuade them that the future repair bills for our cities affected by Global Warming will likely have to come from somewhere - and that somewhere is most likely going to be from carbon pricing. 

Not to mention the insurance business not being able to offer insurance for ever increasing parts of Australia might finally persuade rural Nationals voters that maybe denialism and head in the sand-ism of the National Party has to come to an end. We'll see. 

One thing we know for sure is that we have run out of time for inaction.  Something's going to break. It may very well be party politics.

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Barnaby's A Bit Slow

Is There Any Other Way To Put It?

Maybe it's because he insists on being on the outer reaches of ideological extremism, it's easy to confuse Barnaby Joyce with somebody who might have a clue about what is good for the country. He's convinced he's a good man, trying to good by his country but his skewed ideology takes him to places where stupid cohabitates with insanity. 

That's really all there is to it. 

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There's No Money

There's Never Any Money

Some time after those terrible fires, it got to rebuilding, and affected people went looking around for reconstruction/support money from the government. At the time, announcements were made that there was 2 billion dollars to go around but months later it was found out that there was no such fund as announced. People found it impossible to navigate the bureaucracy to be heard by the Federal Government. Arguably, the Federal Government put in wear plugs and sat in the maze in order to make it inaccessible A little like Major Major Major Major in Catch-22 when he says he will only take meetings when he is not in his office.  

People affected by the fires went into the winter of 2020 with the pandemic going, without having rebuilt anything. It should have been a bigger scandal but of course this Covid-19 pandemic has been such a monster of sorts it ate up all the airspace for the message to get out. 

I kind of imagine that Scomo, having been snubbed pretty hard in his attempt to PR and Spin his way out of the deep ditch he had dug himself, decided these people would get punished through the power of bureaucracy. The ABC was reporting people still living in tents in the middle of winter. This is a terrible state of affairs. 

All of which got me thinking that we do terrible things to one another. I didn't vote in this terrible government but somebody did, and those people knew full well what kind of crackpot policies would be put into place or left to die through inaction and omission. And now that people in the south end of the continent were facing this terrible plight, there were people in Queensland who were quite smug that they got the government for which they had hoped. The absence of empathy is psychopathic. It's a horrible thought, really when part of the populace abandons another to depredation and neglect. We used to be better than this. Really, we were, once upon a long time ago. 

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That Time When...

...Scomo Went To Hawaii

It's been well over a year and a part of me finds it still way too hard to forgive Scomo's abandonment of his country to go on a family holiday during the worst fire season in recorded history. The country was ablaze, he was on vacation - because it had been arranged with his family months ago, allegedly - and whole communities had been burnt to the ground.

It was a bit like FDR going on a vacation to the Bahamas the week after WWII landed on his desk. Except, FDR did no such thing, and here was our Prime Minister sipping Pina Coladas by the sea in Hawaii. I mean, come on. How do you spin that, you PR hack Scomo? 

After which he kind of hid behind his kids and took his lumps in the press and looked like yesterday's burnt toast util of course another disaster came along in the form of the COVID-19 pandemic. Then, he was quick off the mark to do things.  You sort of wonder if he would have been as quick had he not had to eat so much humble pie over the bushfire response and his holiday to Hawaii. 

His Prime Ministerial performance has picked up somewhat since then, probably because he finally connected in his head that what he does in his office matters to everybody in the country. All I can say is let us hope he gets voted out as soon as possible.

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Justice For Lewis

A Year Later I'm Still Upset

Some things are just too awful to let pass. That's how I feel about the mega-fires that visited our land in the summer of 2019-2020. Combined with the unpreparedness, the wilful ignorance of the Federal Government, runaway heatwaves, under-investment in infrastructure for dealing with mega-fires, and you had a catastrophic failure of leadership that manifested as a total, unmitigated disaster. 

And it's one thing if idiot Queenslanders voted for Clive Palmer's mob as a 'hedge' and found themselves with this terrifyingly incompetent government were the ones getting burned out of their houses. Instead it was innocent wildlife was getting hurt and killed in these fires. You can blame the idiot humans who voted for the idiot government, but the wildlife is blame-free - and yet they bore the burnt of the consequence.

I'm not some Animal Liberationist nut job - but even I can see how disproportionately the piling up of bad decisions and their horrible consequences are falling upon those without the power to withstand it, or change it, move away from it, or voice their concerns. 

