breathe

Well it has been a very long time between drinks, as I waited for a suitable, appropriate, telling, devastatingly insightful (you get the picture) moment to celebrate blog the one thousandth number.

I have been tempted, ohlord have I been tempted. The actions of the UK government give no pause for thought as they embark on the further enrichening of the rich classes, and you know who that leaves. It's a neoliberal project of biblical scale and, almost assuredly because of aforesaid scale, the wheels will come off in a very big, almost enormous, way at some stage.

Australian politics at any level is leaving me - along with a goodly proportion of the Australian public, it would seem - feeling more or less meh, if you follow me.

The US continues its fine tradition of allowing, nay encouraging, its citizens to not only bear arms but to use them. Frequently. No links, I know you will have read the stories.

And I've been on the lookout for the whimsical, the wry, the gently cynical insights into the human condition that make blogging of that ilk so incredibly popular. And lightweight. Except for xkcd, of course.

And all along the wearying burden of knowing that my devoted readership (11 followers? Say again? Don't you people have anything better to do with your time?) have been waiting in anticipation. More than likely breathless anticipation because, as we all know, most anticipation is indeed breathless.

But for nought. What possibly could substantiate this epochal hopping into print?

OK then: this.

It's kind of political, it's certainly got a galaxyful of whimsy about it, it's not cheap or nasty, maybe it falls short of real human condition type stuff but it tells us a story.

And now I can take another breath.

For reasons that some readers may divine and others don't need to bother about, we are living in interesting time.

Keeping on breathing is going to be critical.

god only knows

so Mrs VVB is flicking through the TV channels and suddenly there's Tony Abbott and I hear him say "...like you, sir, we are one nation indivisible under God..."

At that stage I started ranting and Mrs VVB was obliged to, again, (a) warn me of the dangers of going on like that and (b) change the channel.

Umm...we're not, are we?

Also, I suspect in this case 'sir' is capitalised.

history never repeats

But one thing that you can bet will be repeated until your eardrums turn to something probably resembling licorice:

"Labor's gigantic big new tax."

You didn't hear that here first, either.

In the past I've kind of banged on about why government by targets supported by bureaucratic sausage machines doesn't work. I've noted that Blair introduced it with a vengeance in the UK, it didn't work, and of course that nice Mr Rudd is doing the same thing here, where the result will - unsurprisingly - be similar.

Today someone asked me did I "do the math" or "do the maths." I said that when I went to school, I studied mathematics, not mathematic.

Well, actually "studied" is not the completely accurate term. John McGee, you did well as a maths teacher. You taught both of them.

Vis-a-vis the introduction of more Americanisms into our lingua franca, something else has got up my throat recently but it's been dislodged. I think because I came to the conclusion that I, too, had allowed the cultural hegemon to slide a few of its popularly accepted neologisms into my cranial cavity.

Cavity being the operative word.

I'm now quite tired and am going to (a) pack for yet another trip and then (b) have a good lie down.

Good night, Mr Abbott. You just stay away from that naughty 'Cardinal' Pell.

parallel lines

You'd reckon if you were a well resourced company using a well established ad agency, that the visual (whatever the technical term is) bods would be able to get things right?

Case in point: an ad in today's paper for some way upmarket condominia in the Gold Coast. Picture of said building - looked mostly real - with a Porsche at the portico, well dressed lady and uniformed doorman.

Except if you followed the perspective, the car was sitting about 2 feet clear of the ground.

Similar mistake is made in an ad for some insurance company: again, a lady walking away from a car but the car is floating.

I guess it's all about saving dollars, but surely the sorts of people who flog Gold Coast condominia mix in the social circles where someone has a Porsche that can be borrowed for an hour or two so that some pictures can be taken.

Alternatively, if you are going to hire uni students to do the Photoshopping (or, more likely, ask them to pay you for the privilege - work experience don't you know) at least extend the proofreading to having a good squizz at the photos to ensure they're within the realm of the physically possible.

Ya dig?

In other universes the Scots - who, as we all know, are raving socialists - get a tad upset about capitalism the way she is now practised.

