Partnering up with ourbrisbane.com is exciting because they are THE site to tell you about what’s happening around Brisbane. They have huge reach in Brisbane, about 500,000 people visit their site each month. When I made a decision to move up here early last year, the first site I ended up on to learn more about Brisbane was ourbrisbane.com and I remember thinking at the time "I wish they had some podcasts".

Well, now they do.

Yes, say my guests:

Andrew Hadley, COO, Credit Union Australia
Tony Beck, Group Manager, Corporate Affairs, ME Bank (Members Equity)

They both belong to organisations that can provide all of the same services that you get from your bank - and they will do it with less fees and with much more customer service. Why? Both organisations are owned by their members instead of shareholders. In CUA’s case, they are owned by their customers. In ME’s case, they are owned by a group of superannuation firms which, in turn, are owned by their members.

So both organisations exist to provide good service - not solely for the sake of returning profits to shareholders. And, judging by their NPS scores, it makes a difference.

Do you want an independent media?

Today’s music is by:

Rick Estrin & The Nightcats
“U B U” (mp3)
from “Twisted”
(Alligator Records)

Buy at Amazon

So why do we feel as though we are having a single stream of conscious experiences? Perhaps it was useful for our past survival to have a false model of ourselves, to attribute our body’s actions to an inner self, and to see the world in terms of spiritual forces and non-physical agents, when there are no such things. Perhaps it is possible to give up these illusions by practising watching the mind.

Susan was a guest on G’Day World talking about free will back in May 2008.

Read the rest of her recent article in The Guardian here.

Some insight into the way banks work from Dilbert creator Scott Adams (who says he was working at a bank when Dilbert was born):

Banks and credit card companies make a lot of money from late fees. They have a naked interest in keeping their service as inconvenient as possible.

Makes sense, right? Except that it’s another example of good profits vs bad profits (as Jen Storey explained on my last banking podcast). This rational might increase bank profits in the short term, but in the long term it pisses us off. That doesn’t matter too much to the existing bank executives, as their bonuses are based on THIS year’s profits and not the long term future of the bank. They are incented to have a short term outlook. The bank execs also know that we don’t have much choice. Except that we DO. That’s why I set up an account with a credit union last week (CUA). I’ll be shutting down my bank accounts over the next month and moving everything over to CUA - a credit union is owned by its MEMBERS and not SHARE HOLDERS, so it has an incentive to provide good service, not to maximize profits at the expense of service.

Read the rest of Scott’s blog post here.

It’s horrifying! Death to villany in Iran!

Oh no, wait… that’s London in May 2009.

Funny - i don’t remember people changing the colour of their Twitter avatars when THAT happened…

I was at this concert. I’ll never forget this opening number. It was TOTALLY INSANE. This video doesn’t begin to do it justice. Instead of the footage of the audience in the first 30 seconds it should have shown the stage. First thing you heard was the loud thunderous thumping. Then the top of the stage opened up and bright white lights blinded you. Then MJ marched up from inside the stage. Lights dimmed, smoke cleared, he screamed, everything exploded.

I still say it was the most amazing concert I’ve ever been to in my life. He was at his peak and - let’s face it - BAD was his last interesting album. After that he just melted down and become more freak than artist.

I was talking to Chrissy the other day, wondering who taught Michael how to dance - turns out it was a guy called Jeffrey Daniel. Check this video out:

Let’s remember though that the evidence seems to indicate that Michael was a very disturbed human being, a paedophile who only didn’t end up serving 20 years in jail because he could afford to buy his way out of trouble with $22 million of hush money.

And I don’t care that "he had a tough childhood". Yeah sure - being super rich and famous and talented must be a bitch. Guess what? Lots of people who end up committing criminal behaviour had messed up childhoods. And while we should definitely be understanding of that in our legal system, and recognize that emotional and psychological damage need to be treated responsibly, it’s not a ‘get out of jail free card’.

Unless, of course, you are someone who can spend $22 million on out-of-court settlements - like Michael Jackson - or priests in the Catholic Church.

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Interestingly, Francis doesn’t seem to believe the biblical stories and yet considers himself a Catholic.

If you want to hear my other shows about the historicity of Jesus, check out this page.

Do you want an independent media?

Abigail Washburn & The Shanghai Restoration Project
“Sala” (mp3)
from “Afterquake”
(Undercover Culture Music)

Buy at iTunes Music Store
Buy at Rhapsody
Buy at Napster
Stream from Rhapsody
Buy at Puretracks
More On This Album

"Bank Customers Deposit Their Anger On The Internet".

Of course, News.com didn’t mention my stories. Coincidence?

Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.

Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of “high-value targets” in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature.

(read the full story)

"… designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership".

The article goes on to say:

The Finding was focussed on undermining Iran’s nuclear ambitions and trying to undermine the government through regime change.

Now think about the activities of the last couple of weeks. Starting to add up for you?

And who was running JSOC? General Stanley A. McChrystal, President Obama’s recently anointed Commander, U.S. Forces Afghanistan.

The guy was just rude, obnoxious and uninformed.

I’ve had a 3G card from 3 for the last 18 months and never used it. But I’ve paid my $29 a month - so they have done very well out of me.

When I did try to use it a couple of days ago - because my TPG account has been capped for a couple of days - the throughput on the card was terrible, I’m talking single digits. I rang 3 support and was told their network is overloaded in my area (inner suburb of Brisbane) and that it might take a month to resolve.

So I rang them back today and asked them today to cancel my account - and was told there would be an $80 charge! When I explained they are not providing me with the service I signed up for, the guy on the phone had the temerity to try to tell me that it is MY FAULT because I recently moved house!! And that just because they agreed to give me coverage in one location, didn’t mean they provided access across 100% of the country!

I explained that I’m not in Alice Springs - I’m in an inner suburb of Brisbane where they normally DO provide access but they haven’t provisioned their network sufficiently.

But he just kept talking over me, not listening at all. I had to raise my voice for him to even stop talking for a second to let me finish my sentence.

Eventually he went and "spoke to a supervisor" and agreed to cut my cancellation charges in half. I said that I refused to pay them a cent more and asked to speak directly to a supervisor. He said someone would call me - WITHIN 48 HOURS.

It takes 48 hours to get someone to call me back?

What kind of operation are they running?

Network is down.

48 hours to get a call center supervisor to call me back.

Pathetic.

They have made $522 bucks out of me on this card and provided ZERO SERVICE.

That’s a figure that comes from the National Indigenous Drug and Alcohol Committee (NIDAC is a division of the Australian National Council on Drugs, a Federal government body) report "Bridges and Barriers - Addressing Indigenous Incarceration and Health".

There are about 750,000 aboriginal people in Australia out of a total population of about 23 million. They comprise about 3% of the total population. But, according to the report:

"One in four prisoners in Australia is Indigenous and their over-representation in the jail system is only getting worse."

3% of the population - 25% of the prison population.

And it’s just getting worse.

"In the decade to 2007, the number of Indigenous Australians in prison rose by 6.7 per cent a year, on average.

Aboriginal people went from comprising 18 per cent of the prison population to 24 per cent."

Why?

Obviously it’s a complex issue and there are lots of reasons, some that go back 200 years, but I believe the major reason is this:

Aussies are racists.

And I know most Aussies are going to hate that - but I think it’s true.

Wikipedia defines racism as:

"… the belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race."

Ask most Aussies why they think one quarter of the prison population is Aboriginal and I guarantee you most of them will shrug their shoulders. They just don’t care. Why? Because we’ve been programmed not to care. We’ve been programmed to think aboriginals are just lazy, child-molesting alcoholics. Unless, of course, they excel at an Anglo sport, such as athletics or footy. Then they’re alright. Or if they excel at an Anglo art - musicians and actors, they’re okay too. Or if they become a politician and survive in the Westminster System (the form of government instituted by their occupying power) - then they’re alright in our books too.

But as for the other 99% of the Aboriginal population - we’ve been told, over and over, by the mainstream media and successive governments, that they are mostly just lazy, child-molesting, petrol-sniffing alcoholics who don’t appreciate the money we throw at them, who drive a car until it runs out of petrol then leave it by the side of the road, who rip perfectly good fridges out of houses and leave them to rust in their backyards.

So most Aussies just shrug their shoulders, as if to say "what more can we do?".

Meanwhile, a 45,000 year old civilisation is being wiped out in our backyard.

A people who lived in harmony with nature for 45,000 years, who lived sustainably, who didn’t feel the need to go out and invade other countries, a civilisation that was already 40,000 years old when the Great Pyramid of Cheops was built - is being wiped out as a direct result of the Christian invasion and occupation of their country.

Our country.

Imagine if the headlines said "One in Four Prisoners is Muslim". I think that would create more of an uproar. I guarantee you a week from now, people won’t even be talking about this issue in the press.

But we’ll still be talking about Neda.

We’ll still be talking about Andrew Symons.

We’ll still be talking about Utegate.

We’ll still be talking about Transformers 2.

We’ll still be talking about whatever we’re told to talk about.

Just not the Aboriginals.

Racism isn’t just when you put on a white robe and burn people on crosses. That’s just an extreme expression of racism. That’s just a convenient version of racism that lets the rest of us off the hook. We can say "oh I’m not a racist". 

Meanwhile, we let a 45,000 year old civilisation disappear.

I think we’re guilty of the same kind of insidious racism that allowed the people in Germany 60 years ago to turn their heads while their Jewish population were being lead out of their homes.

It’s the kind of racism that says "they don’t look like me - so it doesn’t matter."

If we - the people - don’t talk about it, the politicians won’t talk about it.

Oh they will - they will have committees, Kevin Rudd will say sorry for the lost generation - but it won’t be a major focus.

He’ll spend his time looking after the interests of mining companies and banks.

He’ll spend his time worrying about how to get re-elected.

But the Aboriginal people of Australia are a long way down the list.

It’s up to us. We need to make this a priority.

We need to say "not on our watch".

At the time of writing this, I’ve done 19,563 public posts (not counting DMs)  which works our to about 27 per day over two years. As I’m usually online about 18 hours a day, that works out to an average of only 1.4 posts per online hour.

I often have people who aren’t yet using Twitter ask "how do you find the time?" Although I guess I’m possibly a fairly heavy user of Twitter compared to most, I only post on average once every 45 minutes. Each post takes… what… ten seconds? Hardly a big time waster. Let’s say I spent another couple of minutes every hour scanning replies, DMs and general tweets in my feed. I guess if I was generous, I might say I spend 6 minutes an hour reading and responding - that’s 1.8 hours a day (6 minutes x 18 waking hours) or 10% of my day. And it does sound like a lot. Until I factor in the following:

1. I work from home. No daily commute to listen to the radio and catch up on the morning news / gossip. Let’s say most people spend an hour a day commuting, either in their car or on public transport. That’s an hour they spend (out of 18 hours in the waking day) probably reading or listening to some kind of media. On those rare occasions during the week when I am in the car, heading to meetings etc, I’m normally listening to podcasts.

2. I don’t watch TV news. The only TV I watch at all is pre-recorded stuff on my laptop (at the moment - Mad Men, The Daily Show, Kings and DVDs). Most people spend 30 - 60 minutes a day watching some kind of news / current affairs (including those god-awful morning shows). I get my news from Twitter and from scanning the  blogs. Oh and from podcasts when I go for my run, of course.

3. I’ve been living alone for the last year, my girlfriend living half a world away, and so I’ve had no social life and tweet mostly (I suspect) in the evenings to provide some relief from work. Wow… that sounded a lot more pathetic than it feels. :-)  I guess it’s true - people on Twitter are losers who have no social life.

So, I figure most people spend a couple of hours a day watching, listening or reading the news. I might (and it’s a stretch) spend the same amount of time on Twitter. If I counted the amount of time I spend on Twitter and reading blogs, I’d say it’s about the same. So, for me, Twitter and blogs have replaced mainstream media.

As I said, I’m probably a fairly heavy user of Twitter, which is justified somewhat by the line of work I am in (social media). Having a good handle on how Twitter works is my business.

Let me tell you some of the things I dislike about Twitter at the moment:

• MLM chumps.
• Affiliate pimps.
• People who auto-send DMs pimping stuff when you follow them.
• Follow Fridays.
• The way people are jumping on the Iran bandwagon without much evidence of critical thinking. Cmon people - think.

For the record, I immediately un-follow people who commit the first three crimes.

