PED Offences And Russian Sport

The Olympic Games And Their Dwindling Appeal

With every passing year the Olympics loses its lustre and allure. Maybe I'm saying that because we've had ours in Sydney and it's fading into memory and history every year. Yeah 2000 was grand but every Olympic since has made you wonder if it's really right or worth it. 2004 Athens and the Greeks who ended up with the GFC and austerity?; 2008 Beijing and the self-congratulatory navel-gazing?; 2012 London which was okay, but then it's London so it's hard to go wrong; and now Rio with all the reported problems that make you not want to fall in to the water at all. As for the Winter Games? There's been Sochi with guards beating up on Pussy Riot and all the other unmemorable events, and if you're an Aussie it's hard to take the Winter Games as seriously anyway, seeing that we'll never stage one.

Now that I think about it Baseball got kicked out of the Olympic Games because of the doping scandals in the mid 2000s. They kicked out Softball with it, which was a bit like punishing Table Tennis because Maria Sharapova tested positive. And they added Golf and none of the top players in Golf are going to play at Rio because... Zika virus, apparently. I guess golfers are susceptible to acephalic medical conditions. All of which makes you wonder if the Olympics actually have relevance to the rest of the world of sport. Think of all the sports that aren't contested at the Games and they now include Baseball, Softball, Cricket, and Rugby. But hey, they have Volleyball AND Beach Volleyball as separate, discrete sports. Sports we don't watch unless it's on because of the Olympics.

Quite simply, the Olympic Games is like a bundle package of obscure sports we only want to watch once every 4 years. The sports that aren't there are the staple sports we like to watch regularly. It's a big gap. Baseball, Cricket and Rugby don't need to be at the Olympics at all and can sustain their global audiences quite nicely. It's sports like Track and Field and Swimming that need to be at the Olympics, and probably Table Tennis too. Golf and Tennis? Clearly not so much. Basketball of course started the joke of inviting highly professionalised sport into what used to be the pinnacle of amateur sports. 1992 USA vs. Angola Basketball game was 'fun' (if you enjoy a team of professionals smash through country amateurs), but totally not in the Olympic spirit.

Anyway, all of these things have made me reconsider how I feel about the Olympic Games, and I have to say I'm less enamoured of them today than I was in 2000.

So, here's the news that Russia's Track and Field athletes are out for Rio.

Russia's Whole Track And Field Team Is Out For Rio

It's quite disturbing really.

The Court of Arbitration for Sport said on Thursday it had rejected Russia's appeal against the exclusion of its track and field athletes from the Rio Games starting on August 5, opening the door to a full ban on Russian athletes from the Olympics.
"CAS rejects the claims/appeal of the Russian Olympic Committee and 68 Russian athletes," CAS said in a statement. 

The ruling by the CAS, sport's highest tribunal, will be taken into consideration by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) as it ponders whether to impose a blanket ban on Russia from all sports. 

The affair has triggered a crisis in world sport, with Russian President Vladimir Putin speaking of the risk of a split in the Olympic movement. 

Russian track and field athletes were banned from international competition in November after an independent commission set up by the World Anti-Doping Agency found rampant state-sponsored doping in Russian athletics. 

The ban was imposed by the IAAF, the global governing body for athletics, which reconfirmed it last month, saying there were still considerable problems with anti-doping in Russia. 

The appeal was launched by the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) and 68 Russian athletes who said they were being punished despite not having failed drugs tests, and that they should be eligible to compete in Rio.

Thus, if you're an innocent little schlub whose only talent is chucking a spear and you've never done any PEDs, you're still out thanks to those who did in your country and got caught which includes your whole nation's sport administrative institutions. The problem is you don't choose to which country you are born. There is no point at which the innocent go unpunished in this WADA regimen.
Clearly it's unfair on the innocent, there's no presumption of innocence that would happen in a court of law, and this was the appeals court that just cited precedent to punish the innocent with the guilty. Way to go guys. I can really feel the righteous burn of justice right there... not.

This isn't like the 1919 Black Sox where knowing about the match-fixing and not blowing the whistle got Buck Weaver banned for life from organised Baseball by Kennesaw Mountain Landis. That was done to send message forever eternal that match-fixing threatened the integrity of the game and won't be tolerated. That's kind of a worthy sacrifice. What this is, is like punishing Svetlana Kuznetsova because Maria Sharapova got banned for a failed drug test - even though Kuznetsova had no idea about Sharapova's doping let alone anything to do with it. I'm amazed they're doing this with a straight face.

That's not to say the Russian sports federation doesn't have major issues with doping. Clearly they do.  But 28 years after Ben Johnson, and with what we know today, you'd think the thinking about PEDs might have moved on from the ban-everybody-in-sight routine they've been trotting out forever. There's got to be a better way of dealing with PEDs than what WADA is doing.

Honestly, I've long lost faith that this approach has much merit. I know it's the minority view, but I think we're coming to the point in history where the War on Drugs has failed and we'd better take stock of what that means, right across the pharmaceutical board. That would include admitting PEDs might not be all unilaterally harmful.

Amphetamines, Ephedrine, Pseudoephedrine, Phenylephrine

Once upon a time, Amphetamines were legal over the counter, and they were also PEDs. MLB players took them a lot in the 50s and 60s from what we can gather, until the whole drug abuse thing became such a legal anathema they made amphetamines illegal. Which, I think is an over-reaction.

My ex-friend KJ (we fell out badly but that's another story) had high-powered academics as parents. One of them was even a professor of Pharmacology. They said that when they were doing exams in the 60s, they'd bolster their cramming with Amphetamines. And they didn't turn into crazed drug abusers or mentally compromised brain-disease cases. The worst they would have experienced would have been come-down after the exams, which they also related. The Amphetamines were sold as flu medication to stop nasal congestion.

By the time KJ and I were cramming for our exams at Med School, the Amphetamines were replaced with Ephedrine. Yes you could get Ephedrine over the counter in the 80's and they were really quite good as nasal decongestants. They used to have this ad where you could 'soldier on with Codral', With Ephedrine, you really could sit through days of 3hour exams even with a ringing flu. Then you crashed for a couple of days - but it worked. Even so KJ's parents said it wasn't quite as good as Amphetamines in terms of efficacy.

Of course, Bikie gangs discovered that they could convert Ephedrine into Methamphetamine, a methylated analog of Amphetamine, so they went out and bought up big on Ephedrine in order to produce their Methamphetamine,and sell it as 'Speed'. This led to legislation banning Ephedrine, and so the pharmaceutical companies came out wiht Pseudoephedrine, which once again was not anywhere near as good as its predecessor as a nasal decongestant. It sort of worked, as opposed to really working.

Years went by, and bikie gangs figured out how to make Crystal Meth, otherwise known as 'Ice' out of Pseudophedrine. 'Ice' is by all accounts, a much worse drug than its predecessor 'Speed', which was a worse drug than straight up Amphetamines. Now, the 'Ice Epidemic' has forced Pseudoephedrine off the shelves, replacing it with Phenylepinephrine, which hardly works at all as a nasal decongestant. If things keep going the way they go, the bikies will probably figure out how to make an even worse drug out of Phenylepinephrine than 'Ice' or 'Speed' before it. This will inevitably lead to an even less effective medication replacing Phenylepinephrine; and whatever that medication is, the Bikies will then turn that into an even worse drug than whatever they'll do with Phenylephrine.

The point is, it is the War on Drugs that is enabling this gradual degradation in the quality of medication available to the ordinary innocent consumer, all to stop some people abusing it to get a buzz. That's it. To that end, the Bikies work harder and harder to make worse and worse drugs. Had it just stayed at Amphetamines, and the government not banned it being sold over the counter, it probably would have stayed mundane with some kids giving themselves a buzz. Instead, it's the highly ineffectual Phenylepinephrine that's available over the counter (they might as well be selling placebos) while the Bikies are busy cooking up Crystal Meth like Walter White. It's tremendously difficult to argue we're in a better place for all of this "fighting drugs" business. We're getting all the problems of prohibition without the joy of jazz or speakeasies.

