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

Taro Aso's Lecture Revisited

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Temperature Spike 

This is not good news.

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

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

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

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

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

Nobody's Talking About North Korea

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

View From The Couch - 24/Dec/2015

Kim Jong-Un And His Hydrogen Bomb

As these things go, maybe it's not as hysterical as it sounds, but Kim Jong-Un recently said North Korea has a hydrogen bomb, and is able to stick it on the tip of a Rodong rocket and fire it into Washington DC. Amazingly, this didn't make the news in Australia because it's the kind of thing I tend to notice in the headlines.  It might have been missed because Reuters' headline was already tinged with scepticism. Experts think it is unlikely:

In Washington, the White House said it was doubtful that North Korea had developed a hydrogen bomb, but said Pyongyang remained a threat. 

"At this point, the information that we have access to calls into serious question those claims, but we take very seriously the risk and the threat that is posed by the North Korean regime in their ambitions to develop a nuclear weapon," White House spokesman Josh Earnest told a regular briefing.

The U.S. State Department repeated a call on North Korea to comply with its international obligations and abandon all nuclear weapons.

One sort of wonders what the dictator is up to, but it's all kind of kooky how he wants to get the wrong kind of attention at this juncture. In response to this claim, Xi Jinping shut off oil supplies to North Korea, which is unheard of when you think about what it might mean. It tacitly indicates China is ready to disown its old communist bulwark ally; or it may mean nothing especially because oil has collapsed down to US$35 a barrel, and seems to be the ubiquitous commodity - North Korea can buy it cheaply elsewhere. It's really hard to figure out how much this would even corner North Korea. When all the European banks closed off business with North Korea because of sanctions, they simply moved on to using African banks for international settlements. Much like ISIL, it is proving hard to completely shut off the supply of cash to the rogue state. Too many entities seem to be able to profit from dealing with the North Koreans.

Anyway, it's a nice thought on Christmas Eve that Kim Jong-Un has his nation working busily with a plan to blow up the world. He really is like some Bond villain.

Turkey, Russia, Oil

The business of that downed Russian jet by the Turks is turning into a drama of sorts. It goes back to the ISIL thing where the Islamist insurgents are selling oil on the black market. Buying this oil at next-to-nix is none other than Turkey, which then on-sells it for a tidy profit, even with prices crashing to US$35/barrel. As it turns out, the man running this operation out of Turkey is none other than President Recep Erdogan's son.

Sometime back at the the G-20, Putin pressed Erdogan about this issue. Erdogan denied all of it. Apparently Vladimir Putin pressed pretty hard, asking to make sure Recep Erdogan's family weren't in on the ISIL oil deal, and Erdogan still denied it.  So Putin ordered his airmen to go bomb all the lorries carrying oil out of ISIL held territory which resulted in hundreds of these oil trucks getting blown up in Syria. As it turns out, these trucks were mostly Turkish trucks. So Erdogan got upset and green-lit that attack on the Sukhoi. Basically, there was no invasion of Turkish airspace.

Since then Russia has closed off all trade with Turkey, which basically amounts to about half of Turkey's exports.Turkey for it's part is staggering towards more armed conflict with Russia, which is kind of insane because Turkey's nuclear deterrent is NATO. What's worrying about this is that the relationship between the two nations is pretty much naked power politics in the style of the 15th century, just with modern equipment. All this leads me to think that west will likely rue the day they let Turkey into NATO. A war could start on the eastern end of Turkey, and NATO might be drawn into this stupidity by dint of the alliance.

It would be especially galling if it happened as Turkey kept dealing and cash-funding ISIL.

On The Low Low Oil Prices

Jeez, the ACCC must be pretty dumb. If you ever needed evidence that petrol prices at the pump are fixed through collusion, you only have to look at the prices at the bowser and the oil prices by the barrel. Crude oil prices have gone from US$120/barrel down to US$35/barrel. That's roughly a third to a quarter. If the petrol stations and suppliers were genuinely competing, the prices at the bowser should proportionately go down to about 40-50cents per litre. The fact that it hasn't tells you all you need to know. It doesn't go down because they're not really competing, and if they're not competing, the only answer is that they're colluding. In short, these companies are pocketing the difference and not passing it on to the consumer. What a joke.

Anyway.
I saw this interesting account of fossil fuels and their future today.

Why and how coal (and oil) is and will be produced at a loss has been neatly explained by the Australia Institute's Richard Denniss: 

"Imagine you owned an ice cream van parked by the beach and your refrigerator broke. No matter what you paid for the ice cream, you should sell it for anything you can before it melts. Some money is better than no money. 

"Now imagine that you owned billions of tonnes of coal and you thought that in 20 years time new technology or new global restrictions meant you might not be able to sell it. We have heard for decades how Australia had 'hundreds of years' worth of coal, but now we are trying to sell it in a few decades. The green paradox says that talk of future emission reductions can cause an increase in current coal production. Indeed, global coal production has risen 50 percent since the world first agreed to reduce emissions in 1992." 

Dumping coal (and oil) on the market keeps renewables expensive, but it also provides the incentive to make renewables cheaper. There are very good arguments for governments to invest more in renewables research than just subsidising the existing quality of solar and wind projects.

And that explains why the Coalition Government is going to make sure the Adani mine goes ahead in Queensland. It's anti-democratic and breaks a whole bunch of environmental protections, but the promise of 10,000 jobs in North Queensland has essentially convinced this government that this is somehow going to be okay.

