Archive for January, 2004
Protected: Go Get Him George
Posted in Uncategorized on January 31, 2004|
Go Get Him George
Posted in Uncategorized on January 31, 2004| Leave a Comment »
I hope George Soros is successful-
The billionaire who is stalking George Bush
January 31, 2004
George Soros, Chairman of Soros Fund management speaks during the Riding the Next Democratic Wave conference. Photo: AFP
He is one of the world’s wealthiest men. America made George Soros, but now he’s digging deep to topple the ‘truth machine’, he tells Peter Fray.
George Soros is one of the world’s wealthiest men, a self-created financial genius who has amassed a fortune by exploiting the foibles of the market and human nature. He is also a zealous philanthropist and supporter of both small and big “d” democrats. In short, he’s a player.
But if you didn’t know any of that or had somehow missed the entire Bush presidency, he might come across as more of a leftie sociology lecturer, the type who wears a leather-patched corduroy jacket and steadfastly clings to an equally faded world view. Come the revolution, brothers . . .
With Soros, it’s not his dress sense, which is traditional business, but the patter. Within minutes of meeting the Herald at his plush west London abode, he complains about George Bush’s “Orwellian truth machine” and its use of “doublespeak”.
He believes that ending this presidency’s “supremacist ideology” has become a “matter of life and death” for the planet’s future. It’s like meeting his compatriot Michael Moore in a posh suit and tie. “This Orwellian truth machine really does remind you of the conditions that Orwell was drawing from, mainly the Nazi and Soviet truth machines, with one tremendously significant difference – that in the Soviet and Nazi case, the state party apparatus absolutely controlled the media and all the sources of information totally. “In the United States today you do have a pluralistic, free media. Neverthe-less, the truth machine is capable of manufacturing truth, so that the majority of people in America continue to believe that Saddam was somehow connected to September 11, when all the evidence points to the opposite.
“It raises the question, how is this possible?”
Indeed. How is it possible that Mr Soros, at 73 and with a reported fortune of about $US7 billion ($9.1 billion), gives a hoot about Mr Bush; or why, when he himself has obviously lived the American dream to its fullest, has he devoted this year to unseating the man whom many Americans still believe is the living embodiment of that dream? Isn’t this biting the system that feeds?
Soros, a Hungarian emigre to the US, concedes that he is open to such accusations. “I can be seen as a traitor to my class and my adopted country, but I am proud to take that role. I think there are values which transcend class and country. I think my country can be wrong and that’s the value of an open society and that is the value which has made America great.
“I do think the open society and democracy is now in danger because the ultimate guarantor of an open society is a well-informed electorate that has a commitment to or values the truth.
“We now have a largely or partially misinformed electorate. But more to the point is that people are not concerned about the truth. In America, success counts more than the truth.
“You can see it in the [most recent] stockmarket bubble where entrepreneurs and various professionals used whatever means were needed to be successful. It got off the rails there, but that bubble did burst and you now have a lot of new regulations about corporate disclosure. But in the political area it reigns unconstrained and hasn’t burst.”
To assist in the bursting, Soros has written his eighth book, The Bubble of American Supremacy. It is a savage critique of Mr Bush’s war on terrorism and the way in which it is being used to impose US views and interests “on the rest of the world by the use of military force”.
He sees Mr Bush as a classic “victim-turned-perpetrator” and, as such, an ideal frontman for neo-conservative ideologues such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, in his Administration.
“It suits his personality because he’s a born-again. He is a former substance abuser [alcohol] who has personal acquaintance with the devil because he has experienced it inside himself and then he has been reinforced by a devil [al-Qaeda] which tried to destroy him by attacking him in the White House.”
The book offers a post-Bush vision in which the US rejoins the international community to foster democracy with financial incentives (“carrots”) in much the same way as Mr Soros’s philanthropic organisations in more than 50 countries.
