Quick Shots 01/Jan/2014

Hey, First Post Of the Year From Me

I've been busy watching a few silly movies on FetchTV in between the seasonal obligations. It's pretty cool watching on FetchTV because it saves the on the trip to the video store if nothing else and it sure beats buying more media. I've been stuck in the bad habit of buying stuff because I still have the carry-over from the ear when DVDs were actually worth something. It was ever so brief, but they were important for a good half a decade there until Blu-Ray came along and scotched that little bubble.

My New Years resolution last year was that I shouldn't just buy more media, but a) sometimes it is easier to just buy the box set and b) sometimes it's better to own than rent and c) it's impossible to stick to arbitrary rules meant that I bought my fair share of stuff. It's a bit of a worry if you can't remember if you've bought something or simply watched it on a rented bit of media, but if I think I'm going to go, "you have to watch this scene!?" or "you just have to hear this guitar solo!" then it's better to own this stuff.

Still, it's weird having a pile of this media that grew to be irrelevant so quickly. At least with LPs and CDs, there's an argument to be made that mp3s are a their best worse than either LPs or CDs, and that moving on to just data on hard disks isn't really an improvement in your listening pleasure. Besides which, you can squeeze a hello of a lot more out of LPs and CDs by having better speakers and amplifiers. Video is different.

With 4k TV looming in the not too distant future, even the marvelous Blu-Ray 1080p format is going to look pretty outdated in the next few years. I'm sure there's 8k and 16k TVs beyond that, and without an NBN pumping at last 50mbps it's going to be difficult to run the IPTV services on 4k and up download services, so maybe buying media won't become totally extinct. Let me just say, 4k is gorgeous. You're going to want this much more than the time you went from SD PAL or NTSC to HDTV. (That being said, I do seriously  wonder if there's any joy in seeing 4k TV footage of Kanye West or Miley Cyrus twerking.)

Getting Bad Advice

The news this week that's been most grating has been this business of Maurice Newman proclaiming that climate science on global warming is delusional.

In an opinion piece in The Australian newspaper, Maurice Newman, the Prime Minister's pick as head of his Business Advisory Council, claimed high energy costs caused by the carbon tax and the renewable energy target, introduced by the Howard government, had eroded Australia's competitiveness. Under Labor and the Greens, Australia had been taken ''hostage'' by ''climate change madness'', Mr Newman wrote.

"Newman!!"

It's really no big deal except for the fact that it's wrong and willfully wrong, and that he is slated to offer up advice to the Prime Minister based on this kind of idiotic denialism. If nothing else, it shows Tony Abbott still thinks the science on this is 'complete crap'. What's even weirder is that because the first 100days of Tony Abbott's time in office was 'complete crap', we're not surprised in the least bit find that his business advisor is a highly motivated climate change denialist.

Can We Please Stop With The Government Debt Hysteria?

This one came in from Skarp last week but I've been a bit preoccupied. Paul Sheehan - he of the rather squeaky voice and reflexively right-leaning views - wrote this rather tawdry column.

At 12.30 on Tuesday, Hockey, who has also been the stand-out thespian of the new federal parliament, will unveil the real horror, dysfunction and narcissism of Kevin Rudd's contribution to Australian political history, disably assisted by Julia Gillard. Hockey will release the mid-year economic and fiscal outlook, known in the trade as MYEFO, which will show a budget deficit much worse than Labor led us to believe, probably close to $50 billion, debt obligations much higher than Labor led us to believe, and unfunded liabilities that are so irresponsibly crushing the government will have to walk away from many of them. The most monumental folly is the National Broadband Network, whose economic rationale was worked out on a piece of paper by Rudd. The scheme subsequently created by former communications minister Stephen Conroy would cost more than $70 billion and never recover its cost of capital. The Abbott government will have to start again.

The way that paragraph is written, you'd think that the sky was going to cave in. Fortunately, professor Steve Keen had this article as a retort:

I’m not going to debate (or defend) Kevin Rudd’s personality, but getting this hysterical over a $50 billion deficit in a $1.5 trillion economy? Oh come on: that is slightly less than 3 per cent of GDP (the precise GDP figure is $1.525 trillion, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics). Comparable figures for some of our trading partners are 5.5 per cent for the USA, 6 per cent for the UK, and 10 per cent for Japan. Australia’s deficit for 2013 is almost 50 per cent below the expected average for the OECD of 4.8 per cent of GDP.

