Housing 

....seems to be a constant issue, in our neck of the woods. But it is not just the 'Ville struggling to keep a roof over everyone's heads. How do we find solutions, permanently? How do we address once and for all, the social issues faced by tropical areas - often prone to cyclones and heavy winds? 

We innovate. We use Bio Mimicry. Bio mimicry - put simply, is the use of nature's ways, to our advantage. If we work with nature, we have a much better chance at creating lasting living spaces, and global longevity. I must ask the question: If we destroy this planet, where are we going to live? 

As the warm weather edges towards summer, lets talk about SOLUTIONS, and focus less on problems. 

Nuclear Japan #2

Nuclear Japan

By:  Kap, Cagle Cartoons, Spain



The end of the bookstore (as we know it)?

Makes you wonder hey?

Australia Day 2011

Something to think about while waving the flag tomorrow:

• "Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it". ~ George Bernard Shaw

• "Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception." ~ George Orwell

• "Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. "Patriotism" is its cult. ~ Erich Fromm

• "A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and a common fear of its neighbors". ~ W. R. Inge

•  "Born in iniquity and conceived in sin, the spirit of nationalism has never ceased to bend human institutions to the service of dissension and distress." ~ Thorstein Veblen

• "There is a higher form of patriotism than nationalism, and that higher form is not limited by the boundaries of one's country; but by a duty to mankind to safeguard the trust of civilization." ~ Oscar S. Strauss

• "Nationalism ... is like cheap alcohol. First it makes you drunk, then it makes you blind, then it kills you." ~ Dan Fried

• "Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind." ~ Albert Einstein

• "Nationalism is a silly cock crowing on his own dunghill." ~ R. Aldington

• "It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars." ~  Arthur C. Clarke

• “Patriotism is proud of a country's virtues and eager to correct its deficiencies; it also acknowledges the legitimate patriotism of other countries, with their own specific virtues. The pride of nationalism, however, trumpets its country's virtues and denies its deficiencies, while it is contemptuous toward the virtues of other countries. It wants to be, and proclaims itself to be, "the greatest," but greatness is not required of a country; only goodness is.” ~  Sydney J. Harris

• “(Nationalism is) a set of beliefs taught to each generation in which the Motherland or the Fatherland is an object of veneration and becomes a burning cause for which one becomes willing to kill the children of other Motherlands or Fatherlands” ~ Howard Zinn

• “Patriotism is a religion, the egg from which wars are hatched.” ~ Guy de Maupassant

• “Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.” ~ George Bernard Shaw

• “Patriotism - the virtue of the vicious.” ~ Oscar Wilde

• “You’ll never have a quiet world until you knock the patriotism out of the human race.” ~ George Bernard Shaw

See also: Australia Day — No time to celebrate by Jay McDonald

Great activists never die - their tactics live forever

This story about residents of the small British town of Stony Stratford borrowing every single book from their local library in an attempt to stop it from being closed reminded me of an extraordinary 70-something who led a similar revolt (invented the tactic?) some 35 years ago - against the State Library in Adelaide.

Arthur Mortimer was what you'd call a radical librarian - as I remember him, a rather eccentric retiree who rode a bike, read nooks to children and kept time with a alarm clock (wind-up and with bells) that he carried in his shoulder bag.

The post-Vietnam 70's in Adelaide were (amongst other things) the days of the community media movement - a reaction during the late-60's and 70's to the corporatisation of the mainstream media and governments' manipulation of them during the Vietnam days. Pre-Internet and before Julian Assange was born, the community media movement ultimately gave rise to the network of community based non-profit broadcasters we have today.

Interwoven with the community media movement, community information activists (a combination of welfare workers and librarians such as Arthur) were agitating for community access and control over information - activism which led to the network of Citizens Advice Bureaus and Community Information Centres we see today around the country.

And it was within this context that Arthur committed himself to getting library services into the information and cultural desert that was the working class western suburbs of Adelaide.

Again, as my memory records it, Arthur's first step was to get a few mates together and create the organisation C.R.O.W. ("Concerned Residents of the West") - giving his one-man movement organisational legitimacy and gravitas and a base from which to launch his demands for a fair go for the West. 

From there, Arthur launched two most stunning (and ultimately successful) tactics:

• Assembling about 100 mates and mates mates, Arthur led a march from the SA Parliament down North Terrace past the Gov's place to the State Library where they preceeded to borrow all of the fiction under 'A' and warn that they would be back the following week for the B's etc.  As I remember he got front page of The Advertiser on Monday and we never had to go back for the B's

• Creating a national security alert (and national press coverage - about library funding!!!) when he sent egg powder in envelopes to federal Cabinet (or was it all federal MPs?) along with extracts from Horton Hatches the Egg by Dr. Seuss (a slightly obtuse reference to the '75 Whitlam Government's Inquiry into Public Libraries chaired by one Mr Horton).