Yet if you look at it from the ice-cream truck simile, you can see why there's such a rush. If Australia doesn't sell off as much of its fossil fuels before it becomes totally unviable, we would be leaving too much money on the table. Greg Hunt isn't really a Minister for the Environment - he's kind of a spokesperson for the Government that addresses the environment as an issue, but doesn't do anything that might remotely be perceived to be standing in the way of corporate profits. He's somebody who is not terribly serious about his job or its title or what it means. He's a careerist pulling down a ministerial pay-packet, pretending to be doing something. He's about as effective as Tony Abbott was as the Minster for Women, and more's the pity. 

This reminds me... Way back a long time ago, I was a young person working at the parcel pickup service of Grace Brothers. The groceries would come up in numbered tubs and we'd hand them out to the customers with the tickets. On certain times of the week, like Thursday night and Saturday morning, they would come in droves, and leave their car engines idling in the driveway. The fumes would be terrible. Just terrible. At this time of the year, the car queues would be 20 cars deep all idling away, and the air was unbreathable. I would dry retch all night long after working some of those shifts. 

Eventually we complained to management asking them to install a powered vent or fan. They demurred. So we called the union, who then organised somebody from the EPA to take measurements. The EPA dude turned up on a Monday morning when there was hardly a vehicle in the whole shopping complex car park - and declared the air was safe. We told him he was there at the wrong time, and that he should come back to when it was peak fumes. He said no, because that would be a biased reading. We were ropable, apoplectic with rage. What was the point of the exercise? He shrugged and said they were the rules, and went back and reported everything was fine. So, management weren't protecting us; the union wasn't really protecting us; and the government wan't protecting us. It was pretty sobering. If you ever wonder why I have occasional bouts of political anarchism, it's from experiences like these. 

I relate this, just to share with you the sense of hopelessness in expecting the government to do the right thing when everybody working for the government, whether elected offical or employed, is against doing any such thing. Folks, they really don't give a shit. Oh, and there's no question that  the ACCC are idiots. 

Colonel Jessup Blues

We Can't Handle The Truth

Pleiades rang me up a couple of days ago to tell me he was in support of the protesters. I didn't even know they were protesting.

Yet, over in Japan, they're having a hell of a time passing a law allowing Japanese troops to be sent to help allies. Partly because it seems to fly in the face of the Peace Constitution to send troops anywhere if they're called 'Self Defence Force'. It is hard to imagine self defence going on anywhere outside of the country - so the argument goes - that it would be an utter change of national direction to make such amendment to the law. To this end, there have been protesters camped outside of the Diet in to the wee hours morning, which is the sorptive spectacle unseen in Tokyo since the student protests of the 1960s.

The origins of this current draft of the law can be sheeted home to the USA who basically want Japan to stop being so peaceful on somebody else's security budget. The USA want Japan to step up and part of an international group that maintains the peace. You can cue the Team America theme song here. As dutiful an ally to the USA as ever, Shinzo Abe and his cabinet are simply passing into law something that Japan's not been doing for a good 70 years - but nobody seems to want to discuss what that 70years has meant.

It's 70years in which the USA had to shoulder the geopolitical problems Imperial Japan was dealing with prior to 1945. Both the Korean War and the Vietnam War were wars that likely would have fallen to the Japanese to fight had World War II never happened. Instead, America found itself at the edges of its hegemony fighting these wars. In both cases, the leadership of the USA had great difficulty explaining to its own population what they were doing there. If you're the Japanese, you're saying, "thank you!" or "lucky miss". Those were some pretty brutal wars being fought as a rearguard action for 19th century imperialism and hegemony being rolled back. It's a good thing to not be on the wrong side of history with those things.

With the rise of China, America does not want to be doing it all alone in the Pacific. It wants all the island nations to chip in on the effort to maintain international security. To this end, it's been sending delegates to ASEAN meetings, but basically America's been getting bupkis from ASEAN while China's been camel-nosing its way into the tent, building island bases on atolls in the South China Sea. The louder China rattles its sabres, there's more call for Japan from America, to step up. Of course, for the better part of the 70years, Japan's been playing passive aggressive to the hilt with its Peace Constitution, which of course was drafted up in General Douglas MacArthur's GHQ offices and not in the Diet at all. The argument has always been, "you gave this thing to us, you can't very we'll complain about it when it doesn't work out for you. We've been Peaceful Percy just as you've asked."

The passive aggressive argument worked satisfactory for all concerned until the point at which America found itself in two wars at once, in Afghanistan and then Iraq. In the mean time, the legitimacy of the Peace Constitution would only grow because 70 years is a long time not fire a shot in anger, for any government. And that brings us up to the point where this century, America has wanted the Peace Constitution to be amended to allow Japan to send troops to support its allies.

And that also brings us to this bill that is being vigorously challenged. The ramifications of which are meant to be simple, but the those aligned against it insist the law of unintended consequences will lead Japan to a war it doesn't want. The realistic appraisal of just how it might be implemented and what that would look like, therefore must be made. Judging from the geopolitical faultiness, it is highly unlikely the Japanese troops will be sent to places her troops weren't sent to during World War II. It is far more likely her troops will be sent to places like the Philippines or the South China Sea or for that matter the Korean Peninsula than anywhere else. And that being the case, it is going to reopen old disputes, layering them on with new ones.

The cleaner option is simply to not go.
It's long been observed that the countries that complain the most about the alleged re-militarisation of Japan - North and South Korea, and China - are the least likely to come to its rescue.  The fact that Japan wants to weather that risk of incessant misguided complaints probably means the post-WWII consensus is finally breaking apart.

