Recently, I set myself a task: to try and find out what exactly is happening in Iraq. To work through the conflicting reports, through the smoke and the spin to try and figure out what exactly is going on, on the ground.

This is a hard thing to do, because every time I sat down to write it, the situation was different. Every few weeks, it’s a different situation. In fact it’s changed since I first wrote this a fortnight ago.

So what is going on in November of 2006?

First, the good news.

That brutal dictator Saddam Hussein is no longer in power. And after months of wrangling, the country has a elected government. Apparently ninety percent of the country are calm and relatively safe. Particularly the northern Kurdish area, which have been effectively self governing since the end of the first gulf war.

In some areas, reconstruction is taking place, albeit slowly. When it’s not fighting, the US army has been doing the job, since they have the engineers and the machinery, and the ability to defend themselves.

And that’s it by way of good news. I looked long and hard for more, but that was it, that was all I could find.

So, onto the bad news.

Every week, on average, the US is shipping home fifteen flagged draped coffins. The military death toll will hit three thousand sometime this year. This is as nothing compared to the civilian death toll, which, depending on who you ask is between 50,000 and 600,000.

The number of car bombings in Baghdad has reached a frenetic level, which seems to no longer be news. It’s not news any more that every week there are over twenty bombs detonated. These have become more and more targeted, hitting the mosques of the opposing Islamic factions and the like. And anyone even remotely associated with the Americans – army recruiting posts are a particularly favoured target. And apparently the most dangerous road in the country is the highway from the airport to Baghdad.

The US has started talking about keeping force levels in the country at their current levels through to 2010. While at the same time the English military is looking for a way to withdraw, saying that the presence of foreign forces is actually making the place more dangerous. Strangely, they don’t like having their country occupied. And US is now talking about getting Syria and Iran involved in stabilizing the place, which rings of desperation.

The fledgling Iraq security forces certainly aren’t up to the task. The new police force has had four thousand members killed in the last two years, and the new Iraqi army can occasionally field just one combat ready battalion (compared to the fifteen the Americans have in the country.)

The new Iraqi government took so long resolving its infighting, which started after the elections late last year, that it might be too late. The power vacuum that has existed for the last three years has been filled by gangs, militias, foreign fighters and fundamentalist organizations. The government having a hard time exerting any influence at all.

All of the top level US intelligence agencies now describe the Iraq as the breeding ground for generations of terrorists, much as Afghanistan in the 80′s spawned Al Qaeda. So much for making the world a safer place.

And the phrase which is being used more and more to describe the situation is “Civil War”. Religious based groups are routinely attacking each other, the ethnic cleansing has begun, with hundreds of people killed and then dumped their bodies, simply for their religious affiliation. The place is starting to sound like Somalia or Rwanda or Yugoslavia in the 90′s.

I could easily go on. Frankly, it couldn’t be much worse.

So is there a winner in all of this? Yes, actually there is, and it may surprise you who it is.

The winner out of the events of the last couple of years is… Iran.

I’ll tell you why. Its two main regional rivals were Saddam’s regime and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Both have been conveniently removed. Plus, the new Iraqi government, such as it is, is dominated by the same Islamic branch which runs Iran, indeed there have been many high level trips by its leaders to Tehran. And Iran’s main international rival, the US, is so overstretched they can’t now credibly threaten them. Hence the recent nuclear posturing by the hard-line Iranian president.

Despite everything, the Iraqi people are a wily and resourceful bunch. They’re also a young nation – 40% of the population are under 14. Left to themselves, under less violent circumstances, they’d be well able to create a functioning and successful state. They have abundant oil, and a well educated population – although those that can are leaving. But the country and the region has been plunged into a kind of chaos which might take decades to sort out.

We helped make this mess. All of us, even people like myself who marched and protested against this war. We sent our fighter jets and our people, when we might have waited Saddam out the way we did with Quaddafi in Libya. We helped make this mess, and it is incumbent on us to somehow try and help sort it out.

No one can deny that he is a nasty piece of work, someone guilty many times over of crimes against “his” people. Even the most vehement lefty will endorse that view. No one doubts his guilt for a moment.

