Bret Stephens at the WSJ writes a glowing “Ode To George W Bush” as the liberator of Iraq who gave them the golden calf of democracy. He neglects to mention that Iraq is an OCCUPIED TERRITORY with 115,000 U.S. troops still there at last count – one U.S. soldier for every 270 Iraqis. That’s the same kind of democracy that you get when Dillinger points a shotgun in a bank teller’s face and gives you the choice to open the vault… or not.

Dear Apple Australia,

I would like to complain about your product quality and customer support.

I’m an Apple convert. I worked at Microsoft for a long time and so my conversion to Apple was a bit like a religious conversion. I remember buying my first Apple product, an iPod, in 2004 just after I left Microsoft. I felt guilty even buying it, like I was doing something dirty. By the time I bought my first Mac in 2007, I owned a couple of iPods, and an iPod touch and my conversion was well and truly complete.

But the last couple of months have really tested my faith in Apple.

It started on Jan 2 this year when my barely-two-year-old Macbook Pro 17″ died on me. When I took it into the Apple store at Chermside (Brisbane), they told me that the logic board had died and would need a replacement – at the cost of $2500. I had evidence to show that it wasn’t the logic board, it was the Nvidia chip, but the Apple folks disagreed with my analysis. I left it with them for two weeks to examine it but all I heard back was “it’s the logic board”.

Unfortunately I had bought this Mac at a Myer Store in Melbourne and they hadn’t sold me on Applecare, so I was screwed. A two-year-old $4000 Macbook Pro, dead in the water. I wasn’t happy.

Anyway, as I’m an Apple convert, I ended up buying a brand new Macbook Pro 17″ towards the end of January. I bought it via Apple Finance and it cost me something like $5000 including Applecare. It’s tricked out with 8Gb RAM, a 500GB drive, the anti-glare screen, etc. And I love it.

UNTIL… about two weeks after I bought it, the logic board DIED. So, I took it into the Apple Store at Chermside. The “Genius” there confirmed that diagnosis and said they’d put a new logic board in – but it would take 3 – 5 days. Why? Because they didn’t carry any logic boards that fit my machine in stock and would have to order one in, which would take 3 days, then would take them another couple of days to swap them over. I explained to the Genius, whose name was Joel, that I was traveling overseas at the end of the week and I *really* needed may laptop to be fixed before I left. He said he’s try to get it done for me quickly, but this still means I’d have to live without my MBP for a few days – which means a few days of no productivity, a few days of not getting my work done. I edit video and audio on my Macbook and without it, I’m screwed. TOUGH SHIT.

When I told Joel about the problem I’d had with my old MBP, he suggested I bring it back in so he could look at it.

So about three days later, when the new logic board came in, I went all the way back to the Apple Store and Joel said if I could stick around an hour, he’d get one of the engineers out the back to put in the new logic board so I could take it with me on my trip that evening. Great.

He also looked at the OLD MBP and confirmed the logic board was FINE, it was the graphic chip – GRRRR. So he said he’d get it fixed for me also. That’s great but WHY DIDN’T THEY TELL ME THAT A MONTH AGO SO I DIDN’T HAVE TO SPEND $5000 ON A NEW MBP???

Anyway… I leave the old MBP with Joel and take the new one, with the new logic board, home with me. Later that night, just as I’m packing to go to Nicaragua for a week, I turn on my fixed, less-than-a-month-old MBP and discover:
1) it won’t sleep
2) it won’t shutdown
3) the left fan isn’t working
4) the microphone isn’t working
5) the right speaker isn’t working

As I was leaving the next morning, I couldn’t take it back to the Apple Store until after my 8-day trip. So I jumped on the Apple site to try to book a Genius appointment for my return. AHA! The Apple store only accepts booking for five days in advance. So it’s IMPOSSIBLE to book an appointment for 8 days in advance.

