Sol Invictus

Melbourne sunrise.  Pic by Steve Davidson

When you consider the financial and environmental benefits, it’s unsurprising rooftop solar power has taken off around the world. Solar is sexy. It's also the grand narrative pantomime for our age, with Tony Abbott our local panto villain – his government is not behind you, nor behind the earth, for that matter. They’re behind the friends and supporters with links to fossil fuels who donated more than A$900,000 to the Libs in four years.

It’s unsurprising that the old guard, who stand to lose most from change, dig their heels in so. We are creatures who do not take kindly to change at the best of times. Our physiology is yet to catch up with our technology and our global connectedness, and our anxiety levels reflect that, as do our biases. Add megabucks in, and you can understand why their sight is so short and their ways so corrupted, though it may be hard to forgive them their blind stupidity.

The change that is to come must come from us, from the so-called leaners. As ever it’s always been.

Someone once said that cash is deceptive. It’s never quite enough to satisfy the particular discomfort that comes from living in this world where nothing is as safe as we wish it to be. Though it is hard to imagine, even Gina Rinehardt – who earned in 3.9 minutes today what I earned in the entire 2013 financial year – feels fragile living here too. Can you imagine living with such a level of hatred directed towards you? Of course you’d surround yourself, more and more, with gatedness, with the people of yes. And even if you’ve had money and power all your life, surely it doesn’t stop the 3am shadows nipping out from the dark whispering that despite it all, you still don’t feel safe. And if Gina and those like her are taking any notice of the still point our society is heading towards, they might just be feeling the nip of the pitchforks at their heels, too.

When your fortune is built on coal – or, for that matter, on newspapers, or on keeping a political party in office – the fear and addiction that comes with that power and success are the noise that drown out the signal that everything, and everybody, ends. (All good Buddhists, Taoists, and people who have watched Six Feet Under know this). The pendulum always swings. The world, Nassim Nicholas Taleb would suggest in his book Antifragile, becomes more fragile when we try and keep it from swinging, not less. Some of the mess we find ourselves in is because we simply don’t know when to stop meddling. We feel so unsafe, so we try to control what is required of us to let be. Sometimes, it is better to sit back, take a breath, and do nothing. Inaction is its own form of action.

Once, the stories we told ourselves about ourselves were limited and local and the ways we kept ourselves warm were the same. Forest wood and coal fared fine when used for household energy purposes. It wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution and the mass rise of industry that the extraction of coal got deeper and dirtier and required more than a bunch of people digging it out with picks.

Today, urbanisation and globalisation have stripped many of our old stories away, just like Mr Abbott’s counterparts in the Tasmanian government plan to strip away more of Tassie’s old-growth forests. The stories we tell ourselves to keep warm now are just as inclined to come from a culture from the other side of the world as from any remnants we are lucky to glean from our own, and if we do have a shared global story today it’s about unforseen climate shit hitting the fan along with long foreseen inequality. See the smog blocking out Beijing’s cityline? Gina dug that out of a hole from land her forebears didn’t even know existed 200 years before.

The problem with all the stuff that needs changing is that we see now like we’ve never seen before the impacts of our unintended actions. At the same time, this expanded view is delivered to us through increasingly fragmented shards of information. Our world’s health report is delivered to us as a whole glass globe made entirely of shards. This continual central nervous system rev-up makes it hard for us to distinguish the signal from the noise and know when to stop looking and start breathing.

Because we have so much to do, right? The way we do stuff is so wrong in so many ways. Ever thought about why, if you want to make big bucks, you can’t do it feeding the homeless? Or that money, invented out of thin air by our richest, is sold to us as a debt, and yet it’s so damn hard to come by? Or how for decades the IMF and the Wold Bank have bailed out the poorest in the world by selling them loans they could never afford to pay back? Or of how we already produce enough food to feed the world; it’s our systems of distribution that are the problem?

