Graffiti

Lachlan Ridge sent me this.  I think he was prompted by a previous post here.

BTW, Lachlan's doing it tough at the moment, so he's a bit too distracted to post here at the moment.   I hope things pick up for him soon.

When No News Is Too Much News

The following was a Channel 10  newsbreak a few minutes ago:

"Sydney's coldest morning in a year!"

D'oh...

Really?

You mean it was just as cold this time last year?

Is that Gina Rinehart's idea of news?

Training The Taliban

What if the Taliban's strategy is as follows:  As each insane act by the NATO troops and each senseless drone attack  drives large numbers of new recruits towards the Taliban, these recruits are encouraged to join the Afghan National Army.

Think about it.

The NATO mentors would  be training the Taliban, arming the Taliban, clothing the Taliban, feeding the Taliban, paying the Taliban, and sheltering the Taliban.

Now tell me that this is not a strategy the Taliban are employing.

Open Season On The Greens

During a dinner conversation last night a friend expressed the opinion that the Greens were to blame for the failure of the offshore processing (of asylum seeker "boat people") legislation to get enacted.

He is a typical victim of Tony Abbott's Liberal Party spin machine. He has been sucked in by Abbott's "blame the Greens" rhetoric.

The Libs could easily have agreed to the Gillard government's Malaysia-Nauru compromise offer, and thus the Greens' "intransigence" would not even remotely have been able to prevent the legislation being enacted.   It would have been an example of bipartisan compromise.

This entire "blame the Greens" hysteria ignores the fact that no major policy back-down was required for Tony Abbott to agree to the legislation.

The Greens, for their part, were merely being true to their long-established onshore processing policy.

Thus, to blame the Greens is to be sucked in by Tony Abbott's Greens-bashing tactics.

Wake up, Australia, the problem is not the Greens, it's Tony Abbott.

Be careful what you vote for - you might get it...

A Free Range Philosopher Rants

 I offered this up when asked why I cancelled my subscription to a left wing publication:

...all I wish to say is that I'm more of a free range philosopher than a politician, and left wing politics, as far as I've been able to discern, is just as toxic as right wing politics. 
Two things in particular stick in my craw:
[1]   I find Anarchism (in all of its manifestations of shiny, smooth rhetoric) to be too destructive to be of any good.  In more than nine years of rubbing shoulders with left wingers I've not been able find one who can give me satisfactory answers to my questions about it.    All I ever get is dismissive, evasive, and glibly supercilious sophistry.  And dogma.  I get tons of dogma. 
[2]   Political non-violence is a "core value" of mine.  I can find only lip service to this concept whenever I dig deeply into the mutterings of those on the left with whom I have been engaged.  All manner of rationalisations, justifications and hypocrisy emerge when discussing this topic.  I am still a "lefty" at heart, but I have lost all hope in the left as a viable political force capable of toppling the right without it surrendering the temptations of violent revolution.    And violent political action is something to which I will never lend my support.   The power of the teachings of Jesus and Gandhi are dismissed derisively as being naiive by those who cling to the idea that political violence can be justified.   The devastating power of non-violence as an absolute political strategy by a mass movement is not fully understood by the dominant ideologues on the left (or the right, for that matter).

They probably have no clue as to what I'm talking about.   All the more reason to stop buying their rag.

War with Iran before November 6?

 Well, this guy thinks so:  >>>

Agent Orange and Agent Blue

A poem by Denis Kevans:

Agent Orange and Agent Blue,
We make real good things for you.
Sweat and slog in mud and slime,
Lots of unpaid overtime.
Planes fly past us every day
Trailing a lovely, misty spray.
All the way from the USA,
All the way with LBJ.

Sweating skin, and nightmares, too.
Agent Orange and Agent Blue.
Agent Orange and Agent White
Wish that I could sleep at night.
What was that the doctor says?
 Somethin's wrong with the baby, Les.
 Agent Orange and Agent Blue,
 Now we know what you can do.
You stripped the leaves from off the trees,
You poisoned the Vietnamese.

Tell me why, and tell me how,
Tell me nothin’, Mr. Dow.
Hitler had another way,
Brought the people to the spray.
Come on Aussie, you’re the pea,
The only white who’ll fight for me.
Tell me how, and tell me why,  ...
Tell me why they had to die?

Agent Orange and Agent Mal,
Thanks for all your help, old pal.
Look at the lovely misty spray,
All the way from the USA.
All the way with LBJ,
All the way to the judgement day.

And...

As John Pilger reports*:  "In 1970, a US Senate report revealed that "the US has dumped [on South Vietnam] a quantity of toxic chemical amounting to six pounds per head of population, including woman and children". The code-name for this weapon of mass destruction, Operation Hades, was changed to the friendlier Operation Ranch Hand. Today, an estimated 4.8 million victims of Agent Orange are children."


*But wait...  there's more!  So much more!  >>>