My blog is currently not blocked by the Great Firewall of China, according to this test. How disappointing. I will be sure in future to say more subversive things about Falun Gong, Taiwan, Tibet and the Chinese government’s many, many human rights abuses.
Archive for the ‘politics’ Category
Free to be annoying
15 Jul 2008The Federal Court ruled that the NSW Government’s ban on annoying World Youth Day pilgrims was invalid in law.
Justices French, Branson and Stone, said the laws “should not be interpreted as conferring powers that are repugnant to fundamental rights and freedoms at common law in the absence of clear authority from Parliament”.
It is, unfortunately, too late to order one of these from the US.
Where is Hetty?
9 Jul 2008In 2001 and 2002, anti-child-abuse campaigner Hetty Johnston’s shrill denunciations and savvy media manipulation were instrumental in the resignation of Governor General Peter Hollingworth, over claims he covered up and mishandled complaints of sexual abuse in the Anglican Church.
In recent months, Johnston has done the rounds of media interviews and opinion pieces sticking the boot into Bill Henson’s photographs of nude teenagers. She has been all over the media calling for tougher sentencing of kiddie fiddlers and child pornographers.
Last night, Hetty was rabble rousing at a community lynch mob over convicted paedo Dennis Ferguson.
However, since Lateline two nights ago revealed that Catholic Cardinal George Pell covered up and mishandled complaints of sexual abuse in his church (gotta love the timing), Hetty has uttered not a peep on the subject.
Now why would that be?
Shouting at the screen
30 May 2008Contemplating the seeming inevitability of a Tory government after the next UK general election, Charlie Brooker writes:
Clearly some kind of self-defence is in order, which is why I’ve already started mentally withdrawing from the real world. It’s easy: all you have to do is imagine that the whole of life itself is just a low-budget daytime TV show, one you’re watching uninterestedly from the sofa with one eye while reading a magazine with the other.
This aptly describes the way I felt pretty much throughout the Howard years. Occasionally I’d get a bit worked up and shout at the screen - this blog is testament - but most of the time it was numb disengagement and keeping my mind on other things.
Following Australia’s transition to Ruddocracy, right-wing pundits pondered what the chattering classes would have to whinge about without their number-one hate figure. And the relatively infrequent postings on this blog in the past six months demonstrate the terrifying reality…
There just haven’t been that many things to get angry about.But that’s changing.
New South Wales Labor daily grows more arrogant, out of touch and incompetent while the state opposition flounders. Big Kev and pals have very poorly handled the transition from symbolic to practical. Their well-intentioned policy measures have been rife with unintended consequences. They’ve gone to jelly on petrol pricing when most punters accept the government can only tinker at the margins. The federal opposition has gone from ineffectual to unconscionable. The commercial media turns more crass, tabloid and trivial by the hour.
I’ve had a bit of a nap. It was a nice dream, but now it’s over and I’m grumpy as all hell.
For fuck’s sake, enough already
27 May 2008Two stories that just won’t die: petrol taxes and free publicity for a stupid movie.
Has society really sunk so low that the product placements in a movie for Cosmo-reading twits are news?
And well done to Brendan Nelson for keeping the petrol tax non-story alive for so long. Fuck our future for an opinion poll blip, why don’t you? But you have to admire the politics. By promising to do something years into the future, which will have no noticeable effect if it ever happens, he forces the Government to do something, or look like they don’t care about the poor struggling masses.
Petrol taxes are TOO LOW, you moron. Until the price reflects the scarcity of the resource and the environmental damage it causes, people have no incentive to stop using it. But try selling that to the battlers.
Bush to Mugabe: rigging elections is bad
18 Apr 2008US President George W Bush has criticised Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe for not releasing the results of last month’s election.
” . . . you can’t have elections unless you’re willing to put the results out. What kind of election is it if you not let the will of the people be known?” Bush told reporters after a White House meeting with British PM Gordon Brown.
George W should perhaps have consulted his diaries for 7 November 2000, or thereabouts, before making statements of this kind.
But I suppose, it makes sense. George W rigs elections, nobbles the media, spies on his citizens, imprisons and tortures people without trial, abuses human rights and keeps poor black people in third-world conditions while ruining the economy to corruptly enrich a cadre of cronies and insiders, blaming all the country’s ills on a nebulous foreign bogeyman.
Whereas Mugabe . . . ?