However.

Leaving aside the huge problems with the death penalty, and the almost overwhelming issues with the judicial taking of life, this has all the makings of yet another celebrated death. Yet another moment when seemingly right thinking people cheer the snuffing out of a life. Not unlike when the Bali bombers were given a similar sentence a few years ago.

Lets make this one thing clear: no one’s death should be celebrated. No death should be cheered, no matter whom it befalls. No matter how evil a murderer or dictator, no matter what they have done in life to make their name vilified across the world, their death should still not be a moment of joy for anyone.

They should be punished, heavily punished – lock them in the darkest cell for the rest of their lives, show them photos of their victims, try and get it through their arrogant skulls that they have done evil against other human beings. But don’t kill them. A corpse in the ground feels no guilt, a corpse in the ground feels no remorse. Let him stew for his many crimes in a dark corner somewhere. Perhaps outside Iraq so no one need be concerned that he’ll escape and take over again. Stick him in the cell next to Noriega, perhaps.

Now, on a related note, could it be have been made any clearer who’s agenda is given priority in Iraq? That’s right, as usual the US administration is playing politics with the whole world. Lets spell it out:

Saturday – The evil dictator everyone loves to hate is sentenced to the harshest penalty known.

The following Tuesday – The Republican party, which prides itself on running a “tough” foreign policy, faces mid-term congressional and senate elections it is widely expected to lose. While, I might add, dealing with a large number of distracting scandals of it’s own making.

Hmmm. Could there possibly be a connection? I can hear the denials being drafted right now.

By the way, in the unlikely event that you’re reading this and your in the US – go out and vote. I don’t care who for, just go and vote because you can and you never know, it might end with Emperor Cheney behaving himself a bit better.

Have a nice election.

Leaving aside the curious way this has become an active “debate” – one wonders which powerful interests and lobbies are behind it, one wonders what inspired them of late to hire spin doctors and light a fire under conservative politicians. Conservative politicians who insult us by pretending this is a “Green” technology. Leaving that speculation behind, there are a lot of technical issues that make nuclear power problematic.

First, let us consider Uranium and Plutonium, the two fuels used by (two different kinds of) nuclear power reactors. These two metals are inherently dangerous. Inhaling a speck – literally speck – of plutonium, is fatal. Storing nuclear fuels, mining it, processing it, requires extraordinary precautions. Layers of lead shielding, impenetrable vessels, steel and cement structures. And everything it touches then becomes contaminated and some form of low or high level nuclear waste.

Compare this to a couple of other common fuels. Say aviation fuel and coal.

Both these substances are somewhat dangerous, and prone to ignition. And potentially explosive, if exposed to a flame or spark. However, the procedures for storing this stuff is simple – you shouldn’t feel particularly nervous standing next to a tank of avgas or a pile of coal. Left to themselves, they are relatively harmless.

The same is not true of nuclear fuel. It’s always emitting something, always there needing to be shielded – the precautions required aren’t just passive (avoiding naked flames) but active.

Now, say you had three containers, each about a litre in volume, one filled with chunks of coal, one with avgas and one with plutonium. If you pour the coal out of the container, it might leave some dust. If you pour the avgas, the container would be slick, still with the a layer of fuel, but could be cleaned and used again for something else. Remove the plutonium, and forever afterwards the container it was in will remember, it will still be radioactive, it will need special treatment to dispose of it. Not to mention that that volume of plutonium could be enough to achieve critical mass, either melting under it’s own heat or exploding. This stuff can also only be stored in small quantities, not too close to each other.

Now, consider two accidentally events, one involving coal the other nuclear fuel. A coal fire might be devastating and dangerous – but once the flames are out, the net result is local and temporary. There might be some burnt buildings and some smoke in the air. Now, compare to a nuclear accident. The results are impossible to predict, not locally confined, and very long lasting. To this day, some farms in Scotland are still being tested for radiation from the Chernobyl accident. Extensive, long range, long lasting effects are inherent with this stuff. It is not a neutral, benign substance.

