DUCKPOND

ANOTHER TURN FOR RUDD ?

2012-01-30T01:22:00.000+11:00

There is speculation Kevin Rudd will have the numbers in the Labor caucas following the Queensland election, which is expected to be a wipeout. In a Federal Election it is said that winning seats in Queensland will be critical to Labor's chances of holding government.

Cosimer Marriner in The Sydney Morning Herald writes:

KEVIN RUDD will use the election campaign in Queensland as the springboard for a renewed push to wrest the prime ministership back from Julia Gillard, Labor Party insiders predict.

The Foreign Minister, who represents the Brisbane seat of Griffith, has promised ''I will help any campaign that they want me to'' during the state election, which pits the Labor Premier, Anna Bligh, against the former Brisbane lord mayor Campbell Newman, now Liberal National Party leader.
Labor insiders say Mr Rudd's involvement in the campaign for the March 24 election is designed to boost his profile, highlight the disparity in popularity between the former and present prime ministers, remind his caucus colleagues how crucial Queensland is in the next federal election - and inevitably stoke leadership tensions.

Antony Green provides a comprehensive account of the state of play in Queensland, concluding:

If the long campaign sees the LNP lead over Labor slip, then the campaigning by Katter's party may be telling. The more cross bench members elected, the harder it will be for the LNP to win a majority in its own right. The nightmare scenario for the LNP would be for the party to fall short of a majority and for Newman to be defeated in Ashgrove. But given the state of the polls, much would have to go wrong for the LNP for this doomsday scenario to matter.

As an aside, I am slightly surprised that there has not been consideration to move from optional preferential voting given the unicameral parliament and the adoption of system similar to Multiple Member Proportional system used in New Zealand.

Still a change of government in Queensland will have Federal implications with an almost complete transformation of the political complexion of the States. It is certain that ALP members of the House of Reps will be concerned, and a change of leadership, it that is the decision will have to take effect reasonably soon after the Queensland State Election.

If Kevin Rudd was again put in the PM's office, how would steer and manage the ship of state differently this time around?

Was this Kevin Rudd's finest hour?

One suspects that Julia Gillard could not have made this speech and that Tony Abbott certainly would not have given it.

TERRORISM AND TREASON

2012-01-29T02:45:00.003+11:00

Not for the first time, the United States is engaged in an endeavour to obtain the release of a CIA in Pakistan. The complication this time is that the agent is a Pakistani citizen.

Secretary of Defence, and former head of the CIA, Leon Panetta, makes his pitch for the release of Dr Shikal Afridi, who allegedly organized a fake polio campaign in Abbotabad to obtain DNA evidence that would confirm the murdered Osama bin Laden's presence in that city.

The BBC reports:

It is not clear if any DNA from Bin Laden or any family members was ever obtained.

Washington has been arguing that Dr Afridi should be freed and allowed to live in the US.

Mr Panetta also repeated US claims that someone in authority in Pakistan must have known where Bin Laden was hiding at the compound - located close to the country's top military academy.

But were it the case, why would it be so?

Panetta talks to CBS News.

The Pakistan Government has refused to accede to the US request for Afridi to be released. An earlier request in July last year by the Secretary of State was met with a similar rejection:

Official sources have confirmed that US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton telephoned President Asif Ali Zardari on July 28 to seek his help in securing Dr Afridi’s release.

However, President Zardari reportedly turned down the request, arguing that the matter was before the judicial commission, which has been investigating the circumstances surrounding the death and presence of Bin Laden in Abbottabad, sources said.

“The matter is sub judice and it is only the Abbottabad Commission which will decide his (Afridi) fate,” said an official quoting President Zardari as having told Secretary Clinton.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told The Express Tribune that the detained doctor may be summoned by the Abbottabad commission for questioning.

The high-powered commission, which is headed by a recently retired senior Supreme Court judge Justice Javed Iqbal, had already barred the government from extraditing Bin Laden’s widows and other persons who are connected with this incident. Afridi was one of several Pakistanis who were detained by the country’s security agencies over allegations of working for the CIA. Afridi has yet to be charged formally, but if he is, he could face the death penalty for collaborating with a foreign spy agency.

It is unclear how the CIA first recruited Afridi to work for the United States.

It is fairly clear that the CIA is a law unto itself, and the failure again to respect Pakistan's sovereignty and laws is unlikely it popular in that country. The alternative would be to establish and respect international laws which would have two significant drawbacks. It would call into question the resort and reign of violence to solve differences and laws could not be applied as victor justice.

Press TV reported in February 2011 on the CIA's secret war in Pakistan:

FRIDAY NIGHT DOG BLOG: ACTING AS THE WEATHER

2012-01-28T01:32:00.005+11:00

Another very wet week. Although the rain was heavy at times it did not create the flooding here, it did elsewhere.

Both Dexter and Hannah can be very strong. I had the unfortunate experience of losing control of Dexter who ran up to a jogger. In these circumstances I usually take a detour, but on this occasion there was nowhere to go.I thought I could hold him by standing on the lead. No sooner than she had declared she was scared than she ran back past me and was gone.

That might be described as an outlier, an extreme event. Of course, once I saw this video the analogy stuck with me (via Real Climate):

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We had nothing to do with it, but decided to keep the name that Hannah was given. It has a Hebrew derivation like others. Chris Floyd wrote and sings his song "Rebecca" in honour of the astronomer and poet, Rebecca Elson who died of cancer at 39.

Rebecca by Chris Floyd
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Again this week we will seeking to board Friday Ark.
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Picasa was used to organize the photos for this collection.

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Our friend Robert died this week, after seven months of treatment for malignant pleural mesothelioma, probably induced by asbestos. I hope the photos of Dexter and Hannah I sent might have brought a smile with all the pain he was experiencing despite the intensive palliative care.

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THE IMAGE OF AUSTRALIA DAY

2012-01-26T23:23:00.000+11:00

The incident involving the PM and the Leader of the Opposition and protesters from the 40th Anniversary of the start of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy will dominate discussion for a while and will linger.

People, such as myself, who were not involved have to be careful about the judgements made. The footage from Channel Nine is infused with a world view based on violence and separation. Notice how the protesters become scapegoats and stereotypes, and the behavior of the police, which on its face seems extraordinarily inappropriate is not commented upon. The behavior of those who protect the PM just seems bizarre.

The ABC is prepared to continence a wider range of opinion, while always cleaving loyally to the perceived mainstream consensus that the media is in the process of creating. ABC Online reports:

Some of the protesters said they were aware Mr Abbott was inside the restaurant but not the Prime Minster, however others say Ms Gillard is a coward for not stepping outside to speak to them.

"The Opposition Leader talks about ripping the tent embassy off us. The other leader fails to even come out and speak to us as Aboriginal people. She runs like a coward, she runs," activist Sean Gordon said.

This morning, Mr Abbott said Aboriginal people could be very proud of their achievements since the tent embassy was first established but that it was probably time to move on.

"I think the Indigenous people of Australia can be very proud of the respect in which they are held by every Australian," he said.

"I think a lot has changed since then and I think it probably is time to move on from that."

But Mr Gordon says many people were angered by those remarks.

"We have not moved on in 200 years. We are hand out to government," he said.

"We have no economic base for who we are as Aboriginal people. We have title to land we aren't able to do anything with. How have we moved on?"

Tent embassy founder Michael Anderson says Mr Abbott's comments are disrespectful and amounted "to inciting racial riots".

Ms Gillard has refused to comment on whether Mr Abbott should apologise for his remarks.

There are questions concerning the PM's behavior. Why did she allow herself to be treated in this way. Why did she not attempt to speak to the demonstrators? Why does she refuse to comment Abbott should apologize? One of the requirements of leadership is physical courage, along with a set of core beliefs and vision. Whatever John Howard's faults, and I am no fan, he possessed those qualities.

EU THREATENS OIL EMBARGO

2012-01-26T00:11:00.001+11:00

The proposed EU sanctions on Iranian oil has elements of the bizarre. What can they be thinking?

Rachel Brown for The ABC reports that Iranian authorities are not taking the threat seriously:

On Tuesday Iran said it expected the EU to backtrack on the embargo and repeated a threat to close the vital Strait of Hormuz shipping lane if the West succeeds in preventing Tehran from exporting crude.

"The West's ineffective sanctions against the Islamic state are not a threat to us. They are opportunities and have already brought lots of benefits to the country," intelligence minister Heydar Moslehi told the official IRNA news agency.

The tone in the Islamic Republic was defiant, even sceptical.

"The global economic situation is not one in which a country can be destroyed by imposing sanctions," Mr Moslehi said, repeating Iran's stance that with the EU in economic and monetary crisis, it needs Iran's oil more than Iran needs its business.

A spokesman for the oil ministry said Iran had had plenty of time to prepare for the sanctions and would find alternative customers for the 18 per cent of its exports that up to now have gone to the 27-nation European bloc.

"The first phase of this (sanctions action) is propaganda, only then it will enter the implementation phase. That is why they put in this six months period, to study the market," Alireza Nikzad Rahbar said, predicting the embargo could be rescinded before it takes force completely.

"This market will harm them because oil is getting more expensive and when oil gets more expensive it will harm the people of Europe," state TV quoted him as saying.

"We hope that in these six months they will choose the right path."

The embargo will not kick in completely until July 1 because the bloc's foreign ministers who agreed the ban at a meeting in Brussels were anxious not to penalise the ailing economies of Greece, Italy and others to whom Iran is a major oil supplier.

Robert Fisk in The Independent has a similar view concluding: Bring on the sanctions. Send in the clowns". Israeli leaders have a long track record of accusing Iran of wanting to build nuclear weapons. Some of this history is detailed by Robert Fisk:

The Israeli President warns us now that Iran is on the cusp of producing a nuclear weapon. Heaven preserve us. Yet we reporters do not mention that Shimon Peres, as Israeli Prime Minister, said exactly the same thing in 1996. That was 16 years ago. And we do not recall that the current Israeli PM, Benjamin Netanyahu, said in 1992 that Iran would have a nuclear bomb by 1999. That would be 13 years ago. Same old story.

So perhaps the story of an Iranian bomb might help Israel. As Robert Fisk notes:

For Palestinians in the West Bank, Israel is the brutal, colonising, occupying power. But the moment Iran is mentioned, this colonial power turns into a tiny, vulnerable, peaceful state under imminent threat of extinction. Ahmadinejad – here again, I quote Netanyahu – is more dangerous than Hitler. Israel's own nuclear warheads – all too real and now numbering almost 300 – disappear from the story. Iran's Revolutionary Guards are helping the Syrian regime destroy its opponents; they might like to – but there is no proof of this.

Kevin Rudd, now in the eyes of some critics, the putative PM, got into the act, but then it turned out that Australia does not import oil from Iran.

RT reports on the suggestion, other wise reported by Press TV that India and China plan to buy Iranian oil with gold:

So what is going on? Pepe Escobar concludes in his article at Tom Dispatch:

t’s not at all far-fetched to imagine hardcore Full-Spectrum-Dominance practitioners inside the Pentagon riding a false-flag incident in the Persian Gulf to an attack on Iran (or simply using it to pressure Tehran into a fatal miscalculation). Consider as well the new U.S. military strategy just unveiled by President Obama in which the focus of Washington’s attention is to move from two failed ground wars in the Greater Middle East to the Pacific (and so to China). Iran happens to be right in the middle, in Southwest Asia, with all that oil heading toward an energy-hungry modern Middle Kingdom over waters guarded by the U.S. Navy.

So yes, this larger-than-life psychodrama we call “Iran” may turn out to be as much about China and the U.S. dollar as it is about the politics of the Persian Gulf or Iran’s nonexistent bomb. The question is: What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Beijing to be born?

Pepe Escobar talks with Scott Horton on AntiWar.com.

If true, aside from the likely increase in the price of oil for Europeans in particular, the end of the Dollar as the reserve currency of the world that the schemozzle is as much an obscenity of military power as it is of an absurdity - although real people have been, and one supposes may be, murdered.

ERUPTIONS ON THE SUN

2012-01-25T00:19:00.000+11:00

Complacency may be due to ignorance, although in this instance there is said to be no cause for concern from the solar storm that the sun has just experienced.

Here is apparently what happened on 2nd January this year:

The BBC reports:

Our planet is being bombarded by high-energy particles unleashed by the strongest solar storm since 2005, scientists say.

The charged particles are mostly a concern for satellites - which they can disrupt - and astronauts.

But they can also cause communication problems for aircraft travelling near the poles.

The geomagnetic storm has been caused by a potent flare that erupted from the Sun at 0400 GMT on Sunday.

The effects are likely to be felt on Earth throughout Wednesday.

A more benign effect of the outpouring of particles is the ability to see aurorae, or "Northern lights", further south than is usually possible.

A spokesman for US space agency Nasa said that flight surgeons and solar scientists have modelled the flare's predicted effects.

They decided that the six astronauts on the International Space Station do not have to take any action to protect themselves from the incoming stream of particles.

Solar flares are caused by the sudden release of magnetic energy stored in the Sun's atmosphere.

In an event called a coronal mass ejection (CME), bursts of charged particles are released into space.

This can interfere with technology on Earth, such as electrical power grids, communications systems and satellites - including satellite navigation (or sat-nav) signals.

Some have seen the potential for disaster in this solar phenomenon, but Nasa physicist Alex Young is not concerned - to the chagrin of at least once critic who suggest that over the last four to five cycles the effect is getting larger:

Lets talk more about the sun and infinity of space more, so as to recognize that what may divide us may in this perspective to inconsequential and our planet its'life support systems are precious.

THE RULE OF LAW?

2012-01-24T03:35:00.000+11:00

The concerted action, by the prominent internet organizations appeared to have successfully stopped the passage of SOPA.

This was discussed by The Daily Kos's alter ego on Keith Olbermann's program (via Juan Cole at Informed Comment):

Then there is the case now before the court in Auckland in relation to Megaupload, along with the confiscation of money and property prior to any court decision. At the very least this suggests that existing laws were sufficient to obtain prosecutions in US courts. This opinion is supported by Glenn Greenwald.

The New Zealand Herald explained the process:

Kim Dotcom and three others were arrested in New Zealand after a request for "mutual legal assistance" by the United States Government - which plans to extradite the accused.

The men have not been charged by police in New Zealand and are being held in custody on the warrant issued by the US Government.

Extradition is the official process allowing for the surrender of a suspected or convicted criminal from one country to another.

Requests are made under the Extradition Act 1999, any relevant treaty and the law of the foreign country. New Zealand signed an extradition treaty with the US in 1970.

Normally, a formal request for extradition is received through diplomatic channels. The Minister of Justice may request an arrest warrant and then the District Court determines whether the individual is eligible for surrender.

The indictments on five counts were sanctioned by a Grand Jury in Virginia, which perhaps was guaranteed to approve the US Government's action. It is one thing to arrest and charge a person; it is another to confiscate property prior to the judgement of a relevant court. I am not across the legal issues, but perhaps there are issues of extra-territoriality in play here.

Glenn Greenwald draws two conclusions that in their own way are a form of indictment:

1. It’s wildly under-appreciated how unrestrained is the Government’s power to do what it wants, and how little effect these debates over various proposed laws have on that power. . . It’s true that website-seizures-without-trials are not quite as lawless as indefinite detentions, since there are actual statutes conferring this power. But it nonetheless sends a very clear message when citizens celebrate a rare victory in denying the Government a power it seeks — the power to shut down websites without a trial — only for the Government to turn around the very next day and shut down one of the world’s largest and best-known sites. Whether intended or not, the message is unmistakable: Congratulations, citizens, on your cute little “democracy” victory in denying us the power to shut down websites without a trial: we’re now going to shut down one of your most popular websites without a trial.

2. The U.S. really is a society that simply no longer believes in due process: once the defining feature of American freedom that is now scorned as some sort of fringe, radical, academic doctrine. That is not hyperbole. Supporters of both political parties endorse, or at least tolerate, all manner of government punishment without so much as the pretense of a trial, based solely on government accusation: imprisonment for life, renditions to other countries, even assassinations of their fellow citizens. Simply uttering the word Terrorist, without proving it, is sufficient. And now here is Megaupload being completely destroyed — its website shuttered, its assets seized, ongoing business rendered impossible — based solely on the unproven accusation of Piracy.

Since US courts are now apparently performing no useful function perhaps they do can be closed, as is suggested for other government functions to save money. Court Martials could used to ensure that the correct conclusions were reached. The letter and spirit of the Constitution is now irrelevant, so that could be another cost saving. Then again as the parties to the action against the Megauploads and the authors of SOPA and PIPA would contend fictions and myths are essential to any national story, with the benefits worth more than a costs.

US PUBLIC OPINION AND POLITICS

2012-01-23T03:28:00.002+11:00

Responses to opinion polls appear to be at odds with public policy and campaign rhetoric in the US. Could it be that the public opinion that is not manufactured simply does not matter?

Truthout reports that the US public when asked in opinion polling gives majority responses that are off the political register. Lawrence S. Wittner reports:

In a World Public Opinion poll of sixteen nations in 2009, 69 percent of Americans supported the view that nations are obliged to abide by international law even when doing so is at odds with their national interest. Furthermore, a 2010 poll by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found 82 percent of Americans favored ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (rejected by the GOP-dominated Senate in 1999), 70 percent favored participation in the International Criminal Court (rejected by President George W. Bush), and 67 percent backed a new international treaty to combat climate change. In December 2008, a World Public Opinion poll found that 77 percent of Americans backed an international treaty abolishing nuclear weapons.

Furthermore, most Americans favor expanding the role of the United Nations in world affairs. Polling in 2010 by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that majorities of Americans favored creating a standing UN peacekeeping force (64 percent), giving the United Nations the authority to enter countries to investigate human rights violations (72 percent), creating an international marshals service with the power to arrest leaders responsible for genocide (73 percent), and empowering the United Nations to regulate the international arms trade (55 percent).

Overall, as public opinion studies show, Americans want a smaller—rather than a larger—global footprint for their nation. According to a 2010 poll by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, only 8 percent favored the United States playing the role of the preeminent world leader, while 71 percent favored a cooperative approach. Gallup polls have turned up similar results. In 2011, Gallup reported that only 16 percent of Americans endorsed the option of the United States playing “the leading role” in world affairs. According to Gallup, 32 percent of Americans favored “a minor role” or “no role” at all for the United States, while 50 percent wanted the United States to “take a major role, but not the leading one.”

"It's the media. . ." Justin Lewis deconstructs the mediation of public polling and political leadership (2006):

POSTSCRIPT:

The Republican Primary in South Carolina won by Gringrich with 40.4% of the votes cast is not relevant, even the turnout given rain at 22% of the total number of registered voters was good. By that measure Grinrich overwhelming level of support, compared to Romney's 27.8%, represents 9% of South Carolina's potential voters. Of course the percentage of the voters who cast ballots has no effect on the electoral outcomes and suppressing the vote is an effective political tactic in the general election.

FRANCE TO LEAVE AFGHANISTAN!

2012-01-22T01:16:00.000+11:00

An Afghan soldier has shot for members of the French contingent in that country. There have been previous attacks on foreign occupation soldiers.

On one level this latest incident has become about whether the French will remain in Afghanistan, and on another it is about the strategy, as distinct from the objectives, of the occupation.

ABC News reports:

Afghan security forces, or insurgents dressed in their uniforms, have attacked and killed international troops or trainers more than a dozen times in the past two years.

This latest attack will undermine trust between Afghan and western troops. But London Think Tank Chatham House spokesman Dr Gareth Price says the coalition has no choice but to forge on. "The whole strategy is to build up the Afghan National Army and there isn't really an alternative strategy," he said. "The alternative would be just to leave Afghanistan. "It would be quite self-defeating if those western countries stopped building it up."

As for vetting methods during recruitment, Dr Price says it is "tricky" for the Afghan National Army to improve its measures. "The issue with the Afghan army at the moment is it's very much an army of non-Pashtuns, and that's difficult for an army that eventually is going to be mainly operating, if it's taking the turnabout, in Pashtun areas," he said. "There are attempts to get more Pashtuns within the Afghan National Army and that's when things get more difficult in terms of vetting. "But at the moment it's very much an army of northern ethnic groups rather than the southern ones."

Former Prime Minister, and now Foreign Minister, Kevin Rudd, could detect no erosion of resolve in his meeting with the French Foreign Minister. This might be as close a reading of French politics as the continued mission in Central Asia is of Afghan politics.

Ramin Mazaheri reports for Press TV Global News that President Sarkozy may have good political reason not to stop at the suspension of combat operations and military training:

John Glaser in an interview with Scott Horton is somewhat pessimistic about the claims of success in Afghanistan.

Will he situation miraculously improve by 2014?

FRIDAY NIGHT DOG BLOG:" . . . ALL THINGS GO"

2012-01-21T01:10:00.001+11:00

We had very heavy rain last Saturday which the crossing the creek a hazard. I was stopped in my tracks, but not the dogs.

Yesterday, when I came home, Dexter had a wound on his ear. I immediately blamed Hannah, who tends to dominate him. The problem is that there are other potential sources of bites, although I have not seen any snakes this year, just another indication of what an unusual Summer we are experiencing. Dexter later vomited. We took him to the Vet and he was running a temperature.

He is OK now and he and Hannah seem to be getting on if the mutual licking of their faces is any indication.

As always the problem is to reduce the number of photos. One way to do that is to create collages, as I have done with the creek in flood.

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Enya sings listen to the rain. We seem to be doing some of that in recent times:

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Friday Ark may be sailing this week and if so, we will be seeking to go on board to meet the other passengers.
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Picasa was used to set up the photos.

SCOTTISH INDEPENDENCE?

2012-01-20T01:03:00.000+11:00

Direct democracy is supposedly in theory a great thing. It can make and possibly break nations.

In Australia, referenda seldom pass, and given the quality of the political leadership this is unlikely to change in the immediate future. In this likelihood, change will forced upon us, so the defeated Republic referendum may be reversed by events in the Northern Hemisphere.

Monarchy may have survived a Republican India and Ireland, but it is doubtful other than existing in a underground box wearing proudly and forlornly the Order of the British Empire, a Republic of Scotland. Referenda from long experience here necessarily evoke scepticism, so how likely are the Scots to vote for independence from England? What would be the implication of Scotland leaving the British Union?

Andrew McFadyen at Aljazeera goes through some of the immediate political and economic outcomes that a successful referendum may produce:

[PM David Cameron's] government's austere programme of spending cuts is beginning to bite; the Scottish Nationalists are counting on them becoming even more unpopular as the referendum approaches. If Salmond gets his way and the Scots vote for independence, the UK will lose 90 per cent of its oil and gas reserves in the North Sea and almost half its land mass.

Sir Malcolm Rifkind MP, who served as Britain's Defence and Foreign Secretary, told Al Jazeera, "I have no doubt that if Scotland became a separate state the perception would be that the UK was a much diminished country."

One of the major issues that Rifkind fears could be at stake is Britain's status as a permanent member of the UN Security Council. The composition of the Council reflects the world as it was in 1945, rather than today. There is no longer any logical reason for Britain to be a permanent member instead of countries with stronger economies, like Germany or Japan, or emerging powers like India or Brazil. Rifkind, who is himself a Scot, said that if Scotland declares independence, "It would certainly open up the question of permanent membership of the Security Council in a way that would be quite awkward for the UK." In the understated language of British diplomats, "quite awkward" almost nearly always means "absolutely bloody awful".

