Sunday, 2 January 2022 - 11:33am
As numbers on the calendar ticked over, I was mostly reading:
- Oh Great They’re Putting Guns On Robodogs Now —Caitlin Johnstone:
So hey they’ve started mounting sniper rifles on robodogs, which is great news for anyone who was hoping they’d start mounting sniper rifles on robodogs. At an exhibit booth in the Association of the United States Army’s annual meeting and exhibition, Ghost Robotics (the military-friendly competitor to the better-known Boston Dynamics) proudly showed off a weapon that is designed to attach to its quadruped bots made by a company called SWORD Defense Systems. “The SWORD Defense Systems Special Purpose Unmanned Rifle (SPUR) was specifically designed to offer precision fire from unmanned platforms such as the Ghost Robotics Vision-60 quadruped,” SWORD proclaims on its website. “Chambered in 6.5 Creedmoor allows for precision fire out to 1200m, the SPUR can similarly utilize 7.62×51 NATO cartridge for ammunition availability. Due to its highly capable sensors the SPUR can operate in a magnitude of conditions, both day and night. The SWORD Defense Systems SPUR is the future of unmanned weapon systems, and that future is now.”
- Nurdles: The Worst Toxic Waste You’ve Probably Never Heard Of — Karen McVeigh at Mother Jones:
Nurdles, the colloquial term for “pre-production plastic pellets,” are the little-known building block for all our plastic products. The tiny beads can be made of polyethylene, polypropylene, polystyrene, polyvinyl chloride and other plastics. Released into the environment from plastic plants or when shipped around the world as raw material to factories, they will sink or float, depending on the density of the pellets and if they are in freshwater or saltwater. They are often mistaken for food by seabirds, fish and other wildlife. In the environment, they fragment into nanoparticles whose hazards are more complex. They are the second-largest source of micropollutants in the ocean, by weight, after tire dust. An astounding 230,000 tons of nurdles end up in oceans every year. Like crude oil, nurdles are highly persistent pollutants, and will continue to circulate in ocean currents and wash ashore for decades. They are also “toxic sponges,” which attract chemical toxins and other pollutants on to their surfaces.
- Doonesbury — by Garry Trudeau:
- Refreshingly Honest Billionaire Says Media Purchase Will Be Used For Propaganda — Caitlin Johnstone:
The billionaire CEO of the multibillion-dollar corporation that recently purchased the news media outlet Politico has said that its newly acquired employees will be required to support Israel and the capitalist world order. In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, Mathias Döpfner, CEO of the German publisher Axel Springer, said that Politico staffers will be required to adhere to a set of principles which include “support for a united Europe, Israel’s right to exist and a free-market economy, among others.” […] I mean, how refreshing is that? How often does a billionaire corporation buy up a media property and just straightforwardly tell you they’re going to be using it to push propaganda? They even say what the propaganda will be. It makes you feel like your intelligence is being respected.
- David Graeber’s Final Challenge — Giulio Ongaro in Tribune reviews The Dawn of Everything by Davids Graeber and Wengrow:
More than a work on the history of inequality, The Dawn of Everything is a treatise on human freedom. In parsing the anthropological record, they identify three types of freedom—freedom to abandon one’s community (knowing one will be welcomed in faraway lands), freedom to reshuffle the political system (often seasonally), and freedom to disobey authorities without consequences—that appear to have been simply assumed among our ancestors but are now largely lost (obviously, their conclusion is a far cry from Rousseau’s: there is nothing inevitable about this loss!). This analysis flips the question one should really be asking about the historical development of hierarchy: ‘The real puzzle is not when chiefs first appeared,’ they suggest, ‘but rather when it was no longer possible to simply laugh them out of court.’
- Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal — by Zach Weinersmith:
- Soft-wars — Blair Fix:
Political economist Chris Mouré has a new paper out in the Review of Capital as Power. It’s called ‘Soft-wars’, and it is a fascinating case study of the behavior of big tech. The story starts in 2011, when Microsoft led a $4.5 billion consortium purchase of Nortel and Novel. Later than year, Google responded by buying Motorola for $12.9 billion. The funny thing is that Google then proceeded to sell off what it had just bought. By 2014, almost nothing was left of Google-owned Motorola. Nothing except patents. And that, Mouré thinks, was the whole point. Mouré argues that this acquisition war was ultimately a battle over intellectual property. Google and Microsoft were competing to control the mobile market. And the way to do that was not to ‘produce’ anything. It was to command property rights.[…] Mouré’s analysis nicely illustrates a truism in economics: big corporations behave nothing like economics textbooks say they should. The textbooks say that profits should stem from productivity. But the reality is that what big companies care about most is restriction. The battle for profits is a battle over property rights — the legal right to restrict.
Sunday, 19 December 2021 - 7:59pm
This month, I have been mostly drinking too much, but I also read a few things:
- Cuba’s Vaccine Could End up Saving Millions of Lives — Branko Marcetic in Jacobin:
After a dire twelve months, when a too hasty reopening sent the pandemic surging, deaths peaking, and the country back into a crippling shutdown, a successful vaccination program has turned the pandemic around in the country. Cuba is now one of the few lower-income countries to have not only vaccinated a majority of its population, but the only one to have done so with a vaccine it developed on its own. The saga suggests a path forward for the developing world as it continues struggling with the pandemic in the face of ongoing corporate-driven vaccine apartheid, and points more broadly to what’s possible when medical science is decoupled from private profit. According to Johns Hopkins University, as of the time of writing, Cuba has fully vaccinated 78 percent of its people, putting it ninth in the world, above wealthy countries like Denmark, China, and Australia (the United States, with a little below 60 percent of its population vaccinated, is ranked fifty-sixth). The turnaround since the vaccination campaign began in May has revived the country’s fortunes in the face of the twin shocks of the pandemic and an intensifying US blockade.
