Quick Shots - 28 Feb 2019

Ex-Cardinal George Fucking Pell, Pederast

I've not blogged anything serious in a long while and the main reason for that is I got burnt out by the stupidity of politics. There's only so much Tony Abbott and climate change denialism and rank class warfare one can take, beyond which came the presidency of Donald Trump. After all of that was the spectacle of various Royal Commissions that laid bare how morally bankrupt our society had become, when it came to making money and getting away with illicit crimes.

Yet, today of all days kind of moved me to blog this date in history. For today is the day Ex-Cardinal George Fucking Pell finds himself in prison for having molested choirboys in the 1990s, while he negotiated away the issue of the Catholic Church's culpability in protecting pederast priests. The irony is simply too much. And if that weren't enough, the Ex-Cardinal got himself excellent character references from two former Prime Minsters of this land.

I am not a wowser. If anything I hate wowsers, so I find myself pleasantly delighted that a man who was the arch-wowser of our times was found out to be exactly the sort of sinner he excoriated from his bully pulpit. The irony is simply too beautiful not to go without being remarked upon. As obvious it is - like the sun in broad day light, really, - this was one man who ought not to have - pardon the phrase - pontificated on the ills of homosexuality when he himself was sticking his penis into the mouths of boys. And I don't for even a single moment mean to suggest it would have somehow been better had he had stuck his dick into the mouths of girls, no, no, no!

And Pell (which is a contraction for Pederast in hell) still insists he is innocent and that he intends to appeal. His lawyer sought a lighter sentence on the grounds that it was a 'vanilla' kind of transgression. Clearly the good counsel has not heard the joke about fucking one goat. It doesn't matter that it only lasted six minutes long, you get judged on the act itself for a reason.

A Father Brennan sought to cast doubt on the judgment itself by suggesting it was impossible to get a penis out to stick it into the mouth of a choirboy from under a Cardinal's robes. It's quite funny because the defence amounts to the same as the idiotic joke wherein it is claimed rapes are impossible because men with trousers around their ankles cannot run after women with the skirts up. It is as if the Catholic Church fraternity have learnt absolutely nothing from the Royal Commission, or the trial and verdict of George Fucking Pell. Creating plausible deniability is hardly the way into the Kingdom of God, Father Brennan.

Two Arseholes in Search of (De-)Meaning

That brings me to the two idiots, the Dishonourable John Howard and Despicable Tony Abbott.

As for the two former Prime Minsters who provided character references, it suggests more about them than it endorses the character of George Fucking Pell. After all, how can they claim their opinions of the man are unchanged in spite of the verdict? Are they thumbing their noses at the court? Are they casting doubt on the system of justice that leans upon jurors? Are they oblivious to the cries of the victims of sexual abuse? Or are they simply dirty old white men circling the wagons around their fellow white man with a conservative weasel mind and a willingness to forgive the errant penis?
In short, have they no embarrassment that they are endorsing a man who shoved his penis down the maws of thirteen year old boys entrusted in his care?

And the answer is clearly not; not, one, bit.

Here's the thing about these men Abbott and Howard. They created the Australia that needed these Royal Commissions. The Royal Commission into banking and insurance had to be done because both of their governments underfunded ASIC and APRA, and came up with terms by which they couldn't go after the most egregious offenders. The Royal Commission in to child abuse by institutions came up because both men presided over governments that privatised out foster care to religious organs, and never looked too hard into the problems when they were Prime Minster. Even the current Royal Commission into Aged Care emerges from the cutting health care budgets and privatising out care for profiteers. The Royal Commission to come on Disability Patients will show the same issue - that successive governments have privatised care out to private profiteers without accountability, and this has resulted in terrible abuse of the most vulnerable.

In fact, these two men contributed greatly to the environment where the Royal Commission were needed because of their polarising politics. The continued cultural wars waged by these two men made it impossible to govern the country in any sensible way. This meant government oversight was limited, understanding dim, knowledge scanty, and mostly blind to abuses in all these areas. All of this was done in the name of fiscal responsibility and tight budgets with a surplus, damn the consequences. Well, the consequences have come home to roost, and none of these Royal Commissions have painted a positive picture of the Federal Government as run by the Coalition.

Really, these men ought to have their platforms taken away in the same way Kevin Spacey had his taken away. They have nothing positive to contribute in public life if what they want to do with their platform is to endorse George Fucking Pell's character.  In most parts of our society, you don't get to claim to have character once you've been convicted of pedophilia.

Even Ray Hadlee thought it was a bit much. And I think Ray Hadlee is a bit much - but that's another rant entirely.

The 121st Day In Sodom

The other ironic thing is that all these people wanted Pier Pasolini's 'Salo' banned. Howard, Abbott, Pell, and Hadlee. Fuck freedom of speech, let's just censor a film based on the Marquis de Sade's big opus, they said. Isn't power to control what other people se or watch corrosive? Probably more than the things they seek to ban.

If you've read '120 Days of Sodom', you would know that a Mayor, a banker, a judged and a bishop get together and create their own little sadistic sex slave haven, and a lot of times spent sexually abusing minors. It's a terrible book, really, except for one thing: it shows us the relationship between the ability of power to corrupt and the libido itself. De Sade wrote this stuff a good half century before Freud, and Co. really nailed his targets. So much so they had his book banned and had De Sade locked up in the Bastille.

It's especially funny to think upon this because if anybody was the highest priest of the land, it was George Fucking Pell, and he turned out to be exactly the kind of monster De Sade said he would be. John Howard is singularly without insight so he is too stupid to understand how it might have happened that his good friend George Fucking Pell turned out to be a monster. Tony Abbott, I suspect knows better, for I suspect Tony Abbott himself is psychosexually perverted by power, and that is why he has remained in Parliament. Being in Parliament being Tony Abbott the wrecker, fuels his libido. It helps him bang Peta Credlin better.

In any case, we now understand better who these men are, thanks to the Marquis de Sade. Don't ever tell me banning his works is a good idea.

How Can Catholics Stay Catholics In This Country After This?

Look, I always bag out religion because I think they're all suspect. That being said, I don't know how Catholics in this country can stay Catholics after a Cardinal has been found to have not only protected pedophile priests, minimised financial pay outs to victims of pedophile priests, and removed the church itself from being sued for damages by those it abused, but also personally abused choir boys in his care?

How can you be okay going back to this church and confessing in the booth to a bunch of people you can no longer trust? Logically, one would look for a personal connection to God that doesn't involve going through priests, and of course that's exactly how the Reformation began. That's just logic, though.

If I were in the Vatican looking at all this, I'd be more than little worried about where Catholicism can go in Australia after this. I guess bullshit is eternal, and I need not worry about the emotional well-being of Catholics, but it has to be said, going back to Church on Sunday would be misconstrued by the rest of society as tacitly supporting these arsehole priests who would protect pedophiles in their ranks.

I mean, are you really going to be okay with that? If so, how fucking low are you willing to go as a society? I'll tell you how low I'm willing to go. From now on, I'm not going to hesitate to ask any Catholic priest how many pedophiles they personally know about and whom they're protecting.

