QOTD

Via the Zanzibari Kittie Counters, this:

Obama has been compared to Spock, but he’s more like GlaDOS. Acts cold and aloof, but is childish when angered. Promises cake we’ll never see.

As Sam Duncan at Counting Cats says, there are people who don't play videogames and there are people who'll look at that and go, 'Hey, yeah, he is, isn't he?'

Do you have to be a European to believe the Euro is not all but dead?

And does the head in the sand approach mean greater problems when it finally keels over? Some certainly think so.

TOP US military officer General Martin Dempsey has admitted he is ''extraordinarily concerned'' about the euro's survival, pointing to potential civil unrest and the break-up of the European Union.

''The euro zone is at great risk,'' the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said, giving the strongest indication yet about the depth of Washington's concerns over Europe's financial tumult.

''We are extraordinarily concerned by the health and viability of the euro because in some ways we're exposed literally to contracts but also because of the potential of civil unrest and break-up of the union that has been forged over there,'' General Dempsey said.

I can't help feeling that if the US are getting the Joint Chiefs of Staff involved they're very, very worried over there. We all know that Americans aren't allowed to die for any reason at all any more, and there are many tens of thousands of them in Europe at any one time. Warnings from economists may carry the weight of expertise but when a major power's military starts talking about it it sounds like someone somewhere now expects the worst.

Cain unable

I don't know the truth behind the allegations against Herman Cain, though I suspect there's at least a small element of how dare a black guy be a Republican among some who believe that minorities are supposed to be Democrats. Whatever, enough mud has been thrown that he's dropped out of the contest for the GOP nomination. So, thinking back to that vote matching thing I was playing with last month, who'd get most of Cain's support, Paul or Perry? And will the media there let Gary Johnson get any attention now?

Probably no to the last one but out of interest I went back to that vote matcher and gave the same answers as last time but dropped Cain, and this was what I got.

That's 4% more for Ron Paul and Michelle Bachman, and everyone else remains unchanged. Not what I expected at all.

Questions to which the answer is "No"

Cick for linky

... the question arises, should the rest of the world take over management of Europe to prevent or mitigate disaster? Specifically, should the US Federal Reserve assume leadership as a monetary superpower and impose policy on a paralyzed ECB, acting as a global lender of last resort?

And for the answer I think we should turn to one of those well worn graphical illustrations of how deep America's debt rabbit hole goes. This one is an excellent example from usdebt.kleptocracy.us. The first image shows the approximate US public debt by the end of the year if it was a piles of actual size $100 bills compared to quite a famous landmark, and the second shows that plus its unfunded liabilities.

If you've read the captions on those images (you can embiggerfy, or better yet go look at the original where you can see a similar representation of the US budget for 2011) you'll have noticed that the first of those, the $15 trillion pile, is roughly the size of the Gross Domestic Product for the entire United States. In fact the captions are a little out of date - US debt will not now reach 100% of GDP by Christmas 2011 because that happened four weeks ago.

So actually the answer to the question of whether the US Federal Reserve should act as Europe's lender of last resort is not just "No" - it's "With what?"

Well, that didn't take long

I've been meaning to get round to blogging on the actions of John Pike, the American cop who calmly sprayed capsicum directly in the faces of some of Occupy protestors sitting peacefully in a row offering no resistance. On the one hand I'm not a huge supporter of the Occupy mob and think that many of them are aiming at the wrong target (business rather than government) and protesting something that doesn't truly exist (the free market). It all rather smacks of the anarchists for a bigger government protests in London last year. However, free speech and association and all that, as enshrined by our American cousins in their Bill of Rights, which makes it troubling that it was in America - Land of the Free, etc - in which a cop unloaded a canister full of capsicum spray right in the faces of some protestors sitting Gandhi style, unresisting and offering no violence.

However, not for the first time events have overtaken my blogging efforts and John Pike, whose identity and contact details quickly made their way online, has now become an internet meme. Those UK readers who are old enough to remember Tony Hart's gallery music can start humming it now.*

Contrasting receptions

Peter Costello, former Liberal party MP and Federal government Treasurer for the Coalition under John Howard, writes in The Age on an interesting difference in receptions given to US Presidents.

When the American president addressed joint Houses of the Australian Parliament back in 2003, Greens Senator Bob Brown interjected. In fact so worked up was he that the Speaker ordered his removal from the chamber. He was yelling about Iraq and Guantanamo Bay.

This time Brown joined a conga line of MPs clamouring to shake hands with the President, Barack Obama. He had to jostle with Greens MP Adam Bandt (who has a PhD on Marxism) to get his chance. Both of them were beaming. It was a good speech. The President declared America's commitment to a military presence in the Asia-Pacific region, including a new proposal to train up to 2500 marines in the Northern Territory. One can only imagine what Bob's reaction would have been had George Bush announced that 2500 US marines would be stationed on Australian soil. They would have had to cart him out of the House of Representatives.

[...]