- In Praise of One-Size-Fits-All — Lawrence B. Glickman in the Boston Review:
In his second inaugural address, FDR celebrated government as an institution that “has innate capacity to protect its people against disasters once considered inevitable, to solve problems once considered unsolvable.” For decades after he died in 1945, the federal government showed itself to be capable of promoting the general welfare not only via programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid and through ambitious infrastructure programs (such as the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956), but in its promotion of civil and voting rights, which, for the first time since Reconstruction, made the United States a true democracy in which all adult citizens had “one-size-fits-all” rights. But as the New Deal order waned, a new ethic emerged that privileged individual choice, denigrated society, denounced public spending, and critiqued the government as sclerotic and increasingly incapable of serving citizens—now often figured as “customers,” “taxpayers,” or “entrepreneurs.” In the process, “one size fits all” migrated from a selling point of modern fabrics to a derogatory term connoting the straitjacket of the autocratic, bureaucratic welfare state. It entered into our political language just as the reigning paradigms of economics (mass production/consumption) and politics (New Dealism) were sputtering. If the phrase signified expansiveness in marketing, it came to stand for constraint in politics. The changing valence of the phrase marks a political transformation with which we are still wrestling.
- Call Corporate Crime Corporate Crime — by the Anonymous (what are they afraid of?) editor of Corporate Crime Reporter:
The section of the Wall Street Journal that covers corporate crime doesn’t use the term. Instead, it’s called Risk & Compliance Journal. NYU Law School has a program to study and report on corporate crime. But they call it the NYU Law Program on Corporate Compliance and Enforcement. The New York Times prefers the term white collar crime. As does the American Bar Association, which has a White Collar Crime Division. Primary topic of discussion? Corporate crime. Why white collar crime instead of corporate crime? White collar crime includes not just the corporate crime of the bank stealing from millions of customers, but bank tellers stealing from the bank. The implication? Hey, it’s not just corporations. Everybody does it!
- Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal — by Zach Weinersmith:
- What living with COVID would really mean for Australia — John Quiggin in Independent Australia:
What most people who talk about “living with COVID” in Australia seem to have in mind is something different: a situation where there is a steady but manageable flow of cases, say 1,000 per day in Australia and where a limited set of restrictions is maintained indefinitely. […] Unfortunately, this version of “living with COVID” represents a mathematical impossibility. The reason this is that infections diseases display exponential growth, or contraction, measured by the (effective) reproduction rate — R. If R>1, the pandemic spreads until it runs out of people to infect and if R<1, it contracts until the number of cases dwindles to zero, or there is some new introduction. […] What this means is that a stable number of cases can only be maintained with an unstable policy, involving repeated tightenings and relaxations, just as we have seen in all countries that have chosen to “live with COVID”.
Sunday, 31 October 2021 - 12:36pm
This fortnight, I have been mostly reading:
- TikTok's algorithm leads users from transphobic videos to far-right rabbit holes — Olivia Little & Abbie Richards at Media Matters for America:
TikTok’s “For You” page (FYP) recommendation algorithm appears to be leading users down far-right rabbit holes. By analyzing and coding over 400 recommended videos after interacting solely with transphobic content, Media Matters traced how TikTok’s recommendation algorithm quickly began populating our research account’s FYP with hateful and far-right content. TikTok has long been scrutinized for its dangerous algorithm, viral misinformation, and hateful video recommendations, yet this new research demonstrates how the company’s recommendation algorithm can quickly radicalize a user’s FYP. Transphobia is deeply intertwined with other kinds of far-right extremism, and TikTok’s algorithm only reinforces this connection. Our research suggests that transphobia can be a gateway prejudice, leading to further far-right radicalization.
- Pru Goward AFR column on ‘underclass’ condemned as disturbing and abusive — Amanda Meade in the Guardian:
An article by the former New South Wales Liberal minister Pru Goward which portrayed lower socio-economic Australians as dysfunctional and lazy “proles” has been condemned as disturbing, abusive and inaccurate by anti-poverty advocates. The opinion piece in the Australian Financial Review by the former NSW families minister argues there is an “underclass” of Australians who are “appalling” housekeepers and neglectful parents and “almost entirely lacking [in] discipline”. […] “Government agencies view them with alarm as huge cost centres; they are over-represented in their use of government crisis services and are always the last to give up smoking, get their shots and eat two servings of vegetables a day,” Goward wrote in Wednesday’s AFR.