If Scotland declares independence, it is also likely that the UK will be forced to find a new home for its four Trident submarines, which are currently based at Faslane, around 25 miles from Glasgow. The Scottish National Party detailed the matter in their election manifesto: "Our opposition to the Trident nuclear missile system and its planned replacement remains firm - there is no place for these weapons in Scotland." Salmond confirmed to Al Jazeera that "an independent Scotland will not have nuclear weapons, and after we become independent Trident weapons of mass destruction will no longer be based in Scottish waters." Defence officials are already looking at contingency plans to transfer Britain's nuclear deterrent to England if Scotland declares independence, but England does not possess a deep-water port with the same secluded and easy access to the North Atlantic. And even if a suitable site could be found, developing a new port would be phenomenally expensive.

As I have suggested there may be other implications as well. The British Government is putting pressure on the Scottish Parliament to hold the referendum as soon as possible, and perhaps certainly on the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn in 2014.

The Scotsman's assistant editor Peter MacMahon discusses recent developments and how things might pan out:

CONSTITUTIONAL PROPOSAL

2012-01-19T00:36:00.004+11:00

The Prime Minister will today receive a proposal to amend the Australian Constitution to recognize Aboriginal people of this continent.

For the most part, the proposed amendment seems to have attracted bipartisan support and therefore, given the precedent set by 1967, the chances of being successful appear good. The proposal has been suggested by a panel. George Williams in The Sydney Morning Herald describes the sections that require change:

Unfortunately, two sections remain that treat people unequally because of their race. The first is section 25. It still recognises that the states can disqualify people, such as Aborigines, from voting.

The races power in section 51 (26) also says that the Federal Parliament can make laws based upon a person's race. This was put into the constitution in 1901 to prevent Asians, Pacific Islanders and other races from living in areas reserved for whites or from taking up certain occupations. In the words of Sir Edmund Barton, Australia's first prime minister, the section permits laws that ''regulate the affairs of the people of coloured or inferior races''.

The panel will recommend that these two provisions be deleted. Disagreement arises as to what should be inserted into the constitution in place of the races power. It should not simply be repealed. An important achievement of the 1967 referendum was to extend this power to Aboriginal people so that the Federal Parliament could make laws for them in areas such as land and health.

The best way forward is the panel's likely recommendation to replace the races power with new federal authority to make laws for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

The hard question is how to limit this new power. Unless it is restricted, laws might still be passed that discriminate against Aboriginal people on the basis of their race.

So far so good, until we get to a hard question, which suggests to me the chances of the amendment passing the referendum hurdles become more difficult.

The Republic had bipartisan support, but that, as has been true before, was not enough:

Consider the results to the 1997 Republic Referendum, via the Australian Electoral Commission:

And if you think this is overly pessimistic consider the results achieved since Federation:
div style="text-align: justify; margin: 0 auto 10px;">

Referendum dates and results 1906 - present

Updated: 6 June 2011

Subject/Proposal	Issue of Writ	Polling Day	Result	States that Voted in Favour	% of Votes in Favour
Senate Elections To enable elections for both Houses to be held concurrently	8 November 1906	12 December 1906	Carried	All	82.65
Finance To implement the agreement to allow the Commonwealth to make a fixed payment out of surplus revenue to the States according to population. This was to replace the arrangement where the Commonwealth returned three-quarters of net revenue to the States	28 February 1910	13 April 1910	Not Carried	Qld, WA, Tas	49.04
State Debts To give the Commonwealth unrestricted power to take over State debts	28 February 1910	13 April 1910	Carried	All except NSW	54.95
*Legislative Powers To extend the Commonwealth's powers over trade, commerce, the control of corporations, labour and employment, including wages and conditions; and the settling of disputes; and combinations and monopolies	15 March 1911	26 April 1911	Not Carried	WA	39.42
*Monopolies To give power to the Commonwealth to nationalise monopolies.	15 March 1911	26 April 1911	Not Carried	WA	39.89
Trade and Commerce	24 April 1913	31 May 1913	Not Carried	Qld, WA, SA	49.38
Corporations	24 April 1913	31 May 1913	Not Carried	Qld, WA, SA	49.33
Industrial Matters	24 April 1913	31 May 1913	Not Carried	Qld, WA, SA	49.33
Railway Disputes	24 April 1913	31 May 1913	Not Carried	Qld, WA, SA	49.13
Trusts	24 April 1913	31 May 1913	Not Carried	Qld, WA, SA	49.78
Nationalisation of Monopolies	24 April 1913	31 May 1913	Not Carried	Qld, WA, SA	49.33
Legislative Powers To seek temporary extension of Commonwealth legislative powers over Trade and Commerce, Corporations, Industrial matters and Trusts	3 November 1919	13 December 1919	Not Carried	Vic, Qld, WA	49.65
Nationalisation of Monopolies To seek power for the commonwealth to make laws with respect to monopolies	3 November 1919	13 December 1919	Not Carried	Vic, Qld, WA	48.64
*Industry and Commerce To authorise the creation of authorities to control the terms and conditions of industrial employment, to give State authorities similar powers to Commonwealth authorities, and to regulate and control trusts and combinations	26 July 1926	4 September 1926	Not Carried	NSW, Qld	43.50
*Essential Services to allow the Commonwealth to take measures to protect thepublic against interruption of essential services	26 July 1926	4 September 1926	Not Carried	NSW, Qld	42.80
State Debts to end the system of per capita payments which have been made by the Commonwealth to the States since 1910, and to restrict the right of each State to borrow for its own development by subjecting that borrowing to control by a loan council	9 October 1928	17 November 1928	Carried	All	74.30
*Aviation to give the Commonwealth power to legislate on air navigation and aircraft	4 February 1937	6 March 1937	Not Carried	Vic, Qld	53.56
*Marketing to give theCommonwealth power to legislate on marketing	4 February 1937	6 March 1937	Not Carried	None	36.26
*Post-war Reconstruction and Democratic Rights to give the Commonwealth power, for a period of five years, to legislate on 14 specific matters, including the rehabilitation of ex-servicemen, national health, family allowances and ‘the people of the Aboriginal race’	4 July 1944	19 August 1944	Not Carried	WA, SA	45.99
Social Services to give the Commonwealth power to legislate on a wide range of social services	21 August 1946	28 September 1946	Carried	All	54.39
Organised Marketing of Primary Products to allow the Commonwealth to make laws for the organised marketing of primary products	21 August 1946	28 September 1946	Not Carried	NSW, Vic, WA	50.57
Industrial Employment to give the Commonwealth power to legislate on terms and conditions of industrial employment	21 August 1946	28 September 1946	Not Carried	NSW, Vic, WA	50.30
*Rent and Prices to give the Commonwealth permanent power to control rents and prices	12 April 1948	29 May 1948	Not Carried	None	40.66
*Powers to Deal with Communists and Communism to give the Commonwealth powers to make laws in respect of communists and communism	10 August 1951	22 September 1951	Not Carried	Qld, WA, Tas	49.44
*Parliament to increase the number of Members of the House of Representatives without necessarily increasing the number of Senators	28 April 1967	27 May 1967	Not Carried	NSW	40.25
*Aboriginals to enable the Commonwealth to enact laws for Aborigines. To remove the prohibition against counting aboriginal people in population counts in the Commonwealth or a State.	28 April 1967	27 May 1967	Carried	All	90.77
*Prices to give powers to the Commonwealth to control prices	12 November 1973	8 December 1973	Not Carried	None	43.81
*Incomes to give powers to the Commonwealth to legislate on incomes	12 November 1973	8 December 1973	Not Carried	None	34.42
Simultaneous Elections to hold elections for the Senate and the House of Representatives on the same day	20 April 1974	18 May 1974	Not Carried	NSW	48.30
Mode of Altering the Constitution to give a vote in referendums to electors in the ACT and the Northern Territory, and to enable amendments to be made to the Constitution if approved by a majority of voters and a majority of voters in half the States	20 April 1974	18 May 1974	Not Carried	NSW	47.99
Democratic Elections to make population instead of electors, as at present, the basis of determining the average size of electorates in each State	20 April 1974	18 May 1974	Not Carried	NSW	47.20
Local Government Bodies to give the Commonwealth powers to borrow money for, and to make financial assistance grants directly to, any local government body	20 April 1974	18 May 1974	Not Carried	NSW	46.85
*Simultaneous Elections to ensure that Senate elections are held at the same time as House of Representatives elections	27 April 1977	21 May 1977	Not Carried	NSW, Vic, SA	62.22
*Senate Casual Vacancies to ensure, as far as practicable, that a casual vacancy in the Senate is filled by a person of the same political party as the Senator chosen by the people, and that the person shall hold the seat for the balance of the term	27 April 1977	21 May 1977	Carried	All	73.32
*Referendums – Territories to allow electors in Territories, as well as in the States, to vote in constitutational referendums	27 April 1977	21 May 1977	Carried	All	77.72
*Retirement of Judges to provide for retiring ages for judges of Federal courts	27 April 1977	21 May 1977	Carried	All	80.10
Terms of Senators to change the terms of Senators so that they are no longer fixed, and to provide that the election for both Houses are always on the same day	26 October 1984	1 December 1984	Not Carried	NSW, Vic	50.64
Interchange of Powers to enable the Commonwealth and the States voluntarily to refer powers to each other	26 October 1984	1 December 1984	Not Carried	None	47.06
*Parliamentary Terms to provide for 4 year maximum terms for members of both Houses of the Commonwealth Parliament	25 July 1988	3 September 1988	Not Carried	None	32.92
*Fair Elections to provide for fair and democratic parliamentary elections throughout Australia	25 July 1988	3 September 1988	Not Carried	None	37.60
*Local Government to recognise local government in the Constitution	25 July 1988	3 September 1988	Not Carried	None	33.62
*Rights and Freedoms to extend the right to trial by jury, to extend freedom of religion, and to ensure fair terms for persons whose property is acquired by any government	25 July 1988	3 September 1988	Not Carried	None	30.79
*Republic To alter the Constitution to establish the Commonwealth of Australia as a republic with the Queen and Governor-General being replaced by a President appointed by a two-thirds majority of the members of the Commonwealth Parliament	1 October 1999	6 November 1999	Not Carried	None	45.13
*Preamble To alter the Constitution to insert a preamble	1 October 1999	6 November 1999	Not Carried	None	39.34

Note:* indicates a referendum that was not held in conjunction with an election

Source: 2008 Parliamentary Handbook. Parliamentary Library

It would appear that even straightforward questions have been lost. Of course 1967 is a remarkable exception, but the international pressures in play then with Apartheid South Africa do not apply today.

UPDATE:

ABC News records the PM receiving the report from Mick Dodson. The Opposition Leader commented according to the text:

"We have some reservations about anything that might turn out to be a one-clause bill of rights," Mr Abbott said.

"But we accept that millions of Australians' hopes and dreams are resting on constitutional recognition of Indigenous people, and the last thing I want to do is do anything other than welcome this report today."

JULIA RETREATS AGAIN

2012-01-18T02:26:00.001+11:00

Gambling is a social curse that has the potential to wreck people's lives, and often it not the gamblers but the people around suffer the most.

The vested interests who profit from misery and application of hidden partial schedules of reinforcement that sustain behavior. Such is the nature of materialism, and the foolish desire that I sometimes experience, and others, have to get rich and in effect the planet and other people be damned.
Richard Willingham and Jacob Saulwick report in The Sydney Morning Herald:

JULIA GILLARD is understood to have backed away from her promise to introduce a mandatory pre-commitment scheme for using poker machines.
The Prime Minister has told the anti-pokies independent, Andrew Wilkie, she will not support an alternative proposal, backed by the senator Nick Xenophon, for maximum bet limits of $1.
Sources close to Mr Wilkie told the Herald Ms Gillard revealed the backdown in a meeting on Sunday. He is said to be ''stunned'' by her decision and is considering whether to continue to support the government.
Advertisement: Story continues below
Mr Wilkie had pledged to withdraw support for Ms Gillard's minority government if it did not legislate by May to introduce a system that compelled poker machine players to nominate a cap on their losses.
But the government's parliamentary numbers were strengthened in November when the Liberal MP Peter Slipper agreed to be the Speaker, giving the government an extra vote in the lower house. This has allowed Ms Gillard to withdraw her offer to Mr Wilkie, knowing she should be able to continue in power.
Sources said Ms Gillard had told Mr Wilkie a trial of mandatory pre-commitment in a single state or territory was possible in the future.

Of course politicians of the same stamp as Ms Gillard have been subject to operant conditioning. Pigeons too can be conditioned become pathological gamblers.

The political and philosophical debate should include the claims of Behaviorist Psychology. The social environment is a set of deep conditioning. Historical and social circumstances are additional factors.

OCCUPY THE DREAM

2012-01-17T02:19:00.003+11:00

n the land of the free and the home of brave, political assassination is inexplicable while fear is silent and pervasive.

A new campaign for economic justice begins today in the US (still 16 January) on Martin Luther King Day. We will see how that goes, or more exactly how that gets closed down, although the Washington DC "occupy" movements have not closed down as in other cities. It is an interesting twist that MLK made his last speech for the Memphis sanitation workers.

MLK's former assistant, Dr Benjamin Chavis, expressing doubt about whether the truth about Dr King's assassination has been revealed:

WHO IS OUR ENEMY?

2012-01-15T16:05:00.003+11:00

We must have an enemy. More exactly, "these guys" must have an enemy. The US must have an enemy. We must follow the US in having their enemy - except when it comes to Central America.

Why must we be have enemies, remembering they are just human beings whose governments we do not like? There have been many times when we have no liked what our own government has done and is doing.

People will lie if they are allowed to get away with it. So what is wrong that this is happening repeatedly.

Iran Is Not Our Enemy from Irani Friend on Vimeo.

(via Peter K. Vickers)

ELSEWHERE:

Earlier this month, Juan Cole was interviewed on the History Channel. He is apparently relaxed about the possibility of war - I hope he is right.

MESSAGE TO THE UOW ALUMNI

2012-01-14T01:31:00.002+11:00

The new Vice-Chancellor of the University of Wollongong, Professor Paul Wellings, sent out a video message to the alumni.

He advised in his letter that there are now almost 100,000 graduates.

Clearly, the business of education, which has become a very important economic asset for a city once wholly dominated by a steel mill. Universities and university education have tangible and intangible benefits. Adopting business model creates an institutional dependency on the economic well-being of our neighbours, perhaps which following recent developments cannot be taken for granted. I wonder whether in an authentic sense education can be framed as a business.

FRIDAY NIGHT DOG BLOG: DOGS AFOOT

2012-01-13T23:18:00.002+11:00

Summer seems to have arrived and will be with us for the next few weeks. Hopefully the relatively cool conditions will continue, but perhaps that is forlorn.

This year against advice I receive from various quarters I have not taken water with us on our walks. We cross the creek and it is usually quite cool in the bush. Of course, to avoid ticks it would be wiser to avoid. Still the environment has been re-engineered as is evidence by the green mound that can be seen in the early photos.

It is fair to say that Dexter and Hannah are usually keen to get out, reacting early to the early signs that something of that nature is afoot.

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I could hear the folk festival today so I thought I would select a folk song, not a straightforward category. Joan Baez singing Wild Mountain Thyme may fit the bill:

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We will plan to hail Friday Ark on its journey and hope to board again and see how that all goes.

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The photos were organized with Picasa.

TERRORISM IN TEHRAN

2012-01-12T23:25:00.004+11:00

How then is the war on terrorism working out, especially now since it is the "unpeople" who seem to be the victims?

Scott Shane in The NY Times reports it has ceased to be a war, and merely a campaign implicitly waged by "proxies" which allows deniability, if not moral condemnation. In an article entitled, "Adversaries of Iran stepping up covert activities", he reports:

As arguments flare in Israel and the United States about a possible military strike to set back Iran’s nuclear program, an accelerating covert campaign of assassinations, bombings, cyberattacks and defections appears intended to make that debate irrelevant, according to current and former American officials and specialists on Iran.

The campaign, which experts believe is being carried out mainly by Israel, apparently claimed its latest victim on Wednesday when a bomb killed a 32-year-old nuclear scientist in Tehran’s morning rush hour.

The scientist, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, was a department supervisor at the Natanz uranium enrichment plant, a participant in what Western leaders believe is Iran’s halting but determined progress toward a nuclear weapon. He was at least the fifth scientist with nuclear connections to be killed since 2007; a sixth scientist, Fereydoon Abbasi, survived a 2010 attack and was put in charge of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization.

The article featured at the top of the page the motor vehicle that Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan was riding when killed. So commiserations to the car. Here is the victim in a photograph with his young son:

US officials, including the Secretary of State, strongly disavowed any involvement in his murder. If they did not fully condemn his murder,one has to wonder why.

Anne Barker for the ABC reports:

The murder of an Iranian nuclear scientist during Tehran's morning rush hour is set to add to growing tensions between Iran and the West.

In the fifth daylight attack on technical experts, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan was blown up when two men on a motorbike attached a magnetised bomb to his car as he drove to work.

The 32-year-old chemistry expert was a chemistry lecturer at a university in northern Tehran, and according to state television, he was also a director at Iran's main uranium enrichment facility in Natanz.

The bomb was similar to those used to kill other scientists, and Iran is pointing the finger at Israel's spy agency Mossad.

Israel never confirms or denies such accusations, but army spokesman Yoav Mordechai wrote on Facebook: "I don't know who settled the score with the Iranian scientist, but I am definitely not shedding any tears."

On Tuesday, Israeli armed forces chief Lieutenant-General Benny Gantz was quoted as telling members of parliament: "For Iran, 2012 is a critical year in combining the continuation of its nuclearisation, internal changes in the Iranian leadership, continuing and growing pressure from the international community, and things which take place in an unnatural manner."

Professor Roshan was on his way to work when two men on a motorcycle reportedly pulled alongside and attached a magnetic bomb to his car, then sped away as it blew up, killing the scientist and one other person.

The "one other person" is unnamed.

Juan Cole is a Farsi speaker and calls the dead scientist, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan Behdast. So it would seem the reports above cannot even get his name right. Professor Cole notes:

The UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions (i.e. illegal assassinations) told Reuters that the attacks on nuclear scientists were indeed worrying, extrajudicial, and executions.

But Christof Heyns, the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, said in a statement to Reuters the Wednesday assassination seemed to reflect a “worrying trend of extrajudicial executions of nuclear scientists in Iran.” But he put the onus on Iranian authorities to solve the murder mystery.

Iran wants the UN General Assembly to condemn the bombings. The UNGA unanimously condemned Iran for an alleged plot to blow up the Saudi ambassador in Washington, though the evidence for that scheme was extremely weak. As Reuters points out, diplomats are particularly upset by assassination plots against . . . diplomats.

Considering motive, means and opportunity, Juan Cole speculates on whom the likely murders might have links with:

The circumstantial evidence would point to a member of the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK or People’s Jihadis) terrorist organization. The MEK is known to have been involved in espionage on the Iranian nuclear program, and it wants to overthrow the current government in favor of a Marxist-Islamic regime, working with Israeli intelligence. Mossad does targeted assassinations, as in Dubai. The MEK has a history of pulling off bombings in Iran. One, in 1981, killed over 80 members of the revolution’s political elite, including the prime minister. The MEK is based in part in Iraq and so could acquire sticky bombs easily. It is known to have an operational alliance with Israeli and American intelligence. And that this bombing occurred on an anniversary of a previous one also suggests a terrorist group for which the date is symbolic.

Speaking at the time when the American drone was downed, Dennis Kucinich makes the Iran and the rest of the world for that matter might be better off developing non-nuclear alternatives to fossil-fuel energy.

New Year's Day was a Sunday and the Christians of Isfahan when to church. It would the religious police know the difference and allow these women to show their hair beneath their veils:

We will have to hope, against experience elsewhere, that Iran will be different and that the Christian religious minority will not be used as scapegoats for the external pressure and terrorism.

(Photos were sourced at War in Context).

ELSEWHERE:

Robert Wright in The Atlantic is sceptical that the purpose of these murders, which without substantial evidence are blamed on Israel as part of a campaign of terror to draw Iran into a war and get support from the US. He writes:

Personally, I don't find the Israeli assassinations as perplexing as [Jeffrey] Goldberg seems to. Though bomb-building knowledge per se can't be extinguished by killing a few scientists, talent is always a scarce commodity, and removing key talent from any enterprise can set it back significantly. So I don't think Israel is assassinating scientists just to draw America into a war. But it wouldn't surprise me if, from Prime Minister Netanyahu's point of view, that prospect isn't exactly a deterrent.

Eric Margoylis is interviewed on RT saying he thinks these incidents could lead to war.

DRAGGING OUT AFGHANISTAN

2012-01-12T02:10:00.003+11:00

At some point the US, and its satraps, will be asked to leave Afghanistan, and the question then will be whether it can be managed better than Iraq.

The consequences when the troops and the drones finally, following the pattern of imperial domination, will be the same as in Iraq - some combination of a dictatorship and a bloodbath. Just as well the people of Afghanistan are "unpeople", otherwise their suffering would be unbearable for the rest of us. It seems that the Pentagon is neither for the indignity of leaving or accountability. As the costs of occupation escalate, there is a question as to whether President Karzai has the leverage to hasten its end before the planned pseudo-exit in 2014.

So as the end approaches, it is interesting that Karzai has chosen to request that the notorious Bagram Prison be handed over now that talks with the Taliban have been have been facilitated by their opening an office in Qatar.

Eltaf Najafizada reported in Bloomsberg:

Afghan President Hamid Karzai ordered the transfer of the U.S.-run Bagram prison to his government’s control within a month, citing human rights violations.
Karzai decided the transfer should be made after hearing a report on the prison from the Constitutional Oversight Commission that “details many cases of violations of the Afghan Constitution and other applicable laws of the country, the relevant international conventions and human rights,” the president’s office said yesterday in a statement.
The detention center is located in the Bagram Air Base, 30 miles (48 kilometers) north of the capital of Kabul. While the number of high-value prisoners isn’t known, human rights groups allege that detainees are kept in solitary confinement in windowless cells, and have been menaced and forced to strip naked, the Associated Press reported without naming the groups.
The U.S. plans to withdraw most of its 98,000 combat soldiers from Afghanistan by 2014 as it hands over operational control of the war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda to Afghan forces. Karzai has clashed with American officials over issues such as corruption and civilian casualties during the conflict.

There have been allegations with regard to President Karzai's emotional stability, but even though his election was bogus - and nobody cared - he presumably is responding to some measure of public opinion with respect to night raids, drone attacks and now the violation of internationally recognized human rights. At least he has to foresee the post-American phase of Afghan history.