The World Is Stupider Than You Hope

I just want to note Donald Trump is in Hanoi talking to Kim Jong-Un in hopes of reaching a nuclear detente. It won't happen because they're too far apart. All the while Trump's former lawyer who flipped on him was bagging him out in Congress. If you thought that whole scenario wasn't crazy enough, India and Pakistan have started a shooting war without actually calling it a war. Imran Khan was on TV asking to meet the Indian Prime Minister. Who knows if that would work. It would be ironic if World War III started over Kashmir between India and Pakistan exactly while the more likely culprits in Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un were busy trying to defuse the bomb they made.

That's how deeply in the clutches of stupidity we have ended. Way to go world!
Hey don't look at me. I didn't make it like this.

Politics of Stupor

Twenty Years Of 'Big Stupid' In The Making

For some time now, our polity has been beset by the idiocy, mendacity and disingenuous hypocrisy on all sides. How long does this go back? It may go all the way back to 1996 when we elected the Howard Government when the seeds for all this stupidity - The Big Stupid - were sown. In twenty years we have come a winding tortured road in climate policy where on the one hand we have made commitments to control our carbon emissions, but on a domestic policy level, failed to implement policies to make that happen. If that were the only area we would be in a position to argue, "okay, let's fix that", but we are not; for we seem to have a legion of linked ideological snares that have been set loose upon our nation and try as we might, we cannot seem to untangle the mess.

Case in point might be the desire not to tax the super profits of mining concerns, or the desire to open ever more coal mines like the Adani mine in Queensland, or the fact that the mind ignores the signs that fossil fuel use for energy generation may steeply decline. What's alarming is that the Australian government has had 20 solid years to do something about it and the break down of how we spent that time goes like this:

1. 11 and a half years under John Howard denying it was a problem, being 'sceptical'. Why he opted to be sceptical of scientific findings but not those of armchair conspiracy theorists is unexplained.  
2. 3years under Kevin Rudd trying to implement Carbon Pricing, whereupon the Greens refused to put it through the Senate because it wasn't their version. 
3. The Rudd government worked to implement as many climate sensitive policies as possible and became a major actor at Copenhagen where emissions talks fell apart. 
4. This prompted a retreat and a simultaneous drop in Rudd's support which led to Julia Gillard's ascendancy.
5. Julia Gillard called an election promising not to put in a Carbon Tax. The election resulted in a hung Parliament, and so in order to form government with the help of the teens, she acceded to their wishes and put in Carbon Pricing. 
6. That led to Tony Abbott's opposition claiming that Gillard broke an election promise and promising to remove the aid 'Carbon Tax'. 
7. 3 years of a Gillard Government and the Opposition attacks on its emissions policy led to a complete breakdown in consensus for carbon policy within the Coalition. 
8. When the Coalition won Government, it dismantled the carbon pricing mechanism and replaced it with Direct Action, which is less efficient and is not working to rein in emissions. 
9. 2years of as utterly retrograde and disastrous government-by-tabloid-headline Abbott government, they replace Tony Abbott with Malcolm Turnbull who, having a reputation for having an understanding of the policy area, completely does an about-face and continues with the disastrous policies of his predecessor. 
10. Turnbull goes to an election, and he too gets his own hung Parliament, and so the numbers dictate he continues with the disastrous an stupid policy he would personally not endorse. 

That's the potted history that brings us up to date. Apart form the years the ALP were in government, the Coalition has done very little to even wrestle with the problem. They've done far more damage than any good and any credible observer would have give them negative marks for not trying and active resistance. Worse still, their constituency applauds this rearguard action for the petrochemical industry and fossil fuel interests.

The ugly prognosis is that it's not going get better any time soon. Worse still the Coalition government can't do better because it is in the pockets of these interests and basically would lie through their teeth to keep the idiotic status quo of climate change denial. It's staggering to think that something so important could be left to blow up in our faces because in the minds of these politicians, the interests of the lobby outweigh the interests of the public.

They can argue about it, but they're not really going to give up the money from the special interests.

No Power, No Glory, Just The Big Stupid Please

Australian kids are falling behind in the education stakes. It's not surprising that this is the case given the numbers of people voting for the Coalition. It would appear that the proportion of truly stupid people has increased exponentially, as evinced by the rise of support for One Nation.
In case you missed it, here's an time on what One Nation thinks should be climate policy.

"We are being controlled by the UN and these agreements that have been done for people's self interest and where they are driving our nation as a sovereignty and the economics of the whole lot," Hanson told the gathered media.

Wheee!
Anyway. Signs of a lack of education are here too:

People regularly cite Australia's economic strength and our egalitarianism as reasons why emotion-driven, fact-free and angry populism will not flourish here as it is flourishing in other Western democracies. 

But research recently published by a University of Melbourne academic, Roberto Stefan Foa, and his former Harvard colleague Yascha Mounk, shows that our democratic consensus is fragile too. 

The pair has been researching the attitudes of people in so-called "consolidated" democracies, to the conventions and institutions that comprise those democracies.
They have found a disturbing trend – over time, in all the liberal democracies including Australia, open-ness to the idea of military rule has grown, the number of people who think a democratic system is "bad" has grown, support for the concept of civil rights is less, and fewer people express an interest in politics. This trend is especially pronounced in young people, so-called Millennials. 

In these conditions, populist politicians gain traction by appealing to emotion and bypassing fact altogether. 

These politicians outrage the "elites", precisely because they don't adhere to the values of liberal democracy, which roll all the way back to the Enlightenment. They are playing "our" game but they won't accept the rules we wrote. They don't value rationalism over emotion. They don't abide by the norms so many of us thought (or hoped) were settled, and in this sense they are radical. 

And when you have a Prime Minister who refuses facts as squarely as Turnbull did this week, despite being educated, intelligent and on record as knowing those facts better than most people, we are edging towards the land of the radical, where policy-making is as fantastical as a go-nowhere boat trip over a bleached-out coral reef.

In other words, the Big Stupid is like a genie unleashed from a bottle already trampling across fairly fundamental philosophical positions upon which things like public discourse and democracy are built.
As George Lucas joked in his script for 'American Graffiti', Rome indeed wasn't burnt in a day.

The funny thing is that the headlines tell us our education system is underperforming. That because of this, our economy is suffering. We already know what we should be doing, - fund the full Gonski - but we have a government that won't.

not educating the populace suits oligarchical interests of the country in as much as more ignorance seems to directly correlate with voting Coalition. If one were of an academic mindset, such readily-made correlations would be embarrassing but that discounts the fact that this bunch of Coalition politicians know no shame. They just want power for the pay-check. It's quite extraordinary how such a situation came about, it is far easier understand that as Trump noted, the conservatives of any land would "love" the 'poorly educated'. Not, not the un-educated, but the poorly educated - which clearly means those who not only weren't left alone to come to stupid choices, but those who were educated so poorly they were given more wrong answers than right ones, and are definitely more inclined to vote for the conservatives. The cynicism involving education beggars belief.

The Stupid wants more Stupidity. It needs more Stupidity to sustain itself - nay, grow - and so Stupidity begets the Big Stupid that we have come to.

