Sordid Saga Continues...

More on Brazilian politico, and reality TV host, Wallace Souza from Associated Press (via the Taiwan News) and The Christian Science Monitor:

Police have not arrested Mr. Souza because he is a state congressman and so enjoys parliamentary immunity from lower courts.

But the allegations are serious enough that judges could break his immunity and try him on charges of drug trafficking, illegal weapons possession, tampering with witnesses, and organized crime, says Divanilson Cavalcanti, the head of the task force investigating the accusations.

Are You a Latent Neo-Conservative?

Does it annoy you when your leftie peers tell you that your facts are less significant than their brilliant theoretical analysis?

Are you dismayed when someone you thought was a leftie can't see that your insightful analysis makes a particular fact irrelevant?

Do you get irritated by long-winded, incomprehensible articles written by left-wing academics who explain everything using the abstruse theories of French philosophers whose names you can't even pronounce?

When Michel Foucault is mentioned in conversation, do you feel a strong impulse to Discipline and Punish?

Have you ever caught yourself agreeing with Andrew Bolt, Piers Ackerman, Janet Albercthsen or Miranda Devine?

And then decided that you had better change your mind?

Have you ever agreed with anything ever written by George Orwell?

And then decided that you had better change your mind?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, then you are either out-there, proudly and openly Conservative or a latent neo-Conservative, a mere hissy-fit away from jumping to the other end of the political spectrum and denouncing your former friends for their stupid adherence to obsolete and evil ideologies. This is nothing to worry about - it's perfectly normal, even desirable: once you've had that epiphanic hissy-fit, you'll find that the career opportunities are so much better.

Fishermen Marooned - Blame Fish

Shaun Carney's boss is going broke - and it's all our fault!

Want to read Sunday's New York Times on a Sunday? Or a fair chunk of Vanity Fair even before the airmail version is dispatched? Or simply read the morning paper? Just log on. Want to see the latest episode of Entourage? It's not hard to find it; you can save it to your hard drive if you've installed the right plug-ins.

The same goes for almost any album of popular music you can think of. Surf around on torrent download sites - all it takes is a rudimentary inquiry via a search engine - and entire back catalogues of artists' work are there to be downloaded. For nothing.

The important thing to note is that some of the above actions, such as reading magazines and newspapers, are legal, and the others are not. But somehow, as we've revelled in this cornucopia of offerings, a lot of us have lost sight of the distinction.

But now it's time for a reckoning; Fairfax, like Rupert Murdoch's News Limited, will have to start charging us for the privilege of reading Shaun and his colleagues, and we'll just have to get used to it. Unless we want to do something naughty, like downloading the daily news bit torrents from the sites that will doubtless spring up once the pay walls are in place. Carney's article is a good example of how the media doesn’t understand the issues that have put it into its present position.

It's well known - but widely ignored, it seems, in news rooms - that the main business of newspapers, television and radio is selling advertising to advertisers. News, cop shows and talk-back are just there as bait to bring in the readers, viewers and listeners; it's the advertisers who pay most of the bills - the cover price of The Age and its rival The Hun make only a token contribution to revenues. If it were raised to the point where it covered even 50% of the production costs of a single issue, the newspaper would lose circulation, and with it, advertising revenue.

The 'old media', regardless of whatever delusions their management and staff may entertain, have been in a business a lot like long-line fishing. Their business is hooking your attention to what advertisers are selling. We're the fish, News Limited and Fairfax are the fishers and the advertisers are the buyers. Blaming us for not taking the bait - because we can get tastier, meatier bait elsewhere - makes as much sense as blaming the collapse of the Grand Banks fishery on the moral laxity of cod.

Storm Warning

It's a pity I don't have a prize to offer. If I did, I'd run a quick sweep on who is going to be the first MSM opinionator to denounce the judgment of Chief County Court Justice Michael Rozenes in the case of Danielle Boundy. Andrew Bolt is my pick for odds-on favourite with The Hun's editorialist, Neil Mitchell and Alan Howe equal second favourites at 2:1.

Anyone care to make odds on other commentators?

A Great Way to Start the Conversation

Maybe it's just my PC, or the browser - they're both getting on a bit.

But What About the Piccaninnies?

Andrew Bolt, The Hun's answer to Kyle Sandilands, has had a very angry bee in his infested bonnet this week. Andrew is outraged that prizes and scholarships for aborigines are going to people who are too deficient in skin and hair pigmentation to be proper blacks.

On Sunday, artist Danie Mellor, winner of the 2009 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award attracted Bolt's outrage with a double offence: not being black enough for Andy and his readers, and winning the prize with an art-work that wasn't proper aboriginal art. It wasn't a dot painting. Mellor was brave (or foolish) enough to reply to Bolt; all it got him from Bolt and his readers was more derision and contempt.

On Wednesday, it was Fulbright Scholar Mark McMillan's turn in Bolt's pillory. Bolt found plenty to sneer about, including this article by McMillan at ABC Online, where 'McMillan describes the agony of not being discriminated against for being Aboriginal'. In keeping with Bolt's high journalistic standards, a bit of deft cut and pasting produced an edited quote that depicted McMillan as a chronic whiner - 'Just the kind of Aboriginal who needs a special handout.'

