Note: This file by early 2018 is being emptied to another set of files for website development purposes. - Ed
Page updated 26 December, 2017
Blog item, 19 October 2011.
Message to Occupy Wall Street Movement in USA: Capitalism is not going to go away because you are annoyed. Can you not see that the US media has been giving you the Positively 4th Street treatment? (Remember Bob Dylan?) Your focus could well be to see to the better regulation of Wall Street operators. That is right, more regulation, however un-American that might be perceived to be. The USA also needs a better calibre of politician. So you had better get out and vote on anything that can be voted on. Keep on truckin'. -Ed
(The USA Congress on TV news - night of 1 August 2011)
I was watching rocks ignite
at the volcano.
Just funnin*, just sayin* ...
Washington politics,
and them Republicans stormed out of the debate,
and they done gone off prayin*.
The dollar! The dollar! Mammon calls.
The Empire moves in, protective,
like the heart of darkness, brayin*
The foreigners plead, how could you do any of this
to yourselves, let alone us?
While the dogs of war are bayin*?
The Existential American said,
Who are you? Where are you? And where is the volcano?
No one here but us good old boys, layin*
down the law a bit more.
In God We Trust as we kiss rattlesnakes, swim in lava, and you betcha,
the devil you know is in the payin*.
Ain*t no way we gonna pay anything out!
We am that We am. Here*s the list of demands.
We ain*t decayin*,
and our imagination is our redoubt.
* Software problem
(Dan Byrnes - new poem of 1 August 2011, draft 1b - and sadly the volcano turned out to be the 2016-elected US President Donald Trump. Go figure on what happened then in the USA!)
This website feels vindicated: This website today feels vindicated as to its long-term editorial policy on the Iraq War (which is probably called in Iraq, The American War, though no one in the West seems to ask). We have just seen on TV a former US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, giving her considered opinion, about which she is gravely troubled - the Iraq War is the greatest disaster in the history of American foreign policy. This is correct, we feel. (Evening TV news, 26 March 2008)
See, Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, The Three Trillion Dollar War. Penguin, 2008, 336pp. (America's Iraq War is the most expensive war the US has ever been involved in excepting WWII. There are seven US soldiers wounded for every fatality, compared with 2.6 injuries per death in Vietnam. An economic adviser to President Bush, said the war would cost US$200 million and "be good for the economy". Defence Secretary Rumsfeld dismissed this and said it would cost US$50-60 billion. Paul Wolfowitz, US deputy-Secretary for Defence, thought the exercise would pay for itself. By 2008, the war costs US$12.5 billion per month, or US$16 billion per month if Afghanistan is included. This does not include the cost of health care for veterans of the war. The entire situation is also being run on the never-never, and the USA's grandchildren will have to pay for it.)
Dear Editor, I'm sorry to finish this letter, because of the suffering. It began because I saw the early January floods in Brisbane. Since I made early notes, we have seen an earthquake in Christchurch NZ and an earthquake/tsunami which shifted the entire south island of Japan eight feet east. Is the situation dire?
I've been noting a new phenomenon in the media. It can only be called, unthinking reportage of “the bleating economy”. I think it's unhealthy because the bleating is immature and would like to know what we can do about it.
Early in 2011, Australia saw serious floods in Brisbane and s/e Queensland, and a well-predicted, disastrous cyclone in northern Queensland.
Suddenly we are flooded with wonderment in the media about the insurance industry (and finding the definition of flood/inundation is nationally a big problem for intelligent people, it seems). About the effects of weather-disaster on the national economy. About lack of bananas and higher prices for sugar.
About whether the nation needs a disaster fund? Which is probably a good idea.
While the climate-change sceptics amuse themselves with doubt and publicity for their view, we watch TV news and see floods worry south-eastern Australia, a bad cyclone in north Queensland, floods in Brazil and South Africa in the Southern Hemisphere. And since Christmas, horrific snow storms in the Northern Hemisphere which paralyse regions and particularly damage the world aviation industries. In early February, 100 million people in the USA were holed-up due to ferocious snow-storm across 30 states and 16,000 flights are cancelled.
Whatever the sets of causes for inconvenient weather, it's obvious that weather events are becoming more ferocious and intense.
Here, the media around the world should be asking, how are insurance companies holding up, around the world? Climate-change deniers should be asking the same.
Because, if insurance, a boring industry as we usually find it, becomes unbearably expensive, or worse, financially unsustainable, the foreseeable future for everyone is foreshortened. This is the world's financial risk arising not from theories of climate change, but the actuality of bad weather events right now.
