verging_on_random

Unfair to Pauline

The never-ending circus that is conservative politics in the USA continues unchecked. Just when you thought they couldn’t top a governor going AWOL for a while to visit his South American mistress, along comes another governor to say she doesn’t want to be governor any more.

Speculation continues about Sarah Palin’s reasons for leaving her job. As we have come to expect, the wingnut bloggers are tying themselves into the most extraordinary knots imaginable in their endeavours to explain that this is a stroke of brilliance on Palin’s part which the dumb lefties, as usual, are too thick to understand. My favourite line of ‘reasoning’ so far is that staying a full term in the job for which she was elected would be ‘quitting’ whereas resigning mid-term is an act of courage.

Of course the speculation is only encouraged by the lady’s own failure to say anything remotely coherent by way of explanation. It’s like Pauline Hanson channelling George W Bush. Her latest statement has this gem:

How sad that Washington and the media will never understand; it’s about country. And though it’s honorable for countless others to leave their positions for a higher calling and without finishing a term, of course we know by now, for some reason a different standard applies for the decisions I make.

Poor baby. It reminds me of that hilarious ‘Leave Britney alone!’ YouTube except that this is not a fan getting emotional but an awesome expression of self-pity. However the reference to ‘a higher calling’ intrigued me. Is she thinking perhaps of joining the Marines? Resuming her academic career so she can teach the next generation? Becoming a nun?

Sadly, the speculation seems to be that she will do mundane celebrity stuff like writing putting her name to a book, giving pep-talks to rednecks and maybe having a spot on Fox News. Only in WingnutWorld would any of those pursuits be regarded as callings higher than being the highest elected official of a state. But Sarah doesn’t seem to regard being governor as involving any actual executive responsibilities; she writes ‘I’ve never thought I needed a title before one’s name to forge progress in America’. For her, apparently, ‘governor’ was nothing more than an honorific, a bit like the titles awarded in those decadent European countries that cling to their aristocracies. Real Americans don’t need any such elitist nonsense.

Upon reflection, the comparisons with our very own Pauline are unfair and a little sexist. Her supporters may see parallels between Sarah Palin and both Moses and Julius Caesar but in my humble opinion she is one of a kind. It would all be extremely comical except for the real possibility that she might right now have been next in line for the presidency. Howard revelled in having a close personal relationship with the crazier elements of the US Republican Party; I hope the current crop of Liberals are watching the circus across the Pacific and vowing never to make the same mistake.

Mourning Michael Jackson

I chat to my partner in The Philippines on Skype almost every night. Last night he said this:

Micheal Jackson dead

People in RP [Republic of the Philippines] very sad

As we talked about it, it became clear that to my partner and our family and our friends, Michael Jackson was a great singer and a great dancer whose performances had given enormous pleasure. They respected his talents and they were sad that someone who had done so much to entertain them was dead. That was all. They weren’t interested in his private life. That was up to him. He was a singer and a dancer and that’s how Filipinos responded to him.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could revert to a simpler life in which politicians were judged on their political performance, entertainers on their ability to entertain, business executives on their management capabilities and so on … instead of this obsessive desire to find the ’story behind’ every slightly public figure and fill the media with gossip that is not even remotely related to their public functions. But in a culture that yearns to be titillated, I suppose we will go on enduring endless stories about business executives’ mistresses and show business celebrities’ drug use, even though none of it has the slightest relevance to the reasons these people came to our attention in the first place.

OMFG

I had thought the accusations by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that the USA was interfering in internal Iranian affairs were a bit over-the-top. Now, however, he really has a legitimate cause for complaint:

Joan Baez adds her support to the Iranians campaigning for more rights, singing “We Shall Overcome” with Persian stanzas toward the end.

Will someone please tell Joan it didn’t even work very well in the 60s when she was singing for the benefit of fellow-Americans?

I bet Bono and Bob Geldof are already planning the Concert for Persian Peace … maybe in the new US embassy in Baghdad would be nice. It’s big enough to hold a few hundred thousand spectators.

(And no I’m not going to embed Joan’s YouTube. I have some standards.)

Thank you America

I never believed the people of the USA would elect Barack Obama as their president. He seemed too black, too different and too cosmopolitan to get a majority of votes in a country that had chosen George W Bush twice. His election with such a healthy majority suggests there are still plenty of Americans who see their country as something better than the bullying bigot portrayed by people like Bush and Cheney and all their fellow-travellers.