When you see footage of people rescuing wildlife amid the chaos and turmoil of the fires, you have to ask yourself, how exactly did we get to this point? When will the comeuppance visit themselves upon those who are ostensibly responsible for this land, the idiot politicians? Why do the animals have to lose their dwellings for the idiot politicians' bad decisions? Why can't the idiot politicians lose their houses and family and habitat? 

There's really no justice on that account. There ought to be. I'll leave it at that. 

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End of An Era For Stupid?

As The Time of Trump Draws Near The End

When it gets right down to it, I'm a sore loser. It didn't seem to matter no matter how much I offered up my opinions and pontificating over here. It was just howling into the wind. The world was stupid enough to be persuaded by the Murdoch papers and TV to vote Tony Abbott and Boris Johnson and Donald Trump into power, solely to give tax cuts for the rich and hold off doing anything about Global Warming, what is the damn point of writing a word more about any of this? Have we not crashed into the Twilight of Civilisation? 

Not only did progressives not win, they could not stave off the onslaught of Stupid that ensued those losses. The English speaking world led by the USA, UK and Australia collectively lost its common sense and went with the worst kind of idiotic rhetoric as substitute for substantive policy. How is one to discuss what ensued those losses with any kind of sense?

So I stopped writing here. Why expend the energy? I can't beat Rupert Murdoch and his mighty minions of mendacity. Besides which, was it really my job to care? After all I have no kids. There is no generation I have to worry about. My friends with kids worry about the future, sure. I have had the odd luxury of not having to worry about that. In one sense, the stupidity that transpired because of those losses affected me less than it did my friends and their families. 

Yet it has been a terrible. 7 years of Liberal Party rule in Australia, 6 years of Brexit politics in the UK, and 5 years of Donald Trump politics has put a huge dent in the credibility of the English speaking world. Nations that would look to the democratic leadership of Washington DC and London got an eyeful of miserable, partisan, anti-intellectual, pseudo-scientific brouhaha that passed for politics in these three countries - all of which share the intoxicating poison of stupidity that is the Murdoch press. 

And so in the days following the Putsch upon Capitol Hill by pro-Trump idiots, we are left in the odd position of waiting to see if this horrible period in history will come to a close, at least in America. Will the Republicans finally wake up in the Senate as to just how untenable Trumpism has been for the GOP? Or will they aid and abet the worst President of all time, one last time? Brexit finally limped over the line in late December so as bad as the outcome is, that little drama has come to the end of its run. All that is left is living with the consequences. As for Australia, there is a good deal of time left before the next election. I don't know if the ALP will ever gets act together in time to oust Scomo and his squad of awful human beings. Also offers me little confidence. It appears that Bill Shorten's loss in 2019 was a spectacularly bad election to lose for the ALP, let alone Australia - but that is all a rant for another day.

If anything, the 2010s were a disappointing decade. It didn't really even have any form. People just scrapped for a living thanks to the GFC, and then it was done.  

The Dying of People

In the intervening years I did not write here, I found some of my friends began dropping like flies. Death is always somewhat surprising, even though you come to realise that you have walked into the age group where death is not so surprising. Plenty of people have died at ages younger than what I am today. I feel a far cry from the person that started blogging back in 2003. And people really do die. I'm deeply saddened by the passing of Geoff Murphy, Brian Burgess, and Michael Jacob. They're all of a certain generation, and they all passed away during the years I did not write here. 

I lost a friend to liver cancer; and I've lost one to COVID-19. If you spend your 30 year adult life drinking a lot, dying of liver cancer is unsurprising. If you are a touring musician in the USA, and Donald Trump is your president, then it is unsurprising that you contract COVID-19 and die. Some famous people have died form COVID-19. Countless animals perished in the mega fires of 2019. Death is all around us. death brought about by stupidity of others, is surprisingly common. 

Death is a thing, in case you were lulled into not thinking about it as a factor in one's decision making. 

Ambivalence Grows

The other thing I want to report from my self-imposed exile from writing on this blog, is that I've become even more ambivalent about how I feel about many things. One becomes less certain as one piles the age on to one's being. One becomes more discerning, but one also becomes less decisive. 

It's also a little disturbing when you read back stuff written by people who died at an age younger than you are right now. This is one of those things that happen. You get perspective on your own life and existence in a  way that you just can't buy into the framework of thought and ideology that is invested in a book. I used to think Soseki Natsume was a giant of literature. He died at age 49 and suddenly when you re-read his work as somebody older, you get this weird cognitive dissonance that maybe you really could rhetorically beat up on the literary giant if he only were around today - hey, I even have a cat these days Mr Natsume! 