Bob Brown was all worked up about Guantanamo Bay when George Bush visited Australia, but he does not seem to worry so much now that Obama is in charge. Julia Gillard used to complain that Australia was subservient to America. Now she claims she has made our alliance stronger than ever before.

In opposition, Labor harvested votes on the left. In government it wants to appeal to conservatives....

[...]

Labor MPs may feel happy to see Obama and Gillard standing in front of troops in the Northern Territory - it is a great photo opportunity for their side of politics. But alliances are between countries. They are designed to outlive the political office-holders of the day. In the future it could be Newt Gingrich and Tony Abbott standing there being cheered by US marines in the NT. The principle is either right or it is wrong and it doesn't turn on who happens to be in office.

That is why it is so useful to have the left of Australian politics now locked in to traditional Coalition policies. Bipartisan support has been firmly established. And in the future if there is ever a complaint about marines based in Australia, just pull out the footage of a beaming Bob Brown grasping the hand of the president who announced it.

Some excellent points made there, and while I have no more love for Peter Costello's party than the ALP - in one sense rather less love because the bastardisation of the word 'liberal' to describe a party of paternalists that like telling other people how to live their lives simply infuriates me - I can't argue that Leftists can be pretty inconsistent if not hypocritical when it comes to the US. The bottom line is this: all the things I disliked about George W Bush, the wars, Gitmo, the loss of individual liberties, cosying up to big business and lobbyists, have by and large continued under Obama.

I'm aware some that Rightists care less about what is done than that it's one of their men doing it - witness David Cameron's actions of late and the deafening silence from his supposedly right of centre party - but if anything it seems to be even more true of Leftists. Is something bad done by a right winger made less bad when a left winger takes over and carries on?

Divided by a common language

You may be aware that Australia is playing host to the Obamessiah at the moment, and I probably wouldn't bother blog about it unless his car got stuck again apart from the fact that the leader of the opposition, Tony Abbott, has brought up the difference between the various flavours of English. Strine being mostly closer to English English than American English this is one I can understand.

Mr Abbott also talked about linguistic mix-ups, recounting his first visit to the US as an MP where a briefing that described him as a "ferocious liberal'' and "deeply anti-republican'' meant he spent a fortnight being introduced to communists.

Heh.

Diversions - UPDATED

Oooh, another one of those how to vote thingies. I'm not sure why it's in The Telegraph since it's for the next year's Republican party primaries in the US and being a British publication most of their readership hasn't got a vote there. As usual with these things depending on your own position on an issue some questions can be a little on the shallow side, and when you don't know the details about a particular program or initiative, e.g. Race To The Top, there's little option but to click the open minded option, but for all that I'd say it's better than the one I did a year and a half ago before the UK general election. Still, just for the sake of it I had a play and ticked the boxes to see who I should hope gets the nomination and, since I know little about many of the candidates, perhaps become a bit better informed. I said I'd be prepared to vote for any of the candidates, though of course the reality is I'm able to vote for exactly none of them, and to my not very great at all surprise these are the results I got.

I might agree even more with Ron Paul than this suggests since of the five questions on which I apparently disagree with him I said I was open minded on two simply through unfamiliarity with the program (Race To The Top) and the use of Executive Orders (repealing ObamaCare question), and a couple more depend a little on how it's interpreted.However, it has informed me a little and defied my expectations since I'd expected Bachmann to come a very distant last and for Herman Cain to be a solid second and much closer to Paul.

But I'm curious - I'm sure that clip of the debate that Trooper Thompson had up the other day had 8 candidates and there are others around. I know that some of them are felt to be no-hopers but I'm surprised that it doesn't include at least all those who took part in the debates.

UPDATE - Noticed that it can be embedded. Have fun.

Predictable attack on private ownership

Not a recent sign in Ohio as far as I know,
but don't you just wish it was? 

The slaughter of dozens of lions, tigers, bears and wolves set free from a private Ohio farm has sparked calls for restrictions on the largely unregulated ownership of exotic pets in several US states.
Police in Ohio shot dead almost 50 animals in a frantic hunt after the owner of an exotic farm freed the dangerous animals and then killed himself.
The bloody toll - which included 18 endangered Bengal tigers - has sparked outrage from conservationists, who say it should be a call to action against private ownership of exotic animals.

No argument from me, this is sad. I don't know the ins and outs of this story, why the guy kept all these dangerous animals or why he set them loose before topping himself, but the unnecessary loss of 18 individuals of a species numbering only a couple of thousand or so - plus the other animals - is a bloody shame. That said I don't think I agree with the conversationists and anyone else whose knee jerk response is not just sadness but outrage and the stock statist cries of 'It shouldn't be allowed' and 'There ought to be a law against it'. Yes, there are all sorts of practical problems to keeping an animal in captivity, and the bigger and stronger and more fearsomely armed it is the greater the problem and the expense needed to tackle it. A dog and two cats? Easy. Fifty or so assorted large predators? Different ball game.