I was thinking today how lucky the world is that the election turned out the way it did. Imagine if we were enduring the early months of a McCain presidency. The US economy would be an utter shambles as McCain blustered about earmarks and cutting wasteful government expenditure.

He would have seized on international events as a welcome relief from domestic economic developments that he did not understand. We would have been subjected to an endless stream of steely-eyed, jaw-jutting pronouncements about the awfulness of Evil and the USA’s determination to Defeat It.

Under the imperialistic influence of Lieberman and Graham, with all the crazy homicidal pundits of Fox News and NRO and the rest baying for blood, there would have been carrier battle fleets cruising off North Korea looking for a fight, and others in the Persian Gulf looking for a fight, and troops acting provocatively on Russian borders looking for even more fights, while the US president slandered the UN and caused international turmoil with half-witted efforts to set up a ‘League of Democracies’ to give some international cover to the grand neo-con plan for a New American Century.

Or maybe we would have seen none of those things. Maybe we would have seen nothing but a pathetic old man in the White House, totally incapable of responding in any constructive way to events beyond his understanding, while the media was preoccupied with a series of trivial stories about Vice President Palin, her dysfunctional family and her heavy-handed attempts to secure the nomination in 2012.

Either way a McCain presidency would have been something between awful and catastrophic and we owe the American people a debt of gratitude for not inflicting it upon us.

Who can you trust?

Much of the news from Iran has been based on blogs, YouTubes, Twitter feeds and other online sources. The ‘proper’ journalists have all been told to piss off out of the country (except for some who haven’t and who still manage to file stories from Tehran, but maybe that just shows Islamofascist internal security is as incompetent as ours).

The hilarious thing about all these stories is that the mainstream media have taken to adding a po-faced qualification along the lines that all this internet stuff can’t be verified, with the implication that readers should take it with a grain of salt.

Unlike, needless to say, photos of Pauline Hanson naked and details of what’s in Mahomed Haneef’s laptop and emails to senior Treasury officials from the PM’s office and other impeccably-sourced material that appears in the MSM in stories written by Serious Reporters and whose authenticity is therefore beyond question .

The CEO as politician

I don’t know whether to respect the Liberals for their perseverance or deride them for their incapacity to learn from experience, but they still seem convinced that being successful in business is a great qualification to be leader of the parliamentary Liberal Party.

One would have thought their experience with any one of Nick Greiner, John Elliott or John Hewson would have made them think twice about this belief (and Elliott didn’t even make it into parliament). The trifecta should surely have convinced rational people that businessmen make crap politicians and the Libs should stick with mediocre lawyers like Howard and Costello and Andrews and Ruddock.

Nevertheless after flirting with the excitement of a bikie doctor, the Libs in Canberra have entrusted their fortunes to Malcolm Turnbull. I’ve never really understood why (and doesn’t it say something about the fragility of both leaders’ principles that they toyed with the idea of becoming Labor MPs before joining the Libs?). His main grounds for elevation always seemed to be Manifest Destiny, as hinted at loudly and often by him and his admirers in the media and business. I bet he made an unsettling impact on the party room when he arrived - like having an important client arrive at a staff meeting and announce he’d joined the team. Anyone with insecurity problems would have felt very uncomfortable.

The thing is, Turnbull has no demonstrated capacity to be either an outstanding leader or a competent politician. Contrary to the received wisdom in some quarters, being a successful politician has almost nothing in common with making money in the private sector. Turnbull has not worked in an environment where he needed to understand and reconcile a mass of competing interests. Maybe he thinks he can be a one-man band and run the opposition like Kerry Packer ran the Nine Network. Well good luck with that.

His forays into politics have been uniform failures. He was spectacularly unsuccessful as leader of the republican movement, so much so that the idea is moribund. As a back-bencher he managed to undermine his deputy leader by commissioning and publicising a series of alternative tax reform systems, just to prove what a great team player he was. And now, he seems to have mishandled the latest piece of media frenzy about utilitities and fake emails and so on with unbelievable clumsiness and lack of judgement.

He might turn out all right in the end of course, who knows? But the signs are that just like his predecessors Greiner and Hewson, he’s much too confident in his own executive ability and doesn’t comprehend the fundamental nature of politics, which is nothing like business.

Second home

Manila slums? Yeah maybe, but they have their attractions.