Here's the thing. Lots of these drugs that are banned are actually useful pharmacological substances. Even Heroin has uses as an anaesthetic. When they banned heroin, it took a grea tool out of the hands of Anaesthetists, and any Anaesthetist would be all too happy to tell you that their work is like having a hand tied behind their backs because they had to work with opiate analogs and derivatives when in fact what would really do the trick was Heroin. Yet instead of regulating it like they do with Morphine, they ban it, and the Anaesthetists have to work pretending they don't know about it.

The point of all this is to say, in banning more and more substances for being PEDs, it's driving people into trying more dangerous pharmacological concoctions. Maybe plain old Testosterone might not be so bad in comparison to some of these synthetic drugs that are being created just to pass WADA's tests.

There's just got to be a better way. Certainly there's got to be a better way than punishing the innocent on the presumption of guilt. The first step is admitting there's a problem. We've had 28years trying the prohibition model and predictably, it's not working. There needs to be a total rethink on what drugs are, and what even "performance-enhancing" means.

'The Stanford Prison Experiment'

We Act Up To Our Roles

Some films are more depressing than others. They rob you of hope for humanity and the ramification obliterate the rosy view you might have about the way people are and how they behave. We are very inexact entities, hardly well-programmed machines.

This is one of those films that punches home that message.


Dr. Philip Zimbardo's famous experiment has deep ramifications for how we incarcerate people, as well as asks us a deep question as to what we expect from incarcerating criminals. In the experiment, half the students were asked to be prisoners, and another half were asked to be their guards in a role-play of a prison for two weeks. The experiment broke down on the sixth day when the experiment was deemed to have gone too far and students were potentially going to be emotionally damaged form the experience.

The simple takeaway from the experiment is that if you give people roles of persecutors, they find no trouble living up to the roles. Equally if you give victim roles to people, they will find ways to live that experience. One way of looking at it is that the problems of incarceration and the prison system are caused by the very fact that we have human beings running and operating them, and that the same humans are living up to or down to their roles as prescribed by the environment.

Yet, not many people have had a close look at Dr. Zimbardo's experiment and the lessons he has been trying to convey to the world since. As with most things, the closer you inspect what happened, the more we find out how nuanced and delicately poised the suppositions and conclusions sit.

This then, is a Dramatised film that purports to tell us how the experiment went down.

What's Good About It

Oddly enough the best thing in the film might be the period hair styles. As production design for a period film set in 1971 goes, there's not enough to look at to enjoy the journey back to the deep past that is 1971. In that sense the film is not terrible evocative or indicative. It sits more perfunctorily as an observational piece. It's very short on the kind of fetishism that made 'Mad Men' so attractive.

Yet, the film does give us a flavour of the 1971 through the shooting style, colour grade and contrast-y lighting that resembles films shot in that era.

The performances are good except we're too familiar with some of the faces that we can't really get on with the wilful suspension of disbelief.

What's Bad About It

It is in parts somewhat monotonous. Once the students dressed as guards get into their intimidatory and sadistic demeanours and routines, the film quickly gets repetitive. The emotional stakes don't get higher, they sort of sit at an uncomfortable place with very little dynamism.

The film also tries to get some exposition into why Dr. Zimbardo wanted to do the experiment but it is in no way clear as to the thinking that led to that point. The audience can see Dr. Zimbardo's motivation to keep going is strong, but it never gets a satisfactory explanation why that is the case.

The film also has an emotionally stilted quality. We're never really sure as to what we're supposed to be empathising with, and why that is the focus.

What's Interesting About It

I happened to catch the movie in between new episodes of 'Orange Is The New Black'. It's very weird when you spend hours upon hours watching a drama about a prison, and somewhere in the middle you watch a film about the study that tells us that the roles we assign to prison guards necessarily creates the institutional sadism prevalent in the prison systems common to the anglophone world.

In Michael Moore's recent documentary, he travels to Norway to investigate how they do prisons, and it's an entirely different operation. The prisons in Norway are conceived to rehabilitate the prisoner first and foremost, and the prison shown in that documentary. The kind of 'Cool Hand Luke' milieu where prisoners are caged animals or slaves of a corporatised prison system we see in the American media appear completely backward and barbaric next to the Norwegian prisons.

There seems to be a layer in the anglophone culture whereby punishment has to be state institutional torment on a daily basis. When the prison system is 'privatised' as in 'Orange Is The New Black', then the state abrogates its responsibilities and let's some private company take over the task of tormenting prisoners. It's quite perverse how the whole thing is conceived and delivered.

Dr. Zimbardo's experiment then sheds light on at least two problems of the US prison system. Firstly, that it creates conditions of mental illness, and that it supports this ongoing condition of inflicting mental illness because culturally we perceive that's the whole point of criminal incarceration.

Sanity Is Actually Quite Fragile

If you asked Americans in 1971, you would probably get the response that the healthy psyche was quite robust and mental illness was not something that could be created by institutions. This solid belief is indeed what underlies the grand sarcasm of 'Catch-22' - that the US Army knows that anybody who wants to get out of active duty cannot be insane because they can make that judgement that active duty is dangerous to the individual. In other words, real crazy was rare and hard to come by.

What Dr. Zimbardo's experiment showed is that given the power of institutions, it only takes days to break down a healthy person's mind. This aspect was so alarming that it forced Dr. Zimbardo's to prematurely shut down the experiment. Given that we now this today, it seems incredibly morally repugnant that the US government would privatise prisons, worse still allow them to profit from the captive low cost labour these privatised prisons provide. It is an incredible reductio ad absurdum of Neo-Liberal logic that prisons should be privatised but there we have it.

If the state enforced a provision that the private corporations had to ensure the sanity of the inmates, then it would be highly unlikely these corporations would be so interested in running prisons on behalf of the state.

Here's a documentary based the real footage:




 And here is a documentary on the Milgram experiment:

News That's Fit To Punt - 20/Jul/2016

Haters Are Gonna Hate

Kevin Rudd wants to be Secretary General of the UN. To run for that office he needs the backing of the Australian Government and of course, it's nominally a Coalition Government. And of course they're split over that choice of whether to back Rudd or not.

But the possibility of the former Labor leader achieving these new-found heights has attracted scorn from Liberal figures, including firebrand senator Cory Bernardi, South Australian MP Tony Pasin and, in the past, Immigration Minister Peter Dutton. 

Mr Pasin, who said in April that "this guy did his best to ruin our country" and shouldn't be imposed on the world, said on Tuesday he still has serious reservations. 

"We shouldn't nominate him because to nominate him is to provide tacit support for his candidacy and I don't think we should do that," Mr Pasin told Fairfax Media.

Yeesh. It's the usual cabal of hateful cunts like Bernardi and Dutton objecting. Don't you love that bit of tautology in Pisan's comment to Fairfax Media? Goodness, the depth of dimwitted-ness seems to know no bounds with the coalition's hard right. 

Pauline's Got A Score To Settle With Little Johnny

Politics is going to be weirder than ever in this coming Parliament. The Libs with their reduced majority added to the increased contrariness of the new cross benchers in the Senate would make for some interesting blogging. 

Pauline Hanson of course headlines the monster cast of weird dumb and ignorant; and before the parliament's even sat down, she's slinging mud at the legacy of John Howard. 

Queensland senator-elect Pauline Hanson has fought back tears recounting her 2003 jailing over quashed political corruption charges, blaming Tony Abbott and John Howard for a "political witch-hunt" against her. 

Following her resurgence at the July 2 election, a new SBS documentary about the 1990s rise and fall of One Nation has been brought forward for broadcast later this month.

Ms Hanson promises her maiden speech in the Senate will be just as controversial as her explosive 1996 parliamentary debut, in which she said Australia was at risk of being swamped by Asians. 

The film, directed Anna Broinowski, explores One Nation's impact on multiculturalism in Australia and includes interviews with Mr Howard, incoming Labor federal MP Linda Burney and Indigenous leader and academic Marcia Langton.

