All Liars are Liars

I hate to say "I hate to say I told you so", but: 'Madden attended meeting over Hotel Windsor sham'
I told you I hate to say I hate to say I told you so.

Better than The Phantom Menace

I don't know if it's because I watched this at least 10 times in a row with my kids on the weekend, or if I'm just playing too much of The Force Unleashed, but this is frickin' golden:

Apparently it's now been played during an event known as the "SuperBowl"*, but I credit @DamonLindelof with giving us the heads-up last week. Thanks, DL**!
* Of course, I know what the SuperBowl is, even if I don't understand it. Is "Third and Down" a thing?
** Based purely on initials, Damon Lindelof is clearly the Bizarro Larry David.

Battlefield Essendon

I read an article yesterday about my old friend Madden the Clown and Roddie Doyle attending the opening of a new Church of Scientology building in Essendon. Apparently, Madden is quoted as saying: ''You have set the standard for the community with your restoration of this building and with your social programs - an example for others to follow''.
He's such a character!
But I loved this quote further down:

"The church was founded by science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, who declared that the galactic dictator Xenu dumped millions of corpses in volcanoes on Earth 75 million years ago and blew them up with 17 hydrogen bombs. The souls, or ''thetans'', of the dead were contaminated and in turn contaminated humans, who can be cleansed only by Scientology."

It reminded me of a ranty book review I'd started a while ago after reading the hilarious-for-all-wrong-reasons Battlefield Earth a while ago. I actually read it for scientific purposes - to see whether this Lafayette Ronald Hubbard guy was for real, or more like a misunderstood Sacha Baron Cohen creation, like Borat. Y'know - just saying lots of crazy shit and seeing if anyone picked up that he was joking.
I'd always seen his books around (I had even accepted free entry to the "L. Ron Hubbard Life Exhibition" in Hollywood once when backpacking and thus very poor), and so when the opportunity arose to borrow Battlefield Earth from the library, I took it.
For those of you who don't know it (a) good on you, and (b) it's about an alien race that enslaves humanity in year 3000, and the fight against them (particularly by the "hero" - Jonnie Goodboy Tyler. Yes, that's the name he went with).
I was predictably shocked and stunned by what I read.
At the sheer badness of it.
For one thing, the language he uses is laughable. The bad guys, called "Psychlos", eat “goo-food”, breathe “breathe-gas”, and drink “kerbango”.
Points for imagination: zero.
Another example of extraordinary writing can be found right at the beginning, on page 4, when one of the Psychlos insults another saying ”You’re as crazy as a nebula of crap.”
Can I remind everyone that this was written AFTER Star Wars had come out?
The following paragraph from page 414 was so terrible, I just had to write it down - it's word for word, no typos:

“Chrissie had been spotted by the Scots, and the news earlier rumored to that effect was now confirmed as she went about helping the parson collect wounded Scots on a flatbed that had been gotten running.”

And of course, it contains the propaganda. The following describes a doctor operating on a Psychlo brain:

“MacKendrick saw their reaction. “Nothing new in this. Just electrical impulses approximating brain commands. Some man-scientist did this maybe thirteen hundred years ago and thought he’d found the secret of all thought and made up a cult about it called ‘psychology’. Forgotten now. It wasn’t the secret of thought; it was just the mechanics of bodies. They started with frogs. I’m cataloging this body’s communication channels, that’s all.””

Relevance? Zero.
It even gets some shameless self-congratulatory delusion in there, stating towards the end that after the humans won, one of the characters “wrote a book: The Jonnie Goodboy Tyler I knew, or The Conqueror of Psychlo, Pride of the Scottish Nation. It was not as good as this book, for it was intended for semiliterate people” (page 1049 - yes, that's one THOUSAND and forty nine pages of this!)
In fact, it appears El Ronnie was particularly adept at the self-congratulation. According to his bio (in the book, though I should point out there's a possibility it's not factually correct...or worse) he was "in addition to a writer (with a career spanning more than half a century of intense literary achievement and creative influence), an explorer, ethnologist, mariner and pilot, filmmaker and photographer, philosopher and educator, composer and musician. He broke his first bronc and became the blood brother of a Blackfeet Indian medicine man by age six. In 1927, when he was 16, he traveled to a still remote Asia…"
Ahhhh! I can't do this any more, so I'll just let him finish off, with his preface to the so-called "book":

“To show that science fiction is not science fiction because of a particular kind of plot, this novel contains practically every type of story there is – detective, spy, adventure, western, love, air war, you name it. All except fantasy; there is none of that. The term “science” also includes economics and sociology and medicine where these are related to material things. So they’re in here, too.
“In writing for magazines, the editors (because of magazine format) force one to write to exact lengths. I was always able to do that – it is kind of a knack. But this time I decided not to cut everything out and to just roll her as she rolled, so long as the pace kept up. So I may have wound up writing the biggest sf novel ever in terms of length. The experts – and there are lots of them to do so – can verify whether this is so…
“And as an old pro I assure that it is pure science fiction. No fantasy. Right on the rails of the genre. Science is for people. And so is science fiction.”
“Ready?
“Stand by.
“Blast off!”

