Palin vs Obama at the SMH

Romeo Mike has started the ball rolling by analysing how the SMH has been covering Obama and McCain/Palin. In my view, they are such one-eyed Obama-fans, I don't know why they haven't resorted to painting horns on every photo of Palin that they publish.

I did a search on the SMH website this morning, and started by searching for "Palin". Here are the results:

• Americans twitter vice-presidential debate - balanced article
  
• US braces for Palin debate with Biden - snide references as to whether Palin is up to it. Totally Obama-biased
• McCain defends 'maverick' Palin - has a number of digs at McCain and Palin. Totally Obama-biased
• Sarah Palin makes it big online - goes on to say that she is "not a big hit with voters". The story chronicles a number of web sites that make fun of Palin. There are many that have a similar dig at Obama, but none have been mentioned by the SMH. Totally Obama-biased by ommission.
• Sandra Bernhard cops Sarah Palin blowback - not sure what to make of this, but the lack of comment from the Obama camp is interesting. You'd think they'd chime in and say comments like Bernhard's are unacceptable, but the silence is deafening.
• I represent everyday Americans: Palin - this is a classic bit of juxtapositioning in an attempt to wreck here statement: "John McCain's running mate Sarah Palin has portrayed herself as a champion of everyday people, while noting her family's stock portfolio took a $US20,000 ($A25,200) hit last week." They are trying to have a dig at her here for being a stock-owning plutocrat, but of course she was referring to her retirement account - essentially her superannuation. Totally Obama-biased
• Feisty Palin escapes gaffes, but Biden wins snap polls - not sure what to make of this story yet.
• Palin has plenty in the bank: records - this story is a total stitch-up job: "Sarah Palin, who regularly tells voters she knows what it is like to struggle to pay the bills, earns nearly $US200,000 ($A259,487) and has substantial savings". What it fails to point out is that her family earns nearly $200,000 - that total amount includes the earnings of her husband. And yes, I think they'd have fun paying the bills, given that they have 5 kids and live in Alaska, which is an expensive place to live. That's also their gross income - it doesn't take into account the expenses that her husband incurs in running his fishing business. In short, totally Obama-biased. By comparison, I did a search for "obama + aragula", to see what the SMH had to say about Obama's famous arugula gaffe, and there is no mention of it on their website. Interestingly, that search on google returns 418,000 hits.
  
• A month after being a sensation, Palin's now a problem - they get their comments for this story from a Professor in Berkeley, possibly the most left wing place in Ameria. Puh-lease. Totally Obama-biased
• Judge will not block Palin firing probe - no comment
  
• Republicans gird for Palin debate - another hatchet job on Palin. Totally Obama-biased
• Palin true to herself and values - a positive story, but it was written by a Conservative

I then did a search on "obama".

• Aussie punter bets $50,000 on Obama win - I don't know why this should be of interest, except in order to fluff up Obama
• The Boss and Billy back Obama - who cares.
  
• McCain trusty but experience costs - a fairly balanced article, written by a Democrat. Interesting that a Democrat writes a more balanced article than is normally published in the SMH.
• Springsteen rocks Obama rally in Philly - a pure plug for Obama.
• Obama slams 'shameless' Palin - a pure plug for Obama.
• Obama accuses McCain of ignoring crisis - a re-write of the above story, with another plug for Obama, and a prissy photo of Palin
  
• Obama pulls ahead in the critical areas - a pure plug for Obama, featuring a photo that shows McCain looking clueless.
• Palin on attack over Obama's terrorist 'pal' - it starts as an attack on Obama, but 2/3 of the story is then devoted to Obama's defence.
• Round one: Obama takes narrow lead - fairly balanced
• Elbows fly in White House race - similar to the story on Obama's terrorist "pal" above, but 3/4 of it is devoted to fluffing up Obama
• Obama has huge lead over McCain -- in cyberspace - you can guess who this is tilted towards
• Obama takes campaign to the iPhone - a pure plug for Obama, and trying to paint McCain as out of touch with technology. The story might as well have been paid for by Obama.
• Obama grabs big lead in key US states - balanced
• US presidential election could come down to race - a story preparing the ground for "racists cost Obama the election"
• Obama, aka fat little Barry, remembered - a fluff piece on Obama
  
• Obama accuses McCain of sordid attacks amid economic peril - totally Obama tilted

I then did a search on McCain, and most of the stories that came up were the same.

• McCain leads in the 'burbs: poll - but the story then devotes about 50% of its space to an attack by Clinton on McCain. Typical.

So, we have one positive story, a few balanced stories and an absolute slew of Obama puff pieces. Note that if they run a positive story about Obama, no space is given over to any negatives from the Republican side. But if they run a vaguely positive piece on Palin or McCain, anywhere from 1/2 to 3/4 of the story is then devoted to attacks from the Democrats.

Interesting.

Should parliament sit on Fridays?

I found out a bit more about one of my grandfathers over the weekend - he who was a state MP for over two decades. I hope you find some of this as interesting as I did.

Born 1881, he left school at 12 because his dad had won a contract to cart sand to fill in a lagoon for the construction of a railway station. He spent the rest of his life complaining that he was uneducated, and was never seen to read a book. (Those of you who have seen the library that my parents have put together over the years would perhaps consider their work to be a slight over reaction to his devout un-learnedness).

He joined the railways after that, and was posted to Southern Cross in 1899. He spent some years doing the Kalgoorlie-Southern Cross run, taking a train up one day, and a train back the following day. He started as a Fireman, and ended as a Driver. He was a founding member of a railways union on the goldfields - at a time when being a union member was a sackable offense. It was essentially a secret society for many years, which I guess made him comfortable with becoming a Mason (which he did). They worked 50 hours a week for 50 shillings - when water on the goldfields cost 1 shilling a gallon (this was before the pipeline was built). They formed a union for obvious reasons - to better their predicament. They were seeking a reduction in the working week to 48 hours - 8 hours a day, 6 days a week. By the sound of it, life was bloody hard.

He was rejected for service in WWI, having varicose veins (which apparently meant he could not march). His older brother, who was 40, went instead - taking his 15 year old son with him to France in 1916 in the 11th Battalion. As I blogged last week, his brother was killed, and someone must have twigged to the age of his son and he was sent home. Good thing granddad didn't go, as dad was not born until some years after the war. Five of his cousins were killed as well - two of them have service numbers in the mid-800's. Yes, a three digit service number.

Grandfather was one of the 36 delegates from WA that attended the great All-Australian Trade Unions Congress in Brisbane in 1921. Plutocrats like me will be interested to know that it was at that Congress that the ALP adopted a socialist policy. Apparently granddad was not an ardent socialist - he was more concerned with improving the conditions of the working man. When he died, apparently he was the last of that delegation to the Congress.

He then stood for state parliament in 1921, losing by 5 votes. Voting was voluntary back then, and apparently 20 people approached him in church the next day and said, "If I had known it was going to be that close, I would have voted for you."

Interesting factoid - there were only around 2000 voters enrolled in that electorate for the entire time he was in parliament. That gives you some idea of how small the population of WA was before the mining boom in the 1960's.

At the next election in 1924, he won by about 50 votes. By the time he retired, his majority was something like 700 votes - and at that next election, the seat switched to the Liberal Party. Prior to granddad siezing the seat, it had always voted conservative. Many of his relatives were farmers and businessmen - people who would naturally vote against Labor, but they all voted for him.