- Pompeo Effectively Admits To Assange Allegations — Caitlin Johnstone:
After a lot of flailing and humming and hawing Pompeo does eventually make what sounds like a concrete denial with the curiously-worded phrase “I can say we never conducted planning to violate US law.” But even this wouldn’t be a denial of the claims in the Yahoo News report, because the report is mostly about the intelligence community and the Trump administration trying to find legal loopholes that would allow them to take out Assange. For example, this quote from the Yahoo News article: “A primary question for U.S. officials was whether any CIA plan to kidnap or potentially kill Assange was legal.” This would in no way be contradicted by Pompeo’s claim that “we never conducted planning to violate US law.” It would mean that there were discussions and plans about assassinating Assange amid conversations and debates about whether it would be legal to do so. The fact that they didn’t plan to violate US law doesn’t mean they didn’t plan to assassinate Assange if they could find a legal loophole for it.
- Why is the idea of ‘gender’ provoking backlash the world over? — Judith Butler in the Guardian:
Anti-gender movements are not just reactionary but fascist trends, the kind that support increasingly authoritarian governments. The inconsistency of their arguments and their equal opportunity approach to rhetorical strategies of the left and right, produce a confusing discourse for some, a compelling one for others. But they are typical of fascist movements that twist rationality to suit hyper-nationalist aims. […] In his well-known list of the elements of fascism, Umberto Eco writes, “the fascist game can be played in many forms,” for fascism is “a collage … a beehive of contradictions”. Indeed, this perfectly describes anti-gender ideology today. It is a reactionary incitement, an incendiary bundle of contradictory and incoherent claims and accusations. They feast off the very instability they promise to contain, and their own discourse only delivers more chaos. Through a spate of inconsistent and hyperbolic claims, they concoct a world of multiple imminent threats to make the case for authoritarian rule and censorship. […] This form of fascism manifests instability even as it seeks to ward off the “destabilization” of the social order brought about by progressive politics. The opposition to “gender” often merges with anti-migrant furor and fear, which is why it is often, in Christian contexts, merged with Islamophobia. Migrants, too, are figured as “infiltrating”, engaging in “criminal” acts even as they exercise their rights of passage under international law. In the imaginary of the anti-gender ideology advocates, “gender” is like an unwanted migrant, an incoming stain, but also, at the same time, a colonizer or totalitarian who must be thrown off. It mixes right and left discourses at will.
- Global Climate Wall: How the world’s wealthiest nations prioritise borders over climate action — Todd Miller, Nick Buxton, and Mark Akkerman, the Transnational Institute (TNI):
Seven of the biggest emitters of GHGs – the United States, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, Canada, France and Australia – collectively spent at least twice as much on border and immigration enforcement (more than $33.1 billion) as on climate finance ($14.4 billion) between 2013 and 2018. Canada spent 15 times more ($1.5 billion compared to around $100 million); Australia 13 times more ($2.7 billion compared to $200 million); the US almost 11 times more ($19.6 billion compared to $1.8 billion); and the UK nearly two times more ($2.7 billion compared to $1.4 billion).
Further Down the Tubes
As the pandemic was getting into its stride in 2020, I was watching:
Pie Net Zero
Whenever I think the momentum's gone, and the Jonathan Pie character should be laid to rest, he comes back with one that's right on target. This long short is rather charming.
How Myst Almost Couldn't Run on CD-ROM | War Stories | Ars Technica
Like anybody who owned a computer in the 1990s, I was mesmerised by Myst. This compelling little mini-doco shows just how hard the Miller brothers were pushing the envelope to get their concept to work on 256-color graphics cards and first generation single-speed CD-ROM drives.
How does an Oscillating Fan work?
The only thing I can make with my bare hands (and maybe a 3D printer) is a mess. I don't have an engineering mind. Jared Owen's videos make me wish I did.
Carol Kaye - Most Heard But Least Known
Wow.
Honest Government Ad | The Fires
There's a smugness to most things that go out under the label "satire", and this is no exception, but it hits the mark. The summer of 2019/20 seemed like the end of the world. Ah, such innocent times.
The Concept of Language (Noam Chomsky)
I love these interviews where the interviewer asks questions about things that they think are within the domain of academic linguistics but aren't. The polite answers, always with the caveat that he's not really qualified to speak on the topic, show that there's not much that Chomsky hasn't spent at least some time thinking about.
"STATE OF THE UNION 2020" — A Bad Lip Reading
This joke never gets old.
A Quiet Day In
I'm back to work on Monday, after two months off recovering from surgery. I'd been overdoing it a bit on the exercise front, trying to make up for months spent flat on my back, so on my todo.txt under "Wed 20 Oct" I'd written "quiet day". It was cloudy, with a little bit of rain, so a perfect day for catching up on light chores and a bit of reading.
Then, as I was doing the washing up, this happened:
I couldn't record more than a few seconds of the storm at its' height, as it required some serious Marcel Marceau work to prevent being immediately blown back from the doorway.
I've never seen hail like it. Normally when a cold front hits moist air, you get a few minutes of hail before the storm loses it's sting and settles down into heavy rain. But on this occasion, the hail just kept coming. Before long, the Aloha carpark was at least four inches deep in it.
As usually happens in anything but the gentlest shower, the storm water drains immediately backed up, and runoff from the hills behind us started to etch a channel through the pack ice.
If you can overlook the shredded foliage and shattered lamps, the neighbourhood began to look positively festive.
As things began to settle down, my phone started pinging. The shopping centre where I work had been closed down until it could be cleaned up and structurally assesed.