All that stuff is dirty, complicated mess, and combine it with all of that win/lose/leaner crap spoken from entitlement, it’s exhausting. We want to get away. We need to pan out a bit and get some distance and some silence. It’s been just over 40 years since our first photographic glimpse beamed back to us of a vision of the earth as a whole, in colour, from space. A beautiful blue, green and brown ball, swirly with clouds, grandly hanging, dammit, right in the middle of the air.
Pan up and out to that 1972 view and from here you see the potential for cohesion. It’s silent up here. Silence might be terrifying to us, in our noisy world, but there is strength in it and a peace once you get used to the agarophobia. Out here, we can believe that change is possible. And of course it is – it’s happening all over the place, if we can just distinguish the signals from the noise.

Out here in space, we can turn and see the sun ... actually, probably best not to frazzle your eyeballs off, so let's keep it metaphorical.  Up here, that damn sun couldn’t be more egalitarian if it was wearing a beret, chowing down on a croissant, and welcoming in the eight hour day. What is more egalitarian than the sun? Though Tony Abbott and his rich friends worldwide seem to believe it shines out of themselves, the fact is that the sun shines on the egalitarian and the oligarch alike. And while solar power is not going to solve everything, it’s a damn good and hopeful symbol of what's started.

If we are all made of stars, then what better way to fuel our lives than star energy? It’s 99% pollution free.

Two Edifying Vids

Here be two edifying vids.  One, external and political and the other, internal and psychological.

The first is 85 year old pensioner, Vilma Ward, giving it to smirking and revolting Prime Minister and part-time comedian Tony Abbott.   Nice seeing someone serving up some truth to this nasty man on national TV:  Especially when it's a plucky and feisty older woman.  Rock on, Vilma.



The second is a fascinating TED talk on stress, by psychologist Kelly McGonigal. She discusses a study's findings that our belief about stress is linked to how it affects us physically.  Reframing stress in our minds from a negative - like reframing anything else that we close ourselves off against - reframes it in our bodies as well.



I'm in the process of reframing my hardcore beliefs about stress and what I can cope with in the hope that my body will follow suit. It needs to because the financial noose tightens here. Not much transcription work and many encouraging rejection emails on the writing front equal real worries when your partner is also facing his own potential job-loss worries.

I persist with my idealistic thoughts that roam along the lines of "But it doesn't even need to be like this! Money is a essentially a construct, invented out of thin air. It is meant to be a method of exchange of our services, a tool that makes society function easier. In the end it's become a tool keeping you and me frozen into place."

If only idealistic thoughts put food on table and paid bills. I guess despite whatever happens on the outside, I feel rich on the inside. For what that's worth.

The Australian Energy Sector's Response

Fuck you.

Fuck you even to the coalminer's granddaughter.  See, it is rather egalitarian when you think about it ...

The Two Ends of the Power Cord

I was one of the estimated 30,000 Melburnians who Marched in March over the weekend from the State Library to Parliament House to register a vote of no confidence in the current government.  I am very proud to have done so. 

It was a messy hodgepodge of people and placards, some of which I was in favour of and others which I wasn't.  That's how it goes, I guess, in a democracy – a loud mix of voices, some contradictory, which can feel uncomfortable and not entirely safe.

This might sound ridiculous in the face of internet trolls, the NSA, city bashings, Kyle Sandilands, reality TV, familial incest, Russia, the US and China sticking out their chests and the Abbott Government, but I really don't believe that humanity has reached anywhere near its highest potential.  We march slowly, slowly forward into unity in diversity, greater compassion and equality, a space where we can all feel safer and freer to express our humanity.  But it's an uncomfortable march – it requires us to not only speak truth to power, but also to own our own shit after a fashion, to own the bits that we don't like about ourselves.

Now, just in case I possibly give the impression of being a preachy Girl Guide with her entire shit together talking about love, rainbows and unity, to dispel that misconception I will share a couple of home truths about myself as well, helpfully highlighted in bold.