Unlike the US invasion of Iraq these incentives don’t violate sovereignty. “If you had more carrots then you would have an additional stick, which is the withdrawal of carrots. So carrots and withdrawal of carrots would play a much bigger role because they don’t violate sovereignty.”
As an example, he cites the European Union’s present carrot approach to assisting full democracy in Turkey.
Mr Soros knows a lot about carrots. He has given more than $US5 billion in the past 25 years to promote democracy in Asia, Africa and the former Soviet bloc. But now he wants to rekindle democracy in his adopted land.
So far, he has spent $US12.5 million supporting two Democrat-linked organisations – America Coming Together, which hopes to mobilise voters in 17 key states, and a web-based organisation, MoveOn.org.
Under strict campaign financing rules, he is restricted to directly giving individual candidates no more than $US2000. But he has organised fund-raisers for Howard Dean and Wesley Clark, and would gladly do one for John Kerry.
Mr Soros probably won’t endorse any one candidate. It’s a case of whoever has the best chance of unseating Mr Bush. But he knows General Clark well because of his own involvement in helping restore the Balkans, and Senator Kerry is a neighbour in Sun Valley, Idaho.
“I think Kerry has a vision of the world that I find very acceptable because his formative experience was in Vietnam. I think he is very sensitive to the falseness of the Bush approach. I am not endorsing Kerry but I am very much encouraged by a possible Kerry-[John] Edwards combination.”
Mr Soros’s high profile in the campaign has made him a target for the Bush “truth machine”. The Republican national committee has claimed he had “purchased the Democratic Party”, a charge he denies, and the Wall Street Journal recently recalled his support for cannabis reform as a way of questioning his motives. “Mr Soros has every right to play in this sandbox, but the rest of us also have a right to wonder how much his view will follow his cash in influencing Democratic policy.”
But the hardest mud to remove has been the false claim that he called Mr Bush a Nazi. For Mr Soros, whose experience of growing up a Jew in wartime Hungary gave him first-hand experience of the Nazis, it was a galling slur.
“I’ve said that when Bush says those who are not with us are with the terrorists it reminds me of the Germans. This has been distorted to my calling Bush a Nazi, which I didn’t and wouldn’t exactly because I know that system and I know the difference.
“But if you took a public opinion sample in so far that people have heard of me, they’ve heard of me as the man who called Bush a Nazi, not as a man who has a foundation devoted to fostering open society.” But the attack hasn’t put Mr Soros off his quest to remove Mr Bush.
The outstanding question is how much is he prepared to spend to achieve it. He would like to stop contributing now, but if the funding gap between the Republicans and Democrats becomes “too great then I’ll try to do something to keep it within manageable proportions. Because the Bush machine has three or four times as much money available, which is OK, but there has to be a critical mass on the other side”.
“I do consider myself in a privileged position and that I why I stick my neck out and I can afford to do it . . .”
As has been noted before, George Soros is probably the only American citizen with his own foreign policy.
As the election moves into another gear, he will find out if that policy is worth anything to anybody else – or whether it’s just about a wealthy old bloke exercising his democratic rights.
And if you want to read an excerpt from his book, you can find it here –
Aubrey/Maturin Books
Posted in Uncategorized on January 31, 2004| 8 Comments »
Sigh, have just finished the last book in the series, Blue At the Mizzen and am starting to consider writing something myself. There are so many parts of the stories, of smooth sailing etc where interesting little extras can be inserted. Am contemplating writing a piece set after the last book when Jack gets to hoist his blue pennant as Admiral and write a fic (rather lengthy) featuring Jack’s & Aubrey’s thoughts on their relationship through the years. There is one sequence that I’ve already thought through – slash/humour which is based on a conversation between Diana & Stephen in bed about the state of Jack & Sophie’s marriage and I’m contemplating an interesting scenario between Jack & Stephen where Stephen tries to help educate Jack in “manouevres” in bed. But before that there is a lot more ground to be covered. I’m starting to think I may be getting a little ambitious, it may end up the length of War and Peace. But it won’t get started unless I put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard to organise my thoughts and maybe have to do a second reading of all to extract the important points from which to diverge and pad out. Have to do a little research to determine a plausible naval action etc that they could be involved in after the series end, as part of the initial setting for Jack’s & Stephen’s ruminations. Though I don’t think I can venture far into battle scenes or anything too technical with any sense of doing it justice, so will have to brief I think here.