Same with Jack Kerouac who died at 47. F Scott Fitzgerald at 44. Jane Austen, 41. Raymond Radiguet, 20. Or the notion that for all his entire, massive, output, everything Frank Zappa ever did was as a person younger than you are today. Ditto Glenn Gould who died at 50. It's all a little unsettling - and this adds to this ambivalence. Everything looks like it has 10 sides to the argument, and it's exhausting.  

So What Are You Gonna Do, Art Neuro?

I'm going to pop in more often this year. Stay tuned. 

Screams of Burning Koalas

 Can't Express Fully How Angry I Still Am

Suffice to say the accounts of what happened last summer in Australia were harrowing as they were bewildering. Harrowing because so many lives were lost, not just humans but much wildlife as well. Some put th e figures at 1 billion. It might have been conservative. It was also bewildering because the Australian government's preparation and response to the Firesign general were all too slow, inadequate and mostly laughable if the tragedy unfolding weren't so dire. 

Mallacoota on New Years Eve sounded like Hell had landed and started dancing on everybody's heads. 

People spent the night in the waters off the pier, up to their necks in the waves as they watched the sky glow red and black embers fell and they could hear screams of burning koalas from the burning tree tops. It's not way to bring in the new year. People talk about how bad 2020 was in relation to the COVID-19 but make no mistake, from Day 1, it was a crap year. 

So yeah, I guess I had to write a song about that. One year on, I'm still livid at the Global Warming Denialism of this Federal Government. I mean yes if we changed out of fossil fuels, it would be a hit the GDP and the wallet of people like Gina and Twiggy Forrest. But honestly, they can wear that pay cut - and they won't exactly starve or lose their houses. Seriously, what price our planet? 

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Gladys The Koala Killer

Amongst Other Terrible Things She Does

Our Premier, the Hon. Premier Gladys Berejiklian is an odd duck, even in the ranks of female politicians who toil in the ranks of conservatives. She must be good at whatever it is politicians do to get ahead of the pack because let's face it, she's got the weird woggy surname, and a visage that is most unlike that of say a TV breakfast host intros country. She seems to be nice on some level, compassionate, even. You wouldn't want to be the guy wagging a finger at her telling her her policies stink, lest people think you're the bully. 

And yet her policies make you want to turn to eco-terrorism. She would countenance the building of these terrible tollways, and chopping down native forests, or putting a coal mine in the middle of a water catchment. Above all, she would name a policy that seems friendly towards the preservation of Koalas but is in fact incentivises for more environmental destruction, not less. It's crazy stuff. And somehow the voting public does not bat a mascara-ed eyelash. We keep going with this insane party in charge, with Gladys at the helm. 

Because of all that, she has earned the moniker, Gladys the Koala Killer. Is it fair? More than plenty! We live in terrible times. She is contributing her part to that terror. 

Thus it seemed appropriate to at least discuss this by writing a song about her being Gladys, the Koala Killer, destroyer of trees, water tables, and the pristine environment of our bushland, amongst other horrible deeds.  

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Lucky Country

Also, The Dumb-Luck Country

I don't want to badmouth my own country but a year on from the massive bushfires, there are days where you just draw a deep sigh.  

When one reflects on everything that happened in Australian politics in the last decade, you're left with a profound sense of lost time. It's all time that could have been spent on doing things better - certainly better than the internecine party-politic-infighting that was a feature of the decade. If the ALP burnt itself out on the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd imbroglio, the Liberal Party regaled with no less than a Turnbull-Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison turn of leadership spills. 6 Prime Minsters in the decade shows the country was in political strife, most over the issue of Climate Change. 

Needless to say the decade was punctuated by an exclamation mark in the massive bushfires last summer and still there is no indication the culture wars over Global Warming has come to an end. There were many villains in the story, but if there was one traitor to this country that deserves special mention, it must be Andrew Robb who sold out this country from his position in government and now receives a fat salary from our burgeoning enemy China. 

All that said, our country lurches on without a policy or apology. just bumbling around trying to find a fig leaf to put over the glaringly obvious absence of a credible climate policy. Again, I won't go into the idiocy of the situation we find ourselves, but it has to beside that making the future precarious through the misapplication of partisan politics is the height of stupidity. As such, it is inescapable to understand that the government we have is a execrable mess. 

So, what exactly is this luckiness we credit ourselves when we must live with such stupidity that undercuts that luck? 

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