At Truthdig, William Pfaff comments:

Departure from Afghanistan on less than triumphal terms would stir an uproar at home among Republican Party patriots. Yet everyone, presumably excepting those patriots, knows what will happen sooner or later. The U.S. will be forced out, directly or indirectly, and Afghan politicians or military leaders will assume control of their country, with or without sponsorship or assistance from the Pakistan—or the Indian—intelligence services. All that is taking place now is futile. Why not take Karzai at his word, and leave?
Well, the Pentagon would not like that, since it prefers a triumphal exit to the rather embarrassing departure that has just taken place in Iraq. There—not to put too fine a point on it—the country is being abandoned in the hands of Shiite politicians and their Iranian allies. The U.S. was willing to stay on, but only on terms of an extra-territorial legal status, exempting Americans from all Iraqi control, to which the Iraqi parliament would not agree.

Second, Republican politicians in the United States do not want proud Americans being ordered out of what they consider petty client countries, whose role is to take orders, not issue them.

There is a strong aversion to irony here, but one wonders who President Karzai imagines himself to be.

Despite the dehumanized prisoners, as far as disclosed by the official video the Parwan Detention Facility seems to be a well appointed amenity:

ELSEWHERE:

Ken Dilanian and David S. Cloud reporting for The LA Times on the latest National Intelligence Estimate report that the war in Afghanistan is at a stalemate despite the surge of foreign military forces. The obvious thing is to negotiate a peace agreement to hopefully avoid the worst consequences of withdrawal and then leave as soon as possible.

BEWARE THE MIDNIGHT HOUR

2012-01-11T00:58:00.001+11:00

Humanity is closer to catastrophe than we might realize, at least in the collective opinion of The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.

The misadventure of nuclear war has not entirely gone away, although the SALT Agreements did seem to help relieve the tension and push the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock back.

It seems that nuclear scientists have been meeting taking now into account climate warming as well as nuclear disaster to make a judgment about on how close to midnight the minute hand should be set. Al Jazeera has the story:

REAL MIDDLE EAST PEACE IN PROSPECT AT LAST?

2012-01-10T02:22:00.004+11:00

Conventional wisdom has it that the remorseless drums of war are beating because of the prospect of Iran obtaining nuclear weapons, and then joining that other exceptional country and actually using them.

Mark H. Gaffney at Foreign Policy Journal goes against conventional understanding. He suggests:

The real issue is the fact that Iran has upgraded its medium range conventionally-armed missiles with GPS technology, making its missiles much more accurate. This means Iran can now target Israel’s own nuclear, bio and chemical weapons stockpiles, located inside Israel, as well as the Dimona nuclear reactor.

In short, Iran has achieved a conventional deterrent to Israel. Therefore, statements by Iranian officials that Iran has no nuclear weapons program are in my view probably correct. Presently, Iran does not need nukes to deter Israel. It can do so with its GPS-guided medium range missiles. The Israelis are no doubt gnashing their teeth over this, because they now find themselves threatened by their own WMD stockpiles, and by their own nuclear reactors, especially Dimona, all of which have become targets.

A few direct hits by Iran could cause a toxic plume, killing thousands of Israelis. A worst case might signal the end of the Jewish state.

This must be the first instance when nuclear weapons posed an existential threat to the nation that possessed them. By this reasoning the purpose of a war against Iran would be take out its medium range missiles.

So what might the implications be:

The sanctions and the counter pressure on the Straits of Hormuz are designed to create an international incident that "the world's cop" can interpret as a breach of international law, although presumably Iran has no interest in closing the supply of oil to Korea, Japan or other customers who wish to buy it.
Given this presumption that nuclear weapons are vulnerable to attack by conventional weapons, Iran might well be believed in its's claim it has no desire to develop them.
It must be concluded that Israel's nuclear weapons represent an existential threat to the state of Israel, given Iran's conventional military capacity.
Any war, and the inevitable mass murder that ensued, would be engaged by the United States to protect Israel's nuclear weapons.
Peace is possible. Both Iran and Israel might be parties to a Middle East nuclear disarmament zone. A fair and viable state should be established for the Palestinians, including mutual recognition of the rights of minorities, after which Israel could then have peace treaties with all it's neighbours with underlying economic agreements.

Gideon Levy in this discussion with Riz Khan on Al Jazeera, occasioned by yet another fake peace summit photo opportunity was pessimistic about the possibility of peace. Maybe, contrary to everything they believe, namely the efficacy of violence and domination,will baulk at the situation and real change will be implemented by the political underlings. This discussion took place in late August 2010:

ELSEWHERE:

John Iacovelli on his blog Scribillare comments on the Iranian missiles and Mark Gaffney's article.

The Israeli inspired US organized sanctions against Iran - an act of war - are damaging the Iranian economy, and so increasing the prospect for war, not peace.

WAR AND IRAN

2012-01-09T01:20:00.015+11:00

Should it eventuate, the putative war against Iran will be an abandonment of the Grenada doctrine.

A doctrine that was not formulated as such but nevertheless followed with the effect at minimum that foreign invasions against constructed enemies should be countries that can be militarily quickly overwhelmed and where the invaders have domination of the air. What is interesting is that the Grenada doctrine did not guarantee victory in Iraq and Afghanistan but rather lead to economic defeat because the invasion was followed with the desire to hold ground and build bases. So now it seems that US global policy is the area of the world where permanent bases were established - the Asia-Pacific - and an area in which the US has a long history of colonialism and imperialism - Hawaii, Samoa, the Philippines, Japan, Korea and China. Of course, now the debacle of Vietnam and Cambodia, and the memory of Cam Ranh Bay, can be now forgotten. Once upon a time Guam had its own doctrine. Much like the earlier example provided by the Spanish, the Americans stood on the hills of Central America, saw the Pacific and reached out to the other side.

And yet the plans for invading Iran, seem both driven and directed by theology of the Israeli Government that views Iran as an existential threat. This seems like a trip down the rabbit hole. One would have thought that a nuclear-armed Israel, not a signatory to the nuclear non proliferation treaty was an existential threat to Iran.

At Al Jazeera, Richard Falk provides an dispassionate account of the case, given his past mistreatment by the Israelis:

Equally disturbing were unacceptably belligerent moves by Israel and the United States threatening to wage war against Iran. This appetite for waging war against Muslim countries is making the projected clash of civilisations a self-fulfilling prophesy as it becomes established as an undeniable historical reality.

As David Swanson notes the casus belli has reached beyond to overt acts of aggression by the United States:

For the past decade, the United States has labeled Iran an evil nation, attacked and destroyed the other non-nuclear nation on the list of evil nations, designated part of Iran's military a terrorist organization, falsely accused Iran of crimes including the attacks of 9-11, murdered Iranian scientists, funded opposition groups in Iran (including some the U.S. also designates as terrorist), flown drones over Iran, openly and illegally threatened to attack Iran, and built up military forces all around Iran's borders, while imposing cruel sanctions on the country.

Dr Farhang Jahanpour, an Iranian writing for Juan Coles Informed comment observes that the war of wars could easily slide into real war, faulting the Iranian Government for breaking international law by blocking the Straits of Hormuz, while conceding the real intention of the sanctions imposed is regime change.

Robert Naiman has The New York Times in on the act again. The Media is not merely embed with the war system, it is a central to the operation:

Then along comes Uri Avnery,spoiling the fun, by declaring that no such war will happen. He writes:

Some time ago I did something no experienced commentator ever does. I promised that there would be no Israeli military attack on Iran. (Nor, for that matter, an American one.)

An experienced journalist or politician never makes such a prediction without leaving a loophole for himself. He puts in an inconspicuous “unless”. If his forecast goes awry, he points to that loophole.

I do have some experience – some 60 or so years of it – but I did not leave any loophole. I said No War, and now General Gantz says the same in so many words. No Tehran, just poor little Gaza.

Why? Because of that one word: Hormuz.

Not the ancient Persian god Hormuzd, but the narrow strait that is the entrance and exit of the Persian Gulf, through which 20% of the world’s oil (and 35% of the sea-borne oil) flows. My contention was that no sane (or even mildly insane) leader would risk the closing of the strait, because the economic consequences would be catastrophic, even apocalyptic.

It seems that the leaders of Iran were not sure that all the world’s leaders read this column, so, just in case, they spelled it out themselves. This week they conducted conspicuous military maneuvers around the Strait of Hormuz, accompanied by the unequivocal threat to close it.

The US responded with vainglorious counter-threats. The invincible US Navy was ready to open the strait by force, if needed.

How, pray? The mightiest multi-billion-dollar aircraft carrier can be easily sunk by a battery of cheap land-to-sea missiles, as well as by small missile-boats. Let’s assume Iran starts to act out its threats. The whole might of the US air force and navy is brought to bear. Iranian ships will be sunk, missile and army installations bombed. Still the Iranian missiles will come in, making passage through the strait impossible.

There is more in this interview on RT with James Corbett:

UPDATE:

Mark H. Gaffney at Foreign Policy Journal suggests a reason for the American aggression against Iran, and Israel's concern:

The real issue is the fact that Iran has upgraded its medium range conventionally-armed missiles with GPS technology, making its missiles much more accurate. This means Iran can now target Israel’s own nuclear, bio and chemical weapons stockpiles, located inside Israel, as well as the Dimona nuclear reactor.

In short, Iran has achieved a conventional deterrent to Israel. Therefore, statements by Iranian officials that Iran has no nuclear weapons program are in my view probably correct. Presently, Iran does not need nukes to deter Israel. It can do so with its GPS-guided medium range missiles. The Israelis are no doubt gnashing their teeth over this, because they now find themselves threatened by their own WMD stockpiles, and by their own nuclear reactors, especially Dimona, all of which have become targets.

A few direct hits by Iran could cause a toxic plume, killing thousands of Israelis. A worst case might signal the end of the Jewish state.

This must be the first instance when nuclear weapons posed an existential threat to the nation that possessed them.

CODA: 11 January 2011

Juan Cole makes a comprehensive case concerning Iran's uranium enrichment for medical purposes, while giving the relevant historical background. He identifies the sanctions, as others must, as war crimes, that would be compounded by any attack on Iran, which has neither attacked or occupied the territory of any other country.

FRIDAY NIGHT DOG BLOG: SO IT GOES

2012-01-07T00:58:00.001+11:00

Summer has arrived and now set in, although just this evening I think was cool, if not cold.

I was pleased to see that the Bureau of Meteorology confirmed my suggestion that the wet weather we have had could be attributed to the current La Nina ~~current~~ effect in the Pacific Ocean. However, I was surprised to learn that 2011 was only the third wettest year on record.

I suppose the same photos are going to had as long as I continue to go the same way. I am not sure that this worries the dogs much as they always find things of great interest along the way. Hannah I can let off the lead and she never goes far. When she strays she comes back as soon as I call her. I am not prepared to take the same risk with Dexter. I foolishly let me out the front gate, when I should have known it was open, and he heard the call of freedom. Luckily he did not go far - but perhaps that is why he is smiling:

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Forget the candle in the window, we will be home soon. "Long as I can see the light" sang by John Fogerty and Credence Clearwater Revival:

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As we do, we will seek to flag down Friday Ark if it sails by again this week.
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The photos were organized with Picasa.

THE FUTURE OF ISRAEL

2012-01-06T03:48:00.002+11:00

Every settler society is a set of experiments.

Some experiments are abandoned along the way which sometimes turn into their opposite. For example, this could be said of the White Australia policy that became multiculturalism under the pressure of "populate or perish". So what happened to the Kibbutz in Israel?

Israel has been under the same pressure to increase it population by migration, but since the collapse of the Soviet Union that has meant a large increase of settlers from that area. This would appear to have two major effects. It has increased the support for right wing parties, although the current government based on proportional representation in the Knesset includes the Labor Party. The second effect is that the population is more polarized on religious lines with the secondary effect resulting from neo-liberal economic policies, Israel is more polarized economically as the demonstrations last year appeared suggested.

Thus, rather than the existential threat it may well be the internal threat of division and disunity that is driving Israel's, and thereby Washington's, policy of military confrontation.

Allyn Fisher-Ilan for Reuters (via AntiWar.com) reports:

Israeli society could be torn apart if disputes between ultra-Orthodox and less observant Jews continue to heat up, Israel's religious affairs minister said on Wednesday.

In a telephone interview, Yaacov Margy, who also serves as director-general of Shas, a religious party in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition government, condemned an incident last month in which zealots seeking gender separation spat at a schoolgirl they accused of dressing immodestly.

That attack was disclosed by an Israeli television station, whose report on the violence stunned many in the Jewish state, where concerns over religious coercion are mounting among its mainly secular population.

Margy said such incidents and ultra-Orthodox protests - in the latest, on Saturday, children were dressed as Nazi Holocaust victims to suggest public persecution of the community - had been overblown in the media.

"If they ganged up on an 8-year-old girl, this is something that must be uprooted. We have a police force, courts - anyone who is violent must be dealt with. But we don't have to go crazy," he said.

Margy accused media outlets of fuelling the religious-secular dispute by covering in detail ultra-Orthodox protests.

"If we have a problem in Israeli society we should deal with it through dialogue," he said. "I call on all people in the media and the extremists on both sides, crazy people: 'climb down off the roof'."

Euronews provided a report of events:

The problem is that the representatives of the "crazy people" who want footpaths and buses to be segregated are in the government.

Israel in so many ways is doing the job of delegitimating itself. Perhaps it is time to remodel and reframe the experiment, perhaps along the lines of an inclusive multi-ethnic and religiously tolerant society that the would really slay the ghosts and nightmares of the European discrimination from it was formed.

ELSEWHERE:

At Tikkun Daily, Jeff Pozmantier reports among other news that Israel again rejects calls for a movement toward peace.

Norman Finkelstein believes he has a chance to get to "the rendezvous of victory" via following the Gandhian road of politics. He was speaking at Nottingham University in November 2011:

Part I:

Part 2:

GLOBAL WARMING TO LEGAL LIABILITY?

2012-01-04T00:42:00.003+11:00

Misrepresenting the agreed facts may be one thing in order to preserve profits, but corporations are legal persons and so in theory they can be legally liable.

The problem may be that while true, the public relations industry that acts behind the curtain may be protected by apparent immunity of the paid mass media and more individual social media that provides climate deniers a platform. The management of public opinion has not been seen, and properly, as the business of science which is concerned with undertaking research, publishing results and doing more research to generate more provisional knowledge.

The Berkeley Earth Project, a study into climate change, although not peer reviewed, yet conducted on the basis of scepticism of the scientific consensus, concluded that the anthropogenic global warming was real.

Christine Shearer, at AlterNet gives a brief history of the nonscience of climate change denialism:

In 1990, IPCC scientists completed their first assessment report for policymakers, stating they were certain human activities were increasing greenhouse gas emissions and warming, with the second report, in 1995, concluding there was a discernible human influence on climate.

The stage seemed set for an international treaty to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

That’s when fossil fuel companies and their supporters sprang in to fund their own research. In 1988 the coal industry founded the Western Fuels Association (WFA), headed by Fred Palmer, who later became vice president of Peabody Energy, the largest private coal company in the world. As outlined in Ross Gelbspan’s The Heat Is On (1998), the WFA actively sought to refute the growing consensus on climate change, stating in its report that “when [the climate change] controversy first erupted at the peak of summer in 1988, Western Fuels Association decided it was important to take a stand.… [S]cientists were found who are skeptical about the potential for climate change.”

A 1998 memo leaked from the National Environmental Trust to the New York Times detailed that a dozen people working for big oil companies, trade associations, and conservative think tanks had been meeting at the American Petroleum Institute’s Washington headquarters to propose a $5 million campaign to convince people that global warming science was riddled with controversy and uncertainty.

Industries like oil and large manufacturers created the lobbying group Global Climate Coalition (GCC) in 1989, with the stated purpose of “cast[ing] doubt on the theory of global warming.” A Freedom of Information Act request unearthed 2001 U.S. State Department documents to the GCC suggesting former President George W. Bush’s decision to pull out of UN international negotiations on climate change had been shaped in part by GCC and Exxon.

The George W. Bush Administration not only resisted GHG regulations, but actively edited government reports to question the science of climate change, one time drawing upon research funded in part by ExxonMobil. As documented by Greenpeace and others, ExxonMobil and Koch Industries went on to become major donors of such research, finding a platform in conservative think tanks and media.

The result? The U.S. perception of scientific consensus about climate change went down in line with the growth of corporate-funded research, particularly among Republicans, even as the science became more clear and the effects more apparent. While the awareness of a consensus is inching back up (although there is still much more confusion than there arguably should be over whether humans are a factor), the U.S. has yet to regulate greenhouse gases, even as the International Energy Agency warns that we may be five years away from being deadlocked into runaway warming.

Social scientists have noted internal barriers to action on climate change – that even people who acknowledge the science may not necessarily alter how they live to match that knowledge. In other words, accepting the consensus on climate change science might not have been enough for swift, immediate action.

Yet the evidence also seems clear that comprehensive understanding of the issue for the nation was muddled, and deliberately so: in 2009, an internal Global Climate Coalition document was leaked to the New York Times – a primer written in 1995 for coalition members admitting that the “scientific basis for the greenhouse effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide on climate is well established and cannot be denied.”

Legal suits have been made, but so far unsuccessfully in the US. For example, Wikipedia reported:

The city of Kivalina and a federally recognized tribe, the Alaska Native Village of Kivalina, sued Exxon Mobil Corporation, eight other oil companies, 14 power companies and one coal company in a lawsuit filed in federal court in San Francisco on February 26, 2008, claiming that the large amounts of greenhouse gases they emit contribute to global warming that threatens the community's existence.[4] The lawsuit estimates the cost of relocation at $400 million.[5]
Kivalina has also sued Canadian mining company Teck Cominco for polluting its water source.[6]

Christine Shearer concludes her article by observing:

Defendant companies argue that climate change is not a matter for the courts – the problem is too big, and we are all responsible. Yet we have not all embarked on multi-million dollar campaigns to fund our own research and prevent change. It is these secondary claims that could be the crux of establishing whether fossil fuel companies will eventually bear liability for harm from greenhouse gas emissions. As prior cases involving lead, asbestos, and tobacco lawsuits show, people seem to think it is one thing to do your own research, but it is another to deliberately deceive people, contributing to widespread harm primarily to retain profits.

One year ago, the Australian legal site, Freehills in January 2011 suggested:

Climate change litigation is at a fledgling stage in Australia.
There have been no Australian tort actions related to climate change to date, and such actions face significant hurdles, namely standing, causation and the utility of granting the relief sought.
However, the recent US developments mentioned above indicate that some of these hurdles at least may be able to be overcome.
The issue of standing appears able to be addressed by framing an action in public nuisance. An action in public nuisance may be framed where the defendant’s conduct unreasonably endangers the health, property or comfort of the public generally or obstructs the public in the exercise of its rights. Importantly, such an action does not require a plaintiff to establish that the plaintiff’s private right to the use and enjoyment of land has been specially affected by the defendant’s conduct. The recent decisions in US courts mentioned above indicate that at least some US courts will entertain such an action and award remedies.13
It seems reasonable to expect that Australian litigants (including environmental groups) will follow the American example. Their path to the courts is likely to be smoother because of the lack in Australia of some of the constitutional doctrines that impede such actions in the United States.
The outcome of the appeal in the US Supreme Court in American Electric Power Co. v Connecticut will be of most interest for Australian litigants because it is likely to raise squarely the difficult issue of causation—in particular, the fact that many factors other than the defendant’s actions are contributory to global warming—and the related issue of the utility of any remedy.
Ultimately, these cases question the role of courts versus parliament on important public issues such as climate change. If climate change litigation gathers momentum then that may increase political pressure for responsive legislation.

The likely outcome may be to expect the corporations to take pre-emptive action and endeavour to have the relevant legislation changed.

ELSEWHERE:

At Larvatus Prodeo, Brian continues his reports on the state of the climate, quoting the Climate Commission's report, The Critical Decade:

This decade is critical. Unless effective action is taken, the global climate may be so irreversibly altered we will struggle to maintain our present way of life.” “Without strong and rapid action there is a significant risk that climate change will undermine our society’s prosperity, health, stability and way of life.”

Oblivious to odd opposing comments, Rafe continues his climate denialism at Catallaxy. He recently wrote:

Huge claims have been made about the scientific rigor of processes in the IPCC, especially by the longserving chairman Rajendra Pachauri. These have been repeated by gullible and scientifically illiterate journalists and by politicians who want us to believe that ”the science is settled”. The credibility of science and scientists has taken a huge hit because so many people who should have known better have been prepared to endorse the scam, including the Chief Scientist of Australia.

And so it goes. In that case the best reference might well be Alice in Wonderland.

"If you go chasing rabbits" . . . Jefferson Airplane:

ISLAMIC POLITICAL DEMOCRACY

2012-01-01T23:39:00.000+11:00

The political transformation of the Arab world is as yet incomplete. The inevitable religious element in the process is both expected and intriguing.

Historians have sought to account for the remarkable success of Islam, how quickly it was established and swept through the Middle East, which may have taken as long as the invasion and occupation of Iraq by the US. Islam spread quickly both eastward to India then to Indonesia and westward along North Africa to Spain and other parts of Africa. Although it had a military component, it was a remarkable sociological phenomena. Christianity by contrast was born in the matrix of the Roman Empire and more widely dispersed under the umbrella of the motive of gold and profit in turn by the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British and the Americans.

Political democracy seems to have a universal appeal. It is remarkable how sustained the popular protest has been in Syria and by implication how ineffective the repression by the government. And yet in Bahrain, far smaller and abutting Saudia Arabia, repression seems to be working. Both Bahrain and Syria host foreign naval ports.

Aljazeera reported on a police clashing with protesters in Manama on 24 November 2011:

Juan Cole gives more credence to opposition to authoritarian government than to the religious divide within Islam to explain events in Bahrain. He writes:

The protesters in Bahrain included reformist Sunni Muslims. And the conservative forces pressuring the king to crack down on the crowds included the country’s great merchant families which comprise both Sunnis and Shiites. The struggle in these islands, like that elsewhere in the Arab world, was over authoritarian forms of government versus popular democracy, accountability and transparency. The king’s constitution allows him to over-rule both houses of parliament, allows him to appoint the upper house, and allows it to over-rule the lower house. The Shiite protesters were upset that these arrangements, along with gerrymandering that reduced Shiite representation, preventing the majority from asserting itself (Shiites are about 58% of the population). But the discourse was about constitutional monarchy, not about Shiite rule or an Iran-style Shiite theocracy, with some small exceptions.

And he adds:

There is no good evidence for this allegation[that Iran was behind the uprising in Bahrain], which is the basis for the Saudi and United Arab Emirates military intervention on behalf of the Sunni Arab monarchy. Bahrain’s Shiites are Arabs and probably a majority of them belong to the conservative Akhbari school of jurisprudence, which rejects ayatollahs in favor of the ability of laypeople to interpret the law for themselves. Bahrain Shiites of the Usuli school, prevalent in Iran and Iraq, are more likely to look for leadership to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Najaf, Iraq, than to Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. Bahrain’s Shiites claim educational and workplace discrimination, and dispute a constitution and electoral system that disadvantages them. They are not agents of Iran.

Who knew the Catholic/Protestant analogy might be more aptly applied to Shia Islam more so than the supposed rivalry between Sunnis and Shia, which might be seen as rivalry between Arabs and Persians?

FRIDAY NIGHT DOG BLOG: EVERY DAY IS JUDGEMENT DAY

2011-12-30T22:59:00.000+11:00

The weather has been very changeable, and at times in the evening quite cool as though it was winter.