Last month my partner found us a new apartment that gets a bit more air than the old one. I like the neighbourhood. I hope he never sees this cos he’ll kill me for posting such an unflattering picture .

Looking inland from our balcony we see the fishing boats coming and going.

I like the evenings when it gets a little cooler and I can drink a Tanduay rhum or two (cost at Kirra Hotel: $35 a bottle. Cost in Philippines: $1.50 a bottle. I buy the special 8 year old premium at the ruinously expensive $8 a bottle and cop some dirty looks for wasting money ).

And as night falls, it’s nice to live in the islands of paradise.

Which is all a bit shallow really. My new family is the real reason why I like living there.

Plus this guy of course … well him most of all … hehe that’s twice he’ll kill me now .

Glories of the free market

There are still dedicated socialists around somewhere I suppose. Proper ones I mean, not Barack Obama and Kevin Rudd and other moderate conservatives who get labelled as socialists by their political opponents the way children in the playground use meaningless names to denigrate kids they don’t like. Assuming such genuine socialists exist they are sad creatures, still committed to a preposterous ideal, oblivious to the overwhelming empirical evidence that it’s an empty dream.

Virtually all conservatives would agree with those sentiments, which is why I puzzle over their sustained commitment to the childish delusion that the free market is the road to prosperity and happiness … a puerile fantasy that has been empirically refuted every bit as convincingly as the socialist pipe dream.

I’m just back from my other home in the Philippines. Two of my partner’s sisters have just had babies - one arrived a week before I got there. He’s a bonnie boy, healthy and handsome. The other one was not so lucky.

The second baby was born 10 days ago. First complication: long labour. After 12 hours, our brother came to visit our apartment to tell us the doctor wanted to do a caesarian. He wanted our advice. What he really meant was to ask if we would pay for it. Because the harsh truth is that without pre-payment there will be no caesarian. That’s how the free market works in this ex-US colony. No money, no treatment. What could be more Hayekian than that?

Excuse me if this is an angry post. I can’t vent in the Philippines because smooth interpersonal relations take priority over everything, so I will vent here instead.

Anyway naturally we said we would pay, which means hunting around for an ATM and providing the money right there and then. None of this credit bullshit - in a perfect market the money has to get paid in advance.

Somewhere along the line I found out this nice piece of information: our sister-in-law (wife of the brother of my partner, if you want the precise relationship) has ‘manas’. No I didn’t know what that meant either but thanks to the magic of Google I soon found out. Manas is beriberi. You know, that disease that Australian prisoners of war suffered from when they came home in 1945. Seems it’s quite common amongst the poor in this ex-US colony where the free market reigns supreme, without taint from government interference.

Beriberi is caused by thiamin deficiency, brought on by an absence of vitamin B1 in the diet. People who eat little but refined rice suffer from it, which describes my extended family pretty well. Refined rice costs about 50 cents a kilo and a little goes a long way. A typical meal for my family consists of a big pot of rice with maybe a small fish. Good days there might be two fish. Fruit? Vegetables? Hahahahahaha. How are they supposed to afford such luxuries? They have to pay rent. They have to pay for electricity (it comes from an illegal connection to the grid but it still costs). They have to buy water. I have no idea how they buy any of these things since they have bugger-all income, but somehow they get by. Fruit and veg however are luxuries that seldom grace their table (that’s a flight of fancy, needless to say. They have no table. To eat, they sit on the floor).

Anyway the baby was born poorly. I have been unable to get any sensible description of her ailments, possibly because any halfway competent doctor does not work in the Manila public hospital system. Pursuant to the logic of the market they go to the private system, or if they are even tolerably capable they go overseas. After all this is the magic of the market; it will encourage more and more Filipinos to study medicine so they can go and work in Europe or the USA and eventually the market will be in equilibrium. The great god market is an awesome thing.

The baby required a blood transfusion, for which the family had to go and buy the blood. Hey, it’s the free market in operation. What could be more efficient than families of sick people having to go and buy blood on the open market when they want to stop a baby dying? The price they are willing to pay will send a signal to blood suppliers. It’s called catallaxy. Hayek would be hugging himself with glee. It’s a bit hard to find blood on a Sunday afternoon but our family managed somehow, after I kicked in a few thousand more pesos.

Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to have done much good. Latest news is that the baby ‘is not good’, which I think is code for the baby is dying. She continues to get treatment courtesy of a regular supply of pesos from the family which of course they get from me. When I ask what would happen if I wasn’t on the scene I get a shrug of the shoulders. “Bahala na.” Leave it to god.

I should have mentioned that the father of the baby - my partner’s brother - is skinny as a rake. His hair is unnaturally thin for a 30 year old. He coughs a lot, even though he doesn’t smoke. He has blood in his faeces. I’ve told him to go to a hospital for proper tests and I will pay. He won’t. He is a proud man and won’t take charity from some foreigner. I’ve told him I expect him to die fairly soon. The answer? “Bahala na”. Of course poor people die … that’s just the way life is. Trying to eat a proper diet, live in a decent house, get regular medical treatment … these are things that rich people do. My family’s incapacity to even begin to confront their problems is not only practical, it’s cultural. After a lifetime spent in abject poverty they are literally incapable of imagining any other life.

Smug wankers in the USA and here blather complacently about the joys of freedom and Western civilisation that await the inhabitants of Iraq and Afghanistan and other benighted countries if only they would recognise where their best interests are and accept the tutelage of a great and powerful BFF in the United States of America. I cannot comprehend why more people don’t point to the Philippines: a nation of almost 100 million people that was a US colony for more than 50 years and remains to a large extent a US economic dependency. If I was an Iraqi or an Afghan and I saw what the bastard yanks had done to the Philippines I would tell them to piss off right now and take their infantile free market ideology with them.

Supporting the troops

A few weeks ago, the US Department of Homeland Security sent out a routine bulletin to various law enforcement agencies. The bulletin gave a quick overview of the risks posed to internal security by extremist right wing groups. All very sensible and unexceptionable to normal people, I would have thought.

Naturally it sent the loopier wingnuts into a frenzy of hysterical baying about how the socialists in the White House were setting up a police state and it would only be a matter of time before Republicans were locked up in concentration camps. It was all very predictable and funny, tempered only by the worrying thought that some of them might actually have believed the ridiculous conspiracy theories and/or be incapable of differentiating ‘right wing extremist who might be plotting a terrorist act’ from ‘dipshit blogger who writes rubbish about Obama at Nation Review Online’.

The part of the bulletin that really brought out the red-faced arm-waving apoplexy was the suggestion that some ex-military people might need greater-than-usual watching to make sure they weren’t up to mischief. They didn’t come out and say that anyone who’s been wandering Iraq for a few tours of duty carrying a variety of lethal weapons, unaccountable to any civil authority, might be more inclined than most people to resort to violence when faced with a perceived injustice back home, but I wouldn’t have thought they needed to. Pretty bloody obvious, if you ask me. Especially when there have been repeated reports that troops returning fron Iraq and Afghanistan are suffering a high incidence of emotional trauma.

Of course the wingnuts were having none of it. This was nothing but an Appalling Insult to Our Soldiers, all of whom are heroes fighting for truth and justice and the American way and are about as likely to want to kill Americans as Nancy Reagan was.

Therefore it’s not surprising that this story seems to have been studiously ignored in the wingnut publications:

Five American service members were killed at a counseling center on an American military base in Baghdad on Monday, gunned down by a fellow soldier who was later taken into custody, military officials said.

But I’m sure none of them would even dream of hurting fellow-American civilians.

Ungrateful bastards

Can you believe the nerve of some of these Iraqis?

The new regime in Iraq raised the slogan of lifting oppression from deprived Iraqis. But six years passed and Iraqis are still waiting for their dreams to come true. It was worthless waiting because the new comers followed the policy of former regime by giving food for the satisfied bellies and left the hungry mouths eating air. Again Iraqi regime and his followers have every thing and Iraqi poor people are looking for shelters in overseas lands. In the new Iraq still the lands and the houses are given to those who are not in need. The officials and politicians now have properties in the highest neighborhoods and the poor in Iraq feel bitterness.

Haha like anyone said anything about improving the lives of Iraqis. Someone should tell her that TEH 2007 SURGE WORKED, which was why we invaded in 2003. Victory is ours and as she admits, she’s no worse off than she was before. WTF is her problem? Apart from the fact a few friends and family members got killed along the way and more are refugees and even more got injured, and as our late grubby prime minister Howard sagely opined, this is a small price to pay for taking down a regime that he believed might at some future date support another terrorist attack on the Glorious Imperial Homeland.

Damn whiny bitch.