Interest Rates, Property, Banking, Greed, And Fear

The ticking time bomb is the housing affordability crisis and the Property Bubble.
The long and short of it is that all our banks have committed vast sums of money into private sector debt. It can't afford for the asset values to fall, or else all those big loans will go bad and wipe out the banks. Our society is too reliant on the four banks and Macquarie Bank because they are too big to fail. And so in order not make things harder for them or their mortgage customers, the RBA has eased interest rates to historic lows, just to keep the soufflé going. Will the Bubble pop? Over the dead body of the RBA.

And it's been going like this for 8 years going on 9 since the GFC. It has gotten so big, nobody can contemplate what a correction would look like.We don't even know what might trigger such a correction. It's bit like living the shadow of a very big object that is precariously balanced, but we marvel at the engineering that has so far kept it from toppling.

The Federal Government knows what it has to do. It has to wind back Negative Gearing. It has to implement rules to limit investors, it has to scrutinise foreign investors more, and it has to provide more supply, and more infrastructure. It's not exactly doing any of these things. The Federal government under the Coalition has argued that retaining the AAA credit rating is necessary in order to keep interest rates low. Except, they're already low enough. All that the low interest rates accomplish is help investors take more risks in the market.

It's not surprising then that nothing gets done. Nobody wants to fix it. So one of these days, there will be something that triggers a collapse and then we'll se how many people get out of the market ahead. but the long this goes, the bigger the impact is going to be and more people will get wiped out. It's like the Coalition government is committing Australians to play chicken with the biggest purchase of their lives.

That Infrastructure Issue

What little infrastructure they're building, the Federal government is for of building the wrong ones. This is because they are in the pockets of the general construction lobby and this lobby likes to build unless toll roads. Of course, they're so careful not to lose the AAA credit rating, they're not investing in much else, and this has led to a contraction in the economy this quarter.

Economic growth over the year to September was just 1.8 per cent, a big comedown from 3.1 per cent over the year to June, which was itself revised down from 3.3 per cent. 

"This is the second-worst economic growth result in 25 years," Labor treasury spokesman Chris Bowen said. "It's only the fourth negative quarter since 1991, and on the only other occasions there were good reasons. In 2011 it was dealing with Cyclone Yasi in Queensland, in 2009 it was the greatest international downturn since the Great Depression, and in 2000 it was the aftermath of the Sydney Olympics. It is also the case that this figure is worse than 2011, worse than 2000, and comparable with 2009, in the middle of the global financial crisis."

Mr Morrison said the unexpected result would be incorporated in the mid-year budget update to be delivered on December 19.
The government itself was responsible for some of the decline in GDP, with a wind-back in its spending accounting for 0.1 percentage points of the 0.5 per cent drop.

Mr Morrison said the December update would continue to show the budget on a path to return to balance by 2021. But it was possible the trajectory would change, so that the government supported the economy by investing more in infrastructure upfront in return for bigger cutbacks later, as recommended by the International Monetary Fund and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. 

A further slide in business investment knocked another 0.4 points off economic growth, and a partly weather-related slide in construction knocked off 0.3 points.

And so that one went. The thing is, it's not like Australia' economy suddenly found its way into negative growth. It's been a few years now that the mining investment boom was coming off the boil so something had to be done to boost investment. Instead, under Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey, the Coalition government went for cuts and destroyed the automobile manufacturing industry as well. It was hard to decipher what those two idiots wanted except maybe for people to lose their jobs but somehow stay off the dole. One ought to give ScoMo the benefit of the doubt, but it's not looking like he's got a good grip on the problem if he thinks tax cuts to businesses is going to do the trick. At this point in time, even the Coalition government ought to know that trickle-down bullshit just doesn't work, and that rhetoric is long past its use by date.

More On That Intellectual Bankruptcy

Here's An Example!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then there's this bit...

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

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

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

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

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

Just saying.

Weapons Of Mass Distraction

Tony Blair The War Criminal Suspect

It seems so long go, yet the ghastly wound the whole Iraq War inflicted not just on Iraq and the Middle East but to our own polity is still suppurating. It's so long ago that it dates back to even before the original entries of this blog. In many ways this blog began amid the rancour in the post-invasion days - what the hell were we doing there'd just how justified was this bit of military adventurism worth? The eventual hanging of Saddam Hussein in 2005 left a bitter after-taste that basically destroyed any pretence that the invasion was anything but the Bush family vendetta against Saddam and his family.

The Chilcot Report has landed and the world is awash with the notion that basically Tony Blair ignored expert advice and took the UK to war with Iraq. The ramification being, he is a war criminal. Certainly the Chilcot Report places him squarely as a suspect, if only the Hague could work up the gumption to sign an arrest warrant that Interpol can then put into action. Of course, Tony Blair is 'defiant'. One imagines that if an arrest warrant is issued by Interpol, the British establishment will tighten the huddle, standing should to shoulder claiming that Heads of States can't be brought to the Hague for War Crimes trials. It sure didn't stop Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic respectively ending up at the Hague so we'll sure see about that one.

Paul McGeough has a pretty good rundown over at the shake-my-head:

The former British Prime Minister earns a rare place in history's crosshairs as one of just two on the planet who might have stopped crazy man Bush – the other being Bush's hapless Secretary of State, Colin Powell. By not restraining the US president, each was an enabler in Washington's worst-ever foreign policy blunder. 

And the Australian PM? Howard's was a bit part, but it was important – as the patsy from Down Under, his eagerness to sign on made it possible for Bush to dress up his miscalculated need to go after Saddam Hussein in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, as an imposing "Coalition of the Willing".

Now the arrogance – Donald Trump would call it stupidity – of this trio, in unleashing their mind-boggling incompetence on the world, is revealed in a damning critique by the Chilcot Report, which was released in London on Wednesday. 

Chilcot can write as he does, because of the exhaustive, forensic nature of his seven years' work – and I can concur because for much of the last 15 years I have seen, first-hand, the brutal impact of their ignorance and indifference, in particular, on the people of Iraq and Afghanistan; and consequentially, on populations great and small, from the Mediterranean all the way to the Hindu Kush.

Chilcot's unambiguous findings include:

• There was no imminent threat from Saddam Hussein
• A strategy of containment was preferable to military intervention
• There was no justified certainty to London's judgments on the severity of any threat imposed by Iraq's WMD
• Blair was warned explicitly, but chose to underestimate the consequences of the 2003 invasion
• Planning for managing post-Saddam Iraq was inadequate

In all of Chilcot's 12 volumes that comprise 2.6 million words, just a few hundred words in Blair's "I will be with you, whatever…" letter to Bush are as self-incriminating as they are revealing. 

And there it is, the cat is out of the bag at long last. The world's worst kept secret that was the outrageous conglomeration of pseudo-facts and blurry pictures and underwhelming presentations to the UN that Saddam Hussein was this massive threat with 'weapons of mass destruction'. He didn't exactly have nukes or Fuel-Air Bombs like the Americans, Europeans and Russians did, but he had mustard gas! ("Run for the hills!")