So I rang Applecare and explained to the guy on the phone my problem. He said that he too could only book an appointment five days and so “you’ll need to call back in a few days”. I explained I was going to be in the jungles of Nicaragua WITHOUT A PHONE OR INTERNET for the next week and I wouldn’t be able to call back. “Well.. I can’t help you”, he said.

I lost my temper then and said “listen, LEAVE A MESSAGE FOR THE APPLE STORE IN CHERMSIDE AND TELL THEM I’LL BE COMING IN AT 11AM ON SATURDAY FEB 6.” Jesus. What a moron this guy was.

Okay so… I go to Nicaragua, taking my half-working-less-than-a-month-old-$5000-Macbook-Pro with me. I come back, go straight to the Apple Store in Chermside again. This time I see a new “Genius” called Marc. Marc checks my new laptop and confirms – the logic board needs to be replaced – AGAIN.

Oh and guess what – they don’t have any of them in the store, so, yep, I’ll have to wait another three days for them to order a new logic board in. Then I’ll need to COME BACK to Chermside again, leave it with them while they fix it, then come back to pick it up. That will make five trips to the Apple Store in two weeks to get a less-than-a-month-old Macbook Pro working like it should.

I tell Marc I’m not happy about all this and I want to speak with the manager. So that’s when I meet JARROD.

Jarrod’s a scruffy looking guy, probably about 25 or 26. I explain to Jarrod my problem. I started by asking why they don’t have replacement logic boards in stock and he replied “well we only carry the older ones, because the new ones don’t fail”. Well that hasn’t been MY experience,

I went on to tell Jarrod: “I’m not happy. I paid $5000 for a top of the line Macbook and it’s still not working and I don’t want to keep coming back here.” He said they’d fix it. I said “Well I know you will, but that’s not the point. I’m not happy about having to keep coming back here. What are you going to do to make me happy?”, I asked.

Jarrod said they’d make me happy by fixing my laptop. I explained “That’s not going to make me happy. That’s the very LEAST you’re can do. That’s what you should have done THE FIRST TIME. I want you to make me happy.”

Jarrod asked what that would take and I told him I didn’t know. “Be creative,” I told him. But Jarrod didn’t want to be creative. All Jarrod could offer was to fix my Macbook. Again.

When I told him that’s fixing my Macbook isn’t really good enough, that’s just the basic level of what they SHOULD do, he replied “I think you’ll find our service is better than you’d get anywhere else.”

OH REALLY, JARROD?

I think if I bought a top-of-the-line laptop from Dell or HP and it failed TWICE IN THE FIRST MONTH, they would at least send a courier to pick it up from my office and then deliver a new one or a fixed one back to me. I wouldn’t have to visit their office FIVE TIMES IN A MONTH.

But Jarrod didn’t want to help. Jarrod didn’t want to make me happy. Jarrod let me leave the store MAJORLY pissed off that I’ll have to come back TWICE again in the next week just to get this problem resolved.

And all the while I was having this conversation with Jarrod, he was SMIRKING, like this was all some kind of big joke. I was NOT laughing. This is wasting my TIME and my ENERGY. And it means downtime, which costs me MONEY. And Jarrod seemed to think this was some huge joke.

One good note (kind of) – the old Macbook Pro that I took in on Jan 2? Fixed. It was the graphics chip after all. So I didn’t really need to buy the new one anyway.

As someone who extols the virtues of Apple all the time to friends and family and who has converted a few people to the Apple world, I have to say – while I love the products and the company, the Australian operation leaves a LOT to be desired. The quality control and customer support that I’ve experienced in the last couple of months has been terrible. Except for Joel. Joel’s a keeper. I think I might hire him.

Anyway Apple, you haven’t lost me as a customer – yet. I can’t go back to Windows. I guess I’ll wait to see what Google’s Chrome OS looks like.

I just thought you’d like feedback from a VERY unhappy customer. For what it’s worth.