Oh, great. I've been off recovering from surgery for eight weeks, and was due back Monday. My imminent return appears to have jinxed the building to the point where the roof caved in. It (the collapsed roof, not my return to work) made the national and international media.
The messages from work continue: Part-timers like myself may be needed to help clean up, or else at the store in town to deal with the overflow demand. Implied: casuals can go hang - no work for you.
(There's a few dozen on the payroll in my department: one or two are full time employees, the rest are part-time - with minimum contract hours that would not cover the cheapest rent available in the area, or casual - with no minimum hours. This arrangement guarantees a satisfyingly desperate servility from the labour force.)
As my friend Ruben observed, the universe is telling me I need a career change.
The next day I set out for a sticky beak around the neighbourhood. There's still plenty of ice wherever it's been sheltered from the sun and the wind. State Emergency Services are swarming about, clearing ice from roof gutters, throwing tarps over shattered skylights and solar water heaters, and demolishing collapsed awnings.
Nature has turned suddenly Autumnal, except that it's Spring, and none of these trees are deciduous.
Nothing like a walk on a carpet of shredded eucalyptus to really clear those sinuses.
The beloved workplace is indeed closed for the duration.
I went out of my way to bump into some of the less laddish of the lads from work. Incredibly, as best as I could make out from the hyper-masculine grunting, it appeared the plan was that we'd be up and running for home deliveries and click 'n' collect within days, and ready for in-store customers soon after.
I had assumed we'd be out of action for weeks, at the very least, while centre management fixed the roof. Silly me. Centre management have no intention of actually fixing the roof, because they have never fixed the roof. In the lightest of showers it is up to the individual stores to position buckets as needed. In extreme cases, where the sodden interior ceiling gives way such as in this staff lavatory earlier in the year, workarounds will be implemented like so:
Disaster preparedness for the twenty-first century: expect the unexpected, but expect the unexpected to occur long after you personally have moved on to another scam, so it will be somebody else's problem. This from the ideology that also brought you a global pandemic. Thanks, neoliberalism!
Meanwhile, there are plenty of opprtunities for freshening stale brands with a logotype makeover.
There's a pleasingly novel copper hue to the countryside.
And water views have never been more open, if unnervingly overlaid with a Brothers Grimm vibe.
Still a couple of months left in 2021. Can't wait to see what's coming next.
Sunday, 17 October 2021 - 12:01pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Where Was All The Investigative Journalism On US Airstrikes The Last 20 Years? — Caitlin Johnstone:
The Pentagon doesn’t care that it snuffed out innocent lives in an airstrike; it does that all the time and its officials would do it a lot more if that’s what it took to secure their futures as lobbyists, consultants, board members and executives for defense industry corporations after they retire from the military. And the mass media don’t care either; they only cared about this one particular highly politicized airstrike during a withdrawal from a military engagement the mass media vehemently opposed. […] Think about all the murder victims we’d have known about if the news media had done its job and used their immense resources to investigate them as journalists should over the last twenty years. Think about how much harder it would have been for the war machine to inflict these evils upon the world if they had.
- A line in the water — Peter Mares, Inside Story:
With the world watching in horror as the window closes on evacuation efforts at Kabul airport, it’s hard to avoid the comparison with another drama, twenty years ago, involving Afghans fleeing a Taliban regime. The window to safety was blocked back then, too, but it was closer to home, on the waters around Christmas Island.
- Dinosaur Comics — by Ryan North:
- Kidnapping, assassination and a London shoot-out: Inside the CIA's secret war plans against WikiLeaks — Zach Dorfman, Sean D. Naylor and Michael Isikoff for Yahoo! News:
In 2017, as Julian Assange began his fifth year holed up in Ecuador’s embassy in London, the CIA plotted to kidnap the WikiLeaks founder, spurring heated debate among Trump administration officials over the legality and practicality of such an operation. Some senior officials inside the CIA and the Trump administration even discussed killing Assange, going so far as to request “sketches” or “options” for how to assassinate him. Discussions over kidnapping or killing Assange occurred “at the highest levels” of the Trump administration, said a former senior counterintelligence official. “There seemed to be no boundaries.”
- Jeff Bezos’s date with Boris Johnson didn’t prove all that taxing — David Mitchell in the Guardian:
The New York meeting with Bezos was extensively trailed in advance as an occasion when the prime minister would confront the world’s richest man on the issue of taxation. “Boris Johnson to address Amazon’s tax record with Jeff Bezos,” promised the Guardian; “Johnson’s taxing questions for Amazon,” warned the Times. Brace yourselves, Manhattan, the straight-talking Etonian is on his way! It didn’t quite work out like that. For a start, Jeff Bezos and his partner, Lauren Sánchez, were late. Was it gamesmanship or traffic? Traffic was blamed and there will have been traffic, but there’s always traffic. And the lateness played well in two ways: first Johnson was left waiting so seemed junior, and second Bezos showed himself vulnerable to traffic so seemed human. Despite his stratospheric wealth, he hadn’t arrived punctually, borne by chopper or drone or sewer crocodile. For the man whose stylist appears to have last worked with Donald Pleasence on You Only Live Twice, this was a refreshingly normal look.
