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.

View From The Couch - 28/Jul/2016

What Need For Terror Laws?

Since 9/11, all the western societies have seen a steady erosion of privacy and rights as governments have sought more powers to contain the terror threat. Each time a bill has come up, more rights have been curtailed and more powers given to the security forces of the western world. At this juncture, it is worth asking if these powers are actually helping at all.

Consider Man Monis, our very own terrorist dickhead. The AFP had him on their watchlist and he fell off. Then he acquired a gun and did what he did at the Lindt Cafe in Martin Place, Sydney. The argy-bargy to do with the Lindt Cafe Siege has been going for a number of weeks now, and nobody exactly has explained how Monis slipped off the AFP's watch list and nobody has reported just how Monis got hold of a weapon.

This is notable because since 2007's APEC in Sydney, there have been APEC Anti-Terror laws in place without a sunset clause. We're all still in danger of being arrested without charge on alleged suspicions of terror links and being refused a lawyer - because hey, we don't have Miranda Rights in this country, and that's all okay by our state governments as well as Federal Government.

And yet with all this great power (and as follows Spiderman "comes great responsibility"), the AFP completely missed Monis. The NSW police had no chance as it went around looking for drugs at festivals rather then round up Monis with its great powers.

The same goes for the bastard who shot up the gay bar in Orlando, the truck driving bastard in Nice, the neck-slitting bastard in Normandy, and all the bastards who participate in the big Paris terror attack. Each and every one of them it turned out was on the radar of the authorities and somehow slipped the net togged through and do their dastardly bastardly deeds.

So today, we must ask, what good are these powers given to our police? What good is us citizenry giving up our privacy and rights to these governments whose security apparatuses still fail to stop these bastards anyway? Ed Snowden tells us the governments of the world are listening into everything we say on the phone, everything we write on emails an so on. With all this omniscience, you'd think they'd be doing a better job of stopping these bastards.

There's even a school of thought out there that they want these attacks to happen so they can justify their vast power and surveillance budgets. It's looking more believable by the day as more anymore terror attacks happen, only be revealed the perp was on some watch list but dropped out.

I say, we need a drastic re-think of these terror laws because they seem to be doing sweet fuck all. really. The bastards keep getting through. I am not fearful, I am angry at the rights of mine they are curtailing.

Privatisation Killed The Economic Growth

Pleiades alerted me to this one. The ACCC thinks privatisation kills economic growth.

Selling public assets has created unregulated monopolies that hurt productivity and damage the economy, according to Australia's consumer and competition tsar, who says he is on the verge of becoming a privatisation opponent.  

In a blistering attack on decades of common government practice, Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chairman Rod Sims said the sale of ports and electricity infrastructure and the opening of vocational education to private companies had caused him and the public to lose faith in privatisation and deregulation.

"I've been a very strong advocate of privatisation for probably 30 years; I believe it enhances economic efficiency," Mr Sims told the Melbourne Economic Forum on Tuesday.

"I'm now almost at the point of opposing privatisation because it's been done to boost proceeds, it's been done to boost asset sales and I think it's severely damaging our economy." 

Mr Sims said privatising ports, including Port Botany and Port Kembla in NSW, which were privatised together, and the Port of Melbourne, which came with conditions restricting competition from other ports, were examples where monopolies had been created without suitable regulation to control how much they could then charge users.

"Of course you get these lovely headlines in the Financial Review saying 'Gosh, what a successful sale, look at the multiple they achieved'," Mr Sims said.
"Well of course they bloody well did: the owners factored in very large price rises because there's no regulation on how they set the price of a monopoly. How dopey is that?"

Nice to see it told straight out for once. The question is will anybody listen? Or is the greed factor just too good to let go?

No Country For Old Warhorses

Here's something on Kim Carr.

In 2006 Carr cultivated an alliance between Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd, convincing them they should join forces to depose Beazley. 

In government he supported Gillard's leadership challenge before later becoming a leading agitator for Rudd. 