It's a bit like a 70 year 'sin bin' time-out has come to an end and Japan will have to resume being a nation that will guarantee security in its own waters as well as send armed troops as part of international peacekeeping missions. It's also probably time that the exceptionalism in Japan to do with its stance on peace and war was made to reassess its viability. These aren't difficult notions to digest, but are hard truths to handle.

They Can't Handle The Truth

So just how is it being reassessed? In Japan, the bill only has 15% popular support. If you allow for 10% being the average size of any minority interest in any electorate, it's only about as popular as 5% more than the smallest single issue party. Like, say the Greens in Australian politics, or UKIP in the UK. The lack of appeal across the broader spectrum of society has resulted in a great deal of scepticism right across the rest of society that doesn't support it. Namely, they're complaining they don't understand the need for it. And if it's something that requires special pleading by the Prime Minister, then isn't it more likely it is just a case of pleading a special case? 15% for and everybody else either against it or undecided is a big obstacle.

This fact alone explains the strength of the voices arrayed against the bill, and many of them argue the contradiction of amending the Peace Constitution with technicalities about how to go to war. Most people in Japan clearly don't see the "clear and present danger" that deems it necessary to abandon the central plank of the Peace Constitution - that you forever don't go to war - for the dubious opportunity of supporting actions of the USA.

The USA of course has lost quite a lot of prestige since George Bush's Gulf War. Back in 1991, legitimacy was easily granted by the international community to swing into action. Indeed, it was expected of it to do so. Yet since Clinton's 'Desert Fox' (which took place the same week the Lewinsky scandal broke the news) and George W. Bush's Iraq War, many people in Japan find it hard to equate American military action as having the automatic legitimacy that they had in the Gulf War.

The fact that America has lost credibility, combined with the fact that it was the American GHQ which dictated the drafts of the Peace Constitution in the first place, makes it immensely harder of US interest to suddenly assert that Japan should become the sort of country that joins Team America on those wayward military misadventures. As a citizen of a country that does automatically send troops  to any old coalition of the willing led by the USA, I think it's a wise choice to balk at such a notion.

Nonetheless I can imagine the equivalent of Colonel Jessup from 'A Few Good Men' working in the base in Kadena Okinawa, ready to go toe-to-toe with the Chinese or North Koreans or God-Forbid-The Russians, and protect the FREE WORLD™; yet right around the base are local Okinawan people carrying on wanting them to leave and Yankee-Go-Home - but also at the same time expect them to be protected by the very same Colonel Jessup and his marines should the Chinese, North Koreans or God-Forbid-The-Russians come invading. That too would be a hard truth to handle.

Still, at 15% it's really not likely Japan wants to go to war on any kind of pretext or principle. The USA would be better advised to note that very single fact before trying to drag Japan into some misadventure.

Nobody Can Handle The Truth

Back in the late 1580s, Hideyoshi Toyotomi united the warring states of Japan and united Japan as a state with a central government. Having done so, he had found his population was more warrior and far fewer farmers, merchants and craftsmen. And so he went on the misadventure known as the Ming war. This is the origin of the invasion of Korean Peninsula that Korean people resent so much, because it was on Korean soil that most of this war between Japan and the Ming Dynasty China was fought, and by all accounts it was as brutal as any proto-modern war.

Fortunately Hideyoshi died, and the war came to an end with complete withdrawal of decimated forces. The war was so costly it brought about the early end of the Ming dynasty, which was the last of the Chinese dynasties headed by the Han people. The next dynasty that arose, the Qing, was led by the Manchurians, and China would crash into modernity without Han leadership. Something their historians still blame on Hideyoshi. They may even have a point, but China, like the rest of Asia opted to go slow on technology to keep the peace. It was the Neo-Confucian way to suppress progress to maintain the status quo - and if there ever was a system of thought that was very much the Ming, it was Neo-Confucianism.

After 1598, Japan wasn't found fighting the Chinese until 1894. That's close to 300years of peace right there. If you add the 70 since WWII, that's 366 years out of 415 years of peace going back to 1600. If you go on the most recent record, it's probably true Japan has no designs on China, and if you go back far enough, there's enough historic data to show that in most part, Japan is not interested in invading China. It's the kind of record that stands in stark contrast to the relationships between the UK, France, and Germany. Even America and Canada have fought a war in 1812. The weight of historic evidence says it is far more anomalous for Japan to be fighting with any of its neighbours.

Why Japan might have fought the wars it did in the 20th Century would be a long discussion so I'm going to skip it today. A lot of people think they were unjustified wars of colonialist invasion but others have found cause to see them as the first wars to roll back Western colonialism. It's far more of a mixed bag. It's interesting to note that when thrust into the cauldron of modern warfare, Japanese officers and soldiers reverted to cultural practices of war that date back to Hideyoshi Toyotomi. That is to say, the seeming barbarism of the Japanese troops had a great deal to do with culture shock on both sides. I would hazard a guess and say for all the talk of the warrior, Japan had stopped being a martial kind nation by 1868, and had to find that fire again, belatedly, in the context of 19th century imperialism.

The truth is, apart from some short stretches, Japan sucked at prosecuting its wars. World War II was a grind where all these valued tactical positions got wiped out by strategic carpet bombing. They spent more the time fighting the wrong war getting whacked. The next time Japan goes to war, it is equally likely that it would be very much out of practice when it comes to war. They're liable to bring forth the ghosts of 1944 as well as the ghosts of 1589 in a tight spot. It's amazing America wants them to come out of historic retirement.

