I am shocked at these allegations.
Kicking Against the Pricks
Showing posts with label Political Rants. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Political Rants. Show all posts
Thursday, 11 April 2019
Praising by Faint Damnation
Recently I received an election leaflet in the mail; it was purportedly explaining why we should not vote for Peter Dutton.
I am shocked at these allegations.
I am shocked at these allegations.
Wednesday, 4 July 2018
We will do more than just tread on you!
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| [click for larger image] |
The photo of the mother possum extracting her baby from the coils of a python is from this story.
Thursday, 4 January 2018
#BringYourGuillotine To Work
Some time ago I was talked into signing up to LinkedIn. I haven't used my account virtually at all; the last time I remember logging in was to change my password after they got hacked. However I still regularly get their spam.
Normally their emails go straight to dev/null, however recently one caught my eye. It went as follows:
Go get absolutely fucked!
Normally their emails go straight to dev/null, however recently one caught my eye. It went as follows:
#BringYourWholeSelfSo, in these days when corporate profits are at record levels, when wages are being cut and hard-won rights are being wound back and when workers are in general considered to be disposable and treated like shit, they are expecting us to Bring Our Whole Selves to work. To, of our own accord, throw our Whole Selves into our work, with the enthusiasm of a naive child, in order to make even more money for people who would quite probably harvest our organs for profit if they could get away with it
Kids don't have the same inhibitions as adults — so, imagine the possibilities if you could tap your inner child and #BringYourWholeSelf to work. Watch this video in which we ask kids "What does it mean to be yourself?”
Now, your community would love to hear your thoughts on how you #BringYourWholeSelf to work.
Go get absolutely fucked!
Monday, 31 July 2017
The Delusion Of Gainful Employment
Since this will be a long post, I'll briefly outline the points that I'm trying to make:
1) Criticism of unemployed people on the basis of not contributing to society, or being in some way a burden, is unjustified and irrational; even if considered on a purely economic rationalist basis.
2) Many jobs are deliberately structured to be inefficient and unproductive and this is at least partly a consequence of how the system works.
3) Creating or maintaining a harmful industry in order to "create jobs" is not a legitimate thing to do as the level of employment is regulated by others factors.
4) An age of leisure, where people can live in comfort while working only short hours or none at all, will never happen with the current system, regardless of how far automation progresses. If fact, we have already had the technical capability to make this happen for a considerable time.
1) Criticism of unemployed people on the basis of not contributing to society, or being in some way a burden, is unjustified and irrational; even if considered on a purely economic rationalist basis.
2) Many jobs are deliberately structured to be inefficient and unproductive and this is at least partly a consequence of how the system works.
3) Creating or maintaining a harmful industry in order to "create jobs" is not a legitimate thing to do as the level of employment is regulated by others factors.
4) An age of leisure, where people can live in comfort while working only short hours or none at all, will never happen with the current system, regardless of how far automation progresses. If fact, we have already had the technical capability to make this happen for a considerable time.
Wednesday, 19 July 2017
A Rant
There are a number of things I have intended to post about on this blog, but it seems that every time I get close to finishing something, I'm overtaken by events.
The main thrust of the blog was intended to be shining a light on things that one takes for granted and showing that there is more to the story than it may appear. Something to challenge people's assumptions, make them uncomfortable, and hopefully make them think.
Not to say that I have any profound wisdom to impart, or that I'm necessarily even right, but if I can at least make people think, that's surely a good thing.
The difficulty I face is that every day I see so much outright idiocy, and jaw-droppingly evil decisions being made, that I don't know where to start or what approach to use. Ideally, I would like to construct robust logical arguments, with carefully selected references, and illustrated with relevant examples, but this approach is just simply not valid when I'm faced with things that are plainly ludicrous to anyone capable of thinking.
What sort of logic works when people are not only claiming that 1 + 1 = 3, but are going around and beating up anyone who says otherwise?
What can you do other than point out that it's stupid?
Let's just look (in no particular order) at some of the things going on at the moment:
1) We have the ongoing Centrelink Robodebt lunacy. I would have thought that since this malicious and disastrous policy was so plainly exposed, the Coalition would at the very least have thrown some scapegoat (probably the unfortunate intern who coded the logic [and BTW, I take back my suggestion they used COBOL, more likely it was something like Brainfuck to save on using all those expensive letters and numbers]) under the bus. Instead, they're not only defending it, but seeking to expand it to aged pensions.
The whole Robodebt business is like the punch-line of a joke which begins "Franz Kafka, Joseph Heller and George Orwell walk into a bar...", and the fact that it's one of the lesser evils we face just shows how bad things have become.
2) We have the government proposing laws to weaken encryption so that it can gather even more confidential data on its citizens, at the very same time as their Medicare records were found to have been hacked. This on top of the still-unresolved Census debacle of last year.
It gets worse though; in the process of proudly announcing these proposed laws, our prime-minister claims that that the laws of Australia override the laws of mathematics.
For FUCK sake, this is literally a scene out of 1984.
3) And what the HELL is going on with the Carmichael Mine?
Here we have a corrupt foreign billionaire seeking to open one of the biggest coal mines in the world. This at a time when we've just had two consecutive massive coral bleaching events on the Great Barrier Reef, and at the same time as an ice shelf larger than Kangaroo Island has just broken off Antarctica.
The mine is not even economically viable; they're going to give Adani a billion dollar handout, not even collect royalties for decades and give them unlimited free water, at the expense of farmers.
The only justification given for this is "jobs". Now I want to write more about this in future since it's wrong on a number of levels, but for the moment I'll just say that the intention is to automate the mine to the max. We will probably have trucks driven by remote control from India, by people paid 50c/hr. There might be a bit over a thousand local jobs. If it were simply about jobs, then it's a ludicrously inefficient use of money; it's costing us nearly a million dollars per job, which is more than the people involved will ever earn back.
It's also amazing that a racist/xenophobic place like Australia isn't upset that Adani is an Indian. Seemingly, being a billionaire makes you an honorary White Man or something.
If it were just to Coalition supporting the mine, that would be understandable - they are after all irredeemably corrupt and evil (we're taking about people wearing hi-vis shirts in parliament; no longer even trying to hide their corrupt ties to the mining industry, but flaunting them) - but both the state and federal Labor Party are behind this. Why?
What are the Greens doing about this? Busy falling on their swords, one after another. First the hissy fit with the NSW branch, then Scott Ludlum and now Larissa Waters gone. They are the closest thing we have to a sensible political party and their very best people are abandoning their posts one after another, just at the time they're needed the most.
It's heart-breaking, and makes me not a little suspicious that something underhand is going on.
4) And let's not get started on fracking and Coal Seam Gas. The phrase "fugitive methane emissions" should in itself be enough for anyone with a brain to demand that it be banned outright.
5) Now we have the terrifying prospect of a massive new paramilitary police force; merging the incompetent ASIO, the politically motivated AFP, the Nazi thugs from Border Farce, and more, all under the control of the worst possible person to wield such power: my nemesis, the anti-Possum Dreaming; Peter Dutton.
What's going on? Even in banana republics, an aspiring dictator would have to be smart enough to sweet-talk the colonels into staging a coup d'etat. Dutton is far too stupid to do this, but somehow he just gets handed the power on a plate, while sitting there like a useless potato.
We can only hope that he's too incompetent to wield such power effectively, but this is a very thin straw to grasp at; like giving a toddler a machine-gun and hoping he's not a very good shot.
6) When considering ludicrous idiots getting handed extraordinary power, one's mind is naturally drawn to the clown that the United States has seen fit to elect to its highest office.
There is no excuse for this in a country which claims to be a democracy.
The guy is outright corrupt, he is ridiculously incompetent at everything he does and he has a particularly obnoxious personality. For FUCK sake, the guy is a fucking rapist, which should in itself be enough to disqualify him from leading any civilised country - and should surely disqualify him a hundred times over in a prudish country like the US where they pretty much crucified Bill Clinton for much less. Trump's personal "qualities" have been known for a long time. Here is a page from a Robert Crumb comic from 1989:
So nearly thirty years ago he was widely considered to be "one of the most evil men alive".
No one can say they didn't known what he was like, and don't give me that rubbish about "The Russians Done It" either. Do you think that the vast array of US spy agencies, with almost unlimited money and power at their disposal, would allow a country, that had traditionally been their mortal enemy - a threat they had been specifically built to counter - to interfere with such a critical process as a presidential election and do nothing about it?
The only possible argument you could give for voting in such a person would be that you believed The System to be so irredeemably bad that the only alternative is to wreck it as quickly and thoroughly as possible. But this would be a desperately dangerous game to play. Who knows what the outcome would be: Handmaid's Tale territory? Nuclear war?
What is worse is that Trump is only a symptom of a much more fundamental problem. Like Tony Abbott, he is just the most prominent pustule on the face of a plague victim. Getting rid of him (and don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen) might reduce the chance of some immediate disaster caused by extreme stupidity, but won't really fix anything.
7) And this disease has seemingly spread everywhere. The UK is in chaos with Brexit and a minority government dependent on religious extremists. The Middle East is an ongoing disaster area that's been getting steadily worse for the last two decades. Turkey is rapidly falling into dictatorship...
. . .
Anyway.
The point of this rant is not so much that everything is hopeless and we should all slash our wrists, or that we need to rise up in revolt at once, but more to give an excuse as to why I haven't been posting so much. Things keep happening which make me feel that what I'm writing is lame and irrelevant and I get discouraged.
I'll try to do better in future.
The main thrust of the blog was intended to be shining a light on things that one takes for granted and showing that there is more to the story than it may appear. Something to challenge people's assumptions, make them uncomfortable, and hopefully make them think.
Not to say that I have any profound wisdom to impart, or that I'm necessarily even right, but if I can at least make people think, that's surely a good thing.