"Shorten is the first leader he hasn't ratted on," a colleague says.
Gillard dumped Carr from cabinet after many colleagues concluded he had been leaking damaging stories to the media. Carr, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has denied this charge. 

Carr's rivalry with Albanese deepened during his leadership battle with Shorten in 2013. After winning the vote among Labor members, Albanese would have become leader if left-wing MPs locked in behind him. 

A furious Albanese has told colleagues Carr promised him his support only to vote for Shorten and encourage his allies to do the same. Carr denies reneging on any deal.
Laurie Ferguson, a left-wing Labor MP who retired at at this election, says the move against Carr was clear "payback" from Albanese and his allies.

It's probably not right to say this from a clinical perspective because I'm not qualified (educated yes, but not qualified) and Kim Carr is not my patient but I'll say it anyway. That prone-to-dramas thing is a dead giveaway for a personality disorder. It is conceivable that the schizo-genic nature of the ALP in the past two decades could be a function of this guy being an influence broker.

Speaking of this kind of thing...

No Country For Old Female Politicians

Okay, a bit distasteful, but only because it's in reference to the sexism referred to here.

At the Republican Convention last week, attendees had the chance to wear their sexist derision for Hillary Clinton with pride. Just outside, hawkers sold T-shirts emblazoned with "Trump vs Tramp", bumper stickers proclaiming "Life's a bitch, don't vote for one," and the badges printed with "KFC Hillary Special: 2 fat thighs, 2 small breasts, one left wing". 

If that last one sounds familiar, it should. Almost exactly the same "joke" was made at the expense of Australia's first female prime minister in a menu at a fundraiser for Liberal MP Mal Brough: "Julia Gillard Kentucky Fried Quail - Small Breasts, Huge Thighs & A Big Red Box".

That 'menu incident' was about as low as 'politics' in this country got. It's one thing to dislike the Prime Minster because you disagreed with her position on policy. It's another thing to go ad hominem and liken people to poultry as a sex joke - that's all kinds of wrong and it was about as much disrespect as one could take.  And let's not forget, the Opposition that presided over that kind of sexism is now our government to this day.

Anyway, Julia Gillard is backing Hillary Clinton. No surprises there. To give Ms Gillard her due, I should quote this bit, which is important and something I agree with greatly. More people should have called out the rank sexism for what it was. Not doing so robbed the moral authority from the genuine criticism of her office.

No one called for my execution by firing squad, as a supporter of Donald Trump did for Mrs. Clinton, but a radio talk-show host did say I should be put in a bag and dropped in the sea. Witches can’t be drowned, I cynically joked. 

I have often reflected how powerful it would have been if, at that moment, a male business leader, especially one who opposed my policies, said, “I may not support the prime minister politically, but Australia must not conduct its democratic debates this way.” 

Unfortunately, that never happened. 

To my dismay, some of the young women who chat with me are not asking for political insights. Instead, they tell me that, having seen how I was treated, they have decided politics is too punishing for them. I always try to talk them out of this position. Sometimes I succeed. 

In 2016, I hope there are many brave voices naming and shaming any sexism in the presidential contest. The next generation of potential female leaders is watching.

I guess in Hillary's case, she didn't exactly knife Obama to get into her current spot, but she did do her damnedest to hobble Bernie Sanders' campaign, and with it shred the credibility of the Democratic Party. That would definitely get Hillary Clinton into the same hot-seat as Julia Gillard's time in office, which is kind of where she is in Philly right now. They have more than one thing in common.

No Country For Old Perverts

Cardinal George Pell is getting investigated after all.

The ABC's 7.30 program has revealed that Taskforce Sano has been examining allegations from complainants in Ballarat, Torquay and Melbourne for more than a year, and is looking into incidents that allegedly happened during Cardinal Pell's time as Archbishop of Melbourne in the 1990s. 