By the same token, China after the Ming dynasty wasn't great shakes in any war either. They lost to the Manchus which gave rise to the Qing dynasty; they fought Russia badly several times and was on the losing end of the stick on several occasions. Of course there was the Opium War which was decisive in sending China to the ranks of the third world. They of course fought Japan badly, and then descended into a civil war. Since then they've been a military junta disguised in business suits, but they've really not distinguished themselves in many wars going back to the time they fought Hideyoshi Toyotomi's Japan. They might want to prove a point, but they're not exactly good at it.
Nobody's really talking about it, but it's true.

I'm so inclined to think that the historic mission of war itself is over in Asia. They should, in all instances, just talk. Because, they can. And that's the simple truth.

Movie Doubles - 'White House Down' & 'Olympus Has Fallen'

'Die Hard' In A Box

Way back in the late 1980s when action movies were hitting the new generation of incoherence-over-substance, 'Die Hard' set a new benchmark in action and incoherence-over-substance. It was a great formula. You get a lone hero who cowboys his way to victory in the confines of a building against a group of terrorists or bank thieves or whatever else that came handy as a group of bad guys.

The formula worked so well, they started making these Die-Hard-In-A-Something movies, quite apart from the sequel which was Die Hard in an Airport. Most of these copycats featured Seteven Seagal: 'Under Siege' was Die-Hard-On-A-Boat; 'Under Siege II' was Die-Hard-On-A-Train and 'Executive decision' was Die-Hard-On-A-Plane (although Steven Seagal's character gets blown out of an airlock about 25minutes into the movie.) Telemovies were worse - they were making all kinds of Die-Hard-In-A-Something movies at an alarming clip, some of which were so unimaginative, they were actually Die-Hard-In-A-Building-But-With-Somebody-Not-Bruce-Willis.

I don't know when the fad died out in Hollywood. Maybe it died out about the time 'Die Hard 3: Die Hard With A Vengeance' came out an that was not set in any kind of confined space, it was just all out action all over New York State. but on some level all this stuff lives on because they recently made the fifth 'Die Hard' movie. The concept itself obviously dies very hard.

Going on 25years, and yes, not one but two studios have imaginatively decided to make Die-Hard-In-The White-House.

Spoiler Alert. Although if you've seen 'Die Hard', then there really are no surprises.

How To Spin A Bad Moment

This is kind of weird, but these two films are actually quite politically loaded in how they couch the problem. 'Olympus' casts the bad guys as North Koreans. 'WH Down' thinks the likely culprits to take over the White House are domestic MIC operatives gone rogue. The Olympus President is a white guy. 'WH Down' has a black President. The hero in 'Olympus' is a grizzled, hardened vet. A former US Rangers and Special Forces guy. The elite amongst the elite and played by Gerard Butler who is dragging his cache as Leonidas from '300' The hero in 'WH Down' is a blue collar guy who did serve in Afghanistan but he's working for the police department and comes in for a job interview with the Secret Service wherein he's told he just doesn't make the grade.

As you can see, 'Olympus Has Fallen' is an out and out Republican sort of fantasy where the bad guys are foreign commies, the good guy is an elite killer and the President is a white man who is also capable of handling himself in combat. 'White House Down' is a Democrat fantasy where a black US President wants to defuse the tension in the Middle East by making peace offerings to the Iranians (!), and he wants to smoke out the Military Industry Complex and send them to prison. And dare I say, 'White House Down' is a slightly better film because not only does it look better, the drama plays better.

Fascism and Dufus Factor


The tenor of 'Olympus Has Fallen' is tinged with fascism once the violence starts. There is no tangible logic except to fulfill the conditions of a Die Hard plot which involves traveling in the interstitial spaces of a building and unleashing appropriate amounts of lethal violence in short bursts. These Die Hard plots done well usually involve the good guy hiding for long parts of the story only come out for a flurry of action while the bad guy hogs the screen and preens and pouts for the camera. It certainly worked for Steven Seagal.

In turn, it is necessary for the bad guys to be squabbling dufuses. They usually come in hard with their plan and shut down power and communications and then start sending out threats and ransom notes, but the moment something starts to go wrong, they start bickering at one another. This leads to the opportunity for the hero to pick them off in small numbers. In other words, the only way the Die Hard story works as a first order text is if the hero is a fascist and the bad guys are stupid.

Of course, 'White House Down' is more of a tongue-in-cheek second order text. It's clear they know they're doing Die Hard in the White House, so Channing Tatum is the lead, he spends a few scenes in a white singlet, Jamie Foxx loses his shoes in reference to the barefooted John McClane. It's a stranger film than 'Olympus Has Fallen' because the film includes political commentary, political satire and a good dose of deference to the original Die Hard so the whole film proceeds with a disjointed irony, more than the po-faced assuredness of the other film.

The Veep Is Dead

Both films make the interesting manoeuvre of ridding themselves of the Vice President so they can get to the Speaker of the House as fill-in President to make executive decisions. I guess it's  an interesting quirk of American democracy where there is a President who heads up the State but there is a Congress that functions mostly like a Parliament. So the King got swapped out for a popular President and you have a Vice President who is the backup guy in case the King goes down mid-term. The Speaker of the House in Parliamentary terms would be the equivalent position of a Prime Minister but you'd never guess that from the way the US Congress is condicted.

The designers of the United States Government clearly didn't trust the Westminster system because they clearly felt the power should devolve from the President to another figure who was also elected by the people on a popular ticket. Yet both films spend a small time to get rid of the Vice President. It's hard to figure why they both did this except to get the story into the hands of somebody of authority outside the White House and a Vice President would not have achieved that aim.