Anyway, I never made it to Girl Guides.  I distinctly remember as a 10 year old dancing as a Brownie around a plastic mushroom with my fellow Junjarins and thinking, “What a bloody load of cods this is.”

It's the hardest of hard work to understand your cultural place in history, to see the shadows and blind spots that others in 500 years' time will be able to see very clearly.  But as evidenced on the weekend, there are some spots that come into focus and beam like beacons – unfair distribution of power and wealth which shows up in the way previous governments on both sides have treated refugees, the way those in power are increasingly treating us. 

I like one Bryan Adams song and love another one.

And yet while it's right to march and voice your opinion and empower yourself, it's a victim's stance to believe that all of the power lies in the hands of the powerful.  After all, hard as it is to believe, they are human as well.  I try to put myself in their position and imagine how all of us would appear to them.  The mob has never been pretty and for all of our moves forward into tolerance and diversity we are still just as intolerant and hateful and despising and dualistic in our thinking as we've ever been when it comes to those who we believe are wrong.  If I was a politician, I would be scared of us.  And as much as I would hate to imagine it, I would be swept along in the fear and revolt that formed in me in response to that and, swept along with the revolting political machine would find myself where most politicians find themselves, toeing the line and stifling my idealism and speaking lies and bullshit.

On the train on the way to the march I saw an Anglo guy sitting with an Asian woman and my initial thought until I rejected it was that he had probably spent money to have her sitting next to him with her hand entwined in his hair.

Power is a corrupter, as we all know.  Like money, I imagine there doesn't ever quite seem to be enough of it.  It doesn’t fill up the hole of insecurity like we imagine it might.  It seems that within Maslow's hierarchy of needs, more than enough of both money and power starts to rot and decay us from the inside.

We all know that pretty well, and for most of us it's why we were marching on the weekend.

When I was a teenager I used to call Aboriginal people boongs and not think twice about what I was saying.

I didn’t stay for any of the speeches at the march because quite frankly I was starving and my feet were killing me and my energy had run out.  So perhaps my view is a little more glowing than of those who did stay because I left with lovely action-ey feelings of marching in spotty rain with thousands of people in unity.  I didn't end up listening to individual people with individual views who might have appeared to some to be hijacking the whole event for their own ends.  I don’t know.  I didn’t hear any of that – I was eating a footlong flatbread Seafood Sensation at Subway and dreaming beautiful thoughts of the potential of humanity.

Beautiful ideas about humanity are so much easier to handle than the messy blobs of it that show up in our lives, after all, with their own ideas and how to go about achieving them and the defensiveness that flares up within our selves in response.  Perhaps that's why ideas that seem so wonderful fall to poo when wielded in the hands of people on behalf of other people.

Perhaps that's what will stand out so starkly in 500 years' time – what control freaks we were when we thought we weren't.  Our beautiful ideas always end up falling into the stink of control because those filth out there don't know how to do them properly so we in here need to enforce the parameters with which they do them.  It's not only powerful people who do this stuff.

I sometimes expect people with depression and anxiety to “snap out of it” if I happen to be having a good run of not experiencing those things myself.  I suffer from those demons myself and have been clinically depressed in the past.

I do not think that we are very good at putting our ideas out there into the world and letting them be.  We are micromanagers and control freaks.  We do not trust each other, not one bit.  And sometimes we won't give each other an inch without a fight, either.  We have been so easily divided and conquered by those at the top for so many millennia that we too easily fight amongst ourselves for the spoils they leave us, and whenever our egos are threatened by someone who thinks differently than us. 

Maybe this is partially what keeps us weak and the powerful strong.  Maybe the work of correcting the imbalance rests more with us than we think it does.  Maybe our actions in our own lives to those of us who we consider our enemies is about loving them, as some carpenter dude said once and others have said before and after him.  Maybe our actions there affect the greater whole in ways we can't quite understand in our cause and effect reasoning.  After all, we live in an era when the unified field of consciousness has moved from the realms of fancy into the realms of science as a reality we can stand on.  On more levels than the mushy Hallmark one, we really are one.