Sincerely,
Cameron Reilly
twitter.com/cameronreilly
0400455334

It’s been fascinating to me to note the difference between the way the media has been treating the two Americans who have lashed out at their government in the last month – John Patrick Bedell, who shot a couple of Pentagons guards, and Joe Stack, who flew a plane into an IRS building in Austin – and they way the media treats civilian deaths at the hands of US and NATO troops in Afghanistan. The media, completely unable to even explore whether or not men like Bedell and Stack might have had genuine grievances, have immediately closed ranks to write both men off as being crazy. There’s no investigative reporting, no genuine inquiry into what would make these US citizens commit acts of suicide to make a point about the actions of the US government. Both men have just been tarred and brushed. The media grabs quotes from family and friends that make it sound like each man was a loony and then they editorialise with descriptions to back that up.

Some examples:

On Bedell:

The Washington Post just puts it in the headline “Pentagon shooter’s spiral from early promise to madness”.

The Boston Globe, in its first paragraph, says Bedell “crisscrossed the country in a frenetic and sometimes doped-up state”.

The Mirror in the UK claims he was a “conspiracy theorist”.

The Associated Press claims Bedell “a history of mental illness”.

CBS News leads with the headline that Bedell was a “nut”.

On Stack:

The Christian Science Monitor refers to Stack’s online writing as a “lengthy, disjointed screed”.

USA Today says his writing “drips with cynicism, paranoia and narcissism.”

Of course, the 535 Afghani civilians who were murdered by US & NATO bombs in 2009, are just “collateral damage” or “civilian casualties”. When one out of every three people killed by US bombs in Afghanistan is a civilian, that’s just unfortunate. Obama is actually increasing the use of drones, not decreasing them. The media makes no psychological analysis about the people who are sending in drones that kill THOUSANDS of innocent civilians, men, woman and children. They don’t ask whether or not those people, the politicians or the soldiers, are paranoid or suffering from a mental illness. The issue isn’t even broached.

The lesson? When “we” kill civilians, it’s justifiable. But when someone, even one of our own, attacks us, then they suffer from a mental illness.

According to CatholicCulture.org:

Father Jim Denham, a priest of the Diocese of Maitland-Newcastle, will be sentenced next month on 29 counts of child sexual abuse. Twenty-seven of the 40 men who allege abuse by the priest are seeking a settlement with the diocese.

Sentencing for this reprobate has apparently been dragging on since JUNE 2009. I wonder what shady deals the Catholics are trying to pull in the background so they can save a few more bucks?

Keep in mind always that these incidents are NOT just “a few bad apples” – sexual abuse was systematically hidden and protected by Catholic leadership from the Popes on down for decades. Why haven’t we had a Royal Commission into Catholic sexual abuse in this country yet, like they did in Ireland? Especially as we know that many Irish priests were moved out there when they got themselves into trouble?

I’d like to take a short break from talking about geopolitics and organized religion to pimp a new business I’m launching today: Instyle Pergolas!

Instyle Pergolas & Gazebos is a family owned company that’s been running for many years in SA and we’re now expanding the operation to QLD, NSW & VIC. We provide the Australian market with high quality outdoor lifestyle products such as Pergolas, Carports, Decking, Gazebos, and Outdoor Features.

What do I know about building gazebos? Not much. This is another business I’m involved in with my business partner Jason Nelson (the other business being Perdomo Cigars). Jason’s the guy with the building experience – I’m just the marketing guy. We’re going to be marketing our services mostly online which is where I lay down my phat skllz.

After spending most of the last five years building an online media business with no discernible source of revenue and then spending the last year also doing digital strategy for a range of clients, it’s exciting to be working on digital strategy for some fairly traditional businesses that a) have the potential to make some money and b) I have a stake in. It’s also fun to have a business partner again. Being an entrepreneur can be pretty lonely at times. Even though you might have people you can talk to about direction and strategy, at the end of the day it’s all up to you to make things happen. Having someone with a complimentary skill set and experience that you can share the load with, means you don’t need to be everything to everyone all of the time.