The power devolves to the Speaker in both films seem to betray the notion that the House Speaker is an under-recognised office in the US Government. The thought did occur to me during the recent spats between the Obama administration and the Republican led Congress. I could see the argument that Congress should have more power to set budgets as you could make the argument that John Boehner was technically a kind of Prime Minister of sorts with the US Congress having some sort of roots in the Westminster system of government. Not that I felt the current Republicans were a good agency to have such power but that in some ways it would simplify the problems pertaining to budget limits and so on if more responsibility could be sheeted home to members of Congress. Even if that were to happen, one imagines the President of the United States would have significant 'reserve powers' to govern.

In any case it's interesting both films wanted to show this system. Even on this issue both films betray their underlying political leanings. 'Olympus Has Fallen' gives us Morgan Freeman as the House Speaker and he is clearly an oppositional (if deferential) political figure to the President. The House Speaker in 'White House Down' turns out to be the chief instigator and culprit of all the mayhem, and he is a wealthy white man who is clearly in opposition to the President's agenda.

North Korea As Threat

It's a good thing to see that at least parts of Hollywood still thinks of North Korea as a threat. It's a mad place. It's also a much longer shot than the threat of domestic radicalised militias and disgruntled elements.

I know the whole Dennis Rodman is weirding us all out, first of all, for getting on so well with Kim Jong-Un but also because he seems to take his self-appointed diplomatic role so seriously. It's hard to see how North Korea could really win back the proper place of straight-faced menace in movies after 'Team America', but I guess we're on to the next generation and it's anybody's guess as to just how weird Jong-Un is going to be. In that light, it's vaguely plausible a crack unit of North Koreans might make a dash for the White House but it seems more likely they'll make a beeline for the nearest burger joint given how impoverished and famished they're meant to be. Still, it doesn't get much better than having North Koreans as the bad guys because it squarely puts North Korea in the spotlight of our consciousness.

The Really Scary People Are Closer

Unlike the threat of North Koreans hell-bent on changing the world order, the possibly scarier people seem to be ex-special forces and ex-CIA, living with liberal amounts of guns and ammo. I know it's a lifestyle choice in some parts of the USA, but the bottom line is that there have been more terror deaths thanks to domestic terrorism than the spectre of 9/11 foreign terrorists in America. What's worse, there are conspiracy theories which suggest even 9/11 was an inside hatchet job, so the deaths there would go on the domestic terror victims' list.

Not that one takes one's political cues from movies in a big way, but 'White House Down' is a bit more pointed about what kind of extremism lurks in the American political psyche. 'Olympus Has Fallen' is more positive about this kind of loose cannon persona, armed to the hilt, doing the violent things they were trained to do. Some people might even call it blow-back, but who's really counting?

Grim Tales

Living The Orwellian Dream

Like most news coming out of North Korea, this business of Kim Jong-Un purging his uncle is more than a little grotesque. I guess it's one thing to remove somebody you find threatening, it's entirely another thing to execute them and make them an object lesson. Fortunately most of us don't have to make such choices, but all the same, one is confronted by the very blood-thirsty nature of power plays in dictatorships.

Before his arrest Mr Jang sought foreign investment for a country that lacks hard currency, overseeing special economic zones near the border with China. Mr Jang represented a "China wing" of the leadership that was very close to Beijing, Professor Armstrong said.

Mr Jang's crimes included "overtly and covertly standing in the way of settling the issue of succession" when Mr Kim was readying to take over from his father, longtime ruler Kim Jong-il, KCNA said, describing him as a traitor with a "dirty political ambition''.

"Despicable human scum Jang, who was worse than a dog, perpetrated thrice-cursed acts of treachery in betrayal of such profound trust and warmest paternal love shown by the party and the leader for him," KCNA said.

There have been other news of people getting purged and executed by the new tyrant. None of this terribly comforting to read because in all honesty, this kind of institutionally violent human being is at the helm of a nation that wants to have nuclear weapons. A man ready and willing to be a kin-slayer in order to hold power is a very frightening man. The news sticks out because whatever you might think of the disputes between Japan, China and South Korea, North Korea remains the biggest joker in the pack. The speculation is that more purges are likely to follow.

The truly horrible thing about North Korean politics as it stands is that it exists not as an example of an Orwellian Dystopia, but it has gone beyond it to being a kind of parody of an Orwellian Dystopia. There, you would dare not bat an eyelid without it somehow being support of the regime, and Doublethink would be the only way to think. There is no rhyme or reason why the people in the countryside are starved to death while an army that never goes to war exploits the masses so vigorously. Despite sanctions and shaming and international pressure, the Kim regime keeps on going by selling arms and illicit drugs. It's like n entire nation that has "broken bad". Perhaps the best way to understand Kim Jong-Un is that he's a kind of Jesse Pinkman, and he has finally killed his Walter White.

News That's Fit To Punt - 04/08/09

Is This Going To Be Futile Or What?

Former US President Bill Clinton is on a surprise trip to North Korea. Team America would probably warn him not to listen to Kim Jong-Il when he says, "Step a Rittre to your reft Prease!"

His mission, which he chose to accept, was trying to free a couple journalists who have been detained by the said regime, one of the axis of evil.