I have engaged quite happily when at get-togethers with friends in talking about whoever isn't there even though I hate it when other people gossip about me.

When we truly believe this and know this, we might not need to march.  But if we do, we will not be able to walk past the homeless guy and pretend he's not there while we're doing it.  And we won't ignore the red traffic lights either just because we can, forcing the unfortunate cars finding themselves in the city at that time to bank themselves up and beep.

I once gave someone a blowjob in my car in the street. 

When we marched round the corner from Swanston Street onto Bourke Street, there was a young woman and a homeless guy. 

I vacuum four times a year tops.

The homeless guy sat with a cardboard sign and a couple of bags surrounding him and downcast eyes as we all marched past him.  We really are one.

I walked past the homeless guy myself.

I used to go to school with a guy who was quite obviously not very clever.  I knew this but I was very insecure.  I used to say things in front of my other classmates to make myself look better and to make him look even stupider.  His response was always a goofy smile.  I guess that is its own  punishment.

The young woman was playing Auld Lang Syne on the erdu.  A traditional Scottish poem, played by a Chinese woman, on the streets of Melbourne.  It seemed a fitting, beautiful accompaniment for a walk where people from one of the most multicultural countries on the earth were marching partially against the treatment of those who seek asylum here. 

Despite all of the evidence to the contrary, yes, we really are one.

The Politics of Australia

"What does it say of a nation - what does it say to a nation - when in a time of austerity, of slashing of essential public services, that $1 billion of Australian taxpayers' money - our money - is being spent annually to persecute, damage and sometimes destroy the lives of people of whom between 80 and 95% are finally proven to be genuine refugees? That is to hurt the most powerless and helpless and deserving of help and kindness. It shames us a nation that claims to be both humane and generous, it belittles us as a people, and none of it will deter the wretched of the earth, forced to choose between despair and hope, from continuing to choose hope" - Richard Flanagan

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bookshow/richard-flanagan-on-the-decline-of-love-and-freedom/3583396#comments

I'm rather taken by the work of Carl Jung.  He's the one behind the Myers Briggs Indicator you've probably taken at some point.  He coined the idea of the collective consciosness, and of the shadow side of a personality - the place where we repress and suppress those things which we cannot consciously integrate or handle.  What lies out on Australia's shadow side - a country founded only a couple of hundred years ago on genocide and displacement of a people?  What happens if we cannot bear to think too much about that element of our history?  Does it transfer itself into paranoia that what hunted will now be hunted?

So much media space has been taken up in this country in recent years on both sides of the political spectrum fearmongering about the boat people.  Terrified we'll be overrun by the boat people, the boat people - the same people who make up just a blip on the radar of people who arrive on our shores every year.  Because of a politically-fostered myth that just continues to be perpetuated because of the stain in our psyche and the bloodstained earth, the politicians of our country persist in punishing the most vulnerable who arrive here.  How much longer do we put up with it?

They are the 99%

Valoracion by Alfonso Maggiolo Peirano

Beep, Beep, Beep

I can hear as I begin typing the beep, beep, beep of a reversing truck in the next street over from where I live.

It is good that a giant reversing truck has a beeping noise attached to it so that when it reverses it does not run over hapless workers.  I can only wonder, however, about the side effects of the payoff.  Silence is golden.  How much more distracted must those workers be if, for example, they are working on a large site where there are, say, seven reversing vehicles around them, all beeping at once?  Does the distraction of the beepingness negate any positive effects the warning might have?

Any way, no matter.  The manufacturers of the trucks, the owners of the sites, their hands at least are clean.

There is a federal election coming up here in Australia.  All the more reason to switch off the television.  The empty heads taking pot shots at each other, the lack of any sort of vision, the stubborn and complete and absolute refusal to come within a 100 kilometre radius of admitting that continued economic growth is not only unsustainable, but that it is damaging, makes me want to weep at how deep the smoke and the mirrors go.  Etched into our skin.