The Saga of F-bomb Freddy, Part One
My neighbours, here at the Aloha Home for Deadbeat Divorcees, are a colourful lot. As a rule I've ried to keep out of their way for the last two years. I'm not actually rude, you understand. I smile and nod. I just don't talk, beyond the occasional "good morning", etc. That polite aloofness is how F-bomb Freddy came to suspect me as an obvious snitch.
As I generally don't talk to them, I rarely learn my nighbours' names. When I have to think about them, I use the names I've given them myself for internal reference. As tenancy here is overwhelmingly a matter of unfortunate circumstance rather than choice, a lot of people have come and gone: Boom Box Barry, Zen Ken, Breaking Bad, the Care Bear Kids, Surfing Steptoe, Thumper and Boyband, and so on.
The most memorable, by sheer dint of his desperate need to make an impression, was F-Bomb Freddy.
Freddy was one of those farking people who farking says farking farking all the farking time. His body language strongly suggested that he'd spent some time in prison; that or, less likely, an elite boys' school. Ever-mindful of social rank, he spent half his day swaggering and strutting about like a cockerel, and the other half slinking, glancing nervously over his shoulder as though fearing that he was about to be caught out for whatever past imprudent act was currently preying on his mind.
He occupied what had been the manager's lodgings back in the days when the Aloha was a motel, and had absorbed some of the proprietorial manner appropriate to the tenant of the largest unit in the facility. He always seemed to have a flatmate, but the cohabitation rarely lasted more than a few months before disintegrating into a fistfight in the carpark, followed by a shower of personal effects from the balcony. Yet somehow another flatmate arrived to take the last one's place before you knew it. Each had a shaved head, little in the way of teeth, and a baroque efflorescence of tattoos.
His only constant friend was Mayor McWheeze, who occupied the unit directly below mine. When Freddy wasn't patrolling/slinking about the perimeter in shorts and thongs, or skimming leaves from the common swimming pool to (in his mind, at least) earn his keep, he was holding forth to McWheeze.
Mayor McWheeze was a stupendously unhealthy man; one of those who prefer to approach the art of not dying at the highest degree of difficulty possible. He was almost perfectly spherical in shape, with a voice which started low down - somewhere about his navel - before rumbling up a congested windpipe, doubling back in frustration at a slack, toothless mouth plugged by an omnipresent smouldering cigarette butt, and at last gently seeping out of his nose like politely-suppressed flatulence.
In order to keep a firm footing on the wobbling tightrope which was all that separated near-death from actual death, McWheeze rarely left the table he'd set up at his front window. From behind flyscreen, he had a magisterial view of the only entrance to the complex, and took a keen interest in comings and goings, cheerfully saluting all in a manner which made one feel disconcertingly like Patrick McGoohan in the Prisoner.
In his own mind, Mayor McWheeze was the bright shining star at the centre of a seaside Bloomsbury set. In reality, his days were overwhemingly occupied in dispensing homilies to soothe the wounds from whatever slings and arrows F-bomb Freddy presently felt most outrageous. From upstairs I was mercifully spared the details, receiving only the gist via the to and fro of bitterly spat obscenities and mollifying emphysemic rumbles.
At the start of my tenancy, I wasn't much bothered by Freddy's alarmingly powerful stereo system. As a rule, Australians don't like to know more than a few dozen songs, any of which you can hear any time of the day in any suburban shopping mall. Conspicuous consumption often manifests as hi-fi equipment, so having one's bones rattled of an evening by the bass notes of the same songs over and over again must be accepted as merely the price of entry to suburbia.
However the verve with which Freddy enjoyed the Great Australian Songbook was somewhat disquieting. It had never occured to me that it was possible to whoop and yee-haw in exuberant joy along to the works of Billy Joel, Dire Straits, and the Eagles. Yet somehow Freddy managed to do so. With, it seemed with each passing week, increasing frequency and intensity.
I like to think of myself as a tolerant sort. I thought it not unreasonable to surmise that perhaps Freddy was nursing a broken heart and, having been spurned by some lady — or indeed gentleman, he was proving to himself that he had much left to live for, including slapping a thigh and hooting like a klaxon whenever Greatest Aussie Pub Rock Favourites Vol. 1 worked its' inevitable way around to Working Class Man.
Out of this desire to make allowances for a little high-decible self-care, and also a keen interest in finding a reason not to provoke someone who appeared considerably less reasonable, and more practiced in pugilism, than myself, I sought inside knowledge from Mayor McWheeze. One evening, as the keening strains of Sweet Child O' Mine etched visible ripples in the asphalt of the Aloha carpark, I stood by his window and asked, as casually as I could whilst shouting over the din, "What's the story with your mate over there?"
The hitherto relentlessly genial McWheeze turned dour, even going so far as to remove the cigarette butt from his mouth and stub it out. Possibly in an ashtray. It was impossible to tell through the flyscreen at dusk. "He likes a drink. Enjoys a bit of music," he pronounced at length, before lighting another cigarette to signal the end of the matter.
Ah. Jolly good. Just an obnoxious arse, then. "Is there anything you could do about it?"
He drew on his fresh cigarette for as long as his severly compromised lung capacity would permit, and gazed into the delicate tracery of burst capiliaries at the back of his drooping eyelids. "You could try writing a letter to the strata body."
"Right." Thanks for being so helpful. I will indeed correspond with a handful of people empowered to say "Stop it at once, or we shall be forced to ask you to stop it once more." I went back upstairs and shut all the windows.