The program has obtained eight police statements from complainants, witnesses and family members who are helping the taskforce with its investigation. The allegations were repeated on 7.30 on Wednesday night, and include: 

• that Cardinal Pell would touch the genitals of children while swimming in a public pool in Ballarat in the late '70s
• that he was naked in the change rooms on a regular basis in front of children
• that he exposed himself to three young children in another change room, at the Torquay Surf Club in 1986 or 1987.

Cardinal Pell vehemently denied the allegations, with his office saying he "emphatically and unequivocally rejects any allegations of sexual abuse against him".

This is going to get good.

View From The Couch - 28/Jul/2016

What Need For Terror Laws?

Since 9/11, all the western societies have seen a steady erosion of privacy and rights as governments have sought more powers to contain the terror threat. Each time a bill has come up, more rights have been curtailed and more powers given to the security forces of the western world. At this juncture, it is worth asking if these powers are actually helping at all.

Consider Man Monis, our very own terrorist dickhead. The AFP had him on their watchlist and he fell off. Then he acquired a gun and did what he did at the Lindt Cafe in Martin Place, Sydney. The argy-bargy to do with the Lindt Cafe Siege has been going for a number of weeks now, and nobody exactly has explained how Monis slipped off the AFP's watch list and nobody has reported just how Monis got hold of a weapon.

This is notable because since 2007's APEC in Sydney, there have been APEC Anti-Terror laws in place without a sunset clause. We're all still in danger of being arrested without charge on alleged suspicions of terror links and being refused a lawyer - because hey, we don't have Miranda Rights in this country, and that's all okay by our state governments as well as Federal Government.

And yet with all this great power (and as follows Spiderman "comes great responsibility"), the AFP completely missed Monis. The NSW police had no chance as it went around looking for drugs at festivals rather then round up Monis with its great powers.

The same goes for the bastard who shot up the gay bar in Orlando, the truck driving bastard in Nice, the neck-slitting bastard in Normandy, and all the bastards who participate in the big Paris terror attack. Each and every one of them it turned out was on the radar of the authorities and somehow slipped the net togged through and do their dastardly bastardly deeds.

So today, we must ask, what good are these powers given to our police? What good is us citizenry giving up our privacy and rights to these governments whose security apparatuses still fail to stop these bastards anyway? Ed Snowden tells us the governments of the world are listening into everything we say on the phone, everything we write on emails an so on. With all this omniscience, you'd think they'd be doing a better job of stopping these bastards.

There's even a school of thought out there that they want these attacks to happen so they can justify their vast power and surveillance budgets. It's looking more believable by the day as more anymore terror attacks happen, only be revealed the perp was on some watch list but dropped out.

I say, we need a drastic re-think of these terror laws because they seem to be doing sweet fuck all. really. The bastards keep getting through. I am not fearful, I am angry at the rights of mine they are curtailing.

Privatisation Killed The Economic Growth

Pleiades alerted me to this one. The ACCC thinks privatisation kills economic growth.

Selling public assets has created unregulated monopolies that hurt productivity and damage the economy, according to Australia's consumer and competition tsar, who says he is on the verge of becoming a privatisation opponent.  

In a blistering attack on decades of common government practice, Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chairman Rod Sims said the sale of ports and electricity infrastructure and the opening of vocational education to private companies had caused him and the public to lose faith in privatisation and deregulation.

"I've been a very strong advocate of privatisation for probably 30 years; I believe it enhances economic efficiency," Mr Sims told the Melbourne Economic Forum on Tuesday.

"I'm now almost at the point of opposing privatisation because it's been done to boost proceeds, it's been done to boost asset sales and I think it's severely damaging our economy." 

Mr Sims said privatising ports, including Port Botany and Port Kembla in NSW, which were privatised together, and the Port of Melbourne, which came with conditions restricting competition from other ports, were examples where monopolies had been created without suitable regulation to control how much they could then charge users.