And now you want to read it.

Trail blazing trial grazing

A quick mini-rant:
In response to the new Victorian Government's decision to allow cattle back into Alpine National Parks to graze as part of a "scientific trial"*, Libby Rumpff**, of the University of Melbourne's School of Botany, stated:
"The only fact that this trial can discover is that cows eat grass."
That's scientific comedy gold.
* Seems similar to Japanese whaling "scientific trials", which are scientifically determining whether stabbing whales kills them, and whether dead whales are more edible than live whales. The results so far appear inconclusive.
** Notice how I didn't make any scientific comedy gold comments about the word "Rumpff"? That's because I'm a grown-up.

Things I've learned in the past week or so...

(Or how I learned to stop writing long blog posts and just get this stuff out there, short-stuff Twitter-style)

A few things I've learnt this week:

• Alberto Cheatador got nailed (and I got to see Lance many, many times up close and personal at the Tour Down Under -BAM!)
  
• Apparently I'm to blame for Angus and Julia and Stone getting the No.1 spot in the Hottest 100, even though I did not and would not vote for them (my No.1 song of the year was "Tighten Up" by the Black Keys, but I consistently have my thumb off the pulse of what the general public like, as evidenced by my failure to watch a single episode of Masterchef, combined with my constant ability to watch shows that get cancelled or placed at weird times or on weird stations (Community, 30 Rock, even Buffy), plus predicting that no-one liked John Howard or (heaven forbid) that Peter Costello would be better than Howard...and so forth. Come to think of it, my inability to see eye-to-eye with the public-at-large could be why I rant...)
  
• Ricky Gervais is an hilarious atheist
• Douchebaggery
• Privatising our public transport has meant we've paid a billion dollars for worse service (but of course if you read this blog, and the fact you just read that previous sentence indicates you do, you already know that)
• By putting the maintenance of the surplus above climate change reform (and, indeed, common sense, by taxing people a small amount for a lot of grief), Julia Gillard really doesn't know what she's doing there.

That last bullet point of learning is very disappointing. I (and an entire country, besides) have given her a chance, but it's just getting worse. The right-wing crazies were already howling for her blood, but the progressives don't seem too keen on what she's been doing either.
Some bold decisions need to be made - the flooding we've seen this year is likely to become a frequent occurrence (as early as next week apparently, with some cyclones bearing down on a Queensland that must be full to the brim with homosexuals, assuming you're into the whole Wrath Of God thing), and we've already seen other evidence of extreme weather events with not just the bushfires in Victoria, but events all over the world. Ian Lowe, president of the Australian Conservation Foundation, has some good suggestions in his article "Drowning in a hothouse", mostly to do with acknowledging there's a problem and putting a price on carbon pronto, as well as investing in public transport, phasing out multibillion-dollar subsidies of fossil fuel production and use, and investing in clean energy. Y'know, obvious stuff. Also, I'm no engineer, but I also wonder if there shouldn't be some kind of huge nation-building program undertaken to divert water that would otherwise cause flooding through the Great Dividing Range and into the Murray-Darling river system - #twobirdsonestone. Twitter-style!
Plus the ongoing debacle that is the resource rent tax (or the "Some minerals extraction tax", or "Oil-and-coal-companies-can-you-lend-me-a-fiver-scheme", or whatever it's going to end up as) really sticks in my ... anyone? Anyone? "Craw" - That's right - its sticks in my motherlovin' craw. To add insult to injury about our Government's limp-wristed approach to this issue, an Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne, Peter Christoff, decided to rub our noses in it a bit (with good intentions), telling us that:

"Mesmerised by the short-term benefits of successive mineral booms and shackled to their revenue flows, Australian governments have become both increasingly reluctant and increasingly politically terrified to regulate the pace of exploitation of these resources or to seek their full worth. And because returns to the state have been spent immediately, governments have become addicted to the income stream and unable to slow the exploitation of resources that have no future, such as coal and, eventually, gas, if we are to take climate change seriously.
We have been told over and again that this development path was the only choice for Australia, which doesn't have the public capital base to invest in exploration and exploitation of its non-renewable natural resources.
Strange, then, that a small nation such as Norway - population 5 million - should have had the capacity to do so. Stranger still that Norway could use revenue from its oil and gas windfall to establish a national fund that is now a major investor in economic development both in Norway and overseas, guaranteeing a revenue stream to fund the very robust Norwegian welfare state - its health, transport, public housing, and social security system."