Yes, the Iraqis had mustard gas that they bought from the CIA who organised the German recipe  from World War I so Iraq could use against Iran in chelate 1980s. Of course after the Gulf War, UNSCOM went in to chase him around for them and he kept playing hide-the-sausage with his chemical weapons but ultimately they were found and blown up by Bill Clinton's Operation Desert Fox. Queue the irony because Operation Desert Fox only came about because Bill Clinton was neck deep in the breaking scandal of his affair with Monica Lewinsky. It's oddly ironic that all these years later the Democratic candidate for the POTUS elections this years Hillary Rodham Clinton. The more things change, the more they stay the same. You've been warned, America!

By the time George W. Bush and Tony Blair were pimping this notion that Saddam had really dangerous WMDs, Saddam Hussein's capability to actually use them were too far degraded to be any serious threat. And let's all be honest here; if there was one thing that was proven by the Gulf War, it was how far war technology had come, and if Saddam Hussein wasting to unleash his World War I tech of mustard gas, it sure as heck wasn't going to change the tide of the war. In short, the case of Saddam having WMDs worth calling WMDs were slight at best.
Yet in they went and the rest is history.

When Tony Blair denies culpability, the punchline that springs timing is "he who denied it supplied it." It's a shame the Iraq War is a much, much bigger tragedy than mis-told schoolyard fart jokes.

George W. Bush "Hasn't Read The Report"

Some things never change. George W. Bush has led off his defence with the fact that he hasn't read the Chilcot Report. As if his not reading it somehow invalidates its contents. It's curious how the mind of George W. Bush works to come up with that, but that's what we've got.

In a statement, Bush spokesman Freddy Ford explained that the former president hasn't had the chance to read the Chilcot report and that "despite the intelligence failures and other mistakes he has acknowledged previously, President Bush continues to believe the whole world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power". 

"He is deeply grateful for the service and sacrifice of American and coalition forces in the war on terror. And there was no stronger ally than the United Kingdom under the leadership of Prime Minister Tony Blair," Ford said.

Somehow principle of the law escapes George W. Bush as well as the obvious fact that just because he hasn't read it doesn't mean it's not right. Where do you start explaining this to a functional idiot - even if he was once POTUS?

The years have not been kind to his administration. There is no revisionism that makes his administration look any good. Even Donald Trump is running on the platform that the Iraq War was a bad idea This merely adds the frosting on the cake that was  his terrible two terms as POTUS, an early harbinger for the kind of politics that results in Donald Trump being the GOP nominee. Oh, and Hillary Clinton being the Democratic nominee. We're a morass of stupidity and mendacity, thanks to the slipstream of stupid that GWB created, that is still curdling politics around the world.

John Howard Defends The Indefensible

And this little guy is doing the same, sticking to form, for if there's one thing John Howard is known for is his ability to defend the indefensible, like Pauline Hanson the first time around. So here he is, John Howard defending his decision to go to war.

At the time, Mr Blair said intelligence showed that dictator Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but after the invasion none were found.
Critics of the war have said that amounted to lies, but Mr Howard today disagreed with that assertion. 

"There was no lie. There were errors in intelligence, but there was no lie," he said.
Mr Howard said one of the most relevant findings to come out of the report was that there was no evidence to support claims that intelligence used to justify the war on Iraq had been doctored by Western governments. 

"The joint intelligence committee, which is the broad equivalent in the United Kingdom of the Office of National Assessments in Australia, accepted ownership of the dossier and agreed its content," he said.

The indelicate hair-splitting going on there is John Howard to a tee. The first claim that there was lie and there were errors in intelligence flies utterly in the face of the Chilcot Report. Just blindly insisting that his recollection is different doesn't make the findings exactly ... go away.

It's lovely how he states thing that just fly in the face of the Chilcot Report's salient points.  The Intelligence was there; Andrew Wilkie could tell you all about it.

Mr Wilkie, who quit as a government intelligence analyst in 2003 because of concerns about the invasion, said it had been "the biggest security and foreign policy blunder in our country's history".

He claimed neither the Lindt Cafe siege nor the 2005 Bali bombings would have happened if not for the 2003 Iraq invasion because it had "created the circumstances for the rise of the Islamic State". 

He accused then Mr Howard and former foreign minister Alexander Downer of taking the country "to war on a lie". He added there was a "pretty compelling case" that Mr Howard along with then US president George W. Bush and British prime minister Tony Blair had committed war crimes and should face an international court. 

Mr Wilkie called for a full Australian inquiry and vowed to raise the issue with whoever became Australia's next prime minister when election counting has concluded.

Where intelligence wasn't was between the ears of these guys.

Also, here's Paul Keating on John Howard and his denials of culpability:

On Thursday evening, Mr Keating gave a scathing assessment of Mr Howard's justification, saying it was a "stubborn and unctuous denial" that should be "held in contempt by every thinking Australian". 

"Could you imagine the woebetidings of Howard and the Liberal Party, had it been [Bob] Hawke or I who had committed Australia to such an un-mandated assault on another country?" Mr Keating said in a statement. 

"We would never have heard the end of it. The Liberals would have been wringing their hands for decades. 

"The incompetent management of Iraq following the invasion, fractured that country and with it, Syria and the region around it, casting millions adrift from their lives and homes. A sea of refugees. Yet Howard has no shame of it. And no responsibility.
"Howard has visited on Australia the whole spectre of terrorism, through his craven and ill-judged support of the United States and its invasion." 

Mr Keating said Australia was "perhaps the most successful multicultural society in the world", with the settlement of a large Muslim population, but "John Howard put the torch to that". 

"Now we live perpetually with the spectre of terrorism and racial strife, visited upon us by his prejudices and lack of judgment," he said.
"In the face of the Chilcot Report, John Howard should atone for his actions and those of his government. He should, at least, hang his head in shame."

And that would be the least of it. 

'Here, Hold The Leash Lynndie'

For my musical mates and I, if there ever was a moment that politics fractured in the Western World, it would have been under George W. Bush's watch as POTUS. You don't expect the massive political edifice that is the US Government, the UK Government and even the Australian government to jointly descend into a Punch-and-Judy farce to pitch a war to the world. Frankly, we were horrified and appalled.

Which drove us to creative overdrive. The mid-2000s were fruitful with songs. One of which was our take on just how badly the farce went down. The Chilcot Report essentially underlines what were real concerns at the time of the invasion.
So, here's the song by Coelacanth to commemorate that horrible moment history:

That's right. If you look hard enough at the photos, you can almost imagine it. 

The Torture Never Stops - Part 1001

David Hicks, Fighting For His Name

Long time readers will know I can't stand David Hicks. It's the one sticking point that makes me part ways with my fellow progressives. The illegitimacy of the wars and the charges and the torture at Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay, are all things I agree that are terrible things. But every time Mary Kostakidis or some other progressive talking head gets on the TV and starts championing David Hicks' cause and claiming that what happened to him was unjust, I get cold feet and beset with the desire to run the other way with those cold feet.