Former president Bill Clinton made a surprise trip to North Korea on Tuesday to try to bring home two jailed US reporters, in what was the highest-profile visit by an American to Pyongyang for nearly a decade.
The hardline communist state sent two senior officials and a schoolgirl with a floral bouquet to greet him at the capital's Sunan airport.
Analysts said the reception may indicate Pyongyang is seeking better relations with its arch enemy Washington, after months of high tensions sparked by the North's nuclear and missile tests and subsequent UN sanctions.
A US official travelling separately with the former president's wife, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, confirmed he would seek the release of the female reporters detained during an assignment along the China border in March.
"Our interest is the successful completion of this issue and to confirm the safe return of the two journalists," the official told reporters on condition of anonymity.
South Korea's Yonhap news agency, quoting sources, said Clinton was expected to meet leader Kim Jong-Il later Tuesday and fly back on Wednesday with the journalists.

If this plan works, then they should send him to Tehran on the next leg to free those idiot American backpackers who wandered into Iran from Iraq and got captured.

UPDATE: And amazingly, Bill Clinton gets it done.

[caption id="attachment_2558" align="aligncenter" width="420" caption="Herro-o-o!"][/caption]

Bill Clinton brought some unusual strengths to a round of diplomacy that won the release of two US journalists on Tuesday: the cachet of a two-term presidency, a keen understanding of Asia, a history of North Korean outreach and smackdowns, and a gift for gab. Not to mention a wife who is secretary of state.

His drawbacks - that short fuse and oversized ego - were unlikely to be risks in this episode. In high-stakes diplomacy, some things are decided before anything is negotiated, and it was all but certain going in that Clinton would not be empty-handed coming out.

Old entanglements were in play. Clinton negotiated on behalf of journalists employed by Al Gore, his former vice president, in a media enterprise Gore started after losing a presidential election he might have won absent Clinton's impeachment scandal.

He negotiated for the benefit of President Barack Obama, the man who dashed his wife's White House hopes.

Clinton succeeded in the mission at hand: pardons for journalists sentenced to 12 years of hard labor for illegally entering North Korea. Clinton's spokesman said on Wednesday the former president left North Korea with two American journalists who had been held hostage.

I don't know what to make of 'The Kim' in his sudden benevolence. What is that? You can never tell in this world. Optimism springs eternal.

I think they should send him to Tehran too.

"Who Let Them Into The Country?" They'll Ask

A terrorist plot has allegedly been foiled by the erstwhile AFP and state cops in NSW and Victoria.

El Sayed is charged with conspiring to do acts in preparation for a terrorist act, namely an armed attack on the Australian Army Base at Holsworthy, south-west of Sydney.

Earlier, the court heard that the suspected terrorists arrested today allegedly intended to become martyrs in an attack on the base.

The court heard police believed there was a conspiracy to use weapons to fire upon Australian military personnel.

Prosecutor Nick Robinson, SC, alleged the men intended to keep shooting until they were killed or arrested.

Mr Robinson agreed with the magistrate that their intention was to become martyrs.

The court heard only one man had been charged with terrorism-related offences while three other men remained in custody without charge.

Investigators are seeking a court order to extend their questioning of the men for eight hours.

One of the men, Saney Aweys, appeared in court handcuffed and flanked by two federal agents. He denied any connection with the men mentioned in court by Mr Robinson.

Aweys, who has not been charged and who was unrepresented, said he was a boilermaker and needed sleep after being awake for the past 30 hours.

He said the police had put him in a "small room [and] when I told them of my fatigue and tiredness they told me to have a nap with the lights on".

"I want it to stop now,’’ he said. "I want to have a rest.’’

Ah, the good ol terror laws. Glad to see them in action, doing some evil. I ask, "but is the torture really necessary?" I guess they'll get Dick Cheney on the line and ask his opinion.

Turnbull's Regrets Over Utegate


KRuddie and Wayne Swann have been cleared.

"The variability in Treasury's response did not reflect any instruction on the part of the Prime Minister or his office, the Treasurer or his office, or senior Treasury management that some representations were to receive more favourable treatment than others," the report, from the Australian National Audit Office, said.

Godwin Grech has 'fessed up to the fact that he made up the fake e-mail. Malcolm Turnbull is running in the other direction from Grech's psych ward as fast as he can, but he did express his deep regret today.

"It is very regrettable that in doing so Mr Grech misled the Opposition, the Parliament and the Australian people," Mr Turnbull told reporters in Sydney.

"At all times the Opposition acted in good faith."

Mr Turnbull countered suggestions in The Australian that Mr Grech was pressured by the Opposition to provide details, saying the public servant approached Senate deputy leader Eric Abetz.

"Mr Grech proposed a detailed list of questions be put to him relating to OzCar, including questions concerning Mr Grant and representations made on his behalf."

Mr Turnbull has been under Government pressure to explain his role in the OzCar affair and his relationship with Mr Grech.

He faces accusations he met Mr Grech prior to the official giving evidence to a Senate inquiry linking Mr Rudd and Treasurer Wayne Swan to a request for special treatment be given to the car dealer seeking help under the $2 billion taxpayer-funded OzCar scheme.

The Auditor-General, in a report tabled today, has cleared both Mr Rudd and Mr Swan of making any inappropriate representations on behalf of the dealer.

Mr Turnbull rejected Mr Grech's suggestions he wanted to co-operate with the Coalition to stop it from blocking the Government's financing scheme for car dealerships.

"The suggestion that the Opposition was considering blocking the OzCar legislation is false," he said.

"The legislation had the full support of the Opposition and this was publicly known long before Mr Grech drew Mr Grant to the attention of the Opposition.''

So that would make Godwin Grech the patsy. He'll never eat lunch in Canberra again, so to speak.

I don't think all this reflects well on the Leader of the Opposition. I'm still inclined to think this thing with Godwin Grech and the fake e-mail is going to keep yapping at his heel, making him far less effective.  in the long run, I suspect it's going to kill Turnbull's career in politics.