Easy? You'll pay for that in your sleep, Exile.

And yet should that alone be a barrier if someone has the resources needed? Sure, if you live near a private zoo and the lion keeps coming over your fence and taking a dump in your veggie patch there's an issue, but isn't that sort of thing what tort law is for? Wouldn't it still be an issue if an animal escapes from any other zoo, private or public owned?

Not only that but banning private ownership means losing one of the advantages of private ownership - property rights. Think about who owns all the endangered species in the world. Generally it's nobody, isn't it? Oh, states and governments and maybe monarchs might claim ownership but even then for all practical purposes there's no real owner, and if the animal is either a resource itself or getting in the way of a resource someone else wants to get at then tough. This is tragedy of the commons stuff, and the way to avoid it is private property rights and the threat of someone coming along and suing the arse off anyone who causes damage or loss, i.e. hurts or kills, that animal.

Take the unfortunate Bengal tiger, for example. Wikipedia suggests that the principle threat to its survival is poaching for skins and body parts, which sounds plausible enough. But what if the tigers were all or mostly privately owned? Wouldn't the owners take steps to protect their property, and if the tigers had value (this is distasteful but presumably the tiger doesn't need its skin, teeth, bellend or whatever after it's carked it from natural causes, so is there still a problem with trading in parts then, and if so is it different from telling the doctors they can harvest a dead relative for organs even though they didn't have a donor card) wouldn't they also encourage the tigers to make lots of little tigers and feed them up to make even more little tigers, and so on? Yes, you could simply hack up all your tigers now for a quick buck, but every half competent owner would be aware of the downside of killing the goose that lays gold eggs or at least understand the principle. Most owners would want to maximise their return and keep up the supply, which in turn means wanting there to be as many tigers as the market can cope with (and can safely be accommodated without eating said private owners, of course).

Now I agree that it's a little weird and not a little nasty to think of encouraging a trade in tiger bollocks or rhino lips or shark earlobes or whatever, and certainly my inner and not quite dead lefty is wailing something about the humiliation of noble beasts for profit, but you know what? Fuck it. If it means not seeing the Bengal tiger go the way of the Tasmanian tiger wouldn't it be worth it?

Really the only concern should be whether or not private ownership would work, and for that I suggest we look at species which are largely in private ownership and see if any are endangered. And as far as I can tell the world isn't exactly short of cats, dogs, horses, sheep, cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys.....

Occupy Wall Street...

... and then what, you clueless bunch of fucknuts? Going to throw America's captains of industry from the roofs of their own buildings, are you? Should be pretty fucking entertaining given the US has a national debt on the order of fifteen trillion dollars. Now, what's Mandarin for, "Nice one, you fucking idiots"?

Cunts.

Troy Davis

Beyond reasonable doubt? Really? No DNA, no blood, no murder weapon, no ballistics, in fact no physical evidence of any kind beyond cartridges and fired bullets of the same calibre as a handgun Davis admitted having on him earlier that day, and .38 is a very widely used calibre - literally millions of .38 guns exist. And of the nine eyewitnesses seven have signed affidavits recanting their testimonies, among claims that some were pressured into their statements by police and that others were illiterate and didn't know what they were signing. The eighth eyewitness simply refuses to speak, and the last, the one who stands by what he told the court, is felt by some (Davis' defence team, for instance) to have been the real killer all along. In fact nine people have come forward with evidence implicating this man. If so it would not be the first time in the US that someone has ended up on Death Row for a murder they didn't commit, all thanks to the eyewitness testimony of those were actually guilty of the crime.

Spencer Lawton, the retired prosecutor in the case, told CNN: “There is the legal case, the case in court, and the public relations case. We have consistently won the case as it has been presented in court. We have consistently lost the case as it has been presented in the public realm, on TV and elsewhere."

Maybe that's because with no physical evidence and questionably eyewitness testimony many people can't figure out why you've won in court. In the original trial when you had all those eyewitnesses, fair enough, but there's a huge question mark over that evidence now. There's no statute of limitations on murder, yet Davis' team was told it was too late to consider these things now. It's too late to take a polygraph test as well. At the same time he's told that he can't have a retrial 'on the grounds that he had failed to "prove his innocence"'. Well, hey, of course he's failed to prove his innocence, of course the prosecution won in court. You'll always fail to prove your innocence and the prosecution will always win if courts simply decide not to look at contradictory evidence.

What worries me is that even a prison sentence is supposed to be handed down only when the case is proven beyond reasonable doubt - better that ten guilty men go free than an innocent is deprived of liberty, and all that - and surely even more so if a death sentence is on the cards. In Troy Davis' case is there enough to be sure beyond reasonable doubt that he should have been in prison, much less put to death?