The wave of sanctimonious gobbledegook that flowed in defence of the man was intolerable, at the time and even to this day. The only person who was in Hicks' corner that I could get behind was Major Mori who was the counsel assigned to defend David Hicks at the military tribunal. For him, I have an undying respect. David Hicks himself just leaves me cold. Now that his conviction has been overturned, there is talk of a government apology. Yet, much as I reviled the Howard government in its day and dislike this Abbott government even more, I can't help but agree with them when they say there won't be an apology coming from their government.

Have a quick look at this section of the article:

In a tense exchange with reporters at the end of the press conference, Mr Hicks hit out at his critics. 

"I think they're supporters of torture," Mr Hicks said. 

"The only thing that matters is what the US government has said." 

Asked what he was doing when he was picked up in Afghanistan, Mr Hicks replied: 

"Having a holiday." 

He said he wanted "to live a normal life and be a normal person".

Good Grief. 

I don't support torture, I'm against it. The "only thing that matters" to me is most definitely not what the US Government said or says. What he was doing in Afghanistan when he was picked up in the early days is contentious to this day. However we do know one thing. When the events of 9/11 were unfolding, we all went to work that day. We all went to school that day. We discharged our duties to society as was expected of us. Hicks chose to go fight with his mates in Afghanistan. That's how you get picked up by the US Marines. That's how you end up in Gitmo getting the iron sausage. I do think it was a travesty that kept him there, I think the military tribunal set up to try him was equally a travesty and I feel sorry for him he had to endure torture and the attendant legal circus. 

But I just can't think of a way to couch what happened to him other than he had it coming. It's exactly as John Lennon quipped, "nobody ever gets what they deserve, they only get what's coming to them". He walked right into it - it was his choice - and landed in hell. And now he wants an apology for his trouble? Please count me out, and please, not in my name. 

David Hicks should grow the fuck up and accept that what happened to him has to do with his own actions.  Somebody was going to pay for 9/11. The fact that he put himself into that picture is his own  stupid bloody fault, and it was no bloody accident. 

The Crappiness Of This New War

Nobody Expects The Spanish Inquisition

The old war of the 21st century, as in 'the Bush-Blair-Howard Misadventures In Iraq', (a.k.a. the Coalition Of The Unwitting Go To A Quagmire For A Bath) was characterised by a one-sided whup-ass of the industrially and technologically inferior Iraqi forces followed by years of door-to-door combat culminating in prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison. If it was meant to be morally edifying - and war rarely is such a thing - then the 'BBHMII' was a thoroughly miserable travesty in the morality stakes. Then they pinned it on a woman with low IQ and whistled by in their black limos. All  of which reminds us of the tremendous Monty Python sketch. Just as the Inquisitors start with fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, devotion to the Pope and red uniforms and then their claims degenerate in meaning, the 'BBHMII' started with Shock and Awe and eventually ended up with a brawling kind of war, the sort of which nobody could make any sense.

Then there is Guantanamo Bay prison where people are still kept without trial or warrants as somewhere between insane asylum of the 19th century and a torture chamber. Barack Obama came to power in 2008 promising to close the prison but of course it still exists today. One would think that Obama could easily and readily close that damnable institution by releasing all the prisoners with microchips in their skulls. At least the torture ought to end. The fact that it doesn't end is rather emblematic, and we come to realise Frank Zappa wasn't exactly kidding when he sang that Torture Never Stops. Yes, it's all been one long night of the iron sausage for all of us. It's hard to claim any moral ascendancy when what our side is offering is victimhood in a military prison in Cuba.

Now we're about to go back in and do it all over again, mostly because we can find even more moral revulsion in ISIL/ISOR than we could in Saddam Hussein. Not many people in parliament are expressing objections to the deep hypocrisy and great folly in going back to war in Iraq.

What we can deduce from all of this is that there are certain cultural tropes in our leadership and military that go right back to the Dark Ages, and despite our iPhones and internet connectivity and social media and Lady Gaga and Katy Perry freedoms, our leadership in war is ethically no better than the kind of medieval kings. It is no wonder that something claiming to be an Islamic State and a Caliphate becomes our opposite number and promptly started beheading people like this is the Fall of Constantinople, where the Ottomans fired chopped heads out of bronze canons. We are in essence replaying the nightmares of the past because it amuses us as entertainment in the news cycle.

They Think It's A Real Crusade, Not A Metaphorical One

Some weeks go I noticed ion Facebook that a couple of people with whom I went to school had served in Afghanistan (a.k.a 'The Other Crappy War of the 21st Century'). Couple of good old boys from Sydneys North Shore, 'Phil' and 'Potty' doing their bit for the cause of enduring freedom... I mean 'Operation Enduring Freedom'. There they were, one in the ADF as a soldier and the other as a chaplain. They were smiling like they were having a good time, and maybe they were on their boys' own adventure.

The bit that caught my eye was the big crucifix on the collar of the chaplain 'Potty', which got me thinking, was he walking around Kandahar or Kabul or wherever they were stationed in that uniform? Doubtless he was; and it struck me that he was the living walking talking crusader in a nation of Muslims, wearing that dirty big crucifix on his uniform - losing over the hearts that might have just been won over by our good efforts. It's like spending all the good will you're earning on the slot machine of faith.

How could the ADF not looked like a bunch of Crusaders come to the land of the muslims. It got me depressed. I understand that there are many religious people amongst our services and that they would require spiritual guidance in the business of shooting and killing people and still wanting to go to a Christian heaven (and I do mean that with the utmost ironic contempt). I pity the soldiers who would be getting this spiritual guidance from 'Potty' who in his days as a high school kid was about as emotionally evolved as a raging haemorrhoid; but be that as it may, it made me sick to the pit of my stomach that the ADF thought this was worth the effort.

So you can see I am really thrilled and excited about the prospect of sending 'boots on the ground'; and 'Potty' with them, to offer spiritual guidance to our Rampaging Crusading Christian Solders so they can still go through the eye of the needle into a Christian heaven having dispatched a bunch of Islamist Beheading Bastards to Allah. It's a great concept isn't it? When do they get to sack Jerusalem and fill the streets ankle deep in heathen blood? Looking forward to that in the news cycle!

No, really it's appropriate to say Jesus wept.

This Must Be The Week For Ex-PMs Airing Grievances

Dear John Howard... You Can STFU Too

If Julia Gillard offering up her analysis about her time in government wasn't painful enough yesterday, today we have the wretched John Howard offering up some spuds of stupidity and onions of opinions.

The first spud of stupidity is that he says he's 'embarrassed' about the WMDs not being there in Iraq. This is interesting because a lot of people died and got maimed for that mistake. John Howard insists the intelligence said in forceful language that the WMDs were there. I seem to recall at the time, Collin Powell was telling us that if we looked at the photographs closely enough, we could almost imagine there being WMDs on the ground.