Even the descendants of Sir John Forrest, who was its first MP, voted for granddad - Twiggy Forrest is descended from that line (I am vaguely related to him by marriage I guess, but then every family that has been in WA for 100 years is related to everyone else. You may start making strange, twanging banjo noises at this point if you feel the need). The Forrests were some of the richest people in the state, so that says something about the personal following that granddad had.

He originally made his way around the electorate on horseback or in a sulky, but he eventually bought a car - a Willys Overland of some sort. All the roads in the electorate were sand or gravel tracks, and any journey generally involved at least one puncture. The car had two spares - one mounted on each side above the running boards. Dad remembers granddad fixing a flat almost every other day. Getting bogged was a fact of life - you always carried an axe and some rope, and had to be ready to pull other motorists out if need be. Horses were also used to unbog cars.

(As an aside, I remember driving to Perth as a kid and part of the road was still gravel for a distance - it is now two lane freeway most of the way. I remember the gravel because we got into a slide one day and ended up off the side of the road in a ditch).

The electorate was quite large (for its time), and it could easily take 2 hours to drive to a meeting. Going to Perth by car was out of the question - the only way to go was by train, which took 5 hours. The train stopped every 15 miles to take on milk containers, so it was a bit of a slow trip.

That to me answered the question as to why parliaments usually never sit on a Friday, and only sit for around 30 weeks a year. In the old days, transport being what it was, you only sat for 4 days to give the MPs a chance to get back to their electorate for the weekend. Parliament also had long recesses to give the members a chance to actually get around their electorate in order to conduct whatever business they had to. I guess a lot of people didn't have phones, so meetings had to be face to face.

When he retired, he stood for Mayor and was elected. There aren't many politicians who are happy to step from state or federal parliament to local government, but he didn't mind doing it.

I am sure Dad told me some more, and I will post it as my memory returns.

Resisting the urge to do something

I figured out last night why we have so many problems in this world. By that, I mean "problems that need solving", as in when something happens, and there is an immediate hue and cry from the media/activitists/a political figure to "do something".

We end up in the soup because there is an unlimited supply of problems, but a limited supply of resources to deal with them. By "resources", I don't mean money and things like bulldozers and buildings and computers - I mean competent people who can actually get things done.

If we assume that competence in getting things organised and done is distributed according to a normal distribution, then there are only a small number of "super stars" that are really brilliant in delivering things - whether they be social services, kicking goals, flipping hamburgers or doing footrubs.


So let's start with the idea that in any given population (whether they be social workers at DOCS, school Principals, Nurses or Police), there are a small number of really, really good people; a large mass of competent followers and a tail of completely useless drones.

Now in my experience, the really good people are always being siphoned off - they tend to get promoted up the ranks into management, where they then get sorted again according to theBell Curve. Some turn out to be great managers, whilst with others we find that others never make the transition properly - they make terrible managers. The great bulk muddle along somewhere in the middle. Then people get promoted again and the whole sorting process starts anew. In some cases, the truly incompetent continue to get promoted simply because they are unbelievably good in interviews, and their management is always too weak to get rid of them.

I have generally found though that the people that get tapped to be managers are those that are doers. The inert, the lazy and the dozey never get considered - most of the time. So what you find is that the ranks of management are full of people who are looking to solve problems - the reason they ended up there in the first place is probably because they were seen to be good at fixing things, and had the gumption to wade through shit six feet deep in order to make things happen.

Politicians are the same. You can say what you like about the policies of our current crop of politicans at council, state and federal level, but one thing you can't accuse them of is laziness. Some might be intellectually lazy, but the reason they get preselected is that their selection committees saw a history of action. Look at Malcolm Turnbull for instance. You can't accuse him of being a work-shy shirker. Or Bob Brown. Brown might be a meat head, but I'm sure he is an extremely busy meat head.

I personally know quite a few politicians at all three levels of government, and none of them sat down at 18 and decided that a career in politics was for them. All of them went and did lots of stuff, were quite good at what they did, and they eventually fell into politics because it was an extension of getting stuff done. They entered politics not with the aim of grasping power for themselves, but instead because they figured that they could do a better job than the useless bastards currently giving it a go. As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions....

Newspaper editors and TV Producers are the same - they are people who have made their bones at a newspaper or TV station by being people that make shit happen.

The biggest problem all these people face - public service managers, media people and politicians - is that they can't resist wanting to take action whenever a problem rears its ugly head. They are congenitally unable to sit back and say, "Fuck it, just leave it alone". They want to throw money and resources at the problem and fix it, because that is what they do. They fix things. They don't care what they are fixing or why they are fixing it - they just enjoy the process of fixing. They are full of the restless energy of the high achiever. They need an outlet for that restless energy, and they find it in solving problems and doing stuff.

(I did a very interesting psych test a few years ago that showed that I am one of these people. Some people like to talk about things, others want to know why we should do something, and another group wants to know how to do something - the process driven people. I am part of that group of people that don't care about they how or the why - we just need to be told to do something and we'll figure out a way to do it and just get it done. We also hate gas-bagging about it.

That's a big hint to my fellow managers by the way - you'll always find yourself having to deal with a certain number of underlings who can't even start on a task until either the how or the why is explained to them. That is immensely frustrating to people like me, who just expect people to salute and get on with it, but now that I understand that this is how some people tick, my life as a manager has become a lot easier).

Anyway, here is the big problem with wanting to fix the problems of the world - there is a strictly limited supply of people who can solve problems. When you look at the Bell Curve as a manager, you will have a few people that are utterly brilliant and priceless, a large mass of people who will work for food and a couple of complete drongos bringing up the rear. However, a can-do manager, or a can-do politician, does not regard his or her resource base in this manner - they think that everyone should be as capable as them, and therefore capable of tearing in and massacring problems as they arise. If only everyone had as much get up and go as me.... that should be the sad lament of every burnt out problem solver that has been run into the ground after 20 or 30 years of effort trying to get this or that organisation to do something.

I started off being a "we can solve every problem" kind of guy, because I worked in a small company with a staff of very capable people - all of them were A class people, both in their technical knowledge and their approach to work. We ripped through stuff because we had no one slowing us down. I didn't need to spend all day managing them - I simply pointed them at a problem and left them to it. Stuff got done. Lots of stuff. Mountains of stuff.

Then we had a merger, and got a lot bigger, and suddenly I went from having 4 very good underlings to a staff of 12, and I now had 4 x A and 8 x B. We still got a hell of a lot of stuff done, because even the B types were very good. All I had to do was partner an A and a B and the A would lead the way and the B would lift their game and they'd make short work of whatever I'd given them.

Then we had another merger, and I found myself with 40 staff. I inherited a couple of A's, but I now had something like the following:

• 6 x A
• 20 x B
• 10 x C
• 3 x D
• 1 x F-

The F- was a real problem. We couldn't sack him, so we had to wait for him to resign or die. Thankfully, he died on the job, which solved a really big problem for me. But apart from him, it suddenly because really difficult to get anything done, for we had this big boat anchor of 1/3 of our staff slowing the rest down. The D types were actually obstructive and did their best to destroy every initiative - and we couldn't sack them either, and they were all too young and healthy to die on me. They were a shovel-full of sand in the gearbox.