"Of course you get these lovely headlines in the Financial Review saying 'Gosh, what a successful sale, look at the multiple they achieved'," Mr Sims said.
"Well of course they bloody well did: the owners factored in very large price rises because there's no regulation on how they set the price of a monopoly. How dopey is that?"

Nice to see it told straight out for once. The question is will anybody listen? Or is the greed factor just too good to let go?

No Country For Old Warhorses

Here's something on Kim Carr.

In 2006 Carr cultivated an alliance between Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd, convincing them they should join forces to depose Beazley. 

In government he supported Gillard's leadership challenge before later becoming a leading agitator for Rudd. 

"Shorten is the first leader he hasn't ratted on," a colleague says.
Gillard dumped Carr from cabinet after many colleagues concluded he had been leaking damaging stories to the media. Carr, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has denied this charge. 

Carr's rivalry with Albanese deepened during his leadership battle with Shorten in 2013. After winning the vote among Labor members, Albanese would have become leader if left-wing MPs locked in behind him. 

A furious Albanese has told colleagues Carr promised him his support only to vote for Shorten and encourage his allies to do the same. Carr denies reneging on any deal.
Laurie Ferguson, a left-wing Labor MP who retired at at this election, says the move against Carr was clear "payback" from Albanese and his allies.

It's probably not right to say this from a clinical perspective because I'm not qualified (educated yes, but not qualified) and Kim Carr is not my patient but I'll say it anyway. That prone-to-dramas thing is a dead giveaway for a personality disorder. It is conceivable that the schizo-genic nature of the ALP in the past two decades could be a function of this guy being an influence broker.

Speaking of this kind of thing...

No Country For Old Female Politicians

Okay, a bit distasteful, but only because it's in reference to the sexism referred to here.

At the Republican Convention last week, attendees had the chance to wear their sexist derision for Hillary Clinton with pride. Just outside, hawkers sold T-shirts emblazoned with "Trump vs Tramp", bumper stickers proclaiming "Life's a bitch, don't vote for one," and the badges printed with "KFC Hillary Special: 2 fat thighs, 2 small breasts, one left wing". 

If that last one sounds familiar, it should. Almost exactly the same "joke" was made at the expense of Australia's first female prime minister in a menu at a fundraiser for Liberal MP Mal Brough: "Julia Gillard Kentucky Fried Quail - Small Breasts, Huge Thighs & A Big Red Box".

That 'menu incident' was about as low as 'politics' in this country got. It's one thing to dislike the Prime Minster because you disagreed with her position on policy. It's another thing to go ad hominem and liken people to poultry as a sex joke - that's all kinds of wrong and it was about as much disrespect as one could take.  And let's not forget, the Opposition that presided over that kind of sexism is now our government to this day.

Anyway, Julia Gillard is backing Hillary Clinton. No surprises there. To give Ms Gillard her due, I should quote this bit, which is important and something I agree with greatly. More people should have called out the rank sexism for what it was. Not doing so robbed the moral authority from the genuine criticism of her office.

No one called for my execution by firing squad, as a supporter of Donald Trump did for Mrs. Clinton, but a radio talk-show host did say I should be put in a bag and dropped in the sea. Witches can’t be drowned, I cynically joked. 

I have often reflected how powerful it would have been if, at that moment, a male business leader, especially one who opposed my policies, said, “I may not support the prime minister politically, but Australia must not conduct its democratic debates this way.” 

Unfortunately, that never happened. 

To my dismay, some of the young women who chat with me are not asking for political insights. Instead, they tell me that, having seen how I was treated, they have decided politics is too punishing for them. I always try to talk them out of this position. Sometimes I succeed. 

In 2016, I hope there are many brave voices naming and shaming any sexism in the presidential contest. The next generation of potential female leaders is watching.

I guess in Hillary's case, she didn't exactly knife Obama to get into her current spot, but she did do her damnedest to hobble Bernie Sanders' campaign, and with it shred the credibility of the Democratic Party. That would definitely get Hillary Clinton into the same hot-seat as Julia Gillard's time in office, which is kind of where she is in Philly right now. They have more than one thing in common.