Later that evening, Neil from the Young Ones, residing a few doors up the first floor landing from Freddy, had the temerity to slink over and knock on Freddy's door. He was tossed back like a leaf in a gale of full-throated farks. As Neil, on his heels and suddenly finding himself back at his own door, slipped inside, trembling, Freddy came out onto the balcony to address the gallery of twitching blinds.
"ANY OF YOUSE OTHER LOWLIFE FARKERS WANNA FARKING GO AT ME, YOUSE FARKING MAGGOTS?"
And thus mollified by the comparative silence of nothing but passing vehicular traffic and the lazy trotting of A Horse With No Name, Freddy returned to his lair.
After an hour or so, with no sign of the festival of easy-listening rock abating, Mayor McWheeze, motivated by some glimmer of community spirit, left his customary seat and waddled across the carpark.
He had no hope of ascending the stairs to the first floor landing, so he stood below, calling with increasing volume and urgency "Freddy… Freddy!"
I couldn't hear much of the resulting conversation over the J. Geils Band's 1982 smash Centrefold, but it was clear that Freddy transitioned from curiosity to shock, to outraged betrayal, and finally an explosion of fire and brimstone farks that had McWheeze skipping back to his flat as though peppered by buckshot.
At this final egregious violation of the sovereign Aussie male's right to feel the bassline of Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer reverberating deep in his substantial loins, Freddy seemed fit to rend his garments, had they not been pretty thoroughly rent already. Instead he spun on his heels, and bellowed one final, desperate "FAAAAARK!" to nobody in particular before slamming his door behind him.
The next morning, Freddy was back on McWheeze's doorstep, the two exchanging politely convivial farks like characters in a Jane Austen novel.
There's something deeply disquieting about the aloof cameraderie between Australians who consider themselves mens' men. There's a sense of things understood but unspoken, seeming to hint at dark, soul-eating secrets; of tramatising initiation rites, pacts, threats, and decades-old unspeakable crimes. At least that's how it appears to me.
A few days later, I was sitting out on the landing with my laptop. Kitty, my darling fluffy grey feline familiar, had got it into her head that it was dinner time at two-thirty in the afternoon, so in the face of her implacable entreaties, I had no option but to put myself on the other side of the lounge room window in order to get some reading done.
Zen Ken, a petite, tanned, and alarmingly fit gentleman who eschewed shirts and footwear, and was in the habit of rising early to sit out on the back lawn cross-legged to greet the dawn, stopped by on his way downstairs for a spot of impromptu mindfulness among the stand of banana trees behind the pool. He asked me how I was settling in and what I thought of the place.
"It's fine, apart from…" I glanced in the direction of Freddy's flat, "the odd colourful character."
"Oh, I think he'll be pulling his head in from now on," he smiled, "After that letter to the strata body."
Oh, dear God no. I couldn't imagine anything more calculated to elicit Freddy's ire than a window-faced envelope and the use of the menacingly passive voice ("All residents are reminded that…"). Still, it was nothing to do with me.
"Your cat seems to want your attention," Ken observed, and went on his way, accompanied by the hum of finely-tuned chakras. No sense in wasting the best mind-emptying hours of the day in idle chit-chat.
I love a reasonable degree of uncertainty. I'm miserable out in the suburbs, because in the city you feel that at any moment anything might happen. Nothing ever does, but the potential is electrifying. However that's a different kind of uncertainty to the knowledge that you have an explosion coming, and you just don't know when it will arrive.
One morning, while getting ready for work I heard a knock on the door, shortly followed by the unmistakable "whomp" of a sheaf of paper hitting my doormat, and seconds later the beeping of a reversing delivery van, long gone by the time it took to walk the length of a very, very small flat.
The contents of this A4 window-faced envelope were at least a hundred pages thick and it was addressed to Freddy at unit 21. Mine is unit 20, where the line of rooms runs out, so it wasn't at all unusual for lost postmen (and once, a pair of police officers in armoured vests) to ask for the location of 21, over at the opposite end of the landing, next to unit 12.
I had so far managed to avoid any interaction with Freddy beyond nodding hello, but in the circumstances there was no alternative to being neighbourly. At least it clearly wasn't from the strata body. No consortium of landlords would take the time to devote over a hundred pages to anything.
The door was answered by a young man I'd never seen before. Did Freddy keep him in a cupboard?
"This is for here. Postman left it at my place."
"Oh, right. Thanks."
Crew cut, tattoos, crumbling teeth: Freddy definitely has a type. I never saw him again.
Freddy had just bought himself a new ute (the Australian term for a sedan-sized truck Americans would call a "pickup"). Gleaming white, like something out of the 1970s TV series Battlestar Gallactica. Lord knows how he could afford it; Freddy didn't seem to work.
I grew to love the absence of that vehicle. Freddy's unit being at the entrance to the complex, it was parked at the very front, and could be seen from a hundred metres away. When returning from work of an evening, my heart always sank to see it. I don't know why. In retrospect, it's clear that as he had no need, or particular desire, to go anywhere, it's absence could only mean that he was out purchasing a carton of cans of rum and cola, prior to filling a rotisserie of CD platters with the fruits of the bargain bin, cranking up the volume, and hitting the "shuffle" button.