Of course, finding that out doesn’t require a trip overseas: all you have to do is search the web. But what a trip overseas might alert Sheehan to is the economic performance of the rest of the planet – and especially of those parts of it that, as he does, make the size of the government deficit the only stick by which economic performance is measured.

The rest of the article is Keen dismantling Sheehan's stated position that all this debt is somehow crippling and wrong.Austerity i a terrible thing; not to mention the fact that it doesn't work.

You sort of wonder how people like Paul Sheehan keep jobs as columnists. It's like he gets paid not for his thinking and critical faculties - which on the whole seem faulty anyway - but for how hard his blowhard entries blow. And they really blow. Sheehan's symptomatic of what's making the media market worse in this era. You just can't trust what any of these sloppy commentators write.  but somehow they're up there with a public soapbox on the SMH masthead spreading his kind of nonsense. I mean really! Why do they have to give 'equal time' to stupidity and misinformation?

But back to Keen's take home message about Government debt:

I would far rather see governments acknowledging the problem of private debt, and doing something concrete to reduce it – since the financial sector should never have been allowed to create much of that debt in the first place. But as a second best policy, government spending should buffer the impact of the decline in private sector deleveraging. To do otherwise is to turn a serious recession into a genuine Depression – as Europe has done.

Behind the veneer of apparent fiscal prudence, that is what hysterical articles like Sheehan’s are encouraging – in utter denial both of the actual cause of the crisis and, more importantly for a journalist, in ignorance of what even casual empiricism shows has been the actual impact of austerity.

That, just about sums it all up.

The Gender Card

Julia Gillard, Feminist Superstar

You have to admit, the world moves in mysterious ways. Overnight, Tony Abbott became an international laughing stock as  result of Julia Gillard's big rant.

The most enthusiastic praise came from US women's site Jezebel, which described Ms Gillard as "one badass mother----er".

"In an impassioned 15-minute smackdown in front of the House of Representatives, the country's first female leader gave a scathing speech calling out opposition leader Tony Abbott's extremely misogynistic comments, actions, views on abortion and single women, all while pointing in his face."

Jezebel also highlighted some of her "choice quotes" including:
- "I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man, I will not. And the government will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. Not now, not ever. The leader of the opposition says that people who hold sexist views and who are misogynists are not appropriate for high office. Well, I hope the leader of the opposition has got a piece of paper and he is writing out his resignation. Because if he wants to know what misogyny looks like in modern Australia, he doesn't need a motion in the house of representatives, he needs a mirror.
- "I was very offended personally the Leader of the Opposition said abortion is the easy way out."
- "I was offended when he stood next to a sign that described me as a 'man's bitch.'"

Online political magazine Salon said US politicians such as Todd Akin, who said "legitimate rape" did not result in pregnancy, and Allen West, who was blasted after telling a Democrat she was "not a lady", could learn something from Ms Gillard.

"If only the US could borrow Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard to take on Congress's misogynist caucus," Salon said.
"We wonder if Gillard takes requests: Todd Akin, R.-Mo., and Allen West, R.- Fla., to name just a couple, could certainly use a similar treatment."

And so it went. Germaine Greer, eat your heart out, the world has a new poster-child for Feminism. And yes, Tony Abbott looked a right git toward the end of Gillard's rant.

Shut Up 'n' Take Yer Medicine Tony

Of course today, Tony Abbott's trying to come back at the rant, trying to characterise it as 'playing the gender card'.

Mr Abbott said today he would not retreat from his criticism of the Prime Minister.
He called on Labor to stop playing the gender card.
''Just because the Prime Minister has sometimes been the victim of unfair criticism doesn't mean she can dismiss any criticism as sexism or she can dismiss any criticism on gender grounds,'' Mr Abbott said.

The staggering chutzpah of Tony Abbott is that he nary shows that he has to acknowledge he got beat by his own cudgel yesterday, good and proper. Maybe this kind of chutzpah is something admirable to a certain kind of conservative mindset, but I wonder if he's going to ever overcome the international PR damage of being 'that guy who had to sit there and take that 15minute rant from the first female Prime Minister of Australia'.

The sad (and decidedly ugly) point about the whole Peter Slipper affair is that Peter Slipper was indeed a one time friend of Tony Abbott, who got sold down the river by Tony Abbott. Peter Slipper - for whatever reasons of his own - made his move to accept the role of Speaker of House if for no other reason than the money and prestige. It certainly damaged the Coalition because it went against the overall aim of destabilising the fragile Parliament where the independents held so much power, however it really must be asked whether it was realistic of Tony Abbott and his front benchers to expect the apple of government to fall on their laps like some gift from the gods.