Good ole' Anna Broinowski. Don't think she's ever seen a controversy she wouldn't court. 

Choice! The fun is just beginning. Grab some popcorn and pull up a deck chair. This sucker hit the iceberg a lo-o-ong time ago and there's no life boat for you or I. 

The Third Man Strikes Again 

This is kind of wild, like throwback right to that movie starting Orson Welles.

Indonesian President Joko Widodo on Monday called for calm after revelations that four criminal syndicates have allegedly been producing counterfeit vaccines throughout Jakarta and Java for up to 13 years. 

Police have named 14 hospitals and eight midwife clinics which allegedly administered the bogus boosters, creating havoc as angry parents flocked to the facilities. 

Although corruption is endemic in Indonesia, a scam that knowingly put the lives of infants at risk has caused widespread anger and disbelief. "Producing false vaccines is a crime against humanity," thundered an editorial in Tempo magazine.

That's some pretty amazing kind of criminality right there. I mean like the man Harry Lime says, "five hundred years of peace and what did the Swiss produce? Cuckoo clocks. So long, Holly."

The Strangeness Of Celebrity-hood

God, this Kanye West Taylor Swift saga sure keeps going doesn't it? 

I'll be honest, I've never sat through a single song by either one of these people who have amassed multiple Grammys between them, which in a weird way has dismantled any kind of residual respect I had for the said awards because, well, I'm an old fart and at least what Kanye' peddling isn't exactly music while what Taylor's peddling is bland as lo-fat yoghurt watered down. Anyway, things get more trashy with the Kardashian woman being Kanye's wife and all; and somewhere in there is a line of exes being artistically skewered by Taylor Swift in her lyrics; and not heeding those cries Tom Hiddleston is doing Tay-tay which may be true love and not just a publicity stunt, but far more likely just a future double album for Tay-tay. Yay!

Kim Kardashian West gave the FBI, the CIA and the illuminati a run for their money when she delivered on her promise by providing evidence that America's sweetheart and media manipulator extraordinaire, Taylor Swift, knew about Kanye West's infamousFamous lyrics. 

Kardashian West set the internet ablaze when she revealed her greatest home video to date - the possibly illegally taped conversation between West, 39, and Swift, 26.

Not satisfied with dismantling Swift's public image, Kardashian West, 35, decided to keep on trolling the Shake It Off singer, along with three of her adult sisters. (Their youngest sibling, Kylie Jenner, 18, had the sense to sit this one out, instead using the media scrutiny on the family to promote her beauty range, like the good little capitalist that Kris Jenner has reared.) 

While Team Kardashian-West had ammunition on their side, Team Swift were not going down without a fight. 

Swift's squad of besties, namely singer Selena Gomez, actor Chloe Moretz and Australian actor Ruby Rose, rallied and jumped on social media to support their leader (and definitely not because it was the biggest story of the day and it would send some publicity their way).

Life's good, right? I mean what more do we need in life but this kind of gossip? 

Look, Taylor Swift says the video of her giving approval to Kanye West to write lyrics about her amounts to "character assassination". For that term to work, you need to have 'character' in the first place.

View From The Couch - 18/Jul/2016

Ain't So Nice Deeds Going On In Nice

This business of the Nice Terror Truck thing this last Bastille Day is turning into one of those media circuses. From the best we can glean from the media, the perpetrators seems to have been some lone nut - exactly the kind that goes and assassinates a Kennedy. The media have been trying to pin the Islamist terrorist thing on this guy, but it seems like as far as muslims go, he wasn't even very good at being a good muslim. The more likely explanation is that he was so angry about his small, lowly station in his life, he decided to go for a spree killing; and instead of doing it with an MR-15 like you do in America, he opted for the more Terminator-inspired truck-stunt of running over innocent people. Turns out it's more effective than shooting up a room full of gay people in disco if you time your attack on a big parade day.

The rest of this is baffling too. He was carrying ammunition including grenades but he didn't get time to set them off because he was gunned down before he could use them. So it is clear he really only had one purpose, which is to kill as many people as possible before going out in a blaze of glory. Just when it looks like it was a spree-killing, the French authorities arrest 5 other people in connection to the killer, and ISIL claim responsibility. I mean, really? Thus it turns out that the spree-killing was indeed to do with the Islamic State.

You have to get a little incredulous when you try to form a picture of just what has happened and what it could possibly mean. For one, I can say it would suck to be a muslim having to defend their religion ever more vigorously in the west. The line going around is that you can't take what Westboro Baptist Church thinks is christian faith as being christian, and so equally, one cannot go around thinking what Islam extremists thinks is islam. Let's not forget that there's also evidence to believe that the Islamist extremists aren't all that well read up on aspects of their religious texts, but that is another discussion.

There are globally, 1.16 billion muslims. If 0.1% went batshit crazy and violent, you're talking about 1.16 million people on the planet. Judging from the numbers flocking to ISIL and carrying out these acts, 0.1% might actually be over-estimating just how big the portion of batshit crazy and violent makes up the population. It is however worrying that any old spree-killing asshole can tie-up their spree kill with religious extremism.

Turkey Coup Attempt

Talk about a wet firecracker. The coup attempt in Turkey has fizzled, and now they are reporting 6000 arrests. The old wisdom being paraded around was that Turkey tends to experience coups when the government gets a little too religious. It may have been the case in the past but it seems distinctly that with a failed coup and the rounding up of these officers, it is looking like that historical mission has failed. Not to mention of course the democratic voices in support of a democratically elected government in Turkey and you get a growing feeling that this coup was not only mis-executed, it also misjudged of the mood of the country. This is clearly not the Turkey of your parents and grandparents.

That being said, the coup is likely to play into the hands of Erdogan and his power block who are in private helping ISIL sell their crude oil, as well as bombing the crap out of Kurdish separatists. Some of these relations and hostilities go back to the conquest of Turkey by the Turks so you don't really know if modern political discourses going to be able to rein in the Erdogan government. It's a fun sight as it was in Egypt to see a religious government rely on arguments for Western Democracy to take power in elections, then set about dismantling secular western institutions.

It illustrates how uneasily western values like democracy and separation of powers sits with islam. If the islamic countries want to benefit from western style living standards, they need to adopt some of the posturing of the west. But with the posturing comes capitalism which has the effect of eroding traditional values, and this creates a desire in people to go back to time before capital, but of course this is nigh impossible. So instead the people adopt a regressive sentimental position on the past and embrace older ideas as if they will withstand the eroding power of capitalism, especially global capitalism. There is going to be a lot of gnashing of teeth where ancient settlements are undone and ancient entitlements are rescinded.

No wonder people are angry.
James Baldwin allegedly said that people hang on to their anger in order not to confront their own pain. When you look at Nice in light of estranged, alienated, disenfranchised, mentally unstable angry people involved the attacks; and then you look at Turkey in terms of how much it embraces the west and then recoils in horror from the west, you get a clearer understanding of how the anger and pain manifest itself as these social ructions. It's enough to make you wonder about muslims who come to the west looking for a better life and just how much they are willing to give upon their identity to get it. It may not be so invalid to at least be sceptical of these things.

Game Of Thrones - Season 6

At Least They Moved Things Forward

If you had to put it in a nutshell, season 5 felt like they were spinning their wheels. Nothing really advanced a whole lot and some pieces moved around the board to reposition things, but in most part season 5 was mostly a regrouping kind of season for many of the major characters, and then Jon Snow got killed by his own guys.

So... (world's worst kept ) Spoiler alert!



I'm guessing we'll remember this decade for the great TV series we're seeing, just as much as we remember the 60s for music and the 70s for bad taste in fashion! ... we'll remember the 2010s as the decade of amazing TV series that commanded loyalty and close watching. With things like 'Breaking Bad', 'Mad Men' 'House of Cards' and 'Game of Thrones' together with any number more of amazing serials; it really is a golden age right now.