No Country For Old Perverts

Cardinal George Pell is getting investigated after all.

The ABC's 7.30 program has revealed that Taskforce Sano has been examining allegations from complainants in Ballarat, Torquay and Melbourne for more than a year, and is looking into incidents that allegedly happened during Cardinal Pell's time as Archbishop of Melbourne in the 1990s. 

The program has obtained eight police statements from complainants, witnesses and family members who are helping the taskforce with its investigation. The allegations were repeated on 7.30 on Wednesday night, and include: 

• that Cardinal Pell would touch the genitals of children while swimming in a public pool in Ballarat in the late '70s
• that he was naked in the change rooms on a regular basis in front of children
• that he exposed himself to three young children in another change room, at the Torquay Surf Club in 1986 or 1987.

Cardinal Pell vehemently denied the allegations, with his office saying he "emphatically and unequivocally rejects any allegations of sexual abuse against him".

This is going to get good.

Movie Doubles - 'Spotlight' & 'The Big Short'

American Tragedies

It's cool when stars get together and appear in a morally righteous movie. The omnibus casting in both of these films is something to behold. The All-Star lineup in 'Spotlight' makes for an interesting ensemble while the split narrative of 'The Big Short' demands a distribution of war power across three narrative threads.

Both these films deal with a tragedy that came about because nobody thought to question a big institution. People had way too much faith in the Catholic Church, and they had too much trust in banks. Both the Catholic Church and the banks ended up making a lot of people look very foolish for their faith and trust; and delivered devastating consequences for that misplaced faith and trust.

We live in amazing times when you think about it. The revelation that the Catholic Church was covering up for paedophile priests was an apocryphal joke for a long time. The fact that we got any proper investigation that has led to global uncovering of such activities would have been unthinkable not so long ago. Similarly, the notion that banks through their greed and stupidity could manufacture the condition for the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression was unthinkable right up until it happened. Both topics deserve some kind of narrative reconstruction to get a sense of how these things came about. These stories are at their core, remarkably alike.

And so... here's the usual spoiler alert. Don't read on if you hate spoilers.



The Tradition Of Investigation

Both these films have long roots that reach out from beyond the screen. 'Spotlight' actually has many echoes of the other great newspaper movie, 'All The President's Men' where Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman playing Woodford and Bernstein went in hard against the authoritarian Nixon Administration which was trying to cover up its criminal tracks. Similarly, 'Spotlight' shows four news reporters going after the Catholic Church that indulges in systematic coverup of paedophile priests. If you are into even more interesting connections between these two films, the editor at The Washington Post who backed Woodford and Bernstein during the Watergate investigations was Ben Bradlee. The editor at The Boston Globe presiding over the Spotlight investigations into the Catholic Church was his son Ben Bradlee Jr. Rachel McAdam follows her performance from 'State of Play', another film that tried to capture the newspaper news room dynamic.

'The Big Short' is actually based on the book of the same title by Michael Lewis. Lewis was able to navigate the complex world of Wall Street banking because he himself was once a Wall Street banker and penned the great tome 'Liar's Poker' which explained the invention of mortgage bonds. We are enlightened of the strangeness and incongruous opacity of banking terminology thanks to Lewis' abilities as an investigative writer and part-insider to the world of Wall Street investment banking. The pedigree of this film carries previous Michael Lewis adaptations which include 'The Blind Side' and 'Moneyball', and we even have Brad Pitt playing a role in one of the narratives.

Both these films are thus built on accounts and testimonies from the very frontline of fact-collecting.  Because both these films go to great lengths to explain the problems of exposing or capitalising on the issue at hand, we are given tremendous insight into America as an immensely complicated society.