The answer is necessarily subjective. Those involved in the prosecution think so, but they are advocates for an adversarial legal system and I'd be disappointed if they didn't. It's their job. The MacPhails, the family of the off duty officer who was murdered think so, but twenty years ago they were promised closure and it's been a long wait - I can't honestly say for sure that in the same position I'd want to believe anything else myself. But objectively it seems as if there is effectively no reliable evidence anymore, and even at the point where he'd have been certain that he was about to be killed anyway and owning up to the murder couldn't do him any more harm, Troy Davis maintained his innocence. Maybe he was lying to the very end, maybe not - who really knows? And that's kind of the point.

Oh well, men have hanged with less against them than that.

When did Australia turn into America?

Not having a dig at our American cousins here, but I've always felt flag veneration is more their thing what with their national anthem being about it and with every other person you meet prepared to tell you that it's illegal to set fire to it (which apparently it isn't). Maybe some of my fellow Brits feel much the same for the Union Jack, especially those who know it's real name is the Union Flag, but here in Oz most people I've come across seem much less attached to the Australian Flag. There are those republican types who dislike the constant reminder of Britain's influence provided by the Union Flag in the top left quarter, and there are those who say that it doesn't represent the aborigines and Torres Strait islanders who were here first. There are those who think the Southern Cross bit has been hijacked by bogans anyway. And there are those to whom it's just the flag and apart from maybe waving one on Australia Day or watching it being lowered to half mast on ANZAC Day they probably don't think about it often.*

I didn't realise there were a group that venerated it in a similar fashion to the Americans and 'Old Glory' or that this group was more commonly known as opposition MPs, but apparently it's so because they're angry about a scene in an ABC satirical comedy called At Home With Julia, featuring Julia Gillard impersonator Amanda Bishop (you've seen her on this blog before). In this scene, to be broadcast this evening unless the ABC have chickened out and pulled it, Bishop's Julia Gillard dances the horizontal tango with the First Bloke, Tim Mathieson, as played by Phil Lloyd. On the floor of the Prime Minister's office. Under a duvet sized Australian flag. And the Liberal Party and their allies have gone apeshit.

COALITION MPs have attacked a controversial TV satire on Julia Gillard as demeaning and suggested ABC funding should be reviewed.
[...]
Liberal MP Teresa Gambaro also expressed disgust with At Home with Julia, suggesting to the party room that the national broadcaster's funding should be reviewed.

I'd agree, but not for that reason. Where I'm from many people complain about the TV licence forcing people who don't watch BBC programmes to pay for the BBC anyway, but since it's funded out of general taxation people pay for the ABC even if they haven't got a television. Review away, but review the principle of making people pay for a service they don't necessarily use rather than use it as a stick to beat them with because you find some of their content objectionable. Once again, this is liberalism in name only - the Australian Liberal Party seems to be as conservative as they come.

... Nationals MP John Forrest [urged] the return of tasteful comedy shows such as the 1970s series Are You Being Served.
Mr Forrest told colleagues the satirical take on Ms Gillard's private life demeaned the office of prime minister, after learning tomorrow's episode features on-air prime minister Amanda Bishop and actor Phil Lloyd, playing Tim Mathieson, naked on her office floor under an Australian flag.
“Having sex in the prime minister's office under the Australian flag is the last straw for me," Mr Forrest reportedly told MPs.

So, is this sticking up for Julia Gillard or disappointment that you won't get to see Amanda Bishop's arse, John? Apparently, neither. It's the flaaaaag.

“It's nothing to do with Julia Gillard. I'm not trying to defend her. It's the office of prime minister and it's not even funny.
“The old English traditional shows like Are You Being Served - they were funny, but this isn't."

John, they weren't funny. You found them funny. Lots of other people also find them funny. Other people don't. I've been for a look on YouTube to refresh my memory, and I found it to be a repetitive series of jokes mostly involving the ambiguous availability of an unambiguously camp salesman in a menswear department and the pussy of the ancient woman with a blue rinse who works opposite (feline kind, but - oh, my sides - never referred to as a cat). This may have been bleeding edge comedy in the 1970s when it began, and to be honest I did think the I'm free/pussy gags were funny the first time, but it felt like the show really didn't have much else. Blackadder or Yes Minister it ain't, but if John Forrest is amused by it then he's welcome to buy it on DVD. I suspect the ABC, despite all the things for which it could be criticised, has a better grasp of what audiences in 2011 want. In fact if ratings are any guide what they want is actually on Channel 7 (and much of it is shit if you ask me) but the ABC seem to be doing an okay job of treading the middle ground, and if it makes John Forrest feel better they are still buying second hand stuff from Britain.

"And to desecrate the flag dishonours what my dad did.”

I don't know what your dad did, John, but was it anything to do with fighting to prevent dictatorial types attempting to control other people's lives? I'm only asking.

Or, bearing in mind the religious nut element of Australian politics, is it just the thought of Julia Gillard having sex that's upsetting people? Newsflash, prudes: the woman is 50 in a couple of weeks - she's probably not a virgin, and having had a stable relationship with the same guy for some years she probably enjoys it when he gives her a nice hot fuck as an alternative to a cup of Milo at bedtime. I wouldn't want to see it on my TV either - in a weird kind of way that has to do with her job and personality it'd be like seeing your parents do it - but I can live with it being referred to on TV. And if not I know what to do about it, as does one Liberal who does actually act up to the name and understands what choice means.

