Mood:  cool

The 5th estate is this writer's term for the accountability and integrity tests that experienced blogging brings to the traditional 'free press' (but probably more accurately described as Big Media) known as the '4th estate', which in turn is defined by these other institutional power structures in Australia and most western countries:

3rd estate - Judiciary

2nd estate - Executive government

1st estate - Parliament

This was in Fairfax press on Jan 20-21st January 2007 and it's a good read.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/web/bloggers-unite/2007/01/18/1169330760687.html

Posted by editor at 11:24 AM EADT

Updated: Tuesday, 23 January 2007 11:32 AM EADT

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Mood:  bright

Some "pearls from Leunig" (the cartoonist in the Fairfax Press here with his own web page.

 Sent to SAM byStevie Bee who was also editor of Third Opinion alternative energy journal for roughly 20 years here in Sydney, and a graphic designer by trade. The first diagnosis on 'over stimulation' echoes the same comment of famous Everest climber Tim McCartney Snape regarding the exhaustion exhibited by much of western society:

Leunig on:

Over stimulation

"The individual is overwhelmed by the magnitude. We have embraced technology and economic systems that are just unfathomable and massive and all-powerful. I think television is a totally destructive and corrosive medium. People are living lives though television and films and the media rather than through their own lives. They are not living creatively. They are living reactively and passively all the time. We feel we need all this stimulation, but in fact we need very little.

Inner-self

"I suppose it dates back to an early childhood feeling that people weren't really saying what they were thinking. I think a lot of children grow up thinking, "Hang on, more is going on here, but people aren't saying it." I wanted to know what they really thought, what they were saying to themselves that they couldn't say out loud. People lie constantly, we all do. I think we suffer from the absence of the personal. When society lapses into the personal it gets all maudlin and inept and clumsy. Because we are not used to incorporating spontaneous, natural, truthful response."

Eternal Living

"There is a kind of letting go of the particularities of this time in which I live. You start to relate more to nature. You start to identify with all cultures and all humans. The problems of existence and this whole matter of living you start to see as having been essentially the same for the past 2000 years. You begin to feel for all things from all times and places so you are no longer a creature of these times as much as you used to be: concerned with the novelties of the moment. I have been shedding the technologies, the gadgets. I don't have a television. I cook with things I have always cooked with. I believe if you can move away from the time in which you live and allow yourself to be drawn to the eternal aspects of life, and the simple tools which simplify life, then you can almost move from this life automatically into what follows in another."

Television

"You see a society that's provided for by television is a society that says it doesn't need too many parks or natural situations for children to play in because television will look after them. So I think we, we start to construct the shape of our cities and our suburbs is built around this fact that people can be taken care of, they can be plonked in a room and absorbed in this virtual reality and reality itself becomes kind of a little bit degraded. I have a sense that it is mad making somewhere. That the quality of attention we give to each other as humans is degraded and diminished eventually with the sustained cultural usage"

Childcare Cartoon

"I made that piece with the total compassion I feel for what I see as a sad drift in the nature of family life in modern society, and that its infants and children who are so vulnerable are being forced onto a kind of production line of life too early. I think play, and tenderness and slowness and safety are being taken away more and more. You see I was just representing the voiceless one, the child, as I understand it. My sympathy is with the mother and child both-I understand all the different reasons for putting babies into care. One of the functions of my work is simply to try and speak for the voiceless ones, and there are many voiceless people."

Cartoons

"My work is often therapeutic because I often give expression to this inner voice. For example, I might make a small piece about a person oppressed and ground down by tiredness. This life is actually very exhausting. It doesn't give humans much time to contemplate anything. We are not resting ourselves and there is the feeling we have got to keep working and pushing really hard. So I draw the person running and running and running-for no apparent reason. And suddenly I find that I have touched on something that is perhaps universal."

Nature

"At the very simplest, I think as Van Gogh said and St Francis would have said, we must find nature. Just to be in the presence of nature your feelings and 'little seedlings' start to awake. So if we disassociate ourselves from God we cut nature out, too. More and more we turn nature into a commodity, into eco-tourism. But we must integrate it into the way people live every day."

http://www.leunig.com.au/

Posted by editor at 10:13 AM EADT

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Mood:  incredulous

Lifted from crikey.com.au of 22nd January 07 :

3. Where have all the voters gone?

Greens electoral analyst, Stephen Luntz, writes:

Every day the population of Australia grows by about 700 people. Every two minutes there is an extra Australian. At least, that is, if you believe the Bureau of Statistics. But according to the Australian Electoral Commission the population of Australia is in decline.