All great fun at the time but, the thing is, Arthur won!! - as Susan Marsden notes in her A History of Woodville (1977) (pdf here):

The "West" had long been deprived of good, local library services, and public agitation, led by the humorous, but determined C.R.O.W.'s ("Concerned Residents of the West") stimulated a profound change at State library level to a direct involvement with local libraries. The most dramatic period of expansion in public library services, provided in co-operation with Councils, was between 1977-1979 when 10 new services came into operation in the Western region, three of these in Woodville.

You won't find much about Arthur on-line although I did find this reference which is held in the SA State Library: Information and power : an activist view.

I wonder if Julian Assange has read it?

Enough for now.  Sometime remind me to tell you the story of the Dewhurst's - a couple who saved some 300 young men from going to Vietnam from their Northern suburbs lounge room.

Of dogs and defrauders and dams

Koala 049
Pic: George Hirst, Magnetic Times

Reading in the Magnetic Times of another koala killing by domestic dogs on the island is a stark and bloody reminder of our apparent inability as a species to live in some sort of harmony with our environment.

Other recent examples include:

• Big Agriculture's arguing that a once in 100 year flood event means that attempts to rescue the Murray should be put on hold - unbelievable!  Read Gary Sauer-Thompson's full post here at Public Opinion

• Tony Abbott and Barney Joyce's response to a whole heap of people who built/brought on a flood plain ending up wet (and to Julia wining the daily news cycle for the past week or more with pics of her hugging damp Queenslanders) - a committee of farmer-MPs (presemably expert in hydrometeorology, surface hydrology and hydrogeology), to compile a list of dam sites! He didn't actually commit to build them but imagine if he did - just before a 1 in 200 year flood event. See also Ruchira Talukdar's response here at The Punch

Sadly, all true stories I'm afraid

Labour market policy 101 - victimise the most vulnerable

From Paul Norton's letter to the Fairfax press - published in Larvatus Prodeo today:

The Federal Government’s response to the National Welfare Rights Network’s call for an increase in the unemployment benefit is, predictably, to reject this call on the grounds that the best way to help the unemployed is to help them to find work. This is humbug, for two reasons.

The first is that the unemployed are hindered, rather than helped, in their job seeking efforts by things such as undernourishment, lack of medical care, poor mental health, bad teeth, underspending on clothes and grooming, and unstable housing situations, which are all predictable consequences of having to live on the current level of unemployment benefit.

The second is that the Federal Treasurer is on record as claiming that an unemployment rate of 4.75 per cent – that is, about 500,000 people on the dole – is “consistent with full employment”.

The result is that the unemployed are currently being crucified between two metaphorical thieves which have robbed modern Labor of its intellectual and moral fibre – on one side, economic policy orthodoxy based on neoliberal dogma concerning the supposed “non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment”, and on the other, tabloid and focus group mythology about “dole bludgers”.

I also liked this contribution by 'Huggybunny' at comment #8 to Paul's post:

When I started work the unemployment rate was about 1%, Menzies was in power and all the “reffos” were working two shifts. You could walk out the gate of one factory and into the gate of the next and change jobs in five minutes.
Now you need an email account, a CV, a resume and a degree in Horde(Horse?)Management as well as some smart clothes. Nice tits and teeth help if you are a female.
Oh yes it was a brave new world back then, the free market and Capitalism had triumphed over despotism and despair.
It was to be only a matter of time before the socialist revolution took over and we would all be free.
So what have we got?
Despotism rules in most of the globe.
Imperialism runs rampant.
The bees are dying
The fish are dying
The wildlife is dying
The water is polluted
The air is polluted
The climate is on the cusp of thermal runaway.
Sorry Pandora, Ben, Meg and Nell, I will do my best to fix it before I go.
Huggy

The real meaning of xmas

Via Planet Irf

Is Wikileaks making an ememy in Murdoch?

Isn't it interesting that the Fairfax Press seem to be doing all the running on the Wikileaks story - all of the Australia related leaks (Arbib the Cabinet rat, howAfghanistan scares the hell out of Rudd etc) have been reported first on the front page of The Age.

Perhaps Wikileaks are doing here what they are doing globally - that is, not providing a feed to any Murdoch owned press.  Globally, they  provide advances of what they will publish online to The Guardian, The New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and El Pais - not one Murdoch rag among them.

Smart man that Maggie Island kid, Assange.  Makes me wonder whether News Corp will be one of the global mega-businesses that Assange has warned Wikileaks has files on and plan to release soon.

Now that would be fun!