Today, might be described as the first day of summer, and I had to go out to get a whipper snipper. Hannah has developed an allergic condition around her mouth and nose, which is likely due to the weeds growing in the back yard. I had to do something about that.

The place is usually green. A neighbour complains that the rain has ruined many of his vegetables, although it was reported that vegetable prices were lower than usual for this time of year.

It is easier for me to have the dogs leading. Dexter can be quite strong, and Hannah too, although she will sometimes fall behind. Hannah is not the demure, obedient dog she once was, and that could be taken as bad management.

We went out taking some photos along the way:

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Somebody must have once said, "Its All Right" and then qualified their statement. That must have been The Travelling Wilburys singing End of the Line:

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There is a chance this week that Friday Ark will be sailing and we will hope to board.
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The photos were placed with Picasa.

SUNNI-SHIA RIVALRY

2011-12-30T02:05:00.001+11:00

If indeed it is the case that the divide between the two major traditions of Islam, which apparently does not include the Sufis, is the reason for the conflict and loyalty to authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, why has become so apparent in recent times?

Here is one explanation that the difference is not doctrinal, but rather legitimate succession to the Prophet:

At The Independent, Patrick Cockburn describes the current state of play in the Middle East due in large part to this religious division:

In three of the Arab countries east of Egypt – Syria, Bahrain and Yemen – protesters have challenged their governments over the past year but failed to overthrow them. The reasons for those failures are very different though they have important points in common. In each of these states protesters were frustrated because a significant part of the population had a lot to lose if the ruling elite were reformed or overthrown.

In Syria and Bahrain religious identity helps explain loyalty to the powers-that-be. Protesters in Bahrain might insist that their programme was secular and democratic, but everybody knew that a fair poll would affect revolutionary change by putting the majority Shia in power instead of the minority Sunni. In Syria, similarly, democracy means that the Sunni, three quarters of the population, would effectively replace the Alawites, a heterodox Shia sect, as rulers of the state.

This does not mean that the demonstrators in both countries had a secret sectarian agenda. It was simply that political divisions already ran along sectarian lines. In Bahrain the security forces were almost entirely Sunni. As the year went on sectarian hatreds became starker.

At the height of the repression, the government demolished Shia mosques claiming it had suddenly discovered they did not have planning permission. Unlike Tunisia and Egypt, the sectarian homogeneity of the ruling elite in Syria and Bahrain made it impossible for senior state officials to dump an unpopular regime in order to maintain their own power and privileges. In Syria the Alawites came to believe that if President Bashar al-Assad lost so would they.

The Shia and Sunni split has other serious implications. The struggle between these two Islamic traditions, so similar to the battle between Roman Catholics and Protestants in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, has been escalating since the Iranian revolution of 1979. The Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88 and Shia-Sunni civil war in Iraq in 2006-7 deepened the hatred between the two sects. Of course it was always much in the interests of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the Assad clan in Syria and the al-Khalifa dynasty in Bahrain to play the sectarian card and demand communal solidarity from their co-religionists. As far back as 1991 I remember Saddam Hussein bringing the mutilated bodies of Baathist officials back from Najaf, where they had been lynched by Shia insurgents, and the terror expressed by Sunni friends in Baghdad, previously opposed to the regime, that the same fate awaited them if Saddam was toppled.

The Sunni-Shia rivalry goes some way to explaining why the Arab Spring won successes in North Africa that it has not achieved east of Egypt. Each side has been led by religiously inspired states, Saudi Arabia and Iran, which have struggled for supremacy in the region for 30 years. Embattled regimes and their insurgent enemies automatically gain allies. The Assad government might be isolated, but not quite to degree that Muammar Gaddafi was before his fall. Iran will do almost anything to keep its most crucial ally in the Arab world in power. By the same token Iran's many enemies, unable to overthrow the government in Tehran, are determined to weaken it by changing the regime in Damascus.

Patrick Cockburn concludes by writing:

The bright hopes of the Arab Spring are vanishing and peaceful protests may have had their day across the region as civil confrontation threatens to turn into civil war.

It looks like monolithic Islam is as much of a myth as monolithic Communism. Who would have known?

CODA:
I had second thoughts about Patrick Cockburn's analysis in that he left the history of imperial involvement. However at Truthdig, William Pfaff suggests that the oil resources of the Middle East are of less importance, and there is less need to prop up the Saudi Arabian regime, and less support in the US to underwrite Israeli expansion. Arabic speaking people have been a source of immigration, especially to Europe, which he says have been associated with a hysterical concern with terrorism. He concludes his article:

Thus the great question about the Arab Awakening is whether it can lead to political systems that provide freedom for everyone in society. The people of the Islamic Middle East have been struggling with this problem since long before 2011-2012. They are coping with problems that the West confronted in the Reformation and counter-Reformation. You might say that they are today searching for their own form of the European Enlightenment. If this is a fair analogy, however, the Islamic time of troubles has only just begun.

Perhaps the problem here may be arguing from analogy and not considering the long history of toleration that puts the European experience to shame.

WORLD DEMOCRACY?

2011-12-29T01:02:00.002+11:00

The United States of America with its global bases and by spending more on weapons and wars than all other nations combined has hegemonic ambition.

The ambition is failing in its realization, and perhaps if the US continues to spend like a drunken sailor it will fall overboard. Then who will rescue it. Whatever, values that once might have excused violence and domination, these, as probably inevitably happens, are now shown to be base as the principles of the Constitution are lived in denial in the case of habeas corpus and the exercise of executive murder and torture. There is a grave disorder in the world order of killing, exploitation and killing machines.

Still, as Tony Karon writes in The National (via War in Context), "Be careful what you wish for". As the US withdraws firstly from Iraq and then surely from Afghanistan despite vast expenditure, aside from the uncounted and discounted human suffering, its role will be diminished. Tony Karon reflects:

Alarmed by the unchecked global dominance of Washington in the late 1990s, France's then-foreign minister Hubert Vedrine described the US as a "hyperpower" whose influence needed to be checked for the greater good. This would be achieved, he suggested, by the construction of a "multipolar" world order, in which US influence would be balanced by the emergence of a number of different power centres.

As 2011 draws to a close, there can be no doubt that "multipolarity" is upon us, and then some: Washington has found its abilities limited to influence the dramatic political events unfolding across the wider Middle East and beyond. The US in 2012 faces a wave of crises that could have profound consequences for America's well-being, yet with dramatically weakened levers of influence to shape the outcomes to those crises.

Today, decisions made in Ankara, Beijing, Paris, Berlin, Tehran, Riyadh and even Doha are having an effect on international affairs that might have been unthinkable just a few years ago. A quick glance at a few of the crises currently on the boil suggests the "multipolar" world may be a more unpredictable place than Mr Vedrine imagined.

Now he says the US can do very little as under Maliki Iraq implodes into sectarian conflict. Ironically, the best chance that this will not happen would be Iran, the arch-enemy reigning in the Maliki. Iran is the country that without any evidence and contrary to evidence is the country subject to sanctions to supposedly deter it developing nuclear weapons. Israel exerts disproportionate influence in Washington decision making, but the reality is that China, Russia and Turkey are pushing back against sanctions. And so it goes from the newly liberated Libya, to the Israel-Palestine conflict, to Egypt, to Afghanistan where Pakistan is taking the rather curious course of protecting it's national sovereignty and finally the economic problems of Europe.

As Tony Karon comes the full circle, the nautical metaphor is extended:

... the economic turmoil in Europe, which threatens cataclysmic consequences that could once again rock the US banking system, is beyond Mr Obama's control - instead, his fate is in the hands of squabbling European politicians unable to agree on the basic steps to address the crisis. Economic and financial interdependence and the globalisation of risk have not been accompanied by the equivalent globalisation of economic governance. We may all be in the same boat, but nobody seems to have the wheel.

Increasingly, the same may be true on the geopolitical stage. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for flying Multipolarity. Please fasten your seat belts, we're expecting turbulence ...

I thought there was a third choice. Here is part of one person's view on global governance, as it is now, and how it might be:

Global justice and world peace are inconceivable without some form of world governance, as distinct from a world order based on violence and dominance and thus by implication structural inequality between the peoples of world. Common goods are inherent in the social nature of human beings, not considering the development of scientific knowledge and technology. Social norms are about common assumptions. The law of contract is internalized and accompanied by symbolic actions such as shaking hands and so forth other when a dispute arises.

The UNO and international agreements are incipient forms of global governance. Clearly the atmosphere and oceans are common goods. The problem is that the UN is based on the nation state and democratic, one man, one value electorates.

I do not accept that a democratic system of governance is impossible, which implies the recognition of minorities, or that it is not needed. Those who refuse to acknowledge the possibility or the necessity, are likely to be not so much anti-government as they might claim but more profoundly undemocratic and unsocial. Do we imagine that transnational corporations are not forms of autocratic government? The climate crisis has not just happened spontaneously as if the lamp of the Enlightenment has been darkened as if mysteriously. The forces of irrationality often masquerade as the status quo and self interest or manufactured to become the enthusiasms of "the bewildered herd".

POSTSCRIPT:

Former Senator Mike Gravel talks about the moral compass in the US in retrospect of the invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam. He extends the drunken metaphor. Mike Gravel is talking with RT:

CODA:

The Guardian notes in an editorial the failure of US hegemony and the rise of world disorder. The time is not yet, the editorial declares for new world institutions be created to fill the vacuum. They imply, and I agree, the vacuum is one of lack of political imagination.

RUSSIAN ELECTIONS AND PROTESTS

2011-12-28T04:19:00.002+11:00

Vladimir Putin has rejected calls for calls for any review of the parliamentary elections declaring the the Duma was now a fait accompli.

Even as claimed by the protesters that the elections were rigged, support for the All Russia People's Front party - probably sounds better in Russian - fell from 64% in the previous election to less than 50%.

The question then is why were there unprecedented protests at the results. One important clue may be to get some idea of how the system works. The voting system has been modified, and it seems the modifications have been strongly influenced by Putin. It would appear, based on the summary from the University of Aberdeen that the single member seats have been abolished leaving an Australian Senate style proportional representation list system, with a 7% threshold.

Anissa Naouai reports on the elections and the protests for RT:

The BBC reports that Vladimir Putin argues that the opposition has no clear agenda and the only way the vote can be disputed is by recourse to the courts. BBC News notes:

Observers from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) said the polls were slanted in favour of the pro-Kremlin party United Russia.

They reported apparent manipulations such as the stuffing of ballot boxes and said the election administration "lacked independence".

The Russian authorities were also criticised for banning several opposition parties.

The protesters have called for a re-run of the vote, a demand rejected by the Kremlin. President Medvedev announced political reforms last week, but many demonstrators said they did not go far enough.Mr Medvedev is not standing for another term as president and will make way for Mr Putin who previously held the post between 2000 and 2008.

Mr Putin remains popular with many Russians and until recently a presidential victory had appeared all but certain. However, correspondents say the protests have made him look more vulnerable.

Former US presidential candidate, John McCain, was keen to make the connection with the Arab Spring suggesting that the tide of events was running against Putin, and so as these things work it might be, but equally could it not be possible that the same force of history is working against the two-party owned monopoly in the US? Equally, it is fair to observe that it would take a far more intense political earthquake to displace an entrenched system, however corrupt, than to dispute and depose a recently contrived one.

POSTSCRIPT:

I don't know very much about this subject - modern philosophy, or even ancient philosophy - but it occurred to me that what is happening in both Russia and the United States was "a crisis of legitimacy". So where does the term come from, and are the defining characteristics of such a crisis. It seems the expression perhaps originates with Jurgen Habermas.

As a further note, it seems to me that philosophy is a deeper understanding of history and context. While I accept as a given that science provides a consensusal understanding of reality based on provisional strengths of the assumptions made, such as the realm of the first fixed star or the closeness to the speed of light, consciousness is indeterminate (and I had not thought that somebody had thought of that before me, leaving me with the sense that my understanding was at best threadbare). We know for example that human beings consciously, and perhaps unconsciously, make stuff. But to what end? I was lead to this line of thought by reading William Butler Yeats' sonnet form, exploring the options:

KARACHI ABUZZ

2011-12-27T00:51:00.002+11:00

The crowds in Karachi and previously in Lahore were larger than those attending any cricket match. It seems clear that Imran Khan must now be judged as a major political figure in Pakistan.

Kamal Hyder reports for Aljazeera against the backdrop of the massive numbers of people attending the rally called by Imran Khan's Pakistan's Movement for Justice party (PTI):

Imran Khan is running on a platform "to end major corruption in 90 days". The military is reported to be increasingly dissatisfied with the government of President Zardari. Reuters reports in The Dawn that this is a time of crisis in Pakistan and at a time of crisis in the relationship with the United States resulting in the sealing of the Afghanistan border. Whether there is any significance that Imran Khan is Pashtun is not mentioned.

However, despite the impressive numbers that have come out to hear him, and his attraction in urban areas, the report notes that will not be sufficient to play a strong political hand:

Several recent polls have shown Khan is Pakistan’s most popular politician. He is especially favoured in urban areas.

“He is riding a wave of popular politics right now,” said Mutahir Ahmed, a professor of International Relations at the University of Karachi. “There is a lot of frustration among ordinary people, as well as political workers right now, which he is cashing on.”

On Oct 30 Khan staged a similar rally in Lahore that observers said pulled between 100,000 and 200,000 people, then one of the largest political rallies ever in Pakistan.

“He has … managed to bring people out on the roads, and this is a big achievement, especially in Karachi, where three months back people were not ready to come out of their houses because of rampant violence and killings,” Ahmed said.

But popularity doesn’t always translate into political power. The majority of Pakistan’s voters are rural, where feudal relationships determine generations of political loyalty.

Khan, for all the enthusiasm shown for him among young people and the urban middle class, has yet to demonstrate the party machinery that the PPP and the Pakistan Muslim League-N faction have had decades to perfect.

In the last 15 years, the PTI has only briefly held one seat in parliament, Khan’s. Most analysts say Khan could score an upset of 20 to 30 seats in parliament, but that’s not enough to give him the premiership. It is enough to make him a major political player, however or even a kingmaker.

Interestingly, the American Ambassador, did not seem to believe that Imran Khan was "anti-American", perhaps judging that any Pakistani politician seeking popular approval would adopt such a position, or perhaps discounting as rhetoric the position in regard to major corruption.

IRAQ WAR AND MONEY

2011-12-25T04:21:00.004+11:00

The Iraq slaughter was a great success, even if military analysts describe it as a failure. Certain interests, otherwise known as corporations have the money to prove it. Where there is blood and human suffering there is money.

Lawrence Wilkerson is interviewed by the Real News:

Another take on the success of the Iraq War is given by Tom Engelhardt who discusses with Scott Horton "the cakewalk" of invasion and occupation.

Perhaps the proposition regarding the profitability of war, and by implication the manufactured fear that generates the conflict in Afghanistan is not as straightforward as suggested. Before the border with Afghanistan was closed, the international shipping companies were doing well, as were the trucking companies that transhipped goods from Karachi. Regarding the later, there is a twist to the story. The truck owners and drivers are largely Pashtuns, who have to justify to themselves there assistance to the American war against their ethnic compatriots. Bloomberg (via War in Context) has a comprehensive account of the situation, including the significant items, including military supplies that surprisingly have gone missing, and may have found their way "into the wrong hands".

FRIDAY NIGHT DOG BLOG: ONLY TIME

2011-12-24T04:53:00.000+11:00

This was supposed to Friday night, but time slipped away. Let's forget about tomorrow. Or maybe not.

Around here we have cause to celebrate, if everything works out the important person around here will not be in intensive care, which will be the first time for two years. But how quickly have I fell back in taking too much for granted.

And tomorrow is Christmas, and the summer solstice some days ago. Dexter and Hannah have other concerns. Hannah is bounding with energy, and many times Dexter is overwhelmed by the enthusiasm. But every so often his grim façade is broken.

So the weather is not getting them down, and as you might notice the clouds promised rain yesterday and they delivered.

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"Who say where the road goes?" as a metaphysical speculation may be true enough. Enya sings Only Time. For me this song simultaneously credits those two women at the fruit shop who held the trolley for me, telling me they were demonstrating girl power, and the sub titles credit our multi-cultural locality:

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Friday Ark may be sailing this week, and should it sail around here we again to be pleased to board.
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The photos were placed with Picasa.

NELSON FLOODS AND MUDSLIDES

2011-12-23T03:10:00.001+11:00

The rainstorm that last week hit the New Zealand city of Nelson, the 9th largest urban area in the country, was the heaviest ever to hit such a populated area. Civil Defence operations controller, Jim Frater was quoted in the Nelson Mail as saying:

''This is not just exceptional - this has never happened before''.

Here is some video footage:

So the question then is, was this due to climate change? Sarah Young in the Nelson Mail reports:

Nelson's recent flooding is in line with climate change projections and what we can expect more of in the future, says a Nelson expert on climate change.

Carbon Farm director Murray McClintock said that what people had seen in the region's recent deluge was exactly what an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released last month was predicting.

The IPCC report said the frequency of heavy precipitation, or the proportion of total rainfall from heavy falls, would increase in the 21st century over many areas, meaning that cloudbursts which could have been expected once in 20 years would now become one-in-five-year occurrences.

Dr McClintock said warming temperatures contributed to more water vapour in the atmosphere, leading to a lot more rain.

Projections of more intense rain were being borne out locally, with two significant high-intensity rain flooding events in the region in as many years, he said.

Both last week's flood, and the flooding of the Aorere and Anatoki rivers in Golden Bay in December last year, were classified as one-in-50-year events.

However, the difficulty was saying with any certainty whether this was linked to climate change, Dr McClintock said.

"Some people will say there's no basis for that certainty, but we have got to be realistic. We have projections that's what's going to happen, and it is happening, so it's just as foolish to say it's not climate change.

"It's not one-off events – it's starting to look like a trend."

Such events were leading to "intense competition for resources and political attention".

However, the necessary focus on recovery and spending more money on fixing infrastructure – a big strain on budgets in tight economic times – meant there was less money for combating climate change, he said.

It also meant an adaptive approach was taking precedence over a mitigative one, which was not ideal, considering that the cost of cleaning up was bigger than the cost of prevention, he said.

The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, a report for the British Government released in 2006, estimated that capping climate change would cost about 1 per cent of global GDP, while letting things go on and dealing with the impacts would cost between 5 and 20 per cent.

In Nelson, people were going to have to put more energy into planning for things like how to cope with rising sea levels, more frequent storms and protecting freshwater aquifers from seawater pollution, Dr McClintock said.

Agriculture would bear the brunt of significant flood events, with stock and production levels affected, as well as blocked roads stopping perishable products getting to market, and some farm properties would face years of cleaning up, he said.

Weather events have compound effects, especially when they have not been foreseen and have not been engineered for. Some choose to deny that climate change is happening, and this is not the only event of its kind in the past year but is a case study of the consequences. If the Stern report is even half right about the economic consequences of global warming and stimulus for pre-emptive action, which becomes less effective the longer it is delayed.

A MOTHER AND A DOCTOR

2011-12-22T02:51:00.000+11:00

She does not have a chance to be President of the US, because in part the mass media will not report her candidacy or the issues that she is raising, arguably to the detriment of the interests of the overwhelming majority of the people, who have the misfortune to live there, and so the rest of us on this planet.

Jill Stein announces her candidacy for the US presidency:

ECONOMIC ALARM FOR CHINA?

2011-12-22T01:52:00.000+11:00

Could it be that China too is heading into the economic doldrums. Where will that leave Australia's bifurcated economic and security co-dependencies?

Paul Krugman in The New York Times on 18 December is calling a bust in the Chinese economy. The boom, like others that occurred in Japan and the US,
he suggests has been caused by a massive increase in construction induced by real estate prices and relying for credit on a shadow banking system, not subject to supervision. He admits it is difficult to know exactly what is happening in China, and while official figures may be unreliable, the recent news is alarming.

He writes:

The most striking thing about the Chinese economy over the past decade was the way household consumption, although rising, lagged behind overall growth. At this point consumer spending is only about 35 percent of G.D.P., about half the level in the United States.

So who’s buying the goods and services China produces? Part of the answer is, well, we are: as the consumer share of the economy declined, China increasingly relied on trade surpluses to keep manufacturing afloat. But the bigger story from China’s point of view is investment spending, which has soared to almost half of G.D.P.
[Investment spending has increased to almost half of GDP. This investment is going into real estate and construction.]
The obvious question is, with consumer demand relatively weak, what motivated all that investment? And the answer, to an important extent, is that it depended on an ever-inflating real estate bubble. Real estate investment has roughly doubled as a share of G.D.P. since 2000, accounting directly for more than half of the overall rise in investment. And surely much of the rest of the increase was from firms expanding to sell to the burgeoning construction industry.

Do we actually know that real estate was a bubble? It exhibited all the signs: not just rising prices, but also the kind of speculative fever all too familiar from our own experiences just a few years back — think coastal Florida.

And there was another parallel with U.S. experience: as credit boomed, much of it came not from banks but from an unsupervised, unprotected shadow banking system. There were huge differences in detail: shadow banking American style tended to involve prestigious Wall Street firms and complex financial instruments, while the Chinese version tends to run through underground banks and even pawnshops. Yet the consequences were similar: in China as in America a few years ago, the financial system may be much more vulnerable than data on conventional banking reveal.

Now the bubble is visibly bursting. How much damage will it do to the Chinese economy — and the world?

Some commentators say not to worry, that China has strong, smart leaders who will do whatever is necessary to cope with a downturn. Implied though not often stated is the thought that China can do what it takes because it doesn’t have to worry about democratic niceties.

To me, however, these sound like famous last words. After all, I remember very well getting similar assurances about Japan in the 1980s, where the brilliant bureaucrats at the Ministry of Finance supposedly had everything under control. And later, there were assurances that America would never, ever, repeat the mistakes that led to Japan’s lost decade — when we are, in reality, doing even worse than Japan did.

For what it’s worth, statements about economic policy from Chinese officials don’t strike me as being especially clear-headed. In particular, the way China has been lashing out at foreigners — among other things, imposing a punitive tariff on imports of U.S.-made autos that will do nothing to help its economy but will help poison trade relations — does not sound like a mature government that knows what it’s doing.

And anecdotal evidence suggests that while China’s government may not be constrained by rule of law, it is constrained by pervasive corruption, which means that what actually happens at the local level may bear little resemblance to what is ordered in Beijing.

I hope that I’m being needlessly alarmist here. But it’s impossible not to be worried: China’s story just sounds too much like the crack-ups we’ve already seen elsewhere. And a world economy already suffering from the mess in Europe really, really doesn’t need a new epicenter of crisis.

In February 2010, Mish Shedlock was prepared to forecast that the Chinese economy would blow up:

Once consequence of such an economic crisis, especially ironic in an economic led supposedly by a Communist government will be a heightened of economic inequality and other sources of social fracturing. The protest that would arise would be meet intense violence, as has happened in Egypt and the US. The democratic movement in China, as in other countries has gone underground, and economic dislocation, were it to happen, as elsewhere may lead to it emergence, and thus to the realization of one of the major fears of the Chinese leadership.