Apart from them, we also went from having a management team that was all A types to having the following after our first merger:

• 3 x A
• 2 x B
• 1 x F-

I have dealt with the F- in other posts; he was our fuckwit, and he was in charge of a critical team of people. Under his tutelage, they all went from go-gettum A types to D types in about 6 months. He managed to wreck every initiative that we managers tried to put up, and he was a deadweight drag in every meeting. But that was not the worst of it. After our second merger, we had:

• 3 x A
• 2 x B
• 3 x C
• 1 x D
  
• 3 x F-

Yes, we ended up with more boneheads in management positions than capable people. You can imagine the debacle that ensued. We went from being an operation that had a reputation for getting things done (in the small company) to an operation with a reasonable reputation (after the first merger, when things started to go wrong thanks to Fuckwit) to having the most shithouse reputation you can imagine after the three amigo boneheads got together and wrecked everything.

I believe the root of our problems though was that the next level of management above us had not performed an evaluation like I had, so they thought we were a team of superstars, able to achieve any task thrown our way. If they had taken a realistic view of our capabilities, they would have scaled back their ambitions in a big way.

But no manager ever gets ahead by telling their boss that their team should be doing less. So they agree to take on things that in reality, they have no hope of implementing with the people that they have on hand (I am generally talking about the public sector here, but I am sure that there are many people with lots of private sector experience that have seen the same thing).

I once shocked the hell out of our GM by drawing a pyramid on the whiteboard, and took them through my evaluation of my team - so many A's at the top, then a mass of B's, then the C's, the D's and the F- at the bottom. The shock was when I told them that we were working on 30 separate initiatives, and that I did not have 30 people each working on one initiative. Instead, I had my top 3 people working on all 30, because the other 37 people on my team were incapable of delivering what was required. Until that meeting, they had this amazing expectation that because I had 40 people, we could easily handle 30 different initiatives. I think that meeting was a real eye-opener. They left the meeting trembling in shock at what they had got themselves into. The worst of it was that with only 3 really good staff, we could only handle about 10 initiatives at once.

You have to wonder though about how people can get to that level of management without ever going through that sort of sorting and sifting exercise at least once in their career.

Anyway, next time you see a newspaper editorial screaming for "something to be done", or a politician promoting a new program of spending to fix a problem, just do us all a favour and tell them loudly to JUST FUCK OFF AND DO NOTHING for a change. They really don't have to spend our money in the vain hope of changing the world.

And they call religious nutters crazy...

I picked up this snippet about mis-reporting of Governor Palin from Jules Crittenden:

"The governor told us though she’s not a member of any church, she visits a couple of them regularly when she’s home. She took issue with news reports that one of them, The Wasilla Bible Church, sponsored a conference where gays could be made straight through prayer."

Some lefties have made hay with that statement, beating it up as another one of those "the religious right are crazy - they believe prayer can 'cure' gayness" comments.

I for one don't believe that prayer can make gays straight. I also don't see why anyone should want to convert gays to the straight side. As far as I am concerned, if you're happy and you know it, clap your hands.

The only thing that prayer, or religious observance, can do is to make you celibate - regardless of whether you like boys, girls or catfish. If you choose to be celibate, I'm sure prayer can assist you in keeping to the straight and narrow (wouldn't know myself - I am not the prayin' type, nor do I always feel the need to stick to the straight and narrow). It can't stop you from being gay - but it might stop you from engaging in gay sex, if that's the sort of thing you want to give up for some reason.

I think I am off track here.

So, you might think that someone is beyond the pale because they associate with people that try to make gays straight through prayer. I find that a little odd, but then a mate of mine believes in levitation and UFO's, and I have met people who believe in Ley Lines and talk about Gaia as if the Earth was a living thing. The last lot can be seen quite regularly in what passes for the mall in Five Dock, and they recently ran for a Council seat as candidates for the Greens.

I guess it is alright for the Greens to have completely batty ideas, and no one says that it disqualifies them from holding office. I don't care if they believe in Ley Lines - I only care about their policies (which I generally find to be completely objectionable).

The Left can also hold ideas that are utterly batshit crazy - some seem to believe that locking criminals up does nothing to stop them commiting crime. Others seem to believe that children don't require discipline in order to develop into mature and responsible adults. The worst of them seem to think that governments can create money out of thin air.

If you ask me, believing that prayer can make you straight is a lot less freaky than believing that certain indigenous Australians can talk to whales.

A close shave

Nearly developed a very nasty case of road rash tonight. I went for a spin on the bike, and was nearly home when I decided to do a left hand turn into a street that would take me along a nice bit of waterfront. Trouble is, when I braked in preparation for the turn, the front wheel almost slid out from underneath me. Now that is something that you might expect on gravel, but I was on asphalt, and there was nothing remotely slippery about it.

What had happened is that my front wheel had suffered a puncture and gone flat in about 5 seconds - and I hadn't noticed it as I was too busy paying attention to all the nasty "I'm off home now" traffic on the road beside me. As the tube went flat, the tyre separated from the rim, and hence the skidding - I was pretty much riding on 1mm of metal rim instead of 23mm of inflated rubber. And metal rims 1mm wide do not grip that well on anything.

I managed to hold the slide (making all those broggies on gravel as a kid worthwhile), so instead of falling under a truck to my right, I managed to slide into the kerb on my left. My front wheel slammed into the kerb about a foot short of the corner, and I then bounced around the corner and came to a halt in a quiet side street, heart racing, shoulder muscles torn from the effort of staying upright and me quietly cursing the RTA and their useless bloody road surfaces.

I was reasonably close to home, so I walked the bike home rather than fixing the flat on the side of the road. When I removed the front wheel to fix the flat, I found an almighty ding in the rim from where the wheel had crashed into the concrete kerb - it's off to the shop tomorrow to determine whether it can be repaired, or whether it is time for a new wheel rim.

The front tyre also needs replacing - they're supposed to be good for 6000km, but it's only done 3000km since new. Just goes to show how even a kevlar reinforced tyre gets chopped up quickly by Sydney's nasty road surfaces. The gouges on the tyre from broken glass and metal shavings have to be seen to be believed. This is not a bike friendly town. Tyre + rim = maybe $300. This is not a cheap sport.

But at least I am home with all my skin and bones intact.

The windbag must be home

Rudd must be back in the country - I went for a ride this morning and almost got blown off the bike. Only a prodigiously boring windbag could create such an effect.

Even the rowers were having a hard time of it. Rowing in wind-driven chop like you see here is no fun at all. In my day, when no one wore gloves, the oar blades would hit the top of the chop as you went forward on each stroke, and that would strike up spray that would always land right on the spot where you were gripping the oar. A wet oar handle is a quick way to get lots of blisters. You knew you'd had a rough day when you could count 36 blisters on each hand.

A sign of why we have a financial crisis

In days gone by, finance was hard to come by. You'd make an appointment with a bank manager, put on a suit and go and lay out your case as to why the bank should give you money. It was a time of trepidation for many, as banks were notoriously tight with their lending criteria.

Nowadays, the bank comes to you, and they try to lend you as much money as they think you can afford, and then some. Borrowers have become like French geese, with a funnel stuffed into their beaks and corn being force-fed into their gullets.

When I see a car like this, it reinforces my view that the banks only have themselves to blame, and that any bank managers crying poor to the government should be shown the door with a swift kick up the date.

When I was at Uni, studying Commerce, everyone wanted to be a Merchant Banker (this was at a time when Alan Bond and Laurie Connell were riding high). I know that because one of lecturers did a survey one day and asked us students to raise our hands if we found a certain career choice as being attractive.

90% wanted to go into stock broking or merchant banking. Maybe 10% thought commercial banking was attractive (essentially going to work for Westpac was seen as a sign of abject failure).