So if you are looking for add a pergola, carport, decking, gazebo or other outdoor feature to your house, give us a call! And if you want to relax with a premium cigar, go Perdomo!

One of my favourite “new atheists” is Angie Jackson aka “Angie The Anti-Theist”. At only 27, she’s been blogging, tweeting & YouTubing up a storm for the last two years since she googled her grandmother and discovered she had spent her whole life growing up in an extreme Christian cult. Now she’s fighting again faith in all its forms.

Al Jazeera reports that the last surviving member of the Bo tribe from India has died. The 65,000 year old people – who were 5,000 strong when the British invaded that Andaman Islands in 1858 – are no more. Would love to know how people from the UK feel about this. And what you’re going to do about it.

I got back today from a trip to Bangkok for a couple of days. The purpose of the trip was to pay a site visit to Club Perdomo Bangkok, a gentleman’s club built around Perdomo cigars. I’ve recently taken on Perdomo Cigars Australia as a new digital strategy client and, as someone who loves a cigar every now and then and who has come to appreciate the Perdomo brand over the last year, it was a very exciting trip. If you’re interested in such things, you can read about it on the Perdomo blog.

Insightful as always, award-winning Australian journalist John Pilger has written his assessment of what’s happening in Haiti. Here’s an excerpt:

The theft of Haiti has been swift and crude. On 22 January, the United States secured “formal approval” from the United Nations to take over all air and sea ports in Haiti, and to “secure” roads. No Haitian signed the agreement, which has no basis in law. Power rules in an American naval blockade and the arrival of 13,000 marines, special forces, spooks and mercenaries, none with humanitarian relief training.

When I was last in Haiti, I watched very young girls stooped in front of whirring, hissing, binding machines at the Port-au-Prince Superior Baseball Plant. Many had swollen eyes and lacerated arms. I produced a camera and was thrown out. Haiti is where America makes the equipment for its hallowed national game, for next to nothing. Haiti is where Walt Disney contractors make Mickey Mouse pjamas, for next to nothing. The US controls Haiti’s sugar, bauxite and sisal. Rice-growing was replaced by imported American rice, driving people into the cities and towns and jerry-built housing. Years after year, Haiti was invaded by US marines, infamous for atrocities that have been their specialty from the Philippines to Afghanistan.

Not for tourists is the US building its fifth biggest embassy in Port-au-Prince. Oil was found in Haiti’s waters decades ago and the US has kept it in reserve until the Middle East begins to run dry. More urgently, an occupied Haiti has a strategic importance in Washington’s “rollback” plans for Latin America. The goal is the overthrow of the popular democracies in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, control of Venezuela’s abundant oil reserves and sabotage of the growing regional cooperation that has given millions their first taste of an economic and social justice long denied by US-sponsored regimes.

Today I’m chatting about Haiti. To understand why many people are concerned about the USA sending thousands of marines into Haiti after the recent earthquake, you have to understand the history between these two countries. Of course, you won’t hear much of this in the mainstream media, as they tend to have amnesia. However a little research shows that America has had its corporate paws all over Haiti for a century and the Haitian people have suffered as a result.

My first No Illusions podcast for 2010! Today I’m talking about the Australian Government’s “clean feed” with three guys who know a lot more about it than I do: Stephen Collins (@trib), Peter Black (@peterblackQUT) and Jim Stewart (@jimboot). This episode was recorded with a live studio audience. Well, okay, they weren’t in a studio, they were on my uStream channel, but I’ve always wanted to say that.

So instead of Christmas, we celebrated the life of Anaxagoras, history’s first recorded scientist and atheist. And instead of giving my kids presents, we gave them power vouchers. Chrissy and I made up our own books of vouchers for the kids. They give the kids some extra power – for example, the ones I made up say things such as:

“This voucher entitles the bearer to spend an hour at the park alone with Dad.”