But Liberal MP Bronwyn Bishop said if people didn't like the show they could change channels.
She said former prime minister John Howard had been lampooned for years by comedy shows.

And Julia Gillard herself? To her credit also, she's calmly said she won't be watching (fair enough - I can't even look at myself making a speech on someone else's wedding video) and other than that has no commented the whole thing. And while I haven't got a lot of time for her that attitude as raised my opinion of her a smidgeon.



Americans seem to venerate their flag because they think it stands for freedom, representing as it does the original 13 colonies which gained independence from Britain as well as the 50 states of today. Brits and Aussies not so much because their flags are more hybrids of other flags, and in the case of Australia independence was granted at least as much as it was won. So let's leave the flag veneration to people that not only understand it but, understand also that what a flag stands for is rather more important than the flag itself. Because I think that if something's symbolic of being free to do only as you're told I'm not sure it's worth venerating in the first place, as illustrated by a couple of my favourite American libertarians.



* Personally I'm happy with whatever flag Australia choose to have and don't mind what people choose to tattoo on themselves, so I suppose that puts me in the last group.

Ooooh, there's a surprise

Last month I wrote that there seemed to be a bizarre game of international keeping up with the Joneses going on in that every nation with a significant News Corp presence seemed determined to be able to say "Yes, yes, those evil Murdoch hacks have, er, hacked our phones too". 9/11? Yes, they must have done it then, surely. If they did for the London bombings four years later then they're bound to have done it for the much bigger 9/11, right? Cue investigations carried out by people who almost certainly have something better to do despite the phone hacking not being known outside the UK and not actually being hacking at all and, to me at least, not all that likely to begin with.

... in the immediate aftermath there was a lot of confusion and some estimates of the number of dead were as high as ten thousand, more than five times what it turned out to be (correction: 10,000 is not five times 3,000 - my mental arithmetic was clearly not all that flash when I originally wrote this - AE). Nobody knew who was missing, who was dead and who was lucky enough not to have been anywhere near the place after all, and in all that confusion and not really knowing it seems like use of the NotW style not-hacking voicemails would have been much trickier than the 7/7 bombings in London in 2005. I might be wrong but I can't help thinking that the identities of the dead in an incident that killed so many more people... well, where would you even start? Supposedly someone from the NotW tried to bribe a cop or an ex-cop for phone records, but that seems a little odd. If it happened in 2001 or maybe 02, which is when it would have been newsworthy, then how come it's only now that we're hearing about it?
[...]
On the other hand if this is supposed to have taken place more recently then you have to wonder about the sanity of the NotW still playing the same games when they'd already been caught once and were under the spotlight. You'd also have to wonder at how slow a news day it must have been to go on that kind of fishing expedition perhaps five or six years on and, if they were going to do the not-hack of voicemails again, whether there'd even be anything there after all that time. Obviously the idea is out there now and of course it needs to be looked into but if I was a betting man I'd put a few dollars on it being all smoke and no substance.

And I'd be feeling confident about those dollars coming back with company having seen this Wall Street Journal headline in The Australian yesterday.

Click for linky

INVESTIGATORS haven't found hard evidence so far in probing whether News Corporation's UK-based journalists might have hacked the phones of 9/11 victims, but US authorities have expanded their query to see whether they can establish a broader pattern of more recent misconduct at the company's US operations, say people familiar with the matter.

British police investigating the sweeping phone-hacking scandal at the company's now-closed News of the World tabloid have told the Federal Bureau of Investigation there are no names or telephone numbers of September 11 victims among the evidence they have gathered to date, according to people familiar with the case.

London's Metropolitan Police Service, known as Scotland Yard, has examined voluminous phone records of what could be thousands of potential phone-hacking victims, but those records don't suggest 9/11 victims were among the targets of the hacking, according to the people familiar with the case. A Scotland Yard spokesman declined to comment.

The New York Police Department also has told the FBI it has no indication such attempted violations occurred, and the FBI's own crime-victims assistance office has said the same. Attorney General Eric Holder plans to meet later this month with some September 11 families, to discuss their concerns about the issue.

So they've looked, and for the time being will continue to do so, but there's not a shred of evidence that any not-hacking went on in relation to 9/11. This should not come as a surprise, not because we have any reason to think that the people covering that story must have been saintly types who would never stoop to but because it would have been extremely difficult while it was still worth doing and no longer worth doing by the time it became a lot easier. Now I realise that both the WSJ and The Aussie are owned by News Corp itself and that they may be a little biased in favour of reports that don't drag their parent company further down the swannie, but news is a competitive industry and the same holds true, though in reverse, for their opposition. Despite The Age running a couple of related stories yesterday Fairfax Media doesn't seem to have covered it yet, and nor has the Graun/Indie/Obs. Why should they be in a rush to see their rival off the hook a femtosecond sooner than absolutely necessary? As for the grubbier end of the market, and again turning to the WSJ/Aussie piece for lack of anything else, let's not forget where the 9/11 hacking thing came from.