Burgled from Rebness
Posted in Uncategorized on January 31, 2004| Leave a Comment »
I am an Intellectual
Which America Hating Minority Are You?
Protected: To All Necrophiliacs – Please Bury Your Dead
Posted in Uncategorized on January 30, 2004|
To All Necrophiliacs – Please Bury Your Dead
Posted in Uncategorized on January 30, 2004| Leave a Comment »
I liked this little opinion piece about those who died young and left a beautiful corpse and a lot of unfulfilled “what-ifs” –
Die young and leave a beautiful poster: the cult of Che lives on
January 30, 2004
Bolivian officials were not the only ones who needed the Argentinian guerilla leader dead, writes Tug Dumbly.
An early death can be underrated. Witness the martyrdom of Che Guevara. Since his execution as a guerilla by the Bolivian Army 36 years ago, the Che industry has gone from strength to strength.
Subsequent generations of students, protesters and aspiring Marxists have all come to venerate that iconic shot of St Che, and today the famous bearded-Bolshie-in-a-beret image is more ubiquitous than ever – T-shirts, tattoos, badges, placards, posters … Che’s heroic mug graces them all.
Now he’s become grist for the Hollywood mill with the film adaptation of The Motorcyle Diaries, produced by Robert Redford and shown recently at the Sundance Film Festival in the US.
Che is press-ganged into service for any and every cause. From anti-globalisation to refugees, he is the protester’s all-occasion poster boy, a cipher to rally the troops around.
His face on a badge or the kitchen wall of a stranger’s house is an instant credential check, a kind of masonic handshake that, taken in conjunction with the Tasmanian wilderness poster in the dunny and Leunig cartoon on the fridge, lets you know you’re among fellow travellers.
As well as providing a rallying point for millions of young firebrands Che’s death has had other practical benefits. The industry spawned by his martyrdom has fed thousands. All those peasants employed for decades churning out Che merchandise, all those poor Cubans grifting Yankee dollars by showing tourists Che “sites-of-interest” are grateful proof that his greatest act as a revolutionary was to die a young and bloody death.
If there is irony in the fact that the demise of socialism’s pin-up boy has created a ravenous capitalist enterprise, then so be it.
It’s still best he died when he did, before growing fat in a Malibu mansion, appearing on chat shows and endorsing an aftershave.
No, some early deaths are definitely for the greater good. Most rock stars are only improved by it. Jim Morrison took his last bath in ’71 and who’d have it any other way? The Doors had peaked, he lived fast, died young and left … an only slightly bloated corpse.
The thought of corpulent, bald, wrinkled Jim running a Pontiac dealership in Florida, spruiking cars in Lizard King verse just isn’t pretty.
Dare I say it, I so loved John Lennon that I’m grateful Mark Chapman shot him, before dotage, contentment and Yoko conspired to snuff his creative flame and soil his legend with records of banal, bland, house-hubby dribble.
And in the same way I can never again watch Arnie’s Terminator films without seeing a Republican Party cyborg, I couldn’t imagine playing the records of Senator Jimi Hendrix with any real joy, nor draw the inspiration I do from a non-martyred Martin Luther King, one who maybe lived to sell Hawaiian package holidays on cable: I have a tropical dream!
People might weep for Di and lament the unfulfilled potential of JFK, but their deaths serve a very necessary and important purpose: we need our beautiful martyrs. The myths of their hounded/heroic/tragic lives inspire and give purpose to our own in a way that would never happen had they lived.