Returning home one evening about a week after my little chat with Ken, I heard Freddy already in full swing before I saw his ute. I didn't know if Freddy was partial to any drugs other than rum and coke, but at the very least he was definitely one of those people who use alcohol to get wound up rather than to wind down. Quite apart from giving we mild, decent alcoholics a bad name, that class of drinker scares me.
I hurried up to my flat, keen to remain unobserved, though I'd hardly made it through the door before robust exchanges of opinion began echoing across the car park. By the time I'd served Kitty her dinner, the arguments that Freddy was simultaneously conducting with multiple interlocutors, like a chess grand master, had reached record-breaking intensity.
I drew the blinds. My neighbours all had curtains and/or venetian blinds, but my unit was kitted out with roller blinds. These were wonderfully low-maintenance, but had to be raised to at least half-mast if one wanted any fresh air or natural light. Positioned as I was at one end of the top row of units, with three big windows, it was rather like living in a giant illuminated fishbowl. When signing the lease, I reasoned that if somebody had any desire to watch me doing the washing up, or to stand out on the landing, nose pressed to the glass to enjoy the spectacle of an old wreck sweating and snoring though a humid summer night, that was very much their problem. This opinion had been under review for a while now.
The agitation outside was starting to sound as though an element of physical contact had worked its' way into proceedings. Concern for the welfare of my neighbours led me to open the front door and take a look.
Freddy was standing near the top of the stairs leading to his door, and I was relieved to see that it was unlikely he'd just pushed someone down them, as he was vigorously summing up his assessment of the character of Boombox Barry, for the latter's moral edification.
On noticing me framed in the light of my doorway, resplendant in business socks, boxer shorts, and burger-flippers' polo shirt, he swung round and thrust out an accusing finger.
"And YOU! If you've farkin' got something to say to me, whyn'tya come over here and farkin' say it to my face, ya cat-farker!"
The customary colour (a kind of mottled green-grey) drained from my haggard face. Oh, brilliant. He thinks it was me that made that farking — sorry, I mean that blasted — complaint to the strata body.
Freddy leaned over the railing, and dropping his vocal pitch for dramatic effect, announced in a low rasp, "I've got my farking eye on you, ya c**t!"
Unlike most of my neighbours, I lack any of the zest in my emotional repertoire that would enable me to respond with matching vigor, and so somewhat at a loss, I took a step back and closed the door. Freddy moved on to his next target without missing a beat.
Kitty had finished dinner, so now it was cuddle time. The fact that Freddy had chosen to make a point of Kitty's existence (and also, in passing, his unsettling explanation for why he thought anybody might want to keep a pet) unnerved me.
Being six foot two, and typically sporting pretty threadbare attire, I've had the luxury of living my adult life without much regard for my personal safety. I've strolled merrily late at night through some notorious precincts with blithe unconcern about being singled out as a target for assault and/or robbery, and am well aware of my privilege in that regard.
By drawing attention to Kitty, Freddy had struck at the heart of that complacency. After nearly fifty years on the planet, my major moral obligation was to that adorably vexatious ball of fluff. She was also my sole motivation: after a number of very difficult years, I was managing to keep it together for the sake of Kitty. And we were very happy in that condition. We were very nearly one person, except that no one person, at least in my experience, cares for themselves as Kitty and I cared for each other.
And that dim, foul-mouthed, petulant man-child was somehow cunning enough to identify her as my critical vulnerability. In doing so he had upset everything.
Continued in part two.
Sunday, 10 October 2021 - 3:31pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Where Has All the Money Gone? — Robert Skidelsky in Project Syndicate:
But in his Treatise on Money, Keynes provided a more realistic account based on the “speculative demand for money.” During a sharp economic downturn, he argued, money is not necessarily hoarded, but flows from “industrial” to “financial” circulation. Money in industrial circulation supports the normal processes of producing output, but in financial circulation it is used for “the business of holding and exchanging existing titles to wealth, including stock exchange and money market transactions.” A depression is marked by a transfer of money from industrial to financial circulation – from investment to speculation. So, the reason why QE has had hardly any effect on the general price level may be that a large part of the new money has fueled asset speculation, thus creating financial bubbles, while prices and output as a whole remained stable. One implication of this is that QE generates its own boom-and-bust cycles.
- On The Cusp — George Monbiot:
If there’s one thing we know about climate breakdown, it’s that it will not be linear, smooth or gradual. Just as one continental plate might push beneath another in sudden fits and starts, causing periodic earthquakes and tsunamis, our atmospheric systems will absorb the stress for a while, then suddenly shift. Yet everywhere, the programmes designed to avert it are linear, smooth and gradual. Current plans to avoid catastrophe would work in a simple system like a washbasin, in which you can close the tap until the inflow is less than the outflow. But they’re less likely to work in complex systems, such as the atmosphere, oceans and biosphere. Complex systems seek equilibrium. When they are pushed too far out of one equilibrium state, they can flip suddenly into another. A common property of complex systems is that it’s much easier to push them past a tipping point than to push them back. Once a transition has happened, it cannot realistically be reversed.