The difficulty I face is that every day I see so much outright idiocy, and jaw-droppingly evil decisions being made, that I don't know where to start or what approach to use. Ideally, I would like to construct robust logical arguments, with carefully selected references, and illustrated with relevant examples, but this approach is just simply not valid when I'm faced with things that are plainly ludicrous to anyone capable of thinking.
What sort of logic works when people are not only claiming that 1 + 1 = 3, but are going around and beating up anyone who says otherwise?
What can you do other than point out that it's stupid?
Let's just look (in no particular order) at some of the things going on at the moment:
1) We have the ongoing Centrelink Robodebt lunacy. I would have thought that since this malicious and disastrous policy was so plainly exposed, the Coalition would at the very least have thrown some scapegoat (probably the unfortunate intern who coded the logic [and BTW, I take back my suggestion they used COBOL, more likely it was something like Brainfuck to save on using all those expensive letters and numbers]) under the bus. Instead, they're not only defending it, but seeking to expand it to aged pensions.
The whole Robodebt business is like the punch-line of a joke which begins "Franz Kafka, Joseph Heller and George Orwell walk into a bar...", and the fact that it's one of the lesser evils we face just shows how bad things have become.
2) We have the government proposing laws to weaken encryption so that it can gather even more confidential data on its citizens, at the very same time as their Medicare records were found to have been hacked. This on top of the still-unresolved Census debacle of last year.
It gets worse though; in the process of proudly announcing these proposed laws, our prime-minister claims that that the laws of Australia override the laws of mathematics.
For FUCK sake, this is literally a scene out of 1984.
3) And what the HELL is going on with the Carmichael Mine?
Here we have a corrupt foreign billionaire seeking to open one of the biggest coal mines in the world. This at a time when we've just had two consecutive massive coral bleaching events on the Great Barrier Reef, and at the same time as an ice shelf larger than Kangaroo Island has just broken off Antarctica.
The mine is not even economically viable; they're going to give Adani a billion dollar handout, not even collect royalties for decades and give them unlimited free water, at the expense of farmers.
The only justification given for this is "jobs". Now I want to write more about this in future since it's wrong on a number of levels, but for the moment I'll just say that the intention is to automate the mine to the max. We will probably have trucks driven by remote control from India, by people paid 50c/hr. There might be a bit over a thousand local jobs. If it were simply about jobs, then it's a ludicrously inefficient use of money; it's costing us nearly a million dollars per job, which is more than the people involved will ever earn back.
It's also amazing that a racist/xenophobic place like Australia isn't upset that Adani is an Indian. Seemingly, being a billionaire makes you an honorary White Man or something.
If it were just to Coalition supporting the mine, that would be understandable - they are after all irredeemably corrupt and evil (we're taking about people wearing hi-vis shirts in parliament; no longer even trying to hide their corrupt ties to the mining industry, but flaunting them) - but both the state and federal Labor Party are behind this. Why?
What are the Greens doing about this? Busy falling on their swords, one after another. First the hissy fit with the NSW branch, then Scott Ludlum and now Larissa Waters gone. They are the closest thing we have to a sensible political party and their very best people are abandoning their posts one after another, just at the time they're needed the most.
It's heart-breaking, and makes me not a little suspicious that something underhand is going on.
4) And let's not get started on fracking and Coal Seam Gas. The phrase "fugitive methane emissions" should in itself be enough for anyone with a brain to demand that it be banned outright.
5) Now we have the terrifying prospect of a massive new paramilitary police force; merging the incompetent ASIO, the politically motivated AFP, the Nazi thugs from Border Farce, and more, all under the control of the worst possible person to wield such power: my nemesis, the anti-Possum Dreaming; Peter Dutton.
What's going on? Even in banana republics, an aspiring dictator would have to be smart enough to sweet-talk the colonels into staging a coup d'etat. Dutton is far too stupid to do this, but somehow he just gets handed the power on a plate, while sitting there like a useless potato.
We can only hope that he's too incompetent to wield such power effectively, but this is a very thin straw to grasp at; like giving a toddler a machine-gun and hoping he's not a very good shot.
6) When considering ludicrous idiots getting handed extraordinary power, one's mind is naturally drawn to the clown that the United States has seen fit to elect to its highest office.
There is no excuse for this in a country which claims to be a democracy.
The guy is outright corrupt, he is ridiculously incompetent at everything he does and he has a particularly obnoxious personality. For FUCK sake, the guy is a fucking rapist, which should in itself be enough to disqualify him from leading any civilised country - and should surely disqualify him a hundred times over in a prudish country like the US where they pretty much crucified Bill Clinton for much less. Trump's personal "qualities" have been known for a long time. Here is a page from a Robert Crumb comic from 1989:
 |
| HUP No. 3, page 20 [click for readable image] |
So nearly thirty years ago he was widely considered to be "one of the most evil men alive".
No one can say they didn't known what he was like, and don't give me that rubbish about "The Russians Done It" either. Do you think that the vast array of US spy agencies, with almost unlimited money and power at their disposal, would allow a country, that had traditionally been their mortal enemy - a threat they had been specifically built to counter - to interfere with such a critical process as a presidential election and do nothing about it?
The only possible argument you could give for voting in such a person would be that you believed The System to be so irredeemably bad that the only alternative is to wreck it as quickly and thoroughly as possible. But this would be a desperately dangerous game to play. Who knows what the outcome would be: Handmaid's Tale territory? Nuclear war?
What is worse is that Trump is only a symptom of a much more fundamental problem. Like Tony Abbott, he is just the most prominent pustule on the face of a plague victim. Getting rid of him (and don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen) might reduce the chance of some immediate disaster caused by extreme stupidity, but won't really fix anything.
7) And this disease has seemingly spread everywhere. The UK is in chaos with Brexit and a minority government dependent on religious extremists. The Middle East is an ongoing disaster area that's been getting steadily worse for the last two decades. Turkey is rapidly falling into dictatorship...
. . .
Anyway.
The point of this rant is not so much that everything is hopeless and we should all slash our wrists, or that we need to rise up in revolt at once, but more to give an excuse as to why I haven't been posting so much. Things keep happening which make me feel that what I'm writing is lame and irrelevant and I get discouraged.
I'll try to do better in future.
Friday, 20 January 2017
Turnbull's Victories
Prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has had some big successes since his party formed government.
I will consider here only those successes related to the IT field, since Turnbull is considered by some to be an IT genius who brought the Internet to Australia (he bought shares in the now-defunct Ozemail and sold them a few years later at a massive profit).
To the uninitiated, it might seem that his actual performance has been more like a three-train wreck; that is to say, not only a disaster, but something where you marvel at how it's physically possibly for it to have happened.
But looking at it from the point of view of the Coalition, it has been instead a series of mighty victories.
There is no question that the wrecking of the NBN was deliberate.
Turnbull's FTTN (Fibre-to-the-node) network is inferior to Labor's FTTP (Fibre-to-the-premises) system in every conceivable way. It costs just as much to install, but is orders of magnitude slower, it's not upgradable, it won't last as long, it's much less reliable and it has enormous ongoing operating costs. The technical community - despite an intrinsic right-wing bias - are uniformly against it. Have a look the Whirlpool forum to see what I mean; whenever a Coalition troll ventures in to spruik Turnbull's FTTN, they are immediately shot down with technical arguments by experts in the field.
Not only is this obvious now, but it was obvious right from the start.
Soon after gaining office in 2007, the ALP's original proposal for the NBN was actually something very much like Turnbull's FTTN network. At the time, the Coalition correctly called it out as useless. The term "Fraudband" was actually coined by Nationals Senator Fiona Nash to describe this network.
So the Coalition knew, nearly 10 years ago, that FTTN was a dud.
So how come they ended up in favour of it?
It seems that just before the 2010 election, opposition leader Tony Abbott had a luncheon with his master Rupert Murdoch, whose influence and profits were being threatened by expanding Internet usage.
The very next day Abbott rashly announced that he would destroy the NBN.
I think he was then quickly taken aside and given a stern talking to by his handler Peta Credlin ("Not like that you fool, the NBN is popular; you need to destroy it by stealth"). He therefore entrusted this unpopular task to his main rival, Malcolm Turnbull. I think he expected Turnbull to fail, or at least come out of it looking bad.
Turnbull, however, exerted his lying skills to their fullest. He first proposed a wireless system as an alternative to Labor's NBN, and when that was laughed down, he then went with FTTN. He had a plan fully costed and worked out, he said, and ready to go the moment they won government. It would be a third of the price of Labor's system and would be finished much sooner. Their 2013 pre-election promise was for everyone to be connected by 2016.
The technical community saw through these lies at once (although some took a bit longer), but the Coalition had all of the mainstream media on their side. All of the traditional media stood to lose out as the Internet expanded, so they made sure to stifle any objections to the plan.
Now we can see how things turned out. Nowhere near finished, abysmal speed and reliability, $20B over budget so far; all as predicted. Last time I checked, Australia had dropped to 60th in the world in Internet speed. An appalling thing for a first world country.
In other words, it all happened exactly as planned and is a big victory to the Coalition. Those responsible for getting the Coalition into power - the mainstream media, and in particular Rupert Murdoch - have their influence and profits preserved for a little longer. Meanwhile, the NBN has been crippled to the extent of becoming a burden to the taxpayer, so no one will complain when it's given away to Telstra, to further cement their monopoly position.
What is the betting we'll see some Coalition politicians offered well-paid positions on the Telstra board when they lose their seats next election?
The ABS (Australian Bureau of Statistics) gathers statistical data on the nation. Reliable data is critical for running the country. If you are distributing resources, you need to know what resources you have and who needs them. If you are implementing a policy, you need to have some feedback on whether it's achieving its goals.
However, since the Coalition came to power in 2013, they haven't had any use for objective data. The decisions they have made have been based on a mixture of ideology and implementing the requests of their corporate sponsors. The problem with having objective data available is that it might contradict these decisions, and in that case there's the need to go through the tiresome process of suppressing the data, censoring or discrediting anyone who publicises it and so on.