And finally, they should replace all the Kyle Sandilandses of this world with Ross Gittins. They say the truth will out, it'd be nice if it happened sooner and in a more widespread fashion than is occurring because of the infatuation with Malcolm.

Oh, no infatuation? Don't give him the airtime, then.

masters of war

Oh, John Howard, the gift that keeps on giving. I spent three years (*) in a barely controlled fury - oh all right, a complete, insane, illogical ball of seething hate - searching for the words to describe, to encapsulate the essence of, the previous Prime Minister and so seek to explain why he did what (I thought he) did to the country.

Norman Abjorensen does far, far better:

"It was watching this that made me think what it is about Howard that provokes
such antipathy in many of us, and it is this: Howard is the resentful reactionary that we all seek to overcome in ourselves."

"...Howard and his own peculiar small dream of suburban Australia."

And as for Alexander Downer ("who seems to have been interviewed after lunch") describing himself as a a "warrior": what is it about the self described "hard right" that deludes them into thinking themselves as hard men when, inevitably, it's other people who pay the cost, with their livelihoods in a domestic sense and their lives in the case of war?

Puke.

You know what, I'm starting to feel cleansed.

Sort of.

(*) It probably felt like 30 to Mrs VVB.

*Update - the gift that keeps on giving, indeed.

I asked them what their leader's secret might be, given he seemed to have all the
charisma of a stoat, and yet he had a habit of sneaking through to victory at the hustings. 'Dog-whistling', they replied."

parliament

The state of the conservatives in the UK gives you this:

I have to say i saw a Tory MP on tv last night saying selection should be about 'merit and ability' nothing else, then can the Tories explain why they are discriminating against white, straight men please?

I loved this comment: don't you love the tension between the nickname and views expressed and the given address?

An English parliament is what we need. So if voting Tory encourages the Scots to
complete independence then that is fine. I would prefer the English to make a
decision on this but who really cares how it happens. Brown/Cameron/Campbell are all useless so wake up England vote for England.

bobbyboy, Prague, Czech Republic

And it all leads almost inexorably to this (bloody hell, what a tangled web this story is).

Anyway, let me leave you on a lighter, if not louder, note. I remember when Monica Seles emerged on the tennis scene and how off putting her grunts were. Then recently we've had the shrieking of Mario Sharapova. Apparently it's going to get worse, but this time 'they' might do something about it.

I put a lot of faith in 'them', so I hope 'they' do.

Now, I want to know what Schopenhauer has to say about the great Jaffa Cake / biscuit debate."

As do we all, no doubt. Read it and weep, or exhibit some other more appropriate response.

macarena

You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll do both at once:

"It's hard trying to do the Lord's work in the city of Satan."

"We're the dead-meat party," she said. "We need to be the happy meal."

"Twitter is the Internet's macarena."

You couldn't make it up. For rooly.

Via Bookforum, as always.

What else? Dunno. Tomorrow's Friday, promises to be a big day workywise, quite looking forward to it. Get to see the bull elephants in action, learn how it's done. I've been in the workforce for coming up to 40 years, you'd think I'd have figured it out by now, eh? I'm a firm believer in the 'you never stop learning' school.

Well, some people probably stopped learning shortly before they ever started. Example 1. Example 2 (read the comments especially).

You understand why they didn't open Example 1 to comments.

No wonder there's wars.

don't look back in anger (2)

Well I said there wouldn't be anything this week and, true to my word, here it is. Probbaly less than nothing, truth be told.

Mrs VVB and I were sitting through yet another news bulletin whose first item commenced with "The Opposition has..."

Doesn't really matter what verb follows: "claimed"; "accused"; or "combusted in a freak industrial accident." Every single damn flamin' piece of alleged reporting is framed by something the Opposition (or actually Oppositions plural, as Turnbull and Barrrrnabbby are not so much on different song sheets but rather one's singing and the other's planting melons, or something) has claimed.