Continued economic growth is a pipedream concept, an ostrich paradigm, fuelled by the greed of people who want continued and greater return on their investment for no extra effort to continue gushing out of the ground forever and ever.

We do not want to stop and ask questions about the validity and viability of this paradigm, of who the losers may be in this contest.  We allow ourselves to be absorbed back into the endless electronic beeping of the next ADD distraction because it is comfortable there, and we have become comfortable.

We have become so comfortable that it's like an article of clothing we may wish to remove because the sun is out and we want the vitamin D to seep into our skin, for our skin to breathe.  But we find we cannot do so without great difficulty;  the edges of the fabric have seemingly seared themselves into our skin.

It is I suspect the same sort of looking away we do when we go to buy our latest piece of beeping electronica and are gratified to see how low the price is (how much cheaper our consumer drugs have become in the past 10 years!)  We do not wish to follow the thought pattern down, as we stand in line to complete our purchase, or click "pay now" on our computer screens, to consider that anyone would be losing out on our big deal.

We do not want to think that the cheap price we pay has any link at all to the conditions of workers at the Foxconn plant in China.  But everything is linked.  Ten workers have suicided at this plant since January.

Is there a link between our purchasing at this end and their conditions at that end?  We do not want it to be so.  We do not want to be our brothers' and sisters' keepers.

But perhaps everything is far more linked than we would like it to be.

Luckily, there's a distraction coming our way, just around the corner, to put an end to these thoughts of discomfort.

Beep.  Beep.  Beep.

What - Again - Is Wrong With This Picture?

Police have launched a five-year plan to reduce violence against women and children in Victoria

You can put in place as many programs as you want. But real change only ever comes from within the heart, between people, not externally, handed down from an expert or an institutional authority, no matter how good or well-intentioned it is.

Domestic violence happens because men are at their wits end, because they do not know how to communicate, because the way we live totally fucks us up, because they are big babies, because there is not the right kind of support that comes from people you know instead of some psychologist across the other side of the desk, because 40 million other reasons.

Nothing will ever change unless something changes in us, unless people can see within themselves reasons to change. Programs run by the police are not the answer. Great social ties are the answer. The more programs there are run by the police, the more people believe that the answer must lie "out there" with the "experts" and not "in here" with me and the people I know coming to grips with ourselves.

I've been thinking lately about where I stand politically. I left lean and I vote left, but I am really right wing in my ideas about a limited form of government. But then it struck me the other day - my political ideas are not based in the political system. My political ideas are based in humanity. I don't know what that means entirely but it feels once more like everything that is meant to be in here gets placed out there, where we all have to then take sides. If we vote left or vote right, we are not then allowed to constructively criticise the side we are on because then we are being unfaithful to that side.

And how bloody childish is that?

Too Much Is Never Enough

You know, I love the Americans who read here. But I am sick of hearing about your bloody country. This is a rant about certain things that are infuriating me, so if you are sensitive in this area, probably best to stop reading now, okay? If you wonder who the hell am I to have an opinion, if you find it difficult to read anything that does not have a right-wing focus, if you continue to believe what an amazing fair eagle your country is, then stop reading now. Because this is my blog, and I get to rant, and I am not ranting against you people here personally that I love, but I am going to rant anyway. So really, go away if you don't want to read it. But I get to say it.

I am sick to death of hearing about America and the evil antichrist Obama. So many people the world over are dying, and all we hear about are the eroding freedoms under the great evil socialist. (Which is not to say that your freedoms perhaps are not being eroded, or that Obama isn't in fact a socialist or even that he is not the antichrist. But I'm not sure what I think about all three of those words, freedom, socialism, antichrist. And my focus isn't so much on what might be actually happening - of which obviously I know very little apart from what I am told - but my focus is more on what America seems to be encouraged to believe about herself, and what she is therefore discouraged to believe about herself. That's the part that interests me.)