Of course it's theoretically possible that, by chance, objective data might support their decisions, but why risk it? Far better to just invent the data as you need to; it's quicker and cheaper to do and always gives the right answer.
Therefore, in 2014, the Coalition made crippling budget cuts to the ABS. These came on top of a previous set of crippling budget cuts by the previous Labor government (who I am by no means defending as they were probably inspired by the same motives).
Things got so dire that when Brian Pink retired as Chief Statistician in January of 2014, they couldn't find anyone to replace him and the department struggled on without a head for several months. But then things got worse: the Coalition appointed David Kalisch as Chief Statistician. Now I don't know for sure that Kalisch is any more than a useful idiot, but there is some reason to believe he's a coalition stooge.
Firstly, Kalisch isn't even a statistician. He is an economist, which these days means someone whose role is to think up reasons why money should taken from the poor and given to the rich. Therefore it would be fair enough to assume that he at least sides with the Coalition politically.
Of interest is that the fact that his appointment was rushed through, along with a number of other partisan appointments, just before Christmas in 2014 - which is a traditional time of year to hide shenanigans.
In February of 2015, he was already spin-doctoring unemployment figures in the government's favour.
Soon afterwards, he was delivering the line that the 2016 census should be scrapped. Given that the census is critically important to the role of the ABS this would seem a very strange thing to say - although not so strange if he was testing the waters on behalf of the coalition.
There was some backlash about this and he was forced to change his tune. Then some Machiavellian plotter (I would like to know who) came up with a quite ingenious strategy: They would announce that, unlike previous years, the ABS would be retaining people's names for data matching purposes.
On the face of it, this didn't make any sense; why expand the scope of the census immediately after you've claimed there wasn't enough money to even hold it at all. Therefore there was much speculation that the motives were entirely sinister. Hitler used the German census data to track down Jews. More recently, the United States used census data to track down Muslims. With those on the left already nervous (if not terrified) about abuses of power by the Coalition there was therefore considerable outcry about this.
This was all part of the plan.
Either no one would care very much and people would fill out their census forms dutifully, thus giving the Coalition a treasure trove of data to use against its enemies, or there would be mass disobedience, which would render the census useless. Either way they would win.
Then came the online census debacle.
Before this happened, I had an inkling that something wasn't quite right. I had heard some people saying the encryption on the ABS server wasn't up to scratch. It's never a good idea to take rumours like this at face value, so I checked myself and it turned out they were right. Specifically; I ran an SSL security check on the ABS server and found the encryption protocols available did not provide Forward Secrecy. Forward Secrecy is something you particularly want with something like a census and it's not difficult to set up.
At the time, even my own personal Possum TV server provided Forward Secrecy. [And I'm not trying to make myself out to be a security guru here; if you can set up a server, it's really not rocket science to configure the encryption right. Literally all I did was Google something like "best SSL configuration for Apache" and followed the instructions on the first (trustworthy) site I found.]
When it came to the actual night of the census, things went worse than even I had thought possible. I have looked at a submission by the ABS to the senate enquiry on this embarrassing business, and despite spinning everything in the ABS's favour, it was still obvious that they were totally unprepared and flew into a flailing panic when things started to go wrong.
After the event, Turnbull beat his chest talking about how he would bring those responsible to account. Still waiting on that. Maybe he should look in a mirror.
Words fail me when it comes to describing what a mess they've made of this; it makes even the census debacle look good by comparison. It's like they sent the intern to a short course on whatever retarded programming language they use there, probably COBOL, and asked him write a data matching program, with no oversight, then rolled it out with no testing and met all complaints with the unanswerable "The computer is always right".
However, to say that this incredible debacle is an unintended consequence of cost-cutting is wrong, and to think that it is hurting the Coalition is also wrong. I believe this is all deliberate and the Coalition is benefiting from it.
The people who are upset about this are people who would never vote for the Coalition anyway.
The Coalition is more interested in winning back voters who have deserted it for lunatic Fascist parties like One Nation. The average One Nation voter most probably considers those on welfare to be scum who should be put against a wall and shot. The idea of welfare recipients being mistreated is music to their ears.
The Coalition want this to hurt people. They need it to be unfair, and be seen to be unfair. The more the progressives scream about how evil and stupid it is, the more the One Nationists like it and the more the Coalition knows they are doing the right thing (at least for a certain value of "right").
There is a common theme to all of these victories. They all involve interfering with, and under-funding, key public services to the extent that they become incapable of performing their roles, ultimately leading to spectacular failures.
Quite apart from the benefits to the Coalition listed above, these victories all have some additional benefits in common:
Firstly, the Coalition gets seen to be prudent economic managers because they are "willing to make the tough decisions" to save money. It's true the NBN disaster is costing enormous amounts of extra money, but since the NBN was originally a Labor initiative this can be blamed on Labor.
Secondly, these sort of things get progressives really riled up, thus taking the focus off other extremely important problems - such as the Coalition's bitter and relentless war against the environment and the crimes against humanity being committed in the refugee death camps.
Thirdly - and I think this is the most important reason - it opens the way for privatisation. Noam Chomsky summed up this strategy in a 2011 speech:
Let's hope the in-fighting between the many crazies in the Coalition (e.g. that dickhead Bernardi who somehow thinks there's a need for yet another reactionary fringe party: The "Australian Majority Party". Off to a good start there, idiot - even the name is a lie.) prevent them from achieving this.
I will consider here only those successes related to the IT field, since Turnbull is considered by some to be an IT genius who brought the Internet to Australia (he bought shares in the now-defunct Ozemail and sold them a few years later at a massive profit).
To the uninitiated, it might seem that his actual performance has been more like a three-train wreck; that is to say, not only a disaster, but something where you marvel at how it's physically possibly for it to have happened.
 |
| [Based on an illustration from here] |
But looking at it from the point of view of the Coalition, it has been instead a series of mighty victories.
Victory 1: The NBN
 |
[Based on a stock photo from here] |
There is no question that the wrecking of the NBN was deliberate.
Turnbull's FTTN (Fibre-to-the-node) network is inferior to Labor's FTTP (Fibre-to-the-premises) system in every conceivable way. It costs just as much to install, but is orders of magnitude slower, it's not upgradable, it won't last as long, it's much less reliable and it has enormous ongoing operating costs. The technical community - despite an intrinsic right-wing bias - are uniformly against it. Have a look the Whirlpool forum to see what I mean; whenever a Coalition troll ventures in to spruik Turnbull's FTTN, they are immediately shot down with technical arguments by experts in the field.
Not only is this obvious now, but it was obvious right from the start.
Soon after gaining office in 2007, the ALP's original proposal for the NBN was actually something very much like Turnbull's FTTN network. At the time, the Coalition correctly called it out as useless. The term "Fraudband" was actually coined by Nationals Senator Fiona Nash to describe this network.
So the Coalition knew, nearly 10 years ago, that FTTN was a dud.
So how come they ended up in favour of it?
It seems that just before the 2010 election, opposition leader Tony Abbott had a luncheon with his master Rupert Murdoch, whose influence and profits were being threatened by expanding Internet usage.
The very next day Abbott rashly announced that he would destroy the NBN.
I think he was then quickly taken aside and given a stern talking to by his handler Peta Credlin ("Not like that you fool, the NBN is popular; you need to destroy it by stealth"). He therefore entrusted this unpopular task to his main rival, Malcolm Turnbull. I think he expected Turnbull to fail, or at least come out of it looking bad.
Turnbull, however, exerted his lying skills to their fullest. He first proposed a wireless system as an alternative to Labor's NBN, and when that was laughed down, he then went with FTTN. He had a plan fully costed and worked out, he said, and ready to go the moment they won government. It would be a third of the price of Labor's system and would be finished much sooner. Their 2013 pre-election promise was for everyone to be connected by 2016.
The technical community saw through these lies at once (although some took a bit longer), but the Coalition had all of the mainstream media on their side. All of the traditional media stood to lose out as the Internet expanded, so they made sure to stifle any objections to the plan.
Now we can see how things turned out. Nowhere near finished, abysmal speed and reliability, $20B over budget so far; all as predicted. Last time I checked, Australia had dropped to 60th in the world in Internet speed. An appalling thing for a first world country.
In other words, it all happened exactly as planned and is a big victory to the Coalition. Those responsible for getting the Coalition into power - the mainstream media, and in particular Rupert Murdoch - have their influence and profits preserved for a little longer. Meanwhile, the NBN has been crippled to the extent of becoming a burden to the taxpayer, so no one will complain when it's given away to Telstra, to further cement their monopoly position.
What is the betting we'll see some Coalition politicians offered well-paid positions on the Telstra board when they lose their seats next election?
Victory 2: The 2016 Census
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| In 2016 there was a sudden increase in the number of people named Winston Smith in Australia [won't reveal the source of this one ;)] |
The ABS (Australian Bureau of Statistics) gathers statistical data on the nation. Reliable data is critical for running the country. If you are distributing resources, you need to know what resources you have and who needs them. If you are implementing a policy, you need to have some feedback on whether it's achieving its goals.
However, since the Coalition came to power in 2013, they haven't had any use for objective data. The decisions they have made have been based on a mixture of ideology and implementing the requests of their corporate sponsors. The problem with having objective data available is that it might contradict these decisions, and in that case there's the need to go through the tiresome process of suppressing the data, censoring or discrediting anyone who publicises it and so on.
Of course it's theoretically possible that, by chance, objective data might support their decisions, but why risk it? Far better to just invent the data as you need to; it's quicker and cheaper to do and always gives the right answer.
Therefore, in 2014, the Coalition made crippling budget cuts to the ABS. These came on top of a previous set of crippling budget cuts by the previous Labor government (who I am by no means defending as they were probably inspired by the same motives).