In the US, para-military repression seems to have worked for the moment on the Occupy movement, and in its own darkly ironic way, we are left with relying on a Russian news service to provide some form of update:

RT reports that OWS is not going away:

CLIMATE SCIENCE AND POLITICS

2011-12-20T00:00:00.000+11:00

Bob Carter, at The Drum (via Jess at Larvatus Prodeo), attempts to rebut Robert Manne's argument in relation to climate change.

Of course, it not just Robert Manne's argument. Public policy necessarily relies on the scientists to get the science right.

So in relation to the science the only relevant questions have to do with the scientific evidence and its acceptance by those who publish and research in the field of climate-related research. Robert Manne's particular expertise is in the area of public policy, including those influences that attempt to shape public opinion and policy implementation, such as the media and special interest groups.

Thus there are two major sets of questions at issue in what Bob Carter has written. What does the science say, and what do the relevant scientists generally accept? What has been the politics of implementation, in particular of influencing public opinion. Implicitly, there is another question: What arguments are therefore relevant?

Bob Carter begins his refutation by engaging in ad hominem to confuse science and politics.I at least remember that Robert Manne observed that if it were the case that 50% of scientists believed that global warming was likely to have significant effects on the habitat and human well being that would be sufficient to entertain an appropriate policy response on the basis of risk management. Instead Carter begins by playing the man, not the argument.

It is appropriate for Bob Carter to argue that an equivalent number (he writes army) of scientists and:

thousands of refereed scientific papers contain information that conflicts with the dangerous human-caused warming hypothesis; nor that even the most rudimentary cost-benefit analysis demonstrates that it is far more cost-effective to adapt to, rather than to try to prevent, any possible human-caused climate changes.

It is more impressive were it to be that thousands of research papers concluded that the GHG global warming hypothesis was in error. I am not sure it is sound science to use the evidence in the various papers to draw conclusions independently of what has been adduced, or simply, as must often be the case, the evidence suggests we do not know. Secondly, by its nature cost-benefit analysis is accounting process, useful for distinguishing public policy options, but not for understanding the natural world which presumably exists and works independently of dollar values.

Bob Carter then considers the evidence for Global Warming and supplies his refutation. I find these opinion completely boring. His job, were he to take on this mission, is to convince the relevant scientists. No lay person can become a scientist in five minutes. Nonetheless, here is the litany in full:

Average global temperature has risen by 0.7°C in the last 100 years. (Prima facie, perhaps; but (i) the accuracy of the figure is under challenge, a conservative possible error range being 0.7 ± 0.7°C, and (ii) that some warming may have occurred says nothing whatever about the likelihood of human causation).
A further increase of 0.5°C is guaranteed even without further emissions. (Such computer model projections conflict with the fact that no warming has now occurred for the 15 years since 1995 despite an increase of carbon dioxide of 10 per cent – an increase that of itself represents 34 per cent of all the extra carbon dioxide contributed since the start of the industrial revolution. Remembering that the radiative effects of extra carbon dioxide occur at the speed of light, and that both the ocean and the atmosphere are currently cooling, just where is this 0.5°C. of "pipeline" heat supposed to be hiding?).
An increase of 2°C in global temperature above pre-industrial levels will be "dangerous".(Another fable of Arthurian proportions, the figure being plucked out of the air at a 2005 meeting of the climate faithful in Exeter in response to a belief that "if politicians are to take action, then they need a number"; no sound empirical evidence existed then, nor exists now, that 2°C of warming will be harmful, and indeed from a human perspective any such warming is most likely to be beneficial).
Warming of 7°C is possible by 2100. (Anything is possible, the question is whether it is probable; and the answer is "no". Such extreme warmings are projected only by unvalidated computer models that conjure future virtual realities, or gedankenwelt; by no stretch of the imagination can such projections be viewed as accurate forecasts; see Carter et al., 2009, Appendix D).
Sea-level rise will displace hundreds of millions of persons from coastal regions. (If global sea-level rise continues at its current, natural rate of about 1.7 mm/yr, then in several thousand years many persons doubtless will be displaced from present coastal locations. But such an occurrence will have nothing to do with human carbon dioxide emissions, the rise being a natural environmental change that humanity will simply have to adapt to, as the Dutch and many others have done for similar rises in the past.
There will be more or more intense droughts, floods, cyclones/hurricanes, heat-waves and forest fires; a melting of Himalayan glaciers; and mass extinctions of species. (Selective computer models may specify so, but empirical evidence stubbornly refuses to endorse such theoretical projections as reality. To date, and despite an intensive research effort, not a single paper exists that demonstrates modern variation in any of these processes to lie outside of their natural range (Carter, 2010, Chapter 6). In reality, variations in all of these processes, including their intermittent extreme manifestations, are part and parcel of the dynamic natural planet on which we happen to live. For as the IPCC itself concluded in 1996: "overall, there is no evidence that extreme weather events, or climate variability, has increased in a global sense, through the twentieth century".)
Ninety-seven per cent of scientists accept dangerous warming is occurring. (How gullible can you be? Figures such as these are simple fantasy, based on selective or biased studies. In reality, no-one can actually know what "most scientists" think, but there is overwhelming evidence that at least hundreds of accomplished scientists are lined up on all the main sides of the debate. Any idea that "the science is settled" is simply banal).
There exists no plausible alternative theory to explain global warming. (A statement of scientific farce, equivalent in intellectual merit to "the dog ate my homework, Miss". The statement also grotesquely misrepresents scientific reality.

Notwithstanding the conclusions of the various IPCC reports and other scientific sources that have both preceded them and followed them, not to mention the conclusions and research of most governmental bodies, including CSIRO, Global Warming is not happening because Bob Carter says so.

But here is an alternative view, from CSIRO scientists:

He then goes on with an impressive, and suitably irrelevant ad hominem. However, Bob Carter does present his scientific argument:

The scientifically preferable null hypothesis regarding observed modern climate change (because it is the simplest consistent with the known facts) is that it has a natural causation unless and until factual evidence indicates otherwise (Carter, 2010, p.144). Literally tens of thousands of scientific papers describe facts that are consistent with this null hypothesis; in contrast, not a single credible paper yet provides factual information that substantively conflicts with it.

Since there is no problem, do nothing. And yet he does not fully and logically address the issue. So what, for example, is the major sets of scientific evidence that global warming is occurring. So what then is causing it? Natural causation is a large assumption, although admittedly there would be reason to assume that a degree of stochastic variation would be due to natural causes. It is a strange fact that science was successfully undertaken before statistics were developed. I recall that Einstein published the Theory of Relativity in 1905. I was prepared to believe the observations regarding smoking causing cancer before the relationship was confirmed by the relevant statistics. What reason do published scientists, other than himself, have for accepting the connection between the net increase in atmospheric green house gases and global warming. Why is the Artic ice cap shrinking.

The scientific consensus is critical to public policy. Adaptation may be necessary for public policy, that is necessarily global in its implication. If the causes for warming are anthropogenic a number of positive measures become possible to undertake, perhaps including geo-engineering. The alternative is sit here and cook. For those that come after that would be catastrophic on many levels, as well as profoundly immoral and short-sighted.

What do you think? I don't claim any expertise, scientific or political - although I do know what "to legitimize" means, so do the Israelis.

ASSANGE, MANNING AND DESTINY

2011-12-19T03:13:00.003+11:00

We will get to see whether Julian Assange is "trialled" in the United States in 2012.

The probability is high that this will be the case, although this court display will be contingent on the fate of Bradley Manning. Timing can be arranged, especially when justice has become irrelevant.

We may look with quizzically at the United States and its descent into a from of fascism masquerading as democracy, but with an empire there is always an excuse, and much historical precedent. Fascism can be defined, in part as the rule of corporations, although perhaps it has other features.Such a fate could hardly be forestalled, despite the best endeavours of the writers of the Constitution informed by the development of Common Law and the history of tyranny. Democracy in any true sense was never meant to be the rule of the supper-rich, whatever the intent of the eighteenth century men of property.

A contemporary American historian, taking a less extreme view, observes:

We are headed towards uncharted territory: a modern state and economy without effective government. The Obama Administration has slowed, not interrupted, the trend. . . The great adventure of the Enlightenment, the design of a government to assure justice and meet the needs of the people, is for the moment at an end in the United States. We shall need a new and more flexible view of history to integrate this epochal fact into our world view.

But dare we not engage in self reflection? In The Sydney Morning Herald, Michael Pearce, after reminding us that Julian Assange was accused by certain political persons of breaking the law but who then were unable to say which one, observes:

Imagine instead that he was the citizen of a country not obsessed with security at the expense of liberty; a country mature and self-confident enough to distinguish its own interests from those of its allies; a country whose political leadership could tell politics from policies; a country not riven by culture wars and marred by character assassination; whose citizenry could take offence at obvious injustice to one of its own and do something about it.

That would be as to imagine that Pluto was a planet and the Earth was a large item in the whole scheme of the universe.

A number of people, including Noam Chomsky, have signed a letter to Kevin Rudd, the prime minister in waiting.

(I had not realized that this letter, with its 72 signatories was coordinated by Bernard Keane of Crikey. ABC News reports:

He says the signatories fear that if Mr Assange is placed in custody in Sweden, where he is accused of sexual assault, the US will extradite and prosecute him over what Keane says is "legitimate journalism".

"Concerns about the treatment of Julian Assange go beyond whatever people may think about WikiLeaks," Keane said.

"We've seen before the circumstances in which an Australian Government fails to do the right thing by an Australian citizien who for whatever reason the Americans have decided they have a problem with.

"We just don't want to go back to the sorts of circumstances we saw with David Hicks where there was a widespread concern that justice was just not being seen to be done.")

Meantime the pre-trial hearing continues of the person thought to be the source of the documents that Wikileaks released.Bradley Manning has friends, it seems, even though he is locked in there:

Naturally, and with qualification, it seems, Daniel Ellsberg is among Manning's friends:

POLITICAL MANAGEMENT

2011-12-17T22:10:00.003+11:00

It was the inestimable Bill who said: "When words are few, they are seldom spent in vain".

Here is Moir from The Sydney Morning Herald displaying the craft and managing to be both:apt and funny:

FRIDAY NIGHT DOG BLOG: WAIT, IT'S SUMMER

2011-12-17T01:41:00.004+11:00

The rain may have stopped us going out on a few days, but the real impediment was with the dog walker. We will get this problem referred to the relevant doctor and see what happens.

Dexter and Hannah were doubtless disappointed, but dogs are accepting of what fate throws them. Things have not yet deteriorated to not going out at all, although the tendency is to not worry about the photos on the assumption that there is always tomorrow, and perhaps we might have better cooperation from the subjects.

Nonetheless patience and cooperation, such that it was, resulted in the following:

.........................
Why then not engage the normality assumption by ignoring the reality. Well it is supposed to summer, let's wait for a sunny day. Bruce Spingstein sings:

..........................
We might see Friday Ark sailing on the horizon and we wait for the passengers and crew to come by.
..........................
The photos were organized with Picasa.

RUN OUT OF IRAQ?

2011-12-16T17:58:00.000+11:00

Fictions apparently can be reported as news, as at best a part of the story is told.

So it is with "the defeat" of the American Imperialism in Iraq. The object of the invasion was to steal the oil, and perhaps they might have been more successful in Libya so maybe it does not matter. There is some doubt as the extent of the withdrawal and the success of establishing a democratic polity.

The Sydney Morning Herald takes its report from AP/AFP:

The US military has formally shut down the war in Iraq, officially retiring the flag of US Forces-Iraq. Troops lowered the flag and wrapped it in camouflage, formally "casing" it, according to Army tradition. The ceremony was attended by US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta, who told troops they leave Iraq with "lasting pride". Panetta said veterans of the nearly nine-year conflict can be "secure in knowing that your sacrifice has helped the Iraqi people to cast tyranny aside". Army General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and General Lloyd Austin, the top US commander in Iraq, also spoke at the ceremony at Baghdad International Airport.

There are a little more than 4000 US soldiers in Iraq, but they will depart in the coming days, at which point almost no more American troops will remain in a country where there were once nearly 170,000 personnel on more than 500 bases.

The criminals responsive for this "greatest crime against humanity" walk free, wallowing the the wealth they have acquired.

In 2007, Christopher Hitchens foresaw further disintegration if the US military occupation was ended:

DENYING THE REASONABLE

2011-12-15T02:37:00.002+11:00

Robert Manne , professor of politics and Latrobe University, has recently published an essay asked to my mind a reasonable question given its' premise: "How can climate change denial be explained?".

The essay was published at ABC's The Drum and The Monthly, which by contrast carried the reference links.There were far more comments on the ABC site, but the pattern was the same, in my opinion missing the point. It seems on this evidence that those who would deny the understanding as is generally held by the scientists engaged in researching the climate take offence at been described as "denialists". There are a few work-arounds. One of which is to deny that a scientific consensus exists, and The Drum is deficient in that it does not provide the links for which there may be good reasons.They quote the climate denial sources, without cross checking with sources that might correct misconceptions. Then, and I hate to say it, they engage in fallacious arguments while arguing their case is superior. After awhile, and especially at The Drum there is a lot, this stuff gets boring.

Robert Manne's premise is that the climate change denial is a right wing project suggesting immediately that it is ideological in origin. Some people in the Left he reminds us had a problem with "the disaster of communism" in coming to terms with the available evidence. The argument in relation to global warming is overwhelming. Thousands of scientists working on the climate throughout the world agree that the problem is man-made and an is due to the emission of greenhouse gases. Two studies, one in 2009 and the other in 2010, have identified the consensus to be 97%. Why in general terms might such a consensus be possible,other than the underlying science, as distinct from the measurement, is well established? Form memory, somebody commenting at The Drum did call one of these studies into question.

So why do people in denial about the possible, and perhaps likely in the absence of coordinated global action, consequence of anthropogenic global warming? Robert Manne proposes five possible and related explanations. In summary:
1. The role of vested economic interests eg the fossil fuel industry.
This is a familiar story and Robert Manne does not engage in demonization. He quotes Naomi Oreskes. Here is a brief interveiw:

2. The part played by the mass media.
There is a study by James Painter. Robert Manne has written about the role of the Murdoch media, in particular The Australian.
3. Extension of the culture wars to include scientist.
Robert Mann notes:

Following the coming of the climate crisis everything changed. The neoconservatives and the neoliberals in the media, politics, the think tanks and the academy applied their ideas about the corrosive influence of political correctness and collectivism to a group they had hitherto staunchly defended against the attacks of relativistic “deconstructionists” and “postmodernists” – the scientists. Or at least, to put it more precisely, they extended their analysis to one branch of scientists – those who specialised in analysis of the climate. When the climate scientists began pointing out the urgent need to curb emissions of greenhouse gases, the neoconservatives and neoliberals decided that these scientists were little better than the “tenured radicals” in the humanities faculties of the universities who deployed their so-called scholarship to undermine the free market or traditional Western values. Their science was dubious. They perverted the peer review process. They suppressed dissenting voices. They engaged in research they knew to be fraudulent – “climategate” – for the sole purpose of winning lucrative research grants from the “nanny state”.

And best of all since these things are true, evidence and proof, and even science are irrelevant.
4. The psychology of denial
Robert Manne's comments are, I think worth, noting. He writes:

Ideologues only feel comfortable when they hunt in packs. Within a remarkably short time, almost all anti-political correctness and anti-collectivist ideologues became climate change denialists. Nonetheless, it would be quite misleading to argue that all leading climate change denialists are neoconservatives and neoliberals. As Clive Hamilton has pointed out, there is a certain kind of individual who is offended by the conclusions of the climate scientists. For such people – frequently ageing white males of science, engineering and technology backgrounds – the conclusions of the climate scientists are experienced as a shock, as a challenge, but most deeply of all as an affront to their deepest and most cherished basic faith: the capacity and indeed the right of “mankind” to subdue the Earth and all its fruits and to establish a “mastery” over Nature. I use these words advisedly. The conclusions of the climate scientists suggested a problem with this generally free-thinking, secular, pro-capitalist faith.

The people I have in mind were the kind who had mercilessly mocked the once-fashionable idea that there might ultimately be “limits to growth”. They are the kind of people who had vigorously and sometimes successfully disputed claims about the eventual depletion of natural resources or theories like “peak oil”. Now they were faced with scientists who had arrived at the conclusion that there was something even more fundamentally amiss in the process of the industrial revolution itself – namely, that the decision to provide the energy for industrialisation by burning fossil fuels was possibly the most consequential, although perfectly innocent, misstep human beings had ever taken. Within the mindset of the engineers and geologists, such a thought is not merely mistaken. It is intolerable and deeply offensive. Those preaching this doctrine have to be resisted and indeed denounced.

For such people – in Australia, one thinks of Ian Plimer, Bob Carter, William Kininmonth – the struggle against climate science is both urgent and existential. They are fighting to preserve life-long beliefs which have provided them with comfort and with meaning. In the fight against the climate scientists, they have proved to be important allies of the anti-political correctness and anti-collectivist ideologues, the right-wing media and the fossil fuel corporations.

I suppose he is a political scientist, not a psychologist but the psychology of denial needs to be considered. I suppose that the alternative account to the official story of what happened seems fanciful as first, but perhaps in the light of context and evidence a different view might be considered. A number of psychologists report on reactions, including poignantly their own:

5. Public receptivity to the message.
Robert Manne speculates:

Perhaps it is the character type that flourishes under the conditions of consumer capitalism that presents the primary obstacle to taking action on climate change. Faced by an apparent choice between the continuation of our lifestyle and the wellbeing of our planet, perhaps it is the continuation of our lifestyle that in the end we will decide to choose.

Those of us in the rich world want to keep our comfortable lifestyles, but the different in the public perception of the reality of climate change is interesting.

The question, which none of the commenters as far as I could tell addressed, is how sufficient these possible explanations might be for the denial of global warming. Robert Manne has identified that climate denial is a right wing pre-occupation. I don't think he has the addressed the question of asking what is it about about "right wing" ideology, as distinct from "left wing ideology" global warming a cause for denial and cognitive dissonance. The answer may lie in the notion of cultural cognition which Wikipedia explains as:

The cultural cognition hypothesis holds that individuals are motivated by a variety of psychological processes to form beliefs about putatively dangerous activities that match their cultural evaluations of them. Persons who subscribe to relatively individualistic values, for example, tend to value commerce and industry and are inclined to disbelieve that such activities pose serious environmental risks. Persons who subscribe to relatively egalitarian and communitarian values, in contrast, readily credit claims of environmental risks, consistent with their moral suspicion of commerce and industry as sources of inequality and symbols of excessive self-seeking.

That seems to fit with what Robert Manne is saying and with the what is know about the psychology of denial, which presumably has become permanent rather than transient as it in, for example, the grieving process. So how can we get out of such a fix?

And then, I think, there is insufficient attention given to the fact that industrial society and post industrial society has been wholly constructed around and dependent on fossil fuels. But does that make the development of alternative energy sources impossible? Alternative energy sources are challenging, to corporations and governments, because they are decentralized.

The third aspect that Robert Manne does not cover is that simultaneously AGW is a global challenge with differential effects across the world, fundamentally causing a reappraisal of the relationship between human beings and the natural world, while rising the unsettling issues of fairness, justice and the sustainability of the human population.

The Independent reports that the worst case scenario appears to be happening. Russian scientists are reporting that methane is being released as the ice cover recedes from the north west Arctic coast. But lets think happy thoughts, as Robert Manne notes only one percept of Americans think it is the most urgent problem for them, even as they emit more GHG than anybody else on a per capital basis.
( I have included most of the references from The Monthly, which enhance Robert Manne's essay. Those that I have included should be apparent.)

CLIMATE, DEPRESSION AND DEMOCRACY

2011-12-13T00:42:00.002+11:00

Paul Krugman (via Truthdig) writing in the New York Times says in effect let's call the economic situation for what it is: a depression. These are not, as he notes with reference to Europe, good times for democracy. Nor are they good times for the climate, despite the last minute agreement arranged in Durban.

The obvious thing to do, and the first consideration to mind, is the answer to the question as to what these three aspects of human existence have in common. That proposition would be that the freeing of the market economy has lead inexorably to the dominance of corporate power over the economy and the political processes with a consequence commitment to fossil fuels and negligence in relation to climate science. If there were other explanation what would they be?

I don't have the answers.

Paul Krugman argues the case for the linkage between the current economy in both the US and Europe and their respective democratic crises. Paul Krugman says:

True, it’s not a full replay of the Great Depression, but that’s cold comfort. Unemployment in both America and Europe remains disastrously high. Leaders and institutions are increasingly discredited. And democratic values are under siege.

On that last point, I am not being alarmist. On the political as on the economic front it’s important not to fall into the “not as bad as” trap. High unemployment isn’t O.K. just because it hasn’t hit 1933 levels; ominous political trends shouldn’t be dismissed just because there’s no Hitler in sight.

Let’s talk, in particular, about what’s happening in Europe — not because all is well with America, but because the gravity of European political developments isn’t widely understood.

First of all, the crisis of the euro is killing the European dream. The shared currency, which was supposed to bind nations together, has instead created an atmosphere of bitter acrimony.

Specifically, demands for ever-harsher austerity, with no offsetting effort to foster growth, have done double damage. They have failed as economic policy, worsening unemployment without restoring confidence; a Europe-wide recession now looks likely even if the immediate threat of financial crisis is contained. And they have created immense anger, with many Europeans furious at what is perceived, fairly or unfairly (or actually a bit of both), as a heavy-handed exercise of German power.

Nobody familiar with Europe’s history can look at this resurgence of hostility without feeling a shiver. Yet there may be worse things happening.

Right-wing populists are on the rise from Austria, where the Freedom Party (whose leader used to have neo-Nazi connections) runs neck-and-neck in the polls with established parties, to Finland, where the anti-immigrant True Finns party had a strong electoral showing last April. And these are rich countries whose economies have held up fairly well. Matters look even more ominous in the poorer nations of Central and Eastern Europe.

At this point, soon after the election of Obama, Paul Krugman is optimistic about the "progressive moment" and the possibility of a carbon tax:

And then he observes the middle class society just did not happen:

American commentators can point to the rise of extremist parties in Europe because unlike in the US those countries typically have electoral systems that allow minorities to be represented. One can argue, I believe, that the failure to reflect minority opinion gives rise to false majorities. The counter argument as bitterly expressed recently in New Zealand is that proportional representation favors party placements over individual candidates and gives minority representatives disproportional power.

Still the imperfections of a system should not blind to the merits. An economic crisis is likely to create the conditions for a change of consciousness about other system processes. However the problem is, as is evident in relation to the climate, the positive intervention needs to proceed to the denouement. The normal assumption is that in order to collectively orchestrate a fundamental change in social direction charismatic leadership is essential.

The most productive course, in my opinion, would be make problems associated with Global Warming the central focus, and not to ignore, especially in regard to the US the economic implications of the role of violence in establishing and maintaining the global political order. There is much money to be saved by limiting defence spending and redirecting those saving to socially and ecologically beneficial purposes, which paradoxically perhaps if it lead to the development of non-fossil energy systems would negate the need for the exercise of threat power.

So what are the moral choices to be framed and made? How might a culture be reconstrued ahead of catastrophe?

So can we "prepare for business as unusual"?