To this - mostly imaginary, partly mirage-like - end, Tony Abbott has bent his considerable effort at portraying the Prime Minster as a lying witch, bitch slut and whatever else, as well as hunted Craig Thomson into a kind of wilderness where he may never get a fair trial should he ever have to face charges. The utter lack of restraint and the most naked of blind ambitions has made him less of a candidate for the highest elected office of Australia.

Now, he might complain and call all this dressing down he got from Julia Gillard as Gillard playing the gender card, but no, no, no, Mr. Abbott, this is just the beginning. It is fairly clear that the polite, protective rubber gloves are off, and Julia Gillard has stainless steel fists.

Why Does Paul Sheehan Even Have A Job At The SMH?

I know he only writes opinion pieces but really, somebody should tell him the tone of his writing is as low as he accuses others of being.

After sending out two attack dogs, Gutter and Sewer, to do the dirty work, after hiding behind two political zombies, Insufferable and Unspeakable, to stay in power, after using the Minister for Innuendo and the Compromise-General to play the gender card, the mask has finally dropped away to reveal the driver of the politics of hate in Australia.

The mask fell at exactly 2.42pm in the House of Representatives. Looking on were the member for Gutter, Anthony Albanese, the member for Sewer, Wayne Swan, the Minister for Innuendo, Tanya Plibersek, and the Compromise-General, Nicola Roxon, and the independents who will do anything to avoid facing their electorates, Mr Insufferable, Robert Oakeshott, and his fellow regional zombie, Mr Unspeakable, Tony Windsor.

Someone had to set Gutter and Sewer loose. Someone directed Innuendo and Compromise to play the gender card. Someone paid the bill for Insufferable and Unspeakable. Someone's authority still rests on the vote of Craig Thomson. And someone had to approve making Peter Slipper the Speaker despite his being manifestly disrespected by either side of the house, a low point of political opportunism.

At 2.42 pm on Tuesday that someone rose to speak. The mask fell away. Julia Gillard came out snarling. The Parliament had before it a great issue, the dignity of the house itself, which had been traduced by the scandal that had attached itself to Slipper.

Instead of directly addressing the issue of a discredited speakership which had become engulfed in an expensive and degrading legal action that did no credit to anyone involved, least of all the Attorney-General, the Prime Minister wasted no timing in using misdirection and personal abuse.

That's all pretty vulgar as he is trying to paint the Prime Minister for daring to point out the blindingly obvious - the reason why the Leader of the Opposition Tony Abbott cannot be taken seriously for his motion against Peter Slipper on the basis of misogyny and sexism is that the only way to interpret Tony Abbott's public utterances and prevarications and qualifications and babble-burble-bicker-banter is that he himself is sexist and a misogynist. And no amount of hauling Abbott's wife out into the limelight is going to fix that fact - not perception, but fact on the public record. Similarly, no amount of name-calling and belittling of the Prime Minster (for being a woman, I guess)  is going to add any moral authority to a man who has made hypocrisy a sport all his life and can't even tell when he's doing it.

Paul Sheehan then goes on to argue that Julia Gillard lied about the Carbon Tax.

"Lied"!

Now, regular readers of this blog will well know that I do not approve of Julia Gillard and will not vote for her or the ALP at the next Federal Election. My mind is made up; she cannot persuade me otherwise. This is between me and my political conviction.

All the same, even I know and understand and remember well enough, that what happened with respect to the Carbon Tax was that she had to go ahead with it in order to form government with the one Green MP and the 3 independents. It didn't matter that she campaigned against it and removed Kevin Rudd in order not to have the ETS. It was the hung Parliament that forced her to agree to the Carbon Tax. To argue that she "lied" given these circumstances is stretching the truth way beyond breaking point. It's one thing for idiot pundits like Alan Jones and other shock jocks to call this a lie: They're not smart enough to understand how things went that led up to that point in history. They're intellectual pygmies (and I'm being un-nice to real pygmies when I say that) preaching to the brain-damaged sub-literate morons who cannot read newspapers nor hold a thought long enough to understand history (but alas as citizens have the vote nonetheless).

However, a man who is paid to write opinion pieces in the Sydney Morning Herald website ought to have a better understanding than calling Julia Gillard a liar. It's willfully stupid and blind to the facts.

If I had Gina Rinehart's money to buy Fairfax, I'd make a point of sacking Paul Sheehan too.