Things got so dire that when Brian Pink retired as Chief Statistician in January of 2014, they couldn't find anyone to replace him and the department struggled on without a head for several months. But then things got worse: the Coalition appointed David Kalisch as Chief Statistician. Now I don't know for sure that Kalisch is any more than a useful idiot, but there is some reason to believe he's a coalition stooge.
Firstly, Kalisch isn't even a statistician. He is an economist, which these days means someone whose role is to think up reasons why money should taken from the poor and given to the rich. Therefore it would be fair enough to assume that he at least sides with the Coalition politically.
Of interest is that the fact that his appointment was rushed through, along with a number of other partisan appointments, just before Christmas in 2014 - which is a traditional time of year to hide shenanigans.
In February of 2015, he was already spin-doctoring unemployment figures in the government's favour.
Soon afterwards, he was delivering the line that the 2016 census should be scrapped. Given that the census is critically important to the role of the ABS this would seem a very strange thing to say - although not so strange if he was testing the waters on behalf of the coalition.
There was some backlash about this and he was forced to change his tune. Then some Machiavellian plotter (I would like to know who) came up with a quite ingenious strategy: They would announce that, unlike previous years, the ABS would be retaining people's names for data matching purposes.
On the face of it, this didn't make any sense; why expand the scope of the census immediately after you've claimed there wasn't enough money to even hold it at all. Therefore there was much speculation that the motives were entirely sinister. Hitler used the German census data to track down Jews. More recently, the United States used census data to track down Muslims. With those on the left already nervous (if not terrified) about abuses of power by the Coalition there was therefore considerable outcry about this.
This was all part of the plan.
Either no one would care very much and people would fill out their census forms dutifully, thus giving the Coalition a treasure trove of data to use against its enemies, or there would be mass disobedience, which would render the census useless. Either way they would win.
Then came the online census debacle.
Before this happened, I had an inkling that something wasn't quite right. I had heard some people saying the encryption on the ABS server wasn't up to scratch. It's never a good idea to take rumours like this at face value, so I checked myself and it turned out they were right. Specifically; I ran an SSL security check on the ABS server and found the encryption protocols available did not provide Forward Secrecy. Forward Secrecy is something you particularly want with something like a census and it's not difficult to set up.
At the time, even my own personal Possum TV server provided Forward Secrecy. [And I'm not trying to make myself out to be a security guru here; if you can set up a server, it's really not rocket science to configure the encryption right. Literally all I did was Google something like "best SSL configuration for Apache" and followed the instructions on the first (trustworthy) site I found.]
When it came to the actual night of the census, things went worse than even I had thought possible. I have looked at a submission by the ABS to the senate enquiry on this embarrassing business, and despite spinning everything in the ABS's favour, it was still obvious that they were totally unprepared and flew into a flailing panic when things started to go wrong.
After the event, Turnbull beat his chest talking about how he would bring those responsible to account. Still waiting on that. Maybe he should look in a mirror.
Victory 3: Centrelink "debt" recovery
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| Centrelink's sensitive and understanding robo-debt-collectors [source] |
Words fail me when it comes to describing what a mess they've made of this; it makes even the census debacle look good by comparison. It's like they sent the intern to a short course on whatever retarded programming language they use there, probably COBOL, and asked him write a data matching program, with no oversight, then rolled it out with no testing and met all complaints with the unanswerable "The computer is always right".
However, to say that this incredible debacle is an unintended consequence of cost-cutting is wrong, and to think that it is hurting the Coalition is also wrong. I believe this is all deliberate and the Coalition is benefiting from it.
The people who are upset about this are people who would never vote for the Coalition anyway.
The Coalition is more interested in winning back voters who have deserted it for lunatic Fascist parties like One Nation. The average One Nation voter most probably considers those on welfare to be scum who should be put against a wall and shot. The idea of welfare recipients being mistreated is music to their ears.
The Coalition want this to hurt people. They need it to be unfair, and be seen to be unfair. The more the progressives scream about how evil and stupid it is, the more the One Nationists like it and the more the Coalition knows they are doing the right thing (at least for a certain value of "right").
The Overall Strategy
There is a common theme to all of these victories. They all involve interfering with, and under-funding, key public services to the extent that they become incapable of performing their roles, ultimately leading to spectacular failures.
Quite apart from the benefits to the Coalition listed above, these victories all have some additional benefits in common:
Firstly, the Coalition gets seen to be prudent economic managers because they are "willing to make the tough decisions" to save money. It's true the NBN disaster is costing enormous amounts of extra money, but since the NBN was originally a Labor initiative this can be blamed on Labor.
Secondly, these sort of things get progressives really riled up, thus taking the focus off other extremely important problems - such as the Coalition's bitter and relentless war against the environment and the crimes against humanity being committed in the refugee death camps.
Thirdly - and I think this is the most important reason - it opens the way for privatisation. Noam Chomsky summed up this strategy in a 2011 speech:
"That's the standard technique of privatisation: defund, make sure things don't work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital."I'm not sure what their ultimate aim is; possibly some Libertarian paradise where the only government services remaining are the police and military. In which case, future generations will think Orwell's 1984 was a historical novel, and will marvel at how good people had it back then.
Let's hope the in-fighting between the many crazies in the Coalition (e.g. that dickhead Bernardi who somehow thinks there's a need for yet another reactionary fringe party: The "Australian Majority Party". Off to a good start there, idiot - even the name is a lie.) prevent them from achieving this.
Thursday, 29 December 2016
RoHS Complaint
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[For the uninitiated: RoHS stands for "Restriction of Hazardous Substances" and is an initiative to reduce the use of stuff like lead and cadmium in electronic devices. And, yes, there is a typo on the label above which has deliberately been replicated in the title of this post.]
One thing that puzzles me about a lot of technical people - that is to say, people with a trade/technician/engineer background - is that they seem to hold an extreme faith in the ability of science and technology to overcome any and every problem, yet they can at the same time be intensely resistant to technological change when it comes to environmental issues.
A specific example of this is lead-free solder.
Lead is a problematic substance. As a solid metal, it's fairly inert and arguably tolerable for some applications, but under the right (or should I say wrong) conditions it can be converted to soluble salts which are really bad news. It's a cumulative poison and toxic to just about every living thing. Consequently, you don't want to go pumping lead into the environment unnecessarily.
Now these days, there are an extraordinary number of short-lived consumer electronic devices available. Many are specifically designed to last only a short time and virtually none are repairable in any way. Regardless, pretty much all become superseded within a very few years.
The old units need to be disposed of. You're meant to take them to special recycling centres, but they're few and far between in many parts of the world. I'd say that well over half end up in landfill.
To say, as some do, that "no one has ever died from lead pollution caused by consumer electronics" is most probably wrong but in any case is disingenuous. It's a cumulative poison - by the time that there's enough of it floating around in the environment that people start dying, we are already totally screwed.
It therefore makes sense to eliminate lead (and similar toxic materials) from electronic devices where possible. Lead-free solder has been in use for many years now and works successfully in all sorts of increasingly complicated devices.
I use lead-free solder.
A quick guide to soldering: The most important thing with soldering is to have the items you wish to join clean, but a close second is to use the right amount of heat. Too much and you burn flux, melt insulation, lift PCB pads and damage components (in roughly that order). Too little and the solder doesn't wet the metal properly. The usual beginner error is to have things too cold.
Lead-free solder makes this process more difficult because it melts at a significantly higher temperature than lead/tin solder, meaning there's a smaller temperature window to operate in.
However, the difference isn't really that great. If you can solder properly using leaded solder, you'll also be fine with lead-free. To use a car analogy: the level of difficulty in moving from one to the other is not like moving from an automatic transmission to a manual; it's more like parking a sedan when you've previously only had to park a mini. That is to say, the same problems apply and you still use the same technique, but there's less margin for error.
For soldering components onto a PCB the difference is barely noticeable. For soldering difficult items the difference is greater; you will for instance have to go to a higher temperature setting (or get out the propane torch) sooner when soldering thicker wire; but it's still fair to say that anything that gives trouble with lead-free solder will also give trouble with the leaded variety.
Now I have had an electrician, who had never used lead-free solder, rant to me about stuff. His attitude was like that of a radio shock jock who'd just been kicked in the groin by an unemployed Muslim asylum seeker.
He told me of the horror of "tin whiskers" (an effect only seen with some very early tin-only solders) and that lead-free solder was the primary cause of the (non-existent) plague of unreliable electronics that supposedly now besets us.
As proof of his point, he mentioned a computer monitor he had purchased which had failed. He had opened it up and found the cause was a defective electrolytic capacitor.
:Sigh: Anyone who has repaired electrical equipment will be aware that electrolytic capacitors are notoriously one of the least reliable electronic components. They have been consistently so ever since they were first invented - decades before lead-free solder had been heard of - and this is due to the electrolyte they contain, which tends to dry up over time. The current ones don't even use solder internally. Blaming the failure of an electrolytic capacitor on lead-free solder is not merely akin to blaming a road accident on the use of unleaded petrol, but doing so when the vehicles involved were both diesels.
The guy must have known this, yet his visceral loathing of lead-free solder was such that he felt justified in telling a flat-out lie to bolster his position.
So it would seem that in the minds of some, lead/tin solder - a substance unchanged since Roman times - is the be-all and end-all of solder and it is not possible for modern technology to improve on it.
But on the other hand, technology can apparently overcome every other possible problem. Permanent manned base on Mars? Fusion power? Tsiolkovsky tower? No problem! The only thing holding us back is the lack of political will.
Anyway...
What I think is quite revealing is that there is nowhere near this level of hatred directed towards surface mount components. Surface mount components are at best diabolically difficult, and at worst impossible, to solder by hand. To continue with the motor vehicle analogies; if using lead-free solder is like parking a sedan as opposed to a mini, then hand-soldering SMDs - even with your beloved lead/tin solder - is like trying to reverse a three-unit road train into a parking space.