Okay, now the things I like about Twitter:

• Intelligent debate - it’s hard to find, but it’s out there. Too many people seem to think you can’t have an intelligent discussion 140 characters at a time, but that’s just wrong. It just requires discipline and clarity.
• Support - Twitter is better than any tech support service I’ve ever used. But I’m not just talking about tech support. Mention that you’ve got any sort of problem, and you’ll usually have a stream of people - most of whom you’ve never met in real life and probably never will - offering to help out. These people counter-balance the brain dead MLM and affiliate folks and stop me from giving up all hope for the human race. 
• The sense that this is the dawn of…. something. Something big. Something important. Something profound.

Twitter kind of reminds me of the skin jobs on BSG when they are on their base ship, dipping their hands into the pink water that somehow plugs them into the control feed of the ship. It’s also a bit like being Superman with his super hearing, just letting the entire planet’s voices wash over you.

I often find myself wondering about what a mind-blowing platform Twitter (and the interwebs in general) could be in an historical sense for the human race - just imagine jumping in the TARDIS and scooting back 100 years to 1909, then trying to explain the concept of Twitter to folks. What potential! The whole world (well… the connected world) talking to each other! The kids in New York shouting out real time support to the kids (or are they embedded CIA operatives pretending to be kids?) in Tehran! I wonder what the folks in 1909 would want to do with it. Or imagine going back another 30 years to 1879 and explaining it to Karl Marx. I wonder if he’d think it was the perfect medium to discuss MLM, Jon & Kate (and I honestly have NO frakking idea who they are), and whether or not Megan is as hot as Angelina.

Here’s my question for you all - are we smart enough for Twitter? Or will we waste it?

My guest on today’s show is Michael Doneman - one part business coach, one part social activist, one part guru.

Over the last few months his name has come up in a startling variety of conversations I’ve had with people. These people have a few things in common - they are very bright, have a sparkle in their eye, are entrepreneurs, think they can change the world - and they are students of Doneman.

Michael explains the basis of his business / school, Edgeware, where he teaches something he calls “ethical entrepreneurship” and we discuss the future of capitalism.

This is also the first interview in my series where I intend to interview Brisbane’s Best Minds. If you want to nominate someone to be interviewed as part of this series, please submit their details here.

Further links:

John Gray video

Edgeware site

Follow Michael Doneman on Twitter

Do you want an independent media?

Abigail Washburn & The Shanghai Restoration Project
“Sala” (mp3)
from “Afterquake”
(Undercover Culture Music)

Buy at iTunes Music Store
Buy at Rhapsody
Buy at Napster
Stream from Rhapsody
Buy at Puretracks
More On This Album

A few people on Twitter tried to suggest there was no connection between abuse in Ireland and in Australia, so I invited Dr Wayne Chamley from Broken Rites onto the show. Broken Rites is an Australian advocacy group that works with victims of religious child abuse. He believes that if we had a Royal Commission into Catholic child abuse in this country we would discover TENS OF THOUSANDS of victims.

By the way folks, don’t forget - if you are looking for an easy way to listen to the G’Day World archives (all 381 episodes!), and you’ve got iTunes installed, go to our page on iTunes. While you’re there, give the show a quick review!

Transformers 2: Revenge Of The Fallen review from Cameron Reilly on Vimeo.

Transformers 2: Revenge Of The Fallen is prety good as far as blockbusters go if you can look past the silliness and you dont get a headache from the Michael Bay cut-cut-cut bot fighting scenes.

SPOILERS ALERT

It starts 2 years after the last film.

Sam Witwiky is about to go off to college. He’s still dating Mikaela (the hot as usual Megan Fox). Blunty told me she isn’t that hot in real life and so I didn’t talk to him for the rest of the morning.

As he’s packing to leave home for college, Sam pulls out the jacket he wore in the first film out of the closet and a piece of the AllSpark falls off of it. Apparently it got caught in his jacket when the AllSpark was destroyed. His mum didn’t wash the jacket? In TWO YEARS??? What kind of mother is that? My mother would have found that shit, washed it and the washing machine would have come alive and eaten her up like cookie monster eating cookies.

Anyway, the bit of the AllSpark falls on teh floor and all manner of kitchen implements come alive and start trying to kill Sam. Lucky he’s got a simpering Bumblebee living in his garage who exists soley to save Sam’s ass, like some big yellow slave. Sam even talks him like a cross between his house boy and a starved dog.

MEANWHILE, back on the ranch…. Optimus and the other autobots are running around with some soldiers trying to kill a bunch of Decepticons who are hiding. Two years and they cant find a bunch of Decepticons? WTF?

And other piece of the AllSpark which was left over from the first film is being protected in some military base. Without any autobots protecting it! WTF? The most powerful piece of tech in the UNIVERSE and it’s being protected by a handful of dopey soliders? RIIIIGHT.

So, of course, some Decepticons break in, steal it, and use it to bring Megatron back to life. He flies up into space to meet his master. Megatron has a master? I thought he was the big boss of the bad guys?

Noooo. Turns out he’s Darth Vader to an Emperor guy (who even refers to Megatron as “my apprentice”) who we find out is called THE FALLEN.

APPARENTLY… this guy, Teh Fallen, was on earth 12,000 years ago, building a machine would would suck the sun dry to use as energy. He was a Prime autobot who turned bad. He was defeated by the other Primes but, for some reason, not killed. He’s been recovering…. for 12,000 years. Waiting for his revenge.

And apparently he can’t get back into the game until all of the Primes are killed - the last being Optimus.

So Megatron hunts Optimus down and kills him. Yep - KILLS HIM.

Oh somewhere in here, Sam started having crazy visions of alien symbols, spazzing out in his astronomy class. His professor is played by Rainn Wilson from the US version of The Office.

It turns out that the AllSpark uploaded everything it knew about the history of the Transformers into Sam’s brain. That’s right - the entire history of a billion year old civilization was uploaded into this guys brain. And he didn’t have any side effects for TWO YEARS.

Riiiight.

Oh yeah and Sam gets orally raped by a decepticon disguised as a hot chick at college. Hot chick is played by Aussie Home & Away star Isabel Lucas. I didn’t know she was an Aussie though, of course, because I don’t watch shitty Aussie TV. I found out from IMDB.

So apparently 12,000 years ago, during the big fight between the Primes and The Fallen, there was this other superduper energy source called “The Matrix” (riiight) that was supposed to power the sun-eating machine. Some of the Primes sacrificed themselves to bury it somewhere seeekret. Sam has to find it to bring Optimus back to life.

It turns out it’s buried somewhere in Egypt. Shades of Indiana Jones! A bunch of lame secret messages leads to the Petra in Jordan. I fully expected to hear Shia le Bouf say “Hey this is the place from Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade!”

But no.

The find the Matrix, have a big fight with the Decepticons, finally stick the Matrix into Optimus, he wakes up, gets all pimped out, and kicks everyone’s ass, including Megatron and Teh Fallen.

End of movie.

Best bits?

The cameos from Deep Roy (as an Egyptian military guy at a border crossing), Rainn Wilson and, of course, the return of John The Fucking Man Turturro half way through the film.

Oh and you know that scene in the trailer of Megan Fox bending over the bike? Yah. That bit. That’s pretty good too.

In the end, what makes the film work for me is the humour. It’s the laughs. The big problems with the film, again, are that the scenes with the boys fighting are hard to follow and likely to give you a headache. It’s like someone threw up on the screen, just crap everywhere. I can’t tell who is who, all I know is that the bad guys are chrome and the good guys have colour. That’s it.

Final notes:

The VMAX cinema at Chermside is very nice, all leather seats, mmmm.

By the way folks, don’t forget - if you are looking for an easy way to listen to the G’Day World archives (all 381 episodes!), and you’ve got iTunes installed, go to our page on iTunes. While you’re there, give the show a quick review!

“As the financial institutions we have come to rely on appear to topple under their own weight, it’s only natural that we rush to support them. These are the banks, investment groups, and insurance firms to which we have outsourced our savings, financing, and investing. They fund our businesses and lend most of our currency into existence. Were we just a bit more aware of how this dependency developed, however, as well as what it costs us in the long run, we might choose instead to exploit their temporary vulnerability toward very different ends. Indeed, if we had our wits about us, we would seek to put our biggest banks out of our misery, for good.”

"The failure of giant banking is less a crisis  than it is an opportunity to rediscover the long lost art of local commerce."

Download the manifesto.

Remember that this bank used to be owned by the Government until it was privatized by the ALP under Paul Keating.

Commonwealth Bank announced on 11 February 2009 a net profit after tax of $2,573 million for the half year ended 31 December 2008. This represents an increase of 9 percent on the prior comparative period.

However it has a Net Promoter Score of -40. MINUS 40! Companies obtain their Net Promoter Score by asking customers a single question on a 0 to 10 rating scale: “How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?”Based on their responses, customers can be categorized into one of three groups: Promoters (9-10 rating), Passives (7-8 rating), and Detractors (0-6 rating). The percentage of Detractors is then subtracted from the percentage of Promoters to obtain a Net Promoter score.

According to the NPS site, “Banking had an average NPS of approximately 15%.”

Now, I’ve had a few people say “but their shareholders are happy”. Sure. For now. What’s important to understand, though, is the concept of “Good and Bad Profits” (as Jen Storey mentioned on last week’s banking show).

To quote again from the NPS site:

The right goal for a company is to deliver customer experiences of such high quality that customers recognize the value in the relationship and become Promoters. These Promoters generate good profits and fuel true growth. They become, in effect, part of a company’s marketing department, not only increasing their own purchases but also providing enthusiastic referrals.

By contrast, companies can boost short-term profits by exploiting customer relationships, raising prices when they can get away with it, or cutting back on services to save costs and boost margins. Those practices boost bad profits by extracting value from customers at the expense of loyalty, creating Detractors. Companies can not achieve long-term sustained growth on the basis of bad profits.

Which basically translates like this:

If you screw people over to make more money, it will catch up with you sooner or later.

Congratulations on the -40 score Commonwealth Bank. You must be really proud.

If all you know about Che is stuff you’ve picked up from US media, then take some time today to educate yourself about the other side of the Che story. I’ve added Jon Lee Anderson’s "Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life" to my book recommendations.

I dare anyone to read that book, along with Che’s diaries, and still think this man was a violent, bloodthirsty dictator.

I’ve read them both (along with a few other books about Che) and it just doesn’t add up in my mind. Violent dictators rarely talk endlessly about social justice. Che (and Fidel too, for that matter) spent his life arguing eloquently for the need to equal rights for all people. He put his life on the line to fight for the rights of the poor people in Cuba and Bolivia.

If all he wanted was power (which is usually what motivates dictators), why leave Cuba at the height of his success to go into the jungles of Bolivia? It doesn’t make sense.

Compare Che’s words to the speeches and writing of Hitler or Stalin or even the last half dozen American Presidents and you’ll spot the difference.

And, if you can, watch Steven Soderbergh’s recent film about Che. I don’t think it’s out on DVD yet but I’ve seen Part One and it’s terrific.

We hate banks. (see my recent poll) It’s true. You know it. I know it. The only people who don’t seem to know it are the banks themselves. Although, I suspect they DO know it - they just don’t care. They’ve had an effective oligopoly for so long they think they can just say and do whatever they want and we’ll just sit here and take it.

Well I’m not taking it anymore. I’m going to do a series of shows exploring why we hate banks so much and what the alternatives are. We have a voice. Let’s use it to change things.

Today on the show I interview three people - Jen Storey from Online Banking Review, Mike Jarocki from Credit Card Finder, and Owen Davies, Group Manager, Corporate Affairs, Bendigo Bank, the bank that Aussies seem to actually like a bit.

Show sponsor:

People keep sending me links to articles about how time is an illusion and not a quality of the universe. Apparently that is the common view of physicists. Scientists prefer concepts such as warped space-time and whatnot. I won’t pretend to understand any of that. The point is that science doesn’t recognize time — in the way we understand it — as a quality of the universe.

Given that science can’t find evidence for either God or time, it takes a leap of faith to assume either one exists. Therefore, anything in our daily life that depends on either God or time is built on a foundation of faith and not science.

I’ve often thought that time is a property of memory. If you damaged the part of your brain that manages memory, to the hippocampus or surrounding cortices - say a combination of retrograde amnesia and anterograde amnesia - what would your experience of time likely be? If you couldn’t remember what happened five minutes ago - and you couldn’t use your memories to predict the future - wouldn’t your experience be just what’s happening right now? Strangely enough, this is what gurus have been telling us for a long, long time: "What’s wrong with right now?"