Free Ute?

These Guys Got Expensive EuroCars!

I know one ute is causing so much ruckus in Australia's political landscape, but spare a thought for what goes on in North Korea that passes for news.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Il has put his youngest son in charge of the country's spy agency in a move aimed at handing the communist regime over to him, a news report said.

Kim visited the headquarters of the State Security Department in March, along with his 26-year-old third son, Kim Jong Un, and told agency leaders to "uphold" the son as head of the department, the Dong-a Ilbo newspaper reported on Tuesday, citing an unnamed source.

Kim also told department leaders to "safeguard comrade Kim Jong Un with (your) lives as you did for me in the past," and gave them five foreign-made cars, each worth some $US80,000 ($A100,743), as gifts, the mass-market daily said.

Just in case you thought our politics in this country had hit rock bottom, I thought you should know that there is much earth and many layers of hell beneath that bottom of the barrel.

Who Is Godwin Grech

Yes, who is this weasely wretch, an ill-omen-ed fetch from the horrors most eldretch!

Here's a sketch:

He likes advising younger colleagues on how to advance their careers, although some of his interlocutors regarded him as a little on the paternalistic side.

Mr Grech has spent most of his career in Treasury, the elite Canberra department that prides itself on the intellectual rigour of its analysis. He wears his economically rationalist heart on his sleeve, describing himself as a "believer in the positive power of the market".

In the late 1990s Mr Grech had executive assignments in Treasury's markets group dealing with financial institutions and systems and with competition and market access policy.

By 2003 he had risen to the senior position of general manager of Treasury's competition and consumer policy division, according to Hansard records. The position put him just two levels below the Treasury secretary in the department's organisational structure, but he held it for just a few months.

By early 2005 he had moved to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, working for three years in effect in a level below his position at Treasury.

After the change of government in 2007 Mr Grech may have spent a lot of time responding to requests for briefs from one Andrew Charlton in the Prime Minister's office, an economist more than 10 years the public servant's junior.

In the early months of the Labor Government Dr Charlton was Mr Rudd's adviser on employment, business conditions, competition and consumer affairs. In a strange twist, the concocted email that has now involved Mr Grech was supposed to have been written by Dr Charlton.

Then, in June last year, Mr Grech was offered a position as a policy director in a strategic policy division set up for the Prime Minister.

A couple of months after that sideways shift, Mr Grech returned to Treasury as a principal adviser in its financial systems division.

Late last year he was given the huge project of pulling together the Government's emergency response to the crisis in motor dealer finance. It was that assignment that inextricably involved him in the Ozcar affair.

Sounds like a careerist conservative weasel. Why is it that these rogue apparatchiks always find their way into the breach? It's a mystery isn't it? And what was the faked e-mail doing on his computer - and nowhere else legitimate in the system? Why, he'd fit right in in North Korea.

How Now Mr. Turnbull?

As I pointed out yesterday, I think it best if he turned bear and fled. The only reason he will still be Leader of the Opposition next month would be because the Libs have nobody better.

Not How You Do It

Elections, Iranian Style

The country that offered up in no particular order, Ayatollah Khomeini; Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; Theocracy in the 21st Century;  the worst cuisine in the world; is undergoing elections. Of course, this being Iran, the news coming out is hilariously disjointed.

TEHRAN, Iran – Iran's interior ministry said President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took nearly 70 percent of the early votes counted, but his pro-reform rival countered that he was the clear victor and warned of possible fraud in the election.

The dispute rose up even before polls closed early Saturday, heightening tensions across the capital where emotions have been running at a fever pitch. Mir Hossein Mousavi, the reformist candidate, suggested he might challenge the results.

The messy and tense outcome capped a long day of voting — extended for six hours to accommodate a huge turnout. It raised worries that Iran's Islamic establishment could use its vast powers to pressure backers of Mousavi.
During the voting, text messages were blocked — a key campaign tool for reformers — as well as some pro-Mousavi Web sites. Security officials warned they would not tolerate political gatherings or rallies before the final results were known.

Even before the first vote counts were released, Mousavi held a news conference to declare himself "definitely the winner" based on "all indications from all over Iran." But he gave nothing more to back up his claim and alleged widespread voting irregularities without giving specifics — suggesting he was ready to challenge the final results.

Moments after Mousavi spoke, however, Iran's state news agency reported that Ahmadinejad was the victor. The report by the Islamic Republic News Agency also gave no details.
With more than 15 million votes counted, Ahmadinejad had 67.7 percent and Mousavi had 30.3 percent, said Kamran Daneshjoo, a senior officials with the Interior Ministry, which oversees the voting.

It was not reported whether the results were from locations considered Ahmadinejad strongholds or where Mousavi hoped to make headway.

The turnout was not immediately known, but election officials had predicted a possible record among the 46.2 million eligible voters.

That's a lot of voters. It's always a bad sign when 2 candidates go to the polls and both claim victory. Reminds you of Al Gore and GWBush? Of course, this being Iran, the theocracy gets to have the final say and they will pick the Holocaust-denying Nuke-building demagogue that is Mr. Ahmadinejad.

I guess Iranian elections are much like their western counterparts, a kind of punch and judy show fronting for the industrial interests of their country.

Succession North Korean Style

Here's an interesting column about the North Korean transfer of leadership from Kim Jong-Il to his 26year old son.