Turning to nuclear power plants.

A nuclear power plant is a machine, a large and immensely complicated machine, and at the same time a very specialised container for an inherently dangerous substance. A reactor is a complex machine which could be compared to other complex machines – say modern transport jets or indeed the Space Shuttle. The comparison is also apt because all these systems are extremely heavily regulated and have extremely stringent safety standards.

Let have a quick closer look at a jet aircraft – say, a Boeing 737. Each individual aircraft has a stringent maintenance regime, laid down by regulators and the manufacturer, from the moment it rolls out of the factory. After x number of flying hours, these check shall be performed, after x more hours, this maintenance will be required, and so on up to and including striping older aircraft back to the bare metal and looking for hairline fatigue cracks in the airframe. Every part in every aircraft is tracked. Almost weekly there are new additions made to the maintenance manual. After every accident, there are more maintenance tasks added to the list. A plane isn’t allowed off the ground or into the airspace of a given country unless it can be proved to have passed all these checks.

All this is necessary because flying is inherently dangerous. So as far as possible – regardless of the economic consequences to the airlines – all the planes in the sky are taking a known and minimised risk, from a mechanical point of view.

Now, despite all of this, it is impossible to swear that no aircraft will ever fall out of the sky unexpectedly. This is not a guarantee which can be given. Despite the manuals and the engineers crawling all over the planes.

Aircraft occasionally fail for unexpected reasons, like any machine. They have fallen out of the sky because of a single metal filing falling into a screw hole. They have fallen out of the sky because of a mis-applied piece of duct tape. The more complex the machine, the more points of failure. The more complex the machine, the more likely some unknown will one day cause an accident. Look at the space shuttle. No amount of diligent maintenance can reduce this possibility to zero. All moving parts will fail, sooner or later.

A nuclear power plant is also a complex machine.

A nuclear power plant is a complex machine with many complicated sub-systems, several of which – the cooling system for example – are so vital that a failure would guarantee an accident of some sort.

Therefore, it is also impossible to swear than no power plant will ever fail. It cannot be guaranteed, complex systems can and will fail.

A plane crashes into the ground. People in it and on the ground are killed. The houses are rebuilt, the wreckage is cleared up. Devastating for those involved. Devastating for the place where it happened. But you can visit the runway at Tenerife where the worse plane crash every occurred. And find no evidence, at no consequence to yourself.

A reactor explodes. Radiation enters the atmosphere and spread thousands of kilometres on the prevailing winds. The site is off limits (effectively) forever. People exposed at a great distance from the event – in both time and space – are effected. Can we see the difference?

Most modern reactors – outside the old Soviet Union at least – are surrounded by a containment vessel. These are the domed cement shapes one sees in photos of reactors. The idea being that any accident or leakage will be contained inside this structure. This has not been tested in any serious way, although the reactor accident at Three Mile Island (aka Harrisberg) was contained in such a building. This just has the effect of localising the accident, making the building permanently – literally for thousands of years – off-limits. And other lower-level accidents at other similar plants around the world have still managed to release radioactivity into the environment.

Think about the machines around you. Think about how much you trust them. We all take calculated risks, stepping into a car, getting on to a plane, taking the lift. The nuclear power industry and, to a similar extent the (still active) nuclear weapons industry are all taking these risks for us. However, the consequences are so far reaching and so unpredictable, it’s a wonder that they are allowed at all.

At that other notable accident, Chernobyl, during the reactor fire, a vivid blue glow lit up the sky above the reactor as charged particles and x-rays ionised the air above it. People in the town stood on bridges watching this beautiful sight – exposing themselves to dangerous levels of radiation. The fire fighters and other rescue crew on site lived or died simply because they did or didn’t step around a certain corner, they did or didn’t stand in a direct line of sight to the burning reactor.

It is literally only a matter of time and random chance before this happens to one of the existing reactors. Do we really want to increase their number?

No new reactor has been ordered in the US since 1978, none has been completed since 1995. There is talk of “new, safer reactor designs.” These exist exclusively on paper. Would you fly in the very first of a brand new model of plane which has never taken off before?

