President of Real America

Yes, Virginians you may not be in the real part, "Jon Stewart Clarifies Palin Remarks, Expands To 'F%ck All Y'All'". America seems to have gone completely mental. The second video covers the current lunacy including the pro and anti American members of congress and the endorsement of Colin Powell, a black militant backing Obama, what a surprise.

Antimetabole

Bill Clinton had an interesting one recently in his Democratic convention speech: "People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power."

Save us China

I was in Victoria when the ETS for Australia was announced (well the discussion papers). It's fairly funny, that replacing the world's worst plants even with other coal plants (Hazelwood is the world's worst), with Chineese brown coal plant technology, would reduce emissions by 30% to 40% (by just drying out the brown coal). It's still very poluting but it just shows how far behind Australia is. This has lead to greater compensation to Victorian polluters (which is just mad). At the same time Queensland is creating another coal port because we can't export the carbon fast enough.

The exclusions were annoying (aluminium, cement and some types of steel). Cement is annoying (5% of all CO2 apparently) as there exists green alternative technologies. The time is to invest not compensate.

Bankrupt

"And now, we're [Americans are] the most religious nation on earth - that's why we kill so easily. We're sending people to heaven. And because we are now terribly, terribly religious in a sense that no proper American ever was when I was young - I was in the Second World War." - Gore Vidal.

And they are bankrupt in the finacial sense as well due to Iraq (and other causes of course). The speaker also follows a line I've seen often where the war has been fought without enough commitment from the government (i.e. decreasing taxes instead of increasing them, hiring fighters instead of drafting, etc.). One rather shocking statistic was that 48 percent of returning troops will be disabled in some way - maybe that's because more a living than dying but it's still quite an amazing number - but it means "...we've created just for the disabled in this war in the last five years, a gap equal to the gap that we created over decades in the social security system...It's an order of magnitude worse than the Vietnam War."

Sorry

Maybe I'm in leftist, socialist heaven here but it does seem that most people were following the apology to the stolen generations. People were sitting in their cars listening to it rather than going to work. I liked the focus on how saying sorry is not about making you feel better it's about the person (or people in this case) you're saying sorry to and that you have to take the good with the bad about your country and make amends. There is also a sense that some sort of action will take place; with both sides of parliament working together. A lot of the Howard policies were designed as wedges to divide, so while I'm very skeptical, I'm a little bit hopeful that some inclusive politics will occur.

There were a couple of moments I thought worth mentioning from Rudd's speech:

After living in Alice Springs for a "few years", government policy changed and the young girl was handed over to the missions.

"The kids were simply told to line up in three lines ... those on the left were told they had become Catholics, those in the middle, Methodist and those on the right, Church of England," Mr Rudd said.

"That's how the complex questions of post-reformation theology were resolved in the Australian outback in the 1930s.

"It was as crude as that."

Mr Rudd said should there still be doubts, the historical record showed that between 1910 and 1970, between 10 and 30 per cent of indigenous children were forcibly taken from their mothers and fathers.

"As a result up to 50,000 children were forcibly taken from their families," he said.

Mr Rudd said one of the most notorious examples of this approach came from the Northern Territory Protector of Natives, who had stated: "Generally by the fifth and invariably by the sixth generation all native characteristics of the Australian Aborigine are eradicated. The problem of our half castes... will quickly be eliminated by the complete disappearance of the black race and the swift submergence of their progeny in the white."

"The 1970s is not exactly a point in remote antiquity," he said.

"There are still serving members in this parliament who were first elected to this place in the early 1970s.

It's been a long time, I remember Paul Keating's Redfern Park speech which was voted the number 3 speech after Martin Luther King and Jesus.

The Web is to Blame

It is the year 2000, we were promised flying cars.

While putting YouTube links I also appreciated, U2 & Green Day - The Saints are Coming.

Sheeple

Happy sheep (mp3) "There are more than 110-million sheep in Australia. Almost 3-and-a-half million are exported overseas every year. In a bid to allay public concern about sheep welfare, a group of CSIRO scientists in NSW is working on a rather unusual project.

They're trying to work out how to tell if a sheep is happy."

Firstly, they have been able to train sheep to press a lever when they were discontent and they also found that sheep have a sense of time.

Now to the point, when sheep are in a paddock without shade they will just be distributed throughout the paddock. However, if they are hot (discontent) and there are trees they will obviously move to the shade. So it's difficult to tell the difference between a discontent sheep that has no other option or a content sheep. If there is an alternative and they are discontent then they will move to the better alternative.

How to Win Against Terrorists? Don't Fight a War

Fighting terrorism with justice "What is remarkable is how American policy-makers have refused to learn from the historical experiences of Great Britain, a country that faced terror threats for decades in Northern Ireland, from no surrender zealots motivated by religious and nationalist fervor. In the case of the IRA, several hundred terrorists were organized after 1978 into secret cells that could wage terror pretty much indefinitely. The IRA was embedded within a global terror network that included Marxist guerrillas in South America, ETA in Spain and foreign governments, such as Libya. Not so different from al Qaeda.