Cowboys,
apparently

The allegation stemmed from an article in the UK's Daily Mirror, based on unnamed sources, that reported News Corp journalists tried to hack the phones of 9/11 victims. It was among the most serious allegations made in the high-profile scandal that hit News Corp's UK operations involving widespread phone hacking that targeted celebrities, politicians and a murder victim.

I'm not saying they made it up because for all I know those unnamed sources were real and otherwise reliable. I'm not even saying that this unnamed source wasn't telling the truth that he'd been approached by NotW journos offering to pay for access to the phone records of 9/11 victims, though as I said last month it seems a little surprising that this has taken almost ten years to come out when the phone not-hacking scandal has been simmering away for the best part of the last five. I am saying that The Mirror's article - in which they use a photo of Murdoch arriving in London wearing a Fedora and describe it variously as a 'cowboy style' and a Panama - was mainly a rehash of what was already known with a dash of shit stirring about 9/11 mixed in. Nothing solid, no names, no actual facts beyond 'he alleges' and 'he said', and for damned sure nothing at all about why it's taken ten years for this to come out despite phone not-hacking first coming to light in 2005, how odd that appears and what might be a reasonable explanation for it. Nada. And fair enough because if the Mirror was paying me to write I'd be tempted to help kick the competition while they're down.*

But of course investigations will continue, and the while the original one about 9/11 looks like it will be the dead end I thought it seems the powers that be aren't content to let it lie there.

Now, US authorities are trying to determine whether they can find a broad pattern of misdeeds at News Corp that continued into 2006 or more recently, according to the people familiar with the matter. If they find evidence of such conduct, which could include rewarding executives accused of wrongdoing, for example, that would open the door to pursuing matters beyond the five-year time frame [of the statute of limitations].

As I said last month, if a government constitutionally bound to protect press freedom wanted to be able to bring the media more under its own control it needs a bloody good dose of public outrage and preferably a few people jailed for breaking the law, since breaking existing laws is the favourite pretext of most governments for making up some new ones. I'd hope that the Americans' reverence for their Bill of Rights combined with the fact that the area of main outrage, the allegations about 9/11, appears to be a dud will prevent things going that far, but here in Oz and in the UK the governments have greater power to muzzle the press. In their desire to give their News Corp competition the shoeing the bastards so thoroughly deserve the other media groups seem to be forgetting this.

I hope it doesn't come back to bite them, because if it does it'll bite everybody.


* Nobody pays me, which is why I'm not fussy who I kick.

Ouch!

More vestigial blogging, but remaining on the topic of governments' debts.



No comment necessary, really, except to note that it might be a little more now that dropping to a AA credit rating might mean an increase in borrowing costs. Tip of the Akubra to Restoring Britain, via Witterings from Witney and Oldrightie.

Brief comment on breaking news

Still a busy weekend for me, but I didn't want to let one particular event pass without comment.

Click for linky

The United States' credit rating was cut for the first time when Standard and Poor's lowered it from triple-A to AA+, citing the country's looming deficit burden and weak policy-making process.

Standard and Poor's on Friday revised the nation's rating downwards to a AA+ with a negative outlook, despite a push back from the White House, which said the rating agency's analysis of the US economy was deeply flawed.

And my comment is this: holy shit! Okay, it's not unexpected but it is unprecedented in modern times. Is this the end of the idea that governments can just spend money they don't have on crap we don't need more or less indefinitely by taxing us more now and running up debts for which they'll need to tax us in the future? We can but hope so.

A very expensive night at the Oprah

It's a recurring theme among many libertarians and free market types that governments are pretty crap at picking winners, so bad in fact that it would be much better if things that required them even to try were not government functions in the first place. It's been a recurring theme with me that in particular governments should stop trying their hand (with our money) at events promotion, starting two years ago with a rant about Formula 1 which touched on the increasing cost to the Victorian taxpayer of the Melbourne Grand Prix and soon expanding to include the $1.5 million the state government paid the pre-shamed-by-affairs Tiger Woods to swing his stick around on a gold course* as well as the eye-watering sum spent on the London Olympics and good result for Britain and Australia in losing the bid to host the soccer World Cup.

And to that we can also add that it's not a government function to dream up gimmicks to promote tourism, especially if it involves giving five million dollars of taxpayers' money to an extremely wealthy American chat show host to come to Australia with her own audience and say nice things about the place.

Us too! Us too!!

In one of the more bizarre forms of international keeping-up-with-the-G7s it seems like it might become the in thing to have a pressing need to investigate and possibly re-regulate your media. So in America, despite there having been no suggestion that the NotW or anyone else not-hacked the phones of the victims in the ten years since the World Trade Centre attacks, the FBI is investigating to see if anyone from Murdoch's News Corp attempted to not-hack the phones of the victims of the World Trade Centre attacks.