Andrew Wilkie who once had to become a whistleblower on this very subject came forth and slammed John Howard saying he should be ashamed. This was peculiar. The man says he's embarrassed - presumably that's shameful enough. I mean, I don't rely get the political nuance difference between being embarrassed and being ashamed, that would some how "un-fuck the goat". I guess John Howard wants us to know that he didn't lie - because he's still wanting to be 'Honest John'. Well, thanks John Howard you're still racist prick in my books. Which brings me to this other bit:

Yes, just as I predicted there would be throng coming forth to slam multiculturalism in the wake of the arrests over the ISOR terrorists the other day, John Howard chose this moment to say he "wasn't a fan of the doctrine of multiculturalism".  John Howard then goes on to say he doesn't believe in culture, he believes in races and people coming here to assimilate.

He also weighed back into multiculturalism. Howard in the 1980s was a trenchant public critic of multiculturalism and argued for a reduction in Asian immigration. He later recanted the position on reducing Asian immigration. 

“I’m not an overwhelming fan of the doctrine of multiculturalism, I believe in multi-racialism, I believe in bringing people from different races, different religions to this country but once you’re here, you’ve got to become part of the mainstream of the community,” he said. “I think over the years we’ve dropped off a bit too much.” 

On Sunday night he argued now was not the time to debate the level of immigration from the Middle East - but he remained critical of the term multiculturalism. 

“I think it’s a confusing term, what does it mean? It means different things to different people” he said. Howard contended we needed to “try harder” to integrate communities of different ethnicity into Australian society.

Which is to say, he's a racist and an unreconstructed colonialist bully - which we already knew but there he is again flying the flag for all the racist dingbat boys and girls to go riot in Cronulla. Way to go John, now wrap yourself in a flag and choke.

He even had something negative to say about Julia Gillard's big shining international moment, 'The Misgyny Speech'.

“I thought that was nonsense … the idea that Tony Abbott is anti-women is ridiculous,” he said. Howard said that type of posturing discouraged women from entering politics when more are needed in the parliament, though he said it should not be through quotas. He said Gillard’s speech “did not resonate” with women he knew. 

Note, "women" he "knew". I rest my case.
The fact that he wanted comment on it in that way spoke volumes about why he had to go and be consigned to history's dust bin. Except I thought this was self-evident in 1987, so I don't know why it took another 20 years for Australia to be finally done with him.

While he was in a mood to diss people and things left, right, and centre, he decided to tell us that Peter Costello didn't have the ticker to take over as Prime Minister. Well, thanks for that non-history lesson John Howard, we surmised that when Peter Costello pulled up stumps in a petulant frenzy and quit politics after that 2007 election.

No, really. With a cavalcade of wretched excuses for mistakes and insults for both Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd, it was an interview we really didn't need. if they really want a say in all this, they should've stayed and fought on. It's the worst kind of commentary in a democracy.

And Then There's Bob Carr

Bob Carr wasn't happy that Julia Gillard said he was lazy.

Bob Carr has suggested Julia Gillard's claim that he was a "lazy" foreign minister for Labor could be payback for his decision to switch his support to her leadership rival Kevin Rudd before the 2013 federal election. 

And Mr Carr has denied admitting that he struggled to keep up with the demands of modern politics because he was more settled into his retirement than he realised.

What do you do? What are we to make of this? Bob Carr isn't exactly somebody who acquitted themselves very well in the last ALP Government. If anything, he's one of those people who should be copping it sweet and slinking off to enjoy his bountiful retirement cheques courtesy of the taxpayer. All of these people, John Howard, Bob Carr, Julia Gillard, need to shut the fuck up and get out of our faces.

I can't think of another time in the last 30years where politics equalled such misery-making. If you go back 40, I guess you get The Dismissal. This, is just The Dismal.

News That's Fit ToPunt - 06/Nov/2013

Laurie Oakes' Body Slam... Okay, Just Slam.

The doyen of Australian political journalism, Laurie Oakes thinks Tony Abbott's government sucks so far when it comes to transparency.

"They’re busily trying to avoid the media as much as possible and to control the media and so far they’re getting away with it but I don’t think they will get away with it for too long," he said ahead of the release of his new book Remarkable Times: Australian Politics 2010-13.

"You can see the way the story of the expenses rorts is gathering speed, and that horse bolted because Tony Abbott and his Special Minister of State Michael Ronaldson didn’t move to nip it in the bud."They could have killed it off but they’ve got this attitude of not feeding the news cycle so it got away from them."

Other journos have voiced their concerns on the same point.

Since winning office, Abbott has fronted the nation's media just eight times. Calls to his office, and to his ministers, frequently go unanswered or unreturned.

During the week, Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop was a star speaker at the Australian Council for International Development conference in Canberra. The two-day event was open to the public, including the media - except for Bishop's speech. It's understood the media was barred at the request of the minister, who is tasked with enforcing the government's $4.5 billion cut to foreign aid over the next four years.

Announcing the government would respond to Australia's ballooning credit card bill by almost doubling the borrowing limit to half a trillion dollars, Treasurer Joe Hockey held a 10-minute press conference and took few questions.

Immigration Minister Scott Morrison has radically overhauled the approach of his department and others to information about asylum seekers. No longer does Customs issue advice about boats in distress en route to Australia. No longer is information on boats arriving in Australian territorial waters released to the public as soon as it comes to hand. Nor is the rebadged Department of Immigration and Border Protection authorised to provide previously innocuous information about asylum seekers.

So there's a pattern emerging already and it seems that not only are they not willing to defend their decisions or thinking, they'd rather not talk about it; which of course underlines the inherently undemocratic instincts shown by the Coalition in the years since they won in 1996. Thee simple fact is that they don't want to talk about the areas that made much noise about while in opposition because it would show that it was all rhetoric and the Coalition have no better solution for the said problems.  Nobody's really surprised by this any more than we are impressed - we're not!

It's just a little funny watching journalists of the various newspapers complaining about it having supported Tony Abbott's cause on election eve with their stupid editorials. Yes, I'm looking at you Sydney Morning Herald.

It's enough to make you cry if it weren't so ironic.

Whatever It Is He Is Doing, He's Making A Hash Of It!
Then there's this thing here.

The making of effective foreign policy always looks easier than it is. As a result, new governments tend to underestimate the task. The Howard and Rudd/Gillard governments each made tentative starts on the international stage. The current government's diplomatic initiation has been worse. Even allowing for inexperience, the Abbott government appears to be setting a new standard for diplomatic ineptitude. The Prime Minister in particular has lurched from one mistake to another, with each episode more ham-fisted than the last.

Indonesia's sure as heck not happy with the Coalition duo of Abbott and Bishop. Julie Bishop's been doing the denying which strongly suggests that she's been doing the supplying, so to speak. On some level, you expect all embassies to be a hotbed of spying activity. So this emerging all of a sudden as an issue between Australia and Indonesia seems a little contrived.

Bruce Haigh at Crikey recently observed thus:

According to sources close to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) is less than impressed with Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Foreign Minister Julie Bishop. It is said this view was formed before the election, when Abbott, Bishop and now Immigration Minister Scott Morrison talked loud and long about turning around refugee boats and sending them back to Indonesia.
The rumour was confirmed when Abbott turned up late for two important gatherings at APEC where SBY was in the chair, and in case there are some who would to contest this, when the egos of heads of state are on the line the attendance at all meetings of conferences such as APEC are important.

