What's Left Of Altered States?

"When servants are rude one should merely ignore it."
EM Forster

"There was something better in life than this rubbish, if only he could get to it - love - nobility - big spaces where passion clasped peace, spaces no science could reach, but they existed for ever, full of woods some of them, and arched with majestic sky and a friend..."
EM Forster

This is a picture of Phillip across the paddock at Tambar; when he came down pissed as a newt one night for a smoke; and was belligerent and friendly all at once; the sparks flying from the over-hot fire; fighting with his wife and overwhelmed by his five kids. He's not really all that old. I paid him to mow my lawns.

I have to do my bi-monthly column Hunting In Packs for the local paper, The South Sydney Herald, so I'm going to do it on Nick Cohen's book What's Left: How Liberals Lost Their Way, which I've just finished reading.

So here goes. Hopefully I can do it in one take:

HUNTING IN PACKS:

We have entered a world where there is a strange disconnect between the manufactured world of what we see on our television screens and read in our newspapers on the one hand, and the lives that most of us live on the other. There's a gnawing sense that all rationality has left us; that there is something fundamentally wrong with the bland fronts that make up Australian culture - its decaying intellectual and media life.
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Left and right have morphed into each other, even reversed. Kevin Rudd paints a smug, self-satisfied, conservative veneer across every controversy, emphasising at every opportunity how truly boring he is and how utterly mundane his life in "Brissie" really is; with nothing more exciting than a cup of tea on the verandah with his wife, the dog, the cat and the kids. Meanwhile our supposedly conservative Prime Minister John Howard has thrown all dignity to the wind, appearing ever more pathetic and frenetic as he runs frantically from one policy front to the next; desperately trying to retain power while dishing out money at a giddying rate.

People once thought John Howard stood for small government and constrained public spending; but he has become the biggest taxer and the biggest spender in Australian history. While Howasrd boasts incessantly about a booming economy, gifted to him courtesy of China's insatiable demand for raw materials; many of the so-called "Howard battlers" are drowning in debt and living on credit. While bankruptcies and fore-closures are climbing rapidly; those who encouraged these very same people to over-mortgage through the $7,000 first home buyers grant escape blame. They don't only escape blame, they boast about how rich we all are.

While preening himself as a good economic manager; ask any small business person, strangled by paperwork and the continuing nightmare of the GST, whether they think Howard was a good economic manager. Or whether he's bled them all dry so he can spend vast sums of money on social programs designed to keep him in power - expanding welfare into the middle classes and beefing up the bureaucracy to levels worthy of a communist.

We have entered a surreal, Orwellian world dominated by government advertising and divorced from reality. This will only get worse as the election approaches. Our newspapers reflect a slice of life, full of concern for the environment and global warming, that bears almost no resemblance to conditions on the ground or the toil of people's daily existence: a narrative we have been trained to accept.

Someone had to work very hard in a factory to pay the taxes which allow the government to spend hundreds of millions of dollars of our money to convince us that black is white. If Howard had really done such a great job of running our lives he wouldn't have to spend so much money to convince us of the fact. But where are the voices raised in protest at this grotesque waste?

Know Where You Stand demand WorkChoices advertisements. Bent over the kitchen table waiting to cop it; was the image that came most readily to most people's minds. Why should we have to pay taxes for this type of poor-qualtiy propaganda? For a government that didn't have the gumption to mention the word Workchoices at the last election; before radically rewriting Australia's industrial relations landscape with no mandate whatsoever.

Howard has announced yet another crackdown on drug users and a new round of anti-drug advertising. But governments have been perfectly well aware, ever since Nancy Reagan's Just Say No campaign back-fired and increased the level of illegal drug use in the community, that these campaigns are counter-productive; they don't work. They arouse rather than dampen interest and define margins towards which people are drawn. That a morally bankrupt Howard is prepared to put the welfare of young people at such patent risk in order to reassure the middle classes his government is doing something; and thereby hoping to garner a few more votes; is an absolutely shameful disgrace. But will a single major newspaper pursue this line of questioning?

The Howard government knew perfectly well when it launched its "Violence Against Women: Australia Says No" campaign that there was no evidence from anywhere in the world that these types of campaigns actually decrease the levels of inter-personal violence in the community and that in fact public campaigns are often counter-productive, their outcomes controlled by the Law of Unintended Consequence.

The government, preening itself on a motherhood issue, knew perfectly well that academics around the world have critiqued the ideologically driven feminist depiction of domestic violence as a simple paradigm of the oppressor and the oppressed, the batterer and the battered, the male perpetrator and the female victim, as not just inadequate but ultimately dishonest. But the Howard government appears not to have cared.

Deliberately stirring up public hysteria over domestic violence and vilifying all males as violent patriarchs for the government's own personal gain has indeed had unintended consequences. We see the results in a blizzard of false or exaggerated allegations across the nation's court rooms. Where are the voices raised in protest? Why are men presumably happy to see hundreds of millions of dollars of their taxes used in a campaign designed purely to vilify them?