PAKISTANI SOVEIGNTY

2011-12-12T01:44:00.000+11:00

The Pakistani Foreign Minister told the US Secretary of State the attacks that lead to the death of 24 soldiers on 26 November was "totally unacceptable" and "an attack on Pakistani Sovereignty"

While threatening to shoot down any drones that cross the nation's borders, the Pakistanis have insisted that the Americans leave the Shamsi Airbase in Balochostan from which drones had been launched to Afghanistan and the Federally Administrated Trust Territories. Dawn reported:

“A cargo plane of the US Air Force arrived at the airbase today[11 December] to take the US troops to their next destination,” a senior government official told Dawn on Saturday night.

A private plane carrying Pakistani officials also landed at the airbase on Saturday. They visited the facility to witness the evacuation process.

The sources said that about 20 US cargo planes had landed at the airbase over the past week to shift sensitive equipment, vehicles and belongings of the US troops who had been using the base for the last 10 years.

MSNBC reports reported the honeymoon was over. They were referring to the threat to shoot down drones that violated Pakistani airspace and not the extended stay at Shamsi where US drones were located. The relationship, for the moment, has been rent apart between the two countries.

And then there is the embargo of supplies to the forces in Afghanistan. Who knows what effect that is having in Afghanistan. Presumably alternative routes are been employed, perhaps increasing the costs of the operations against the Taliban. Over 600 trucks loaded with supplies have been stranded. One other consequence is that Pakistan's major ports are being clogged with containers. Dawn notes:

Port users told Dawn that if the large number of Nato containers were not removed from the two ports soon, there will hardly be any space left for movement of commercial cargo, badly affecting the country’s imports and exports.

Terminal operators wondered who would pay the demurrage, plugging and other charges in case of any change in the government’s blockade decision. According to official documents, three container carriers belonging to American President
Line (APL), an official carrier of US military hardware and equipment, called at country’s ports during the past 15 days.

Another container carrier was expected to call any time and may be given berth at the Karachi port.

Shipping sources said a large number of reefer containers (meant to keep perishable goods fresh) are also clogging the terminals and clocking phenomenal plugging charges.

“Since ports are transit points, and not meant for storage, the government should immediately arrange the removal of these containers from ports so that the movement of commercial cargo does not suffer,” a terminal operator told Dawn.

So the analogy may be stronger than supposed. The break up of the relationship is not just about the emotion; it is intensified by money. At some point ships will have to stop off loading military equipment. Do the Pakistanis get to keep what has already been unloaded, or do the Americans send ships to transport it away, after paying the associated costs?

Somebody has overplayed their hand.

WAR AGAINST IRAN?

2011-12-10T23:16:00.006+11:00

According to Lawrence Wilkerson, the same script is in play for an aggressive war against Iran as that followed against Iraq in 2003. He says it is the same script with the same players.

Retired Colonel Wilkerson, who was the Chief of Staff for Colin Powell, was closely involved in the planning for the invasion of Iraq. He has spoken out on previous occasions. He described the information that Powell presented to the UN on 5 February 2003 as "hoax" for which he blamed the CIA.

In a recent interview on RT (Russia Times) he connects the dots saying the time horizon, subject to contingencies, which means in particular the Israeli Government, can be expected to be within three years. His interviewer is Alyona Minkovski, a Moskova born, Californian raised and educated American.

"We've lost it", Wilkerson declares in relation to the Obama statement that he is fact is a tough guy and how the world views the killing machines sans "due process" - whatever that might be. "How would we react if someone flew drones over our cities" he is asked, and then he takes over the questioning saying in part that Israel is walking down that route as well: (via AntiWar.com):

Although it does not count, except for us, "inane and idiotic" is apt description fro members of the Australian Parliament and Government in relation to such matters.There is just a chance that the reaction to the economic crisis will arrive ahead of the bombs. For example, Bulldog Cameron has just locked himself out of the EU discussions on behalf of "the city". We might keep in mind who the real rulers are.

FRIDAY NIGHT DOG BLOG: ALONG THE WAY

2011-12-10T01:24:00.002+11:00

So we went out this week, but not at much as might have. It was raining for some of time and if you waited long enough it would be.There was mist low over the sea, and so perhaps it was the La Nina effect.

Dexter and Hannah were either very patient or very resigned. The season of leeches and, from the reported experience of someone along the way, ticks has arrived.

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Perhaps rain and rumination run together. "Don't Look Now" was sung by Credence Clearwater Revival:

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We hope to see the sails of Friday Ark crossing the horizon and then go aboard.

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The photos were organized by Picasa.

CIA DRONE DISPLAYED

2011-12-09T08:47:00.004+11:00

Iranian television has shown pictures of the CIA drone that reportedly was flying over the country. Such an invasion of air space constitutes an act of war.

Those rules apply to the United States but not to other countries. The Americans believed that their advanced technology gave them impunity to act as they wished.Now they have engaged in technology transfer presumably not simply with Iran but in all likelihood Russia, and perhaps China. Here is the report and pictures from RT:

The real question is how was this feat managed by the Iranians. The vehicle appears to be intact. There was supposedly a self destruct switch option for the operator.

RT reports:

The Sentinel has been in the arsenal of the US military since 2009 and the Pentagon has gone to great lengths to keep its exact capabilities under wraps, though those speaking under condition of anonymity to the Los Angeles Times have revealed that among its powers is the ability to intercept cell phone transmissions and sniff out toxic chemicals from miles above the Earth’s surface, all while remaining undetected.
"It's bad — they'll have everything,” one official added to the Times.
"It carries a variety of systems,” author Peter W. Singer tells the Times, “to its allies . . . it's a potential gold mine.”
Given the craft’s complex technology, the interception out of Iran allowed for authorities to down the drone in what appears to be perfect condition. BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner says such supports the claim by Iran that its forces electronically hijacked the plane brought it down without a crash.
Is the hacking of the drone’s complex system a possibility for Iran? Less than two months ago, RT reported that a key-logger virus was installed on the computers at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, infecting information in the cockpits of drones. The Air Force officials on the base were not made aware of the incident until an expose in Wired’s Danger Room revealed the details.
As it so happens, the Sentinel is dispatched out of the same base. If that virus from months back was in fact perpetrated by Tehran, the United States could be the victim of cyber warfare courtesy of Iran. Such an attack has been among the Pentagon’s worries for years now, and in May the DoD formally filed paperwork that says computer sabotage from another nation counts as an act of war. Speaking to the Wall Street Journal at the time, one unnamed military official was quoted as saying, “If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks.”
While the US investigates how they managed to lose the craft to Iran, the biggest concern for America right now is what Tehran will do with the craft. As threats grow of a potential nuclear program overseas and tensions between countries worsen, the technology of such an advanced craft in the hands of the perceived enemy — and its allies — could be detrimental to any military action the US intends on carrying out in the future — or any action dished out by Iran.
"Among the United States' main concerns is that Iran could use an intact aircraft to examine the vulnerabilities in stealth technology and take countermeasures with its air defense systems,” reports Iran’s FARS news agency. “Another is that China or other US adversaries could help Iran extract data from the drone that would reveal its flight history, surveillance targets and other capabilities. The drone was programmed to destroy such data in the event of a malfunction, but it failed to do so.”
“The blow has been so heavy that the US officials do not still want to accept that Iran brought down the plane by a cyberattack."

Could it be that capture of one drone will be enough to deflect the much heralded attack on Iran? But then again maybe it is just a model. But what would be gained by that course, other than propaganda. On balance I am inclined to think this might be the real thing and if it is due to cyberwarfare, to which the Iranians have been subject, the plot thickens.

Interestingly this development if true has a connection with the long incarceration of Bradley Manning who was among other things critical of the tech saviness among the military. It is simply astonishing to believe that the Cheech base was operating state of the art technology but was not aware that they have hacked until pointed out by Wired.

ELSEWHERE:

At War In Context, Paul Woodward, provides further references relating to the significance of this incident, although presumably was not the first occasion of spying by manned, unmanned and satellite platforms. I am thinking that perhaps this aircraft was flying below cloud level to obtain more detailed information.

THE DIVIDED BRAIN

2011-12-08T23:51:00.000+11:00

"The organ that is profoundly about making connection is divided" - although connected via the corpus callosum.

"Iain McGilchrist explains how our 'divided brain' has profoundly altered human behaviour, culture and society." The animations are so much better now they have been slowed down a bit. Here goes:

CATCH 222

2011-12-08T00:53:00.003+11:00

Regardless of the number of people killed, the prosecution of war is very expensive. Keeping the supply lines open and flowing is critical to bases on the ground requires constant air drops.

The moral cost can always be spun left in the vapour trails in the sky. Nathan Hodge goes into the practical problems for the Wall Street Journal:

Over Eastern Afghanistan parachuting a barrel of fuel to a remote Afghan base takes sharp flying skills, steady nerves and flawless timing.

It also costs a lot of money—up to $400 a gallon, by military estimates.

But the Pentagon is stuck with the expense for the foreseeable future, especially given the recent deterioration in U.S.-Pakistani relations.

"We're going to burn a lot of gas to drop a lot of gas," said Capt. Zack Albaugh, a California Air National Guard pilot deployed with the 774th Expeditionary Airlift Squadron. He spoke just before a recent mission to supply a remote base near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, scene of cross-border rocket attacks that have heightened regional tensions this fall.

Such security issues were addressed Monday at an international meeting over Afghanistan in Bonn, Germany, where President Hamid Karzai appealed for continuing international funding well after most coalition forces withdraw in 2014.

But for now, nearly 100,000 U.S. troops are on the ground in Afghanistan, often stationed in difficult-to-reach outposts that depend on pallets of food, water, ammunition and fuel that are dropped by parachute out of cargo planes.

Capt. Albaugh's recent supply flight over the country's Paktika province underscored a simple fact of the U.S. military presence: War is inherently costly, and that is keenly felt when the military's budget is under growing strain and vital supply lines come under pressure.

This example of human behavior makes problem gamblers addicted to poker machines look good by comparison. At some point the money tap will have to be turned off and the situation in Afghanistan will not have changed for the better but for the worst. The money wasted so extravagantly could have been productively spent at home with a net benefit for human welfare.

Meanwhile, many people are reported to have died following two suicide attacks on shrines where people were gathered for the Shiite holy day of Asura. AFP reports (via The New Zealand Herald) that 58 people were killed. The major blast was in Kabul and another attack occurred in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif. Lashkar-i-Jhangvi has claimed responsibility. Because of suspected links to the ISI, the attack is likely to increase the animosity between the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan. As Ernesto Londono writes in The Washington Post:

If the group is extending operations into Afghanistan, it could add a highly destabilizing sectarian dimension to the costly and protracted Afghan war.

The invasion and occupation of both Iraq and Afghanistan, aside from other and more important considerations, have been blunders. These admissions will be made in due course in the context of strategic errors, but doubtless the related moral and legal issues will be ignored. This is the way the world works.

Gareth Porter reports on last weeks attack by the US/NATO on Pakistan border posts and the killing of 24 Pakistan soldiers. He discusses his article with Scott Horton.

The stream of news incidents is much like the endless charges of the climate denialists enabling unresolved issues to be buried as the flow of news moves on without resolution or comprehension.

DRONE DOWNED OVER IRAN

2011-12-06T01:14:00.002+11:00

News items proceed at such a clip it becomes a challenge to fit them into context. And it has to be observed perhaps we are not mean to.

One method is use multiple sources of news. Take the case of the drone reportedly captured by the Iran in its air space.How can the lies be deflected so that the truth can be observed?

ABC News Online for me will often be the first source of information. They first up take the news agency reports, which I think can be repeatedly demonstrated to be spun. When they interview their correspondent in Washington we are none the wiser. As expected anonymous American sources deny the veracity of the Iranian reports. Notice in this report there is no attempt to explain what a RQ-170 unmanned aerial vehicle might be, what they are designed to do, and there use in Afghanistan. We are left in no position to assess the significance of the events.

The BBC provides more comprehensive information as to the type of drone involved and the ongoing contretemps between the US and Iran.

The Jerusalem Post reports that the Americans were sceptical about the Iranian capacity to down the UAV, but that one vehicle did go missing over Western Afghanistan.

Al Jazeera reports previous drones shot down by Iran have been reverse engineered and these models along with the originals have been shown to the Russians, and not apparently to the Chinese.

RT provides a different view and a fuller explanation.

Given the official lying and lack of attribution of the official statement sense can be made of these incidents only make sense by recording them individually and detecting the pattern that emerges. This is the activity that, for example, Gareth Porter does.

Scott Horton talks to John Glaser who discusses the storming of the British Embassy in Tehran. Juan Cole provides some background on the Embassy Affray.

Glenn Greenwald attempts to provide a deeper background:

The U.S. has long had Iran virtually encircled as a result of the American occupation of Afghanistan on Iran’s Eastern border, its invasion of Iraq on its Western border, its NATO ally Turkey hovering on Iran’s Northwestern border, some degree of military relationship with Turkmenistan on Iran’s Northeastern border, and multiple U.S. client states sitting right across the Persian Gulf (Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain, where the massive U.S. Fifth Fleet is stationed). Additionally, some combination of the U.S. and Israel has bombarded Iran with multiple acts of war over the last year, including explosions on Iranian soil, the murder of numerous Iranian nuclear scientists (in which even one of their wives was shot), and sophisticated cyberattacks. Meanwhile, top American political officials from both parties are actively demanding that an Iranian revolutionary cult be removed from the list of Terrorist organizations (just coincidentally, they’re all on the cult’s payroll). In the past decade, the U.S. and/or Israel have invaded, air attacked, and/or occupied Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, Lebanon, Sudan, Syria, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (to say nothing of the creation of a worldwide torture regime, a system of “black site” prisons around the world to which people were disappeared, and a due-process-free detention camp in the middle of the Caribbean Ocean where many people remain encaged for almost a full decade without charges). During this same time period, Iran has not invaded, occupied or air attacked anyone. Iran, to be sure, is domestically oppressive, but no more so — and in many cases less — than the multiple regimes funded, armed and otherwise propped up by the U.S. during this period. Those are all just facts.(Links not included)

The average person is criticized because they are not keeping up with events, but it is understandable why that is the situation. It means they are more susceptible to propaganda and the Orwellian manipulation. So what should news organizations do? Perhaps they could provide a three level approach:the quick summary, an more extended report, and an extensive coverage. I don't see that happening.

UPDATE:
The LA Times reports:

The radar-evading drone that crash-landed over the weekend in Iran was on a mission for the CIA, according to a senior U.S. official, raising fears that the aircraft's sophisticated technology could be exploited by Tehran or shared with other American rivals.

The jet-powered, bat-winged RQ-170 Sentinel drone is considered one of the most advanced in the U.S. arsenal, with stealth technology and sophisticated computer systems that enable it to penetrate deep into hostile territory without detection.

This, as could be guessed, is now admitted to be a more significant loss that was first admitted.

HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE AND OWS

2011-12-04T00:25:00.002+11:00

History is a process but NOT one as Hegel suggested is not so much driven by reason but by an evolutionary purpose to light up our individual and collective neo-cortexts and so inform our actions.

In this view other more primitive processes are in play that might metaphorically referred to as the reptilian brain. So we have in evidence, not just technology, but violence, domination and greed and the cynical manipulation of people.

Shopping in the supermarket while conscious of the music played and fed to the consumers to encourage buying of bargains, I apprehend living in bubble as perhaps the eco-system of the outside world collapses. This maudlin thought brings to mind how the aristocrats of Paris and St Petersburg danced on as the revolutions proceeded apace outside.

David Graeber reflects on what OWS might mean, or more generally the Occupy Movement. Firstly he observes:

Perhaps the greatest world historian alive today, Immanuel Wallerstein, has argued that since 1789 all major revolutions have really been world revolutions. The French revolution might have appeared to only take place in one country, but really it quickly transformed the entire North Atlantic world so profoundly that a mere 20 years later, ideas that had previously been considered lunatic fringe – that social change was good, that governments existed to manage social change, that governments drew their legitimacy from an entity known as the people – had been propelled so deeply into common sense that even the stodgiest conservative had to at least pay lip service to them.

Since Immanuel Wallestein came into the picture here is a recent address he gave:

Now to get back to David Graeber's conclusions:

Could we be in the presence of a fundamental shift like 1789 – a shift not only in global power relations but in our elementary political common sense? It’s impossible to say, but there are reasons to be optimistic.

Let me end by listing three:

First, in no previous world revolution has the main center of mobilization been in the imperial center itself. Great Britain, the great imperial power of the 19th century, was barely affected by the uprisings of 1789 and 1848. In the same way, the US remained largely immune from the great revolutionary moments of the 20th century. The decisive street battles typically happen not in the imperial center, nor in the super-exploited margins, but in what might be termed the second tier: not London but Paris, not Berlin but St. Petersburg. The 2011 revolution started according to that familiar pattern, but it has actually spread to the imperial center itself. If this is sustained, it will be quite unprecedented.

Also, this time the power elite can’t start a war. They already tried that. They’re basically out of cards to play in this respect. This makes an enormous difference.

Lastly, the spread of feminist and anarchist sensibilities has opened up the possibility of a genuine cultural transformation. Here is the big question: Can we create a genuinely democratic culture? Can we change our fundamental conceptions of what politics must necessarily be like? For me, the image of middle-aged white guys in suits, in places like Denver or Minneapolis, patiently learning consensus process from pagan priestesses or members of groups like Anarchist People of Color so as to take part in their local General Assemblies (and there are … it’s true! I’ve heard reports) may well be the single most dramatic image to have come out of the Occupy movement so far.

Of course this could be the first moment in yet another round of recuperation and defeat. But if we are witnessing another 1789, a moment where our most basic assumptions about politics, economics, society, are about to be transformed – this is precisely how it would have to begin.

I would take exception to some of these statements to the extent that the developments within the imperial powers are ignored, and while perhaps they did not have global implications they nevertheless had impacts. For example, since I relate to this historical development on a family level if not a personal level, the development of steam-driven passenger ships and the related construction of the Suez Canal made it possible for the self-governing colonial governments in Australia and New Zealand to pay the boat people to set up occupation as families in these distant lands. The scheme was finished with the late nineteenth century depression. It was the Suez Canal and later oil, rather than Jerusalem, that animated the imperial vision. We think now our only connection with the Eastern Mediterranean is via the carnage of war.

History may be a process from which we cannot extract ourselves, and my apprehensions might we an example of "the optical illusion of consciousness", but its' understanding, albeit retrospective informs understanding of our situation.

Nonetheless as we continue to do the things that no longer work, we are drawn to consider what has. A case in point, labor unions borrow the rhetoric of the OWS but continue with the old methods:

The new method is not unproblematic and there are some issues related to homelessness, drug abuse and other ailments of the under class in full site, but much like the labor march out of sight of media consciousness, which subsumes consumer consciousness. The first segment of Truthdig Radio on KPFK deals with these problems as they related to LA. Globalization takes on a whole new reference by the comment made and endorsed in relation to the labor protest in NY:

It's so amazingly sad that I need to watch a foreign news source to see what's going on a few hour drive from me.

Some advise stepping outside to smell the eucalypts and observe the kookaburra on the power line while we turn off all our electronic gadgets. Perhaps we can be selective by junking the televison, or turning into a disconnected family altar, made like Roman houses had, while keeping the internet and work for "an emergent clarity".

POSTSCRIPT:

I try to imagine what a critical reader might be thinking. One point that would come up would be the importance of the Raj, as the jewel of the Empire in the late nineteenth century. How did Britain make money out of India? I am guessing that it was important than other colonies, although rubber would in time assume greater importance than, for example, tea. How strategically important were Gandhi's insight that lead to the Salt March and his encouragement of home spinning as distinct from buying Lancashire manufactured cloth?

Here is one account, but it does not give an assessment of the capital flows that favoured the British.

Britain, like the US, was a capitalist power:

British interests were of several kinds. At first the main purpose was to achieve a monopolistic trading position. Later it was felt that a regime of free trade would make India a major market for British goods and a source of raw materials, but British capitalists who invested in India,or who sold banking or shipping service there, continued effectively to enjoy monopolistic privileges. India also provided interesting and lucrative employment for a sizeable portion of the
British upper middle class, and the remittances they sent home made an appreciable contribution to Britain's balance of payments and capacity to save. Finally, control of India was a key element in the world power structure, in terms of geography, logistics and military manpower. The British were not averse to Indian economic development if it increased their markets but refused to help in areas where they felt there was conflict with their own economic interests or political security.
Hence, they refused to give protection to the Indian textile industry until its main competitor became Japan rather than Manchester, and they did almost nothing to further technical education. They introduced some British concepts of property, but did not push them too far when they met vested interests

The difference now lies in the role of transnational corporations that may be nominally American or British or whatever, who might be assumed organize national governments to do their bidding.

FRIDAY NIGHT DOG BLOG - NO WAY TODAY

2011-12-03T03:00:00.003+11:00

The weather over the past week has been very unsettled. Thunder storms that were forecast did not happen. We did get heavy rain and so the creek was up. So I retreated last Saturday from attempting to cross.

Dexter and Hannah would have been happy to continue, but it is bad enough holding my foothold on the ground, especially since I keep Dexter on the lead. We did have a close encounter with two people. I held him up on his back legs as passed on the path. Sometimes it is the state of mind of the dog handler that is critical.

The dogs work together and independently when walking as distinct from when Hannah arrives back home when she jumps all over Dexter and tears around the place.

Summer has arrived on the calendar.

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A creek, even when running high, is not a river. There are better renditions, but perhaps not as much fun. Still, I can see why the para-military police were sent to close this mob down:

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If we are again lucky this week we may board Friday Ark as it sails by.
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The photos were arranged and placed using Picasa.

PREPARING FOR THE US PRESIDENCY

2011-12-02T01:53:00.002+11:00

What is a suitable background for a US presidential candidate to enable that person to go on to be a success in the office?

John Kennedy's grandfather, John F Fitzgerald had been mayor of Boston, and he seems to me to have been preparing to be president from the time he inherited the family mantle to enter public office. The current crop of Republican candidates seem to have the ambition without the ability, personality, or preparation.

New York mayor Michael Bloomberg has some ideas about preparation for the job of president. In a speech at MIT he observed that as major hecontrolled the seventh largest army in the world and they had the capacity to shot down aeroplanes. He argued that local government is where the action is, and where politicians acquire executive experience. Politicer NY reports:

You see, according to Mayor Bloomberg, he and his mayoral colleagues are focused on results. It’s the rest of the politicians who are screwing things up.

“At the state or federal level, that’s where the real problems are. You see it particularly in American government at the moment where they are just unable to do anything, and yet, the mayors of this country still have to deal with the real world,” said Mayor Bloomberg.

Mayor Bloomberg closed by expressing the desire for someone with real, executive experience to arrive on the scene and change things in Washington.

“Unfortunately, people at the federal level or the state level typically spend their whole lives in politics, and they’ve never been an executive and it shows,” Mayor Bloomberg said.

I suspect he is right about that. As able as President Obama is, regardless of my criticism of him, I think he would have been a far more effective president had he had executive experience. Such experience is a greater requirement in the presidential system than in a parliamentary system.