This is not funny!

I can think of a dozen funny lines I could have written about this headline but read the story.  Psychometric testing is standard practice for any business of size and should be mandatory for all aspiring politicians.

Myers-Briggs and the like are hardly "new-age" (well perhaps so in Murdoch's empire where head-kicking 101 seems to be the only criteria for promotion).  And while they would do a good job of weeding out at least the worst of the megalomaniacs, wankers, evolution-deniers, thieves and idiots, I'm not sure how such instruments could be calibrated to (safely) take account of ego - that essential ingredient in political success which is usually the last thing you look for in a good CEO or leader.

Howard deseves more...a LOT more

Peter Gray explains why he felt compelled to throw his shoes at John Howard on QandA:

Well said!  But he deserves to have a lot more than shoes thrown at him - like "the book"

Explaining the US mid-term election results

America frightens me at the best of times, but the swing to the radical right evident in the mid-term election results scares me absolutely sh*tless.

Think about this graph and what it is likely to mean over the next couple of decades in countries with similar demographics (like Oz) - voluntary voting or not.  Think too about the backlash that will come from under-30's as they have less and less power in the process. 

My guess is that the next wave of new music will emerge over the next 2-3 years - about the time that we should expect the rise of the next anarchist, neo-Nazi, and hippie movements

Via The Daily Dish

Are you a Planet killer?

I just love the work of John Sherffius

What a damn good idea

Although, given our experience in Townsviile, I'd suggest that candidates in Council elections should also be similarly banned from accepting money from the alcohol industry! 

And then, if industry advertising was banned we might also finally get some balanced reporting on the real costs to taxpayers of the alcohol industry.



An Indigenous woman speaks out

The following posted by Ken Parish at Club Troppo first caught my attention because it mentioned a common old firend - when I saw Bob Durnan's name I knew the piece would be worth reading.  Turns out it is a must read and is cross-posted in full below:

An Indigenous woman speaks out

Bob Durnan is an old ALP colleague who has worked in Indigenous communities in central Australia for the best part of 30 years. Like me, he has witnessed the tragic deterioration of living conditions in many if not most remote communities and town camps in the Northern Territory over that period of time. As such Bob is a strong supporter of many aspects of the Howard government-initiated NT Intervention, especially the income management system.
Bob has just emailed me a copy of what I think is a very important speech delivered to the Australian Alliance of Lawyers last Friday in Alice Springs by Bess Price, a senior Warlpiri woman from Yuendumu.

The background is the release last week of the Bath Report into children’s services in the NT, which revealed that not much had improved in that area since the “Little Children Are Sacred” report which triggered the Intervention in 2007. NT Minister Kon Vatskalis said last week:

“The communities out there are in total collapse. There is a crisis in the communities,” Mr Vatskalis said.

“Yesterday, I was thinking, I said where is the person like Martin Luther King to come out and say ‘I’ve got a dream?’, because I can’t see anybody in the Indigenous community at the moment coming out and saying ‘I’ve got a dream’ and lead the communities. There is no leadership.”

Ms Price is certainly an Indigenous leader whose voice needs to be heard more widely.

My mother and father were born in the desert. They lived their childhood out of contact with whitefellas. They were terrified when they first saw a whitefella. They taught me the Old Law that our people lived by. That Law worked when we were living in tiny family groups taking everything that we needed from the desert. It is Sacred Law. There was strong Law for sacred business. If the sacred Law was broken both men and women could be killed. There was strong Law for who we could marry. Men had the power of life and death over their wives. Young girls were forced into marriage. Men too had no choice in who they married. There was no law for property except that everything must be shared. There was no law for money because we didn’t have any. There was no law for houses, cars, grog, petrol or drugs – we didn’t have any except for bush tobacco which was shared like everything else we had. The only way to punish was physically, by beating or killing the law breaker. They couldn’t be fined, we had no money or wealth to take. They couldn’t be locked up, we had no jails.

Everybody knew what they had to do to make sure that everybody survived. We all knew how to make a living from our country. We lived from day to day. Everybody was taught to fight. We only had our family to defend us. We had no army, no police, no courts. Everybody needed to know how to use a weapon, women and men both learned to fight and knew they would have to do that sometime. We also believe that our Law Man can make magic, they can heal the sick but they can also make people sick and die by magic. That is what all my people believe. We kept the peace by fear of violence and magic.

Now we live in a world ruled by a new law that is not sacred, that doesn’t accept that magic exists. Now we are all equal citizens with human rights. Now we have property, houses, cars, grog, drugs, pornography. Now we live off welfare, other people’s money or we need to get a whitefella education and get a job. We still share everything and this keeps us poor. We can’t say ‘no’ to our family even when we know they are drinkers and gamblers and will waste our money or destroy themselves with it. Now too many of our men still think they have the power of life and death over their wives. My people think all property should be shared and we think whitefellas are just greedy and stingy. We don’t plan for the future, we don’t budget or invest – we share and consume. All this has happened too quickly.