This Government led by Kevin Rudd is proving less ept by the minute, but they're still the bloody elected government and it would be nice, it'd be a bloody change, if people including alleged reporters could get over the fact that the Coalition actually lost the last election. Despite what it may appear to them, it's not the end of the bloody world, it's not Armageddon.

Although this cartoon may lead you to think otherwise.

/rant

people are strange

"nice tie
we're fucked
i like your tie"

Explanation.

So...

Can you not see the connection between the majority bullying a gifted pupil, and the tax robbery of the country's minority wealth creators?

Well, not immediately, no.

We all know Americans get fixated, well boy do they get fixated.

More fixation of a very different kind:

"I field 800-900 emails a day."

Sound highly unlikely, doesn't it? 800?

Yes, I'm still up.

minor epic failure

So now Turnbull and his assorted bunch of assortments are in high dudgeon because Kevin (that'll be the PM to you, sonny) has only just announced/conceded/boasted that Australia is officially in recession, and he wouldn't previously, so obviously he's covering something up.

Remind me, please, because my memory is crap, just how many minutes ago was it that the same assortments were tearing into Wayne Swan for talking down the economy?

As I believe the contemporary parlance has it:

Consistency: epic FAIL.

Credibility: also EPIC fail.

I think you're meant to read 'fail' as 'failure', but whatevs.

come out swinging

Having been led to the on-line Australian - how on earth that happened I don't know - I learn that a group within the Liberal Party, known as the Big Swinging Dicks, are trying to bring down Julie Bishop.

I found this quite astonishing. Who would have guessed that anyone within the Libs had a dick?

Of course it's a Glen Milne article so it ends with a little snark intended to cast nasturtiums at Malcolm Turnbull so that Peter Costello can, according to some type of divine right apparent only to Milne and Costello himself, stroll into the leadership at some as yet undetermined time in the future.

Yawn.

But I did laugh about the dicks.

i wanna live the real life

The MSM and the blogosphere are all over the Costello thing and the current trials of the Libs. Not much attention is being paid to their Coalition partners the Nationals, although this article does touch on that particular element of the Coalition's current 'issues'.

We got a issues. Boy do we ever. I imagine I'm not alone in thinking that, in office, Kevin07 has fallen a bit short of our hopes and dreams. Then again, Howard's first term wasn't covered in any glory and he nearly got ousted at his first defence (damn! damn!). But the current Australian Government is by far the preferable choice right now, and for quite a while yet, I would contend.

I didn't think I'd run across anything that could add to the ongoing story. While my day was improved immeasurably by reading John Hewson's WWE takedown of Costello - and then tempered by the inevitable Glen Milne piece which, in a boringly predictable fashion, focused on Turnbull's failures as a way to promote Milne's hero, Costello, by implication.

Most of it's been on the money - I was very, very taken by Hewson's piece which simply brought out into the open what seemed to have been common knowledge amongst the policy and political wonk 'elites' - but any article which implies Costello was as good at his job as he'd like everyone to believe ("Costello embodies the lost era of competence and assuredness") essentially shoots itself in the foot in my book.

Wonder what the real people are doing?

out of touch

Two short thoughts - thought shorts, perhaps.

Whatevs.

1) Can we please replace "they're out of touch" as the current insult du jour for your political opponents. It's been done to death for a year or more. Exercise a little creativity.

2) The recent prevalence of references to Gough Whitlam by conservative politicians trying to scare us leads me to propose that we need a term, similar in intent to Godwin's Law, to apply to Whitlam. So, as anybody who brings Hitler into an argument can be automatically deemed to have lost the argument, so should reference to Gough. What should we call this (apart from desperate scaremongering, of course).

r.e.s.p.e.c.t.

"What is better working in retail or learning some respect?"

Buggered if I know, I never realised they were meant to be mutually incompatible.

Then again, it's just the youth branch of the Liberals trying to be clever so as to appear relevant to each other. I also particularly liked this:

"almost (note, almost) every President i can remember of the NSW YLs has been a
complete loser with no social skills. And Mr McCoy is a backstabbing arsehole anyway, so i wouldnt expect any less from him. "

He must be in retail.

