American bastards jailed David Hicks for five years without charge. He trained with terrorists, what should we do with those who trained them? December 30, 2007

Alleged terrorist (he was made to plead guilty if he wanted freedom, after being jailed for 5 years without charge – what bastards Americans are) David Hicks, who was no more than an enterprising adventurer tasting what the world has to offer, has been called stupid etc by the media. Remember it’s the same media that’s been wrong on climate change, Iraq, nuclear power safety, and a host of other causes they supported in their subtle ways. Oh and they’ve done absolutely nothing in protesting our terrorist legislation that makes us a parallel for Muslim countries that also flout a denial of human and legal rights of the individual.

If only more of those greedy fucking accountants who have stolen Australia’s culture of generosity and humour and replaced it with a mean, narrow and souless pursuit of the dollar – now on the point of failing (the American dollar is about to bust) – had taken off to taste the world’s diversity. We placed such expectation and responsibility on ignorant numbers creatures.

We jailed Hicks for training with terrorist, what should we do with those Americans who trained them? They were just as innocent as Hicks.

In killing Benazir Bhutto Musharaff has proved himself a dog December 28, 2007

Musharaff has proved himself the murdering dog that he is. Finally he has killed Benazir Bhutto and he’ll get away with it because he is being protected by Bush and the terrorists. America has paid him billions of dollars to maintain opposition to the terrorists who are bedded down in Pakistan’s mountains, so it behoves them to mouth support for him and his bogus democracy. Meanwhile the terrorists are unphased by the verbal campaign he has conducted against them. Al-Qaida has major bases in the rugged mountains and wants to stay there. They left Musharaf alone and he left them alone, besides assuring America he was on its side. Of course he was on his side and never had worthwhile results in tracking terrorists or ridding Pakistan of them.

Here’s a portion of an earlier post updated. Musharaff had more time than any leader supported for an alleged stand on terrorism. There has been no significant arrests or even discoveries during his time but his totalitarian attitude has prevailed against his people for the years he has been supported by America. When is American Security going to realise that to support the mealy-mouthed brutals will always be counter productive? Perhaps now. But how do average Americans change this? They don’t because they’re ruled, like Australia, by the wealthy of their country, and the wealthy want to have terrorists scaring the bejesus out of their people because that way they are easily ruled.

It’s very silly to imagine that they can rectify the Pakistan problem by attacking the mountains (that’s all it would be) with air power, because the country is even more rugged than Afghanistan and look how the West is faring there. Iraq would be a total pushover compared to Pakistan.

Robert Cornwall the irresponsible head of attorney-general’s dept should be sacked. December 26, 2007

Our top legal incompetent should be sacked. Head of the attorney-general’s department, Robert Cornall, has allowed personal angst, after criticism of the way ASIO handled the kidnapping (by them) of Sydney medical student, Izhar ul-Haque, to interfere with the way he runs his gross spying business. He should have been sacked the moment the Labor Party came to power. He is supposed to be protecting our freedoms not trying to restrict them. One of the Westminster traditions (our democracy is supposed to be based on them, along with the Constitution) there should be total separation of government, the courts and the church. That means no influence being brought against the others, for any reason at all. That makes us different from other systems (say those based on Muslim and Communist beliefs). However under the new terrorism laws ASIO thinks it can abduct and interrogate (even get the CIA to render suspects) without responsibility to our democratic process. Well, fuck them. Do we want our system to be unrecognisable if placed up against those run by the ridiculous fundamentalism of some Muslim regimes?

After Bali we know why Al will stand for presidential nomination December 24, 2007

The planet needs new climate change leaders. Bali set no emission caps and no dates.  Are our leaders (and this includes Gore) dumb or do they think we’re fucking idiots?  In your own experience have you ever dealt with a benign corporation who would spend money on greening the planet? Look closely at those who do. They give to green charities (classed as such by themselves after spending several hundred thousand to get the paperwork right, and subsequently by governments) so they can claim tax cuts. These charities take the money knowing they are not to disturb the placid media, and the students at schools where they are developing alleged green curriculum. If they do they won’t get their next bunch of money. Everyone can be seen to be doing the right thing while they don’t curb emissions or do anything remotely connected with preventing the speed of climate change.

Al Gore was surprise. Leading the American team he fought against targets or dates and threatened to break apart any international agreement. He did support a totally meaningless international agreement that was toothless, impotent and should have been greeted with hysterical laughter: “Oh Jesus, we’re not going to do anything; that’s foul humour for you. ” The media generally supported the agreement as a breakthrough. They must have kept their bub’s grade logic.