True for most marketing / PR /corporate people. Trent is quitting Twitter. Good. I hate celebrity twitterers anyway. I’ll be happy if they all follow Trent’s example.

I’m interviewing a range of people about banks, independent commentators as well as bank representatives.

This all started with a twtpoll I started last night about which bank is the least evil.

We all know that banks are one of the major causes of the Global Financial Crisis. It’s time we did something about them.

Here’s a list of information and twitter comments I’ve gathered while preparing for the show:

All of the major banks in Australia have MAJOR negative customer satisfaction scores.

Bank fees rose by 8% last year to nearly $12 billion

There is absolutely no reason for bank fees of any kind to exist. Banks borrow our money and charge us for the privilege. Banks already make a metric fuckton of money just by HAVING our hard earned savings in their possession. (@ryanbooker)

without the govt guarantee, i would not be depositing w bendigobank. Nice guys, crap risk management. (@bernardk)

Have found St George to be best bank I have used in AU but I still get best service from UK banks despite being here 15 yrs (@marksmithers)

all banks are evil! $12 billion made from penalty fees in 2008 (@jeremycabral)

In 1992, Melbourne businesswoman Yvonne Bornstein and her husband Daniel went to Russia on a business trip. They were kidnapped at the airport and tortured for 11 days in captivity while their captors held them for random. They were finally rescued in a joint operation by the FBI and the KGB. Yvonne joined me on G’Day World Live tonight to tell her story - what they went through and how she has dealt with it in the years since.

links:
Yvonne’ website.
Yvonne is on Twitter!
NYTimes article from 1992.
Melbourne Herald Sun article from 1992.
“Burned”, the novelization of her story, just released.

“Eleven Days Of Hell”, Yvonne’s book.

Are you a member of the TPN500?

Yesterday afternoon I was sitting in a cafe here in Brisbane, reading, thinking about how unlikely it was that Chrissy and I were both in Ajaccio at the same time last year. How, statistically, we should never have met. And then I started thinking about what lead me there… about all of the little events that happened over my life that put me in Ajaccio in July 2008. So I started to jot down this mindmap, tracing each event back in time to the event that had to happen, HAD TO HAPPEN, in order for me to end up in Ajaccio.

Listen to the podcast if you want to know more.

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 The Commission was set up in 2000 to conduct an inquiry into abuse of children in religious institutions in Ireland from 1936 - 1970.

According to one blog, the Catholic church is getting away almost entirely off the hook as a result of a Church-State deal:

In the closing days of the last Fianna Fail adminstration, a deal was rushed through which ‘indemnified’ the religious orders from any further financial responsibility than that agreed in the deal. This notorious Church-State deal, capped the contribution of the religious orders at €128 million (and only a fraction of that in hard cash), the religious orders claimed there had been no cover-up of abuse and no protection of abusers. We now discover from the Ryan report that this was a lie, and that several religious orders not only knew all about the abusers in their midst but concealed that knowledge from the rest of us.
It was a fantastic deal for the religious orders, and an absolute stinker for the people of Ireland, and most importantly of all a retrospectively studied insult to the victims .
The religious establishment here in Ireland , were in effect left well and truly off the hook, for a relatively small financial pay-out, most of which took the form of properties, which were in effect for various legal, and now, economic reasons unsaleable assets in any case.

Among the Commission’s conclusions:

• Sexual abuse was endemic in boys’ institutions.

• It is impossible to determine the full extent of sexual abuse committed in boys’ schools. The schools investigated revealed a substantial level of sexual abuse of boys in care that extended over a range from improper touching and fondling to rape with violence. Perpetrators of abuse were able to operate undetected for long periods at the core of institutions.

• Cases of sexual abuse were managed with a view to minimising the risk of public disclosure and consequent damage to the institution and the Congregation. This policy resulted in the protection of the perpetrator. When lay people were discovered to have sexually abused, they were generally reported to the Gardai. When a member of a Congregation was found to be abusing, it was dealt with internally and was not reported to the Gardaí.

• The recidivist nature of sexual abuse was known to religious authorities.

• When confronted with evidence of sexual abuse, the response of the religious authorities was to transfer the offender to another location where, in many instances, he was free to abuse again. Permitting an offender to obtain dispensation from vows often enabled him to continue working as a lay teacher.

• Sexual abuse was known to religious authorities to be a persistent problem in male religious organisations throughout the relevant period.

• In general, male religious Congregations were not prepared to accept their responsibility for the sexual abuse that their members perpetrated.

• Older boys sexually abused younger boys and the system did not offer protection from bullying of this kind.

• Sexual abuse by members of religious Orders was seldom brought to the attention of the Department of Education by religious authorities because of a culture of silence about the issue.

And that’s just the sexual abuse. There was plenty of physical, psychological and emotional abuse as well.

According to the ABC, many of the Irish catholic priests who were the abusers were moved overseas to countries such as Australia.

When are the authorities going to do something serious about the Catholic Church and hold it accountable for its actions? I still maintain that in Australia it should be SHUT DOWN pending an independent commission into it’s crimes. It’s ridiculous to suggest this was something that only happened in Ireland. It is probable that the same conditions that lead to this kind of abuse in Ireland also existed in other countries, such as Australia. It has everything to do, I suspect, with the insanity inherent in  Catholicism itself.

Anyway, I was impressed with Obama’s speech… until… I watched it again the next day and I started to think about it from the perspective of the citizens of the Middle East and what THEY want to hear Obama say.

Anyone who has read anything about the history of USA - Middle East relations, knows that the reason people in the Middle East are angry about the USA has nothing to do with religious differences or even George Bush specifically. They are angry because for 60 years the USA has been interfering in their countries, overthrowing their governments and taking their natural resources and wealth at the point of a gun. The USA have supported Israel’s occupation of Palestine and the oppression of the Palestinian people. The USA have supported oppressive regimes in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Indonesia, Egypt, and various African countries (eg Uganda) in return for access to the natural wealth of those countries while the citizens have remained in poverty.

None of this is news to people living in the Middle East. This is their history. This is their reality.

So if Obama genuinely wanted to "change" relations between the United States and the people living in the Middle East, he would have talked less about religious differences and said something more like:

"For the last 60 years, America has terrorized your countries, murdered your citizens and stolen your natural wealth. I am here to promise you that will never happen again and you no longer need to fear us."

Until the USA admits their past crimes and pays compensation to the victims, everything else is just blowing smoke.

It seems to me that Obama’s speech was targeted, not at the citizens of the Middle East, but at Americans who, after feeling ashamed (understandably) by Bush’s warmongering rhetoric, are just relieved not to be portrayed on the international stage as a bunch of neocons. Is this enough, though? I mean, I understand it, but if Americans want to be taken seriously on the international stage again, surely they need to be seen to be talking about the REAL ISSUES, not cosmetics?

Of course, most Americans haven’t read Chomsky or Pilger or Zinn or Monbiot or anything else written by critics of American policy (and I’m not talking about Democrat vs Republican which is just theatre distracting people from the real issues) so they don’t even understand what the real issues are. Most of them still don’t understand that the 9/11 attacks were RETRIBUTION and not terrorism. They were REVENGE for atrocities committed by Americans for decades against the people of the Middle East.

And, of course, most Americans have spent their entire lives being conditioned 24×7 by the American media, being told that they are the good guys, that even when they do wrong it’s an honest mistake made for the right reasons, that Americans are the saviours of the worlds (no wonder they think they’ve elected the messiah).

So few Americans can even begin to comprehend that their Presidential elections are a farce and that Obama is just another in a long line of candidates specially designed by PR professionals to appeal to a certain demographic. As I heard Bill Maher say on a recent show: "You don’t get to be President when you are 46 and black unless you have powerful friends in very high places who believe you will look after their interests. And so far all he’s done is look after the interests of his buddies he went to Harvard with, the American elite."

Obama is a Hollywood President. He looks good, sounds good, has a good backstory, he’s obviously smart, smooth, and can sell the sizzle. And after the Bush years, most Americans can’t get past the joy of the sizzle and ask "where’s the sausage?" They can’t even stand to hear criticism of Obama. Even Bill Maher gets booed on his show when he criticizes Obama.

Anywayyyy…. regarding the Cairo speech, apparently Noam Chomsky has the same concerns.

(via Geeky Gadgets)

My lovely girlfriend, Christine Dunaway (@fddlgrl on Twitter), is moving from Seattle, Washington to Brisbane in July! No, we didn’t meet on Twitter, we actually met on the island of Corsica last year while we were both there for the Napoleon conference. Chrissy  was there to perform at the gala dinner (she’s definitely NOT a Napoleon geek!).

Chrissy is a Suzuki violin teacher with 10 years teaching experience (she’s not as young as she looks!) and for the last year has been the Director of The Suzuki Academy at Seattle Music Center. As she’s moving to Brisbane, she will be setting up a new music school and will be looking for students to start immediately!

She will be looking for students from age 4 up to adults and from beginners to advanced in Brisbane who want violin lessons or viola lessons starting in July 2009.

Chrissy is a very popular teacher in Seattle (check out some of the testimonials from parents of students on her site) and I’m sure she’ll be just as sought after here.

So if you’ve got kids in Brisbane wanting violin or viola lessons - or even if you want to learn yourself - check out her new website for more information!

Part 1

Part 2

Salbuchi goes on to explain the "new world orders" that we’ve already seen arise over the last century that were engineered out of WWI and WWII and the next "new world order", a world government. I’m a fan or having a world government - if it’s a legitimate democracy - but his explanation is quite dystopian, an unelected, unofficial world government run by private corporations and, in particular, a small handful of think tanks and lobby groups. Hey - isn’t that the world we already have? Yes - and that seems to be his point. Salbuchi says there is no conspiracy theory involved - all of the players are out in the open.

Part 1

Part 2

It seem that back in January, Letterman invited the legendary Bill Hicks‘ mother onto the show to formally apologize in public for cutting Bill’s Oct 1993 stand-up routine from the show. Apparently Letterman and his producer were concerned about Bill’s jokes about Jesus. As Bill Hicks’ fans know, he died 5 months later from pancreatic cancer.

Not only did Dave apologize back in January, he played the banned stand-up routine. It’s pretty moving.

 Here it is:

Here are the first two parts of the full interview.

Part One

Part Two

I’ll be using Tokbox again tonight, so keep an eye on my Twitter feed for the conference link, about 8pm AEST.

"This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins".

Apparently Chirac himself confirms this in a new book published in France last March and the conversation had been published earlier by a French theology professor who the French government turned to for clarification about what the hell Bush might have been talking about.

I seriously never thought of Bush as really nuts. I figured he just put on the whole Jesus-lovin’ Texan ol’ boy routine purely as manipulation, just as a way to squeeze extra votes out of the Religious Right. Could I have been wrong? Is Bush simply insane?

And if Obama continues his "war" in Afghanistan (I still laugh at how the US likes to declare that it’s a war but refuse to classify their prisoners as Prisoners Of WAR under the Geneva Convention), is he perpetuating Bush’s Holy Jihad?

Yet again we see Christianity used as a justification for the murder of tens of thousands of civilians. It’s just another reason why we need to treat Christianity in the same way we treat any other intolerant, violent philosophy - with extreme disdain and our own (non-violent) intolerance.

Anyway, this show is a live recording of the event.

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Last week, Leilani Neumann was found guilty of second-degree reckless homicide.

Then there is this mother who is on the run with her 13 year-old cancer-stricken son to avoid chemo.

This highlights what I’ve often said is one of my major concerns with religion. It invariably teaches that faith is not only equal to reason but actually superior to it. I’ve often said that this is a dangerous and despicable kind of brain washing. The death of this child is just one example of why faith is dangerous. On a larger scale, it seems to me that once people come to accept that faith is all you need, they are less likely to challenge authority figures when told things like "Saddam is going to use WMD on us" or "climate change is natural". If we live in a society that conditions us not to say "well hold on a second, where’s the proof?" but "ummm okay, if you say so", then we can be lead like sheep to the slaughter house by figures of power and authority.

Madeline Kara Neumann, known as Kara, died on Easter Sunday, March 23, 2008. Three weeks before that, on Feb 28, her mother wrote this article on a Christian site called "America’s Last Days". In the article, she talks about how she and her husband had been ‘laying their hands’ on people so that, as with one woman they touched, "the power of God fell on her and she immediately felt the Holy Spirit fill her with His Presence". She also writes:

"Many times The Lord has told me things that are going to happen many years down the road…"

Apparently he neglected to tell her that her daughter had Type 1 diabetes, was going to die in three weeks, and needed to see a doctor urgently.