All this is about the Young Libs' plan for a new version of national service - well actually petty slavery as the author of the above article quite rightly points out. So much for free enterprise and liberty, these evidently aren't core Liberal values any more (as if we should be surprised)any more.

have yourself a merry little Chistmas etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc tec etc etc etc etc etc

Via Bookforum, Christmas presents you'd not only rather not have, but not even wish to think about.

Not surprisingly, the Maggie Thatcher nutcracker - oh, how accurate! - tops the list.

And while we're here, all the usual and best compliments of the season to my devoted - um, yes well - little band of readers and here's hoping for a somewhat better 2009 than 2008 turned out to be in many ways.

My world is slightly emptier since I lost John Howard to whinge/complain/rant about, but on t'other hand my blood pressure is far better and the TV is no longer in danger of getting something solid thrown through it every 7 pm news.

Kevin 07 is predictably falling somewhat short of general expectations. It'd wouldn't be so bad if he wasn't recycling every proven-to-be-useless idea that Tony Blair ever came up with. As part of the machine and well experienced in the damage wrought by the law of unintended consequences, I could have told him how badly stupid targets and ill thought through plans and reporting frameworks usually end up.

The proposed internet filter is stupidity on wheels.

When I come home I usually go to Oz Politics first and I increasingly come to understand that stupid leftists are the cause of all the world's ills. There seems to be more of these sites and posts which I imagine is a result of the other 'side' having lost in Australia and the US. So I'll guess we'll just have to get used to that by doing the usual thing - ignoring it.

The pope is a candidate for taking out the back of the bike sheds.

And on that cheery note - ciao for niao. I am about to take the longest holiday I've ever taken since I started work on 8 December 1969...hmmm, better let one one rest.
But I shall return.

i've looked at clouds from both sides now

...and I still don't understand cloud computing.

Surely you need a box or something somewhere to connect..only connect, baby...

Meanwhile, Les Macdonald of Balmain gets it right in the SMH today.

Learning from our failures

It is a testament to the durability of ideology in the face of reality that we still have American consulting groups recommending the failed ideology of privatisation ("Push to privatise apprentice training", October 29).

These are the same US consulting groups that for 30 years have recommended to US companies that they send the jobs of US workers offshore, to the point where the US now lacks a viable manufacturing base. These same consultants said the US
would create post-industrial jobs in sophisticated service industries such as finance, IT and science.

But the IT and science-based industries also moved to China and India, leaving only finance and the low-skilled, low-paid service jobs. Again, with the active encouragement of the same consulting firms, the US government deregulated its finance industry. Reality intervened to turn that industry toxic. Why anyone with a functioning brain would continue to listen to the recommendations of such failures is beyond me.

Les MacDonald Balmain

Only I don't think it's just Amercan consultants still pushing that particular tired old barrow. Ideology is not only durable, it's kind of...expandable. Give it half a chance, it'll populate all the nooks and crannies it can find.

Meanwhile, here's a young man with an incipient problem. The video is a ripper, but apart from the young man's rant I was mostly taken with the Chrissy Amphlett clone standing behind him (maybe the next act?) and when the kid doing the videoing said "Holy God" at the end. As it was Corpus Christi College, could you expect no less I suppose.

Through most of the rant I was thinking, "hmmm, young Liberal stockbroker type in the making", except I rather suspect he might harbour Che Guevara-ish tendencies. Look out Mr Headmaster when you get back from India.

Unsettling, no? So let me lead you back to quiet contemplation: here's a picture of a blue garden setting in a green garden, which I am sure will give you lots to think about.

sweet blindness*

I came home from work just thinking that I needed to write something, anything, and then Kevin-oh-seven and ten months pops up on 7.30 Report. I listened for about 30 seconds and then went off to do the dishes. I am so over politicians dodging the questions or responding with "Now Kerry, what I need to tell you.." and so on. According to today's Crikey (subscription only and -disclosure - I'm currently on a freebie) it's called conversational blindness:

Rating political performance. I have a new way of putting interest into those
essentially dull and boring presidential television debates since reading the work of two American academics called Conversational Blindness: Answering the Wrong Question the Right Way. What Todd Rogers and Michael I. Norton from Harvard set out to discover is how politicians get away with not answering questions when appearing on television. What happens, they wondered, when people try to "dodge" a question they would rather not answer by answering a different question? They conducted two experiments demonstrated this conversational
blindness - listeners' surprising failure to notice such dodges – and explored the interpersonal consequences of this phenomenon.