John Donne wrote “any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde”, yet the sumptuous state funerals of Di and JFK had the opposite effect.
They united much of the planet in mourning and perhaps, if only for a moment, made us relish life more richly and hug each other a little more tightly.
It’s always tempting to speculate and ponder the “what ifs?” What heights might these people have achieved had they lived and not been prettily fixed in aspic for eternity? But then what if those “what ifs?” turned ugly? Would anyone really prefer reading weight-gain horror stories of the thrice-divorced Diana in New Weekly to the current Queen of Hearts myth? How would you rather remember JFK – as Camelot’s shining beacon of hope, or as a leech hounded from office for fondling Mafia molls in the White House pool?
By dying young they didn’t have a chance to let us down and we should be grateful. Dean, Monroe, Cobain … they were all kind enough to leave our memories unsullied.
At least in most cases. If we are going to speculate upon alternative endings then it might be interesting to imagine one for Jesus, the martyr’s martyr.
Imagine he’d been pardoned by Pilate, married Mary Magdalene and gone off to raise swine on a small farm in Samaria.
Picture him having kids, growing wine and hanging out fishing with his disciple buddies, before dying peacefully in his sleep at a ripe old age.
True, had he lived he mightn’t inspire the same fervent passion today that he does, and may even have come and gone anonymously.
But that’s the point. We’d have had to find another pin-up boy to fight our crusades over, perhaps a nice benign stone idol engraved with just one command, something along the lines of Don’t Worry, Be Happy.
Tug Dumbly is a Sydney performance poet.
Protected: Now Something Altogether More Serious
Posted in Uncategorized on January 30, 2004|
Now Something Altogether More Serious
Posted in Uncategorized on January 30, 2004| 2 Comments »
This was an interesting viewpoint from a lawyer/journalist/media commentator here about the Hutton report and it’s total irrelevance in many ways to what happened and the British Government’s obvious deceit. It seems it is all in the drawing up of the parameters of the investigation.
Law lord hits wrong target on evidence over Iraq war
By Richard Ackland
January 30, 2004
Why does it come as no surprise that Lord Hutton took the stick to the BBC and its reporter Andrew Gilligan and in the process exonerated the Blair Government over the dossier justifying the war against Iraq? Because in the view of judges, and most other long-in-the-tooth lawyers, the media invariably is out of line, and if it makes a mistake, as Gilligan did, then the crucifixion is so much easier.
Maybe it is not a good idea to have judges doing these sort of critical reports. Their views of how the actual world functions are pretty preposterous. Germaine Greer or Jonny Wilkinson probably would have done a fairer job. Yet judges and senior barristers are wheeled out for these big set-piece exercises on the strength of their capacity to distil large quantities of evidence, see through the fibs, get to the truth and make worthy recommendations.
Rod Liddle, a London newspaper columnist, made an interesting point yesterday which was reported in The Guardian. “Multifarious law lords have been asked to investigate the government over the years, and if anyone can name one where the government has not been exonerated pretty much entirely I would be interested. It happened back in 1963 with Lord Denning and Profumo and it’s the same again.”
Liddle was a former editor at the Today program on BBC radio, where Gilligan made his claim that the Government “sexed up” the intelligence report on Iraq. He’s also been one of Gilligan’s biggest supporters in the British media. Yet his point is a good one. In this country, too, you could count on one hand the reports of inquiry conducted by judges in which governments have not got off scot-free. The Fitzgerald inquiry is the main one that comes to mind, although by the time that report came out a government different to the one it was investigating was in place.
But what is so unpalatable about Hutton’s report, apart from the murdered syntax?
As a starting point Hutton’s interpretation of the terms of reference was such that he decided not to examine the reliability of the intelligence reports on which the Government based its argument that Iraq posed a present threat to Britain.
This had a rather surreal consequence because his report was all about whether Gilligan and the BBC were defective in the content and manner of the report about the sexed-up dossier, but the sexed-up dossier itself sat there throughout like a vestal virgin.