Bob Carr: genius
19 Mar 2008Former NSW premier Bob Carr was often criticised for being too cosy with business. Especially with the development of large infrastructure projects such as the Sydney Airport railway line, Cross-City Tunnel and Lane Cove Tunnel, many believe Carr ignored the interests of citizens to get better deals for his mates in construction and investment banking.
However, recent events have revealed Carr’s true nature: a socialist subversive, intent on swindling the corporate fat cats for the benefit of the good people of New South Wales.
What all these projects have in common, the latest being the Lane Cove Tunnel, was that once these projects failed to achieve their ridiculously inflated income projections, the investors wrote off the billions they spent or sold off their stakes at a drastically reduced price.
This was all a deliberate strategy on Carr’s part. He was willing to wear the endless criticisms of being a capitalist stooge and big-business crony, because deep down he knew that within a few years, he would effectively have given the citizens of this great state a beautiful gift: free roads and railways!
What better way to build infrastructure than to con a bunch of investment bank money men, lured by false and unachievable promises of revenue, into paying for it?
Cost to taxpayer: zip. Cost to business: who cares?
It’s no wonder Bob went straight from Sussex St to Macquarie Bank. After the people of NSW helped themselves to such an enormous free dinner, Bob’s going to have to wash a lot of dishes to make up for it.
Slightly faster broadband
3 Mar 2008Minister for Broadband Stephen Conroy yesterday delivered the exciting news that the government’s planned $4.7 billion broadband network would deliver speeds “up to 100 times faster than what is currently available”. Sounds great!
It will achieve this by running fibre-optic connections to the telecommunications pillar mushrooms on street corners then using VDSL (very fast digital something something else) to deliver speeds of up to 25Mbps to homes.
Call me a pedant if you must, but that’s not 100 times faster than what’s currently available. I may be decaf soy latte drinking inner city elite, but I get around 19Mbps using ADSL2 and living about a kilometre from my phone exchange. I’m no maths genius, but I’m pretty sure 25Mbps is not 100 times faster than 19Mpbs. In fact I’d say it something closer to 1.3 times faster.
But Senator Conroy’s calculation is based on the claim that “most broadband users currently receive only 256 kilobits per second”. Which is
- A lie - statistics more than a year old show two-thirds of broadband users on faster than 256Kbps and
- A damning criticism of how Conroy’s predecessors let Telstra and the rest of the internet industry deliberately retard broadband access and make obscene profits.
Seems like when it comes to technology, the new federal government is as pompous and incompetent as the last.
Barack the Builder - can we fix it?
8 Feb 2008During the recent Australian federal election campaign, Herald columnist Annabel Crabb lamented that both party leaders were helping police with their inquiries into the death of political oratory.
I may the last person in the world to have noticed, but the same can not be said for the US elections. A prime example is Barack Obama’s rousing words in New Hampshire last month . . .
We know the battle ahead will be long. But always remember that, no matter what obstacles stand in our way, nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for change.
We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics. And they will only grow louder and more dissonant in the weeks and months to come.
We’ve been asked to pause for a reality check. We’ve been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.
For when we have faced down impossible odds, when we’ve been told we’re not ready or that we shouldn’t try or that we can’t, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can. Yes, we can. Yes, we can.
It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation: Yes, we can.
It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail towards freedom through the darkest of nights: Yes, we can.
It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness: Yes, we can.
It was the call of workers who organized, women who reached for the ballot, a president who chose the moon as our new frontier, and a king who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the promised land: Yes, we can, to justice and equality.
Yes, we can, to opportunity and prosperity. Yes, we can heal this nation. Yes, we can repair this world. Yes, we can.
And so, tomorrow, as we take the campaign south and west, as we learn that the struggles of the textile workers in Spartanburg are not so different than the plight of the dishwasher in Las Vegas, that the hopes of the little girl who goes to the crumbling school in Dillon are the same as the dreams of the boy who learns on the streets of L.A., we will remember that there is something happening in America, that we are not as divided as our politics suggest, that we are one people, we are one nation.
And, together, we will begin the next great chapter in the American story, with three words that will ring from coast to coast, from sea to shining sea: Yes, we can.
Or if you have a short attention span, you can watch the Black Eyed Peas’ celebrity-studded music video of the speech. No, for real. And while you’re at it, read the 2,500-odd illiterate, pigheaded, uneducated, self-important ejaculations from the American public in the comments section. Viva Web 2.0!