The Neumann’s are part of a church called Unleavened Bread Ministries which is run by the preacher David Eells. Apparently in his conversations with God, the subject of Kara’s disease didn’t come up either.

Even worse than adults being inculcated with faith is when kids are brain washed before they are old enough to know better. In a press release Leilani wrote after the trial, she claims:

"Madeline Kara was a very mature Christian of deep faith in God’s Word; she did her own study on doctors and medicine exactly one week prior to her death…. Kara found out through her study of God’s Word that the Bible did not advocate doctors or medicine but, rather, that modern-day medicine is a counterfeit to God’s healing power."

I’m torn between feeling genuinely sorry for the Neumann’s and feeling disdainful at their ignorance. I can’t imagine how awful it must be to lose a child. And I don’t doubt for an instant that they thought they were doing the right thing. On the other hand, believing that your imaginary friend is going to heal your sick child is just plain stupid and irresponsible. There’s no excuse. She writes:

Dale and I thought we were within our rights to pray for our daughter’s recovery.

I agree. But why not take her to a doctor as well? What about Kara’s right to live? What about her right to have medical care? As a society, where should our priorities lie - respecting people’s religious beliefs, no matter how primitive and ignorant, or protecting children from their irresponsible parents?

The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1944 ruling in the case of Prince v. Massachusetts ruled:

The right to practice religion freely does not include the right to expose the community or the child to communicable disease or the latter to ill-health or death… Parents may be free to become martyrs themselves. But it does not follow they are free, in identical circumstances, to make martyrs of their children before they have reached the age of full and legal discretion when they can make that choice for themselves.

Neumann writing about the progress of her daughter’s illness:

Later on Sunday, I recognized a change in Kara’s condition, as we witnessed the deep sleep and a completely limp body, but for reasons some may not understand, I was not fearful — thinking this was something my daughter could fully recover from. Again, I did not understand what the changes in Kara’s body meant, whether good or bad, so we sought for answers from God.

"We sought answers from God." No doctors.

Now - if you’re a Christian reading this, and you’re saying to yourself "oh yes, well those people are obviously stupid Christians, but my particular kind of Christianity has it right", let me ask you: what’s so different between what you believe and the Neumann’s believed?

I continually talk to Christians who tell me that they have a "relationship" with God or Jesus and that one or both of them "talks" to them. What makes them different from the Neumanns?

Perhaps you’re thinking "well *we* would have taken our child to the doctor." Well good for you. But what areas of your life *do* you put faith ahead of reason and facts? If you put faith ahead of facts in any circumstance, then I submit to you that you are just as deluded and dangerous as the Neumanns.

Faith is dangerous. The people who told you that faith is superior have brain washed you so that you won’t question them while they pick your pocket and lead you down a blind alley. Faith is basically not thinking for yourself. Anyone who tells you not to think for yourself is someone who you should not trust.

The only sensible way to evaluate anything in life is to collect as much data as you can, think about it as best you can, and make the most educated decision you can.

“’Faith’ means not wanting to know what is true” - Friedrich Nietzsche

Clare Werbeloff has punk’d the news. Brilliant. For years the news media have been punking us. It took Clare Werbeloff to turn the tables. She punk’d them. She made up the entire “chk chk boom” story on the spur of the moment. What talent! What creativity! What balls!

Years from now, when studying how the media died, I’m sure journalism professors will point to Clare as one of the defining moments. She perfected the media punk model.

1. Be in the right place at the right time.

2. Find a news crew.

3. Make sure you’re looking hawt - the news doesn’t talk to fuglies.

4. Create a somewhat believable story.

5. Here’s the most important part - Come up with an instant catch phrase that works as a 10 second sound bite!

Together we can speed up the end of the old media by punking them over and over, day and night. They won’t know who to believe. And let’s face it - they won’t care. It’s not like they have cared much about what’s true for the last 20 years anyway. What they care about are the three S’s: sensationalism, scandal, and selling advertising. So this is just taking their model to its natural conclusion.

PUNK THE NEWS!

I totally recommend this film although it’s not for the faint of heart and you won’t come out of the cinema feeling uplifted or positive about the state of the world. The issues that the RAF were protesting in the 60s are still around - and in a worse state - today. American imperialism runs rampant across the globe, using the ‘free media’ as its propaganda tool and manipulating the minds of the populace with suggestion that an Obama is really more than a couple of degrees different from a Bush.

The film stars a couple of familiar faces -

Horst Herold, who played Hitler in the brilliant DOWNFALL (which has served for unlimited parodies on YouTube) and here plays the president of the Federal Police, and warns the politicians that the guerillas won’t stop until their issues are actually addressed, something none of the politicians wants to hear.

Moritz Bleibtreu who I remember as the lead role in DAS EXPERIMENT, another brilliant film, and here plays Andreas Baader, the flawed but fearless leader of the RAF. As his girlfriend says at one point "Andreas has more revolution in him than the rest of us put together."

Anyway, go see the movie.

With the question of "terrorist or freedom fighter" fresh in my mind, I was reading from Robert Fisk’s excellent book "The Great War For Civilisation - The Conquest of the Middle East" today and the following lines jumped out at me. He’s writing about Afghanistan in the late 70s:

For "terrorists", read "guerillas" or - as President Ronald Reagan would call them in the years to come - "freedom fighters." Terrorists, terrorists, terrorists. In the Middle East, in the entire Muslim world, this word would become a plague, a meaningless punctuation mark in all our lives, a full stop erected to finish all discussion of injustice, constructed as a wall by Russian, Americans, Israelis, British, Pakistanis, Saudis, Turks, to shut us up. Who would ever say a word in favour of terrorists? What cause could justify terror? So our enemies are always "terrorists." In the seventeenth century, governments used "heretic" in much the same way, to end all dialogue, to prescribe obedience. Karmal’s policy (CR Note: Karmal was the President of Afghanistan who was in support of the Russian invasion) was simple: you are either with us or against us. For decades, I have listened to this dangerous equation, uttered by capitalist and communist, presidents and prime ministers, generals and intelligence officers and, of course, newspaper editors.

Click on the book cover to order the book from BookDepository in the UK - free worldwide shipping!

As Fisk points out - every time you read or hear the word "terrorist", be aware that it’s being used to shut you up. It’s a manipulative word, a weasel word, and the use of it by politicians or the media should tell you something about their true agenda.

(all rights reserved maumeedb8)

Clare Werbeloff (the CHK CHK BOOM girl) is apparently on Twitter but I’m guessing its fake. I can’t wait to see what happens with this girl. My guess is she’ll be the next host of Today Tonight.

If you haven’t heard the story yet, read more here. 

Q: What does Clare Werbeloff use to clean her house? A: a chk chk broom.

Apparently Brisbane City Council have seven committees that meet, so I’m looking for six other Brisbanites to attend the other meetings and report.

According to "the rules", you aren’t allowed to record a City Council meeting. I find that a bit strange.

Here’s the clever bit - the meetings are held weekly and DURING THE DAY (here’s the schedule). That’s going to make it difficult for your average wage slave to attend.

I’m going to attend the Infrastructure Committee meeting once a month.

Anybody else want to sign up to cover the others?

Original Post: According to Dawn.com, US journalist Seymour Hersh claims a US government hit squad assassinated Benazir Bhutto on the order of Dick Cheney. Why? Apparently because she announced (on the below TV interview with David Frost) that Osama Bin Laden. Remember how the BBC, when they ran the clip (originally aired on Al Jazeera), edited out the comment about Bin Laden? Hersh says the US was pissed that she leaked that Bin Laden is already dead, which would reduce their justification for continued occupation of Afghanistan and so they had her whacked. And who did the job? Probably JSOC, the top top secret "snake-eating, throat-slitting" black ops team formerly lead by Obama’s new Afghanistan leader, General Stanley McChrystal.

Do I buy it? Yes and no. Do I believe the US assassinates foreign leaders from time to time? Of course I do. They have admitted it. Do I believe they might have been involved in killing Bhutto? Yes, I do. But not because she spoke out about Bin Laden. More likely because the US had invested a LOT ($10 billion) in Pakistan’s military dictator Musharraf and they didn’t want to see that go to waste under a Bhutto government. Of course, it didn’t buy them much time. Musharraf was forced to resign in August 2008 amid corruption allegations and Bhutto’s widower, Asif Ali Zardari, is now President.

Watch Bhutto’s interview on Frost:

Watch Hersh interviewed on Gulf News:

As Allan Nairn, who has carried out some of the most revealing and courageous investigations of torture, points out: "What the Obama [ban on torture] ostensibly knocks off is that small percentage of torture now done by Americans while retaining the overwhelming bulk of the system’s torture, which is done by foreigners under U.S. patronage. Obama could stop backing foreign forces that torture, but he has chosen not to do so."

Obama did not shut down the practice of torture, Nairn observes, but "merely repositioned it," restoring it to the American norm, a matter of indifference to the victims. "[H]is is a return to the status quo ante," writes Nairn, "the torture regime of Ford through Clinton, which, year by year, often produced more U.S.-backed strapped-down agony than was produced during the Bush/Cheney years."

He also explains that the Obama administration is continuing to fight the courts to allow the USA to continue to send prisoners to international prisons where they will continue to be denied basic legal and human rights, away from the prying eyes of the US legal system.

While Obama, like Bush, eloquently affirms our unwavering commitment to international law, he seems intent on substantially reinstating the extremist Bush measures. In the important case of Boumediene v. Bush in June 2008, the Supreme Court rejected as unconstitutional the Bush administration claim that prisoners in Guantanamo are not entitled to the right of habeas corpus.

Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald reviews the aftermath. Seeking to "preserve the power to abduct people from around the world" and imprison them without due process, the Bush administration decided to ship them to the U.S. prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, treating "the Boumediene ruling, grounded in our most basic constitutional guarantees, as though it was some sort of a silly game — fly your abducted prisoners to Guantanamo and they have constitutional rights, but fly them instead to Bagram and you can disappear them forever with no judicial process."

Obama adopted the Bush position, "filing a brief in federal court that, in two sentences, declared that it embraced the most extremist Bush theory on this issue," arguing that prisoners flown to Bagram from anywhere in the world (in the case in question, Yemenis and Tunisians captured in Thailand and the United Arab Emirates) "can be imprisoned indefinitely with no rights of any kind — as long as they are kept in Bagram rather than Guantanamo."

In March, however, a Bush-appointed federal judge "rejected the Bush/Obama position and held that the rationale of Boumediene applies every bit as much to Bagram as it does to Guantanamo." The Obama administration announced that it would appeal the ruling, thus placing Obama’s Department of Justice, Greenwald concludes, "squarely to the Right of an extremely conservative, pro-executive-power, Bush 43-appointed judge on issues of executive power and due-process-less detentions," in radical violation of Obama’s campaign promises and earlier stands.

Of course, it now looks like Obama’s first Presidential act - closing down Gitmo - might not happen after all. Surprise, surprise, surprise.

(Thanks to Marcelo Castro for the link to the Chomsky piece.)

It’s interesting that Fareed Zakaria is going (according to this list anyway). He’s a regular guest on The Daily Show.

Just another demonstration of how Christians use their Bible to justify violence and intolerance. As I’ve said many times before, violence is at the CORE of Christianity. It’s built into the very fabric of their scriptures. That’s why the history of Christianity is replete almost 1700 years of bloodshed and intolerance.

The final lines of Joshua 1 (from the OT) says it all:

Whoever rebels against your word and does not obey your words, whatever you may command them, will be put to death. Only be strong and courageous!

Getting back to the White House under GWB, I agree with Pharyngula’s final comment:

We lived under the rule of monsters for eight years. We can’t just pretend it didn’t happen, we need to fight back in the courts to condemn these people and their actions.

This forum "Teens Against Pornography" is a must read.

Are you addicted to pornography?
It’s a simple question. Are you? Have you ever decided to stop? Yeah, so have we. How long did it last for you?

It even has a podcast!

Teh pr0ncast offers practical, Christian-oriented advice to teens that desire to stop surfing porn (and the other act that goes with it) but can’t seem to kick the habit.

I can’t wait to listen to that one! One of the best posts is this one that deus linked to, where a forum member describes the "not abnormal" transition from innocent porn to feeling the need to watch videos about rape, homosexual acts, incest and bestiality.

I also like this post where someone asks "so i’m gay and sometimes i look at straight porn and get off on it. does that make me straight?"