The objection might be in selecting successful city mayors as presidential candidates is that they would not have a grasp of foreign affairs. As Michael Bloomberg also made clear that would not apply to the mayor of New York.

Bloomberg had a fan in relation to his position in relation to the mosque at Ground Zero:

The same politician sent his para-military police to clean out Liberty Park. So what gives? Stanley Rogousky has some ideas.

So regardless of preparation, or any other factors, the times must suit the candidate.

ELSEWHERE:

The tabloid press, with Murdoch in the lead set the frame for the heavy-handed police action in NY. In Washington, the Occupy DC media unit are on the case responding to an article in the city's journal of record.

Occupy Boston issued a statement in relation to their First Amendment permit and among other issues the police seizure of their winter tents.

PAKISTAN BORDER ATTACK

2011-12-01T00:14:00.000+11:00

What happened then? The facts are that twenty-four Pakistani soldiers are now dead after an helicopter attack by Nato on two border positions.

Pakistan is in no doubt as to the sequence of events and has taken diplomatic and other action against the occupiers of Afghanistan. Imagine what would happen if the roles were reversed, and it was Americans who were attacked on the US border.

In that case the New York Times would not be making equivocal statements, including the suggestions that the American military authorities were incompetent. Salman Masood writes:

In the briefing on Tuesday, Pakistani military officials also expressed a lack of confidence in the investigations promised by American officials. “Past investigations of similar attacks have not been to our satisfaction and no one was punished,” the military official was quoted as saying.

The generals said that troops had been deployed on the Western borders to “fight the militants and not with ISAF/NATO forces.”

When asked what would be the response of the Pakistani military in case of another strike, one of the generals replied, “The rules of engagement have to be formulated by the government,” in a reference to the civilian government.

Both generals were pressed about the possible American motives for the attack but they remained evasive, according to those who attended the briefing.

Some participants, who declined to be identified by name, expressed dissatisfaction with the military briefing.

“They could not even be sure whether our border was violated or not — they had no clue,” said one participant. Another participant agreed that “they were vague whether the U.S. helicopters had violated our airspace or not.”

During the briefing, the Pakistani generals said that a letter has to be sent by the Pakistani Foreign Office to have the Shamsi air base vacated.

When asked what would happen if the United States did not vacate the air base within 15 days, one of the two generals vaguely replied, “Then we are looking at various other options.”

The inference is that the Americans can continue to act with impunity? Pratap Chatterjee writes the assumption by the American Press is we cannot trust the Pakistanis because they are in cahoots with the Taliban. Then he points out several cases in which "tragic mistakes" occurred. He concludes:

So before we jump to conclusions that the Mohmand strike was a result of the Pakistani military's relationship [with] the Taliban, we need to ask ourselves a much more basic question: should we be allowing NATO, let alone the CIA, free rein to attack people and kill them – especially when their attacks are based on what is clearly very poor intelligence in the field?

The following is claimed to be exclusive footage:

PLANNING PEACE

2011-11-30T00:14:00.002+11:00

Might the American Empire fall, as the Roman Empire did?

The most likely reason would be the popular apprehension it is sucking too many resources from the domestic economy. Of course that would mean that the costs and opportunity costs of "war" spending would have to be accounted for. Meanwhile the planning for war continues as do the refinements to the marketing campaigns to justify them, although for the most part they are hardly necessary. The Occupy Movement may have been an expos'e of sorts, but the propaganda outlets will continue churning out their stuff combined with the opinion surveys.

Choice provides a moral dilemma. A better world may be possible. Who knew there was an alternative to insanity and stupidity, or that human beings were so capable? At Open Democracy, several authors suggest two propositions. Firstly, violence can be prevented. It could be handled as a public health issue. Secondly, peace can be planned.

The multiple authors suggest the following elements beginning with an awareness of the costs of violence to Global well being:

For how much longer can the world continue to spend almost 2000 times more on its military than on its peace-builders? How much longer can the world afford not to invest properly in peace-building and conflict prevention?

It’s been estimated that violence cost the global economy more than $8.12 trillion in 2010. That’s a staggering sum when debt is ballooning in many countries – especially as it’s clear that conflict prevention is so extraordinarily cost-effective. The economic losses from Kenya’s post-election violence in 2008 have been estimated at $3.6 billion . The successful 2010 initiative to prevent violence around the vote on the new constitution cost about $5 million.

So compelling are figures like these that some commentators argue that the surest way to revive the global economy is to commit effort, resources and political will to one area above all others – reducing violence.

What then might a coherent peace-building strategy look like?

The vision would be of a world in which conflict is managed without violence.

The mission would be to support greater coherence of efforts – by civil society, NGOs, governments and inter-governmental organisations - to prepare for and prevent violence and violent conflict.

The approach would be based on what is actually working – plus the emerging twenty-first century paradigm of holding collective responsibility for the planet, rather than on the twentieth century paradigm of exercising national power. To reflect the need for systemic change, conflict response mechanisms must be more strategic, more guided by long-term planning and crisis readiness, more collaborative at all levels and more inclusive of grassroots initiatives. We must move away from responses that are slow, late, reactive, fractured and destructive, and towards a focus on early warning, early response and preventive action.

The initial objectives, specifically, would be:

To support more countries to build national Infrastructures for Peace – dynamic networks of interdependent structures, mechanisms, resources, values and skills which, through dialogue and consultation, contribute to conflict prevention and peacebuilding in a society

To establish a ‘Global Fund for Local Peace’ that will find, grow and replicate the best locally-led peace-building initiatives around the world

To create a sustainable, measurable increase in the number of young people participating in and leading peacebuilding programmes, including in economically-advanced countries – with the right training, skills and support young people can play a critical role in conflict prevention

To make it the norm – not the exception – for qualified and representative women to be included in peace processes, and for their agency as peace-builders to be recognised and utilised. In places such as Rwanda and Liberia where women have taken a more active and positive role in ending conflict and developing post conflict constitutions, they have led the way in finding more equitable transitional settlements and putting in place the foundations for longer lasting peace. In 2000 the United Nations passed resolution UNSCR1325, mandating the inclusion of women at all stages of peace building. Yet ten years on, and a number of subsequent resolutions later, women generally remain disempowered in fragile states. Having recognized how vital it is to have greater numbers of women in positions of influence on peace and security issues and to ensure they are present in good numbers at peace talks, the practical question is how to get them there and how to ensure their participation at all levels in building peace

To start a global campaign to render the arms trade obsolete

The Pentagon is not going to go away, and it is doubtful whether its' budget will be significantly reduced for example of 60%, and the same applies to budgets of other nation states that fund the global arms trade. Still, developing a strategic plan for the next 200 years has got to begin somewhere. That sounds a long time, but when the period is broken down by generations it becomes more manageable as it does when computer programs are designed to organize information and alternatives. A reduction in "defence" spending would effect a reduction in greenhouse gases and reduce pressure on the existing petroleum stocks.

ELSEWHERE:

The War Party is on the long march through the institutions engaged in manufacturing consent.

Incredible as it may seem, the Chinese economy is expected to be larger than that of the US by 2016 if things continue as they are now. I am not sure it is as straight forward as suggested. RT has the story:

NON-REPLICATING DNA?

2011-11-29T03:23:00.001+11:00

While President Obama was declaring in the House of Reps before a joint sitting in what The Age called a tough speech but which I thought reads as palaver that the US has a commitment to freedom, because ''in our DNA, it's who we are'', the NYPD were trashing and tearing down Occupy Wall Street in Liberty Park.

If the DNA is taken as the US Constitution then the First Amendment is clear evidence that analogy. It states:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

As with the Australian Constitution, which lacks a Bill of Rights, it is not the words you see that count but how they have been interpreted by the relevant courts. At Tom Despatch, Peter Van Buren writes:

Those beautiful words, almost haiku-like, are the sparse poetry of the American democratic experiment. The Founders purposely wrote the First Amendment to read broadly, and not like a snippet of tax code, in order to emphasize that it should encompass everything from shouted religious rantings to eloquent political criticism. Go ahead, reread it aloud at this moment when the government seems to be carving out an exception to it large enough to drive a tank through.

As the occupiers of Zuccotti Park, like those pepper-sprayed at UC Davis or the Marine veteran shot in Oakland, recently found out, the government’s ability to limit free speech, to stopper the First Amendment, to undercut the right to peaceably assemble and petition for redress of grievances, is perhaps the most critical issue our republic can face. If you were to write the history of the last decade in Washington, it might well be a story of how, issue by issue, the government freed itself from legal and constitutional bounds when it came to torture, the assassination of U.S. citizens, the holding of prisoners without trial or access to a court of law, the illegal surveillance of American citizens, and so on. In the process, it has entrenched itself in a comfortable shadowland of ever more impenetrable secrecy, while going after any whistleblower who might shine a light in.

Not doubt those that suffered the para-military and violent policing at the various Occupy sites will get there day to argue for their First Amendment rights, but the process will take time and the outcome is less than certain. A newspaper article which saw Morris Davis lose his job is only now scheduled for a hearing. Bradley Manning's case is inherently difficult and the circumstances so extraordinary, aside from any tactical considerations, and the statement by the President that he was guilty, has not been adjudicated, never mind the principle that justice delayed is justice denied.

The NYPD, the Mayor, and the owners of the public park were able to ignore a judicial order which had been served while they went shopping for a suitable judge to hear their prepared case, while not acknowledging as elsewhere that the First Amendment was not at issue reduces it to irrelevant. DNA only replicates in a living body. We will have to wait to see whether the Constitution in this respect, as in others, has not become a dead letter.

As always it is not the words that matter; it how they are understood. "The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life". It is not coincidental that President Obama was addressing the members of the House of Representatives and Senate in Canberra the revival of the First Amendment may be implied rights here as well.

ELSEWHERE:

New Zealand does have a Bill of Rights and it seems to be making a difference in the opening court arguments to close down Occupy Aotearoa (which obviously should be called re-occupy Aotearoa)

THOUGHTS ON OWS

2011-11-27T21:43:00.006+11:00

Tomorrow is the deadline issued by the Mayor to close down Occupy LA.

The failure of the Media to raise questions and investigate issues surrounding the apparent Police violence, plain to see on livestream for example in relation to the "cleansing of Occupy Wall Street" is either extraordinary, or confirms the worst attributions in its role in politics and public affairs. There will be a delay before the court actions begin concerning the debasement of the First Amendment rights and the violent methods used by the police. I would take issue with the practice of arresting people and then letting them go after detaining them without charge.

Still, it is surprising that these are not mainstream concerns that cross political party divides. On reflection the fact that is not the case can be too easily explained in co-option of the institutions of democratic society in the interests of the few at the expense of the many, and thus the creation of fake democracy in which power does in few hands and pockets rather than with the mass of the people. If that is an accurate description how did that happen?

The media acts as if nothing has happened. They want to normalize the atmosphere and the discourse, and perhaps they can do that for their viewers, listeners and readers. News can now be shared and spread in ways that were not previously available. The implication that events that happen outside of the United States have an effect now, that they have not previously, or that the methods for insulating the country, especially in a diverse and international entrepot such as New York, are not as effective as they used to be. Other parts of the globe, for example Latin America and the Caribbean are now more interconnected. Just from personal experience, meeting a person from Liberia at the dry cleaners who was illiterate but had suffered from her experience had an impact on me.

For such a diverse movement without leaders, OWS seems to be remarkably strategically savvy. They seem to understand what they are up against. And it has extraordinary elements. I suppose the commitment to nonviolence is not surprising given the influence of the Civil Rights Movement. The following discussion, via Metta, is surprising in it content and range:

If winter was going to drive OWS from the Park, why was it deemed necessary to use massive para-military methods to sanitise the privately owned public public space?

It occurs to me a different world is possible, but only if we begin to think in different ways,and unless that happens we will simply re-create another version of the the political-economic reality we have now. So the media are right, this revolution will be played out on there turf. It is a competition for minds. And they can probably rest comfortably that they occupy the majority.

UPDATE:

The 12am deadline set by the Mayor for the Occupy LA to move out has now passed, so presumably the police will now move in to clear the demonstrators. Best not go to sleep, otherwise you may be woken up this morning. So where is the First Amendment?

NEW ZEALAND ELECTION 2011

2011-11-27T01:36:00.001+11:00

I am interested in the polling results and have no idea what the campaign issues were. The National Government led by John Key was returned. Early voters suggest that the Multi-Member Proportional system will be continued.

The New Zealand Herald reports:

With nearly all votes counted in the 2011 general election, National secured 48 percent of the vote tonight while Labour mustered just 27 per cent support.

With 100 per cent of polling places and just over two million votes counted, the Greens were sitting on 10.62 per cent and New Zealand First comfortably managed to clear the 5 per cent threshold, sitting on 6.81 per cent.

Of the minor parties, the Maori Party managed 1.35 per cent, United Future 0.61 per cent, the Conservative Party 2.76 per cent, Act 1.07 per cent and Mana 1.00 per cent of the vote.

The graphics showing the results seem to indicate there are four electoral seats (if that is what they are called) in doubt at the end of the night's counting, with one of them on a tie. The Labour Party seems to have hit bedrock with it's 27% support, but the National Party was in a similar position a few years ago. Winston Peters will be returning to Parliament. His party, New Zealand First, seems to have done well.

In theory if the Labour Party were to get together with the Greens, NZ First and others they could get the numbers to form the Government. It seems that the more likely outcome is that the Nationals and the Maori Party will continue their coalition. This is an interesting contrast, it seem to me, with preferential system based on an absolute majority. It cannot be argued that proportional representation provides a plurality of representation in the Parliament.

So what happened in the referendum on the voting system? At this point there are only the pre-poll votes counted. The Herald reports:

With 100 per cent of the 284,312 advance votes counted in the referendum, 53.89 per cent of voters were keen for MMP to be retained, while 42.46 per cent would like the system change, and 3.65 per cent were informal.

Asked which system voters would prefer should MMP be abandoned, 31.76 per cent opted for First Past the Post, 14.48 per cent chose Supplementary Member, 11.27 per cent picked Single Transferable Vote and 8.21 per cent chose Preferential Vote, while a whopping 34.29 per cent cast informal votes.

These voters appear to be consistent with the poll results, as reported by Antony Green. It is interesting that voters and poll respondents seem to have preferred the Tasmanian Lower House system to preferential voting. The disquiet with PR seems to be the voice and role that minor parties have, which is the point of the system. I am assuming the referendum will be decided on the basis of first past the post principle.

More news to come. There are four seats to be decided, and I am guessing because of the margins, recounts. And we get to see the results for the referendum, which may take some days.

POSTSCRIPT:

Why is it, that with the best available electoral system, more people are choosing not to vote?

Despite the plurality that the system allows, I am guessing the media political discourse remains bipartisan. If true, there would be a mismatch between political culture and the political system.

AN EMPHATIC CIVILIZATION

2011-11-25T22:53:00.001+11:00

As much as we isolate and separate our lives, it seems that we are at most "six steps away by way of introduction" from everyone else on the planet. Now that is hard to believe.

Ken Butigan points out this increased global inter-relationship is not merely due to communication technology, although that is a factor, since importantly we now increasingly get to see events as they happen and feel them. He writes:

The emergent connectivity all around us is only the palest hint of our true unity. Social media can be fruitfully understood as a metaphor—an image representing the less tangible but much more primordial vision and experience of oneness. We came out of oneness—from the Big Bang fourteen billion years ago, from the plains of Africa since then—and, in spite of the fratricidal violence we inflict on one another, this experience of oneness is actually growing and expanding, if Jeremy Rifkin’s research is right in his book, The Empathic Civilization. In spite of all the evidence to the contrary, Rifkin charts a growth in empathy in the human species as its social organization has systematically expanded its notion of family and belonging: from tribes to religious communities to nation-states.

The video summary of the Rifkin book is one of those whiz bang presentations. See if you can keep up:

. . . otherwise you might make good use of the pause option.

FRIDAY NIGHT DOG BLOG: NOT GOING OUT TODAY

2011-11-25T21:41:00.000+11:00

Dexter and Hannah would seem to be happier when they get out. We did not do much of that this week since it was so wet and because I was still hobbling.

I had not expected the rain to last so long. We will have to do something about it. It is not so much getting wet that is the problem rather it is the security of my footing.

The contrast in the faces of the dogs seems quite marked, although it is no way an objective study:

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"Pick up your money and pack up your tent, you ain't going nowhere". Originally song by Bob Dylan and. the Byrds had a version:

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There are no guarantees but if Friday Ark passes we will try to flag it down
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The photos were placed with Picasa.

CHILDREN AS THE COLLATERAL DAMAGE

2011-11-25T02:31:00.001+11:00

More children are reported as murdered in Afghanistan from "Nato" bombing.The terror waged against the enemy, including the incidental murder of children, is failing to win hearts and minds.

There are reports that officials were surprised about this outcome. (I made that up.) The BBC reports:

Seven civilians, including six children, have been killed in a Nato air strike in southern Afghanistan, local officials say.

District Governor Niaz Mohammad Sarhadi told the BBC the civilians died late on Wednesday in the Zheray district of Kandahar province.

He said the strike had been launched in a remote area after Taliban insurgents were seen planting roadside bombs.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai strongly condemned the bombing.

A Nato spokesman in Kabul said he was aware of reports of civilian casualties in Kandahar, adding that a joint assessment team was on its way to the site.

Victory in Afghanistan is just around the corner, as it has been for the last ten years.There are real gains, yet they are fragile and reversible. The "government in a box" had to be returned to the store, but unfortunately there was a no refund policy in place.The elections that saw the continuation of the reign of President Karzai that there problems, but the decision was made to overlook any discrepancies. As a staunch member of the coalition of the invaders, Australia will see the mission through to 2013, and then those forces will be withdrawn to defend the continent against a foreign invasion force beginning with 2,500 marines combined with the black arts of imperial intervention.

ELSEWHERE:

Glenn Greenwald as they say in the newspapers and on the ABC is "scathing" concerning the continued murder of children for the noble cause and by the noble nation.

EGYPTIAN PROTESTS CONTINUE

2011-11-24T01:53:00.003+11:00

The efforts of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces to suppress protest by violence causing death and injury has been counterproductive.

Rather than disappear the protests have become larger.It has now persisted into the fifth day. At what point will the generals retreat? The Independent has the report from AP:

Tens of thousands of protesters in Tahrir Square have rejected a promise by Egypt's military ruler to speed up a presidential election to the first half of 2012.

They want Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi to step down immediately in favour of an interim civilian council.

Today's street battles centred around the heavily fortified interior ministry, near the iconic square.

An Egyptian rights group known for its careful research of victims of police violence says the number of protesters killed in clashes nationwide since Saturday is 38, nine more than the health ministry's death toll.

The five days of clashes are the longest spate of uninterrupted violence since the 18-day uprising that toppled the former regime in February, deepening the country's economic and security woes. the unrest also threatens to cloud the country's first parliamentary elections since former leader Hosni Mubarak's February removal, which are scheduled to begin on November 28.

In a televised address Gen. Tantawi rejected all criticism of the military's handling of the transitional period and sought to cast himself and the generals on the military council he heads as the nation's foremost patriots. Significantly, he made no mention of the protesters gathered in Tahrir Square or elsewhere in the country.

"Our demands are clear," said Khaled El-Sayed, a protester from the Youth Revolution Coalition and a candidate in the November 28 parliamentary election. "We want the military council to step down and hand over authority to a national salvation government with full authority."

Three days ago, Scott Horton interviewed Adam Morrow reporting from Cairo:

OWS BODY BLOW?

2011-11-23T01:25:00.007+11:00

Was the removal of the tents and facilities of the Occupy Wall Street Movement a knock-out blow?

If so take a bow Michael Bloomberg in the red corner, who exercised executive prerogative. This is a victory for cleanliness, order and sanitation in Zuccotti Park, if nowhere else. The operation represents a success for military planning, which is not inconsequential since planning is so closely associated with socialism and corporations. All in all, to bring forward the troubling thought at the back of my mind an making the connection, it must be very good for the nation, since police actions were coordinated across the country.Even after the eviction of the campers, it was extraordinary to see the number of police in the riot gear ready for action.

There are other troubling aspects that ought to be top of the mind considerations that surprisingly or not were ignored by The New York Times and possibly other media. Was the eviction a lawful action executed in accordance with the full requirements. For example was it necessary to destroy personal and common property? Why was it necessary take action in the early hours of the morning? What about the First Amendment claims of the protesters? What is the purpose of city parks if not be place where people gather peaceably?

The violence was incipient in the planning of the action. It was not just violence against the human rights of people but against democracy and democratic process. David Lindorff is on the case against overt violence. He writes:

The thuggish attacks on the peaceful protesters of the Occupy Movement are even more brutal than were many of the attacks on the Civil Rights Movement marchers of the 1950s and ’60s. The only thing lacking right now from those dark days are the murders and the dogs, but no doubt those will be next, as the movement demanding economic justice for the 99% and punishment for the 1% builds further.

Back in the 1950s, an earlier president, former Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhour, witnessing the atrocities of local police in Arkansas and other jurisdictions, did the right thing. He ordered out the National Guard to defend the civil rights of young black people who wanted to be able to attend public schools and colleges, and those week-end soldiers defended the people and the Constitution and kept the cops and their dogs at bay.

Now President Obama must do the same thing. Whether or not his Department of Homeland Security and his Justice Department have been orchestrating the attacks on demonstrators in the Occupy Movement, Obama must now order out the Guard and instruct them to defend the protesters and the Constitution. It would be a welcome new assignment for the Guard, which for the past decade has been wrongly shipped out of the country to help wage imperialist wars on Iraqis and Afghans.

Nice picture:

If the past is a guide, the forecast will be that the President will remain silent.

ELSEWHERE:

Michael Moore reports on a proposed nine point vision statement to OWS, and a set of demands. I tend to agree with all of what is said. However, I draw attention to the vision statement, restated:

[We envisage a just society] where we provide full and free education to everyone, not merely ~~to get jobs~~ to do the necessary human work but to grow and flourish as human beings . . .

And his suggested demand to:

Require corporations with more than 10,000 employees to restructure their board of directors so that 50% of its members are elected by the company’s workers. We can never have a real democracy as long as most people have no say in what happens at the place they spend most of their time: their job. (For any U.S. businesspeople freaking out at this idea because you think workers can't run a successful company: Germany has a law like this and it has helped to make Germany the world’s leading manufacturing exporter.)

Murat Cem Menguc essay at Informed Comment(Global Affairs) is a perspective from an immigrant in a multicultural city. He writies:

An immigrant always searches for inclusion, and in New York, at the aftermath of 9/11, the experience of inclusion became fragmented. Since that day, the city behaved like a disjointed puzzle, trying to keep itself together, yet it’s multicultural fabric dissolved under the constant threat of popular conservatism and gentrification. The US mainstream media of the post 9/11 perpetuated an appalling ignorance of world economy, international politics and history in general. Authorities patronized and patriotized the public spaces with blunt expressions of white male Christian chauvinism that had outright fascist tones. Any warming sense of solidarity, was privatized, and had to be experience behind closed doors, in the company of one’s immediate family and friends. The Occupy Wall Street protest changed that. As one of the protesters I had interviewed stated, this time the protest did not go home, and stayed in the public sphere. It refused to be privatized.