I was the only one who expressed an interest in manufacturing. Out of about 300 students.

In other words, my fellow students all wanted to get rich by working for a stockbroker or a merchant bank (no one had heard of Macquarie Bank back then, funnily enough). Being a commercial banker was not seen as the road to riches.

However, a reasonable number ended up working for banks after the likes of Bond Corp went belly up, and they had nowhere else to go. But the desire to make money never went away, and I suspect it was the likes of them that came up with all sorts of money-making schemes as they cast an envious eye at their compadres in the stock broking and merchant banking houses. The only way for them to make money was to grow their banks like topsy, and that meant lending money with a fury.

Main Street bankers are normally seen as a sober lot when compared to their Wall Street rivals, but I don't believe there is much difference between the two. Next time you get one of those "you have been pre-approved for a $5,000 gold Mastercard" type letters in the mail, consider who is to blame for this mess.

With teachers like these..........

"The federal govt spends 75% of its education budget on private schools and 35% on public schools".

I hope that is a misprint by the paper. I really hope it is.

How long until I kill my Nokia N95?

If I hadn't spent so much money on such a small pile of crap, I'd have fed it to a dog by now.

Consider this.

I charged it completely on Thursday night. It even beeped at me to let me know that the battery was full.

I was flat by 9am Friday, even though I had not touched it to do a single thing. It failed to even last 12 hours on a brand new battery.

Then it decided to start locking up everytime I tried to use the "maps" function. The only way to recover was to remove the battery and reboot the bloody thing.

And speaking of reboot time, it takes at least 5 minutes to boot. I am going to time it one of these days, just to find out how long it takes. I can make an omelette for breakfast in less time than it takes it to boot (that I do know).

I seem to have solved the "maps" problem. I went into the GPS application and told it to find out where I was standing. After 5 minutes of searching the heavens (and flattening the battery), it managed to find out where I was. Since then, the mapping function has performed as it should - but it shouldn't have needed that initial "boot" to get it to work.

As for changing between functions...........sigh.

When I was at Uni, I did a stats course. We had to do all sorts of number crunching, either on a PDP-11 mainframe, or on the ultramodern IBM XT PC's in the computer lab. Or they might have been the AT model. Whatever. They had two 5 1/4 inch floppy drives - you booted DOS from one disk, then inserted a second disk that ran the application that you wanted - say Lotus 123 (Excel did not exist at that time). After putting a spreadsheet together, you'd save the data to a floppy, then take out the 123 floppy and put in another floppy in order to run SPSS (a stats package).

Now, consider how long it takes to close a program, remove a floppy, put that floppy back in it sleeve, take another floppy out of its sleeve, insert into floppy drive, boot program etc etc.

The Nokia takes even longer to flip between applications. No, let me rephrase that - to crawl between applications. Flip has too many connotations about speed. I imagine that there is a little troll inside the phone, sitting there in a cubicle waiting to swap floppy disks over every time I want to use the camera or the music player........and they are the type of troll that doesn't get out of bed unless they are being paid doubletime.

I don't know what Nokia were thinking of when they designed this phone.... but whatever it was, they couldn't have been thinking about very much.

Public school teachers - MIA

Junior started high school this year, and he has been attending what we think is one of the better state schools in our area. It's in a fantastic location (so fantastic, the state government tried to close the school and sell the land for development, as it has amazing water frontages), has good facilities and is not suffering from being stuffed to the gills with useless drongo kids.

We got some test results the other day - they were from some statewide assessments in Maths and English and that sort of thing. They came with a covering letter from the former-heroin addict that is now "running" the Education Department. In it, he said that we should feel free to contact Junior's teachers if we want to discuss the results etc etc.

We wish!

One of his teachers has called me twice this year, both times when I was at work, and both times to discuss his miserable performance in her subject. I spent a good 10 minutes on the phone each time, trying to get from her an idea of what we (we, as in her and us) should do to turn his performance around.

She didn't have a clue. She was just telling us that he was not doing well, probably because she was under orders to do so, but coming up with an action plan to improve his education was not in her job description.

During each call, I asked her to email me certain information, which she promised to do (and has never done). I have rung the school, asking to talk to her, and have never been put through. I have left messages with the school asking repeatedly for the information to be sent through - we've never heard anything back.

J went to a parent-teacher night earlier in the year, and that turned into a complete debacle. She was supposed to have 5 minutes with each teacher, but the teachers were so disorganised and ill-disciplined, everyone ran over time and she missed out on speaking to several of them. When she met the teacher where we have most concern about Junior's performance, all she wanted to talk about was how her sister was pregnant. J's assessment of the teacher was that she was straight out of teacher's college, was completely clueless and utterly scatter brained. We have enough trouble with Junior being scatter brained - he is 12 and full of hormones, so you expect that from him. But from his teacher?

J of course asked again for certain information to be emailed to us, but nothing ever arrived. The excuse we were given was that "your email address is wrong" - this was after I emailed the school to ensure that they couldn't get it wrong - all they had to do was hit "reply" and send me what I wanted.

I even left them our fax number, but that didn't help either.

They have our address, because we get a regular newsletter in the post, but they won't post out the educational information that we actually want. Newsletters - yes. Curriculum information - no. Begging letters asking for us to give the school money are also ok. But nothing that will actually allow us to "partner" with the school to provide the best education possible.

The receptionist at the school will not give out any phone numbers - none at all. I rang last month and asked to be put through to the Library (I wanted to know if an overdue book had been returned). The extension for the Library was busy, so the receptionist told me to call back later. When I asked for the direct number of the Library, she refused. Under her rules, I might have to call back 20 times before being put through, if the extension that I want to talk to is busy or not picking up. There was no consideration for the cost of my repeat calls, or the complete waste of my time.

I had a look at the website for my old school. It lists the office numbers and email addresses of the 20 most senior teachers and the Headmaster. It even lists mobile numbers for some teachers.

With Junior's school, the website does not even provide the name of the Headmaster, let alone their email address or phone number. There is a generic, Department-supplied email address, and the reception phone number. And that is it.

So, Mr Heroin-Addict (former), how on earth am I supposed to get in touch with anyone at this school to discuss Junior's performance? Should I just front up one morning at Assembly and make it known that I want to talk to the dingbat in charge? I might want to talk to the teachers that you employ, but they don't want to talk to me. A one-way conversation will not get us anywhere.

The state school system is always crying poor, and screaming that the private schools get too much money. Well, here's some news for you - you don't deserve any more money, because you are a useless pile of trolls. You are worth less than a thimble full of toe fungus. You are a disorganised, disinterested, un-dismissable rabble.

If Junior does not pull his socks up this semester, I'm going to start attending the local Catholic church each week (a tough gig for a lapsed Anglican like me) in order to get him into one of the local Mick schools.

Petrol prices at the end of the rainbow

As I was waiting for the lights to change, an employee of this petrol station wandered out and adjusted the price of unleaded - downwards by 5 cents a litre (I think).

So prices are falling, eventually.


Is that the death of FoolWatch that I see at the end of this rainbow?

Ferry nice view

A ferry makes its way up the Parramatta River, near Putney.

Woin Swan is an idiot

Why does the government feel the need to bail out the non-bank lending sector, given that some of these idiots are responsible for writing the crummiest mortgages on the planet? Talk about reinforcing failure.