And now for the encroaching weather change and Al Gore as President of the biggest emitter. He’s about to give up the planet for power. Now do we see what the human creature values most? Do we do anything about it?

America -with desert super bases – is to stay in Iraq forever, and the mainstream media didn’t tell you December 22, 2007

For so long I tried to make a link between the US not wanting to sign up for cutting emissions and their reliance on oil. I could never make it, until now. Jim Holt in The London Review of Books (October) has helped me. He has shown readers that the United States feel they can rely on oil longer than any other country, and so establish continuing industrial dominance (you wondered why Bush was so arrogant didn’t you?) They can do this because Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves, five times the total of the United States. According to experts there may also be another 300 billion barrels of undiscovered oil. In Iraq there has only been two thousand oil wells drilled but in Texas they have over a million. See the potential there? Well if you don’t, according to Jim Holt, the US forces are sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources.

Who will finally get this oil? In the draft bill, prepared by the US for the Iraqi Congress, Iraq will cede nearly all this oil to Western companies for the next thirty years. The Iraq oil company will retain seventeen of the present eighty oil fields. The undiscovered oil fields will all go to the western companies.

Now, you might ask, how will they be protected? Is the US simply behaving in the manner of a boastful pretender. Are they, by enforcing their authority on a country that appears to be thrashing them, simply attempting to impress the rest of the planet?

No, the US is serious, and to this end are building five super bases in the deserts of Iraq, each super base capable of holding twenty thousand men. The bases are well along and far from the urban terrorists. These men will control and protect all the oil infrastructure. America is to stay in Iraq forever. And remember the mainstream media hasn’t told you.

The Queen and her relationship to her laureate of ordinary humour December 21, 2007

Poet laureate Ted Hughes is given a hollow role by the Spectator’s Phillip Hensher. In his slavish and servile tribute to Ted Hughes (and a considerable poet he was) he makes him appear a laureate of ordinary humour. The poor lad wrote to his Aunt that the Queen was fascinated by his volume Birthday Letters. Problem was he had just given it to her and she hadn’t read it. She was extremely vivacious and happy-spirited. How cliched could a poet be. No wonder Sylvia Plath topped herself. He writes: “It’s well known that Hughes’ relationship with the monarch and her family was warmer and more direct than any other laureate since Lord Tennyson’s with Queen Victoria.” Really? Why? That Hughes was dying perhaps, and she wouldn’t have to see him for too much longer. No one questions that the Queen hasn’t a bloody clue about poetry, politics, art, other cultures, or anything remotely connected with life. Aaaah, of course, racing, but has anyone seen her race, or even ride a horse at speed, or look after one of the creatures. Let’s be serious about the Queen, she hasn’t been seen to have experienced real life in any form whatsoever. And those bloody Xmas speeches. At least they’d have been better if Hughes had written them.

Australia never had a place in its culture for adventure, romance or experimenting with different ideas December 21, 2007

The evidence in the Hicks case spells the end of Australian understanding of romance, adventure, and the thrill of experimenting with new ideas. We never really did understand, for our present hollow culture is more of the cruel, bureaucratic and vengeful genre. Let’s not kid ourselves. The fading culture that we glorified came from the David Hickses and Jack Thomases of the nation who took to the sniff of war in 1914 for comradeship and adventure. It didn’t come from our imitative, educated and ambitious classes who sacrificed fun for doubtful status. Doubtful because in the swim to the top of the horrible pile it means servility to those nations we wrongfully regarded as our superiors. Look at our subsequent distorted perceptions. Menzies imagined the Queen as a romantic, sexualised image. Keating thought Menzies correct and being opportunistic working class ( which used to have a strong culture) placed his hand on her waist and was splapped on the wrist by the media. How unbelievably banal and pathetic. If she had responded in a knowing way Keating would have rogered her without hesitation, later receiving the offer of a knighthood. Keating was a bit too real for our sick bureaucratic nation.

And are we going to pay for the nasty, obsequious drivel that our department heads foist on our lazy politicians.

The Hicks case shows just how far we have deprived ourselves of our democratic rights and the rule of law. It’s not just Hicks who has to prove himself innocent of terrorist sympathies, and being a future danger, it’s all of us. Don’t think so? Just remember the environmental protesters who were arrested in the UK under such laws a few weeks ago.