Season 6 of GOT is a departure from the earlier seasons in the sense that it is starting to pay off some of the tory promises they made along the way. We're get an elaborate introduction as to who the three eyed crow really was and why it was important for Bran Stark to travel deep into the north, and what the whole business warg-ing really means. Arya starts plying her skills as an assassin, and the Lannisters do more Lannister things. Even Danaerys looks to be gathering all her assets, getting them ready to cross these to invade Westeros; and even Theon Greyjoy makes it home. For those whom destiny has called, they are beginning to answer those calls in Season 6.

In a sense, if the entire 'Game of Thrones' series can be seen as one long epic story (which it obviously is) we've moved deeper into Act 2 and maybe to the turning point that get us to Act 3. The sort of story churn that was endemic in Season 5 was perhaps a symptom of the story being in Act 2, right across the board. it felt like nobody was really getting anywhere.

Just How Much Stuff Is There?

It's worth doing some back of the envelope calculations, as you know I like doing.
A series of 'Game Thrones' goes for 10 episodes at roughly 45mins content subtracting out opening title and end credits of each episode. That makes it roughly 450minutes of story per season, across the 8 projected seasons we're talking about 3600minutes, a 60hour story. That's pretty extraordinary for a screen story that is serialised. This in't like 'Seinfeld' with 60hours of 22minute episodes each standing freely.

Just for comparison, if you count all the behemoth 'Lord of the Rings' and 'Hobbit' movies together, you get about 1100minutes excluding opener and end credits. So when all's said and done, 'Game of Thrones' is going to be 3 times as long as the epic-beyond-epic Tolkien screen adaptations.  It's going to be twice as long as all the Star Wars movies put together even after 'Rogue One' makes its entry late this year; twice as long as all the Harry Potter movies strung together; three and a half times longer than all the Rocky movies put together and about the same for all the 'Die Hard' movies strung together.

You - literally - get the picture.

How can something like this not be the 'War and Peace' /monumental-creative-output™️ of this decade if not this century? Clive James was lamenting that he would not get to see Season 5 because he was expecting to die. I really hope he enjoyed Season 6.

It's gobs and gobs of narrative about people and places you'll never really need to know about except to participate in conversations about TV around the water fountain at work. It might just be overkill. A fine example where overwhelming quantity is of itself a kind of quality.

"But Is It Any Good?"

Amazingly there are some holdouts out there who won't watch it until G.R.R. Martin has finished the books and they've read it all. The report I got from Skarp about these bookish that after the first one, the actual quality of the writing goes down sharply, and os one would not be missing much in skipping the books altogether and consuming the fiction as one epic TV story.
I'm agnostic about these things because life is actually short enough not to want to engage in reading yet another FAT Book when you could read 3-4 cool books in their stead.

I mean, we're already inundated with content. Take it from somebody who watched a lot of television this year - if I had to read all the comics and books before I watched all that stuff it was based on, I'd have no time to do my thing... Like this blog.

Of course I'd be amiss if I didn't link to this, so here it is...


Some people are really intense about all this.

The Ironic Politics Of 'Winter'

The catchphrase "Winter is Coming" finally got its moment in Season 6 where it was declared Winter has arrived. That's another sign the entire series has transitioned into the final act.

The Winter is very much the metaphor for Global Warming, except it's a kind of global cooling in the world of Westerns and Essos. As you'd expect the big picture problem of the army of the (un)dead doesn't seem register much with anybody in Westeros. If you consider Jon Snow strategically brought the Wildlings to the south of the Ice Wall in order to deprive the army of the (un)dead, then not even his compatriot Crows could understand the simple maths of addition by subtraction and promptly killed him as traitor at the end of Season 5. So do people wise up even a little bit about the impending problem? No, Season 6 is spent in equal parts settling old scores and squabbling for the penny-ante.

I can't but help think about our own recent elections where the big vote-swayer was the Medicare but nobody - not event eh Greens - went on the front foot about Global Warming or Renewable Energy. The most I could gather from Grayndler was that the Greens candidate trying to knock off Albo was a real dickhead in private, and many a lefty-greeny was glad he didn't get up. Meanwhile the planet...
I only bring that up to highlight the point that the Greens are equally unperturbed by Global Warming as characters in Game of Thrones are unperturbed by the army of the dead.

Why Is Westeros Like That?

It's a weird milieu, the world of 'Game of Thrones'. It's a little like it should maybe be an alternative England. The events are reminiscent of (because they're based on) events of the Hundred Years War as well as the War of the Roses. Yet, there is a strangely modern sensibility to the English vernacular spoken. I struggle with this because it's the biggest impediment to me suspending the disbelief as required. I can' help but wonder "when and where the hell is this going on?"

My current pet theory is that Westeros and Essos is a future lost colony deep in space where English has survived. That would account for the accumulated knowledge of English-speaking in our world as it applies to their medieval-looking world. It would make much more sense if they were in the far future, rather than in a parallel world given the way they speak.

Also, I struggle with the notion that their civilisation is thousands of years old, but static in this high-medieval mode. When you consider even one thousand years gets us to the Viking invasion of England and another gets you to Julius Caesar invading Britain, a static culture and technology for "thousands" of years gets me thinking of that as a feasibility.

In my version - which is totally made up so I can combat my own straining cognitive dissonance at watching the series - is that it's taking place in the distant future on another planet that strongly resembles Planet Earth, but isn't. It got colonised by people who were nostalgic for England of Old Earth in parts where they could re-build it. The dragons the Targaeryans had in the past were genetically engineered amusements and/or bio-weapons, but now that technology is lost, but basically these people are living on a lost colony.

Yeah, it's really elaborate but it's the only way my brain can make sense of the way these characters speak and behave.

Orange Is The New Black - Season 4

Back To Incarceration Drama

Spoiler Alert.
This is a surprising season after the languid comedy of season 3.
Heck, I'm opting to write about this before I write about Game of Thrones Season 6... Go figure that one out.


A Growing Indictment Of The Privatisation Of Prisons

As unlikely as it seems, the the series based on Piper Kerman's time in prison which was 13months, has stumbled into its fourth season, awaiting the fifth. As the series has continued, the canvas of characters has also increased as we've gotten to know more and more the stories that led to the incarceration these women.

Needless to say, what started off as a character study of a female prison camp has turned into a vocal protest piece about the nature of incarceration in America. The very concepts that underlie the prison system in the anglophone world are on the whole antiquated. Some of these philosophical underpinnings on punishment date back to the eighteenth century which means we may as well be talking about the musings of Diderot and the Marquis de Sade, and seeing off convicts to a distant new world.

Still, this being America, there is an even nastier, modern, twist, and it takes the form of privatisation - Private companies that run prisons on behalf of governments in order to turn a profit. Naturally, the profit motive overrides any considerations for the welfare of ht prisoners, and all the malfeasances of the system then happen away from government scrutiny and responsibility. When these elements are combined, we get to witness a parade of the most egregious violations of human rights imaginable.

The privatisation of prison also raises questions about governments that think it is somehow wise to farm out the administration of prisons to private companies who seek to turn a profit from prison inmates as virtually-free labour. Who ever thought of this diabolical bit of privatisation needs to be hounded and persecuted. This is a travesty of justice. A simple logical analysis of branches of government tells you that if the government privatises any part of the criminal justice system, it is effectively forfeiting its right to call itself the government. Not surprisingly, private company-run prisons have been found to collude with judges to increase the prison labour force - i.e. compromise judges - so that they needlessly send people into prison to be slave labour.

The season climaxes with a riot, evoking 'Attica', but the prisoners themselves are hardly aware of the historic institution of prison brutality, because its so endemic and it goes back so far. The prison riot at Attica isn't even in the memory. It casts a long shadow asking the question of whether this is the way society should be going at all, if prison culture hasn't moved on since the nineteenth century.

This is still meant to be light comedy, but it's sure not funny when you think about why the stuff is going on.

Ignoring Mental Health Problems

Now, this is a drama series, so the characters in it are there for their ability to generate drama. Many of them would be people that would likely be diagnosed of one mental health condition or another. Some of the even seemingly function ones, look to be borderline personality disordered and narcissistic personality disordered. Other s seem to be genuinely clinically insane, wandering the confines of the prison in a mental state that cannot possibly described as well or healthy. You wonder if the point of incarceration is to make things worse for the mentally ill.