Politicians and other public figures do not live in a vacuum; whatever is said domestically about another government will be reported, with comment, to that government by its embassy, and additionally its foreign ministry will pick up the remarks from wire service reports.

It is a measure of the lack of sophistication and parochial outlook of Abbott and the government he leads that there is an apparent failure to understand the way the world works. Infamously, South African minister of police Jimmy Kruger told a laughing crowd at a 1977 a ruling National Party conference that the death in detention of black activist Steve Biko “left him cold”. That remark haunted his government for years to come.
Some years ago Abbott told an ABC journalist that he sometimes said things he did not mean in order to meet the political imperatives of the moment. This was a rare confession from a politician. It is a pattern of behaviour by Abbott that has been confirmed over the past year, the most recent being the about-turn on his boats policy in Jakarta this month.

“A number of Indonesian specialists were adamant that Indonesia does not believe Abbott’s statements about respecting Indonesian sovereignty.”
According to a long-term Canberra insider, the Indonesians are well aware of Abbott’s propensity for saying whatever he thinks will solve an immediate political problem. They are aware of his bombast, his superficiality and his lack of understanding around the complexities of Indonesian culture and politics. A number of Indonesian specialists were adamant that Indonesia does not believe Abbott’s statements about respecting Indonesian sovereignty. They are also aware of his boasts, in the past, that it was the Howard government that liberated the people of East Timor. They remain concerned that an Abbott-led Coalition government would seek to do the same in West Papua.

The Indonesian elite are not blind to the policies employed in West Papua to keep the province within the republic. They may not like it, but as with Abbott’s approach to refugee policy they see it as necessary, with the use of force the only means to put down the separatist movement. DFAT sources say Abbott’s assertion to the Indonesian President that he admired and respected Indonesia’s policies in West Papua would have been received with scepticism and regarded as patronising.

In sending that stuff to me, Pleiades made the observation that this business of Indonesia could open the floodgates for stuff Indonesia's been holding on to for a rainy day; like say a paedophilia ring run out of DFAT personnel say. This might be just the beginning of where Indonesia unleashes the shit file on us just to humiliate the Abbott Government. I mean, at this point, why wouldn't you? It's not like there's any prospect for proper respect coming from Tony Abbott and his morally-flexible rhetoric.

Denial Is A River That Runs Through Conservativism

We haven't heard much from little Johnny lately, which has been great. when he pops up, he tends to make our days worse. Here, it seems he's been out spruiking the cause of climate change denialism.

London: Former prime minister John Howard has poured scorn on the "alarmist" scientific consensus on global warming in a speech to a gathering of British climate sceptics, comparing those calling for action on climate change to religious zealots.

Mr Howard said he was an "agnostic" on climate science and he preferred to rely on his instinct, which told him that predictions of doom were exaggerated.

He also relied on a book written by a prominent climate sceptic, which scientists have attacked as ignorant and misleading.

And he called on politicians not to be browbeaten into surrendering their role in determining economic policy.Nuclear power – a "very clean source of energy" - shale oil and fracking were solutions to the world's energy needs, Mr Howard said.

Mr Howard's speech in London on Tuesday night was to the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a think tank established by Nigel Lawson, one of Britain's most prominent climate change sceptics, former chancellor in the Thatcher government and father of TV chef Nigella.

Mr Howard revealed before the speech that the only book he had read on climate change was Lawson's An Appeal to Reason: a Cool Look at Global Warming, published in 2008.

Mr Howard said he read it twice, once when he was writing his autobiography, when he used it to counter advice for stronger action on climate change given to him by government departments when he had been prime minister.

But the book has been attacked by climate experts.

So, the former Prime Minster of Australia - in his time in office - decided to look into the topic of Global Warming and chose to read one book, and one book alone, written by a climate change denialist. He read it twice to crib notes and mount his own denialist rhetoric, probably because he saw the political problem of climate change as something that needed to be couched in the traditional Left-Right framework regardless of actual facts and figures and projected ramifications. It's a miracle his government got to the point of proposing an ETS! This would be the one Tony Abbott is trying to tear down in the name of repealing the Carbon Tax.

Today, we can understand that both John Howard and Tony Abbott are ferocious, committed climate change deniers with the latter set to wreak havoc on whatever paltry steps we've taken to control the problem. It's hard to fathom how deep this river runs between these two men, but it brims with anti-scientific bullshit. One of the worst things to have happened to the debate is that the deniers keep getting a more than generous equal airtime hearing of their stupid position.

At this moment in time, it is completely accurate to quote Tenacious D: "The Government Totally Sucks".

Oh great.

Crusader Complex

A Fool, Even in Thought, Is A Fool

Here's an article about the moral crisis allegedly affecting Australia and the western world.It's interesting because it shows there's a philosophical sense of crisis being addressed, but with inadequate tools.

''Sometimes Western civilisation is treated with outright hostility,'' read the invitation letter. ''Cultural relativism has led to our education system often undervaluing the achievements of Western civilisation.''

''The rise of the nanny state is undermining our freedoms of association, of speech, of liberal democracy.''

John Roskam, from the institute, said the evening tapped into a debate about values, where they come from and what they are grounded in - Western civilisation.

''It's rounder than the concept of a threat, it's under challenge,'' he said.

This is some pretty paranoid thinking. I am hard-pressed to think of anybody who is a cultural relativist who thinks that the values of Western civlisation are not worth preserving. Even Johnny Rotten in his rotton-est hour would concede that Western civilisation is pretty cool in parts. The single hallmark of John Howard's time as Prime Minister was his utter defensiveness about these things, and his language that almost reeked of a victim's complaint when it came to things to do with say, Aboriginal Reconciliation and Feminism. You have to take a somewhat culturally relativist position (but not much really) to let Aboriginal Reconciliation happen and be a good thing and let feminism advance. Indeed it's arguable that these kinds of things are good things that are the fruits of Western tradition.

But no, John Howard is worried.

Howard spoke off the cuff. According to those present, he argued that Australia has a secular tradition with no established church. But, while that tradition must be respected, it was his personal belief the Judaeo-Christian ethic has been the most profound moral and cultural influence in this country and it should be preserved. Other religions could be embraced and welcomed without in any way diminishing the Judaeo-Christian influence.

Howard, who never wore his faith on his sleeve, gave examples of where he saw erosion caused by a combination of factors such as post-modernism and people who think the values of Western civilisation are not worth preserving.

Really now. Again, I seriously doubt people on the Left from the champagne socialists out to some hardcore communists in Australia think that the "values of Western civilisation are not worth preserving". The extreme wing of the environmental movement probably want the West to renounce heavy industry but it's seriously questionable if they want the West to renounce, say, Socrates or Pascal or Kant or Freud.

What's really funny is that this meeting is somehow a meeting of people trying to preserve the Western civilisation and they're actually raging against the Enlightenment, so to speak. note especially John Howard's call to have more taboos. If that's not a backward step into the medieval darkness, I don't know what is.