Anyway, incest isn’t a bad thing in God’s eyes. Abraham married his sister. And they weren’t even from Tasmania.

A very interesting show and worth listening to.

In the Oz of all places, a demolition of Ian Plimer so scathing, and so convincing, that it’s hard to imagine how he can salvage any kind of academic reputation, other than by a full retraction (which would be a pretty impressive move, admittedly).

As Plimer seems to be the last person of any credibility denying human-caused climate change in Australia, this has got to be a blow for his supporters.

“Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, see me after class. Your book reports are surprisingly similar.”

Jesus’ first encounter with Judas.

Anyway…

Details here.

There are still limited tickets available and as a special offer to the Podcast Network listeners you can get a ticket for just $25 instead of $45. Simply on the registration page click TPN Member - and use keyword “planet”. After the event is Mobile Monday Brisbane where Keith Ahern from Australia’s leading iPhone developers MoGeneration will be showcasing how to get into the App store… so if you’re interested in the latest mobile tech stuff come along to that as well.

Let the world know you are pissed at your favourite free social networking service today!

(note: this isn’t Kevlex - photo courtesy of Toastie14)

We talked about what it takes to be a superhero in the real world. Fascinating stuff.

You too can be a superhero by becoming a member of the TPN500!

You can also use it to send video mail. Send me a message below.

TokBox - Free Video Chat and Video Messaging

And you can chat with them on Twitter.

What do you think this means? If you’re an ordinary citizen, it’s alright to quote you but not to mention who you are? Or link to your tweets? Is it because the news services think writing something like

@khushee said: “Gretel mentions Twitter - if only she knew what was being said!”

or

@amileegrant said “Bedtime. I’m over this sad attempt at an awards show. Yawn. Hope gretel gets drunk and falls over and her dress rips off on stage.”

would be too confusing to the non-Twittering public? Or just because they news services don’t think it matters who the non-celebrity Twitterers are?

Celebrity culture - I frakking hate it.

A few days after recording this interview, Philip and his wife were detained at London’s Heathrow airport for nine hours and denied access to a lawyer. During the interview he mentioned spending more time in the UK - after this week’s experience, he is reconsidering.

When Amin died in 2003, in exile in Saudi Arabia (US ally) where he’d been since 1979, apparently never deported for crimes against humanity (it is said somewhere between 80,000 and 500,000 Ugandans died during his years in power), the major news outlets around the world said things like:

Amin, who almost single-handedly turned a nation’s prosperity into economic ruin and plunged a peaceful society into a nightmare of chaos and terror, was admitted to King Faisal Specialist Hospital on July 18. He had been in a coma and on life support since his admission. (The Age, borrowed from the LA Times.)

Amin’s eight years as president of Uganda were characterised by bizarre and murderous behaviour. (The Sydney Morning Herald)

The eight-year rule which followed was characterised by bizarre and brutal behaviour. (The BBC…. eerily almost word-for-word the SMH’s version)

Amin brought bloody tragedy and economic ruin to his country, during a selfish life that had no redeeming qualities. (The Guardian)

THEN… I found this fascinating article, The Making of Idi Amin, which was originally written in 1979 by Pat Hutton and Jonathan Bloch and was re-published on this site in 2001. The re-published version starts:

British government documents, recently declassified under the 30-year rule, have supported earlier accounts by the journalists Pat Hutton and Jonathan Bloch which said the rise of Idi Amin was engineered by outside interests to stop President Milton Obote’s nationalisation drive in which the state had taken 60% interest in all foreign and Ugandan-Asian-owned businesses.

The article goes on to describe the involvement of Britain, the USA and Israel in supporting Amin’s rise to power and his years at the helm. The story is that Amin’s predecessor, President Obote, was planning on nationalising British interests in Uganda - the thing Western imperialists hate the most - and that Amin - a former soldier in the colonial British army - was brought to power by British interests to reverse the nationalisation.

Was Idi Amin another in a long line of brutal dictators brought to power by Western governments who murdered thousands upon thousands of his own people? And the people in the West who brought him to power - like they also did with Saddam and Suharto and Somoza and Batista and Trujillo and Mobutu and Pinochet and Pahlavi - go untouched.

Then, on last night’s show, he started by apologizing, saying he was wrong, and completely backing down!

You have to wonder what happened behind the scenes? I totally don’t believe his whole “Oh I knew it was wrong when I said it” shtick. The powers-that-be obviously came down on him HARD. But which powers? The Comedy Central powers? MTV? Viacom? And why? It’s not like Stewart doesn’t say lots of things that the elite don’t like on a nightly basis. Why this one statement?

If anyone can help me understand it, I’d appreciate it. Here’s Stewart talking about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki:

Here’s the segment where he backs down:

Although this is obviously not true.

My question is - what if Jesus comes back, tries to reach his followers via Twitter and finds out it’s already taken?! Is this religious discrimination by Twitter?

My guest on the show is Steve McDonald from a company called Transcendence.

Steve has consulted in change management, strategic planning and organisational development in the public, private and not-for-profit sectors since 1998. His professional background spans the defence, aviation and emergency services industries.

He came on the show to explain to me what Spiral Dynamics is all about.

Steve is blogging about change at http://www.eman8.net

Follow Steve on Twitter: http://twitter.com/stevemc1

What say you to that, climate change skeptics?

The somnolence of a Sunday in Ajaccio. A heavy drowsiness permeates your bones, muscles, brain, willing you to sleep, sleep.

Now, in the evening, a breeze blows in from the sea, and people come alive again, the ’second’ wind. The heat pushes you to stop in the afternoon, but relents at dusk and invites you back out to play. People rejoice in the reprieve like death-row pardonees.

The buildings are age worn, peeling paint in faint shades of dirty white, sad yellow, betrayed pink, dying pale green. All with shutters of canary-egg blue.

I’m sitting at “Le 1er Consul”, 2 Rue Bonaparte, drinking a Pietra, a Corsican beer. I can hear the fountains, cars honking, motorcycles, the drifting voices in French, tumbling over each other like waves on the shore. Pigeon’s wings flapping behind me, cooing.

The sky is completely cloudless and blue to match the window shutters.

I love listening to people speak French. They always sound like they are sulking about something. It sounds French if you pout and say any string of noises with the vowel sounds “oo” and “oh” and “on”. “Foo on coh soo”. And the “monsieur” at the end, the drawn out “ssss” always sounds like an insult. “Foo on coh soo too mo boo, mohsssssyoooor.”

The cheese I bought at the market today was hard and crumbly and oily and eating it felt like committing an act of child rape, something of the utmost carnality and sordidness. It was heavy and indolent and arrogant in its almost lack of flavour. It almost dared you to enjoy it. It was a 20-year life sentence in a closet-sized cell that tasted of urine and stale blood. It was a peasant’s cheese, a cheese to eat out of desperation when the cupboard was bare and your ribs were poking out and you had already eaten the scraps out of the garbage. It was the last straw cheese, the end of the world cheese, the back against the wall cornered rat cheese. A cheese you wouldn’t bring home to mother, a cheese that had spent its life inside a tomb, no light or air for 10,000 years, a cheese that contained all of the curses of all of the mummies, the mold behind the closet in the house that the old, old, impossibly old woman died in six months ago and they only found her when the neighbours noticed the smell cheese.

And I loved it. Tomorrow I’ll go back for more.

The basic premise of the video is that the monetary system we have in the West is a complete fraud and totally unstable as it is built on the foundation that money is created by the banking system through issuing debt. When they agree to loan you (or a corporation or a government) money, they literally create that money out of nowhere. Watch and learn more. I’ll no doubt be talking about this during next week’s live show which will feature @brad_fidler talking about the origins of - and possible alternatives to - capitalism.

The video was created by Paul Grignon and I was pointed to it by @lelaissezfaireisover.

Money as Debt from RoneTyne on Vimeo.

Every now and again I get to chat with someone who has been an inspiration to me for many years - Noam Chomsky, Ray Kurzweil, Doc Searls, Leo Sayer, John Romero, Vint Cerf - and this is another of those episodes.

Kalle Lasn is the founder of Adbusters magazine and author of the books Culture Jam and Design Anarchy. He is the CEO of the Blackspot Anticorporation. For 20 years, Kalle has been trying to buy space on TV networks around the world to show Adbusters’ anti-consumerism commercials such as these:

He is continually rejected by the networks who refuse to take his money and show his ads on the ground that it will offend their larger advertisers. So Kalle has been fighting them in the courts to try to get equal access to the airwaves and, after 20 years of the cases being dismissed by the courts, he’s finally had a win. He joined me recently to talk about it.

Follow Adbusters on Twitter!

Adbusters are the folks behind “Buy Nothing Day”. I shot some video of folks promoting BND in Melbourne back in 2006:

Rebel Priest Fr Peter Kennedy’s Last St Mary’s Mass from Cameron Reilly on Vimeo.

As usual, I’ll be pulling out the old guitar and playing some songs before and after the show. Plan to stick around for the after party, where I’ll also be talking about:

- Why I Believe Women Run The World
- I’ll talk a bit about the interview I did with Kalle Lasn this morning and why the Internet is bad for you
- My plan for the TPN 500
- Why Ashton Kutcher is a douche… or maybe the greatest genius of our time

Oh and this week I have a sponsor for my scotch!

Find out the details of how to listen and participate LIVE in the show here.

On G’Day World Live this week my guest was Fi Bendall from Bendalls Group. Fi is one of Australia’s best known digital strategists who has worked with clients from MTV to Amnesty. She came on to chat about how social media is challenging corporate cultures in Australia and what needs to happen before those companies will be ready to embrace things like Twitter. You can follow Fi on Twitter.

G’Day World Live broadcasts every Tuesday evening, 8pm AEST. Join in the fun! Lately it’s been running for about four hours - I play guitar and we talk about all the things you’re not supposed to talk about in polite company - from politics to religion, sex, social media and single malt whisky.

And finally, please support TPN’s April drive! We need your support!

If you want to keep TPN on the air, please show your support. If just the listeners of this show contributed $20 a month, I could fund TPN indefinitely! Is the information and entertainment you get from TPN worth a bottle of cheap wine?

“Castro has been able to spin the embargo as evidence of “cruel” U.S. policies that use human suffering as a means of political pressure.”

Spin it? Nice work with the biased reporting there Business Week.

There’s no spin involved. The UN has voted with an overwhelming majority that the US should end the embargo for 17 years straight. Why? Because it’s inhumane, immoral and cruel.

But Business Week, another tool of the ruling elite in the US, neglected to mention that fact in its article. It chose to suggest that Castro “spins” the embargo to try to win sympathy.

Just one more example of how the US media can’t be trusted to report impartially on subjects that effect US corporate interests.

Footage of his first day in jail has been leaked to G’Day World:

Follow Tara on Twitter or her blog and read about the book here.

If you want to join me in celebrating
Vanini Day, then join the club.

If you want to listen to some of my other podcasts on the history of Jesus, see this page.

And finally, please support TPN’s April drive! We need your support!

If you want to keep TPN on the air, please show your support. If just the listeners of this show contributed $20 a month, I could fund TPN indefinitely! Is the information and entertainment you get from TPN worth a bottle of cheap wine?

But I learned something interesting today, another twist in the New Testament that I wasn’t previously aware of.

Most versions of the NT say that the man that Pilate released (it was apparently a custom for the the praefectus or governor of Judaea to commute one prisoner’s death sentence by popular acclaim) was a criminal called Barabbas.

For example, in the New International Version of the NT, in Matthew 27:16 it reads:

At that time they had a notorious prisoner, called Barabbas. So when the crowd had gathered, Pilate asked them, “Which one do you want me to release to you: Barabbas, or Jesus who is called Christ?”

HOWEVER…

If we look instead at the Contemporary English Version, the same passage reads:

At that time a well-known terrorist named Jesus Barabbas was in jail. So when the crowd came together, Pilate asked them, “Which prisoner do you want me to set free? Do you want Jesus Barabbas or Jesus who is called the Messiah?”

Apparently some of the oldest versions of the NT, including the Syriac Sinaiticus, have the name of the prisoner as “Yeshua bar Abbas” but the “Yeshua” was dropped from later versions - yet another example of early Christian authorities editing the manuscripts to suit their agenda.

In Amaraic (and in Latin), “bar Abbas” translates as “Son of the Father”.

So the crowd was given a choice of “Jesus, Son Of The Father” or “Jesus, who is called The Messiah”. Don’t they sound like the same person to you?