And regardless of the safety of the reactor, it’s inputs and outputs are all inherently dangerous, for extraordinarily long periods. It will be generations before the city of Chernobyl will be inhabitable again. The US Department of Energy is burying thousands of tons of high-level nuclear waste in a salt deposit in New Mexico. They’re about to spend billions and billions of dollars marking a location as off limits and unsafe – for at least 10,000 years. Why on earth would we want to be expanding this industry?

Cut through the crap. Nuclear power is an answer looking for a question. Nuclear power would be swapping one bad pollution source for one far far worse.

This seems to have been genuinely a sudden decision, since her campaign was actively organizing and raising money as of a fortnight ago, and she also contested a trivial pre-selection battle a few months back. At a personal level, Mary Delahunty has a had a rough trot – losing her mother a few weeks ago, and her husband a few years before that. And she’s been diagnosed with an undisclosed illness recently.

But the threat of being sent to the back bench must also have been on her mind.

So let the games begin.

Northcote is a plum seat, a safe labor seat for generations. Or it least it was, at the last poll, the Greens were nipping at the heals of the ALP. Which is completely consistent with the demographic of the area. Lesbians, young professionals, latte sipping lefties, students (those who can still afford it), the Greens core constituency. Which is saddening, since barely ten years ago they would have been Labor’s core constituents. That is another story.

What the place needs is a strong local candidate, who hasn’t just been parachuted in as part of some cross factional deal. A strong local candidate who knows the area and the people, might actually be recognizable, and might actually share some of the beliefs of the local population.

Chances of this happening? Diddly.

Safe seats are a prize, they are in relatively short supply and hence much cherished, to be haggled over and presented as rewards to “loyal” members of the party. So they can keep a seat warm for a few years, then get a nice shiny pension. Then there is the “celebrity candidate”, recruited with invaluable built-in recognition. Find them another of the safe seats, displacing the locally chosen candidate if any, and hope some of their magic rubs off on the party.

We the people of Northcote have been subjected to both. As a reward for working hard and being loyal party members, as a reward for professing for year after year the values the party (kinda) stands for, we get… Used as a reward in some factional deal.

Pity us who live in the safe seats. The roads are crumbling, the local infrastructure gets older and older. There are no swinging voters here to impress, so no motivation to throw money at us.

Pre-selections for Mary’s old seat opened and closed very soon afterwards. Two names were put forward – a party functionary, already on an upper house ticket, and an ex-Mayor of Darebin. Guess who has got the seat?

The deal was simple really: Northcote, for obscure reasons, was “awarded” to the right of the party. Fiona Richardson, who was first on the ticket for the Western upper house district will get our seat. Justin Madden, who was shifting to the lower house over in Bundoora, takes her spot at the top of the upper house ticket. And the guy who came second to Justin for the Bundoora seat will now contest it instead.

Get it?

The stupidest part about this deal: two out of three of the people involved already had safe positions in the parliament. It would have been skin off no-one’s nose to allow someone from Northcote to contest the seat of Northcote, no one would have to be shoved aside or go unrewarded.

Perhaps Fiona Richardson will make an effort to get to know the locals. Perhaps she really is from nearby, as she claims. Perhaps her electoral office will be open decent hours, with someone in it so the people of Northcote can talk to their local member. Perhaps she will work hard for the area, talk us up in the seat of government, pipe up for us in debates. Perhaps the loyalty of the local members will be rewarded. Perhaps she will regularly attend branch meetings, and not take on too many ministerial responsibilities. Perhaps she will take on issues close to the heart of the local Lesbian community. And the Kooris. Not to mention the groups fighting to rescue Merri Creek. Perhaps. We shall wait and see.

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.” – O’Brian.

For the briefest of seasons, the Actors Gang, a Los Angele’s based theatre group co-founded by Tim Robbins (who directed this production) have brought a play version of 1984 to the arts centre. By the time you read this, you’ll have already missed the all six performances.