They found that listeners viewed successful question-dodgers as positively as speakers who actually answered the question they are asked, but were not blind to all efforts to dodge: They both noticed – and punished – particularly egregious attempts. More troublingly, listeners preferred speakers who answered the wrong question well over those who answered the right question poorly.

I think it is one of those research papers that everyone interested in politics
should read for it helps those of us who hate politicians dodging the hard
questions from getting angry. Instead you can marvel, like I did yesterday, at
the skill with which Barack Obama employs to take advantage of conversational
blindness. That man has to be one of the best ever at sounding great while
saying absolutely nothing.

Well it may pass other people by but it gets right up my throat. On the other hand I had by this time already remarked to Mrs VVB that Red Kez was giving Kevin a much harder time than John (spit) Howard ever got until the dying months of his reign, and maybe it was time for the ABC Board to be purged of its ultra-conservative stackees.

Then I came back from the kitchen sink to hear Kerry asking about housing affordability and whether house prices will come down and the PM got visibly hot under the collar. Now we never saw this in Howard until close to the end so I have to say it wasn't a good look, but on the other hand it accompanied some straighter responses, in more everyday language, than the PM usually seems capable of managing. Even had a "you betcha" in there, he's obviously been into the reporting about Sarah Palin.

He really needs to dumb down the language just a smidgin though, even on the ABC.

So does

Miz Pants's observation hold? Well, it came before Christmas - in fact it's been coming for a while - but I'm not scorned, just a bit disappointed. But not all out of hope.

And of course, you just have to keep remembering the alternative.

And while I'm here, I guess, a couple of observations on the global financial crisis, about to become a global real economy crisis.

First, and I don't think I ever mentioned it here, America's debt overhang with China has been possibly the major structural imbalance that could not be sustained, regardless of any other factors that have contributed to us beingf where we are ("us" being the world, in this case, ie a very broad us).

And second, regardless of coordinated or individual action taken by governments or up-until-very-recently 'independent' central/reserve banks, the actual action is still in the hands of 23 year old screen jockeys with a very narrow mandate for action and absolutely no understanding, or more importantly duty of care, about the wider societal implications of their actions. That is very wrong and that is why we need regulation.

And an end to neoclassical economic responses to absolutely any and every situation, btw :-)

But it's also why jokes like this are so good at this time:

"What's the difference between a Wall Street banker and a pigeon?"

"A pigeon can still leave a deposit on a BMW."

Boom boom. And no BMWs at this year's Sydney Motor Show, where I'll be next week for the annual three amigos reunion.

On a more domestic note, it's raining, Whacko!

(*) Someone called Laura Nyro, it seems.

natural born woman party

As VVB has more or less disintegrated into a weekly, I was scratching around for something of interest. Something I thought I had noticed over recent weeks and months was that some blogs which I had previously thought either apolitical or only mildly 'conservative' in outlook had seemingly gone ferally rightwards. Australian blogs that barely seemed to mention politics have gone stratospherically supportive of Sarah Palin. Maybe because the liberal/left blogs have gone for her throat?

Then today this comment appeared this arvo at Larvatus Prodeo, about an apparent lowering of the volume at the 'leftist' blogs, because the 'enemy' (John Howard, doncha know) has gone.

There's something to it I think but I always struggle with perception vs reality. The easy way would be to leave a comment and check, but as a lifelong wuss who had regrettably had more aggro in recent months than he cares to think about (not here, another part of my life), I just honestly don't feel up to it. Even though I would hope that an evenly-worded, non-judgemental inquiry should elicit a fair and honest answer.