- US government rights in patents on Molnupiravir, based upon funding of R&D at Emory University — Luis Gil Abinader at Knowledge Ecology International:
Molnupiravir, the oral pill that is showing promising results as a potential treatment for covid-19, was invented at Emory University with U.S. government funds. After more than six years of non-clinical testing, Emory licensed molnupiravir to Ridgeback Biotherapeutics to continue its development as a potential treatment for covid-19. The discovery and further research efforts made at Emory between 2013 and 2020 benefited from an estimate of $35 million dollars in government support. As a consequence of these investments, the U.S. government has rights in key molnupiravir patents. […] Perhaps one of the reasons why Ridgeback is minimizing the role of the U.S. government in the development of molnupiravir is to avoid demands to make the drug available at a reasonable price. That kind of move has worked for companies like Novartis in the past. Yet, as a promising oral pill with many potential generic suppliers, the availability and affordability of molnupiravir will likely face intense scrutiny in the upcoming months. Harvard and King’s College researchers Melissa Barber and Dzintars Gotham recently estimated the cost of production for molnupiravir. Based on a previously developed algorithm and public information they concluded that the cost of producing molnupiravir’s active pharmaceutical ingredients, including a 10% profit margin, is $19.99 a course. In June 2021, Merck announced an agreement to supply the U.S. government approximately 1.7 million courses of molnupiravir for approximately $1.2 billion. KEI has obtained a copy of this contract, which is discussed in another blog published today. According to the contract, the U.S. government will pay $712 dollars per unit of molnupiravir, about 35 times the cost of production as estimated by Barber and Gotham.
- GOP Lawmaker Pushes Insane Claim ‘Octopus-Like Creatures’ Are in Vax — Zoe Richards in the Daily Beast:
The email from the legislator contained a 52-page “report” with disinformation on COVID-19, including claims that “unknown, octopus-like creatures are being injected into millions of children worldwide.” The report also made claims that 5G technology had somehow been inserted into the vaccine to control people’s thoughts and called the pope and others “at the top” of the Roman Catholic Church “satanists” and “luciferans” for backing public health measures. The report additionally made the wild suggestion that the babies of vaccinated parents in Mexico were “transhuman”—born with “pitch-black eyes” and undergoing accelerated aging.
Boris: "We Took Back Britain. Now We're Taking Back India!"
In a surprise move, the UK government has announced plans to retake it's former colonial holdings on the Indian subcontinent, in a bid to bolster the country's post-Brexit global trade profile.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson addressed the media late yesterday from his "Westminster Shag Pad", saying "This deal, skillfully and unilaterally negotiated with our subjects, means that Britain immediately becomes not only self-sufficient in tea and sugar, but also the world's leading exporter of exotic spices, jute and fine muslin."
Shaking his pith-helmeted head at suggestions that that the return of the Raj to India might incur domestic job losses, Johnson claimed that "For those seeking work as colonial administrators, I am pleased to announce that at last the lean years are over. Indeed if anything this initiative will be a significant net job creator for boys who went to good schools."
Addressing former European partners, the Prime Minister provocatively asked "Do you see the wan and effete peoples of France, Holland, Portugal, or God help us the Belgians, hamstrung as they are by petty bureacracy, embracing the world beyond their doorstep - with gunboats if necessary?"
"This government is bold and forward-looking. This government is committed to building an empire fit for purpose in the twenty-first century. And this government will have access to a steady supply of opium beyond its' wildest dreams. Huzzah!"
Down the Tubes
Every now and then I find a video worthy of comment, and I never quite get around to commenting on it. Instead, I stick it in a directory labelled "blog".
Now I'm out of disk space on my desktop, my laptop, and for that matter my phone, so while I free up space here it comes, in installments. Back in the pre-pandemic days, I was watching:
How Dark Patterns Trick You Online
If somebody is required to show you something they don't want you to see, you'll find it in a locked filing cabinet in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard".
The Decentralized Web Is Coming — ReasonTV
Ten years ago I might have agreed with the title. Now I have no fight left in me, and I just have to say nope; it's hopeless.
I particularly like the way that they introduce Richard Stallman into the narrative with a photo of some guy with a beard who is definitely not Richard Stallman. I don't know who that person is, but apparently he must be the person who "helped create the popular open source operating system Linux", because that is not a description that RMS would apply to himself. Bonus lazy journalism points for illustrating the concept of "programmer" with the man page for grep.
Visiting a British Pub with Burgess (The Penguin) Meredith
"We're only trying to point out that some of these people are a little more… reserved than some of us."
From a World War II US Military Training film. Times have changed. These days they'd just take out the pub with a drone strike, and get offended at the lack of gratitude.
Endnote 4: How the Alt-Right is Like an Abusive Relationship
I can't help but be fascinated. I'd never slow down while passing the site of a car crash, but maybe I feel compelled because now we're all in the same car — the one that is crashing.
This Is Neoliberalism
This is a really nicely done series. Wish I'd done it.
2020 Harcourt Lecture - Professor Stephanie Kelton
If you've not heard about Modern Monetary Theory, you've not been to the pub with me at any point in the last seven years or so. If, under present circumstances, you aren't able to buy me a drink or six, the next best way to learn about MMT is from Stephanie Kelton. This lecture is from when she was a visiting professor at Adelaide Uni, immediately pre-pandemic, and just prior to the publication of the book which would make her the most influential economist in the world (among everybody but economists).
Season 26 Trailer | The Collection | Doctor Who
Just lovely. A damn near perfect series of Doctor Who, and the last for sixteen years.