waxing lyrical...

The following songs all contain lyrics which, for one reason or another, knock my socks off.

The Rose - Bette Midler (written by Amanda Mc Broom)
Hotel California - The Eagles
Time - Pink Floyd
I Want To Know What Love Is - Foreigner
Wish You Were Here - Pink Floyd
Khe Sanh - Cold Chisel

Lyricswise, what rocks your boat?

a late one, but a good one...

www.thecompassgroup.biz/merryxmas.swf

I can't stand the smell...

Saddam has been hanged. "Justice has been done" is the new propaganda catch-cry.

What a sick joke.

Saddam was the US's strong man in the Middle East (until he stopped dancing to their tune). Most of Saddam's crimes were committed whilst he was enjoying US support. He was America's pit bull against the Islamic Revolution in Iran. One of the main reasons Islamic fundamentalists hate America is America's support for Saddam during the Iran-Iraq war.

And how about the number of Iraqi and Afghani deaths we can firmly pin on US aggression in the region? Will Bush Snr and his idiot son now also be hung? How come Reagan was not hung?

If Saddam's hanging is any sort of a lesson, it is this: "If you're a puppet of the US, don't even think about trying to break free."

And did America gain any kudos from this hanging? I doubt it. It will have been seen for the cynical and hypocritical charade that it was, and among the US-haters it will be seen as just another piece of hard evidence for the argument that hating the US is an entirely appropriate response to US foreign policy.

a distraction...

You gotta love this guy....

democracy - a sick joke...

Something very sinister has happened and gone mostly un-noticed and generally unreported.

And now it's too late to do much about it.

Democracy has been corrupted by "the corporation" (I urge you again to read Joel Bakan's book The Corporation, reviews can be found [HERE]).

We are now ruled by The Corpocracy and far too few people understand the deadly threat this poses and how contra-democratic it actually is.

So thorough has been the shift in attitudes, that now few people can think outside of The Big Lie which asserts "what's good for the corporation is good for the people".

So complete is the spin-doctors' grip on the collective psyche, that no one dare implement anything which is "bad for the economy" (newspeak for "bad for Big Business".)

All politics is now ruled by the imperatives of Big Business and we can see nothing wrong with it. We have gone blind.

Big Business now owns us. We are its slaves. It plays the tunes we dance to. Money is no longer our servant, it has become our master. We, the people, are mere "resources" for Big Money. Our sole purpose is to be exploited by Big Money, for Big Money. That is the new Alpha and Omega. Money is God. God is money. Money is the omipotent force on this planet now. All hail money.

Consume. Be silent. Die.

And now for today's guessing competition: Guess which nation, more than any other in the last 150 years, has done its utmost to empower Big Money?

First prize is a free ticket to hell.

See you on the dark side of the moon...

holiday reading....

An interesting and informative interview with Gore Vidal.

Vidal is 81. Noam Chomsky is no spring chicken. Ditto William Blum. So all of these great American whistleblowers will all too soon be dead. Who will take up their mantle? Hmmm ???

(Thanks to DS for the heads-up on the Vidal interview.)

bah ! humbug !!!

Seriously though... Seasons greetings, and wishing you all, all the best for 2007.

some inconvenient truths...

Here are a few bits of information from Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth":

Taking the average temperature in the Northern Hemisphere for the period 1961-1990 as the datum line, the current temperature is about .7 deg above. By comparison, the last "cyclical" warm period, frequently referred to as the Medieval Warm Period, was only about .1 deg above the datum line. p. 63-65.

Current CO2 levels are about 30% higher than at any time in the last 200,000 years. The correlating temperature increase from this is giving us the hottest period on the planet in 600,000. p. 66.

The global tempemperature has been steadily rising since 1866. Of the 21 hottest years during this period, 20 have occurred in the last 25 years. p.73.

In the period 1950-2000, the number of major flood events per decade has been increasing dramatically each decade. The nineties saw five times the number in the fifties. p.106.

The rate of species loss has gone seriously exponential, in almost exact correlation to the global population explosion. p.163 p.216.

In the US, the number of major wildfires in the last five decades was:
Fifties: 2
Sixties: 2
Seventies: 4
Eighties: 10
Nineties: 46 !!! p.229.

Draw your own conclusions...

three blind mice... see how they run...

John Gates, US Defence Secrtetary, says the US is not winning the Iraq war.

Colin Powell, former US Secretary of State, says "we are losing ... the Army is stretched, possibly broken."

Paul Pillar, a 28-year veteran of the CIA, a national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, and, before that, deputy director of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, reckons that "the US are breeding more terrorists than they're catching."

And here in Australia, Nick McKenzie, writing for the Sydney Morning Herald, quotes (among others) the following Australian defence experts:

Vice-Admiral Ian MacDougall: "It is time the Australian Government … acknowledged this is unwinnable and we have to get out before we get hurt and get our tail kicked ... This is unwinnable."

Vice-Admiral David Leach: "Iraq is a confused and a hearty mess."

Air Marshal Ray Funnell: "...those denying there was civil war in Iraq were not facing up to the reality."

General Peter Gration, chief of the Defence Force during the first Gulf War: "The coalition has clearly failed. Australia should stop re-enforcing failure. The situation cannot be remedied and the decision to withdraw has to be taken."

But...