I am sure many believe Obama is the antichrist. There is no end to the fear available to fuel end-times scenarios, is there? And there is so much extra fear around these days, surely there must be multiple more end-times scenarios. Such an easy way to divide the wheat from the tares. And anyway, we all know the book of Revelation is about America, right? She's gotta be in there, that great eagle? That has to be America, surely. America, America. The land of the free, and the home of the brave. The country that had one attack perpetrated on it (a mighty, amazing, Hollywood-sized attack) that was awful and horrible, and the retribution that came afterwards was 100 times fiercer. But that's okay. You have to protect yourselves after all, don't you.

You're not free and you're not brave, you know. You're rich and fat and greedy and lazy like all of us rich, fat, greedy, lazy Western people are. How many of you continue to believe you are the great benevolent eagle spreading freedom all over the world? Does it surprise and baffle you that the rest of the world sees you quite differently? The world, unfortunately, cannot be rebadged by Disney to make it something nice and palatable for you to feel better about yourselves being the great spreader of Christ and democracy. Because you are not. Did you really think you would get away with being rich and powerful and it not somehow affecting everyone else? Affecting yourselves? As if the deceitfulness of riches was hyperbole? As if you haven't been imprisoned inside your own wealth like the rest of us?

It amazes me how the more people wilfully refuse to ask the hard questions and want everything to be "nice" cannot see the predators in their own midst. It happens on a psyche level and it happens on a national one too. Some people go on about Obama turning America into a socialist state, as if socialism sits somewhere directly to the left of middle right on the political spectrum. They insist on maintaining their freedoms to the extent that they will allow predators like the media and advertising to continue to gobble them up and they don't seem to be able to readily see the paradox. They won't put limits on anything because that is curtailing their freedom.

But what is freedom, exactly? Is it freedom to do what is right, or freedom to do whatever you want?

Perhaps freedom has become the American god. Believe me, past foreign policy makes it pretty evident to the rest of the world that America will insist on her right to keep what she has, even if it involves suppressing those who do not have. This is what rich countries do. The deeper the wealth the deeper the moat. Not that I imagine foreign policy and its effects is something that FOX News has regular in-depth analysis about. There are two sides to every story. If you read every story with the desire to see yourselves as the heroes, then you won't be asking and reading and listening with discernment, asking why stuff is packaged to you in the way that it is. It's easier to watch cable news. It can just simply reinforce your prejudices about all those evil socialist Latin American countries lurking and trying to take away your freedoms from you. When you are the hero in the storybook, you do not readily wish to see what your past governments have done to other countries in the name of keeping YOUR freedoms intact - the richest country the world has ever seen, and you have run in fear for the past 50 years that it is going to be taken away from you. Perhaps this is partly what Jesus was talking about with the deceitfulness of riches. It doesn't feel like a particularly safe space to occupy, to me. How about you?

I'm sick of hearing political stories about people's freedoms being taken away all the time. So much focus, so much fearmongering by the media, and some drink it down whenever it is on offer, without discernment. A country full of Christians who are told not to fear. You've got a tap full of clean, running water whenever you damn well want it. Maybe turn off FOX and drink that one down instead. The kingdom of heaven is still near, still sitting outside of what is happening in our individual countries, the third way. Maybe the world would be safer if we Christians turn our focus there.

Love and solidarity

I think I'm resuming normal broadcasting without feeling so much yukky spiritual weirdness. Unfortunately, the inherent sort people have been accusing me of for years remains :)

My brother has gone out this evening. In a nice shirt. Wearing aftershave. Having showered. It is a nice change to sweat. Gee, some boys surely do stinketh.

There must be a woman involved in this nasal turnaround, you say sagely, and surely dear reader you are correct. A phone call from his ex of several years, and three words, did it.

"It's still there," she said. And off he did runneth, into the wind with the caution blowing out behind him. I admire him his courage. You gotta love crazy love.