It’s plugged on the posters as “George Orwell’s 1984″, which seems redundant – surely most people on earth know of 1984. Which is part of the interest in making a play of this work – the book is so widely read, most members of the audience would know the basics of the story.

The company faced the same problem that faces film directors working from novels: How to fit all that material into a reasonable length time, how to fit say ten hours worth of action into something an audience can sit through.

The adaptation by Michael Gene Sullivan solves the problem by cutting directly to the chase. The entire play consists of the interrogation scenes which make up roughly the last third of the book, with all of the rest of the story told through flashback. Winston Smith is on stage with four other “citizens” throughout, who act out his various transgressions, read from his diary, while an off-stage inquisitor asks questions. Peppering them with phrases like “you must be precise.”

This works, to an extent, although the four “citizens” reveal that they are aware that they’re acting out parts, which somehow breaks the illusion. We in the audience could handle the shifts of time and character as given, without redundant explanation that they were part of the interrogation. At one point one of the characters appeals to the offstage interrogator to stop the action before it goes to far. Like an edit in a film, that jumping about was quite clearly and succinctly done, no excuses required.

The interrogation itself proceeds very realistically, as if from a manual – demanding repeated responses from the subject, punishment for the “thought crimes” he is still committing, and working very hard to unbalance the subject. And making of him a blank slate upon which to reimpress the party line.

“How many fingers am I holding up?”

Any translation of a long story to a short one requires the adapter to chose what to emphasise from the story. For 1984, the several major themes are barely touched on – the extensive musings on the nature of power, for example. And of course many well-known lines are missing entirely. This is not to detract, the story that unfolds is still powerful and still faithful to the book.

What was unusual for such a serious subject was the number of times we found ourselves laughing. Never at a healthy, simple joke, but at the deadly irony of some scenes – the way Winston Smith repeats back to the interrogator some of his stock phrases. In another exchange, when one of the citizens says “Ignorance is bliss”, Winston replies “I thought Ignorance was strength.”

Some of the phrasing used also seems to have been contemporised, which emphasises that the age we’re in is not unlike what George Orwell predicted. Pepper the play with the word “Terrorists” and suddenly it’s a play about today. Which is no doubt a major motivation for doing this play at this time.

This troupe have worked hard to bring the pathos of the story to the stage. Some of the pacing was a bit slow, probably a side effect of the main character being restrained throughout the performance. But the final scenes, which pan out exactly as we expect – everyone knows how this is going to end – are still powerful.

Should there be a return season, I recommend you look it up. In the mean time, now is an excellent era in which to re-reading the book. There are too many striking parallels from that vision of a fascist state in a constant state of war with an unseen enemy, to that we seen every day on our telliscreens…

Henry Rollins, Geelong Performing Arts Centre, “Twenty Five Years of Bullshit” Tour, Jan. 31st 2006

Henry Rollins is touring Australia and New Zealand doing spoken word as part of the Big Day Out. He was added to the bill late in the piece when several other bands pulled out or, as he put it, when they were really scraping the bottom of the barrel. This is only the second time he’s done spoken word at an actual music festival.

And like many of the BDO bands, he’s doing side shows, but not in the places you’d expect. This time, it’s the regional centres like Geelong and Byron Bay. This guy could fill the Palais or even the Concert hall, but he chose this time around to keep it small. Either that or the other venues were booked!

The Geelong Performing Arts Centre is actually a nice venue, and this evening was almost completely full of people from Melbourne, despite being out of town on a Tuesday night.

Henry Rollins is a person of interest. In these paranoid times, a tattooed man sitting on a plane, highlighting passages from a book called “Jihad” (written by a journalist from the Wall Street Journal, and on the New York Times best seller list for months) is considered suspicious, at least by the idiot sitting next to him on the plane. Thankfully the woman given his case at the Department of Foreign Affairs was a fan, so she wasn’t offended when Henry told her “fuck you, and tell your boss fuck you as well!” But now he’s on the official list as a Person of Interest.