Although I expect this will have precisely zero effect on anyone, I would suggest to anyone in the anti-lead-free solder camp to have a good hard look at yourself: Are you being manipulated into an "environment = bad" mindset by those who have a vested interest in being allowed to pollute? Or is it just that you don't know how to solder?
Saturday, 7 May 2016
Another Political Rant
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| My local "member" - Peter Dutton [Click on image for the full horror] source |
I should probably give up speculating on politics because I'm not very good at it.
It looks like I grossly overestimated Malcolm Turnbull. I had thought that the ingenious way he had destroyed the NBN, while at the same time spinning his sabotage as improvements, and his well-timed and efficiently executed knifing of Abbott, were marks of some supreme Machiavellian intellect.
It appears that in reality these were the pinnacle of his achievements and beyond that he is nothing more than a pompous windbag with a gigantic ego. He thinks he knows everything but in fact he has no skills beyond telling lies, and does not even realise that any more skills than this are needed. I though he had an evil plan and, with his Saruman-like skills (and a little help from Sauron aka Rupert Murdoch), would entice the population down the road to some horrible corporatist dystopia. In fact, he seems to have no plan at all and considers it beneath him to even devise a plan.
I take back what I said about him deliberately splitting the vote in the 1999 Republic Referendum. There is a saying that goes "Do not attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.", which I think perfectly applies in this case.
He is no Lord Baelish. I can't think off-hand of any Game of Thrones character who combines such an inner feebleness and incompetence - a lack of both knowledge and skill that rivals even Tony Abbott - with the external veneer of a master manipulator.
I have also underestimated Peter Dutton. I had thought of him as being of the intellectual calibre of Hordor, with the difference that instead of being a good-natured giant fulfilling an important role, he was a nasty and useless weakling.
While this is all still true, I underestimated his sheer brutality. Maybe his extreme stupidity renders him insensitive to the suffering of others. If only he were merely useless, and didn't have the power of life and death over people!
Seriously! A refugee under his "care" attempts suicide by self-immolation - which is quite possibly the most painful way it's possible to die - and all he cares about is censoring an "unflattering" photo of himself. As if it's possible for a mere photo to make him look any worse than he actually is!
I will be doing everything I can to make sure this loathsome scumbag loses his seat in the forthcoming election, but I would really prefer to see him shipped off to rot in one of his own concentration camps.
And, yes, that most likely is the shadow of a swastika on his forehead in the photo.
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| Where the Mutton-head deserves to be. Source |
Tuesday, 3 November 2015
A Scary Thing
For my belated Halloween post this year, let me talk about a scary and evil thing - the horror that is Malcolm Turnbull.
In January this year I predicted that Tony Abbott would be knifed, despite the belief amongst many that the Coalition wouldn't dare to do any such thing. It turns out I was right and they were wrong - Nya Nya Nya! :pokes out tongue:
Actually, I was mostly wrong; I got the timing of the knifing and the identity of the assassin wrong, and the media reaction was different to what I had anticipated. Nevertheless, I think my final words on the subject still hold true:
Now he's gone and good riddance, but the result is that we have Lord Baelish on the Iron Throne. Great! Little Finger as prime minister and Reek as leader of the opposition.
Since Turnbull is fluent enough to string whole sentences together and doesn't come across as obviously unstable, it seems that his rise to power has been greeted with immense relief, and the popularity of the Coalition has soared (to as high as 56% two-party-preferred if you believe the latest polls).
Turnbull scares me.
One thing that strikes me about him is that he represents Politics (in the bad sense) in its purest form. He spins everything to his own advantage with the skill of an unscrupulous lawyer who can turn black into white. He never hesitates to make personal attacks against anyone who dares to question him. He has mastered the art of the Big Lie - unlike Abbott who wasn't smart enough to get away with it. He can be extremely convincing if you don't know the facts.
He doesn't seem to stand for anything at all. I know he's made some statements that seem progressive, but these were just some bullshit he's made up to placate the proles. If we judge him by his actions rather than his words, virtually nothing can be said in his favour.
Consider this:
1) He's supposed to recognise that Climate Change is actually happening and it's important to do something about it - yet he maintains Abbott's Direct Action plan. Direct Action was intended partly as a mechanism to subsidise polluters, and partly as a work-for-the-dole scheme to keep wages down. Environmentally speaking, it's next to useless.
2) He's supposedly in favour of Marriage Equality - yet he maintains Abbott's disingenuous policy of holding a plebiscite. A plebiscite is simply a vote to determine what the population believes on a certain issue; it doesn't create legislation and doesn't bind the government to do anything. Since the opinion of the population is abundantly clear on the matter already, all a plebiscite is doing is telling you what you know already, at considerable expense (I think it's around $100M). Why do it? It's simply a delaying action; they don't want to legislate and need to find an excuse to put it off.
3) He's though of as being more humane than Abbott, yet he still keeps refugees in death camps, and he still keeps that mindless thug Dutton (a weak and evil version of Hordor) in charge of the process. In this case, it's probably a matter of politics again. This terrible situation is bound to boil over into a major international incident sooner or later, and who better than Abbott's mate Dutton to take the blame. Fair enough, but meanwhile innocent people are being tortured in death camps, in a manner that would spark outrage if some other country did it.
Then there's the wrecking of the NBN. The most important infrastructure project in many decades, with incredible social and economic benefits. Deliberately trashed. He can't claim ignorance; he knew what he was doing. Many technical people - a lot of them Coalition supporters - contacted him prior to the election to acquaint him with the facts. There was even a petition, signed by a quarter of a million people, on the subject - which he ignored. Fair enough he was ordered to do it by Abbott, and there was some hope that he'd (quietly) reverse his stand when he come to power, but this too came to nothing.
He's even abandoned his quest for a Republic (although I'm beginning to believe that he was actually working with John Howard to split the republic vote and cause the 1999 Republic Referendum to fail - at the time I thought he was naive, and fell for an obvious divide-and-conquer tactic, but now the evidence seems to be in favour of it being deliberate).
So, in all of the above cases, he is knowingly letting bad polices, with obvious detriment to the people, the environment, the economy, and the country in general, continue unhindered. It seems that pretty much the only thing he has achieved was turning back Abbott's policy on knighthoods. Big Fucking Deal!
Overall, he's capable of doing even more damage than Abbott, and getting away with it too. A scary thing indeed.
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| This year's Halloween pumpkin - angelic by comparison |
In January this year I predicted that Tony Abbott would be knifed, despite the belief amongst many that the Coalition wouldn't dare to do any such thing. It turns out I was right and they were wrong - Nya Nya Nya! :pokes out tongue:
Actually, I was mostly wrong; I got the timing of the knifing and the identity of the assassin wrong, and the media reaction was different to what I had anticipated. Nevertheless, I think my final words on the subject still hold true:
If this happens, don't expect things to get any better; Abbott is merely the symptom, and not the disease.Abbott was a blundering fool. It was a thing of wonder and despair that he managed to keep the (low but still significant) level of public support that he enjoyed. However, in his favour, the damage he managed to do was limited by his incompetence.
Now he's gone and good riddance, but the result is that we have Lord Baelish on the Iron Throne. Great! Little Finger as prime minister and Reek as leader of the opposition.
Since Turnbull is fluent enough to string whole sentences together and doesn't come across as obviously unstable, it seems that his rise to power has been greeted with immense relief, and the popularity of the Coalition has soared (to as high as 56% two-party-preferred if you believe the latest polls).
Turnbull scares me.
One thing that strikes me about him is that he represents Politics (in the bad sense) in its purest form. He spins everything to his own advantage with the skill of an unscrupulous lawyer who can turn black into white. He never hesitates to make personal attacks against anyone who dares to question him. He has mastered the art of the Big Lie - unlike Abbott who wasn't smart enough to get away with it. He can be extremely convincing if you don't know the facts.
He doesn't seem to stand for anything at all. I know he's made some statements that seem progressive, but these were just some bullshit he's made up to placate the proles. If we judge him by his actions rather than his words, virtually nothing can be said in his favour.
Consider this:
1) He's supposed to recognise that Climate Change is actually happening and it's important to do something about it - yet he maintains Abbott's Direct Action plan. Direct Action was intended partly as a mechanism to subsidise polluters, and partly as a work-for-the-dole scheme to keep wages down. Environmentally speaking, it's next to useless.
2) He's supposedly in favour of Marriage Equality - yet he maintains Abbott's disingenuous policy of holding a plebiscite. A plebiscite is simply a vote to determine what the population believes on a certain issue; it doesn't create legislation and doesn't bind the government to do anything. Since the opinion of the population is abundantly clear on the matter already, all a plebiscite is doing is telling you what you know already, at considerable expense (I think it's around $100M). Why do it? It's simply a delaying action; they don't want to legislate and need to find an excuse to put it off.
3) He's though of as being more humane than Abbott, yet he still keeps refugees in death camps, and he still keeps that mindless thug Dutton (a weak and evil version of Hordor) in charge of the process. In this case, it's probably a matter of politics again. This terrible situation is bound to boil over into a major international incident sooner or later, and who better than Abbott's mate Dutton to take the blame. Fair enough, but meanwhile innocent people are being tortured in death camps, in a manner that would spark outrage if some other country did it.
Then there's the wrecking of the NBN. The most important infrastructure project in many decades, with incredible social and economic benefits. Deliberately trashed. He can't claim ignorance; he knew what he was doing. Many technical people - a lot of them Coalition supporters - contacted him prior to the election to acquaint him with the facts. There was even a petition, signed by a quarter of a million people, on the subject - which he ignored. Fair enough he was ordered to do it by Abbott, and there was some hope that he'd (quietly) reverse his stand when he come to power, but this too came to nothing.
He's even abandoned his quest for a Republic (although I'm beginning to believe that he was actually working with John Howard to split the republic vote and cause the 1999 Republic Referendum to fail - at the time I thought he was naive, and fell for an obvious divide-and-conquer tactic, but now the evidence seems to be in favour of it being deliberate).