Ahhh, jeez. I'm just gonna go to the Big Day Out and watch the Black Keys, to calm my nerves.

Speaking of which, here's that favourite song of mine from last year:

What's that? The Black Keys have cancelled their Australian tour?
Motherfuck!
All right, I'll just watch Ricky Gervais being funny again:

All the way with Turn-BJ!!!

Could there be any better way of highlighting the clear differences between current Liberal leader and secret super villain "ClownMan" (TM) (otherwise known as the mild/ill-mannered Tony Abbott), and the man he deposed by a single vote (Malcolm Turnbull: "Turn-BJ" - USE IT!) than by reading the following two relatively recent articles:

• "Judges' election on cards: Abbott" (wherein ClownMan unthinkingly blurts that it is "almost inevitable" that Australia will adopt the American system of electing judges if courts do not listen to the community and deliver tougher sentencing); and
  
• "Political risk in making a martyr of Assange" (wherein Malcolm Turnbull sagely and considerately states "Assange is an Australian citizen. No matter how much the government disapproves of his actions, it should make it clear that he is entitled to return to Australia if he wishes and to receive consular assistance if the charges of sexual assault proceed in Sweden" and "Julia Gillard's claim that Assange had broken Australian laws, when it is clear he has not, demonstrates how out of her depth she is.")
  

Of course, I always preferred gutless wonder Costello to lying scumbag Howard, so what do I know...

The Decline and Fall of the State Labor Government's Empire

Well - it's over.
For the ALP's Victorian Government, that is. Wa-hey!!
And I hate to say "I told you so" but ...
Actually, I think I enjoy saying it. What I really hate saying is "I hate to say "I told you so"" (because I have to say it so often, you see...)
Anyhoo - I told you so! Here, and here and here. And also here quite forcefully. Plus I already mentioned here.
I was half-way through another post railing against the Government that I was going to call "On the Nose" (an enormously witty reference to the former Victorian slogan "On the Move") but they went and got themselves kicked out before I could finish it.
The surprising thing for me was not the result, but the fact that everyone else seemed surprised about the result. I thought I was alone in predicting the Labor Government would go down this election, but to be fair, a few other commentators (or "professional journalists", if you want to get accurate about it) also recognised the danger signs, like Paul Austin of The Age back in February ("Labor's tide begins to turn") and David Rood in March, after the Altona by-election ("The Sorry Factor").
I'm not saying I'm jumping for joy about it - I'm just being self-congratulatory for picking it.
One of my biggest sore points was the Hotel Windsor debacle, which involved the leak of a plan by the Minister for Clowning - Justin Madden - and/or his staff to have a sham consultation into the development of the hotel, followed up with an immediate approval of the project after the leak, and a refusal to allow any of his staff to testify at the subsequent inquiry. As stated in the article "Arrogant executive should be brought to heel in Windsor case":

"DEFIANCE of the law by the government is one of the most serious things that can occur in any democracy. It is a breach of the rule of law, the most fundamental value on which our constitutional arrangements are based. It is precisely this sort of dangerous defiance that the Victorian government is engaged in with its refusal to co-operate with a parliamentary inquiry into the Hotel Windsor planning processes - and it is doing so under the cover of a bogus "parliamentary convention".
"The time has come for the Victorian Legislative Council, the upper house of the Parliament, to take severe action against the executive and to establish the point once and for all that the Parliament's legitimate role must be accepted."

So - their lack of respect for democracy stuck in my craw somewhat.
Plus there was all that stuff they ignored or tried to hide about public transport (and myki), and smart meters, and the desal plant and the Port Phillip Bay dredging and BAD PLANNING and...
You get the idea.
It's unlikely that Baillieu will be able to fix many if any of these problems. But a democratically elected Government that fails to abide by the central tenets of democracy deserves to get democratically kicked in the ar$e.
Baillieu - you're next in the cross-hairs on my boot. Get to work.