"Prudence" used to be a by-word for banks, but it seems that word was excised from their in-house dictionaries in the 1980's. Banks are supposed to be prudent because they are looking after our money - your money and my money. When I go to the ATM this morning, I want money to come out, and the only reason the bank will be able to dispense it is because they have not blown it on one foolish scheme or another.

I fail to see why any of the following statements by Woin make any sense at all:

"We need to have a competitive mortgage market so that people out there who are under financial pressure can get a fair go," Mr Swan said.

Does that mean that people who already owe a lot of money need to be able to go out and borrow more money? Or does it mean that people who don't have enough of an income to support a loan of any size will be able to get a loan?

"This is an important measure to introduce competition into the mortgage market over time."

The mortgage market is already quite competitive. The problem is not a lack of competition between lenders - it's that all of them no longer have great pots of money to lend out. Keeping more lenders in the market will do little, if nothing, to increase the total pot of money available for lending.

And what's with the phrase "over time"? I take it that is a cop out so that if no one notices any difference in 6 months time, he can say, "This process will take time blah blah blah".

Mr Swan described the move as a temporary measure, but did not rule out further taxpayers' money being spent to help the non-bank sector.

Interestingly, all the comments in the article are from the banking sector, rather than the non-bank sector.

Since the middle of last year mortgage lending from the non-bank sector has plummeted to $2.5 billion a quarter from $18 billion a quarter.

And if you ask me, that's a good thing. Do we really need these guys issuing even more low-doc and liar loans to those that can least afford to pay them back? Do we need hordes of shonky mortgage brokers prowling the western suburbs in BMWs enticing people to sign up to NINJA loans, and pocketing a handy commission up front in the process?

Our housing market has been horribly inflated by stupid amounts of money being lent to people suckered by the tale of an ever-rising market.

I just hope we don't end up following the UK down the crapper.

Palin, the uber-Democrat

It's clear to me why Palin has the Democrats in a frenzy; she's more aligned with the old-style Democrat base than any of the current crop of perfumed carpet baggers that claim to represent the working class.

Although I am a plutocrat, you don't have to go back far in our family tree to find a rock solid Labor membership. My grandfather was a train driver, a member of AFULE (Australian Federated Union of Locomotive Engineers), a union organiser and eventually a state MP, representing of course the Labor Party. He held his seat for over two decades - he was old, old-style Labor.

One of my uncles was a wharfie. These guys were solidly working class - their origins were about as blue collar as you can get. Grandfather served in parliament alongside other Labor members who were all short a finger or two - lost in industrial accidents of one form or another. I imagine that they all had hands the size of dinner plates; proper horny-handed gentlemen with rock-like callouses from working for a living.

They were the type of guys (for they were all men) who started as an apprentice boilermaker or steelworker or carpenter, maybe picked up a bit of education along the way (but more often than not, didn't even have a leaving certificate from school) and entered parliament later in life after coming up through the unions the hard way.

I have no idea if Grandfather was typical of his time or not, but he was a hunting man (we still use his .44/40 lever action from time to time, which he used to shoot koalas) and a God-fearing man (church every Sunday, and a man who lived the word of the Book, not just paying lip-service once a week). I doubt he was much of a pacifist, give that his younger brother, who signed up at age 40*, is buried in France (WWI) and both his sons saw active service in WWII.

When I look at his portrait, I see that stern, unsmiling expression of his time, of someone who came up the hard way and ended up as the cream of the working class. I see someone who was a fire-breathing lefty when it came to the economy, but socially very, very conservative. He would probably find the Rev Fred Nile to be a bit soft when it comes to social policy.

His type were swept out of the Labor Party in the late 1960's. He didn't live long enough to see that, but if he were alive today, he'd probably be branded a God-bothering, hillbilly redneck from the deep south (and yes, he was from a small country town in the south of WA - just north of the real hillbilly area of the state).

To me, Sarah Palin is a bit of a throwback to that time. No, I am not calling her a redneck hillbilly. Instead, I think her family has more authentic roots in the birthplace of what we Australians would call the Labor movement than any of the current crop of Democrats. If Grandfather met John Kerry, and was told he was a representative of blue collar America, he would have laughed his head off, but I think he would have recognised Palin as one of his type. Sure, she doesn't have hands the size of dinner plates and callouses the size of walnuts, but she is of that stock.

Which is why she terrifies the Democrats, and why she connects so well with a particular class of American that is supposed to vote Democrat. Hell, I've been a member of more unions than every current serving Labor member of parliament, and I bet I've done more manual labour along the way than every one of them put together. I've probably dealt with more real, front line shop stewards than most of them. I know what a workplace looks like, having spent a decade crawling around the strangest places of a very blue collar industry.

Palin, and her family, give me the impression that they've been down that road as well. Scott Palin looks like he's eaten a lot of meals in a crib room with a lino floor and formica tables and wobbly chairs, eating fish and chips and sharing girlie magazines with the boys, and he has a hardhat with his name on it - and it's not for show. His workboots are real workboots, not something that you pull on for a photo opportunity at a building site.

Obama has not spent his career with workers - he spent it with those that weren't working, and nothing would annoy my grandfather, with his monstrous Presbyterian-style work ethic - than people who didn't pull up their socks and get on with it. Obama doesn't know what the working class looks like. Most of the Democrat big wheels give me the same impression.

* - interesting factoid for any military types reading this. My great uncle had a 4 digit service number. By the time Dad joined, they were handing out 5 digit numbers.

Cool - I want one

This remote controlled aeroplane was doing some pretty cool stunts when I went past. I stopped for a few minutes to check it out.

It was really quiet though - nowhere near as noisy as the planes of my youth. Are they making electric planes these days?

I meet drivers like this on almost every ride

Poor bastard - and I'm talking about the dead cyclist.

I had one idiot overtake me from behind today in the middle of a roundabout, which is about as stupid and illegal as it gets. He was simply in a hurry to get somewhere and didn't want to wait another 2 or 3 seconds for me to clear the roundabout. I had to brake and get out of the way, as he left me a gap of about 6 inches between his car and the kerb.

So if you ever wonder why some cyclists get right out into the middle of the road as they approach roundabouts, it is simply to block idiots from passing when it's as dangerous as all buggery. They're not being impolite - they're just trying to stay alive. If you want to blame anyone, blame the idiot drivers that have brought us to this point.

Take time to smell the flowers

I took a few minutes out from a two hour ride today to snap a few photos of the flowers that are starting to bloom - just to prove that I am not always a hard-hearted RWDB.


Got no idea what any of them are called. My name for them is "pretty".

Not even the pelicans were flying

How the weather has changed in 3 short weeks! This was taken on the last day of August - a cold, wet and miserable day; so miserable, not even the Pelicans could be bothered to take off (there are 4 of them sitting on the mudflat in this photo).


The jacket, leg warmers and gloves with long fingers are about to go into storage for 6 months - they are no longer required, even at dawn. I had a pleasant 2 hour ride yesterday, and returned with the makings of a tan, which is saying something as my forearms have not seen sunlight for months.

The Rocks

From the Harbour Bridge, looking across the rooftops of The Rocks at a ship being manouvered in by tugs.


From one of my recent rides.

Killin' cousins

I've heard of "kissin' cousins", but now it appears we have a documented case of "killin' cousins".

Police identified the attacker as Qasem Mughrabi, 19, from the east Jerusalem neighbourhood of Jebel Mukaber. They said he carried out the attack after his cousin refused to marry him.

What can I say? These people are complete whackjobs.