And who may have beenthe role models for Hicks and Thomas in the thirties? Why, George Orwell and Arthur Koestler. They took the communist side in the Spanish civil war. Each of them were condemned to death and each were subject to a mock execution. Read terrorist for communist in that conflict. However they each saw the error of the side they had chosen and wrote revealing texts on it. Texts we still turn to for enlightenment.

My predictions on Iraqi matters were all hung out to dry December 20, 2007

Did you ever wonder why Downer and Costello beat a hasty retreat from the corridors of power? Could you ever have imagined that they would be charged over the AWB’s kickback scam to Saddam Hussien. To me it was unbelievable that these people were unaware of $290 million worth of bribes paid by Australia. One way to check this at a later date is to see what happens to those who covered for them. The cover up went like this: No, the ministers didn’t see the letters or e-mails despite these missives being sent and seen by individuals in their employ. How slack of their administrations not to mention a leak of so much money to Saddam. I didn’t believe it and predicted that the ministers would be charged along with those  who are accused of “ought to have known about contracts,” “ought to have known fees breached Iraq trade sanctions” etc. Our former ministers, who deal so competently with financial matters, should surely know that those who are banned from receiving Australia’s money shouldn’t get it.

And while I’m about admitting my predictions in these matters have come to nothing, my major prediction on Iraq certainly slid into the absurd genre. I predicted that the Americans, being unable to cope with the war, would reinstall Saddam and everything would return to normal. I had underestimated America’s greed for oil and having their oil legislation passed by the new government they established. Having necked Saddam they had to create a fallback position. Again I imagined (not predicted) that they would follow Colin Powell’s strategy of fighting and beating the Iraqis in the desert. He didn’t want to go near the cities (wise soldier). The fallback position is “structured fabrication.” We didn’t tell anyone about the civilian casualties (and denied the UN figures of hundreds of thousands) so we’ll stop telling them about all the bombings. We’ll have to tell them about some or they won’t believe our story. However with a fall in bomber statistics we can say the Bush surge has worked. We only need more troops. It’s just unfortunate but now the figures are down we’ll be withdrawing troops.

THE CIA CENSOR THE NET December 18, 2007

Following my suspicion that the CIA had censored my post on their torturers having sexual pleasure at the expense of their victims, a correspondent has contacted me with the figures published in a recent Harpers magazine. Since June 2004 Wikipedia has had 310 entries censored and re-written (edited) by the CIA.

I no longer suspect that I’m paranoid. And I was tested. My phone/computer line crashed the day the story appeared in the News Diary in The Age (edited by Suzanne Carbone) and during the evening the lights in the house fused out.

Each event had rational explanation. The phone line was torn from its socket when an extremely large truck (no one has seen one so large prior to this – evidence is that the line hadn’t previously been broken) rounded my corner and stripped the line from the lamp post.

I discovered that the lights had fused out because the lights in my wife’s new gallery (Shed 47, Talbot) was an overload when two freezers came on. See, simple explanations. No need to rush out to purchase dogs and other armaments.

Are you to blame for not preventing climate change? It’s time to walk in the dust on the banks of trickling rivers December 17, 2007

Now we know who to blame for not attempting to prevent climate change. The leaders of the planet’s most polluting democracies haven’t understood what is happening yet. They are ensconced in cities that will allow them comfort to the very end of water and power, and bureaucrats who only tell them what they wish to know. In Australia’s case they are bureaucrats who have been trained to think as the previous government wished. For the US it was how the dolt from Texas winged his speeches. Siding with us was the whale-killer Japan, and you would have imagined we would have attempted to distance ourselves from the Japanese and their love of eating thinking and singing mammals.

In agricultural Australia our leaders have removed themselves from those who make a living from the climate. It’s time they walked in the dust under dying and stressed trees on the banks of trickling rivers. Emission targets have to be set for anything to be achieved for otherwise companies simply add the costs of levies or fines to the product. Capitalism is the best of all systems for making money and having freedom to make money, but let’s not imagine that we have created benevolent and wealthy individuals who care about humanity. No system ever created them. We have to tell our leaders that the bad times are coming if we ignore radical, lateral thinking on how to prevent social dislocation. They and their families will also find climate change very uncomfortable, even if they have money for air-conditioning, for our climate will not be nice to anyone. Heat and related storms will devastate us unless we act. Let’s turn off the lights in our cities. Could we do that? It’s the easiest thing we can do to lower coal-based emissions, and show everyone that power saving acts can be undertaken.