Why aren't the financial pages of our major newspapers asking about the world's insurance industries? Is it because they are too interested in trying to boost optimism after the 2008 GFC debacle. Mother Nature meantime is not co-operating.
Reports on “the bleating economy” probably arise due to the speed of communications generally today, following quick computerisation of the use of economic modelling. When, what we need are actuarial studies on the likelihood that insurance industries can actually survive!
If insurance caves-in as an idea, the gaps between rich and poor can only widen in many countries, and if so, the world politics of the future bodes ill. We really don't need “bleating economy” reports from the media arising from fast computer projections based on ongoing economic forecasts fractured by serious weather events. We need better informed reports and comment on how the private sector, and government organisations, including national treasuries, can possibly cope with present weather events.
Interesting, isn't it? Climate-change deniers, denying that “the science is in”, are also ignoring the weather-impacted present, which globally is rather painful just now. Short of tsunamis/volcanoes, bad weather affects developed countries more badly than it does the undeveloped. It's merely a question of the blasting of the complexities of developed economies and societies. Which I'm sure, that actuarially speaking, the insurance industries realise. It'd be understandable if they were keeping mum. Big time.
Yours sincerely, Dan Byrnes.
24 December 2010:
Today's
feeling/Blog
emotion / truthiness-isms: Happy New Year and about recent tsunami from Wikileaks. US Minister for Foreign Affairs Hillary Clinton, and her boss, are, of course, quite upset at Wikileaks and (a website address was http://wikileaks.ch but it is now defunct>Julian Assange) publishing *so many* US diplomatic cables in such a candid and unprecedented way. And, "unprecedented" is just one reason we make remarks here as we do ... times have changed ...
NB: Ms Clinton used to be known as US Secretary of State, but lately the USA has decided to modify this nomenclature as, semantically, it might have misleadingly suggested, in a truthiness kind of way, that the US Dept of State was chiefly interested in US power on the world stage, and not actually interested in the rest of the world, ("foreign" as it may be or not), and ignorant of it. Semantics rules, ok, this website agrees.
(BTW -- Tks to Stephen Colbert for the wonderfully unreliable notion of "truthiness". For further information, please see the illusion-killing song by Leonard Cohen, Democracy.) BTW, how many states of the USA are now technically bankrupt? Online indications (non-expert) during 2010 suggested 32-43 states of the USA were in serious financial trouble! Go google, go figure.
22 September 2010: Today's feeling/Blog emotion: Dear Netsurfers in NSW, Australia, It's obvious that any company which is now bankrupt should cease trading. And it's equally obvious, scandal after scandal, that with latest (22 Sep) allegations of scandal from a member of the NSW ALP Government, that the NSW State Government is now morally, spiritually and politically bankrupt. What a trifecta of misery for NSW! Therefore it should cease trading, or be made to, forthwith. An Administrator for NSW should be put in: situations in Sydney alone, more so re transport, are a complete disgrace. But God forbid that the Adminstrator should be the NSW Liberal party. It seems, the NSW ALP has quite run out of moral talent. It also seems, the NSW Liberal party somehow can't find the energy to advertise any sort of talent at all it has that it might retain. In which case, all voters in NSW should be afraid, very very afraid, of coming political voids in NSW. End of story. And what a sad story it has become.
24 August 2010: Today's feeling/Blog emotion: More power to Tony Windsor and the other Australian Independent politicans while the major parties have failed us so badly. Seldom in Australia has so much political weight fallen so suddenly on so few political shoulders as it has just now. This website is proud to say, it voted for Tony Windsor, MP for New England. Now can we have some sanity about a National Broadband Network, please?
24 July 2010: Today's feeling/Blog emotion: Moving forward Ms Gillard? Moving from where, to where? Moving into clichesville? It's come to this, has it? No, Ms Gillard. Moving forward simply isn't good enough. Nor is going forward the cliche to use. Nor is the call useful that was used so often in one of my primary school schoolyards, "Wake Up, Australia". What Australia does not need is more inarticulate politicians, we have too many already. Dare you to try some original thinking. Double dare ya! And moving forward on the issues, where is Wong? Has she been entirely sidelined as you discuss your completely nonsense climate-change policy? How and why? Ms Gillard, it's an increasingluy non-good look you are providing. Madam, get a life! Soon! (And as we later found, she did, in a hung parliament!)