Henry’s been at this a long long time, as the stream of spoken word albums shows, and is a fantastic performer. His shtick is still the same – angry old rock guy yells at you for two hours. And somehow he never seems to repeat himself.

The audience consisted mostly of angry suburban white boys, here to see the Uber Angry suburban white boy. He wraps the mic cord around his hand three times, like he always does, strikes a pose, and starts talking. We were fully transfixed for two hours and twenty minutes. This time around he bagged the Bush administration: “I don’t lie, that’s the vice presidents job”, the destruction of New Orleans, his trips to Wal-Mart in his band’s tour bus, the “Def Leopard Express”. By far the most bizarre anecdote concerned the USO, the group who sends entertainers to war zones to boost the moral of the troops. Apparently wherever they go, the soldiers are asking to see Henry, so they called him up. After explaining that they might want to check him out before hiring him, they called back, called him a potty mouth and sent him on a tour of the Middle East. It defies the imagination to think of Henry Rollins standing in a room “full of armed men” in Baghdad, calling Bush a dummy, and no one getting hurt. He’s also visiting injured soldiers in hospital, which made him understandably even angrier than usual.

Rollins is master of the digression. A story about a trip to a massive hunting supplies store digresses into a story about deer and other “prey animals”, then onto the squirrel which lives in his back yard, and some how back to the hunting store. A story about Wal-Mart diverges into a story about “Cops” and a discussion about the Mullet – Australian versus American mullet – and somehow back to Wal-Mart.

One gets the impression that he goes and does stuff in order to have stories to tell, such as his trip on the Trans Siberia Railroad. He seemed disappointed by the experience, since the only stories he got to tell were about the cranky Russian woman who looked after the passengers on the train, and the amazing barfing he did after some bad Russian fish. Rollins is also allegedly in a band, which no one quite remembers, one wonders if perhaps it also exists mostly as a source of more stories.

Henry Rollins is old. He’ll be 45 on February 13th, 2006, the biceps are still firm, the tattoos still clear, but the hair is getting seriously grey, so that he’s buying clothes to match. And “tourists are living in the lines on my face.” But he’s still king of the angry white boys, after the show a knot of them, none more than 19 years old, gathered out the back of the theatre attempting to catch a glimpse of the Person of Interest. More power to Henry’s Adult Attention Deficit Disorder.

One day in forty years time, they’ll be wheeling an ancient Henry Rollins on stage so he can continue to act like an eighteen year old. We should all grow old this disgracefully.

Starting from next month, the services of psychologists and other mental health professionals will finally be claimable on Medicare. I believe everyone would be entitled to ten or twelve counseling sessions per year, plus they’re giving more resources GPs to help with people’s brains.

Our prime minister came out with this long-overdue change on the first day of Mental Health Week. Although of course it would have been initiated by the health department, who in turn have probably been prompted by literally years of reports telling them this was the way to go. As often happens, he’s probably taking the credit for policy made elsewhere. But if his presence increases the number of cameras and the attention when the announcement is made…

Until now, only psychiatrists have been claimable. Some psychologists take a dim view of psychiatrists and no doubt vice-versa. What ever your preference, you can now chose the discipline of your choice to help sort you out. The figures are pretty scary – over a lifetime, one in five of the people reading this will need the help of a professional. And now finally it won’t be a matter of the kind of care you can afford.

Now, all we need is for trips to the Dentists to be claimable.

And, perhaps more interestingly, could this be the first sign of a miniscule amount of compassion in the federal coalition? Could we be seeing Tony Abbott and Mr. Prime Minister developing a soft side? I’m not holding my breath, these guys are interested first and foremost in gaining and maintaining power, showing a soft side is no doubt part of that larger strategy. And strangely, sometimes the right things happen for the wrong reasons.

Make yourself an appointment now.

Mental Health Week (Victoria)

One of the smaller media companies in this country is Fairfax, publishers of arguably the best newspapers in the country – the sister publications The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald. Whatever you may think of recent changes to these publications under their current editors – there seems to be far too many “news” pages populated mostly with large color photographs, like a flimsy daily magazine – these two publications are still the papers of record in this country.