In April 2005 there were 13,216,525 Australians on the electoral roll. In December 06 there were 13,174,866, a fall of around 41,000. If it had not been for a surge created by the Victorian state election the numbers would have been much lower.

In Victoria the numbers on the roll fell 32,000 or so over a 17-month period before rising about 67,000 at the end of the year.

Well Victoria is rustbelt territory, some people would have us know. What about booming WA? It seems the West is in decline as well, losing twenty thousand voters in 18 months.

The population of Australia has grown by about half a million in the last two years, but that hasn’t shown up on the electoral roll. Unless the situation gets fixed, come election day half a million Australians are going to miss out on their chance to vote.

The Victorian election appears to provide some good news – putting on those thousands of extra enrolments in three months as the election came round – who cares if people are not on the roll when there is nothing to vote for?

However, looking closer, things are actually even worse than they seem: 26,000 of those people added to the roll as a result of the election got added too late to vote. Mostly they are people who turned up at the polling booth, found they were not on the roll and filled out a form then.

There is a crumb of comfort that they will be ready for the federal election, but their equivalents in other states may not.

Even worse, a great many of the forty thousand who did get on the roll in Victoria in time to vote only did so because they had plenty of warning (fixed term elections) and could do so after the election campaign hit full swing.

At the federal election this year that won’t be the case. Changes to the law mean that anyone not on the roll has one day after the election is called to enrol. Not many will.

Half a million voters is 3,000 per seat. Enough to make a pretty sizeable difference to the election result one would think. Of course, if the voters who have been kicked off, and the new ones not added, were a random selection none of this would matter, except in a philosophical sense.

But if past experience is any guide the missing voters are not random – they’re young people who've just turned 18 and renters who have moved house (the two groups obviously overlap a bit). And both these groups are disproportionately likely to vote Labor and Green.

That doesn’t mean that the ALP can look forward to missing 3,000 votes per seat. But it does mean that, after preferences, a few hundred more votes are more likely to be missing from the Labor column than the Liberal.

Presumably the more astute Labor candidates are onto this, and are employing people to check that, in marginal seats at least, people are properly enrolled. But if you want to know why there is a high chance the Senate will stay in Liberal hands, no matter what happens in the House, it’s worth considering the collective impact of all the unenrolled voters. And asking a few searching questions of the Australian Electoral Commission.

Posted by editor at 10:09 AM EADT

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Mood:  a-ok

Last night the 7 pm news carried Premier Iemma (starting to look alot like an Uncle Tom for white supremacists) and his plan to change the NSW Judicial Commission from 3 judges to add 2 members of the community (whatever that means).

Magistrate OShane was again mentioned as a reason for this, but the report failed to mention her recent decision involved evidence of racist provocations resulting in a reaction and assault charges. Iemma and Watkins thought they had OShane on toast until that came out.

SAM's editor obtained a copy of the transcript from the Chief Magistrate's Office. It reveals evidence in different directions and material potentially damaging to the reputations of the witnesses in the case both transit officers and the defendant. In other words there are issues of privacy that on balance mean this writer prefers to not publish the transcript and move on.

Suffice to say my summary of the transcript which I put in correspondence last week reads as follows:

----- Original Message -----

Posted by editor at 2:38 PM EADT

Updated: Tuesday, 30 January 2007 8:41 AM EADT

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Mood:  a-ok

SAM's editor as an Aussie of Irish, Italian, German and probably English mixture doesn't mind at all the Union Jack on the Australian Flag being benched, declined, replaced.

Who can forget 1 million Irish dying as the UK exported food for profit from Ireland during the potato famine. And there is the offense to the Original Australians, our Indigenous when they have the Union Jack top left of the flag pushed down on them after the massive pain and suffering of their people, which they have somehow survived.

It's why the Australian Republic needs a new flag. There is one from over in WA which has a boomerang Indigenous theme we quite like too.