On Thursday, Bolt added Rebecca McGrath, the latest recipient of the Monika Law Scholarship at the University of Technology Sydney, to his roster of fake aboriginals, went McMillan again (for receiving the Black Women’s Action in Education Foundation Scholarship) and took a gratuitous swipe at UTS Law professor Larisa Behrendt (A frequent target for Bolt).

Knowing that a picture is worth a thousand inflammatory words, in all three posts, Bolt included photographs of the undeserving 'whites' and the real aborigines they were elbowing aside, including pictures of 'real draw-in-the-dirt Aboriginal artists such as Dorothy Napangardi, Mitjili Napanangka Gibson and Walangkura Napanangka' and a pair of smiling aboriginal children who looked much too young to benefit from either a Fulbright scholarship or a scholarship to UTS anyway.

By Friday Bolt had enough material for a column; he'd also (perhaps at the behest of The Hun's editor) managed to concoct a couple of principled reasons for his outrage. The first we've already heard - white folks shouldn't be taking awards meant for black folks. The second:

And here’s my other objection.

Seeking power and reassurance in a racial identity is not just weak - a
surrendering of your individuality, and a borrowing of other people’s
glories.

It’s also exactly what we have too much of already.

The noble ideal of Australia, that we judge each other by our character
and deeds, and not our faith, fortune or fatherland, is breaking down...

For me, Bolt's resort to calling his targets 'weak' carries vague echoes of the schoolyard of the 1960s, where being 'weak' was an invitation to bullying. It suggests a very unpleasant mentality to match Bolt's unpleasant public behaviour. What he has to say about those who 'borrow other people's glories' might equally apply to the history warriors, like Bolt himself, who want history teachers to ignore the bad stuff and concentrate on giving kids a history they can be proud of. We have too much of it already? That wasn't what he was saying about John Howard's 2006 history summit and for years he has been routinely ranting about the superiority of our culture over all others. Bolt, it seems, is as weak as those he targets.

That final invocation of 'the noble ideal of Australia' rings especially hollow, when Bolt has spent so many words (and so much of his time over the week) on attacking people not so much on their characters and deeds, but on the spurious grounds of race. But then no seasoned Bolt reader expects to find principled consistency in his writing. That's not what he's paid for.

Elsewhere: Jason Wilson describes what it's like to be 'Bolted' at New Matilda.

Abstract

Zombies are a popular figure in pop culture/entertainment and they are usually portrayed as being brought about through an outbreak or epidemic. Consequently, we model a zombie attack, using biological assumptions based on popular zombie movies. We introduce a basic model for zombie infection, determine equilibria and their stability, and illustrate the outcome with numerical solutions. We then refine the model to introduce a latent period of zombification, whereby humans are infected, but not infectious, before becoming undead. We then modify the model to include the effects of possible quarantine or a cure. Finally, we examine the impact of regular, impulsive reductions in the number of zombies and derive conditions under which eradication can occur. We show that only quick, aggressive attacks can stave off the doomsday scenario: the collapse of society as zombies overtake us all.

(When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection, Munz et al (PDF))

(Hat Tip)

A Token Effort...

... at a post actually relevant to the course. Bill Wyman on why newspapers are failing (via Core Economics).

Don't Know Much About Art...

... maybe that's why I love comedy so much.

A Short Trip Down Confabulation Lane

Melbourne Sundays were pretty dire before 1989. Not much was open, apart from churches and your local milk-bar, which was very likely to be picketed by hard-line Sabbatarians. There was nothing on television or radio, not one CBD restaurant or cinema was open and neither was the NGV. The gates of the Botanical Gardens were firmly shut and padlocked, all the pubs were closed - well, you get the picture.

I was reminded of all this by Steve Foley's reflections on the coming 20th anniversary of The Sunday Age:

Twenty years on, Victoria is no longer the ''odd state'' or, as early advocates put it, ''one of the few places of its size in the developed world without large-circulation Sunday papers''. In no small way the advent of the Sundays transformed the day itself. Shedding its ''sleepy town'' image, Melbourne finally matured into the upscale version of the civilised society it always maintained it should be.

What Were They Thinking?

It's real, it's made by Mattel and you can buy it on-line (discounted from US$44.99 to US$24.90). Or you may prefer to hang out for the release of Leatherface Ken.

A Tale of Two Subbies

Same day, same story, same newspaper, but what a difference a change of shift makes:

Stop feeding me: quadriplegic's court plea (SMH, 2:15pm)

Let him starve: court rules on quadriplegic's plea (SMH, 3:34pm)

Meanwhile, In Brazil...

...the future of reality television has arrived:

A Brazilian TV presenter and politician accused of organising killings to feature on his crime show has spoken out to deny the allegations against him.

Police believe Wallace Souza staged crime scenes to eliminate rivals and boost ratings of "Canal Livre", aired in Amazonas state.