They are the two publications which really attempt, with greater or lesser success, to tell both sides of the story. Watching an issue being thrashed out, day to day in the opinion pages will both delight and infuriate depending on which view is getting aired that day.

Compare this to some of the other major dailies, such as The Australian, which is clearly has a viewpoint, and clearly expresses it every single day in the way in approached stories and the stories it chooses to report. The Fairfax approach is both better and, unfortunately far rarer.

Now, despite reportedly increasing circulation and very successful websites – whatever you might think of the “lifestyle” content – Fairfax is a small fish, compared to Rupert’s News Limited and Packer’s Publishing and Broadcasting. And indeed any number of large overseas media companies.

It is a little fish which is very likely to get gobbled if the restrictions on media mergers and acquisitions are removed. As is currently before the parliament.

Now, some would argue that “ownership” does not automatically mean “editorial control” or “undue influence.” That a well-behaved, hands off proprietor will allow an organisation to have and keep its own voice.

This argument is, to put it politely, bullshit.

Every organisation tends to, over time, come to reflect the particular biases and opinions of its leaders. This is true from the local scout club all the way up to the international corporations. Look at News limited. It wouldn’t be the kind of company it is if it was run by someone else. Anyone who argues that the whole place isn’t infused with Rupert’s DNA is also talking bullshit. A company like that is a massive externalized expression of the proprietors personality and, indirectly his opinions. Just by the decisions the guiding hand makes, the company will slowly evolve into the proprietors beast, ditto the new divisions it acquires.

There are no guarantees that the Big Fish can give about the little fish they will swallow. They can’t guarantee anything about retaining editorial independence. No matter how hands off they will attempt to be, the corporate mind set will permeate and take over.

Assuming they even attempt to be hands off. More likely will be the slashing of journalist roles, the combining of functions with other parts of the organization, and other “synergies” which will quickly sap anything unique about these newspapers.

Now, they might not be your preferred daily rag, but they should at least have your respect. And they are an endangered takeover target, for reasons that are still not clear.

So don’t just sit there. The folks over at Getup have started an online campaign to lobby senators about the upcoming changes, sign on and tell them what you think.

And get the “paper dinosaurs” delivered or go pick up a copy, read them while you still can.

The Age
The Sydney Morning Herald
Getup’s Media campaign

Almost all US federal administrations since the second world war have had an exclusive focus on external affairs – be they wars, or one or other crisis, somewhere the world, in which it is felt influence can be brought to bear.

This is more so with the Bush administrator than almost any other. Although Clinton was not significantly different after his attempts at reform at home bogged down.

In fact, the US has been fighting somewhere in every one of the last fifty years.

The party in power often uses these distractions overseas to seem as if it is doing something, to be seen to be pro-active or powerful or even “making America feel good about itself again.” A phrase heard after the first gulf war. Basically, as a big distraction from issues at home.

How does this relate to elections?

What better time to seem powerful, in command, to be taking charge, than just before an election. This has become so predictable as to be almost a cliche, with it’s own name: the October Surprise. Anything organised specifically to happen around October, just before an election, in order to reinforce whichever image the administration is trying to project.

It is October.

It is an election year.

The Republics, this time around, are looking very, very vulnerable and doing a superb job of stumbling around and shooting themselves in the foot. We have a administration which has built it’s image almost exclusively as “tough” and “take charge”, which has worked itself into a huge mess in Iraq.

I think we can expect a surprise.

It’s impossible to predict what form it’ll take. Although if they have any sense, if Dick Cheney still has any of his alleged intelligence left, perhaps they’ll have second thoughts about invading somewhere new, or blowing something up. Hopefully they have got it through their thick skulls that throwing their weight around in the world isn’t working the way it used to. Haiti, Panama – Iraq is a whole different kettle of fish. Which is also using up any resources they could conceivably use to launch a strike of any kind. They are already overstretched, although they could probably spare a few bombers for a few missions.

What they really need is a good capturing of some major “enemy” of the United States. In fact, it wouldn’t be surprising if they’re sitting on someone already is a secret prison right now, and are just waiting to show him off on the nightly news late in October.