Here is a groovy rainbow flag I think is very friendly as an antidote to the race hate white supremacism implicit in the Union Jack, held by two immigrant ladies I met at Turrella in Sydney one morning:

Compare it with the message on the front of the Sydney Daily Telegraph today:

Posted by editor at 12:05 PM EADT

Updated: Monday, 22 January 2007 2:28 PM EADT

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Mood:  amorous

It sounds like a Zen guide to tantric sex but it's actually ‘swimming smooth’: There is a DVD by this name however SAM’s editor consulted this web based teacher easier to access:

Swim Technique and Swim Workout Tips

and the links there.

As a 7 year old almost drowned in a beach hole next to Warrnambool’s Middle Island – the place with the curious stone flints, middens and fairy penguins in burrows (with cute sheepdog protectors in the Herald yesterday (offline) and see:

http://www.warrnambool.vic.gov.au/page/page.asp?page_Id=527)

 - until yesterday swimming has always been an enigma.

The frantic dog paddles off the low diving board at the local pool, to the revelation of blowing bubbles via deductive reasoning of a neglected 8 year old ('where does the stale air go?'), decent swimming technique has always been an art form for superior beings or kids who got real swimming lessons. But no longer. I have joined the ranks.

From an enthusiastic groveller in the lap pool, gasping and straining, I met the Swimming Genie again and we made peace.  20 easy laps, break and then another 16 just for fun. Yes the mid life crisis this summer is benign. All those laps also happen to be good for the flabby chin: Being one of those 2 million misanthropics who live alone

Our incredible shrinking households

I don’t exercise the pharyngial muscles nearly enough talking so controlled breathing in swimming is perfect. There is always didgeridoo, a choir or getting out more and socialising. Next year perhaps.

And then there is my set of scales - a cheapie from Big W Rockdale: If  I stand in a certain way it is either 85 or 95 kg. Now that’s a big margin for error. Time for a calibration via the local dollar coin machine but rapidly decreasing flab suggests it’s the lower end.

 Stabbing the fish – its all about keeping your elbow high when hand (actually 'paddle' being hand/forearm to elbow) enter the water to a foot’s depth just in front of the goggles to grab the water and pull at right angles to the pool floor. Never lock elbow. Paddle with bent arm. Face is down, not looking forward, and let your head relax and float to keep the bum and legs up. Don’t kick hard, it's your chest and back that does most of the work. Do this and you will have 'balance' and you will feel like you are 'reaching over the low wall'.

Grab the water with ‘your paddles’, crawling (the Australian Crawl) as if on forearms actually, with hand at 90 degrees to the floor at all times from start to finish: This means pronating the wrist, that is, wrist fully bent back pushing the water when it gets next to the hip at the end.

And rotate, meaning with good technique habits above, you achieve a certain balance and thus can tilt on your lengthwise axis (a bit like an unlucky piglet on a spit): As you paddle the right hand/forearm stroke you can tilt the left high side of your body effortlessly up, which also helps in the side breath when required. Conversely as you paddle with your left hand/forearm stroke you tilt the right side up to breathe. It also means you get to look a bit at the underwater view to the left and right (but not in front because that stuffs your balance from bum and legs falling, which causes drag).

I took the advice and dropped back to the slow lane to even out my technique. And there is one thing they don’t tell you in these PG classified teaching aids. Or rather they call it ‘kinesthetic connection with the water’ but I don’t buy that. It’s sex. All that sliding, breathing and lapping relaxes the body like a good lover after orgasm. There is an intimacy. Talk about relaxing. I’m going back for more, as you do. Who said swimming was boring?

Picture: My choice of relatively quiet cafe on Glebe Point Rd near Glebe Market on Saturday's near Victoria Park swimming pool to dissect the Big Media coverage and enjoy the world music and great furniture, not least this crocodile table from the Sepik River PNG.

Posted by editor at 7:05 AM EADT

Updated: Sunday, 21 January 2007 8:27 AM EADT

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Mood:  incredulous

It was sad reading Phil Coorey's choreographed piece in the Saturday Sydney Morning Herald today about deposed ALP leader Kim Beazley. The proverbial windbag can't shut up which is really the only loyal thing to do:

Out, but still the party man

Kim Beazley has no plans to dish dirt, or scorn colleagues, despite feeling he was robbed of his best chance to win the prime ministership, writes Phillip Coorey.