Too Big To Scrutinise

In the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, we were made to understand the term "too big to fail". It was a terrible thing that we had to suffer the GFC because of these big institutions. Once the crisis as underway, we discovered that they had racked such astronomical sums of money in debt, had we let them fail it would have taken the world economy with them. And so we let these bastards continue to just be these very same bastards. As it turns out in the telling of 'The Big Short', an alarming few people scrutinised the situation where there was a combination of subprime mortgage bonds, a property bubble, credit-rating agencies that simply rubber-stamped credit ratings, and very greedy and stupid people throwing money around.

The Catholic Church too is a monolithic entity. The closer one's faith resides with the Catholic Church, the more moral authority the church takes on to the point here it has absolute control over the discourse. This allows conditions of absolute unilateral power to be exercised against the faithful when needed - something that dates back to medieval thinking on authority - but also silence issues. Again, investigations revealed that the church had known it had a problem with paedophile priests as early as 1962, but opted to suppress the information and with it the scrutiny.

In both instances the lack of third party scrutiny allowed the problem to snowball. The lack of scrutiny came from the fact that the institutions - the Church and Financial institutions - were deemed too big to tackle. In most instances that would be factually correct, but also place these institutions in a space of utter moral hazard because of it. The fraudulence of the church covering up paedophile priests is in fact the same fraudulence of selling subprime outage bonds rubber-stamped as AAA. They're doing it because they can pull the wool over the average punter's eyes, and comes from a space of contempt so deep it's hard to contemplate the depth of that evil.

The Pompous Appeal To Normalcy

It's also interesting that in both films, the institutions resepctively resort to what can only be called the 'pompous defence'. When the Catholic Church is challenged and the defenders of the Church try to convince the investigators to drop the story, they mount a particularly pompous defence trying to categorise the victim's accusations as somehow a minor irritant or a minority crank position. At every turn, the people who want it not to be true put on the air that because the Catholic Church is too important an institution, the allegations can't possibly be credible.

Similarly, at the climactic moment of the Bears Sterns collapse during the GFC, a banker gets up at a conference and says everything is fine and any attempt to categorise the critical situation as exactly that, is somehow misguided and a crank. Of course in one of the great ironies, Bears Sterns bank collapsed that very day as he was speaking. In both instances the pompous appeal is made to the public to present and pretend that everything going on is normal.

Perhaps these responses are natural. It's a bit like being confronted by bad news and you go into the grief cycle. Given the horrible evidence presented, some go straight to the denial stage - and when doing so, do look stupid and pompous defending the indefensible in public. For the Church the allegations turned out to be all too real with repercussions around the world, and for banking too the repercussions became the Global Financial Crisis. Maybe when the scale of the problem is so huge, people have to pretend the threat is nothing and thus the pomposity comes to the fore.

Institutional Evil Is Institutional Stupidity

In each instance the films reveal something very interesting about institutional malfeasance, and it is that it relies greatly on the stupidity others not to notice what is going on. The people who uncover the great mass of subprime mortgages that are fed into high end mortgage bonds were the people who actually undertook proper due diligence. In a sense, the great fraud of the mortgage bonds based subprime loans relied on the stupidity of people not to admit they did not know what was going on and to go looking for facts. It seems simple enough, yet so many bankers and lawyers let these mortgage bonds written in complicated language, make them stupid and not do due diligence.

Equally, the Roman Catholic Church had insiders warning the Church for decades and instead of heeding the warnings, opted to go for the cover up. Once again, the coverup relied on people opting to be stupid by not noticing a pattern that was carried out in the roster of priests. The evidence was right there on public record if people could put the pieces together. Equally, the press failed to follow up when given evidence earlier because they too opted to be stupid and not look into the evidence being presented. The deep regret from the press in 'Spotlight' is the acknowledgment that it too forms part of the circle of institutional stupid that allowed the institutional evil to flourish.

The pairing of institutional stupidity with institutional evil is right around us. Take Australia's stance on asylum seekers. It relies entirely on making sure that people cannot carry out due diligence to make sure human rights are not violated. In the face of many allegations Peter Dutton pompously pretends that nothing untoward is going in places like Manus Island and Nauru. The middle part of the electorate is now opting to go with stupid silence and back both major parties because it cannot exercise the due diligence an discover the problems going on. Thus we're setting up the scenes for The Great Embarrassment that will surely follow the events on Manus Island and Nauru.