The Bath report on the failure of child protection in the NT tells us that our kids live in a chaotic world where they are at terrible risk. My community of Yuendumu has been torn apart by feuding. These problems show us that government has failed but is also shows us that Aboriginal Law has failed too. Aboriginal organisations have failed as well. Aboriginal politics that focused on the ‘Stolen Generation’ and ‘Deaths in Custody’ also failed. Aboriginal politicians forgot about our women and kids, forgot about the violence on the remote communities, forgot about the problems we are causing for ourselves. We can’t just keep blaming the government without taking our share of the blame. That is the only way we can find our own way out of these problems.

Our old Law worked really well in the old days but it was not about human rights. It was about unconditional loyalty to kin, to family and following the sacred Law. It was about capital and physical punishment. There were wise old people who tried to make sure that there was justice. But they are all dying now. Those like my own parents who were born and grew up in the bush, are all getting very old and passing away. But even they could not stop the grog and the violence that came from the new world we were living in. There is nothing in our old Law that helps us deal with grog and drugs. All these new things that whitefellas brought in we have no law for. But we still respect our ancestors and we still want to keep our culture. The Two Laws, whitefella and blackfella, are based on opposing principles. My people are confused. If they go the blackfella way they break whitefella law, if they go whitefella way they break blackfella law. Our young men are caught in the middle, they are still initiated into the old Law but they live in a world run by the new law, that’s why they fill up the jails.

Con Vaskalis is right when he says that we don’t have effective leadership. We have wonderful old people who know the old Law but are confused and worried by the new. They are truly wise when they have real authority, when they are in small, family based communities away from towns. They are ignored by the drinkers and the young people who are rushing to take the benefits of the whitefella way without learning whitefella law. Too many don’t know either law now. We have Aboriginal people who speak out all the time but don’t live in the communities and don’t speak an Aboriginal language – who don’t have any idea what life is like for my people. We have Aboriginal people who others call leaders who we know are only looking after their own families, their own interests and not those of the whole community. We have very good people who want to do the right thing but are too worried and confused and who are continually grieving over the deaths of their loved ones.

We have white radicals and NGO’s with their own agendas who want to use us like political footballs. When we women talk out about our problems they either ignore us or tell the world that we are liars and trouble makers. Some of my people who carry on about human rights and attack governments every time they try to do anything new run away from their own kin and communities when there is trouble. They never find it hard to find a gullible human rights lawyer to back them up in public but they don’t do anything in their own communities to make things better for their own people.

Too many lawyers are only interested in the rights of the perpetrators. Because they are worried about racism and they don’t like a particular government they will do what ever they can to make sure that murderers and rapists and child abusers are protected from the new law. They will only advocate acknowledging traditional law when they think it will work better for their clients, the perpetrators. But they don’t know how the old Law worked. They never worry about the victims who are also Aboriginal and victims of racism, who have had their basic human rights ignored and trampled on by members of their own communities, their own families. It seems to us that human rights lawyers only worry about the black victims when the perpetrators are white. It is not somehow more acceptable to be raped, abused and murdered when the one doing it to you has the same colour skin.

Our problem is that we want to keep our culture. We want to respect our ancestors and their Law but we also want to be equal citizens and we want human rights. We can’t do that without changing our Law. But we need to change it ourselves, others can’t do that for us. Only we can solve our own problems and we will do it in our own way. But we really need the support of governments and our fellow citizens. You need to listen to the voices that are usually drowned out by the strong, the noisy and the powerful. You need to find a way to listen to those who don’t speak English, who are the most marginalised and victimised in our own communities. You need to listen to our own women and young people, the ones who don’t have a voice under the old Law. If you really want us to have human rights then you have to find ways to protect the victims of black crime as well as white crime.

There is no such thing as a Vegan

Via Gizmodo

Just how powerful are the churches?

When you consider that some 75% of Australian women and GP's support the removal of abortion from the Criminal Code, you really have to wonder what Anna and John-Paul are afraid of (other than the right-wing of both their parties)?  I'd say the men who represent/control the 19% of people who go to church at least monthly

Setting Sons

Mr Fish has to be one of the sharpest cartoonists around.  This piece, both beautiful and profound, truly makes U think - exactly as a good editorial cartoon should!

Setting Sons by Mr Fish:

The furture of the Australian health system?

One American's $76,000 bill for an emergency appendectomy.  From the market controlled health system that Tony Abbott use as the model for Australia