What was Yeshua bar Abbas’ crime? In the different gospels, he is referred to in a variety of ways: a “notorious prisoner”, a “bandit”, an “insurrectionist” and a “murderer”.

When Pilate asked the crowd which prisoner he should release, they said “bar Abbas!” (The Son of the Father!).

What do you think? Confusing?

Some guy called Nick Norelli writes a blog called “Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth -
Study to show thyself approved unto God… (2 Tim. 2:15)”. Apparently Nick is only interested in study if it agrees with his point of view though. On April 6, he wrote a blog post called “Out of Touch with Reality“. Guess who is out of touch with reality? That’s right - me.

Nick wrote a blog post attacking my intelligence. “Mr. Reilly shows himself to be woefully out of touch with reality.” It wasn’t bad enough that he got his argument wrong, claiming that I had, in another discussion on another site (which, by the way, was a very civil debate on both sides) claimed that “all scholars” agreed with my position on the historicity of Jesus, something I had not done.

So I left a comment on Nick post defending myself.

That lead to a discussion with some of the folks who read Nick’s blog and I believe the discussion was civil and honest. True that some of Nick’s readers, like Nick himself, are very dismissive of anyone who disagrees with their position. Instead of debating facts or refuting my position by providing evidence, they prefer to say things like:

“… his arguments reflect a slanted type of scholarship that doesn’t accurately represent the data.”

“… your doubt that Jesus even existed renders you unfit for me to engage in such matters.” (That’s the great Nick himself speaking.)

“… you just don’t know what you’re talking about.” (That’s Nick again.)

“I’m not even willing to discuss your arguments with you let alone debate them.” (Nick, again.)

So, as you can see, typical Christian avoidance and insults. Instead of debating facts, they would rather insult your intelligence, your knowledge or, as Nick did, just end up blocking you from the discussion.

I’d like to remind you again that HE started it by writing a blog post insulting my mental state (”out of touch with reality”).

We talk about the survey that the CPX has recently sponsored that finds that 55 per cent of Australians don’t believe that Jesus rose from the dead but only 11 per cent doubt that Jesus was a real historical figure. As you know, I am one of those 11 per cent. So Greg and I also had a chat about the lack of evidence (as I see it) for the existence of Jesus. As Greg works in the Dept of Ancient History I thought he could confirm for me that my basic facts are correct. As you’ll hear, that was like drawing blood from a stone.

Here are the census stats for religion in Australia.

If you want to join me in celebrating
Vanini Day, then join the club.

If you want to listen to some of my other podcasts on the history of Jesus, see this page.

And finally, please support TPN’s April drive! We need your support!

If you want to keep TPN on the air, please show your support. If just the listeners of this show contributed $20 a month, I could fund TPN indefinitely! Is the information and entertainment you get from TPN worth a bottle of cheap wine?

During this four hour marathon, Nick and I discussed:

Australia’s National Broadband Network

America’s bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Whether or not Nick is an atheist or an agnostic

The financial crisis scam and what we might replace capitalism with

The ethics of veganism

The Church of LOTU

The historicity of Jesus (or lack thereof)

And much, much more.

Listen to the full three hours - if you dare.

Tune in to future live shows every Tuesday night at 8pm here.

Peter’s “sins” include talking about and promoting advaita and trying to include homosexuals and women in his services.

View part one here and part two here.

I love the term they are using for bankers who deliberately defraud society - “banksters”. Black says the entire financial system is one big ponzi scheme, making Bernie Madoff looking like an amateur and fall guy for the larger crime which involved the entire financial system and governments who allowed them to go unregulated.

Watch.

I hope the current financial crisis leads to a new generation of people reading Marx and those of us who have read him before should be re-reading him.

As David Harvey says in the below video, the G20 governments are just trying to re-boot the same kind of capitalism we’ve had before which has seen a series of collapses over the last 30 years, each collapse leading to the bankers being bailed out by the taxpayers and walking away scott-free so they can do it all over again, “sticking it to the people”, as Harvey says. Rampant consumerism is to blame for our problems and Marx predicted this 150 years ago. Propping up the old regime isn’t the answer. We need a new model. And we need to start figuring out what that model might be. We need to pressure our leaders to start thinking about it, talking publicly about it, not just propping up the old broken system.

Read Marx’s DAS KAPITAL along with David Harvey here.

Peter’s “sins” include talking about and promoting advaita and trying to include homosexuals and women in his services.

View part one here.

Peter Kennedy, Rebel Priest, Part Two from Cameron Reilly on Vimeo.

Peter’s “sins” include talking about and promoting advaita and trying to include homosexuals and women in his services.

Peter Kennedy, Rebel Priest - part 1 from Cameron Reilly on Vimeo.

Irwin Zalkin is a US attorney whose firm, The Zalkin Law Firm PC, specializes in clergy sexual abuse cases. He joins me to talk about the recent news that the Vatican can be sued in a United States court over alleged molestation by its priests.

If you want to keep TPN on the air, please show your support. If just the listeners of this show contributed $20 a month, I could fund TPN indefinitely!

- Robert Fisk, The Great War For Civilisation

Telstra’s ongoing failure to realize what a gift Leslie Nassar is for them boggles my mind.

But not really. I’ve had first hand experience with how poorly large organizations in Australia handle mavericks.

When I left Microsoft in 2004, it was partly a result of my blogging and slightly critical comments I made about Microsoft in a blog post. Like Telstra, Microsoft’s local management at the time felt it was unconscionable for an employee to say something negative about the company in public. And I wasn’t even saying something negative about their products, in fact it was the opposite. I said the products were great but the marketing didn’t reflect that. Which, let’s face it, wasn’t the world’s best kept secret. Everyone knew that then, as now, companies like Apple and IBM were stomping all over Microsoft’s marketing. I was just speaking what I felt was the truth. That, apparently, wasn’t one of Microsoft “core values”. Anyway, things got nasty, and I resigned.

Now - I’m not saying I’m the world’s smartest bloke, but I think in the five years since I’ve left Microsoft, I’ve demonstrated that I can do a thing or two. I think I have some potential. Could Microsoft have used that potential? Could they have embraced and extended my maverickness for their own benefit? Perhaps.

I think the same thing when I read what’s going on with Leslie at Telstra. He’s obviously demonstrated that he’s a clever and creative personality. He’s generated lots of press even before he was outed. Surely a smart company (and a smart manager) would be thinking “Let’s figure out how to use someone like this to our advantage”, and not “let’s crush him if he doesn’t fall into line”. I’ve met his big boss, Telstra’s CTO, Hugh Bradlow, a few times over the years. I’ve even done a few podcasts with him over the last year. He’s obviously a very smart guy.

But let’s be honest - Telstra has brand problems. Stop ten people at random in the street and ask them what they think about Telstra and what do you think you’ll hear? Good reports or bad reports? Surely this is a company that could benefit from someone who is smart, sassy, funny and cheeky.

Don’t fire Leslie - give him his own show on Telstra Media. Turn him into the new John Clarke.

If I had the funds, or if I was running Optus, I’d hire him in a heartbeat.

Then again, if they fire him they might be doing him a favour. It’ll give him a chance to land at a company that values people with original ideas.

UPDATE (1.45pm 26 March): Leslie sets the record straight and tells Hugh Bradlow to go fuck himself.

On today’s show I get to chat with one of the most powerful men in Hollywood - Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of Dreamworks Animation - about their new film MONSTERS V ALIENS and the introduction of their new 3D technology. I also chat with the director of the film, Conrad Vernon.

As I told a couple of Labor Party stalwarts (including a former ALP MP) over lunch last week - Rudd was supposed to be the good guy. At least where the ACMA blacklist is concerned, he’s turning out to be more appalling than John Howard. I wouldn’t vote ALP in a pink fit after this experience (mind you, I’ve never voted ALP in my life) and I doubt many digital folks who voted for the ALP in 2007 will make the same mistake in the next Federal election.

clipped from wotnews.com.au Less than a week after the federal government’s URL blacklist was leaked and caused a furore over the status of online betting company Betfair, Australia’s poker industry is now in the firing line over the number of legitimate poker sites that could be banned by the filter..

]]> http://gdayworld.thepodcastnetwork.com/2009/03/23/the-acma-debacle-just-gets-worse/feed/ http://gdayworld.thepodcastnetwork.com/2009/03/23/twitterfast-update/ http://gdayworld.thepodcastnetwork.com/2009/03/23/twitterfast-update/#comments Mon, 23 Mar 2009 05:53:19 +0000 Cameron Reilly http://gdayworld.thepodcastnetwork.com/?p=1858 I’ve been receiving emails from people asking “what happened to your Twitterfast”? The posts that you’re seeing from me in Twitter are automated posts from Friendfeed which keeps an eye on my blogs, delicious bookmarks, Facebook posts, Flickr uploads, etc. I haven’t posted directly to Twitter (except asking for help on uStream last night) for 36 hours and it has been HARD. I have the impulse to post to or check Twitter every few minutes. Just nonsense stuff really… about thoughts I’m having, people I’m talking to, where to catch a bus, plugging sites I’ve discovered, etc. Nothing terribly important or special but it does really make me notice how much I rely on Twitter every day. As I was discussing with some folks in a meeting today, Twitter is really my primary search engine for so many things. I’m finding living without it pretty difficult.

Back in 2001, I gave a series of CIO breakfasts for Microsoft. One of the things I talked about was a rating system I had for evaluating new technologies and services in my life. It went something like this:

Rating 1: If it disappeared tomorrow, I would hardly notice.
Rating 2: If it disappeared tomorrow, I would notice but could happily live without it.
Rating 3: If it disappeared tomorrow, I would feel the absence but would cope.
Rating 4: If it disappeared tomorrow, I would feel the absence and proactively look for a replacement.
Rating 5: If it disappeared tomorrow, I would go to war to get it back.

Where is Twitter for me right now? Somewhere between 4 and 5 I think.

BEFORE word presentation! So the brain was in a certain “state” before the word was presented. This reminds me a lot of Tony Robbins’ stuff. He talks about using NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) techniques when you are learning a new activity to put yourself into the right “state” for learning. I wonder how many educators consciously use techniques like this in schools?

clipped from scienceblogs.com A team of researchers from Germany now show that the activity which immediately precedes an event is also important for memory formation. In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they report the identification of a signature brain state which occurs just before the appearance of a visual stimulus and predicts the successful encoding of it. The findings point to ways in which the process of memory formation could be enhanced.

]]> http://gdayworld.thepodcastnetwork.com/2009/03/23/new-research-confirms-some-nlp-theories/feed/ http://gdayworld.thepodcastnetwork.com/2009/03/22/israeli-troops-admit-to-gaza-abuses/ http://gdayworld.thepodcastnetwork.com/2009/03/22/israeli-troops-admit-to-gaza-abuses/#comments Sun, 22 Mar 2009 13:02:42 +0000 Cameron Reilly http://gdayworld.thepodcastnetwork.com/2009/03/22/israeli-troops-admit-to-gaza-abuses/ Interesting analysis of the stories coming out from Israeli troops (in the Israeli press) about war crimes committed during their December 2008 attacks on Gaza, why the New York Times is giving it coverage, and what the Obama administration’s response has been so far.

clipped from www.consortiumnews.com

]]> http://gdayworld.thepodcastnetwork.com/2009/03/22/israeli-troops-admit-to-gaza-abuses/feed/ http://gdayworld.thepodcastnetwork.com/2009/03/22/why-im-having-a-twitterfast/ http://gdayworld.thepodcastnetwork.com/2009/03/22/why-im-having-a-twitterfast/#comments Sun, 22 Mar 2009 10:54:34 +0000 Cameron Reilly http://gdayworld.thepodcastnetwork.com/?p=1847 I love Twitter. Too much.

Late last night, I was driving home from having a beer with a couple of old school mates and realized I was checking Twitter on my iPhone WHILE I WAS DRIVING every few minutes.

I don’t like feeling that I’m addicted to things. I gave up drinking alcohol for 12 years (from age 18 to 30) because I felt like I had a problem with it. And with Twitter, I’ve been feeling lately like I NEED to check Twitter. Like I’m missing out on something if I don’t check it or tweet something every ten minutes. It’s an urge. A need. It’s physical. I’d love to see an fMRI scan of the hypothalamus when people are using Twitter. I’m sure some people have a greater addiction to activities that generate increased dopamine (one of the neurochemicals associated with pleasure and motivation) than others, and I know I’m one of them. I get easily addicted to short-term activities that give me a burst of quick pleasure and I want to train myself to develop better impulse control. And I’m starting with Twitter.