“This voucher entitles the bearer to get out of doing the dishes when it’s his turn.”

“This voucher entitles the bearer to a trip to Laserforce.”

They basically let my kids have a little bit of additional power than they normally would.

The vouchers Chrissy made up for the kids are similar, but contain special ones that let the kids go busking with her but keep all of the proceeds.

I was pretty happy with this approach and I think the kids were excited as well. The last thing they needed was more stuff they would have thrown in the corner after a few days and forgotten all about. And it’s better for the environment. And it forces me to spend more quality time with my kids. It’s a win all round, I think.

Tech disasters are like being attacked by a Great White – you never see the danger coming until it’s too late.

Yesterday morning I shut the lid on my two-year old Macbook Pro 17″ to take a shower. Fifteen minutes later, when I opened up the screen again, nothing happened. I tried re-booting it, taking the battery out, etc, but it still wouldn’t boot.

So I dropped it into the Apple Store at Chermside. They called me today to inform me that the logic board is dead and that it will cost $2100 to replace it. An entirely new Macbook Pro only costs about $3500.

Luckily everything was backed up, but my only other machine is a 3 year-old Vista desktop, so it’s not compatible, even in this day of “cloud computing”. Chrissy is also letting me borrow her baby Macbook for urgent Mac-related stuff. But I really need to replace my Macbook Pro asap.

So I’m in the market for a new Macbook. My last one was kindly sponsored by a Canadian company in return for advertising for a year on this podcast. I’m hoping to find someone else willing to do a similar deal. If you’re interested, please email me.

In case you missed the announcement, I recently launched a new TPN podcast: The Peter Ellyard Show. Peter has been a good friend and regular guest on this show for several years. We worked together on his latest book, Designing 2050: Pathways To Sustainable Prosperity On Spaceship Earth. Peter has a massive amount of experience in environmental issues and as a futurist, so I decided he needed his own show. We’ve already got two episodes out, the most recent being an interview with WeForest’s Bill Liao, while he was at COP15. I hope you’ll check out the show.

We just got back from the first Brisbane meetup around #nocleanfeed. It was a pretty huge turnout, I’d guess 100 people. Well done to @nicholasperkins and everyone else involved in pulling it together.

I gave a short talk, mostly trying to convey the idea that this isn’t a campaign that we will win by trying to be RIGHT. This isn’t about FACTS. This is a propaganda war about ideology, the ideology of the Christian Right, a group that Conroy, Rudd, Abbott and Fielding are all card-carrying members of. And you can’t fight a propaganda war by trying to be RIGHT. The only way to fight a propaganda war is to counter it with your own propaganda and by knowing how propaganda campaigns actually work. There’s no use taking a knife to a gun fight.

As a long-time student of people like Chomsky and Pilger, I have some understanding about how modern propaganda works. I quote tonight from 20th century French philosopher and Christian theologian (not often you’ll catch me using a Christian theologian to make a positive point) Jacques Ellul who explained that modern propaganda isn’t telling lies, it’s about telling half truths, limited truths and truths out of context. That’s what Conroy et al are master of. They don’t lie when they talk about the feed, they just limit their use of the truth.

So we need to fight a propaganda war. Fortunately, we are all very-savvy little new media / social media types, so this shouldn’t be too hard to do, as long as know what kind of fight we’re getting into.

The one idea that I didn’t have time to get across tonight was that I don’t think we can win this if we just focus on the mandatory filter. It’s too thorny an issue and too easy for Conroy to deflect criticism . I believe we need to make this a battle against the ALP. I believe we need to focus on weakening their credibility in the upcoming election by getting in their faces on a range of issue where they have either under-performed, such as the environment, indigenous welfare, immigration, etc, or where they have just flat-out turned out to be as bad or worse than Howard (the internet filter, bailing out the banks, failing to rein in corporate executive salaries, etc).