Glenn Greenwald's observations appear to hold up as events unfolded:

The reason the U.S. has para-militarized its police forces is precisely to control this type of domestic unrest, and it’s simply impossible to imagine its not being deployed in full against a growing protest movement aimed at grossly and corruptly unequal resource distribution. As Madeleine Albright said when arguing for U.S. military intervention in the Balkans: “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” That’s obviously how governors, big-city Mayors and Police Chiefs feel about the stockpiles of assault rifles, SWAT gear, hi-tech helicopters, and the coming-soon drone technology lavished on them in the wake of the post/9-11 Security State explosion, to say nothing of the enormous federal law enforcement apparatus that, more than anything else, resembles a standing army which is increasingly directed inward.

President Obama was given an opportunity to respond to recent events when interrupted by a "mic check".

TAHRIR SQUARE CONFLICT

2011-11-22T01:44:00.005+11:00

The protesters in Tahrir Square and elsewhere in Egypt are, it seems, attempting to take on the police and army with their rubber bullets and tear gas with stones.

The discipline and application of nonviolence has fallen away with the realization that the Supreme Council of Armed Forces while allowing elections due next week was going to preserve a veto power over the elected government.The protest resumed on Friday. Protesters have been throwing rocks. They seem to have been taking the casualties and the injuries. Yet there are no reports to suggest that the protesters are backing down.

Jack Shenker reports for The Guardian:

The marches and protests that followed last Friday attracted the largest crowds since Mubarak was toppled, an early indication that concern about the junta and scepticism of their heavily curated vision of democratic transition was beginning to go viral. As usual, the security forces – whose much-promised root-and-branch reform has proved as illusory as their claims of "admirable" self-restraint during the bloodshed this weekend – waited until numbers had dwindled before launching their assault the next morning.

They thought they were battering a rump, but instead the 200 or so demonstrators still camped out in Tahrir proved to be fuel for a fire which is now sweeping the nation.

By Sunday morning, following 24 hours of fierce street fighting and the conquest of Tahrir by revolutionaries, the furniture of the anti-Mubarak uprising was once again wheeled into place in the capital. Civilian checkpoints dotted the square, corrugated iron sheets were torn down for barricades, and the makeshift field hospital – the scraggiest, saddest and often most inspiring cog in the revolution's street battles – was back in action, treating hundreds of youths ferried in by motorbike from the edge of no-man's land, which lay just a couple of blocks away.

"We'll stay here until we die, or military rule dies," said 27-year-old Mahmoud Turg with a matter-of-fact intensity. One side of his face was bandaged because a rubber-coated steel bullet had hit his ear; another had carved a chunk out of his back. "Scaf must leave, because the people have seen through them," added the political researcher. "It has taken a long time, but the mask has slipped."

On the battlefront, order prevailed through the chaos. Scouts and lookouts took to the balconies with their faces wrapped in scarves against the gas; on their instruction waves of protesters surged forward towards the police lines hurling rocks and molotovs, only to be beaten back by a blitz of teargas canisters and a volley of "birdshot" pellet cartridges, almost always aimed at head height. Those staggering blindly towards safety would quickly be supported by those who had stayed behind, with rows of revolutionaries spaced out across the rubble-strewn street handing out tissues and firing short bursts of cooling fluids into burning eyes.

It's a paradox of this year's vast political upheavals across the Arab world that liberation struggles feel simultaneously so local and so global. As the sun began to set, other side streets around Tahrir took on the eerie quality of discarded warzones specked with flashes of ordinary life; two blocks away you could get a shisha – carefully balanced on the paving stones now ripped up and broken in the search for something to throw – while the occasional taxi, having taking a wrong turn, would sail by bewildered.

Except for the thuds and cracks in the air, one could imagine the violence was miles away, yet at the same time it had never felt as intimately close. Activists showed each other Twitter, Facebook and SMS updates from every stretch of the Nile, from Alexandria to Aswan, indicating that all four corners of Egypt were once again in revolt. Others held up teargas cartridges with the name and address of a Pennsylvania company stamped across it; some wondered aloud whether protesters in Cairo and America were being hit by weaponry produced by the same firm.

When the military attack finally came, dissolving once and for all any lingering boundaries in protesters' minds between the army on the one hand and the hated black-clad riot police that symbolised Mubarak's security apparatus on the other, it was brutal and ephemeral. Guns were fired in the air, civilians were beaten on the ground; several soldiers appeared to drag lifeless bodies – unconscious or dead, no one could tell – towards small piles of rubbish by the roadside.

The SCAF are clearly intent on holding onto the reins of political power through the use of police and military violence. Whereas the protesters have been encouraged and emboldened by the successful removal of Mubarak. In the aftermath of this development is not likely that the elections will proceed.So what has happened to the nonviolent protest and international solidarity?

PRESCRIPT:
Noah Chomsky prior to the emergence of conflict in the streets was sceptical concerning support for the demos from certain external powers with an interest in the region:

UPDATE:

ABC reports the SCAF refused the resignation of the prime minister and cabinet. They are determined that the November 28 elections will go ahead.

Juan Code describes the situation in Egypt as rudderless, with the suggestion the military might call on former head of IAEA, Mohammed Elbaradei, to form an interim government. There is more to this story.

MASS ARRESTS IN NY

2011-11-19T22:56:00.002+11:00

The arrests were not limited to New York with the suggestion that there has been a coordinated effort to "evict" the occupy encampments across the country.

Perceptions of the dynamics of events are different based on the direct observations of live streaming and the reports of the mainstream press. What is the objective description?

There are, in my opinion, good reasons to consider major quality newspapers as important as journals of record and opinion. For one thing they provide an aggregation of news that no single individual can match. We can read critically, but hopefully not dismissively. We cannot help but be aware that their business model is in crisis, although I thought the Leunig Calendar was worth the price of the paper today.

The Sydney Morning Herald carried an article concerning the multiple arrests in New York during the day of mass protests immediately following the removal of the Occupy Wall Street tents and personal possessions from Zuccotti Park in the early morning. The personal and common property of the protesters was appropriated, in some instances broken and trashed, including the library books, the media centre and medical centre equipment and then thrown into dump trucks. A judge issued an injunction to allow access to the park which the police and the Mayor ignored. A women with a copy of the injunction was hit in the face. The NYPD seems to have a licence to be physically violent against citizens. On the live stream feeds one notices that male police officers show no restraint against assaulting women. I cannot tell if these behaviors may well be the norms there. So much for American soft power.

Here is a clear example from You Tube of violence by a police officer against a women:

Of course we do not see the development before the White Shirt police officer hits the woman, nevertheless extraordinary behavior for a public servant.Is this, as was suggested for the pepper spray incident with the netted women, intended to ignite crowd violence?

The report of the protest arrests in The Sydney Morning Herald does presume to provide some context:

The New York City Police Department arrested 252 people in connection with yesterday's Occupy Wall Street protests, mostly for resisting arrest and disorderly conduct, police said.
Thousands of people took part in yesterday's demonstrations, which began with unsuccessful attempts to disrupt the New York Stock Exchange and ended with a peaceful march across the Brooklyn Bridge.
More than 1400 people have been arrested since the protest began in Lower Manhattan on September 17, NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said.
Advertisement: Story continues below
New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said some of the people who took part in yesterday's protests tried to provoke law enforcement officers.
"There is no question about it there was a group of people bent on confronting the police," Kelly said.
"They were taunting them."
One demonstrator was charged with assault after throwing a liquid believed to be vinegar on five officers, Kelly said. Another was charged with attempted assault after throwing a battery and pieces of a pen at officers, pushing a barrier into them and removing a deputy inspector's hat, he said.
A group of 65 people who were arrested on Centre Street at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge had arranged their arrests in advance and didn't resist, Browne said.
Photos of Brandon Watts, the protester arrested after taking the inspector's hat, show him with blood on his face, Browne said. Watts, 20, whose address is unknown, struck his head when he was "brought down" while resisting arrest and was treated at Bellevue Hospital for the injury, which wasn't serious enough to require admission to the hospital, Browne said.
Watts, arrested for the fifth time since the protests began, was in custody this afternoon, Browne said.
"Clearly that individual was intent on being arrested," Kelly said.

One protester among the 30,000 plus was violent. The police were consistently violent. When protesters stepped onto the road from the footpath, the livestream showed them being tackled and handcuffed.

Given the circumstances, including the crush of people created by police barriers and the protest's intention to close down the stock exchange, the protest was remarkably nonviolent. Such an opinion is not reported in the article, nor the fact that two New York City Counsellors and accredited journalists were arrested went unrecorded. The crowing irony, if indeed that it what it amounts to, was that the article is sourced to the Bloomsberg new agency.

As Mark Twain said if you don't read the newspapers you are uninformed and if read them you are misinformed. The papers surely have to start bringing awareness in the reports they carry of what their audience can see for themselves through media such as live steaming and You Tube.

ELSEWHERE:

At AlterNet, Joshua Holland records ten earlier instances of US police brutality. There is a pattern but not much reporting in the newspapers.

REFLECTIONS ON THE HOME PLANET

2011-11-19T13:49:00.000+11:00

A pale blue dot in the distance in a vast arena, and it is "the only home we have ever known".

Knowledge increases, technology develops, but somehow most of us struggle to keep up. We seem anchored in paradigms whose references points have fallen away in the newly discovered large scheme of things.

Carl Sagan has left, yet his words and thoughts remain. His truth largely ignored.

FRIDAY NIGHT DOG BLOG: TWO DIGGERS

2011-11-18T23:48:00.003+11:00

I don't know what was wrong, but I had a sore foot and could not walk this week.This problem started on Wednesday, the day I saw my Renal Specialist. I didn't say anything.

That was one somewhat disconcerting matter, otherwise there was rain. So the dogs were somewhat deprived but nonetheless I went out today - making things worse - to take some photos of Dexter and Hannah.

(There is a long introduction. You may wish to fast forward to 3 minutes into the track.)
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I thought "the diggers song" might be apposite for some Dexter and Hannah activities. The historical background to the song is of interest to me:

The Diggers (also known as "Levellers and Diggers") is a 17th century ballad, in terms of content a protest song concerned with land rights, inspired by the Diggers movement, composed by Gerrard Winstanley. The lyrics were published in 1894 by the Camden Society. It is sung to a version of the family of tunes later used for Jack Hall, Captain Kidd and Admiral John Benbow, which according to Palmer was first printed in 1714.

And the events of long ago has resonance in this Commonwealth of Australia. The application of "diggers" for Australian soldiers seems to have come from gold diggers and trench diggers in the First World War. This song has it origins in the First World War, reflecting something of attitude and accent:

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Friday Ark may sail by and we either board or send our best wishes.
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The photos were placed with Picasa.

MARIO SAVIO MEMORIAL LECTURE

2011-11-17T16:40:00.000+11:00

The lecture was given by Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary in the Clinton Administration, adjacent to the Mario Savio steps that lead to Sroul Plaza at the University of California - Berkeley.

So who was Mario Savio? You might remember the "free speech movement" and the trouble that certain people experienced with the university administration in the 1960's. Sometimes, Mario said, you just had to stop the machine:

Robert Reich fills in the gaps and reflects on the relevance of Mario Savio's words for today (via War in Context):

A CHANGED WORLD FOR THE US?

2011-11-15T15:43:00.000+11:00

Andrew Bacevich argues that the US is a declining global power. He identifies four vectors that taken together reflect a change since the ascent of US influence following the Second World War. The international order, he suggests, "is arguably undergoing a fundamental transition".

Firstly, the strategic purpose of the war on terror, associated with the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan which was to remake the Middle East has failed. And, as Tom Englehardt points out it has been a costly failure. Unbelievable amounts of money in the order of trillion or more dollars was spent, with the Americans withdrawing in ignominy from Iraq, although the crimes committed have gone unpublished. The same will be true for Afghanistan.Military violence has failed, although the drone murders continue.

Economic dominance translates into political and military influence around the world but the economic recession in the US now is permanent. The skewering of wealth to the few has happened before but the decline in living standards and levels of unemployment have become a feature of American life. These conditions have created the climate for the Occupy Wall Street Movement. To this point there does not seem to have been a decline in Pentagon funding, although it predictable that component of the budget will be increasingly subject to scrutiny if not by the major political parties.

The Arab Spring is, Andrew Bacevich suggests, continuing as a movement for Arab liberation. This development can be placed in the context of the formation of the modern Middle East to cater for the interests in the first place of the European Powers and then the US. The US has supported dictators in the area to further its strategic purposes, mainly to secure and protect the supply of oil.The Arab Spring is sweeping away the vestiges of imperialism.

Lastly, he notes how extraordinary it is that Europe is looking to China for financial salvation and not the US. China has the money and the US is in debt to China. Much like the Americans, the Europeans have got into financial trouble due to recklessness and irresponsibility.

These vectors of change are more interrelated that is acknowledged in this analysis. The problem for the exercise of American power and influence is the failure to recognize the new circumstances, a failure of policy reality that can be seen in the rhetoric of most Republican candidates for president.

Much like as in Australia public opinion in the US trails strategic and economic reality. Politicians there, as here, play to the gallery created by opinion polls framed in the absence of a institutionalized political debate. The stationing of US Marines in a Darwin base suggests a strategic US withdrawal from East Asia in recognition of an increased Chinese military capacity. China is otherwise our most important trading partner, as well as the largest holder of US debt.

In this issue there is evidence, that Andrew Bacevich refers to of the change in the order of power and prerogative. In The Sydney Morning Herald, Peter Hatcher writes: "We are an ally, not an accomplice." In the past not Australian Government has failed to be both. Perhaps the times have now changed.

ELSEWHERE

Gary at Public Opinion questions the identity of interests between Australia and the US.

CIVIL WAR IN SYRIA

2011-11-14T01:12:00.006+11:00

Al Jareeza reports that former members of the Syrian Army are now using heavy weapons.

Civil Wars, as in Libya and Afghanistan provide an excellent pretext for US intervention. There has been no humanitarian intervention in Bahrain, although the Saudi dictatorship has sent military support for fellow dictator.

It would be far better, if loss of human life and destruction was avoided in Syria as everywhere else. A tragic situation is becoming worse not because of participation but because of a failure of influence.

ELSEWHERE:

The Arab League has suspended Syrian membership. Euronews reports:

Juan Cole adds his commentary on the temporary suspension.

MEDIA CONVERGENCE AND CLIMATE CHANGE

2011-11-14T00:26:00.002+11:00

Naomi Klein attended a Heartland conference and discovered the belief that it was a Trojan horse for social and economic change that was antithetical to the world view of the attendees. Think Tanks function to furnish media talking points.

She explains:

The deniers did not decide that climate change is a left-wing conspiracy by uncovering some covert socialist plot. They arrived at this analysis by taking a hard look at what it would take to lower global emissions as drastically and as rapidly as climate science demands. They have concluded that this can be done only by radically reordering our economic and political systems in ways antithetical to their “free market” belief system. As British blogger and Heartland regular James Delingpole has pointed out, “Modern environmentalism successfully advances many of the causes dear to the left: redistribution of wealth, higher taxes, greater government intervention, regulation.” Heartland’s Bast puts it even more bluntly: For the left, “Climate change is the perfect thing…. It’s the reason why we should do everything [the left] wanted to do anyway.”

Here’s my inconvenient truth: they aren’t wrong. Before I go any further, let me be absolutely clear: as 97 percent of the world’s climate scientists attest, the Heartlanders are completely wrong about the science. The heat-trapping gases released into the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels are already causing temperatures to increase. If we are not on a radically different energy path by the end of this decade, we are in for a world of pain.

But when it comes to the real-world consequences of those scientific findings, specifically the kind of deep changes required not just to our energy consumption but to the underlying logic of our economic system, the crowd gathered at the Marriott Hotel may be in considerably less denial than a lot of professional environmentalists, the ones who paint a picture of global warming Armageddon, then assure us that we can avert catastrophe by buying “green” products and creating clever markets in pollution.

The fact that the earth’s atmosphere cannot safely absorb the amount of carbon we are pumping into it is a symptom of a much larger crisis, one born of the central fiction on which our economic model is based: that nature is limitless, that we will always be able to find more of what we need, and that if something runs out it can be seamlessly replaced by another resource that we can endlessly extract. But it is not just the atmosphere that we have exploited beyond its capacity to recover—we are doing the same to the oceans, to freshwater, to topsoil and to biodiversity. The expansionist, extractive mindset, which has so long governed our relationship to nature, is what the climate crisis calls into question so fundamentally. The abundance of scientific research showing we have pushed nature beyond its limits does not just demand green products and market-based solutions; it demands a new civilizational paradigm, one grounded not in dominance over nature but in respect for natural cycles of renewal—and acutely sensitive to natural limits, including the limits of human intelligence.

I wonder what corporatism has got to do with freedom. Chris Hedges idea that it is quintessentially about new form of feudalism seems more plausible. Indeed, the road to serfdom. An employee within a corporate environment ceases to be a citizen in an effective sense. Wage slave is one description. Within corporations decision making power and influence is concentrated as is expected in a hierarchical structure. Corporations may not be natural persons but they have strategic interests.

So when did corporations begin to be interested in media and governments? Think about it, they are the agencies most heavily invested in public opinion, even more so than political parties and governments. The disconcerting thing about the internet is that it is not platform for pervasive advertising, and thus for business communication models. Technology has gotten ahead of them, much like the printing press got ahead of the Church in the transition from European Medieval Civilization.

The change in American public opinion, as related by Naomi Klein, is striking:

When public opinion on the big social and political issues changes, the trends tend to be relatively gradual. Abrupt shifts, when they come, are usually precipitated by dramatic events. Which is why pollsters are so surprised by what has happened to perceptions about climate change over a span of just four years. A 2007 Harris poll found that 71 percent of Americans believed that the continued burning of fossil fuels would cause the climate to change. By 2009 the figure had dropped to 51 percent. In June 2011 the number of Americans who agreed was down to 44 percent—well under half the population. According to Scott Keeter, director of survey research at the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, this is “among the largest shifts over a short period of time seen in recent public opinion history.”

Even more striking, this shift has occurred almost entirely at one end of the political spectrum. As recently as 2008 (the year Newt Gingrich did a climate change TV spot with Nancy Pelosi) the issue still had a veneer of bipartisan support in the United States. Those days are decidedly over. Today, 70–75 percent of self-identified Democrats and liberals believe humans are changing the climate—a level that has remained stable or risen slightly over the past decade. In sharp contrast, Republicans, particularly Tea Party members, have overwhelmingly chosen to reject the scientific consensus. In some regions, only about 20 percent of self-identified Republicans accept the science.

Changes of public opinion seem to be about media framing and personal beliefs. What then about technical and other subjects for which people in general cannot expect to be well informed or indeed have the time to be well informed? The question might be: What evidence would convince you that the climate was, or was not, getting warmer, and the long term heating was principally due to human activities?

Every selection of what is important and relevant has an editorial viewpoint, and every viewpoint is part of a world view. Media does not select views, it is organized around political philosophies. The argument concerning media diversity and the role of gatekeeping in the age of the internet needs assessment and evaluation is current because of current enquiry. Mark Day in The Australian describes the situation:

THE Australian Communication and Media Authority says most of the legislated regulation it administers has been "broken or significantly strained" by the processes of convergence.

The 93-page Broken Concepts report, released today, makes it clear that media regulation over the past 50 years has failed to keep up with changes in technology and society.

ACMA, a government-funded regulator, administers 26 acts passed by parliament in the past half century that include 523 pieces of regulation. These cover radio and television broadcasting, telecommunications, the internet and radio communications, where convergence is blurring historical distinctions.

Piecemeal changes to legislation have led to a situation where the communications landscape "resembles a patchwork quilt".

"It is fragmented and characterised by 'bandaid' solutions that lack an overarching strategy or co-ordinated approach to regulating communications and media in a digital economy," the report says.

The report identifies problem areas including policy misalignment, gaps in regulation, misplaced emphasis in legislation that skews regulation and the blurring of boundaries between historically distinct services and sectors.

The report will put pressure on the federal government to urgently rewrite the rules for the digital economy, a process that it has begun with the Convergence Review. The three-member Convergence Review panel, established last year by Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, has been touring Australia hearing submissions. It will continue to receive input until October 28 and has promised a report by March.

Tom Dick writing in The Sydney Morning Herald.

The restriction on one owner controlling too many TV networks, radio stations and city newspapers is no longer needed to protect diversity in the digital age, according to Rupert Murdoch's News Ltd, which wants the media ownership rules abolished.
It told the government's convergence review of media regulation that the ownership rules had passed their use-by date, given the abundance of alternative sources of news now provided online - and by pay TV and national newspapers which are ignored by cross-media rules.
The internet made it easy to start websites and the choice for internet audiences was now ''essentially limitless'', it said, arguing the market had delivered a depth of diversity that regulation could never have achieved.

Furthermore, News Ltd papers were read by only 26% of Australians and its influence was limited because now have other sources of information. Henceforth, The Australian and other group newspapers will cease publishing editorials and offering commentaries, or engaging in political campaigning against, for example, climate science since it is so ineffectual on the target audience of opinion leaders whose influence extends across other media. Judith at Catallaxy is not happy with the quality of the quality of the left wing diversity she reads in The Australian.

The Occupy Movement is a case study of mainstream media reporting. In Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi describes how he learnt how to appreciate OWS - and it had much to do with the presentation in the tabloid media, in particular those outlets of diversity of opinion owned by Robert Murdoch. Via War in Context. An opinion unlikely to see the insides of a Murdoch publication or Media presentation.

At Truthdig, David Sirota is surprised that his local television station actually mentioned the social reality. OWS seems to have made a difference. Income inequality was briefly.

The focus should not be on media, but on the system of opinion formation of which certain player, without ignoring those who are operating behind the curtain of media scrutiny, such that it is. The purpose of media may be to make a profit, and those to function as propaganda machine, but it's superordinate democratic role, once performed by the myriad pamphlets created by the printing presses was informing the democratic citizenry.

ELSEWHERE:

Sinclair Davidson is critical of John Quiggin.

Professor Ian Marsh has an analysis of the disconnect within the political process that has developed, in which the media's role is significant as it is negative. He writes as part of a social and political development:

From the perspective of building a prudent public opinion, media influence is almost wholly malign. Media focus is short term, there is an incentive to sensationalise and trivialise, it is impossible to sustain a complex argument via this channel. The media have commercial imperatives which are hardly consistent with good public policy, and sound-bite politics is inevitably lowest common denominator politics.

OCCUPY WALL STREET, NOT PALESTINE

2011-11-12T01:36:00.003+11:00

The apparent consensus of the major political parties on the injustice in Palestine and the opposition to the recognition of a Palestinian state by the United States is staggering.

Understandably many Holocaust survivors were traumatized by their experience, which could not be wished on any group of people. There has been less sympathy for the trauma suffered by the Palestinians. This experience continues to the present with no end in sight.

At same time the numbers of Holocaust survivors are thinning, much like the veterans of the Second World War. Some young Americans have been to Israel and experienced the situation there first hand. The Occupy Wall Street Movement has given them a critique and method for expressing their views as in the following video (via War In Context):

Peace and Justice Studies Association provides a short documentary, Bridges over Blood by Ose Oyamanden focusing on Sdierot and Gaza.