Over the last ten years I have fasted a number of times (ingested nothing but water) for a week to ten days when I’ve felt like my diet was out of control. Every time I’ve done it I have found that it re-calibrates my thinking about food for pleasure versus food for nutrition. I’m hoping a Twitterfast will accomplish the same thing. By the way, when I used the term ‘twitterfast’ last night I thought I was coining it but apparently it’s been around for quite a while.

IN the meantime… if you haven’t watched Bill Gates’ talk from the recent TED conference, watch it now. I was stunned to learn that more investment goes into finding a cure for baldness than a cure for malaria.

Let me handle the usual complaints up front - no, I am not an anti-Semite. I have Jewish friends. I greatly admire many Jewish people, past and present, from Seinfeld to Einstein.

Nor am I anti-Zionist. I completely understand and sympathize with the desire of the Jewish people to have a land of their own where they can live without the fear of oppression, where they have a sense of self-determination.

On the other hand, I can totally sympathize with the feelings of the Arab people of Palestine. for 1000 years, they were occupied at various stages by the Christian armies of Europe, the Ottoman Empire, the British, Egyptians, Jordanians and now Israelis. They have lived on this land for 1000 years and, up until Britain took control in 1917, represented 90% of the population. Surely they too have a right to self-determination and to the land their families have lived on for so long?

It seems to me that the offer that the partitioning of Palestine is pretty difficult to justify on a moral basis. After all, the Palestinian Arabs weren’t the people who had been oppressing the Jews for the last 2000 years. It was mostly the Christians of Europe. Most recently, it was Christian Germany under the Nazis (yes, they were Christians). If the United Nations felt like the Jewish people deserved a land of their own, surely it would have been much more morally justified to carve out part of Germany for them? It doesn’t matter much that the Zionists WANTED Palestine - it wasn’t morally justified to punish the Arabs of Palestine.

So when we look at the anger and violence committed by the Palestinian Arabs (and their supporters in the other Arab countries) against the Jews “invading” (in their eyes) their country since 1917, we have to see it as they see it if we are truly to understand their position. They see the Israelis as invaders and they (the Arabs) are trying to defend their homeland against an occupying army.

The other factor in all this is that, rightly or wrongly, the UN *did* vote for the partition. Therefore, under international law (which I agree with), the Arabs should abide by the decision and take only lawful measures to fight against it if they feel (as I do) that it was immoral.

However, if we accept that the UN has the power to decide such things, then Israel also needs to abide by the UN’s resolution in 1976 that Israel should go back to it’s pre-1967 borders. This is also a resolution that both Hamas and the Arab League have said they will support and, with it, will recognize Israel’s right to exist.

So - I am not anti-Semitic or anti-Zionist, I am pro-peace and pro-justice.

However, like in all things, I don’t claim to know everything about the subject, so I’m happy to be corrected. All I’m interested in is getting to the truth.

Can anyone tell me where I am misguided or wrong?

I chatted with Peter today about the recent IPCC report, Kevin Rudd’s emissions trading scheme and whether or not we are all doomed, as George Monbiot is suggesting. Peter told me that our politicians and media are focusing on the wrong thing. We shouldn’t be just thinking about reducing emissions, we should be talking about MINING THE SKY.

As always, I just loved talking to Peter. He never fails to inspire. He’s now on Twitter (I gave him a crash course today), so make sure you follow him. And we also have a Facebook group for Peter call “The Future Makers Club“, make sure you sign up for that as well.

If you are a journalist, blogger, twitterer or podcaster and you’d like a review copy of Designing 2050, please email me.

Is there a market for such a book? Would you buy it?

Let me know here.

Calling yourself a religion should no longer be a get out of jail free card for criminal behaviour.

clipped from newsweek.washingtonpost.com Let’s start a movement within the Catholic Church to impeach Pope Benedict XVI and remove him from office. While we’re at it, let’s replace him with a woman. I am a Catholic and the idea that such a man is God’s spokesperson on earth is absurd to me.

]]> http://gdayworld.thepodcastnetwork.com/2009/03/19/impeach-the-pope/feed/ http://gdayworld.thepodcastnetwork.com/2009/03/18/gday-world-365-climate-change-skeptics-and-polyamory/ http://gdayworld.thepodcastnetwork.com/2009/03/18/gday-world-365-climate-change-skeptics-and-polyamory/#comments Wed, 18 Mar 2009 12:26:28 +0000 Cameron Reilly http://gdayworld.thepodcastnetwork.com/?p=1823 This episode was recorded LIVE on Tuesday March 17, 2009. We have an audience following in a chat room on the G’Day World uStream page and my guests include:

Ian Kath - The Polyamorist
Nick Beaugeard - The Climate Change Skeptic
and
Kate Edwards - The Polyamory Skeptic

Last week, Reporters Without Borders, in its regular report on enemies of internet freedom, placed Australia on its “watch list” of countries imposing anti-democratic internet restrictions that could open the way for abuses of power and control of information.

I wonder if ACMA considers it illegal to post TinyURLs to banned sites?

I wonder if its illegal to stick up posters on walls with the urls of banned sites?

I wonder if its illegal to stand in the street and speak the name of a banned url out loud?

I wonder if it’s illegal to even think the url of a banned site?

Read more below:

clipped from www.smh.com.au The Australian communications regulator says it will fine people who hyperlink to sites on its blacklist, which has been further expanded to include several pages on the anonymous whistleblower site Wikileaks. Wikileaks was added to the blacklist for publishing a leaked document containing Denmark’s list of banned websites.

]]> http://gdayworld.thepodcastnetwork.com/2009/03/17/okay-this-has-gone-far-enough/feed/ http://gdayworld.thepodcastnetwork.com/2009/03/16/the-show-must-go-on/ http://gdayworld.thepodcastnetwork.com/2009/03/16/the-show-must-go-on/#comments Mon, 16 Mar 2009 08:28:10 +0000 Cameron Reilly http://gdayworld.thepodcastnetwork.com/?p=1818 So… I’ll be doing another live show tomorrow night (ie Tuesday) at 8pm QLD time / 9pm Sydney time. Put it in your diary and log in here. Will hopefully be road testing a new co-host (@joshuawithers), a Christian radio DJ, so that should provide some fun!

On the advice of Rai, I’ve got a rough plan. Each week, the live show will contain the following (roughly 15 minute long) segments:

BAD RELIGION - a story exploring how religious folks are a danger to us all
THE MASTER PLAN - a recent story concerning the game plan of the global elite
SCIENCE WORKS - a story from the world of science, unlocking the secrets of the ‘verse
CAM’S LIBRARY - as you know, I read a lot. So I thought I’m share one of the books I’m reading at the moment.

I’m going to try to set it up so you can actually come ONTO the show as well, audio style. Either just using uStream or via Skype. So if you’re interested in being on the show, let me know.

Hope you’ll join me.

I’ve just been hit with a large hosting bill for TPN’s servers and bandwidth and unfortunately I don’t have the funds to cover it this month. So I have set up a special fund raising exercise via ChipIn which will run for this week. Out of TPN’s hundreds of thousands of listeners, I’m hoping a few hundred will be able to chip in $10 to help us stay on the air. Please click on the widget below if you’re willing to help out.

I talked about:

Free Will

Why Christianity Is Dangerous

Why Capitalism Is Broken

The Israel - Palestine Conflict

You can watch the whole thing below or download it in FLV format.

Sesame Workshop, the US non-profit organisation that produces Sesame Street, is cutting 20% of its workforce because of the recession.

Read more on The Age.

On today’s show I just have another little heart-to-heart chat with anyone out there who is still listening. Among other things, I talk about:

The State of TPN’s finances

The threat of marketing spam on Twitter

Obama’s plan for Cuba

Sean Penn’s interviews with Chavez and Raul Castro

Obama’s encourage of stem cell research

Some talk about my book Debunking Christianity For Dummies and why it’s important to debate Christians in public

My review of CS Lewis’ book ‘Mere Christianity‘

WATCHMEN MOVIE REVIEW PART 1

WATCHMEN MOVIE REVIEW PART 2

If you read comics at all, you’re probably know who Ben Templesmith is already. If you don’t read comics - then why not?

Anyway, Templesmith is an Australian-born comic book artist / writer who now lives and works in the USA where is perhaps best known for his work on 30 DAYS OF NIGHT (which he co-created and which was subsequently turned into a hit Hollywood film), WORMWOOD, HELLSPAWN and FELL (which is authored by Warren Ellis, perhaps the best known comic book writer working today).

Ben has a new book THE PRESIDENTS OF THE UNITED STATES which just came out, as well as a new comic GROOM LAKE and a one-off DOCTOR WHO.

I chatted with him recently about how you become a world-famous comic book artist and what motivates his art.

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So on the weekend I set my kids a project to give me a 5 minute presentation on the scientific method before they could turn the XBOX on. They knew nothing about it before they started. So I told them to Google it and to specifically look for sites that explained it in kid-friendly terms (bonus lesson contained within - how to create good search terms in Google). I told them to answer four questions in their presentation:

1. What is it?
2. Why is it important?
3. What is the process?
4. Who invented it and when? (trick question but worth asking so they get some perspective on the history)

They came out after about 30 minutes and presented what they had. It was about one minute long. They basically just wrote down a one line answer to each question which they had copied and pasted from different sites. When I did the Q&A they failed. So I sent them back to expand on it a bit. This process went on about 3 or 4 times until they were finally able to present on it credibly for 5 minutes including a Q&A.

Later that day I re-inforced their understanding and ability to communicate it in the pool when we played “science swim”. This is a variation on a game I often play with them in the pool, the other variants being “spell swim” and “maths swim”. The basic idea is that I ask them both a question. In this case “What’s the first step in the scientific method?”. The first person to answer it correctly gets a pass. The one who either gets it wrong or is too slow, has to swim two laps (bonus lesson contained within - improves their swimming ability).

I’ve kept it up over the last couple of days while walking them to school, asking them to explain, in their own words, why the scientific method is the best way to determine fact from fiction. They are getting pretty good at it. I’ll keep this up for the next few weeks until it’s drilled into them. Then we’ll start on the theory of evolution.

Green Cross Australia is a new national NGO that works on the frontline of climate change: the human dimension. We anticipate and resolve conflicts over natural resources that put our environment at risk, and we foster sustainable partnerships between business, government and the community. We prepare communities for environmental impacts in Australia and overseas. This ranges from the impact of fires, floods and environmental disasters on Australian cities to the mass displacement of populations due to rising sea levels.

Pretty topical, with the floods in QLD and the fires in VIC. Mara talks about her background (which is an interesting story) and the vision of Green Cross.

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Livewire is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Starlight Children’s Foundation and is supported by funding from the Australian Government under the Clever Networks Program and in-kind contributions from Starlight and Livewire partners.

Together we are working towards keeping children & young people living with illness or disability connected

It’s estimated there are over 400,000 children and young people aged 10-21 years old coping with the impact of living with a serious illness, a chronic condition or a disability in Australia.

While I think a social networking community for young people with serious illnesses is a good thing, I am concerned that this site has cost $14.7 million to set up, with half of that money coming from the Federal Government. I asked Omar and Cinnamon where the money went.

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Anaxagoras is the first recorded atheist; has been described as the first scientist; and was the first philosopher to take up at his abode at Athens. He was the father of the idea of atoms and the teacher of Pericles. Around 450BCE he wrote his treatise “On Nature” which declared (among other things but we don’t know much of it, as it’s been lost to history) that the sun was a red-hot stone (an idea borrowed from the ideas of Anaximenes) and that the moon was made of earth and derives it’s light from the sun. He was accused of being an atheist, sentenced to death, but seems to have escaped (probably with the help of Pericles) and been exiled from Athens.

As we atheists need something to celebrate on December 25th, I’m proposing that we remember the bravery, insight and diligence of the first recorded atheist in history by celebrating ANAXAGORAS DAY.

This year on December 25th I will be sending out Anaxagoras cards to friends and family, decorating my home with pictures remembering the story of Anaxagoras and composing hymns to the life of Anaxagoras. I hope you will join me.

Okay… so I stole that line off of Al Pacino and Oliver Stone, but it’s been in my head tonight, so I’m claiming it.

Life is a lot about timing.

When you meet someone special, if it’s a month too soon, or a month too late, it doesn’t work out.

If you start a business, and you’re a year too soon or a year too late, it can make all the difference.