What is amazing is that there is only the lone counsellor who is emotionally inept, to look after the mental health of the inmates, and should he fail, they inmate is then sent to 'the Psych Ward' which resembles a nineteenth century asylum with screaming inmates strapped down in straitjackets. Yes, those asylums are gone today, they've simply moved those patients in to the psyche ward of prisons as felons.

There are inmates whose backstories seem to be more about mental health care gone wrong than actual premeditated criminality. Should Crazy Eyes Suzanne really be in prison for what she did and who she is? Should Lolly Whitehill? Lorna Morello?  They're far more crazy than criminal, and clearly their criminal record comes out of craziness.
One wonders if this prevalence of crazy is a function of Piper Kerman's observations or whether prison populations really are endemic with mental health patients.

One of the more insightful moments in Season 4 comes about when putative protagonist Piper Chapman comes to the realisation that has been "trying to win (at) prison" (sic). Because of its antiquated system of brutalisation, the prison and survival therein becomes something to be gamed. Surely this is not the point of incarceration, to send a group of people on a kind of low-lethality Hunger Games outside of the purview of society. In a strange way, the personality disordered find a way to thrive in the conflict-ridden confines of prison life. That doesn't make it right.

Zimbardo, Milgram, And The Panopticon

Speaking of the mental health aspects of the story, the other thing that's been on my mind as I watch Season 4 has been the Zimbardo experiment thanks to 'The Stanford Prison Experiment' as well as 'Milgram's 37' thanks to a listen to Peter Gabriel's 'So'. Zimbardo's experiment essentially crystallises the psychological dynamic that gives rise to the institutional sadism of prison guards brutalising the inmates, while Milgram's experiment demonstrates that the guards over-step their mark and over-deliver on the discipline and punishment in a bid to please and appease their superiors. Whatever they do, they're not going under-do it.

Both experiments have been in the public domain for some time and one would think that governments would take note, but it appears that the public consciousness to do with incarceration hasn't moved on one bit. Prisons are assumed to be there to brutalise the inmates as punishment - which is the kind of criminal justice mentality more in common with say, the early colonisation of Australia than what modern psychology has to offer.

The series makes an interesting link between those who went to war in the wake of 9/11 and how they came home with de-humanised experiences, and the mental fitness of guards. Some of the scenarios the ex-military guards think up are straight out of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. Orange Is The New Black paints a picture where the institutional sadists are endemic because institutions are endemic. So many of these guards are people who have been enabled into exercising their worst behavioural instincts, backed by an imaginary authority that wishes to be not culpable.

You occasionally come across the critique about psychology and psychiatry that they attempt to medicalise the judicial problem too much. Season 4 leaves you with the distinct feeling that if that were true, it's been nowhere enough to protect the basic dignity of these people.

Weapons Of Mass Distraction

Tony Blair The War Criminal Suspect

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chilcot's unambiguous findings include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Howard Defends The Indefensible

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that would be the least of it. 

'Here, Hold The Leash Lynndie'

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

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

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

You Don't Say...

The Media Reflects Upon Its Performance

In a mirror-gazing move that resembles how models prepare for the catwalk, the media is giving itself bit of scrutiny based on the fact they got the elections results more than a little wrong.

Margaret Simons, Director of the Centre for Advancing Journalism at University of Melbourne, says: "I was struck by how everyone was so wise after the event and so all-knowing.
"It's easy to write in retrospect where everything went wrong but I didn't see many people pointing it out as the campaign was happening."
Simons offers the example of the eight-week long election double dissolution election campaign itself. Originally hailed as a political masterstroke, it was only after Saturday that many commentators started questioning how wise the decision was.
"Journalists," Simons concludes, "were too quick to become part of Malcolm's fan club."
In preparing this piece, I asked readers on Twitter and on Facebook for their views of the coverage.
Some dominant criticisms emerged:

• An insistence the Coalition was on track to win (despite the polls predicting a tight result) and a consistent under-estimation of Shorten's performance;
• Overly "insular" coverage dominated by conversations with political insiders and other journalists rather than voters
• Coverage that was too "presidential", with an intense focus on daily movements of both leaders;
• Too much focus on the colour and movement of campaigning rather than the policy offerings of the two main parties;
• A lack of co-ordination by journalists, especially in the travelling media pack, to demand answers from the leaders;
• More focus on campaigning techniques by third-party groups such as GetUp!

Journalists may quibble with some points. If the campaign is light on policy, blame the politicians' and not us. Others might argue that, despite what readers say they want to read, many more will click on a story about a "fake" tradie than a plan to save the Murray Darling Basin.

Hmmm.

It's hard to read the tea leaves of polling even when you're close to what's going on. The distinct impression I got from the media through out the campaign was that the Coalition would win narrowly, and that it would have  at least a handful of seats as a buffer. It didn't exactly stack with the 50-50 51-49 polls that were coming in week after week, and really, people were too keen to point to these very same polls to suggest the Coalition would win. In the last 30 years we've seen more than a few elections were incumbent governments lost the popular vote but still won the election because of the way the votes were distributed. At the same time, the polls for those elections weren't a static 50-50 for as long as this election went. 

A more recent quibble I'd have with the media is that a good portion of them are already biased in favour of the Coalition. A good chunk of the media is Murdoch-owned, and we all know the Murdoch media leans the way of the conservatives at all times (the Telegraph) and at all costs (The Australian). The commercial TV network ownership is distinctly in the camp of the Coalition, and when it gets down to it you can count on the Fairfax papers join in and write their inept editorials in favour of the Coalition. They did this in 2013 and 2010. As such, you simply have to take what they write with a truckload of salt. A more accurate description is that the media cant hide their bias so they simply try to pass on their bias as received wisdom when in fact there is no wisdom to be found. 

I don't know if the media did as bad a job as they think they did. You'd have to settle bar high to come to that conclusion. If you set it as low as I do, it looks more like par for the course. All this self reflection is just an extended narcissism on the part of media people. The truth is, when it gets down to the brass tacks of voting, the opinions of the media doesn't amount to a hill of beans. 

Whither The Withering Middling Demographic?

Just who are the swinging voters? How many of them are there? It's a question worth asking because 27% allegedly went into the poll undecided. So, back of the envelope calculation goes like this:

• Greens are 10%, siting on the far left. Sometimes as high as 12, but for now, 10%
• National Party is also 10%, sitting on the far right. 1 in 10 Australians are at 2 Standard Deviations down from the middle of the bell curve.
• ALP diehards are around 27%. This is based on Julia Gillard's lowest poll figure.
• Liberal diehards are 24%. This is based on Tony Abbott's lowest poll. 
• 4% voted for One Nation, the rabid loony far right. 1 in 20 Australians are 3 Standard Deviations down from the middle of the bell curve. Presumably this bunch never vote for the left. 

That puts about 37% on the left and 38% on the right = 75%

So the remaining 25% is roughly the swinging vote who determine elections, and that figure actually dovetails very closely with the 27% figure of people who said they were undecided. Given that the voting ended as close to 50-50 two party preferred, 13% went to the left and 12% went to the right. If it's an equal 12.5% each way, it pretty much paints the picture of the slight edge the Coalition got. People were really split on what to do, just as they were in 2010.

There are also anomalous seats: Bob Katter's continued 'success' in Kennedy; the Greens cobbling together a seat in Melbourne where Regressive Leftists rule supreme; the seat of Indi where Sophie Miserabella contested against an incumbent independent who was liked and lost big; a possible seat to NXT; and Andrew Wilkie retaining Dennison. Out of 150 seats, that's 3.3% which is about what you'd expect for anomalies in human interactions. So if the media had used their brains, it's not exactly hard to see how we've end up exactly where we've ended up. 