Then you have Cardinal Pell, he of the kiddy-fiddlers-anonymous Catholic Church:

Pell went further, saying he felt suicide today was being ''celebrated''. Faith and values, he said, meant you're living for some reason other than yourself. He lamented that a secular view is legitimate but a religious view should not be heard in a public place, and that is was deemed permissible to speak openly of a green god but not a religious God.

Beyond religion, Julia Gillard's proposed national history curriculum was singled out for a belting, because it supposedly does not place enough emphasis on British and European influences.

Howard cited the recent push for a human rights charter in Australia as a consequence of a lack of understanding of our system of parliamentary democracy and an independent judiciary.

Both he and Pell acknowledged the flaws and blemishes of Western civilisation and the ''black spots'' these had left in Australian history.

But Pell referred to China, where he said an erosion of values was also occurring as capitalism took hold. ''This radically different culture is now searching for the secrets of Western vitality to provide a code for decency and social cohesion compatible with sustainable economic development.''

He quoted the Chinese economist Zhao Xiao's ''fascinating comparison with the selfism of Western radical secularism''.

''These days, Chinese people do not believe in anything,'' Zhao asserted. ''A person who believes in nothing can only believe in himself. And self-belief implies anything is possible - what do lies, cheating, harm and swindling matter?''

This is just too rich.

I've never heard the Catholic Church in Australia champion Confucianism. Ever.  Cardinal Pell lamenting the passing of the old values of Confucianism is therefore a new development. You sort of wonder how he reconciles that with his Catholic beliefs, after all Confucius clearly states that belief in the mysterious, the strong, the chaotic and gods is not a rational course of action. i.e.  a proper person does not run to cults and religions.

That China is losing its old ways as a result of capitalism is sort of interesting, as it is China's attempt to reap the fruits of Western civilisation without taking on board the core values of the west that provided for them. Like, good old liberalism. Indeed, it is the free-marketeering profit-above-all-decency kind of economic rationalism that is enabling the contemporary economic animal of China, that is being so disparaged here. Not so long ago, these were the exact western values people like John Howard and Cardinal Pell were peddling to a God-less, communist China. Surely they can't be too shocked at the results! Not if they had any continuity of thought. But of course if you listen to these people it's the fault of 'cultural relativists'.

And that's just the bit that pertains to China's modernisation. It strikes one that perhaps the biggest problem with John Howard and Cardinal Pell talking about  Western civilisation is that they don't understand its historical significance and only want to keep the bits that suit their personal political positions and agendas ("no, you don't say, art!"). This is why they're willing to admit there are 'black spots' in its history and yet they don't really want to deal with those black spots too much. Doesn't this show that the very malaise in the Western civilisation they're talking about with much alarm  is also showing up in their own discourse in their inability to recognise the faults of their own system?

Then there's the complete  muddling of religious doctrine with philosophical and historical traditions of the so-called Western civilisation. It is true, that historically the Church has played a large part in the history of Western Europe and the colonial states they have spawned. It is also true that the Judeo-Christian faith has provided the largest framework from which thinking on ethics and philosophy has been undertaken. Nonetheless, it is totally fallacious to claim that all of this has been good. We only need to look as far as Gallileo's or Darwin's experiences in having to explain scientific findings to the retrograde faithful. The Church and Judeo-Christian thought cannot lay claim to all of Western civilisation, just as Western civilisation cannot lay claim to just the good bits and not the 'black spots'. It certainly can't own all of science and therefore modern technology. It can't even own epistemology these days.

Indeed, the mere fact that we're even talking about Darwin today as a controversial figure in certain circles suggests that the Catholic Church still has not come to terms with science, let alone the enlightenment, and that the true fear of the cultural relativist is actually a fear of the Church's own irrelevance to thought.

What's really frightening is that people like this have so much influence in our society.

What Is This? A Religious Putsch?

The SMH also had this stupid little column, with this hysterical closing bit:

Secularism is certainly not neutral and those who wish to expunge Christian values from our schools and public institutions should more fully explain the worldview from which their alternative values derive.

In the mean time, if we are going to continue to recognise and celebrate our Judeo-Christian heritage, the state government should not dilute the influence of Scripture classes because they are the one opportunity in life the majority of young people have to understand what it is all about.

I don't know why religious types think that they have a monopoly on thinking about goodness. It is the single most repugnant thing about the article. A lot of Christians I know would probably balk at the degree of intellectual hubris of this writer.

Here's news for some people. Ethics is a difficult thing for religious types precisely because it seeks to address and critique morality; and morality is often defined by things like scriptures such as the Bible or the Koran. You can't have ethics unless you're willing to get objective about morality and where it comes from. It's not a big claim, it's just logic.

The simple version of ethics comes down to questions like "religion X says it's okay to do X, but religion Y thinks not. How do we address the goodness and badness of doing X"? If X is male circumcision, nobody bats an eyelid. If it's female circumcision, we all get uptight about it and rightfully so. The question then becomes, what makes it "rightfully" so? That very question is where ethics sits.

So, it's probably important to address what is considered moral under the Judeo-Christian framework of morality, but to do teachings of ethics correctly, you must critique whether thee claims to goodness or badness within the moral frame work stand up to analysis. For instance here's an ethics question for Catholics, was it good for the Pope to have covered for pedophiles when he was a Bishop? The Pope is currently trying to say, it's okay because he ended up as Pope and how dare we question the representative of God? Is this really 'good'?

What's really disturbing is that columns such as the one the SMH put up shows a clear attempt to muddle the water between what is ethics and what is morality so as to shoe-horn religion - in this instance Christianity of this particular dudes' particular denomination - back into the middle of discussions. Once again, this is such a backward step that even if you weren't a strident secularist, you have to combat it by saying how 1) misguided it is 2) how politically motivated it is in its misguidedness 3) and how deliberate it is in its confusing argumentation because it deliberately seeks to muddy the waters.

The long and short of it is, 'secularists' are not trying to sideline religion because they think it's bad. They're trying to sideline it from discussions of ethics because ethics can only begin when we stop harping about morality, and we cannot go there while the religiously motivated keep on trying to bring ethics back to "My God is Better Than Yours" routines of religious thought.

So, Mr. Jim Wallace, please stop trying to corrupt the youth of today with your opiate for the masses!

Apprehend That Pope!

Which brings me to this interesting article today.

Two leading atheists are investigating the possibility of arresting the Pope for "crimes against humanity", lawyers have confirmed.

Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are paying lawyers to investigate whether Pope Benedict XVI should be arrested when he visits Britain in September.

Mr Dawkins and Mr Hitchens believe the Pope should face charges for the alleged cover-up of sex abuse in the Catholic Church, The Guardian reports.

The Guardian reports that a letter written by the Pope in 1985, when he was then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, urged that a paedophile priest in the US not be exposed for the "good of the universal church".

Mr Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, told The Times: "This is a man whose first instinct when his priests are caught with their pants down is to cover up the scandal and damn the young victims to silence."

Mr Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great, added to the London-based paper: "This man is not above or outside the law. The institutionalised concealment of child rape is a crime under any law and demands not private ceremonies of repentance or church-funded pay-offs, but justice and punishment."

Well, right. Somebody's got to be held accountable for all this grief. I say, book him, Danno.