Me, I'm swimming and lathering myself in the rich bath of Friday evening solitude, blogging and toking and listening to music (just a bit of toking, she justified. Just to take the edge off. This is not a land I can live in anymore, but surely there's nothing wrong with dropping in and visiting once a year or so :)

Billy Bragg was singing before There Is Power in a Union. A different sort than my brother is thinking of, I think :) And surely, there is probably more power in a union than in our superannuation funds ;) Today on my 10 minute break, I leafed in agreeance through the September issue of the Socialist Alternative sitting on the lunchroom table. One of my fellow workers, Alison, came in for her last cup of tea in the gentle sun of the Friday afternoon home straight. I told her how much I was in agreeance with what I was reading. (Although it doesn't seem to have translated itself very well off the paper and out into the power corridors, but yes, I would say I am a theoretical socialist in some ways ~ as much as I am a theoretical anything. it feels pointless in some ways, this choosing of one ideology over another. But paper socialism holds the most justice and freedom, in my view, as an ideology).

She's a socialist from way back, Alison said. I wonder how quickly people would have been willing to offer up that kind of information six months ago? I presume they're probably starting to come out of the woodwork around about now :)

"I imagine even the Republicans are feeling like socialists at the moment," she joked, half seriously.

Winds of change, they be blowing :)

Happy weekend, comrades :)

On last night's news ...

... the term "new order" twice (cue creepy music), in relation to what's going on in England at the moment regarding trying to mop-up the economic mess. And they're not talking about the band, either.



Good times (if you like your evil despicable world systems reeling to and fro and realigning themselves :) Those buggers are as slippery as mercury

Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous - or, Priorities of the Utterly Insane

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

- Upton Sinclair

President Bush and his supporters can find $700 billion to spend on a war of choice. Almost overnight, they can stump up an equivalent amount to stop Adam Smith’s invisible hand from throttling their shonky cronies in the banking sector. Such extraordinary sums, if devoted to public transport or alternative energies or scores of other socially useful outlays, would go a long way to ending America’s dependence on carbon fuels.

Yet, when it comes to climate change -- which, like, only threatens the viability of the one planet we have -- there’s no option but to let market forces do their work.

Future generations (if indeed there are any) won’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

Jeff Sparrow, editor of Overland, in www.Crikey.com.au

The United States of Australia

I am so sick of hearing about American politics. It's all over the place. Not just simply on blogs - I can understand that people want to talk politics, even though it feels like a pointless enterprise to me - but it is on my television set and radio all the time.

Dear media: I don't give a rat's arse about running mates. I don't care about morality issues and morality plays - that is what it all feels to me. A play that has little basis in reality except to score cheap shots. It is the most pathetic of plays. And it's not even my reality. I could understand the media in the States blathering on and on about pregnant daughters and such but you know what? It's totally irrelevant to me. But of course, as in America, the media isn't really all that intent on reporting news that has some sort of worth. It's only interested in reporting power stories. Or fear stories. And that kind of coercion is not a game I want to play anymore.

The political system in America will continue to fluff along regardless of how many Australians get to hear about it every single fucking day. Along with all the other cheap imports that flood our television screens every day and which contribute to my barely being able to watch any kind of free to air television. What a joke television is. Entertainment. Yeah. Like chroming or shooting up.

My kind of shooting up is finals football :) And I'll be watching that kind of television all weekend, every single game. I suppose everyone has their weaknesses, don't they :)

To my American friends: I'm not dissing you guys at all. I hope it doesn't come across like that. but seriously, if you got subjected to the amount of crap stuff out of Australia that we do here out of America, it would annoy you, too.

Nothing personal, but ...

Nothing personal, but I'm really sick of hearing about bloody Super Tuesday or whatever it's called. I bet you Northern Americans didn't turn on your radios to your equivalent of Radio National (the intellectual-ish station that talks about cool stuff) and then be subjected to giant long segments about the candidates when Australia was going to the polls?

No, I didn't think so.

You guys are great, you know, but it's not like I want to hear about your damn politics all the time (I just want to complain when whoever becomes President and King of the World Matrix stuffs it up ;)