With Great Power Comes Great Corruption

At the end of the day both major institutions were avaricious to the point of disaster. The Roman Catholic Church sought to limit the financial damages as much as possible. The pattern we see in 'Spotlight' where they paid off people who alleged these crimes and sent them away with tens of thousands instead of incurring millions in damages was repeated elsewhere around the globe. We know this from the recent Royal Commission that Cardinal Pell himself was part of the institutional evil by playing the institutional stupid card very hard to secure his own promotion. In the mean time they sewed up the mouths of victims and lawyers with confidentiality clauses in these private settlements. Those in the public who sought public redress received a great amount of harassment and vitriol - another pattern that was repeated around the globe.

Banking, equally brought itself to the knees through excessive greed. Yet, the most telling part in 'The Big Short' is when Mark Baum realises that the banks knew fun well they would be bailed out because they were too big to fail, And so the moral hazard had always been there right form the beginning. The collusive nature of those who investigate banks and those who work for banks also made it very hard to stop the endemic fraudulence. And the scale of the fraudulence being so endemic was such that it looked like this situation was normal to many onlookers. This is the genuinely crazy part of the story. People like the Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Ben Bernanke couldn't see the GFC coming. US Treasurer - and former Goldman Sachs banker - Hank Paulson couldn't understand what was unfolding and why. It gave rise to the massive effort known as Quantitative Easing to shore up asset prices, just to save the bacon of so many ordinary investors.

Worse still, in the wake of the GFC, none of the remedial actions had taken place and so it is clear we have set ourselves up for yet another GFC if only we could sell these subprime-pimped mortgage loans to a greater fool, for it is the greater fool who gives rise to the great power to corrupt so greatly.

As for the Vatican, things seem to have moved towards reforming their practices under Pope Francis; yet, if celibacy gives rise to 6% paedophile priests and only 50% who actually manage to practice the celibacy, then the biggest reform they could carry out might be to acknowledge celibacy is bullshit.

News That's Fit To Punt - 04/Aug/2015

"You've Never Had It So Good" Revisited

There are a lot of these old paedophiles getting their names dragged through the press these days. Whether it be Jimmy Saville or Rolf Harris, there seems to have been a regular trope of dirty old old men abusing children in their care and then having it covered up. Maybe once upon a time those cover ups were good enough to protect the names of the guilty, but times have changed. The abusers of old are being brought out into the daylight.

And so this bring sis to a former prime Minister of the UK no less, the late Edward Heath is now being investigated for paedophilia allegations that were covered up.

The British police watchdog is investigating claims of an old cover-up over allegations that former prime minister Edward Heath abused children.
Police on Monday called for any victims of abuse by Sir Ted Heath, or witnesses to any abuse, to come forward. 

London's Mirror newspaper spoke to one alleged victim, now 64, who said he was assaulted at age 12 in an exclusive Mayfair flat in 1961 when Sir Edward was an MP. And the Guardian reported that detectives have spoken to a middle-aged man who says he was abused as a child by Heath several times.

Sir Edward died in 2005, aged 89. He was prime minister in the early 1970s and lost the leadership of the Conservative party to Margaret Thatcher in 1975.
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Wiltshire Police were said to have heard allegations about Sir Ted Heath in the 1990s, but they were not followed up. 

Superintendent Sean Memory told the BBC: "We had a senior retired police officer come forward (in late 2014) to inform us that they believed a trial may have been vacated [abandoned] as a result of information received in relation to Sir Ted Heath. We've looked extensively at that and we've decided to make a referral to the IPCC [Independent Police Complaints Commission]." 