Even a passing familiarity with the history of Northern Ireland would provide us with pointers on how not to deal with Islamist terrorists. First, between 1761 and 1972 the British government passed 26 legislative acts containing features designed to combat Irish nationalists, including measures seen in the US Patriot Act such as detention without trial and the suspension of habeas corpus. In the 1970s, the war model led British security services to use harsh interrogation techniques such as hooding, subjecting suspects to loud noises, sleep deprivation, prolonged standing, slaps to the face and slow starvation of detainees. When this severe ill treatment eventually [as it always does] becomes public knowledge, it undermined the legitimacy of government counter-terror policies, and created new constituencies of sympathizers in Northern Ireland. Repressive British government policy in the 1970s-from massacre of 'Bloody Sunday' to the internment of terror suspects without trial and a 'shoot-to-kill' policy in the 1980s, opened up a wellspring of support for a militaristic and Marxist-inspired IRA, which may not have existed otherwise.

In the end, it was only in the 1980s, late 1980's, when the British government moved from a 'war on terror' model to a law enforcement model that it began to win the struggle against Irish nationalist terror groups."

A BBC article supports this: "...the most recent example happened in 1971, when the British Government introduced the internment of hundreds of republican suspects in an attempt to shut down the IRA. The tactic was abandoned four years later and is thought to have increased support for the IRA."

See previous post from 2002, "Using the American model to solve all acts of terrorism".

Irrationality

The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism "...there have been 188 separate suicide terrorist attacks between 1980 and 2001. Of these, 179, or 95%, were parts of organized, coherent campaigns, while only nine were isolated or random events. Seven separate disputes have led to suicide terrorist campaigns: the presence of American and French forces in Lebanon, Israeli occupation of West Bank and Gaza, the independence of the Tamil regions of Sri Lanka, the independence of the Kurdish region of Turkey, Russian occupation of Chechnya, Indian occupation of Kashmir, and the presence of American forces on the Saudi Arabian Peninsula."

"The bottom line is that the ferocious escalation of the pace of suicide terrorism that we have witnessed in the past several years cannot be considered irrational or even surprising. Rather, it is simply the result of the lesson that terrorists have quite reasonably learned from their experience of the previous two decades: Suicide terrorism pays."

"Perhaps most important, the close association between foreign military occupations and the growth of suicide terrorist movements in the occupied regions should give pause to those who favor solutions that involve conquering countries in order to transform their political systems. Conquering countries may disrupt terrorist operations in the short term, but it is important to recognize that occupation of more countries may well increase the number of terrorists coming at us."

Free America

Listening to the radio again (mp3 here). This time it was about Alfred McCoy's article called 'Outcast of Camp Echo: The Punishment of David Hicks' (magazine website here) with overtones of "The President Versus David Hicks" and mind control.

The second interview was with Bobby Kennedy Jr about his Rolling Stone article "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" (moby mirror). The implication is that if the result was in a country like Ukraine or Georgia then the result would've been overturned.

More Gore

A few years ago I tried to imagine what would have happened if Al Gore hadn't won the 2000 election. Well now that we're half way through his second term you can only wonder what kind of problems would've occurred if he hadn't turned solving global warming into the Apollo project of the 21st century. Although his critiques have labeled it a quagmire I guess it's better than half the world becoming so.

Update: In the comments Paul pointed to an introduction to Saturday Night Live introduction by president Gore (the direct link didn't work but this one did).

Update 2: Lawrence Lessig links to two adverts that are surely directed by Paul Verhoeven (from Robocop or Starship Troopers).

Richard Dawkins on the War

Bin Laden's victory "Whatever anyone may say about weapons of mass destruction, or about Saddam's savage brutality to his own people, the reason Bush can now get away with his war is that a sufficient number of Americans, including, apparently, Bush himself, see it as revenge for 9/11. This is worse than bizarre. It is pure racism and/or religious prejudice. Nobody has made even a faintly plausible case that Iraq had anything to do with the atrocity. It was Arabs that hit the World Trade Centre, right? So let's go and kick Arab ass. Those 9/11 terrorists were Muslims, right? And Eye-raqis are Muslims, right? That does it. We're gonna go in there and show them some hardware. Shock and awe? You bet. "

"Saddam Hussein has been a catastrophe for Iraq, but he never posed a threat outside his immediate neighbourhood. George Bush is a catastrophe for the world. And a dream for Bin Laden."

This is so dripping with vitriol. Richard Dawkins has previously written about how religion has caused so many of the world's problems and now he points out that American democracy may also be to blame.

Wrong

I was watching this thing on TV. It's sort of like a book I read that considered what the world would be like if Hitler had won the war, or Sliders or something. Interestingly, it posed the question: "What would happen if Bush won the 2000 election?". Jeez, that would just be wrong. It's lucky that Gore won.

What would he have done then? Maybe he would have moved away from politics and into IT (hasn't that taken off - Wired was so right). Maybe he'd join Apple's board. Nah, that's just ridiculous.