Failing that, a quick bombing run into a budding nuclear power to bomb some installations might do the trick. Much the same as a raid Israel ran in the eighties hitting installations in Iraq. And just think, there’s a belligerent nation just across the border from all those new airbases in Iraq…

It could also be argued that several of the major regimes in the world who have been clustered together in the “Axis of Evil” might actually have an interest in the current powers that be staying in office. It must be nice to have such a touchy enemy with which to tussle and use to rally their own populations behind the glorious leader. They could organize their own surprises to suit their own purposes.

By, for example, conducting a nuclear test…

“This is not a pipe” – René Magritte, 1928

“The Beatles were just content providers” – Doonesbury.

This is not a blog.

This is a website that uses common blogging software as a way of managing content.

This is a just a site, in the old fashioned sense. The web has seen more than enough blogs, millions upon millions being created every day. The have evolved from their original purpose – a kind of web diary – into something that purports to be more. However, aside from blogs written by actual journalists, most of them can only be opinion pieces. Millions of opinion pieces.

Blogs entries often also take the form of “Check out this cool thing I saw on another site”, which almost has the effect of making the web a self-referential closed system.

I will endeavor to avoid both these extremes, and will infrequently post “check out this cool thing” and “Another episode from my life” type of entries. I have another, personal blog on one of the major blogging sites for that, and that mostly because I have formed a small community of people on it. Most of whom I knew offline already. I’m also using it as a kind of externalised memory. This is an outlet for my more serious writing.

And my only real source for “look what I found” posts are sites that you could just as easily browse yourself. Such as slashdot, digg, b3ta, plastic.com and so forth. See post to follow.

And here are too many blogs out there already anyway. I tried to demonstrate as much early in 2004 when I created the entirely fictitious “Goatboy Diaries”. The life and times of a poor wage slave in a cubicle somewhere. Ok, so that part is true.

Yes folks, I intend to create Original Content.

Having said that, I can’t pretend that I am a writer or journalist. Like 99% of people online, I rarely have access to original sources, nor do I have the backing of a large organisition with the ability to do research. This is what distinguishes most efforts from actual news organizations. I do have access to a very small number of People of Interest and News Worthy events, which I will exploit and publish here. Even if I have to generate news myself through my efforts as an activist.

My interests are diverse, and in some way’s counter to each other. For example, the last five magazines I acquired where Flight International, the New Yorker, Viz comics, New Scientist and Time magazine. I also regularly read Adbusters and other journals of that ilk. More on these later.

Self published sites like this are necessarily promoting a (hopefully unique) point of view. I will let you guess what my political leanings are through the content I create. I am a member – just – of one of the major political parties here in Australia, but out on one edge with a love-hate thing going on. I suspect this is the case for all free thinkers attempting to graft themselves onto a larger, more cumbersome organization.

Another thing that differentiates a blog from serious journalism is the used of the personal pronoun, the inclusion of the reporter into the story. You will see the words “I” and “me” and “myself” on this site frequently. I could pretend I’m channeling Hunter Thompson, who was frequently the story himself, but no – I just never went through a course or cadetship to learn the pyramid story structure or the exclusion of self from the narrative.

I will publish here as frequently as the muse and my time allows me – which may not be often, I am after all employed full time and have many other things on my plate.

And finally, a few guidelines on the site itself. I used WordPress software simply because I’m familiar with it. And a slightly tweaked version of a template because I don’t know enough PHP to create my own. If I had the time I’d learn how to use joomla but for my purposes, this setup is sufficient. I will by default place most links at the end of an entry, rather than breaking up the flow with highlighted blue text. I find that when reading webpages I read a few sentences then jump off to the links as soon as I see them, one of the downfalls of Tim Berners-Lee’s little invention here, and my short attention span. Also, there are no ads on this site, and so it will remain until the unlikely day that I can’t afford my web hosting due to the number of hits I get.

And finally I am verbose. As you can see. Get used to it.

Welcome.