20 July 2010: Today's feeling/Blog emotion: In the USA, Of course BP should be paying compensation for whatever damage the Gulf of Mexico oil spill problem has created. Why would anyone ever have thought otherwise? Why didn't BP assume this from day one? Why are corporations so irresponsible, and why are governments so irresponsible as to let them be so irresponsible? In the USA, only voters can decide this further! Meanwhile, congratulations to historian Simon Schama for his TV documentary now being screened in Australia, The American Future: A History. Marvellous viewing!
29 November 2009: Today's feeling/Blog emotion Climate deniers these days: Elaine McCarthy in Port Macquarie had a good idea for fixing the bacon of politicians who are climate-change deniers. Turn off the air-conditioning in Parliament House. Perfect, and very quick too, we think. (Sydney Morning Herald, Letters to Editor, 21-22 November, 2009)
13 November 2009: Major-psychiatrist Hasan running amuk at Fort Hood, Texas: So by mid-November, Hasan has returned to consciousness and is not talking about conducting his atrocity. Investigations continue. This website feels it might be a good idea if the White House made some quiet phone calls to the American Psychiatric Association (APA), asking it to deliver a considered professional opinion on the psychiatric nature of the mindset of the suicide bomber (anywhere in the world), with particular reference to the Hasan case. This website feels that psychiatrists around the world have been sitting on their hands about this question as a mental health issue since 9/11, or earlier, since the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers invented the tactic. It would also be much less tiring and cheaper for the entire world if the "war on terror" could be reduced to a conflict between psychiatrists and misguided Islamic clerics. Who, who knows, may well deserve each other due to the mismatches of their sins of omission, which paradoxically and bewilderingly tend to finally dovetail with such evil elegance in the Hasan case. -Ed
15 May 2010:
Today's
feeling/Blog
emotion 
Circumnavigation congratulations of global proportions to JESSICA WATSON, solo sailor on Ella's Pink Lady. What a spectacularly magnificent young Australian lady!
28 Feb 2010: Today's feeling/Blog emotion Inconvenient weather for climate change deniers: Winter Olympics in Vancouveur Canada but sadly, not enough snow in the area. Maryland USA recently had biggest single drop of snow since records began. Hectic rainstorms in Brisbane Australia, s/e Queensland. Hillside slip/landslide in Calabria Italy after heavy rain. Island of Madeira is flooded. February 2010 ends with coastal western Europe's biggest storm in 60 years. And floods in Queensland which might cost AUD$1 billion to clean up. And, is it true that climate change deniers have superior insurance to everyone else? Hmm?
Today's feeling/Blog emotion 22 October 2009: The Liberal Party/Wilson Tuckey Speaking Tosh Problem: Gasp Shock Horror! Western Australian Liberal Party politician, Wilson "Ironbar" Tuckey, suspects that various Sri Lankan boat people now arriving near Australia's indefensible north-western coast (which is what it is, totally indefensible) might be terrorists. Gasp horror! This website wonders if Tuckey has forgotten that Australian colonial authorities regularly received Irish political prisoners, who just might have wreaked havoc if let loose (aka Ned Kelly?). That is, Australia got used to difficult boat people arriving a long time ago - convicts, they were called. As to Western Australia, it invited convicts in for economic reasons. Some of them were Irish politicals, rescued by a ship sent from the USA named the Catalpa. Do not despair, Mr Tuckey! Remember the Catalpa! It finally made for very good TV! Above all, Tuckey, read a bit of Indian and Sri Lankan history soon. Like, get to know the neighbours and their problems!
By Dan Byrnes Poem 802 (draft 2 of 13-6-2010)
I travel a lot in my mind
and today I see
the Gulf of Mexico is broken.
It collided with the hubris
of the United States of America
and it may well be in traction
for another fifty years.
The fish will die,
the birds will seep oil and die,
the remorse of the USA,
the weeping and gnashing of, yes,
mostly-Christian teeth,
will be surfed on the Internet
for the same half-a-century or more.
The oil men sank too deep,
deeper than anyone can safely go,
hit the bottom of the Gulf,
and it broke, just like that.
Far worse than when the levee broke,
far worse than if the Mississippi floods,
far worse than when the music died.
About as bad as the hard rain
would have been falling
the day Cuba almost disappeared
in a haze of nuclear wipeout
... which at least would have been quite quick.
Not like this abysmal, slow and seeping, creeping
crack in the ocean floor that will spill oil
where oil shouldn't be,
where oilmen should not be.
Where oil ambition went far too far.
The Gulf of Mexico broke, and that's that.