Yet, as we know, the central claim in the dossier was sheer and utter nonsense, namely that Iraq could deploy chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes of an order to use them.
On May 29 last year, at 6.07am, Gilligan took part in a very brief question and answer session with the Today’s program’s presenter, John Humphries. He said that he had spoken to a senior official in charge of drawing up the dossier, used by the Government in its statement of September 24, 2002, who told him that “the Government probably knew that that 45-minute figure was wrong, even before it decided to put it in”.
Hutton’s 328-page report, plus appendices, was focused largely around that sentence.
Gilligan went on to do another 19 broadcasts that morning on the same subject but did not include the line the Government “probably knew” about the falsity of the 45-minute claim. He later admitted this claim in the 6.07am broadcast was wrong. He is now being held out to dry, as is the board of governors of the BBC for not acknowledging that it is wrong to broadcast such things.
Yet Gilligan and the BBC have been at the forefront of nailing the off-beam intelligence reports which the coalition governments all desperately clung to in order to justify getting into Iraq.
We also know that Tony Blair’s then press secretary, Alastair Campbell, had his hands all over the September 24 document. He oversaw 14 changes to the dossier before the Government presented it as the justification for war. What’s a PR man doing in the bowels of this operation if it is not to sex it up a bit?
Such an idea was quite beyond the thinking of Hutton. Instead, he railed about the BBC’s “defective editorial system” which allowed unscripted reports of grave significance to go to air without vetting or checking. In Hutton’s world we would have a media where nothing could go out live, where all risk is removed, where urgency doesn’t exist, where there are time and opportunity to weigh, vet and recast contentious and dangerous material. It’s a prescription for a boring, unresponsive media. Just the speed for a law lord.
At the same time Hutton was quite content to let the wholesale spin and contortions of the Government go unadmonished, including the strategy presided over by Blair that saw the “outing” of David Kelly.
justinian@lawpress.com.au
Protected: Exploding Whales
Posted in Uncategorized on January 30, 2004|
Exploding Whales
Posted in Uncategorized on January 30, 2004| Leave a Comment »
Had to giggle at this story in the newspaper this morning. Pity it wasn’t in Japan or some other country which wants sanctions against whaling to be lifted. That would really be the whales’ revenge. But then it wouldn’t have had the chance to explode there, they would have already carved it up into whale steaks.
Whale rider … a man covers his nose after a truck carrying a dead, 50-tonne sperm whale explodes on the streets of Tainan, Taiwan. The 17-metre whale spewed blubber and blood over cars, shops and shoppers alike. An excessive buildup of accumulated gasses due to the natural decomposing process was the cause, explained a marine biologist. Photo: AFP
A dead, 50-tonne sperm whale exploded in a busy street in Taiwan, showering passers-by in blubber, blood and innards.
The 17-metre whale died after beaching itself and was being hauled to a research station through Tainan City on Wednesday on a flat-bed truck.
Television reports showed a pavement, street and several parked cars covered in dead whale fallout.
“What a stinking mess! This blood and other stuff that blew out on the road is disgusting, and the smell is really awful,” said one resident quoted by the etaiwannews.com website.
The explosion was caused by a build-up of gasses in the decomposing carcass.
“When the pressure build-up was too great, the whale’s belly just exploded and spilled blood and the innards on the street,” the website said, quoting National Cheng Kung University marine biologist Professor Wang Chien-ping.
Many people had reportedly gathered along the road to film and take photos of the dead whale en route to the research centre where an autopsy was to be performed.
Authorities were also planning to preserve the mammal, the largest whale ever to wash up on Taiwan’s shores.
Apparently, even after the explosion, enough of the whale remained intact and authorities still intend to preserve the remains of the remains.
The whale was discovered along a stretch of nearby coast on Saturday. According to reports, it took 13 hours, three large lifting cranes and 50 workers to load the whale on the trailer truck for its final journey.
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