We need a campaign that attacks the ALP’s credibility and performance across the board. We need put pressure on then across multiple fronts, not just on the filter. It’s pretty clear that the mainstream media will give them an easy ride in the upcoming election. So it’ll be up to social media to put the heat on them.

Rangan Srikhanta is the Executive Director, One Laptop per Child Australia. On this show he chats with me about their efforts to get laptops into the hands of kids living in remote regions of Australia. The idea to speak with OLPC came out of a recent Geeks Who Care meeting we had in Brisbane. OLPC have a terrific program running called the “Window of Opportunity Initiative” which enables all of us to contribute to getting these wonderful devices out where they are needed.

I was reading more of Clive Splash’s writing over the last few days and it struck me why I’m always getting into arguments with people about how we’re handling climate change. The problem, I think, stems from the fact that, to me, our approach to tackling climate change is about ETHICS. And the people I get into arguments with, aren’t talking about ETHICS – they are talking about ECONOMICS. And while ECONOMICS is a subset of ETHICS, the reverse is not true.

Ethics examines morality, good and bad, right and wrong, justice, etc. And economics has to be part of ethics. We need to consider how ethical the system of economics in our country is – does everyone have equal opportunity, enough money to afford a reasonable standard of living, access to health care, education, etc.

Economics, on the other hand, doesn’t care anything about ethics. Economics just thinks about the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. How ethical a particular system of economics is, is not the concern of the study of economics.

Unfortunately, I can’t find an ethics portfolio in the Federal government. There is a Treasurer, who worries about the economy, but nowhere to be found is a Minister for Ethics. I think we should have one. The Ministry of Ethics would take the lead on issues such as our treatment of our indigenous population, the handling of boat people, whether or not we should have equal rights for LGBT, and how we handle climate change.

And I think, in future, when I’m having debates with people over climate change, I’ll make sure I clarify at the outset whether or not we’re having a discussion about ethics or economics.

Image credit:

It was announced today that Dr Clive Splash has resigned from the CSIRO because the organisation was censoring his attempts to criticize Cap and Trade schemes. As I’m meeting Dr Peter Ellyard tonight to discuss the current ETS situation, I reviewed some of the materials on Dr Splash’s site. Here’s a short excerpt of a piece he wrote for Adbusters in 2008 (the bold parts are mine):

Well, we’ve been here before. Major international political attention was first paid to climate change in 1988. At a meeting in Toronto, governments agreed to 20 percent cuts in CO2 emissions by 2005. The same year, the Hamburg World Congress recommended 30 percent cuts by 2000 and 50 percent by 2015 (with some dissenters). However, instead of government action, we only saw the IPCC established to “study” the issue further. A decade later, Kyoto’s few percent emissions cuts for developed economies were still seeking ratification. Businesses in the US spent $100 million fighting the Kyoto Protocol, claiming it would hurt the economy. The highest per capita polluters, the US and Australia, withdrew and remained outsiders in the international consensus of concern. Underlying this government backtracking, delay and timid target-setting is economic power politics.

And here we are, 21 years later, with the Rudd government still pussy-footing around, trying to appease the fossil fuel industry, and the new “leadership” (and I use that word with derision) of the Liberal Party sticking to their 1988 rhetoric.

I’m sick of it. We need a people’s revolution.

I’m reading the Australian government’s CPRS white paper tonight and there are some issues that I don’t understand.

In the Foreword, the paper says:

“… we have more to lose than any other developed nation if the world fails to reduce the carbon pollution that causes climate change.”

Wow, we better take it seriously then.

A couple of pages down, it goes on to say:

“By 2020, we have committed to reduce Australia’s carbon pollution by up to 15 per cent below 2000 levels in the context of a global agreement where major economies agree to substantially restrain carbon pollution and advanced economies take on reductions comparable to Australia.”

“Where major economies agree?” And what if they DON’T agree? We will do nothing? I thought this was serious?!