It is this same disconnect that columnist for the UK's flagship left newspaper The Guardian, Nick Cohen, writes about in his excellent new book What's Left: How Liberals Lost Their Way. For him it was the Iraq War and the liberal left's defence of the ultra-right fascistic ideologies of Islamists which compelled him to put pen to paper. What's Left? is essential reading for anyone interested in politics and the history of ideas.

Comfortable with their "well oiled" anti-American rhetoric...

As he notes: "All around me, liberal London descended into the radical chick of the ultra-right... I can see now that going along with the fascistic ideas to some degree was a way of subliminally coping with the Islamist threat, or of letting Bertrand Russell's fallacy of the superior virtue of the oppressed turn anger at the treatment of the Palestinians into sympathy for the Devil. The desire to appease terrorists by agreeing with their prejudices and outrage at oppression in the West Bank and Gaza shepherded the herd of independent minds to the extreme right, and you can't deny that many enjoyed the trip."

Nick Cohen knows full well of what he speaks. Like a reformed smoker...

Columnist for The Guardian in London Nick Cohen had an impeccable left wing upbringing. Growing up, even simple things like going to the supermarket provided a host of ethical dilemmas.

Before him HItchens. ...

Howard has been in campaign mode for months, while the rest of the country would have been much more impressed if he actually went about governing the country instead of using our taxes to denigrate the other side of politics - that is to denigrate half of us.

"Good to meet you, nice to meet you, good to meet you," he says frantically, shaking people's hands for barely a second before moving on in shopping mall after shopping mall. If anybody tries to take up a serious issue with him he dismisses it quickly, "other people tell me different", before moving on, spinning that ultimate of lies: "Good to meet you..." Our political class on both sides of politics have disconnected from the country's heartland; maintained in isolation by their massive salaries and receiving all their information from departmental bureaucrats. Democracy is failing; and we will all be the poorer for it.


THE BIGGER STORY:

Associated Press

SYDNEY, Australia -

The first known pirated copy of "The Simpsons Movie" to make it onto the Internet was tracked to a home raided by Australian police Friday, authorities said.

Police ordered a 21-year-old Sydney man to appear in a Sydney court in October when he will be formally charged, the Australian Federal Police said. Details of the likely charge and penalties have not been made public.

The Motion Picture Association industry group said the investigation involved News Corp. (nyse: NWS - news - people )'s Twentieth Century Fox movie studio, Australian police and the private investigation group Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft.

The federation said the illegal "Simpsons" copy was the first on the Internet and was recorded by a cell phone in a Sydney cinema on July 26 - hours before its release in most of the world. Officials said the movie was uploaded to a video-sharing site based in the United States before it hit U.S. theaters July 27.

"Within 72 hours of making and uploading this unauthorized recording, AFACT had tracked it to other streaming sites and P2P (peer-to-peer) systems, where it had been illegally downloaded in excess of 110,000 times, and in all probability, copied and sold as a pirate DVD all over the world," AFACT executive director Adrianne Pecotic said.

Micheal Duffy in the Sydney Morning Herald:


Cold, hard facts take the heat out of some hot claims

Imagine if the American government agency responsible for temperature records had announced a fortnight ago that it had overestimated annual temperatures since the year 2000. Imagine if, at the time of correcting this error, the hottest year on record was mysteriously altered from 1998 to 1934. Imagine further that if you considered the 10 hottest years on record after these corrections, the hottest decade changed from the 1990s to the 1930s.

Would that change your views on global warming? It should, because climate change theory says increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere raises the temperature. Yet the hot 1930s was hardly a decade of carbon-spewing industrial growth.

Well, all these things have happened. NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies calculates the average US temperature figures. It does this by processing data from land measurement sites. Earlier this year a Canadian mathematician named Steve McIntyre approached the institute and pointed out an error in its more recent calculations. Figures since 2000 had been inflated by about 0.15 of a degree celsius.

The institute thanked him and on August 7 quietly changed these figures, and some of the rankings on its list of the hottest years on record, which extends back to 1880. It did this without any public acknowledgment of the changes.

The Goddard Institute is a major supporter of the climate change orthodoxy, and the discovery that it got one of the central data sets of global warming science and debate wrong is embarrassing and disturbing.

Previously, McIntyre, along with the economist Ross McKitrick, had demolished the so-called "hockey stick" chart used in the third report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The graph incorrectly portrayed the history of the Earth's average temperature over the past millennium as essentially unchanged until a steep climb in the 20th century. This made a modest rise in temperature appear far more unusual than it really was.

The two men had difficulty gaining access to the data and methodologies used in creating the hockey stick, a difficulty facing many who want to question the most basic research on which the science of climate change rests. It was McIntyre's continuing interest in such basic questions, pursued publicly at his blog climateaudit.org, that led him to look at the problematic siting of many US land weather stations (see photos of them at the website SurfaceStations.org) and how the data they produce is processed.