A New Challenge for Libertines

Whether it's endorsed by the Federal Parliament or not, August 13th looks set to become Australia's National Marriage Day. Since the highlight of yesterday's inaugural National Marriage Day was a parliamentary breakfast, organised by Mrs Senator Bill Heffernan, it's only a matter of time before that endorsement is given.

SBS had some footage of the first ever National Marriage Day, including a soundgrab from a speech by the spokescouple from RISE Australia, who raised the question 'Do we really want longer lasting sex?' Some may be heartened to learn that the tradition of lying back, thinking of the ironing and getting it all over with as quickly as possible managed to survive the 1960s after all.

National Marriage Day - who could possibly oppose it? I certainly don't. I'm just going to start agitating for August 14th to become Australia's National Adultery Day and August 15th to become National Divorce Day. Those are just ambit claims - I'll happily settle for the declaration of one day every year to be celebrated as Australia's National No Bullshit Day.

Life Lessons

Here's one thing every member of Gen-X and Gen-Y should know: anyone who can tell you that they know exactly where they were and what they were doing when John F Kennedy was shot is a confabulator. At most, they can make a reasonably accurate guess at where they were and what they were doing etc. This is true of other events since, such as the shooting of John Lennon, on the night of December 8th, 1980, in New York.

Where was I when this momentous event happened? Well, all I can tell you is that I was staying, or living, with my parents, because it was my mother who told me that Lennon had been shot. It was late afternoon or early evening when she told me, probably, given the time difference between New York and Melbourne, on December 7th. The rest is hopelessly vague, except that given that it was 1980 I can be pretty sure that my life-style revolved around sponging off my parents and dole-bludging in roughly equal measure.

I do remember not believing Mum when she first told me, and then struggling to find an emotional response. During my high school years, I'd been a Beatles fan, but by 1980 my record collection had expanded to include all of Beethoven's nine symphonies, a lot of Bach and earlier composers of the Renaissance, MJQ, Oscar Peterson and Dire Straits. It was only by listening to I Am the Walrus, several times on stereo headphones that I managed to conjure up any response to Lennon's death at all.

It wasn't until later, when I went to a party where someone played a mashed-up version of Give Peace a Chance (created with a cassette recorder) that I got a genuine emotional response - anger at the new line that had been substituted into the chorus: 'All we are saying, is Lennon is dead!'. That was an affront to true devotees of St John of Liverpool (and Later Manhattan Island) everywhere. Then I thought it tacky and tasteless. Now, I think it tacky, tasteless and fair because there was always something a little self-aggrandising about Lennon's stunts promoting peace and these days I'm prepared to recognise that.

To put the last four paragraphs into a nutshell: I'm not entirely inured, or indifferent, to celebrity deaths and the outpourings of public grief that follow them. So I can understand - roughly - why the deaths of Michael Jackson, John Hughes and Sam the Koala have touched so many people where they live. They just haven't touched me. And I see nothing wrong with that.

Don't Know Much About Art...

...but I can't help admiring this. It's just one of many works from by English artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster.

Dodging the Column

This cartoon from xkcd is the first, second and third image to come up when you Google 'wrong on the internet'. Just what you need when you've just read the dumbest defence of Kyle Sandilands ever (no names, no pack-drill, no links, no payback).

And there's another thing I dislike about the whole public outrage thing - once you've been manipulated into getting righteously angry, it takes weeks for that brand new red button you've had grafted on to burn itself out.

Don't Know Much About Art...

... but I knows what I likes.

Bottom Feeding

I spent far too much time over the past week following the Kyle and Jackie-O blow-up. Even two minutes spent on Kyle and Jackie-O is too much time.

I'm not a big fan of public outrage - too much of it seems to originate in the editorial offices of news organisations looking for ways to prop up flagging circulation or ratings. It's the stock-in-trade of talk-back radio and radio shock-jocks who hang around the deeps of the same barrel that Kyle and Jackie-O have been scraping the bottom of for years - six of them. according to Kyle Sandilands' self-defensive post at The Punch:

We have had the lie detector thing on regularly for about six years.
It’s a semi-regular segment on the show. We check with the mother
before hand, and go through the questions they want asked.

And there's the problem - according to Sandilands' own admission, he's had teenagers 'strapped into' a 'lie-detector' on a regular basis for the past six years. With parental consent. But it was only last week that he crossed the line; the line between 'tacky, but great radio' and 'tacky, totally unacceptable radio'. Sandilands' big mistake was picking the wrong child from the wrong dysfunctional family to exploit.

Don't believe me? Check out what Channel 7 will be showing as 'family viewing' next Thursday night.

Quick Link

Andrew Bartlett on the international student mess:

There are now reports that the education sector is trying to crack down on so-called ‘rogue education agents’. It’s hard to see how that achieves anything more than window dressing. The previous government specifically exempted education agents from the regulatory requirements which currently apply to migration agents. This exemption was provided specifically to make it easier for Australian educational institutions to recruit students, without the ‘red tape’ of registration and quality control. (my emphasis)

Another fine example of that much loved Australian tradition, the rort.

Welcome...

...to The Flab. I was going to call it The Paunch, but I decided that was a bit too obvious.