So, in all of the above cases, he is knowingly letting bad polices, with obvious detriment to the people, the environment, the economy, and the country in general, continue unhindered. It seems that pretty much the only thing he has achieved was turning back Abbott's policy on knighthoods. Big Fucking Deal!
Overall, he's capable of doing even more damage than Abbott, and getting away with it too. A scary thing indeed.
Tuesday, 29 September 2015
The fascists are still trying to gas us
Recently a shocking crime was unmasked. Billions of dollars were stolen and thousands of people were killed.
I'm talking about the VW Emissions Scandal aka Dieselgate. "Oh that," you say, clicking on another link, "I thought you were going to talk about something important". Which makes you part of the problem.
[Yes, this is an egregious Godwin, and moreover unfairly associates a great car with a couple of utter scumbags, but I think it's worth pointing out the history of this evil corporation.]
This is not merely a case of a company concealing facts to cover for some embarrassing or expensive stuff-up, but systematically engineering a system to break the law. How is this any less criminal than planning and then committing a straight-out robbery?
Then there are the deaths.
Clearly, any estimates of mortality in a case like this are only going to be very rough, but consider this: Many European countries have failed to meet targets for reducing NOx pollution. In the UK alone, 23,500 premature deaths per year are estimated to be caused by NOx pollution. Transport accounts for nearly half of all NOx emissions. The hacked VWs were putting out up to 35 times the legal limits of NOx. VW is Europe's largest car manufacturer, and this scandal has been ongoing for many years.
You do the maths: Whatever way you calculate it, there are thousands of deaths attributable to this hack. And that's not counting illnesses and environmental damage.
Why does no one seem to be upset about this? It's barely being reported on-line, and when it is, it attracts comments like:
Business Insider tells us why they think this scandal is "so annoying": apparently entirely because it will cause VW to lose market share in the US!
Not one word suggesting it's a bad thing to deliberately and cynically break the law, to steal billions of dollars, and knowingly kill people in the process. Presumably these things are just par for the course in Big Business.
Yet imagine if a criminal had committed a bank heist, and cold-bloodedly gunned down some bystanders in the process (that is to say stole 1000 times less money and caused 1000 times fewer fatalities) or, worse still, was a welfare recipient who had ripped off a few thousand; those same commentators would screech like their balls were caught in a rabbit trap and they'd demand that the perpetrator be hung, flogged, and then hung again.
Let us get angry at this. Let us demand that the board of this evil corporation have their heads put on pikes as a warning to others.
I'm talking about the VW Emissions Scandal aka Dieselgate. "Oh that," you say, clicking on another link, "I thought you were going to talk about something important". Which makes you part of the problem.
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| Champions of the Big Lie, then and now |
This is not merely a case of a company concealing facts to cover for some embarrassing or expensive stuff-up, but systematically engineering a system to break the law. How is this any less criminal than planning and then committing a straight-out robbery?
Then there are the deaths.
Clearly, any estimates of mortality in a case like this are only going to be very rough, but consider this: Many European countries have failed to meet targets for reducing NOx pollution. In the UK alone, 23,500 premature deaths per year are estimated to be caused by NOx pollution. Transport accounts for nearly half of all NOx emissions. The hacked VWs were putting out up to 35 times the legal limits of NOx. VW is Europe's largest car manufacturer, and this scandal has been ongoing for many years.
You do the maths: Whatever way you calculate it, there are thousands of deaths attributable to this hack. And that's not counting illnesses and environmental damage.
Why does no one seem to be upset about this? It's barely being reported on-line, and when it is, it attracts comments like:
"Meh, they all do it"and even
"I don't care, I didn't buy my car based on the NOx emissions"
"This is the result of environmental agencies being too strict"
"I still trust VW to give me adequate compensation"
"I admire their skill in pulling something like this off"[These are paraphrased, but genuinely reflect comments I've read.]
Business Insider tells us why they think this scandal is "so annoying": apparently entirely because it will cause VW to lose market share in the US!
Not one word suggesting it's a bad thing to deliberately and cynically break the law, to steal billions of dollars, and knowingly kill people in the process. Presumably these things are just par for the course in Big Business.
Yet imagine if a criminal had committed a bank heist, and cold-bloodedly gunned down some bystanders in the process (that is to say stole 1000 times less money and caused 1000 times fewer fatalities) or, worse still, was a welfare recipient who had ripped off a few thousand; those same commentators would screech like their balls were caught in a rabbit trap and they'd demand that the perpetrator be hung, flogged, and then hung again.
Let us get angry at this. Let us demand that the board of this evil corporation have their heads put on pikes as a warning to others.
Monday, 26 January 2015
In Defence of Tony Abbott
This Australia Day, what could be more patriotic than coming out in defence of our glorious prime minister Tony Abbott, captain of Tame Team Australia?
Tony Abbott is a national embarrassment and the worst prime minister, by a long margin, I have had to endure in my entire life. Almost certainly he is Australia's worst prime minister ever.
I've heard it said that he combines the intelligence of George W Bush with the compassion of Margaret Thatcher. I suppose this statement was intended as an insult, but it's actually flattery since he is inferior to both of his role models in these respects.
He is a pathological liar. He is sufficiently bereft of empathy that I suggest he would meet the clinical definition of a psychopath. He doesn't think things through, believing he can make things up on the spot, yet he can't think on his feet either. He is cowardly and violent; an archetypal bully. He is spiteful. He panics easily. He is not suited to wielding any sort of power.
The media banged on and on about Julia Gillard's "lie" (which amounted to a tedious hair-splitting argument about whether an Emissions Trading Scheme counted as a Tax or not). They don't do this about Abbott. This is partly down to media bias, but also because Abbott has told so many lies it's difficult to know where to even begin. If you try to highlight just a few lies, you end up ignoring, and by implication accepting, scores of other equally bad examples of dishonesty. People have had to resort to listing his lies and the lists run into the hundreds. Check out Tracking Abbotts Wreckage; you will notice that the page is very slow to load, presumably because of its length.
His beliefs, in so far as you can tell what they are through the screen of lies and contradictions, are a mixture of the bizarre and frightening. When someone considers it an important reform to bring back knighthoods, or spend $250m putting chaplains in state schools, you really have to wonder what century they think they're living in.
For a while I was wondering whether there was more to his actions than met the eye; that beneath a veneer of jaw-dropping incompetence there was some deep and cunning scheme afoot. After all, it's not a trivial task to become Prime Minister. You surely have to a reasonably high level of brain power to be able to plot and scheme your way right to the top.
For instance, putting refugees in (what amounts to) death camps is totally evil and the sort of thing that should have those responsible up before an international tribunal, charged with crimes against humanity. Even if you had no morals, it's still undesirable in that it's an extremely expensive and inefficient option, which also breaches international law and therefore weakens your hand internationally.
Yet there are logical reasons why an intelligent (if totally unscrupulous) person might still go down this path. It's Fascism 101; if you demonise a group, you can blame them for any of society's problems, and you can appear strong - even heroic - by taking tough action against them. The benefits in this regard might well outweigh the costs.
Similarly, smashing up a government enterprise or destroying an industry might also be a rational decision if your mates can loot the wreckage.
However, the damage being done is too wide-spread for that, and the only possible scheme that seems compatible with his actions is if he were an anarchist/libertarian (or possibly even an agent of some rival power), who is selflessly sacrificing his image to destroy the state apparatus, bring the country to its knees, and tarnish forever the office of prime minister. But this doesn't seem likely; especially the self-sacrificing part.
So when am I going to get on with defending him?
Actually, I did a Tony Abbott here; that is to say, I lied. At least, I'm not going to try to find some creditable aspect of his personality that has hitherto been overlooked, and claim that as a consequence we should think less badly of him. While he may indeed have some positive characteristics (although discovering them would be like panning for gold in a sewage pond in the middle of summer), I am going to make a different point:
By concentrating on how loathsome Tony Abbott is, we run the serious risk of underestimating how bad the rest of his government is.
The destructive and idiotic policies he is trying to implement are in the main part Coalition policies. Abbott is obviously just a tool; a puppet, elevated to his current position by external forces. While some of his most idiotic ideas seem to be of his own making, he is in general following a script laid down by others.
And in this respect, he is typical of the current cabinet. Hearing Joe Hockey speak about how he finds windmills "utterly offensive" and "a blight on the landscape" brought this home to me. Hockey doesn't strike me having any aesthetic sensibilities at all and in reality probably wouldn't even notice a wind farm if he were chauffeured through the middle of one every day. He is obviously just regurgitating words put into his mouth by others.
If, as seems likely, Abbott gets a knife in the back some time soon, we should not be relieved that we have exorcised this demon. Whoever replaces him might quite easily be worse.
Imagine if we got someone who was a little bit cunning; smart enough to hide their intentions a little better and who was able to swallow their pride enough to negotiate with others.
Imagine if Abbott had been able to get Jacqui Lambie on side - and surely it would not be an onerous task for a warmonger to get an ex-military cop on side - he would not now be crippled by a hostile senate and he could get even more nasty legislation passed. In fact, imagine if he'd been able to negotiate with Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor (both closer in ideology to the Coalition than Labor) after the previous election - he could have formed government in 2010.
To make an analogy with the Game of Thrones; if Abbott were Joffrey, Scott Morrison would be Ramsay Bolton and Malcolm Turnbull would be Lord Baelish. Julie Bishop might be Cersei. [edit: I was also going to link Peter Dutton to Hordor, but Hordor was strong, good-natured and fulfilled a useful role.]
Swapping one of these for another is hardly cause for celebration.
I've heard it said that they wouldn't dare to replace Abbott after all of outrage they confected when Rudd was "knifed" by Gillard. And especially not by Bishop, who shares many of Gillard's characteristics (unmarried woman, no children, ex-lawyer, etc.) that the media attacked so fiercely. Sympathetic to the coalition though they are, the media wouldn't stand for it.
Like Hell they wouldn't!