Now, in the immediate aftermath there was a lot of confusion and some estimates of the number of dead were as high as ten thousand, more than five times what it turned out to be. Nobody knew who was missing, who was dead and who was lucky enough not to have been anywhere near the place after all, and in all that confusion and not really knowing it seems like use of the NotW style not-hacking voicemails would have been much trickier than the 7/7 bombings in London in 2005. I might be wrong but I can't help thinking that the identities of the dead in an incident that killed so many more people... well, where would you even start? Supposedly someone from the NotW tried to bribe a cop or an ex-cop for phone records, but that seems a little odd. If it happened in 2001 or maybe 02, which is when it would have been newsworthy, then how come it's only now that we're hearing about it? Time heals and despite this being a huge injury you have to think that had phone-not-hacking etc of the dead been going on, ignoring for the moment the practical difficulties of not knowing who's dead (and therefore not knowing the phone numbers either), the level of outrage would have been far greater then than it is now. So why make the allegation nearly ten years later and only after it turns out that it was done after a later terrorist incident, one with far fewer dead whose identities emerged much more quickly and, being in the city where the NotW is based, seems likely to have been a much easier proposition as far as getting those phone numbers goes.

On the other hand if this is supposed to have taken place more recently then you have to wonder about the sanity of the NotW still playing the same games when they'd already been caught once and were under the spotlight. You'd also have to wonder at how slow a news day it must have been to go on that kind of fishing expedition perhaps five or six years on and, if they were going to do the not-hack of voicemails again, whether there'd even be anything there after all that time. Obviously the idea is out there now and of course it needs to be looked into but if I was a betting man I'd put a few dollars on it being all smoke and no substance. Still, if a government with a constitutional obligation not to interfere with press freedom wanted to be able to move in that direction, even if only temporarily, then a nice bit of public outrage against the media generated by the judicious poking of a still unhealed wound could be just the ticket. Not saying that the US government is behind the claims or even that they have such an agenda, but the US government is a huge entity with many people working in it and many things it doesn't want to discuss - anyone believe that not one single person has thought 'Just a minute, this could work in our favour'? Anyone? Anyone at all? No... ? Yeah, me neither.

But the US are not alone in wanting to give their media a bit of a shoeing, and so inevitably there's to be an investigation down here in Australia as well.

THE Australian media faces a sweeping parliamentary investigation into its ownership, regulation and ethics after Julia Gillard yesterday left the door open to an inquiry into print and broadcast companies.

The Prime Minister indicated she would consider Greens leader Bob Brown's call for a wide-ranging Senate investigation into media practices in the wake of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal in Britain.

Translation: the bloody media have embarrassed us parliamentarians often enough and if we can't use this to bring the bastards to heel then I reckon we can at least get our pound of flesh, what do you say?

The thing is that Gingery Dullard, unlike the Yanks, may have rather more cause to investigate the Aussie media. And interestingly it's not the Murdoch owned mob but their competitors, the Graun friendly, lefty-loving, phone-hack hating Fairfax group, who have been accused of being up to no good.

THE editor-in-chief of The Age, Paul Ramadge, has refused to detail his personal involvement in the newspaper's unauthorised access of an ALP database now being examined by the Australian Federal Police.

And how did this happen?

The Age accessed the database from its own computer terminals using an unauthorised password provided by an undisclosed source.
"This story came through entirely appropriate journalistic methods," Ramadge said. "Entry to the ALP database came via a whistleblower who raised concerns about private information held on it.
"This whistleblower had authorised access to this material and we reported in the public interest."
[...]
The Age used material obtained from the database to inform a story run in the final week of the Victorian election campaign about Labor keeping a "secret" file on citizens. Several people whose details were accessed were contacted by the newspaper before publication. Others, such as Mr Faris, were contacted after publication and assured their information would not be stored or misused.

Okay, so they may have had good reason but it sounds like it's fair to ask the question. And even if they have good reason if they commit a crime in the process does it somehow un-crime it? I'm not sure a good reason would let me off something as trivial as a speeding offence - actually I'm pretty sure it wouldn't - so I can't help thinking that if a crime has been committed with good intentions it's probably still a crime and that there'd be a case to answer. If there is, and I stress 'if', then it's for the judge and jury to take any claims of good intentions into account. In the meantime they seem to be in a glass house and might be advised to drop the stones.

Barrister Peter Faris QC, one of a group of high-profile Victorians whose personal details were accessed through the database by The Age, described the newspaper's actions as "very close to corruption and criminal conduct."
"The Age has covered up this incident and it is a bit rich that they now lead the charge to criticise the Murdoch press in Australia," he writes in The Australian today.
The Age has denounced the phone hacking by News of the World reporters, which prompted News International, the British arm of Rupert Murdoch's global media interests, to close the paper. It has given front-page prominence to the story every day this week.