Really terrible editing at the SMH

I have been reading the online edition of the SMH this morning, which is a good thing. If I was reading a paper version, it would be covered in red ink with comments like "could do better".

First pet hate - mindlessly adopting American expressions. In this example, even though Fairfax loves to print stories about US cultural imperialism, they have used the term "lawmaker" instead of whatever the correct term is for his title. If he is a member of the state Senate, then he is a "Senator". I don't know what the right term is, but the SMH should be able to find out and use it. "Lawmaker" jars my sensitive Australian ears.

Second pet hat - writing about stuff you clearly don't understand. Try reading that article regaring the price of oil going up $25 a barrel and see if it makes a lick of sense to you. It reads to me like an assignment written by a 12 year old.

This story is not the fault of the paper, but after reading it, I wondered how on earth that person got a licence.

The inquest heard medical evidence that Ms Sutton-Smith suffered from bi-polar disorder and could become extremely agitated, The Daily Mail said.

Her mental condition made it likely that she would act impulsively and fail to appreciate when she was in danger, the paper said.

And someone thought it was a good idea to let her drive? It's a wonder only one person ended up dead.

Napalm sticks to kids

There has been a fascinating and lengthy brawl going on over in Blairdom today. I have not seen that many posts since Tim moved to the dark side.

I would like to toss in my two cents worth over there, but it appears there are two Vietnam Vets going at it hammer and tongs, and I don't want to get caught in the crossfire.

I burst out laughing when I read this comment from Richard Sharpe:

I spent the early years of my career re-fighting the war in Vietnam, albeit in places like Shoalwater Bay, Canungra and High Range. This is a new war. Whilst we are very proud of the achievements of the ATF in Phuoc Tuy, don’t make the mistake of re-fighting Vietnam in the 21st Century.

Yep, did that too, except I was doing it at Northam, Bindoon and Nannup. Funny how the Vietnam War was over in 1975, and I was still re-fighting it in 1985. We even had an enemy dressed in black pyjamas and wearing conical hats, running around yelling things like "Di-di mow" and "chicken chow-mein" as they shot at us at oh-dark-hundred.

I think I can understand why Burke has been brought in by the DS (Directing Staff). He'd give a talk, then one of the DS would march in and yell something like this at the cadets:

"Right you lot, that's enough listening to yellow pooftas for one day. Bayonet practice starts in 5 minutes. The last one of you to have their sorry carcass on the parade ground will be the target. I'm sure most of you will feel like killing something after listening to that idiot crap on for an hour."

When I signed up, I told the recruiter all sorts of rubbish about why I wanted to join. Being patriotic and wanting to do your duty was not the done thing to say, so I waffled some dribble about why I was joining.... but the fact was, I knew what it was all about and why I wanted to do it. I like our country. No, fuck it - I love it. And I was happy to kill any bastard that wanted to mess with us.

As for understanding the enemy, and why they fought, I was all for that too. If it helped me blat them in a more efficient manner, then I wanted to know. You could put 10 Harvard professors in a room and have them lecture me all day on why they think it's evil for us to kill our enemies, but at the end of such a session, I'd still walk outside and happily pick up that big lump of machine gun and march to the sound of the guns. That's because when I joined, I'd been indoctrinated by 16 years of the modern equivalent of God, King and Country. A few hours of lectures by some twat with a bent for post-modernism and stalinist deconstruction would be unlikely to undermine such firm foundations.

As for the question of whether it is a good thing or not for ADFA cadets to be lectured to by this guy, I suspect that their only concern (like all students) would be whether they would be tested on it or not. I had to put up with an enormous amount of lefty shit from lecturers when I was at uni. I wrote papers that made them happy, but I didn't believe a word of it. If they were happy, I got a good mark, and I didn't give a shit about what they were teaching - in the end, it would give me a degree that would start me on a good career path. I just kept my head down and regurgitated their crap.

You may think that's a terrible attitude to take, but I look at it this way. During my infantry training, I had to crawl through a fair bit of mud. But at the end of the training, I went home, washed it off, had a beer and fell asleep in my armchair; happy, clean and content. Some of the units that I studied were like that - I crawled through crap, but at the end of the semester, I washed it out of mind and stepped back onto the path I was travelling along. Crawling through intellectual crap should bother a soldier less than crawling through a spot of mud. If you are confident in your moral positions, it washes off more easily than mud.

Anyway, as I said, I had to put up with some loonie-lefty lecturers from time to time. I occasionally had to tell them that I would be away for two weeks due to an exercise, and that was enough to utterly horrify them. When they suddenly understood that the bloke they had been tutoring for some months was in fact a closet baby killer, some became a little unhinged. Have you ever seen someone back away, their arms flailing, like they've just opened a envelope full of anthrax? I saw that, and whilst I was a bit taken aback at the time and didn't know how to react, it makes me grin today to think that a few simple words could have such a tremendous impact. I even had one bloke (shorts, sandals, long socks, beard) try and talk me into resigning from the Reserves. Fat chance of that working. He spent the rest of the year either scowling at me or ignoring me.

And let me just dispense with this notion that the Army turns soft, innocent recruits into killers. The Army simply helps the process along. I reckon that inside most modern men, there is a Spartan waiting to leap out and poke some bastard in the guts with a pointy stick. People of a certain age may remember the film that made Richard Gere's career - An Officer and a Gentleman. Some may even recall some of the cadences that the cadets chanted as they ran:

Eighteen kids in a No Fire Zone,
Rooks under arms and going home,
Last in line goes home alone,
Napalm sticks to kids.

My platoon actually got in trouble for singing stuff like this - but only because the Major who heard us thought we were becoming "too American". The killing and the maiming and the burning was fine by him, but copying the Yanks was not. I can understand that - I joined the Australian Army, not the Marines. But no one was teaching us cool Australian marching songs, so we copied the only ones we had. Yes, I actually knew the words to that song by heart once. We knew that if had to go to war, we had to be the meanest, nastiest, most killing-est bunch of bastards on the battlefield, and we did what we had to do to mentally and physically prepare ourselves for that time. If we thought our instructors were being a bit soft in that area, we picked up anything that would help to develop that mental shield.

I wish Burke could go back in time to visit our Regiment around 1988. He could have given his talk, and then we'd retire to the boozer and entertain him by singing songs like the above.

As for this dribble:

"students should try to understand terrorists rather than fight them"

Let me just say this about the fellows that I served with. I can't speak for the Army of today, but the Army that I served in was not full of pseudo-intellectuals pondering the next wankfest where they might score a speaking engagement (and I served in a University Regiment which was about 80% Arts students). We were a very well educated set of grunts, but we didn't philosophise much about why we were there or what we were doing.

We didn't need some moral imperative to fight - if the government told us to go do something, we would have done it - no questions asked (except maybe some queries about allowances and tax free status). The only term that I can think of to describe those guys is that you would not insert them into a battlefield, you would unleash them. Think about the battle scene in Braveheart, then put those Scotsmen in DPCU's and add modern firearms (and yes, we were fond of chucking brown-eyes as well). Unleashed is probably putting it a bit mildly. Those that volunteer to serve are self-selected from what I would term the rugby end of the masculinity spectrum, rather than the Burke-badminton end.

As a closer, this bloke is spot on.

PS - I have figured out why Burke is there. It's to uncover the softcocks. If any meat head gets taken in by his views, they get ejected faster than a streaker at the cricket.