I don’t know how you know when the timing is right. Maybe people smarter than me know. Or maybe we don’t ever know. Maybe it’s just chance, or the holographic universe frakking with us. Maybe things are either meant to be or not. Maybe it’s all a cosmic joke.

All I know is that timing is a magic ingredient that either makes it work… or not.

I’ve been very lucky in my life. I’ve had good and bad timing with a few things. I started working at an ISP in 1996. That was good timing. I started working at Microsoft in 1998. That was bad timing - the share price that had climbed for 12 years climbed for another two years - then plummeted. I started podcasting in Nov 2004 - that was good timing, too. Maybe sooner than the market was ready for it, but early enough to get an opportunity to study the market from the outset and build a bit of a brand in an industry from the ground floor.

“In any fight, it’s the guy who’s willing to die who’s going to win that inch.”

In my personal life, too, I’ve had good and bad timing. I’ve met people exactly when I needed to and I’ve met people when it was too soon or too late, either in my life or theirs. You can’t predict that. And you can’t do much about it when it happens. It’s just timing.

In retrospect though, perhaps when I thought the timing was bad, it was actually right. The person/business/job that I thought would have been perfect for me, actually wouldn’t have been.

I know people will say “you make your own luck” but that’s VERY unscientific. It might sell self-help seminars, but it doesn’t stand up to examination. There is no free will. There is only physics. Or the hologram making it LOOK like there is physics. Either way, we ain’t in control.

Perhaps it’s like poker. Sometimes you get the right cards in the right hand and if you know what to do with them, it works out profitably. But if you get the right cards in the wrong hand… well, you can lose your wallet.

I don’t know. Too deep for this time of night. I just thought I had to get it out there. Timing. Inches.

Craig Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab’s Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: “If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram.”

Harry Truman - Among other things, authorized the only use of nuclear weapons on a civilian population in history

John Kennedy - Among other things, authorized the attempted invasion of Cuba, nearly brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, was sleeping with Marilyn Monroe, etc.

Lyndon Johnson - Among other things, escalated the Vietnam war. Possibly implicated in the Kennedy assassination.

Jimmy Carter - Actually, a pretty good guy, defender of human rights.

Bill Clinton - Bombed and starved the people of Iraq, decided the best way to spend his days in the White House was to get blowjobs and stick cigars up an intern’s vag.

So… will Obama be another Jimmy Carter? Or… one of the others?

Anyway, Jed joins me on the show today to talk about our hopes and concerns for the Obama administration.

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Palestinian casualties - 1,400 dead including more than 400 children and 100 women. Israeli casualties - 12 Israeli soldiers and 3 civilians.

My guest on this show is Antony Loewenstein, Sydney-based journalist, author and blogger.

Read more:

David Rose article in Vanity Fair

Henry Siegman, director of the US Middle East Project in New York, former national director of the American Jewish Congress and of the Synagogue Council of America, article “Israel’s Lies”

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A note about this show:

With the help of my two assistants Tim Grainger and Jonathan Hewlett, we ran a LIVE TWITSTREAM of the interview through the gdayworld twitter account. We asked people to submit questions via Twitter during the interview and I fed those back to Antony during our call. It was my first attempt at podcast twinterviewing and the results were interesting.

Thanks to Darryl King from iReckon for seeding the filthy idea into my head over coffee a few days ago.

Who needs a podcast? Anyone in:

- Marketing
- PR
- HR
- Training
- Internal Comms

Especially in this time of financial tightening, podcasting is a tool more companies should be using. It’s a very cost-effective way to reach the key members of your audience on a weekly basis. And, of course, if you’re going to produce social media, you should work with someone who has actually some experience producing media for large audiences and isn’t just all talk.

There are a few different kinds of podcasts my clients tend to be using at the moment:

1. The External “Transparency” podcast - this kind of podcast aims to make a client more accessible to their clients. It can be either video or audio and involves me doing interviews with people inside the company about what they (and their division) actually do. This typically suits a very large org that wants to soften or humanise it’s image. The strategy is that their clients/customers will subscribe to the podcast to get a better understanding of what each of the divisions is working on and how best to engage with them.

2. The External “Value-Add” podcast - this kind of podcast usually has content completely unrelated to the actual services and products of the org, but which is designed to be valuable to the target audience. Typically it might involve interviews with world leaders in the same field. Each podcast is wrapped with an audio or video header and footer, “This podcast is brought to you by….”, to keep the client’s message and brand in front of their audience every week.

3. The Internal Management podcast - this podcast involves video or audio interviews with members of the management team (CEO, CFO, COO, HR Director, etc) on a regular basis to go out to the employees via their intranet. It allows the senior leadership of an org to efficaciously communicate business updates with their teams around the country and world on a weekly basis and in a personable manner. It might also involved interviews with employees throughout the business. Who are they? What do they do? What is their focus? This is a great tool for encouraging cross-collaboration in large orgs.

4. The External Product/Service podcast - this podcast has to be handled cleverly. Most people aren’t going to subscribe to a podcast that’s just a marketing vehicle UNLESS it’s actually cool and informative or very funny. Often the best way to handle this kind of podcast is to get your customers involved. Get THEM talking about or demonstrating your products and services. Make it about THEM, not about you.

Demographics: There’s a common misconception that podcast audiences are still only the young tech savvy folks. While this was probably true back in 2004/5, it certainly isn’t any longer. The success of Apple’s iPods and iPhones, combined with the marketing of podcasts by mainstream media like the ABC, has actually skewed the demographic to a 40+ audience (according to the surveys I run on TPN’s audience each year).

So, here’s how you can help - if you know of anyone who might be interested in using my services, make sure you point them in my direction. In addition, if you email me the names, email addresses and telephone numbers of the people in your company that fulfill the above roles, I’ll contact them directly and give them the pitch (ideally using you as a point of introduction but, if you’re not comfortable with that, I’ll leave your name out of it).

Here are my contact details to make it easy:

Cameron Reilly
CEO, The Podcast Network
tel: +61 400455334
email: cameron@thepodcastnetwork.com

Thanks for your support!

The brave experiment is this:

With the help of my two filthy assistants (sorry Tim and Jonathan, I’ve been reading Transmetropolitan too much tonight), I’m going to be doing a LIVE TWITSTREAM of the interview. You can follow it on the gdayworld twitter account.

If you want to ask questions of Antony during the interview, or debate one of his points, then send a reply to gdayworld and we’ll feed it into the interview!

I’m going to try to take twinterviewing to a new level.

Thanks to Darryl King from iReckon for seeding the filthy idea into my head today over coffee.

Click here for the TPN Pledge.

(Thanks to Bob Seal for the toon!)

This morning I read this passage about the suggested return of Jews to Palestine which I suspect puts the Palestinian view into some perspective:

The injunction, under Article 6 of the Mandate, that the Administration “shall encourage in co-operation with the Jewish Agency close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes” in Palestine, sounded with a curious difference in different ears. To the world at large it seemed a reasonable satisfaction by the bestowal of surplus, unused and unwanted areas. To the Zionist, who had hoped that with the prosperity of British rule his rapidly augmented population would need every possible acre of land in the country, it was the obvious initial minimum of concession unwarrantably delayed by the Government. The thinking Arabs regarded Article 6 as Englishmen would regard instructions from a German conqueror for the settlement and development of the Duchy of Cornwall, of our Downs, commons and golf-courses, not by Germans, but by Italians “returning” as Roman legionaries. For such loss of national and political future repeated assurances of strict and scrupulous maintenance of religious rights and sites (assumed under British rule everywhere) were about as satisfactory compensations for the inviolable conservation of the Court of Arches and of Westminster Abbey. Article 6 has not yet been “implemented”, owing to the lack of available State property, but it still stands in the Mandate, and is still being vigorously pressed by Zionists.

Ever wondered how to exorcise a demon? There’s a handy publication that guides the uninitiated, with subheadings such as “doing the actual deliverance”, “identifying additional demons” and “what to do with obstinate demons”.

Time to have mercy on the broken of mind and spirit - Opinion - smh.com.au

I’ve used this as my expectation of people ever since I first saw the film 20 years ago. People will do what their character demands.

impossibible:

A description of statements in religious books which are impossible.

eg “Jesus rising from the dead is impossibible.”

Urban Dictionary: impossibible

Rapper Greydon Square joins me again on the show to talk about his new album The CPT Theorem.

If you haven’t heard of 27 year-old Greydon before (or heard my first interview with him), his story is interesting: he grew up (as Eddie Collins) in a Group Home in Compton, California, got involved with a gang at a young age, was busted for a crime, and given the choice of prison or joining the US Army. He chose the latter and ended up in the US Army in 2001 and Iraq in 2004. During this time he was a committed Christian who studied the Bible. The more he studied the Bible the more questions he had about his religion which lead to his becoming an atheist, with many of the lyrics of his rap songs focus on atheism and the skeptic inquiry. He also is completing a physics major. His fans include Richard Dawkins, Penn Jillette… and yours truly.

This time, instead of focusing on his atheism, I wanted to talk to Greydon about how he writes his music. He’s a one man band - producer, composer, lyricist, performer, businessman. And, as you’ll here on the tracks I’ve laid into the interview, his shit is excellent.

You can buy his albums through iTunes or from the link on his MySpace.

It’s actually a quote attributed to former Israeli PM Ariel Sharon from 2001.

The quote (which is allegedly from a conversation between Sharon and his Foreign Minister, as quoted by Israeli radio) reads:

I want to tell you something very clear, don’t worry about American pressure on Israel, we, the Jewish people control America, and the Americans know it.

(I found the link on the Beyond The Fringe blog).

Why would Sharon say that? How does it all work? I have no theories. But I find it an interesting quote.

A boast by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that he persuaded President Bush to reverse a U.S. vote on a Gaza cease-fire at the United Nations is “just 100% totally completely not true,” the State Department declared Tuesday.

(from the LA Times - are they still running?)

So - one of them is lying.

You have to wonder - what incentive would Olmert have to lie about such a thing? To make it sound like he has pull with an out-going US President? What’s the point of that? Especially when his phone call didn’t stop the vote passing.

But if you ask yourself what incentive the USA would have for lying - that’s much easier to comprehend. They don’t want it to seem like the US President takes orders from Israel.

The LA Times story also says that diplomats from around the world were sure the vote was going to be unanimous minutes before it happened, so it seems obvious that the US State Dept is lying through their teeth.

What do you think?

(Update: Beyond The Fringe has a great and detailed analysis here.)

In a speech late on Monday, (Ehud) Olmert (Prime Minister of Israel) said Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, was left “pretty shamed” at the vote and had to abstain on a resolution she had helped arrange.

(Al Jazeera - US denies Olmert influenced UN vote)

Olmert goes on to claim he rang Bush, who was pulled off stage to take the call, just minutes before the UNSC vote which insisted a halt to the Gaza offensive. Olmert told Bush that the US must abstain from the vote - and they did. Fourteen of the other fifteen members of the UNSC supported the resolution. Israel has, of course, totally ignored it. Wouldn’t you love to hear a copy of that phone call?

Let’s remember once again that the UN created Israel in the first place. Israel has been a member since 1949 and, as such, is legally bound to abide by decisions of the UNSC. As it isn’t, Israel is, by definition, a rogue nation.

And I keep hearing people say “it’s complex”. I don’t think it is.

Israel is a member of the United Nations. It has been since 1949. In fact, it owes the United Nations for its very existence.

Article 2 (points 3 and 4) of the United Nations charter states:

# All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.
# All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.

If Israel has issues with The Palestinian National Authority or the PLO, it should take those grievances up with the UN and the let UN decide how to deal with them. Unilateral military actions on behalf of Israel are in direct conflict with the UN charter which they have sworn to uphold. If Israel continues to fail to abide by the UN charter, then it should be evicted from the UN and declared a rogue nation.

Sounds simple to me.

Nothing more to say!

HOWEVER - I always find myself at the grocery store having forgotten to pick a recipe for the night and so I don’t have the ingredients list.

Now that I have a shiny new iPhone I came up with this hack this morning.

1. Scan a few recipes from the book into my Mac.
2. Drag each image into Evernote (I have a folder in there called ‘recipes’).
3. Install Evernote iPhone app.

Now, when I’m at the grocery store, I just pull out my iPhone, open up Evernote, and I have everything I need!

I should point out that I started off this morning trying to take photos of the recipes straight into the iPhone but the resolution on the camera isn’t good enough to capture text. However, this Clarifi case from Griffin seems to come with a built-in lens that gives your iPhone a boost in camera resolution. I might try to find one of those today. It would save me the scanning step.