On June 2, it was reported that 26-year-old Kim Jong-un, Kim Jong-il's youngest son, would succeed his father as North Korean leader, probably this fall at the end of a 150-day "struggle" period. Shortly before the "struggle" began, Pyongyang engaged in a series of provocative acts. On April 5, North Korea illegally launched a long range missile under the guise of a satellite test. On April 16, Pyongyang expelled United Nations nuclear inspectors before taking steps to begin processing uranium at the Yongbyon nuclear facility. On May 25, as the struggle period reportedly began, the North tested a nuclear weapon and test-fired three short-range, ground-to-air and ground-to-ship ballistic missiles.

This reminds us of the 70-day campaign Kim Jong-il directed in 1974 as part of his transition to senior leadership. The struggle then was economic, and it resulted in Kim Jong-il being awarded the title of Hero of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, a glory that is likely to be seen in the younger Mr. Kim's future. The recent provocative acts are no doubt tied to the transition as a means of solidifying support for the regime among the party apparatus and giving the young Mr. Kim some needed bona fides for assuming the top post.

I think they're ripe for another parody by the South Park boys. The Axis of evil is more like the Axis of bad governments.

Here's an interesting interview with one of Kim's sons.  If you watch the video, it's amazing how much of regular dude this son of Kim appears. Very disconcerting in that he at least has probably watched 'Team America' and understood it very well.

"Die Hans Brix!"

Team North Korea

Every few years, North Korea surfaces from the sludge of international relations to rattle its sabre and detonate half baked nukes and fire inaccurate missile tests. It's quite a joke really if it weren't for the fact that Kim Jong-Il seems pretty serious about his threats and nobody is willing to march in to North Korea to get themselves some regime-change-a-la-Iraq.

Thus it's always a bad time when North Korea decides to announce that it's detonated its second nuclear test, total contravention of anything discussed in the Six Nations talk. The Six Nations which include the 2 Koreas, China, Russia America and Japan have so far pleaded and begged and bribed with North Korea to stop its nuclear weapons program, but when they go and set off a 20kiloton nuke in a test, it's time for some diplomatic strife.

These fireworks follow the launch in April of a three-stage rocket over Japan and the Pacific. Until that point, it was still possible to argue that increasingly belligerent rhetoric from Mr Kim’s regime was just his way of catching the attention of President Barack Obama’s new administration. The pariah state had long said it wanted an accommodation with the United States that guaranteed its security. But engagement with the outside world now looks near the bottom of its priorities.

North Korea also says it has torn up the truce that ended the Korean war in 1953. This was provoked, it says, by South Korea’s decision to join the American-led Proliferation Security Initiative, a group that aims to block shipments of weapons of mass destruction and related contraband. South Korea was reacting to Mr Kim’s nuclear test; North Korea accused it of a “declaration of war”. With American and South Korean troops put on a higher alert, some kind of military clash looks possible.

North Korea has also said it is restarting its plutonium reprocessing plant at Yongbyon, closed since 2007 as part of a disarmament deal negotiated with America, South Korea, Japan, China and Russia. International nuclear inspectors have been kicked out of the country. There is also concern that North Korea will resume selling nuclear technology abroad.

Earlier this month North Korea told South Korean managers at the Kaesong industrial complex, not long ago seen as a symbol of warming ties on the peninsula, that they must sign new, costlier contracts for North Korean workers, or pack up and go. The chief North Korean negotiator of closer relations between North and South, once a confidant of Mr Kim, is rumoured to have been sent to a labour camp and even shot, possibly for taking bribes.

It's an ongoing joke. Like the warlords of Afghanistan, Kim Jong-Il makes his money dealing Heroin. They sell arms to dictators in Africa, they deal in black diamonds and whatever portable wealth while their population is starving. The regime is repressive to the point of cruelty, and the people are totally brain-washed in to supporting this system because dear leader allegedly makes it so good. It's like a whole nation that's been held captive by a cult of personality trying to build an on-going dynastic system like some medieval king. And the fact that the rest of the 21st Century world actually has to take this nation more seriously because of its serious nuclear ambition is truly pathetic.

But deal with them we must.

Nobody seems to have a plan on how to get North Korea to quit being North Korea as it were. Are they merely essentially fucked up? Or is it that they work hard to be so fucked up? Or is that they get immense help and encouragement to be so fucked up?

The Chinese are too invested in having the nation as a bulwark ally facing off the ...err... capitalist West at the 38th Parallel instead of on its own borders. It's not unlike the anxiety Russia has about the Ukraine wanting to join NATO. China doesn't ant North Korea to be absorbed into South Korea because suddenly the running dogs of the Capitalist West would be at their doorstep across the Yalu River.

Remember Douglas MacArthur's great plan to drop 8 nukes north of that river to create a no-mans land forever which would keep the Chinese out of the Korean peninsula? Yes, the plan that got him sacked by Truman. It sure looks prescient today, if only because dealing with the Kim Regime in both its generations has been like pulling teeth without anaesthetics - a medieval sort of problem. That's the Yalu River for you.

Perhaps we're lucky that Truman's notion of no further nuclear wars prevailed. China and Russia are still talking to the rest of the world, if with their own strategic concerns being their bug bears. That being said, most of these strategic concerns are a bit silly if it means in the case of Russia, the Ukraines cannot get energy supplies and in the case of North Korea, it continues the aggravation of this nuclear threat. And seeing that the Cold War is long over, you wonder why they let these Cold War Era politics continue locally to the detriment of their own reputations. I guess you can put this down to bloody-mindedness.

If it ever comes down to a military solution, it's going to have to be China that digs out the Kims from their bunkers, and not the USA or the West or their allies in the far east. If nukes ever get exchanged, then you'd have to say MacArthur had it right in 1951.