Finally, the N95 coughs up some photos

I have now had the Nokia N95 in my possession for just over 3 weeks, and it has taken that long to get it to cough up the photos that I've taken on it. My first impression is that it takes great photos - so long as you only want to view them on a screen no larger than 2 inches across.


Some fire trucks outside an apartment block in Five Wog. I suspect one of the wogetts living there set her hair on fire with some straightening irons.

This is how I got the photos off.

I bought a blue tooth dongle so that my PC could connect to the phone via bluetooth. That allowed me to sync the contacts in Outlook to the phone. And that was it. No photos came back the other way.

After rooting around with the Nokia PC Suite for two weeks (a bit of software every bit as bloated as MS Office), I got rid of it and installed Nokia's Ovi suite. Nokia do not explain the difference between the two, and the phone does not ship with the Ovi suite on CD - but they do ship the standard PC suite (which does not work).

I installed the Ovi suite, which at least found the phone, but it refused to transfer any photos either. After reading a number of blogs, I eventually found a way to import the photos using some software from Roxio. That is the only thing that works. Apart from bringing the memory card up as another drive and copying them off manually - and the card only showed up after I installed the Ovi suite. The only thing the Ovi suite is good for is making the memory card visible so that Roxio can do its thing.

Have I mentioned what a useless bucket of shit this thing is before now? And why any prospecting buyers should look at something running a Windows or Mac OS?

Sensible people should start shorting Nokia stock based on this pile of pus.

When will the Greens stop polluting the environment?

These Green signs were put up for the Council elections last weekend. Any bets on how long it will take before they take them down? Two months? Three months? Never?

Nice tilt you've got there

I know this might sound like a sickening thing to do, but try this exercise:

Go to the SMH website and type "obama" into their search engine.

Then have a look at the headlines it returns. You can try the same thing with "mccain".

Notice anything about them? Am I the only person to think that the SMH is tilting a certain way?

Nasty way to remove a tattoo

The always excellent Bystander pointed me at these two crispy guys. He makes a good point in his latest article about the tragedy of the way the paper has spun this story - they only make the news because they bonked Paris Hilton half a lifetime ago. What a sad indictment on our modern media that they decide to slant things that way.

The story mentions that the well-inked guy is badly burned beneath the waist. I guess if his bottom half is anything like his top half, it will be covered in tatts. What's the bet they are now all completely buggered, and that his first concern will be for his lost tattoos, rather than the 4 people that died in the crash?

And here's another point about celebrities - note that there were 4 passengers in the Lear jet. Remember all that hoo-ha about carbon emmissions and global worming and all that other crap? Any chance that these two crispy people have played at some concerts proposing that we all get taxed to death in order to 'save the planet'?

If so, I hope this is a judgement on high about their hypocrisy.

Wiggers in our midst

As the temperature climbed into the 30's today, I packed the kiddies into the car and took them down to the Leichhardt pool for a dip. Along with just about everyone else in the suburb. I thought I had taken a wrong turn for a minute and driven to a swimming pool in Tokyo, such was the crush.

But if I was in Tokyo, I would have been surrounded by polite people.

The language definitely told me I was not in Tokyo.

In days gone by, I went to the pool for one reason only, and that was to try and churn out 50 laps and then go home. (Getting my car without power steering out of the car park after 50 laps was always a challenge, since I could barely raise my arms to scratch my nose). Now, I spend most of my time messing around with a Monkey on my back. I wear a rashie for the simple reason that he has viciously sharpened finger nails, and I prefer that he digs them into the rashie rather than my skin.

Since my head is above water 99.5% of the time, instead of below it, I get to see and hear what my fellow pool-people are like. That's a big change from doing laps, where you have to surmise what someone might be like by the shape of their feet or the colour of their bathers. I don't have to do that anymore - I just watch and listen.

Most of the time, things are pretty dull. The indoor pool will be full of kids around the 1-4 year old range, and most of the forty-something mums sit in a chair by the side of the pool instead of jumping in for a splash with the youngsters. I get the raised eyebrow from time to time for wanting to throw the Monkey into the air and have him come down in an enormous splash. Many of the mums have this look of, "Can we just get this over and done with so I can go home and have some vodka?"

But enough of that.

Today was Wigger Day. Within a minute of getting into the water, my attention had been drawn to a girl of about 14-15 and her sister, who looked about 6. What got my attention was that as I towed the Monkey past them, the elder yelled at the younger, "Get over here, you f*&cking c*&t!", and yelled it with a lot of aggression.

Now I am usually non-plussed by swearing. I've been bawled out by instructors who managed to turn the air blue for long periods of time. But I am unused to that kind of language in a public place between sisters.

Except that over the next hour, it became clear that they were aboriginal.

Why did it take me an hour to work that out?

Because both were paler than me, and I am the albino of our family. When dad goes out in the sun, you could mistake him for Kamahl after a few hours, but I could get sunburn in a submarine 50 metres beneath the Arctic icepack. That's how pale I am. And these two were whiter than I.

As I towed the Monkey up and down the pool, I went past this wigger on a number of occasions, and noted that she had a very highly developed case of defiance and an enormous chip on her shoulder. She would mouth off from time to time, just to show that she was "different" and "special".

What a plonker.

When we left, she was part of a brood that walked out to the carpark at the same time. There were 7 or 8 of them, all young kids, and she was yelling about being stressed because "I haven't had a bong this afternoon". Wow. You are so tough. Smoking a bong a few times a day and bragging about it in public. She was making some sort of statement to the kids, which consisted of around 30 words - 20 of them being "fuck", or one of its derivatives.

Why are we not allowed to brand these people with a big "L" on their forehead?

Here's the rub.

On most visits to that pool, I swim and splash alongside a lot of people that I would describe as noticeably Aboriginal or Islander or Melonesian. They don't look like they are 100% Aboriginal or whatever, but they are Aboriginal enough to be worried if the KKK ever comes to town.

The thing is, they are no different to you and me in their behaviour - they play with their kids, are polite and watch what they are doing. Afterwards, they sit in the cafe having an icecream and whiping the mess of their children's faces. If our kids crash into each other, we look each other in the eye and smile and shrug our shoulders and have that little moment of connection between two parents who are trying to keep their kids safe whilst having a good time, and trying to stop them from interfering with others whilst they are doing it. They are middle-class, well adjusted Australians who happen to have a better tan than me. They are probably happy to be termed "aspirational".

But that wigger and her brood - they were anything but. I thought about it afterwards and decided that her behaviour was all about exclusion - she didn't want to join in with the rest of us, or allow us to interact with her. She wanted to stay aloof and different. I have read about "social inclusion" policies in the UK, and can see what they are on about. But what do you do when people are "socially excluded" because they like it that way? At one point, she crashed into us, and I had that little moment of looking her in the eye as I turned around to see who we had collided with, and all I got was a "What the fuck are you looking at?" type of hostility.

I will make an enormous and unfounded leap here and say that she is probably a welfare case (there is a big housing commission development not far from the pool, and I have been through it and seen her feral type there all to often). People like this want us to pay our taxes to support them in their chosen lifestyle, but then they do everything possible not to join in with what I would call the "civil society".

Am I being mean when I say, "Just cut the fuckers off?" If you want out, we're not paying for you.

The best thing about this entire encounter was that I pointed her out to Junior and explained what a "wigger" is, and what it means to be a complete and utter loser. It was a good lesson in trying to reinforce what behaviours that are unacceptable.

I am sure I will get a note from the school next week complaining that he used "wigger" in the playground, and I will have to appear before a Human Rights star chamber somewhere.