They'd do a 180 degree turn so fast that the fillings would fly out of their teeth.
I can just see the Murdoch media now: Abbott would be portrayed as stepping aside gracefully in a statesman-like manner, and Bishop will reluctantly take the helm. It will all be because he was unable to sell his wonderful policies to the ignorant proles who don't understand what's good for them. He will be a martyr. Bishop will be a hero. The word "knifing" will never be uttered. If Rudd and Gillard are mentioned at all, it will only be to contrast the "civilised" and "adult" behaviour of the coalition to the "shambolic" and "vindictive" way the ALP handled a similar situation.
And of course, you'll see the media become ardent feminists overnight; at least in so far as this allows any criticism of Bishop to be written off as a misogynistic attack.
The beauty of the situation, at least from the point of view of the Coalition, is that those in the ALP have virtually no way to use this "knifing" to their advantage. Since the ALP defended Gillard in this same situation, they can't turn around and attack Bishop without having their own words turned against them. They can rail against media double standards of course, but that can simply be dismissed with the remark: "they would say that, wouldn't they".
Anyway, I'm not any good at predicting these things, but I'd be surprised if Abbott doesn't feel the cold steel between his shoulder blades within the next few months. And my money would be on Bishop wielding the knife.
If this happens, don't expect things to get any better; Abbott is merely the symptom, and not the disease.
Tony Abbott is a national embarrassment and the worst prime minister, by a long margin, I have had to endure in my entire life. Almost certainly he is Australia's worst prime minister ever.
I've heard it said that he combines the intelligence of George W Bush with the compassion of Margaret Thatcher. I suppose this statement was intended as an insult, but it's actually flattery since he is inferior to both of his role models in these respects.
He is a pathological liar. He is sufficiently bereft of empathy that I suggest he would meet the clinical definition of a psychopath. He doesn't think things through, believing he can make things up on the spot, yet he can't think on his feet either. He is cowardly and violent; an archetypal bully. He is spiteful. He panics easily. He is not suited to wielding any sort of power.
The media banged on and on about Julia Gillard's "lie" (which amounted to a tedious hair-splitting argument about whether an Emissions Trading Scheme counted as a Tax or not). They don't do this about Abbott. This is partly down to media bias, but also because Abbott has told so many lies it's difficult to know where to even begin. If you try to highlight just a few lies, you end up ignoring, and by implication accepting, scores of other equally bad examples of dishonesty. People have had to resort to listing his lies and the lists run into the hundreds. Check out Tracking Abbotts Wreckage; you will notice that the page is very slow to load, presumably because of its length.
His beliefs, in so far as you can tell what they are through the screen of lies and contradictions, are a mixture of the bizarre and frightening. When someone considers it an important reform to bring back knighthoods, or spend $250m putting chaplains in state schools, you really have to wonder what century they think they're living in.
For a while I was wondering whether there was more to his actions than met the eye; that beneath a veneer of jaw-dropping incompetence there was some deep and cunning scheme afoot. After all, it's not a trivial task to become Prime Minister. You surely have to a reasonably high level of brain power to be able to plot and scheme your way right to the top.
For instance, putting refugees in (what amounts to) death camps is totally evil and the sort of thing that should have those responsible up before an international tribunal, charged with crimes against humanity. Even if you had no morals, it's still undesirable in that it's an extremely expensive and inefficient option, which also breaches international law and therefore weakens your hand internationally.
Yet there are logical reasons why an intelligent (if totally unscrupulous) person might still go down this path. It's Fascism 101; if you demonise a group, you can blame them for any of society's problems, and you can appear strong - even heroic - by taking tough action against them. The benefits in this regard might well outweigh the costs.
Similarly, smashing up a government enterprise or destroying an industry might also be a rational decision if your mates can loot the wreckage.
However, the damage being done is too wide-spread for that, and the only possible scheme that seems compatible with his actions is if he were an anarchist/libertarian (or possibly even an agent of some rival power), who is selflessly sacrificing his image to destroy the state apparatus, bring the country to its knees, and tarnish forever the office of prime minister. But this doesn't seem likely; especially the self-sacrificing part.
So when am I going to get on with defending him?
Actually, I did a Tony Abbott here; that is to say, I lied. At least, I'm not going to try to find some creditable aspect of his personality that has hitherto been overlooked, and claim that as a consequence we should think less badly of him. While he may indeed have some positive characteristics (although discovering them would be like panning for gold in a sewage pond in the middle of summer), I am going to make a different point:
By concentrating on how loathsome Tony Abbott is, we run the serious risk of underestimating how bad the rest of his government is.
The destructive and idiotic policies he is trying to implement are in the main part Coalition policies. Abbott is obviously just a tool; a puppet, elevated to his current position by external forces. While some of his most idiotic ideas seem to be of his own making, he is in general following a script laid down by others.
And in this respect, he is typical of the current cabinet. Hearing Joe Hockey speak about how he finds windmills "utterly offensive" and "a blight on the landscape" brought this home to me. Hockey doesn't strike me having any aesthetic sensibilities at all and in reality probably wouldn't even notice a wind farm if he were chauffeured through the middle of one every day. He is obviously just regurgitating words put into his mouth by others.
If, as seems likely, Abbott gets a knife in the back some time soon, we should not be relieved that we have exorcised this demon. Whoever replaces him might quite easily be worse.
Imagine if we got someone who was a little bit cunning; smart enough to hide their intentions a little better and who was able to swallow their pride enough to negotiate with others.
Imagine if Abbott had been able to get Jacqui Lambie on side - and surely it would not be an onerous task for a warmonger to get an ex-military cop on side - he would not now be crippled by a hostile senate and he could get even more nasty legislation passed. In fact, imagine if he'd been able to negotiate with Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor (both closer in ideology to the Coalition than Labor) after the previous election - he could have formed government in 2010.
To make an analogy with the Game of Thrones; if Abbott were Joffrey, Scott Morrison would be Ramsay Bolton and Malcolm Turnbull would be Lord Baelish. Julie Bishop might be Cersei. [edit: I was also going to link Peter Dutton to Hordor, but Hordor was strong, good-natured and fulfilled a useful role.]
Swapping one of these for another is hardly cause for celebration.
I've heard it said that they wouldn't dare to replace Abbott after all of outrage they confected when Rudd was "knifed" by Gillard. And especially not by Bishop, who shares many of Gillard's characteristics (unmarried woman, no children, ex-lawyer, etc.) that the media attacked so fiercely. Sympathetic to the coalition though they are, the media wouldn't stand for it.
Like Hell they wouldn't!
They'd do a 180 degree turn so fast that the fillings would fly out of their teeth.
I can just see the Murdoch media now: Abbott would be portrayed as stepping aside gracefully in a statesman-like manner, and Bishop will reluctantly take the helm. It will all be because he was unable to sell his wonderful policies to the ignorant proles who don't understand what's good for them. He will be a martyr. Bishop will be a hero. The word "knifing" will never be uttered. If Rudd and Gillard are mentioned at all, it will only be to contrast the "civilised" and "adult" behaviour of the coalition to the "shambolic" and "vindictive" way the ALP handled a similar situation.
And of course, you'll see the media become ardent feminists overnight; at least in so far as this allows any criticism of Bishop to be written off as a misogynistic attack.
The beauty of the situation, at least from the point of view of the Coalition, is that those in the ALP have virtually no way to use this "knifing" to their advantage. Since the ALP defended Gillard in this same situation, they can't turn around and attack Bishop without having their own words turned against them. They can rail against media double standards of course, but that can simply be dismissed with the remark: "they would say that, wouldn't they".
Anyway, I'm not any good at predicting these things, but I'd be surprised if Abbott doesn't feel the cold steel between his shoulder blades within the next few months. And my money would be on Bishop wielding the knife.
If this happens, don't expect things to get any better; Abbott is merely the symptom, and not the disease.
Sunday, 21 September 2014
Terrorists STILL Don't Exist
The same people who brought you "weapons of mass destruction" and Dr Haneef, have done it again. An extraordinary attack on the Muslim community by the media, culminating in theatrical raids by hundreds of police officers.
Do not say that it is an insane overreaction; that is being too generous, because it implies that there was something to react to in the first place.
Every bit of this is based on outright lies. There are no terrorists, no bombs, no plots, nothing. Some innocent people have been arrested in order to further a political agenda.
Clearly, as an individual with no contacts in the security apparatus, I can't know this for sure. But I can't know for sure that you don't have a dragon living in your garage either, and one is as likely as the other. I'll bet you any money that no one arrested was guilty of anything worse than a parking fine, and probably not even that.
That the Murdoch/Abbott coalition is going down this Fascist* path is no surprise, but what is a surprise is that the Labor party and a large chunk of its supporters are goose-stepping along behind them.
[* = I don't user this term lightly, but it legitimately describes the situation.]
What is the point in going along with Murdoch's lies (and anyone in politics must know that this is all a bunch of lies)? You can't appease him; he will always be your enemy and he will always attack you whatever you do. You can't win by out-nastying the nasties (as Rudd tried to do on refugees), because the Coalition will always be perceived to be tougher in this area.
I hear people saying that Shorten is doing the right thing by maintaining a small target and giving Abbott enough rope to hang himself with. "Soon Abbott will go too far", they say. I call bullshit on this.
The ALP have been saying the same thing ever since Abbott became Leader of the Opposition in December 2009. "He's so obviously a brain-dead thug that soon he will do something so stupid that even Murdoch won't be able cover for him," was the theory.
Meanwhile, over the subsequent five years, Abbott has made disastrous blunder after disastrous blunder. Rarely has anyone called him on it, and always the media have covered things up or spun them to his advantage. If there was any theoretical line which could have been described a "going too far", he has long ago crossed it.
To complete the metaphor; Abbott has, with the aid of Murdoch, used the rope he was given to hog-tie the ALP.
You need to use different tactics because what you are doing at the moment isn't working.