If it's true, what has brought it on? With the predictable result in WA, the short 'halcyon' period of coast-to-coast Labor governments has come to an undistinguished end. Do the supporters of the 'natural party of government' theory feel so wronged during those periods when the 'natural party' is not in power?

And other questions, such as do they not realise that have any party in power for a long time is a Bad Thing?

At times like this I'm glad that VVB has no academic pretensions beyond its proprietor's meagre intelligence and is simply free to ask the stupid questions.

silvery moon

That bright dot you can just see in the background is a new rising star for the Liberal Party. Oh all right, it's a moon then. Think of it as a metaphor. It's going to shine light over all it surveys. But being a moon, it'll be reflected light, yes?

So whose light will it reflect?

I really think it's hard to see Malcolm Turnbull as a stalking horse for any others in the Libs: he is his own man (quite apart from all the other things he owns, yeah cheap shot). To all appearances he is ideologically distant from the current eminences grises (extremely grise in the case of Nick Minchin) so how is he going to keep them down on the farm happy? Yeah sorry, it's the other lot who are down on the farm.

I had accumulated a whole truckload of snarks for a post tonight, but spending a couple of hours thinking about distributing responsibilities for the big bits ("deliverables", yuk yuk) of the business plan amongst the willing team has torn my poor ole brain to shreds.

John McCain said something diabolically funny, might have been about the US economy. But I think Kevin Rudd said exactly the same thing about the Australian economy today too.

The view of the moon of course comes to you direct from the viewing balcony here at VVB-by-the-sea. Which I might call VVBC in future. Hilarious, isn't it. My neck hurts, too much typing at an inappropriate desk - goodnight.

nevermind

So it's a Friday night and after watching a bit of the footy I thought I'd turn the new bigscreen over to Mrs VVB so she can watch whatever it is she watches and I'd come and look at a few blogs. As if this was different to...oh yeah.

Anyway, the 'sphere is alive to the celebration or condemnation, depending on your point of view, of Peter Costello and Sarah Palin. Just remind me, where do we live again?

So, Costello it is, then. Yawn. The AFR today does a fairly respectable deconstruction/ demolition of the Liberal Party "World's Greatest Treasurer" myth. At last, but what a pity it wasn't in the Telegraph. Maybe it was, but buggered if I'm going to go looking.

As for the "will he or won't he" for leader of the Libs: yawn. A confected media light breeze in a thimble. The only thing that gets me going - and no surprises here - is this thing about what a great leader he would have been. A brilliant Parliamentary performer. Well yes, exceptionally good with the snide, the sarcasm, the outrage, the put-down. Just what a nation wants in a PM. Look how useful and relevant to the job in hand the voting public thought those same qualities (only more erudite!) were in Keating. The great unwashed voting public actually do want a broader list of abilities in a PM. Most of them in fact don't watch Question Time. Amazing. Does the paid commentariat not realise this?

Answers on the back of a piece of paper that's been in Ian McLachlan's wallet to Liberal Party HQ, behind the bike sheds, Tuesday after school. And where's that other Costello fellow?

So instead I started fiddling about with the colours on the VVB template, then I started fiddling about with the new (well, new-ish) tools that Blogger has added and before you could say "eejit" I'd lost my old template.

Hence this new look. I think I quite like it, I'd be interested in any views. For those of you who really don't have a life :-)

The picture? That's the paternal grandfather sometime after he emigrated to Australia from Poland, so early 1900s. What a fine fellow he looks, although the stories seemed to indicate something different. Only met him once, I was about 4 or 5.

On which note, it's about time to check the footy scores.

A toute a l'heure.

Oh yeah, the picture. It's Afghanistan. Apparently everyone's going to send more troops to defeat the Taliban/al Qaida/"bad guys" there. I'd really be thinking hard about this, at least as long as the words complete victory figure in the political speeches that presage such actions. The politicians, and we've got 'em in Labor ranks, who make these statements really ought to go and read some history. Yes, times have changed, weaponry and technology is on our side (except for what can be bought on the black market etc etc) but it's a formidable field of battle. Just think twice, then a few more times.