Postscript

When I mentioned this to J, her comment was that she couldn't understand why people should try to deliberately degrade themselves instead of bettering themselves. Her parents arrived in this country with nothing, started their own business and raised their kids to do the best they can. Wanting to be a wanna-be gangster wigger is just the pits.

Any bets on whether fuel watch will last until the election?

The whole issue of Fuelwatch seems to have died a quiet death with the recent falls in the price of a barrel of oil.

Let's assume that we get lucky and the price drops back down to say $80 a barrel over the next 12 months. Will Foolwatch be wound up as a short lived political expediency, or will it outlive us all as a bureaucratic monster that refuses to die?

I'd like to know whether the staff that are working on it are on contract, or whether they have been taken on permanently. I'd hate to think of the cost of winding it up if they all have to be given redundancy payments.

Anything government related is hard to kill. I met a bloke once that was part of the reform team that Griener put into State Rail in order to stop it sending NSW into bankruptcy. He told me that the SRA finally finished its conversion from coal to diesel at some point in the 1960's. However, it was his job to come in 25 years later and finally close down all the coaling and watering stations that still existed out in the bush, employing a few men here and there, but collectively adding up to thousands of positions.

Have any of the fatheads in Canberra considered the possibility that we might have faced a one-off blip with the oil prices (higher prices of course acting as a brake on consumption whilst spurring more exploration and the bringing on-stream of more production), and that Foolwatch might not have a reason for existing if the price drops back to $80 a barrel or less?

Hell, even at $100 a barrel, people seem to have stopped complaining. Foolwatch was always less use that a dead mullet, but it's even more useless now.

Pathetic letter of the week

The NRMA President is at it again, writing garbage to those that line his pockets (ie, us, the members).

Here is a snippet from the latest cesspit:

"The Board will continue to wrestle the oil companies until the stranglehold they currently enjoy on Australia's transport energy future is ended".

"wrestle"? How do you "wrestle" with an oil company? Do you go down to the refinery at Botany Bay and grapple with a feed pipe?

As for the "stranglehold", the NRMA has the size and muscle to buy into the oil industry if it wants to. So why doesn't it? I bet the answer will be along the lines of "too risky and not a good enough return". Well, if that's the case, why are you attacking shareholders who are game enough to put their money into buying a stake in an oil company?

Idiot.

This clown, who earns several hundred thousand dollars a year via various directorships associtated with the NRMA, also had this to say:

"...calls on the Federal Government to develop an alternative fuel industry that is green, less volatile and cheaper for Australian families".

In other words, take the taxes extracted from you and me and pour them into one of his pet projects.

How about this for an idea, Alan. How about the NRMA puts up the money to develop an alternative fuel industry. You can put it to the members, along with a business plan, and try and raise the money yourself. After all, if the goddammed supposedly long-suffering motorists of NSW won't stump up the cash, why the hell should the taxpayer?

It is unbelievable that someone like this should get paid so much.

J

J suited up for some meetings today and looked awesome. She has spent the last year getting a home-based business idea off the ground, and it is starting to bear fruit. I am hoping to be a retired house-husband in a few years time. It had better succeed wildly. The fun part of getting the business going was trying to cope with a pregnancy that was less than comfortable, but the idea is so good, even with her flat on her back with pregnancy pains (and then a newborn), the idea has taken root and people are starting to pay her good money for her product. Not bad for someone that has been largely confined to the couch for the last eight months. Now that she is on her feet and back to 100%, I'm looking forward to a Wealth Manager cold-calling us from the bank asking how we want to invest our new-found fortune.

Here's one hilarious sidebar to this business idea. J originally approached one of the Councils in the inner west with the idea of doing the work on their behalf (her product is something that almost every Council has in their strategic plan as a Good Thing that they should be doing, but none of them have been arsed so far to do it). The Council staff umm'd and ahh'd and eventually came back and said, "We are too busy this year to contemplate doing it", even though J would have done 99% of the work, and it was something that they were supposed to do every year for the last six years.

So she decided to do it herself. Bugger the Council and their "I'm too busy" staff attitudes.

All I can say is this - thank goodness for every Council employing a proportion of good-for-nothing nuff-nuffs. If it wasn't for them and their lack of get up and go, we wouldn't have this winner of an idea.

I'm going to have to get used to talking to the media, because she’s been getting increasing media coverage, and I occasionally answer the "office" phone and will probably find myself talking to a sponge-headed "journalist" before too long. I've listened with interest to a few phone interviews (as I've sat beside her blogging), and have found that what they print bears no relation whatsoever to what was said in the interview. They generally get the business name right, and that's about it. J might find herself being described as an "Albanian goat herder" next week, which doesn't bother us - so long as they promote the business, I don't care what picture they paint of us.

All the stuff on my "shelf of stuff" in the office was recently banished to a cupboard to make room for a business award that she has picked up. I can see that we are going to have to create an "ego wall" soon to have space for the stuff she is going to collect. That's led to being invited to speak to various groups of people around the place, which will probably create more media interest etc etc etc.... I wonder how long it will be before she is our new mayor.

I'm also sharing my desk and PC with J's first employee. It's an odd feeling - I am used to managing up to 40 people, but they were not employed by me. I did not have to pay their wages. J has actually created a job for someone else, and is putting money in their pocket. After reading about that dill John Murphy and his antics in parliament, I wonder how many politicians could say, "I have had to make the payroll for my employees". A move to a proper office is now on the horizon - there is only so long that she can continue to run this thing from our lounge room. Personally, I couldn't think of a better place to work from than the nearest couch, but the way things are going, we might have 10 employees next year, and we don't have a lounge room big enough to hold that many couches.

And then Kevin Rudd will tax or regulate the whole thing out of existence. John Murphy is our local MP - your taxes are required to stuff more beef stroganoff into his face and the mouth of his wife.

The whole idea of starting up your own business from home is just so cool. I've spent 20 years commuting into the city to work for someone else, and to work hours set by someone else, to put up with crap from people with sludge between their ears and to rewarded with a kick in the nuts when it is all over. There are no committees in J's business. There is no HR department. There are no executive toilets. There are no risk managers and pencil counters and auditors and policy managers and best of all, no powerpoint presentations. Our meeting room is any cafe within a 10km radius. The hours of work are those that you choose to do. Naps after lunch are not an issue. There is no web filtering policy or staff newsletter or dress code or hierarchy of chairs that are issued to staff at different levels within the organisation.

It makes me wonder why people want to climb the corporate ladder when they could lounge around on the small business couch.

So McCain can't use a computer to send email....

So fucking what? Here is a photo of an A4 Skyhawk cockpit. I have no idea if this is from the era when McCain got blown out of the sky whilst flying one, but this looked a damned sight more complicated to master than sending a frickin' email!!


And there is probably a "computer" or two of sorts in there somewhere. Just because it isn't running Vista, doesn't mean it's not a "computer". We tend to forget that computers are the offspring of the military, and that pilots etc were very extensive users of computers before they got turned into fancy boxes for playing Doom and surfing porn.

In fact, I take my hat off to anyone that can interface to a computer using toggle switches instead of a mouse and a GUI. Whilst flying inverted at 0.8 Mach and dodging SAMs.

And personally, if I was a yank and was making a choice between someone that had decided to master the nuances of email, vs someone that had the intestinal fortitude to serve their country in a time or war..... I wouldn't be putting a whole lot of weight on he who knows how to use the thumbwheel on a Blackberry.