View From The Couch - 06/Jul/2016

Forget Marx, It's Piketty

It's amazing the philosophical backbone of the political left has remained Marxism. Now, I'm not one of those people that point at the USSR (or 'Communist' China) to point out the flaws of Marxism in practice. It goes without saying that what transpired in the USSR was some kind of communism but mostly a totalitarian nightmare and the new-liberals of this world have gotten tremendous mileage out of that confusion in order to legitimate their dodgy little creed of trickle-down economics and user-pays and each man for himself in unregulated free-for-all markets.

Marx and Engels have formed the centrepiece of Leftist thinking for so long that not many people even question the assertions or the inherent assumptions in the works of Marx and Engels. And so we sort of had to wait until somebody utilised big data to see if some of the things Marx and Engels talked about were indeed true. The good news is that they were very much true about the nature of capital. What they missed was the rise of technology and the leapfrogging growth in productivity - which is why capitalism won't sell-destruct quite the way Marx had it.
All of this is in Tomas Piketty's book 'Capital in the Twenty-First Century'.

It seems appropriate that we look at Piketty's claims today because Marx just isn't going get this done.

In short, the arguments have centred on two poles: the first is a tradition that begins with Karl Marx, who believed that capitalism would self-destruct in the endless pursuit of diminishing profit returns. At the opposite end of the spectrum is the work of Simon Kuznets, who won a Nobel prize in 1971 and who made the case that the inequality gap inevitably grows smaller as economies develop and become sophisticated. 

Piketty says that neither of these arguments stand up to the evidence he has accumulated. More to the point, he demonstrates that there is no reason to believe that capitalism can ever solve the problem of inequality, which he insists is getting worse rather than better. From the banking crisis of 2008 to the Occupy movement of 2011, this much has been intuited by ordinary people. The singular significance of his book is that it proves "scientifically" that this intuition is correct. This is why his book has crossed over into the mainstream – it says what many people have already been thinking. 

"I did deliberately aim the book at the general reader," says Piketty as we begin our conversation, "and although it is obviously a book which can be read by specialists too, I wanted the information here to be made clear to everyone who wants to read it.'

----- 

"I began with a straightforward research problematic," he says in elegant French-accented English. "I began to wonder a few years ago where was the hard data behind all the theories about inequality, from Marx to David Ricardo (the 19th-century English economist and advocate of free trade) and more contemporary thinkers. I started with Britain and America and I discovered that there wasn't much at all. And then I discovered that the data that did exist contradicted nearly all of the theories including Marx and Ricardo. And then I started to look at other countries and I saw a pattern beginning to emerge, which is that capital, and the money that it produces, accumulates faster than growth in capital societies. And this pattern, which we last saw in the 19th century, has become even more predominant since the 1980s when controls on capital were lifted in many rich countries."

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So, Piketty's thesis, supported by his extensive research, is that financial inequality in the 21st century is on the rise, and accelerating at a very dangerous pace.

In future, you'd hope the Left start from Piketty and not Marx and Engels. At least it's founded on real, comprehensive big data. It wouldn't be conjecture or theory, it would be empirically backed up. Because let's face it, the only way we're going to beat this neo-liberalism crap is to keep showing these idiot conservatives how it fails the majority of the people, the majority of the time.

The Greens In Their Predicament

The Greens find themselves in a political no-mans land as the political landscape itself shifts around them.

“We can continue to be led by a nice-guy, mainstream footy-playing doctor and negotiate incremental change ... Or maybe as a party of really smart, but often too-privileged-to-quite-get-it members, we should take a long hard look at ourselves and make some radical changes.” 

Cunningham’s comments are significant because it’s incredibly rare for senior party figures to speak on the record about the Greens’ internal political tensions. The party often feels under siege from media attacks and, unlike in the major parties, public, on the record introspection after poor election results is almost never heard of. Cunningham said it was important to speak up because “we will never move from the 10% plateau unless we do a deep analysis of why we are stuck here”. 

Di Natale is regularly described as a leader who shifted the Greens towards a more “mainstream”, moderate position. The truth is the party has long been on a trajectory that prioritises parliamentary deal-making. In 2010 the party was able to secure significant policy wins through this approach, though they were punished at the ballot box in 2013 and weren’t able to recover this election.  

The problem the Greens face is that they have pursued a “steady as she goes” approach over the past decade while the Australian public has been simultaneously losing its faith in politics and rejecting the whole concept of political stability and business as usual. This is why the party has been unable to capitalise on voter distrust with the political establishment in the same way as Nick Xenophon and other minor parties and independents. They have spent the last few terms of parliament trying to become the political establishment while voters have spent every election since 2007 punishing whoever is in power.

I've often wondered why I don't feel compelled to vote for the Greens more often, given what I understand about the environment. Part of it is that I've never been able to shake my distrust of the Greens in areas other than the environment. Worse still, the absolute lack of compromise on the ETS from Bob Brown in 2009 essentially made the subsequent events worse for the environment, not better. The fact that no deal could be struck between the ALP and the Greens essentially meant there would be no ETS at that time. It was the one moment when the Greens were faced with an enormous environmental issue and they were the party that were supposed to be the big help - and they squibbed it. And they've been in denial about it ever since whenever I've talked to any Greens supporter, there's always been a convenient excuse why saintly Bob Brown wouldn't deal with Kevin Rudd and how Rudd's ETS just wasn't good enough. Except it's a bit like they turned up at the World Series Game 7, bottom of the ninth, bases loaded with 2 outs, and you're down 3 runs - It's do-or-die - and they begged out of their at-bat.

Other things sort of bothered me over the years. At one point they were espousing zero economic growth, which is like turning all of life in Australia (or the world) into a Zero-sum game. You just have to check with Tomas Piketty and he'd tell you what a bad idea that would be. There is also the matter of just how much politics they like to play when simple issues demand a more straight response. These include things like campaigning against things like the airport in Wilton or WasteCONex. I sure didn't hear good things about the Greens politicians in their dealings with the people fighting the bad ideas. They're all for limiting carbon emissions but they won't countenance carbon capture on spurious logic grounds. Even the recent dealing in the Senate where they fixed a deal with the Coalition so they effectively cut competition didn't make them look too good either. They didn't look to keep the bastards honest, they went and joined the bastards right there.

The underlying problem is that the Greens don't seem to have realistic alternatives for what they denounce, which make them very unhelpful. This is probably because the roots of the Greens lies in protests and while there is a lot to protest in this world, part of politics is to come up with solutions that work for the most people. At their worst, the Greens go back to protester grandstanding on many issues. It's really difficult to decipher whether the Greens are actually about policy or simply there to provide a brand for people who like trees and animals but hate big business. And that's where they fail politics. It's as if they never grew out of the mindset of trying to save the forest one tree at a time. Right now, the world's entire environment is at risk, and they still want to do it one tree at a time, on principle.

I've tried to imagine what a Greens' budget would look like and I couldn't. Would they nationalise Telstra again? Probably not. Would they raise taxes to the rich and go after multinationals? probably. Their Health and Welfare policies would be full of motherhood statements while Education is a question mark. Defence budget? Huge cuts. I don't know if they'll invest in any industries except renewables but I can't imagine them reforming the structure of energy industry. Another words, it's actually a lot hazier than you think. Part of it is again, things like the economy are not high on their agenda to begin with. You know who really needs to read Piketty's big book? The Greens.

The social policies outside of the environment issue for the Greens aren't particularly spectacular and vote-winning. If the Greens were genuinely progressive then it would be a lot easier give them the vote. As it is, my Senate vote went to the Australian Sex Party because their platform actually is progressive and secular with nary a trapping of the protest vibe. Compared to the Sex Party, the Greens look the picture of the Regressive Left.

View From The Couch - 05/Jul/2016

It Doesn't Get Better For Malcolm

Pleiades rang me yesterday morning to let me know that just about everybody was writing off Malcolm Turnbull. Columnists as far and wide across the AFR, The ABC, The Australian and The Guardian as well as Fairfax were essentially rolling up their sleeves and sharpening their pens to writ Malcolm Turnbull's political obituary.