The people moved from the coast
after their second, huge and real-world disappointment in a decade,
their lives and souls lost along with the ruined fish catches
in the surf of a modern madness
as super-techo as a brand-new Hollywood movie,
but far more deadly than it looks when it's actually real.
The Gulf of Mexico broke.
Already I begin to think of this whenever
I see someone start a car.
If this modern madness doesn't stop,
I suppose this will happen
to another great body of water
somewhere in the world,
once great, once proudly wet and rolling free,
and only wet, but now oiled-up
with nowhere left to go,
miserable as a fish dumped in a bathtub
full of anti-freeze
some madman left on a beach.
I'm sorry, but now I have to move on.
It's a wide world, there's still a lot left to see,
and this will only make us cry,
and not stop crying.
See, there's the top of the Andes.
And over there is yet another melting glacier ...
Do you, perhaps as I do ...
(Ends)
Pope firm on priest's celibacy vow. As reported on 12-13 June 2010 in Australia. So reads the weekend newspaper's headline. But is it only this webmaster who feels it would be far more convenient if the present Pope would cease speaking patent nonsense, at least when he speaks in public? The already-embattled Pope Benedict XVI, who has spent his entire adult life in the celibacy departments of a world-wide institution, "has reaffirmed the Vatican's commitment to priestly vows of celibacy". This item is not the place to re-canvas the problems the Pope's church has world-wide with the paedophile-activity of a variety of priests. In any case, this remark from the Pope cuts off speculation that he might revise views on celibacy in the light of the scandals his church is facing.
The Pope claims that celibacy "is made possible by the grace of God ... who asks us to transcend ourselves." If he believes this, fine, we all in fact share a world in which many people in many countries believe 10,000 impossible things before breakfast. Moving along, "The Pope made it clear he supported continuing the practice of celibacy. He compared it to heterosexual marriage, which he called 'the foundation of Christian culture'." Which is where he instantly falls down. Comparing robust heterosexuality with celibacy? Comparing?
Heterosexual marriage as a chosen way of life has got absolutely nothing to do with the foundations of Christian culture. Some animals are more or less monogamous. Some people are monogamous and some aren't, which is also not the argument about marriage. Marriages between men and women, whether they last many years or not, long pre-date the beginnings of Christanity. Catholicism has nothing at all to do with the history of human marriage in India, or China, which are both civilizations long pre-dating the origins of Europe, or Rome for that matter.
So what the Pope here seems to be doing is to attempt to hijack (to re-hijack?) the ownership of an ancient human custom. For what sort of purposes? To buttress views about the practice of celibacy?
It is not just that the Pope's logic is peculiar, or spurious, or that his view in his remarks, of the entire sociological context of priestly misbehaviour, has been judged dodgy by the rest of the world.
For his purposes, he is backdating human history to before 1AD, or whichever date is preferred, in order to claim some kind of jurisdiction over a perfectly ordinary and often satisfactory sort of arrangement to be made between adult men and women who prefer to be sexually satisfied from time to time rather than be celibate. If he won at this sort of argument, it would be very much a triumph of monkish literary theology over the history of human history! And who needs that sort of triumph to be able to get around the world?
So it appears to this webmaster that heterosexual marriage is not the foundation of Christian culture at all, nor of Roman Catholicism, which incidentally is not the only form of Christian culture. It appears then that this Pope is more energetic than most Popes in uttering patent nonsense whenever he has the whim. And he implicitly makes it apparent that to be a Roman Catholic means meekly accepting this sort of nonsense whenever it is uttered by a Pope. Which, quite frankly, is also plain disgusting. As if the paedophile-priest problem encouraged by the culture of celibacy doesn't already give his church enough disgusting problems.
Or is it that this Pope is merely entering senility? If so, could he not do it in public? It's embarrassing. When old men start talking nonsense, the most sensible thing to do is inform the nurse in charge of their nursing home ... "Patient is confabulating again."
23 February 2013 -Australian daily political newsletter Crikey.com last week was speaking nonsense, saying the Labor Party does not have a narrative to tell us, and ought to have one. This is nonsense. Of course Labor has a narrative. It is that Julia Gillard took over from Kevin Rudd and we never hear the end of it. We certainly never hear the end of it if this weekend´s Australian newspaper is any guide at all. Why are so many people speaking nonsense these days?
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Fred Kaplan, 1959: The Year Everything Changed. John Wiley and Sons, 2009, 336pp. Simon Adams, The Unforgiving Rope. UWA Press, 2009, 285pp. (On capital punishment in Australia) |