There he is giving oxygen to his extensive experience, which inevitably contrasts with Rudd, as if to annoy the MPs especially in NSW who read Fairfax who dumped him. Sour grapes? He wallows in theories of both parties at risk of existential demise talking himself into a real mess by effectively saying if Iemma wins in NSW (which KB says he will despite shedding MPs like an old cat sheds fur), it will be the end of the Liberal Party forever to then vote for Rudd coming next in election timing, because Howard's Coalition will be out of government everywhere, dodgy branches disintegrating.

How's that for smashing democratic checks and balances, according to KB? Alot of swinging voters might take Beazley at his word and just not vote Rudd after all if Iemma wins in NSW first. 

Is that Beazley's real game here, some faux happy go lucky fatalism as 'a loyal party man' while actually viciously damaging Rudd

1. on his relative inexperience, and

2. putting into stark relief the danger to our democratic fabric by having federal and all states as ALP governments?

KB dithers hopelessly saying on the one hand

- The ALP are very robust even in opposition because they have 100 years of tradition to fall back on while out of government, but

- if they lose the next federal election they will still be cactus because the industrial relations changes will kill the union movment that the ALP so greatly relies on.

That's pretty contradictory actually. It is also hopelessly unsustainable to argue the Liberals, conservatives or whatever, will be finished if the ALP hold every government: First it is intrinsically unstable in a country of democratic tradition and second there is the small matter of a capital strike to such critical affect in so many Latin American countries: Nothing like capital (including commentary via Big Media), withdrawing their participation to cause chaos and voter backlash.

I once got an email from Big Kim back in the late 90's. He wondered if I would get involved in an ALP youth round table on the environment there in Canberra or wherever. You get the feeling at such times you are being checked over for potential talent. But the ALP woodchippers are not for me. Their cynicism, not least Bob Carr, cured me of any patience. You can say logger terrorism has expanded under the federal Howard government, as I do, but it's also State ALP government fascism:

6th Dec 2006 - New paper: Logger terrorism under the Howard federal government

[an update of this paper soon collating a story form Environment Victoria May 2000 entitled "Will the Government wait until someone is killed before it acts on forest violence?" with gruesome bloody picture of a greenie bludgeoned on the head.]

The Melbourne leadership of FoE green group were alarmed at my contemptuous response to Big Kim for the pro woodchipping ALP. But it wasn't meant personally, it was policy.

Now Kim is exhibiting the existential angst he speaks of and it's not a pretty sight seeing him do exactly what Latham in his Diaries in the 2003 and earlier sections accuse him of - two faced presentation. On the one hand all kindness and diplomacy, on the other vicious and underhand.

It doesn't help matters that the story leads in on the sadness of his younger brother's sudden death (which was quite the Shakespearean moment) as if to imply the cruel vote to dump him was the shock that did it. Is KB relying on sympathy for his loss to avoid criticism for the meddlesome content of this article with Coorey? Could KB be so cynical? Well we all know Latham's view.

But I can't otherwise explain this pallid regurgitation by the Fairfax hack - who had a similar tedious regurgitation earlier in the week from Howard's view of the world in a direct feed:

http://www.smh.com.au/text/articles/2007/01/18/1169095905740.html

Where indeed is the public curiousity for deposed Kim Beazley amongst the readership, unless Fairfax is making mischief? There is nothing so ex as a soundly defeated ex leader, who has resigned from future politics, and suffering the proverbial relevance deprivation syndrome. It just steals clear air from Rudd who is featured in the foreground of an interesting photo in both the Telegraph and Herald (by different photographers) at a funeral for another silly old bugger Jim Killen with no John Howard in sight:

Survivors of another age say farewell to Killen

Is KB positioning for a deal on the governor generalship? Seems premature, and impertinent. What's his game - make me a promise or I keep running interference? Still the party man in Machiavellian self interest?

No wonder Coorey's article had a tacky hair replacement advert on the flipside page: "More hair or your money back".

Indeed the real political future is covered by Peter Hartcher in another story about "senescent" (love that) Howard needing to implement a reshuffle to match the freshness of Rudd, and his team like Gillard and Garrett:

For a fresh face just make a little nip and tuck

John Howard needs to put some new faces on his ministry if he is to avoid the perception that the Government is simply old and worn out, writes Peter Hartcher.