Pleiades was particularly interested in discussing Barrie Cassidy's prognosis that the Coalition won't get the seats to form government, and Ian Verrender's piece where he couched the problem in a historic context where the political elite have worn out their welcome with the wider electorate. The most damning might be Mark Kenny:

The scale of the failure is colossal. Turnbull's key promise in the final weeks was the assurance of that most valuable thing: stability. Indeed, this emerged as his key edge, his point of market differentiation over the unstable Labor-Greens-independents nexus. 

Two points on this. First, stability is not a policy per se and can no more be promised than happiness. It is rather, the by-product of sound policy, effectively designed and successfully delivered. "Stability" in a democracy, is ultimately the people's to give and in this case, the people have expressly withdrawn it. 

Second, Turnbull in his anger, ignored the electoral message on Saturday night and thus missed the opportunity it gave him to communicate internally. Voters opted for the centre. They voted in more-or-less equal numbers for his style of economic management, but Labor's higher taxes, and more spending on health and education. Ditto for the NBN and climate change. 

Bill Shorten became the first mainstream leader in a generation to actually propose higher taxes and higher spending. Some voters perhaps many, said yes.

It seemed a bit strange that a lot of that noise was also going from the far right of the Liberal Party who are still under the misapprehension that Tony Abbott might have fared better had he been the PM contesting it. Oh, and Peter Reith had stuff to say that made about as much sense as a dog turd omelette. Of course when even Amanda Vanstone points out how out of touch such a view might be, then maybe they have to consider that they might be bad at this politics thing. I guess the corollary there is that if you make Amanda Vanstone look like the voice of reason, you're probably lacking in much reason.

By late in the day even Bill Shorten was calling for Malcolm Turnbull to resign - although it's hard to decipher on what basis he thinks that Malcolm would take on board his expert advice. I guess Bill Shorten knows very well what a terminal leadership looks like given his track record. If Malcolm were his leader, Bill would've removed him by now.  Maybe Mr. Turnbull should accept it as free expert advice.

Of course, there's this non-endorsement from Steve Kilbey of The Church.

Batman Vs Superman

I finally caught with this turd nugget on Fetch TV. I know Warner Brothers are in a hurry to ramp up the DC cinematic universe but this was a dog's breakfast with a side order cat food and birdseed. No, really, I can't poke fun at this film enough. It is as misguided as it is incomprehensible; it is lame as it is dumb and teetered towards the unwatchable and outright laughable in many spots.

The benchmark for the genre is the first 'The Avengers' where the marvel heroes gather and do battle with the aliens threat. This one is a three way tango between Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman, where you can't fully comprehend the motivations for any of the characters. They don't come together - they fail to even gel convincingly. The patina of the film is so dark and grimy, you lose sight of the fact that you're supposed be watching Superman.

Actually, having watched Season 1 of 'Supergirl' (and what a triumph that was) it was distressing to see a film that utterly failed to make Superman 'super'. Or Wonder Woman wonderful for that matter. Gal Gadot is a great bit of casting. It's a shame they gave her so little to do. Ben Affleck as Batman was okay. He wasn't the worst thing in the film as once feared. But Jeremy Irons totally phoned in his Alfred performance. It was just boring. Again, 'Gotham' is doing great things with Alfred, and this film utterly failed to match that intrigue and interest between these characters.

It's hard to believe this is the film that follows up 'Man of Steel'. It's hard to believe Christopher Nolan was even involved. It's hard to believe they're going to launch Ezra Miller as The Flash on the back of his cameo in this film. It's pretty clear that at this point Grant Gustin has him beat. It's no contest, it's not even close; and that tells you the Miller/Flash movie is going to flop - it may as well be stillborn now. There's no point in doing that film. Even the standalone Wonder Woman movie is going to be deeply problematic judging form this movie.
They're doing this all wrong. Unbelievable.

Just A Side Note On Brexit

I want to share a couple of videos worth watching. The first is the inimitable 'Jonathan Pie'.



He's wonderful, this comedian. This is a great character. I guess if he was working in America they'd offer him a show. heck maybe there's a show in that - Jonathan Pie is sent to cover DC.
Anyway, he makes a fair point about branding the people who voted to leave as all racists and xenophobes.

A more apt description might have been "lied-to". Try this video for size:



Basically, the people who voted for Brexit believing they had very good reasons might have been fed false information to come to their conclusions. Of course it doesn't stop Boris Johnson from continuing to spout forth these lies. Such is life in the world of sane men led into terrible waters by madmen and megalomaniacs.

Quick Shots - 04/Jul/2016

A Well-Hung Parliament - A Balls-Up By Any Other Name

Oh what strange joy it is to find out we've got a hung parliament again. And I'm not being sarcastic - I'm getting a kick out of it. It was on the cards, and in an interesting mirror image re-run of the 2010 election that took place after Julia Gillard replaced Kevin Rudd, we now have the same outcome with Malcolm Turnbull after he replaced Tony Abbott. There are some - crazy some - who are screaming out in the far right yonder that the Coalition should have stuck with Tony Abbott because he wouldn't have done any worse. That's hard to imagine. By rights, Tony Abbott was looking more like he was going to surrender a landslide so those far-right people are frantically rewriting history right there.

It is being painted as a disastrous outcome for Malcolm Turnbull, but that overstates his impact on the campaign given what he inherited, as well as how much the party tied his hands. The Malcolm Turnbull people thought they were going to get, and the one the Liberal Party allowed him to be were two completely different people. The Coalition are blaming the ALP for the medicare scare campaign but here's the problem with that theory: 1) Who exactly created the social environment where a Medicare cut would be so devastating? the Coalition; 2) how puny were the Coalition's selling points if a mere scare campaign could defeat their proposition; and 3) blaming other for your own mistakes is unbecoming of the party that tells people to pull themselves up by the bootstraps.
Just sayin'.

We all know the sordid sorry truth: Had they let Malcolm Turnbull properly address the issues that mean so much to the political middle instead of holding him captive to the right wing of the Liberal Party, they would have had a positive proposition to sell to the electorate. What's amazing is that the Liberal Party can't see it at all. They had the biggest election-winning advantage in Malcolm Turnbull's personal popularity, and they managed to squander it by not letting him do the things people expected of Malcolm Turnbull. That the party strategists seemed to think his popularity was somehow separate to the policy positions he espoused in earlier incarnations is quite staggering in its wrong-headed-ness. It is what it is, and what it is, is the height of stupidity.

The ALP medicare scare campaign? I mean, put-lease!

I Thought More Old Codgers Would Have Died Since 2013

I recently attended a funeral of an elderly woman who passed away. The attendance was scant of the elderly. When I enquired I was told most of the deceased's friends had already died or were too senile and demented to attended. It made rethink the Howard-supporting geriatric generation were finally pushing off their mortal coil, moving on into the next world. I mean, let's face it, we've lost some pretty big Baby Boomer musicians this year alone - you'd think the even older were even more dying-er. So in the three years since the 2013 election, one could surmise the ranks of the Howard's grey-power demographic would have shrunk considerably. The hung Parliament sort of shows that maybe this wasn't as big a factor as other things after all.

Of course, I'm told the percentage of the young not enrolled to vote is as high as it's ever been, so perhaps that balanced itself out. Really, we live in difficult times when we need everybody's thinking caps on. It's amazing that this is the moment at which youth apathy has reached pinnacle.

In other sad news, we find Tony Abbott is still alive and well, elected and in office as member of Warringah. Who will ind us of of this meddlesome Abbott?

The Good News

Sophie Mirabella is gone. Miserabella is done as a lower house candidate having now lost twice. With a 3.1% swing against this time and 9.5% swing against last time, she managed to freshly alienate 1/8th of an entire electorate that was once a safe seat for the Coalition. She sure won't be running again - unless of course the Liberal Party is a lot more stupid than we're led to believe.