Against all of this (and more), Bush, Blair, and our own fearless leader, John Howard, reckon that we can win this war. What the do they mean by "win"?

Anyway, it's clear that they willfully distorted the original intelligence assessments on Iraq in order to contrive an excuse to go war, and now they blindly distort the advice they are getting to continue to try to win an unwinnable war.

Is the term "fucking murderous idiots" too strong to describe them?

Ok, how about "war criminals" then... ?

Waddya reckon?

g'day, mate...

Just thought I'd talk about mateship today, mate... On account of our Prime Monster, John Winston HoWARd having a bee in his bonnet about Orstrayan Values.

[sigh] Yeah, again, mate...

Yeah, I know, mate... As if he'd know anything about mateship...

Oh yeah, I forgot, he's real good mates with Dubbya. Not real good mates with six hundred thousand dead Iraqis or their families and friends, but greal good mates with Dubbya. Not real good mates with the workers, their families and friends, but real good mates with their bosses...

Shit, sorry mate, I digressed...

Mateship, HoWARd reckons, is an Orstrayan Value. So I googled it, mate... And here's the upshot of it:

On the one hand, it means being real loyal to your mate, mate. The sort of loyalty HoWARd thinks he's got from Dubbya... Know what I mean, mate? [nudge, nudge, wink, wink]

On the other, it can mean any one of the following as well, mate:

# Solidarity with other whites whilst disposessing and systematically killing off the Aborigines.

# The kind of "brotherhood" bond typically found between members of the Australian Defence Forces, Freemasons, Opus Dei, trade unions, secret societies, the Mafia, the IRA, the CIA, the Bader-Meinhof Gang, the Stern Gang, al Qeida, or the Cronulla Rioters.

# And this, by Assistant Professor Kim Sawyer of the University of Melbourne:

In its most benign form, it is simply friendship. But mateship is often more than benign. Mateship often implies a joint monetary interest. Mates form companies, award contracts to each other, appoint each other, protect each other and honour each other. The corporatisation of mateship is one of the most profound principles of Australia. Australia is neither a democracy, nor a meritocracy. It is a mateocracy. One of the principal returns to mateship is a job. Mates appoint each other for three main reasons.

First, a mate can be relied upon to act with fear and with favour; fear of offending their mates and favour towards their mates.

Secondly, when a mate is appointed, an obligation is created, an obligation that must be repaid. An appointment of a mate is a contingent future claim on that mate.

Thirdly, mates appoint each other because it minimises their risks. Mates are mates because they often think the same. With a mate, there are fewer risks.

Enter the whistleblower. The whistleblower commits a truth, and a truth normally offends a mate. By offending a mate, the whistleblower offends the network of mates. The whistleblower is the outsider. Australian whistleblowers line-up against tight, well-controlled networks of mateship which extend into all areas of governance. If Australian whistleblowers survive, they must survive without
mates. [*]

So there you have it, mate... I hope you now better understand John HoWARd's obsession with Orstrayan Values, in paticular, Mateship. He frequently stresses the need for mateship... Especially, he wants people who are applying for Orstrayan Citizenship to understand the meaning of mateship... Know what I mean, mate? [nudge, nudge, wink, wink]

[*] Borrowed from here.

mania...

I'm home alone, The Angels are singing "No Secrets" on the radio (up loud) , and I'm on an imaginary stage in front of two hundred thousand imaginary fans going absolutely apeshit with my air guitar and screaming into the air microphone. What a buzz...

And we're still the species which is totally fucking this planet.

Talk about air guitaring while Rome burns...

Sheesh !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

anger, frustration, and despondency...

I've been grappling with the rightness/wrongness of a comment I made in here the other day (the one beginning with "GS, what's the point of a "democracy"..."

I've lost faith in democracy.

I've lost faith in the people's wisdom.

With democracy, as it is presented to us at this time, I see only a road to hell with no way back.

But I don't really think a non-democratic government is the answer either.

I don't really think killing those whom you oppose politically or ideologically is the way to go.

I'm just utterly frustrated and very angry that democracy is so subverted by a myriad of conflicting forces in "our culture". What a fucked-up Petri dish this Western "society" has turned out to be!!! And I see no way to avoid the shit we're headed towards.

Global warming? This is a juggernaught which will over-run us even if we all "go green" today. The amount of heat ALREADY stored in the oceans, the land masses, and the atmosphere, right fucking now, is enough to tip us, irrevocably, into a whole new climate paradigm.

Peak oil? That will just add more fun to an already side-splittingly hilarious situation.

Over-population? Who's going to stop fucking first? Who's going to dismantle the "survival through family" paradigm? Who?!?!?! Not anyone YOU know... So, we're going to keep breeding like fucking rabbits till we've trashed the planet and then we'll die in very large numbers due to catastrophes of our own making.

In our desperation and egocentrically twisted "will to survive" we'll wage wars over ever-dwinding resources and the meanest and the most brutal will dominate the gene pool of a "brave new world". To top it all off, these "winners", these "champions" who have killed all who stood in the way of "our interests", will be certain that it was ordained by the anthropomorphised, insane ego-construct they've reified as their God so that no one dare argue with them over the evil crap they speak and the havoc they wreak.

You want me to be all sunshine and light?

You want me to be "positive"?

Based on fucking WHAT ?!?!?!