The IPCC inquiry will look at how the case was handled by Wiltshire Police and if the trial was stopped, why it was stopped, Superintendent Memory said. "More important for me today is, are there victims of sexual abuse from Sir Ted Heath or witnesses, and if so I would ask them to come forward today."

When you think about the Lord John Sewell who was in the papers the other day, who was snorting drugs and cavorting with prostitutes, you get the feeling that these revelations coming in a cluster aren't for nothing; that perhaps somebody somewhere is trying to set right the wrongs that got buried along the way. It really is interesting how these things are coming to light, one after the other lately.

The "It's What You Wanted Isn't It?" Moment

Turns out the Coalition's choice of tackling climate change known as Direct Action does sweet fuck all. That is to say, under this Coalition government, carbon emissions have increased, thanks to burning more black coal. Like, who would've guessed that would happen, right? Who could have guessed it? Repeal the Carbon pricing mechanism and just let these old school carbon-pollutin' Low-Falutin' (if such term could be coined)  energy companies on the loose with their antiquated, filthy, low-efficiency power fossil fuel power generators. The mind boggles. But of course this is exactly what Tony Abbott promised to deliver, and so I guess we should chalk up this mess to him.

Pressure for Australia to set an ambitious goal ahead of the Paris climate summit at the end of the year has also increased with the release overnight of Mr Obama's Clean Power Plan aimed at cutting carbon emissions by 32 per cent on 2005 levels.  

"It's obvious we're going in the other direction," Dr Saddler said. 

Environment Minister Greg Hunt said the post-2020 targets will be released soon.
"We welcome the action by the United States – and note that they are tackling climate change without a painful carbon tax," Mr Hunt said. 

However Mark Butler, the opposition spokesman on climate change, said the Abbott government's policies were to blame for the jump in power-sector emissions, particularly "stalled investment in renewable energy, the removal of the carbon price – and the perpetrator of all this is because of [Prime Minister] Tony Abbott". 

"For as long as Tony Abbott is Prime Minister, carbon pollution will rise," he said.
Greens deputy leader Larissa Waters linked the emissions jump to party donations: "Coal companies' donations to the government are now paying off in a big way with the biggest surge of pollution in living memory. 

"This surge in pollution can be added to the mountain of evidence that the carbon price worked beautifully," Senator Waters said. "Pollution dropped as the economy expanded and unemployment was smaller then than it is now."

Which I guess comes back to the abject lack of leadership in tackling one of the greatest challenges of our times; a challenge that this Federal Government is totally incapable of addressing with any credibility, authority or intellectual honesty. 

Which brings me to the next bit...

The Business Leaders Disagree With Tony Abbott

Just because Tony Abbott installs Maurice Newman to oversea a review of climate policy - a bit like putting an ostrich in charge of airport policy - doesn't mean the business sector as a whole does not believe in climate change and global warming. If anything Maurice Newman appears to be out on his own, out on a limb and mostly out to lunch with his denialist position.

In that light it's probably worth noting this opinion piece by Cameron Clyne, former head of the NAB:

These risks are what the economists call "stranded asset" risks. It's an evocative term for when an asset – a coal mine, a power station, a smelter – still has years of life in it, but just can't compete because the economic or regulatory tide has turned. 

We know from history what happens when a business or a government sets its face against a change that is coming anyway. It's usually not the politicians or the chief executives who end up at the unemployment office. Leadership mistakes are worn by people who are least at fault for the bad decisions: the workers, their families and the communities that depend on them. 

It's everyday Australians who bear the brunt, cop the hit and pay for the wilful ignorance and blindness of political leaders – and some in the business community – to the very real and very rapid changes that are all around us. 

Turning away from the problem will not make the problem go away. It seems some in Australia are willfully blind to these problems and the problems this poses for our nation and its economic and social fabric. 

The Abbott government is not leading Australia in the direction that's needed, but the forthcoming meetings in Paris to set new carbon reduction targets is a chance for them to do so. It will be a critical moment for our national economy and our people.

That's about as clearly put as you can have it.