The Ungovernable Demographics Of Australia

It's no coincidence that the hung Parliament comes so close on the heels of the previous hung Parliament. When you think about how the seats are allocated and distributed, it is pretty clear that over time, seats are becoming more entrenched, not less. The entrenched Liberal seats of the Sydney North Shore, together with Wentworth represents a particular demographic that keeps getting more entrenched, not less. It's hard to imagine any of those seats going to the ALP in the next 10 elections, Maxine McKew's amazing effort in 2007 notwithstanding. The equivalent of those seats in other Australian cities represent the bastion of Liberal Party support. Around those suburbs are the suburbs that are the traditional ALP heartland - and these might get flipped to Liberal as they become wealthier and gentrified, but on the whole the parties are entrenched according to class and income.

If the seats divide up so easily and get entrenched as a result of increasing inequality and disparity, we're going to see a lot more of these hung Parliament scenarios. There's a lot of disillusion going on out there in the deep electorate. It's no coincidence that Pauline Hanson and her One Nation brand have made a comeback, exactly at the moment of maximum uncertainty. The Two Party system funnels everybody's votes into two parties, but people are squirming like mad for another option. Add this altogether and you get a picture of a deeply divided electorate that is suspicious of anything and everything it seems. The hung Parliament isn't a simple dis-endorsement of politics or politicians or the political elite; it's a deeply structural problem manifesting itself in votes.

If the major parties can't pull themselves together they can damn well expect this to keep on happening because the entrenched rigidity of class mobility is only going to increase and reinforce what is already there. People are actively looking for an alternative that is not the major parties. It's only going to get worse for the major parties from here on in, and they themselves are to blame.

The same voter rage that drives support for Donald Trump in the US and Brexit in the UK has taken hold here. Some of it is a perfectly rational response to a political system that is not working for the people it is designed to serve. 

Australian politics broke in December 2009 when the major parties could not reach a consensus on Labor's climate change bills. 

Mr Abbott rose from the ashes of the Coalition leadership spill and so terrified Kevin Rudd that he cut and ran from "the greatest moral challenge of our time". 

That massive breach of trust with the Australian people was compounded by his midnight assassination. It, in turn, fatally wounded Julia Gillard.
The parallels between the two major parties are now eerie. 

Labor dispatches a first term prime minister in 2010 and emerges from an election into a hung parliament. The Coalition did it last year and now faces the same future.

Remember what happened next?

Yes, Tony Abbott ran at the ALP with maximum malice and no intention of governing properly. So the question is whether Bill Shorten is going to pull the same stunt. Arthur Sinodinos seems to think so.

Senator Sinodinos said Mr Shorten's election night speech was "very negative". 

"What comes out of that speech is he's saying the government has lost its mandate. [Mr Shorten] doesn't have a mandate for anything." 

When asked if he meant a re-run of the election, he said: "If Bill Shorten is saying... that he will be frustrating everything the government wants to do. He wants to cut the government down. 

"That is what he is saying. He's saying I've got them on the run, I'm going to cut them down. For what? Is he endorsed on a scare campaign. Is this what this great country has been reduced to?"

Good heavens. Really? Who did the reducing last time? 

Anyway, that's the picture we have of this increasingly unruly electorate. Yay for the unruly electorate, I say.

Quick Shots - 02/Jul/2016

It's Freakin' Election Day

For a long campaign, it sure creeps up on you when you're doing your best to ignore it.
The pollsters are calling it 50-50 which usually means they don't know what they're talking about and there's about to be a massive swing. Or maybe they're right. Short theALP winning, it would actually be kind of fun to see if we get a hung parliament. Yes, that re-run would be fun too, and well deserved. See if Malcolm Turnbull can stick to his guns and say he won't form an extended coalition with the cross bench seats.

With 27% of those polled saying they haven't decided but they're likely to vote for  minor party, this is anybody's guess as to which way it will swing, let alone prognosticate by how much. Truly, there is no justice when it comes to elections so I'm just going to sit back and watch the carnage unfold. 2013 sucked so much I'm sort of possessed by schadenfreude. Secretly, I wish they all suffer - but they can't because somebody has to win.

Grunwald

I am researching the battle of Grunwald. It's the second last major engagement in the Crusades, and has the dubious distinction of pitting the Teutonic Knights against a coalition of Polish knights, Lithuanian light cavalry and some Tartars. The Poles were presumably Catholic at this point in time, and the Lithuanians were recent converts as well so, it was a kind of all-Catholic slugfest. As Crusade battles go, it is one of the less edifying moments. There is no Saladin or Richard the Lion Heart. Instead the leading characters are decidedly petty and perhaps a little personality disordered.  This is not a grand moment in the history of Crusades; it's more a lingering footnote, a cul de sac in history given that the Teutonic order, Lithuania and Poland all edged back from being big players after this battle.

The Teutonic Knights aren't exactly great protagonists. If anything they have the air of a psychotic cult, hellbent on conquering lands. A sort of an early version of the SS to come. Perhaps the SS even modelled themselves after the naked fanaticism and over-the-top brutality. If Crusade stories are told from the 'christian' side with the blessings of the Pope, then these would be your protagonists. It's kind of strange because the northern reaches of Central Europe don't exactly lend themselves to the Crusade project of taking and obtaining Jerusalem. But I guess heathens are everywhere if you look hard enough. The through the lens of religious fanaticism.

If of course you look at this battle from the point of view of the Poles and Lithuanians, this is the great defence of their motherland from the psycho cult Teutonic Knights. The reason I'm looking into this at all is because the battle of Grunwald represents the high watermark of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The Lithuanians see this as their moment in history. They may be right.

The battle of Grunwald took place in 1410. The nuts and bolts of it aside, basically the Poles lured the Teutonic Knights into a battlefield of their choosing. The Lithuanians attacked first with their light cavalry and they were beaten back badly. They eventually regrouped to re-join the fray. By that point the Polish Knights had beaten the Teutonic Knights back to their lines. The Teutonic Knights eventually lost their leader and were routed.

The way the Lithuanians see it, they carried the day with their daring strategy of leaving the battlefield and then coming back. Something they allegedly learned in an earlier war. The way the Poles see it, the Lithuanians turned and fled, only to come back at the end so as not to be complete losers. As you can see , it's hard to draw a completely positive picture of the Lithuanian contribution to the battle. As for the Teutonic Knights, they never really recovered after this loss.

After the battle of Grunwald, there was the battle of Varna in 1444, followed by the fall of Constantinople in 1453. After the fall of Constantinople, the crusaders lost a vital way point on the way tot he Levant. Instead of sending more troops to the Levant, Europe then spent a good deal of time fending off the advancing Turks.
I won't go into the historic irony of the Turks now wanting to join the EU.

Speaking of which...

The Brexit Call We Don't See

I was chatting online with Somebody who voted for 'leave'. He's an educated guy; not necessarily a conservative; and not like some rabid xenophobe. His position was that the Euro project itself was in most part faulty, and therefore doomed to fail. Not only was Brussels faulty as a political organ, the entire Euro project had too many contradictions even before the GFC. Since the GFC, the Euro Zone has been - according to him - patching over the glaring problems, the most problematic of which is Greece and its debt problem. On a plain ledger, if Germany runs a surplus and Greece runs a deficit, Greece has to pay back Germany even though Greece really hasn't the means to do so. If Germany runs a surplus, it effectively constricts growth not just in Germany but also right across the Euro Zone. Yet there is no recourse for Greece or for that matter any other country.

According to him, Germany makes a lot of money exporting stuff it makes at a cheaper price that if they were doing it with Deutsche Marks. Gemran exports are competitive because the Euro currency depresses the price of Germany's exports - This depression of price happens because the entire Euro averages out all the productivity of its member states. Thus Germany clearly benefits from Greece being much less productive. Yet Germany is extra reluctant to share its spoils from this interaction. Why should Greece stick around to be punished by Germany at both ends of the ledger? And if that's the case, what other states are losing out?

He figures the UK is similarly losing out to France and Germany; which is a claim I don't quite get. He argues the Euro project is a house on fire and Brexit is merely the UK getting out of the burning building first. The Scots are crazy for wanting to run back into the burning building. It makes some kind of internal sense. It's not like the handling of Greece made the EU look good or accepting compromise.