The ALP only has a 1% lead in the polls at the moment. Given the absolute train-wreck the Murdoch/Abbott government has become, this should be at least 10%; even factoring in the mass of disengaged (and outright knuckle-headed) voters.
And then there is this insanity about going back to war in Iraq.
The Vietnam War spelled out in agonising detail just how stupid and counter productive it was to go around invading other countries. Do I need to point out the extraordinary human, environmental, financial and even political cost of this disaster? The cost was unbelievable and the benefits none.
You would have thought people would have learned from this, yet they happily marched off to repeat exactly the same mistake in Iraq (with, if anything, even worse motives and not even any clear idea of what they hoped to achieve).
The same lesson was therefore repeated; this time with the aid of glove puppets and slowly spelled out in words of one syllable.
If you don't get by now that it was a really really bad idea, you cannot be thinking at even a kindergarten level. To repeat this mistake before the blood is even dry from last time is something I find difficult to comprehend.
Please, could we just dial the idiocy back down to 11?
Do not say that it is an insane overreaction; that is being too generous, because it implies that there was something to react to in the first place.
Every bit of this is based on outright lies. There are no terrorists, no bombs, no plots, nothing. Some innocent people have been arrested in order to further a political agenda.
Clearly, as an individual with no contacts in the security apparatus, I can't know this for sure. But I can't know for sure that you don't have a dragon living in your garage either, and one is as likely as the other. I'll bet you any money that no one arrested was guilty of anything worse than a parking fine, and probably not even that.
That the Murdoch/Abbott coalition is going down this Fascist* path is no surprise, but what is a surprise is that the Labor party and a large chunk of its supporters are goose-stepping along behind them.
[* = I don't user this term lightly, but it legitimately describes the situation.]
What is the point in going along with Murdoch's lies (and anyone in politics must know that this is all a bunch of lies)? You can't appease him; he will always be your enemy and he will always attack you whatever you do. You can't win by out-nastying the nasties (as Rudd tried to do on refugees), because the Coalition will always be perceived to be tougher in this area.
I hear people saying that Shorten is doing the right thing by maintaining a small target and giving Abbott enough rope to hang himself with. "Soon Abbott will go too far", they say. I call bullshit on this.
The ALP have been saying the same thing ever since Abbott became Leader of the Opposition in December 2009. "He's so obviously a brain-dead thug that soon he will do something so stupid that even Murdoch won't be able cover for him," was the theory.
Meanwhile, over the subsequent five years, Abbott has made disastrous blunder after disastrous blunder. Rarely has anyone called him on it, and always the media have covered things up or spun them to his advantage. If there was any theoretical line which could have been described a "going too far", he has long ago crossed it.
To complete the metaphor; Abbott has, with the aid of Murdoch, used the rope he was given to hog-tie the ALP.
You need to use different tactics because what you are doing at the moment isn't working.
The ALP only has a 1% lead in the polls at the moment. Given the absolute train-wreck the Murdoch/Abbott government has become, this should be at least 10%; even factoring in the mass of disengaged (and outright knuckle-headed) voters.
And then there is this insanity about going back to war in Iraq.
The Vietnam War spelled out in agonising detail just how stupid and counter productive it was to go around invading other countries. Do I need to point out the extraordinary human, environmental, financial and even political cost of this disaster? The cost was unbelievable and the benefits none.
You would have thought people would have learned from this, yet they happily marched off to repeat exactly the same mistake in Iraq (with, if anything, even worse motives and not even any clear idea of what they hoped to achieve).
The same lesson was therefore repeated; this time with the aid of glove puppets and slowly spelled out in words of one syllable.
If you don't get by now that it was a really really bad idea, you cannot be thinking at even a kindergarten level. To repeat this mistake before the blood is even dry from last time is something I find difficult to comprehend.
Please, could we just dial the idiocy back down to 11?
Thursday, 11 September 2014
Terrorists Don't Exist
Let's qualify that by saying that we're talking about Australia here. Other places, maybe there are some around, but over here a terrorist attack is only marginally more likely than getting gored by a unicorn.
Consider this. The last terrorist attack in Australia was the Sydney Hilton bombing outside the venue of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting. This happened in 1978. Let us discount the theory that the bomb was planted by security forces, and assume that it was in fact a deliberate terrorist attack (by people unknown and for motives that are still a mystery).
That was a long time ago. Nearly half* of the people in Australia were not even born when this happened, yet if those in power were truly concerned about terror attacks, you would think they would do their utmost to ensure that subsequent conferences of this type were secure.
[* = median age of the Australian population is 37 years as per the last census and the event happened 36 years ago.]
Yet in 2007 the Chaser team easily managed to infiltrate the APEC summit in Sydney, with one guy dressed as Osama bin Laden, and all wearing fake passes, with printed on them in red "It's pretty obvious this is not a real pass". We're talking here about an economic summit with representatives of 21 nations, including even G W Bush, being present. The mind boggles; you'd have better security at a school social.
To me this was a real smoking gun. It shows that those in charge of our security are not even slightly interested in security. They know it's just a farce.
OK, if you've been paying attention, you'll know all this already.
But some people who must realise this (and I am talking about the majority of the federal ALP) are not pulling their weight in countering the deluge of Abbott-Murdoch hysteria that's yet again flooding the media.
So let me offer some advice for you to ignore.
If legislation is proposed for the purposes of countering terrorism, don't say: "This legislation is open to being abused" - that is conceding too much. You can assume that the purpose of the legislation was only to allow the abuses to occur.
We are not talking about side-effects of an otherwise worthwhile objective, we are talking about straight-out lying to justify something that is straight-out unacceptable.
Similarly, do not criticise such legislation as being ineffective in achieving its stated goal (and I admit that I have been guilty of this). If you say "That's silly, a terrorist could easily get around it by doing X", you have already been tricked.
When we are debating what a "terrorist" would or would not do, we are implicitly admitting that terrorists a) actually exist and b) are worth worrying about. We are letting the opponent set the terms of the debate; which means we have conceded ground and are half-way to losing before we've even started.
Moreover saying this sort of thing carries the risk that those in power will say "OK, then we'll ban X too". This is what happened when some genius realised that the explosive TATP could be manufactured from relatively innocuous liquid ingredients, and led to the absolutely retarded ban on taking liquids on board aircraft. The fact that actually manufacturing the simple chemical TATP (let alone anything more sophisticated) on board an aircraft is ludicrously impractical* didn't seem to concern anyone.
[* = The owner of that site, Nick B Possum (no relation) tends to venture more deeply into the land of conspiracy theories than me, however as far as I have been able to verify, what he writes on this particular subject is technically accurate.]
If someone uses the "T" word to justify anything, the onus is on them to prove there is a problem that needs to be solved. And they won't be able to do it because there isn't one. If they say "there is a real threat, but we can't tell you for security reasons", they are asking you to take the words of a known liar, with a vested interest, on trust alone. This should be rejected as a gross insult to the intelligence.
Let's call this nonsense out for the bullshit it is.
Consider this. The last terrorist attack in Australia was the Sydney Hilton bombing outside the venue of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting. This happened in 1978. Let us discount the theory that the bomb was planted by security forces, and assume that it was in fact a deliberate terrorist attack (by people unknown and for motives that are still a mystery).
That was a long time ago. Nearly half* of the people in Australia were not even born when this happened, yet if those in power were truly concerned about terror attacks, you would think they would do their utmost to ensure that subsequent conferences of this type were secure.
[* = median age of the Australian population is 37 years as per the last census and the event happened 36 years ago.]
Yet in 2007 the Chaser team easily managed to infiltrate the APEC summit in Sydney, with one guy dressed as Osama bin Laden, and all wearing fake passes, with printed on them in red "It's pretty obvious this is not a real pass". We're talking here about an economic summit with representatives of 21 nations, including even G W Bush, being present. The mind boggles; you'd have better security at a school social.
To me this was a real smoking gun. It shows that those in charge of our security are not even slightly interested in security. They know it's just a farce.
OK, if you've been paying attention, you'll know all this already.
But some people who must realise this (and I am talking about the majority of the federal ALP) are not pulling their weight in countering the deluge of Abbott-Murdoch hysteria that's yet again flooding the media.
So let me offer some advice for you to ignore.
If legislation is proposed for the purposes of countering terrorism, don't say: "This legislation is open to being abused" - that is conceding too much. You can assume that the purpose of the legislation was only to allow the abuses to occur.
We are not talking about side-effects of an otherwise worthwhile objective, we are talking about straight-out lying to justify something that is straight-out unacceptable.
Similarly, do not criticise such legislation as being ineffective in achieving its stated goal (and I admit that I have been guilty of this). If you say "That's silly, a terrorist could easily get around it by doing X", you have already been tricked.
When we are debating what a "terrorist" would or would not do, we are implicitly admitting that terrorists a) actually exist and b) are worth worrying about. We are letting the opponent set the terms of the debate; which means we have conceded ground and are half-way to losing before we've even started.
Moreover saying this sort of thing carries the risk that those in power will say "OK, then we'll ban X too". This is what happened when some genius realised that the explosive TATP could be manufactured from relatively innocuous liquid ingredients, and led to the absolutely retarded ban on taking liquids on board aircraft. The fact that actually manufacturing the simple chemical TATP (let alone anything more sophisticated) on board an aircraft is ludicrously impractical* didn't seem to concern anyone.
[* = The owner of that site, Nick B Possum (no relation) tends to venture more deeply into the land of conspiracy theories than me, however as far as I have been able to verify, what he writes on this particular subject is technically accurate.]
If someone uses the "T" word to justify anything, the onus is on them to prove there is a problem that needs to be solved. And they won't be able to do it because there isn't one. If they say "there is a real threat, but we can't tell you for security reasons", they are asking you to take the words of a known liar, with a vested interest, on trust alone. This should be rejected as a gross insult to the intelligence.
Let's call this nonsense out for the bullshit it is.
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