Quite. Motes and beams, fellas, motes and beams. This has been the Angry Exile bringing this information to both his readers (hi Mum).

Because it'll be little short of a fucking miracle if you see it in The Guardian.

What the hell is Obama talking about here?

Seriously, can someone who speaks American make sense of these remarks on the subject of America's worrying debt level and the possibility of the country losing it's top credit rating?

"...we might as well do it now – pull off the Band-Aid, eat our peas."
"They're in one week and they're out one week... You need to be here. I've been here. I've been doing Afghanistan and bin Laden and the Greek crisis. You stay here. Let's get it done."

The words are English and I can understand them just fine, but the some of the sentences have left me confused. Don't mistake this for snooty English criticism of how the Yanks use the language. They can use it any way they want or not at all as far as I'm concerned. If they want fanny to mean arse and bum to mean tramp and all those other little difference that's more than fine by me as I need only learn a little vocabulary rather than a whole language, and like lots of others I watch enough American TV that I'm pretty confident in my ability to get by. But this time, and admittedly it's not unprecedented when it comes to American presidents, I just don't know what the fuck he means.

Holy shit

If, or when, Greece defaults it will be bad. Obviously not as bad as it will be if they keep staggering on, being forced to increase debt by being made to take bail out after bail out, but we can still say that a default is Not A Good Thing. It's just the least worst thing.

However, if a Greek default is Not A Good Thing what the hell do we call a US default?

TWENTY days out from a possible default on its loans by the world's richest nation, America's political leaders apparently agree that it should never have come to this. But on how best to put things right, they remain at loggerheads, deeply divided along ideological lines, anxiously protecting what Barack Obama has termed their ''sacred cows'' - for Republicans, low taxes; for Democrats, coveted entitlement programs such as the national pension scheme and subsidised healthcare for seniors.

The US has racked up debts of more than $US14 trillion, roughly equal to its gross domestic product, and the trajectory portends fiscal disaster.

Without painful remedial action, the debt is expected to climb beyond $US20 trillion within five years, and hit $US25 trillion by 2021, just as the US is facing unprecedented challenges that threaten its global economic standing.

Clinton, for all that he didn't know what to do with a really good cigar, left the country with a budget surplus. The US still had debt of course, but at least it wasn't running up lots more. Two fiscally irresponsible spendthrifts later and there are suggestions that the US, the world's largest economy, may have to default.

Has that even happened before? And what might that mean for other countries whose debts are proportionately even larger?

It could only be a government operation

Via the von Mises blog.

... government job-service engine Workforce Central Florida said it was spending more than $70,000 of federal stimulus money to help the unemployed by handing out 6,000 satiny capes for jobless “superheroes” to “fight” “Dr. Evil Unemployment.”

I've read that sentence a number of times in the hope of seeing a hint of sanity, or failing that a way of outdoing it to take the piss, but it's simply so window-lickingly deranged that I just can't. It also says something about how I've come to view expanding government that when I googled for confirmation of this it was not in expectation that this Dr Evil Unemployment crap would turn out to be bogus but in fear that it was probably true. Sure enough, from Workforce Central Florida's site (PDF):

WORKFORCE CENTRAL FLORIDA takes on Dr. Evil Unemployment with new Cape-A-Bility Challenge
WORKFORCE CENTRAL FLORIDA is inviting the area’s job seekers and employers to join the fight against unemployment in Central Florida with its new Cape-A-Bility Challenge. The Challenge, beginning April 11 and running through June 30, takes on WCF’s comic book villain, Dr. Evil Unemployment, and offers job seekers and employers the opportunity to win $1,000 prize packs.

Christ alive.

How can Central Florida help fight Dr. Evil Unemployment?
Job Seekers: To enter, job seekers must complete one of the following activities:

• Take the WORKFORCE CENTRAL FLORIDA Facebook Quiz, “What Superhero Are You?
• Become a fan of WORKFORCE CENTRAL FLORIDA on Facebook
• Recommend someone on LinkedIn using the word “Super”
• Tweet a job opening from the WORKFORCE CENTRAL FLORIDA online job bank
• Take a photo with Dr. Evil Unemployment at a WORKFORCE CENTRAL FLORIDA or JobVantage location and uploadling it to the microsite by emailing it to DrEvil@wcfla.com

Once the task is complete, job seekers must visit any WORKFORCE CENTRAL FLORIDA or JobVantage office with proof of the activity. All job seekers who show proof of the activity will be provided the official entry form and an official Cape-A-Bility cape (while supplies last).

And we in the west think we've got it so much better than mad banana republics where dictators, pseudo generals and Presidents-for-Life rob their people and spunk the money away on Saville Row suits, gold plated Rolls Royces and AK-47s with ivory grips. Okay, actually we have got it better, but that doesn't mean we've got it right. The point is we're still robbed, albeit by well meaning folk who are using our money to pave the road to hell with their good intentions for us.

Further comment will have to wait while I mop all this blood off the desk and wait for the headache to go away.