Mind you I agree there is resonance in the tag "existential problems" vis a vis the Coalition and ALP but for a wholly different reason being the ecologically unravelling world, with a two party preffered method of voting effectively a corrupt gerry mander against The Greens.

How else to explain the desperation of Howard to rely on $370,000 in electioneering from the evil slavish Christian cult extremists in the Exclusive Brethren to keep the Greens out?:

Sect member funded anti-Greens campaign

A MYSTERY Sydney businessman belonging to the Exclusive Brethren sect spent $370,000 on advertisements and pamphlets during the 2004 federal election, according to the Australian Electoral

But Beazley is part of that duopoly problem. The corrupt gerrymander explains why we have the weird unstable pendulum swing federal to state, Coalition to ALP as the electorate desperately seeks neither and tries to orchestrate a neutralisation of both. This is where the old parties are simply defying the political proportionate representation of The Greens as their vote gets bigger and bigger and will only grow as said greenhouse and other unravel takes over.

That is a party not dedicated to the material economy first, but second. People are getting it, not least professional communicator Richard Glover with influence from HSC papers, abc radio, books, and yes the political patronage machine, in this amusing piece:

It's time to come clean about my dirty little secret

Since age 16, I've created 6988 kilograms of greenhouse gases simply by warming my teapot, writes Richard Glover.

( I was already aware of Glover's shift. It has been a long time coming. It happened when he spoke to a climate change expert and you could hear his voice drop an octave at the reality of the threat to civilisation and the world. Welcome aboard Richard at least you know it really is a ship of fools now, rather than just being fooled.)

Get another satisfying life Kim and stay out of the press, in fact leave the country for a while if at all possible as you suggested years back. Or become a true greenie dedicated to good works. That's a worthy philosophical commitment. Those are the real choices. Federal politics is not 'about you' per se anymore. Carr had the same trouble realising he was actually, really,  REJECTED. You say you get it, but the article suggests otherwise. And that goes for your pilot fish like Maxine McKew, that Costello ratbag et al. Don't feed the pilot fish indeed.

It's about the future of the country, a much bigger deal altogether than the Beazley franchisee of brand ALP. No doubt it gets confusing when the family business has appeared synonymous with the matters of state for decades. Appeared Kim, not reality. That's the problem with intergenerational succession, proprietary as distinct from earned, like fluffing your lines at the most painful of moments when credibiliy was THE question.

But no matter. We are all called including Kim Beazley to save this world from the programmed flaw in Humanity: Modifying and destroying our own ecological cradle over all anthropological time. Glover yesterday, KB tomorrow?

Postscript #1

Perhaps related, or coincidentally, Rudd has grasped the gist of this analysis today 22nd January 07.

The Beazler (silly old geezer) interference in the article mentioned above has effectively been skewered by Rudd's launch of a bipartisan national meeting water summit.

The feds are resisting via loud mouth Malcolm Turnbull especially to keep alive the NSW electoral tactics over desal plant and water etc.

The Feds did this to The Greens too, scorning a summit, then holding it on Melbourne Cup day (November 2006). Turnbull claims this was for availability of the Premiers, but methinks it had the virtue of being hidden from view as a backdown to the Greens that Howard is so desperate to close out on Iraq, on greenhouse, on his whole 'senescent' world view.

Now Maxine McKew, senior ex ABC journalist and Beazley booster, has joined Kevin Rudd's staff on the abc radio headlines here this morning.

My story above suggests McKew is 'a Beazley pilot fish' but obviously she has decided to rise to the occasion and works for Rudd as of this morning.

Sure is an interesting time for a political hack like me, and the gears of democracy are really grinding and clunking and indeed proceeding forward in some fashion.

God help Australia too, not least water.

This story re USA military satellites at risk of China missile reach by Sheridan in the Australian is also very important:

p12 Chinese can hit enemies where it really hurts

* COMMENT
Greg Sheridan
* January 20, 2007

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21088241-25377,00.html

Posted by editor at 5:30 PM EADT

Updated: Monday, 22 January 2007 9:36 AM EADT

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