In debates on Twitter, people have tried to explain to me that it’s about balancing our long-term priorities (eg staying alive) with our short-term priorities (eg keeping people in jobs that are threatening our ability to stay alive).

I don’t see why we should be protecting the jobs of people when those jobs are threatening our ability to LIVE. That’s like protecting the jobs of the terrorists because, well, they have families too.

Mining in Australia employs about 129,000 people. That’s about 1.3% of the work force.  If we shut down mining and pensioned them all off with $100k a year, that’s about $10 billion a year, which, coincidentally, is about the same about of money the government has set aside for financial assistance to businesses and households anyway. So it’s not inconceivable to just shut it all down today.

Anyway, that’s not my point. My point is that you can’t justify continuing to do something that’s just WRONG by saying “yes but it makes money”. For example, slavery is profitable. But we don’t do that anymore (officially, anyway). We also don’t invade poor countries and kill all of their indigenous population and steal their assets (officially, anyway). Why not? Because it’s WRONG. And it’s NOT justified by saying “but we need to stay competitive”. It’s not dissimilar to countries developing nuclear weapons with the rationale that “they have them so we have to have them too”. I call BULLSHIT on that argument.

I would much rather see the leaders of our country stand up for doing what is RIGHT regardless of whether nor not other countries are willing to take that step. We should be LEADERS, not bureaucrats.

As for the mining companies – I don’t feel the need to protect their asses, either. They’ve had plenty of warning that what they were doing was unsustainable. And how much of their BILLIONS of profits did they spend on coming up with alternatives over the last 20 years? Pretty much ZERO. Did their investors force them at their AGMs to change their practices? No, they didn’t. So screw the mining companies AND their investors. Why should we protect the interests of companies that have been deliberately destroying the planet in the name of profit for decades?

Hell, even Bob Hawke understands.

On holidays in Melbourne, having an awesome time showing @fddlgrl all of my favourite haunts. Just have one quick thought to share with you.

We need to stop referring to the “Clinton” administration, the “Bush” administration and the “Obama” administration. We need to start referring to the last 16 years collectively as the “Goldman Sachs” administration.

I was prompted to think of this while reading this post on Crooks and Liars about the TARP bailout. The suggestion is that the bailout isn’t Obama’s fault, because Bush was still in power when it happened. They seem to be forgetting that the US Senate said NO to the original bailout vote, and it wasn’t until Obama took time out of his election campaign to “work Capitol Hill” that the bailout finally passed. I remember him getting the credit for it at the time. So he doesn’t get a pass on that shit.

The point, though, is that the US Treasury, under Clinton, Bush and Obama, has continued to be run by ex-Goldman Sachs executives. So let’s not fool ourselves about who is in power. Goldman were the single largest private investor in Obama’s election campaign. And now they are they have managed to wipe out their competition. As they say here, “Like on the TV program SURVIVOR – the last survivor standing is Goldman Sachs – who receives the grand prize. But in this case it is not just the fame and one million dollar prize. It is infamy with trillions of dollars in rewards.”

The banksters seem to be running things, at least in the USA. A friend of mine who works in finance told me recently how the big four banks in Australia have emerged from the GFC even more arrogant than ever. They managed to buy out most of their competition and now they have an even stronger lock on the marketplace, deciding who gets finance and at what usurious rates. Which is just another reason for all of your to join me on the “Million Bank March” campaign. It’s the only way I can see that we can start to reign them in.

Oh come ON. This CRU hack story is the biggest beat-up I’ve heard in a long time. Of the 4000 documents and emails they hackers got their hands on, the best dirt people can find is a request to delete some non-specified emails and some discussion about how to present the data in the best way to make it easy for non-scientists to understand the trend? That’s a pretty lame smoking gun, especially when the other side have been caught red-handed literally making shit up.

From the excerpts I’ve read, it just sounds like a bunch of scientists trying to win an infowar against a much more powerful and fully-financed opposition. We might wish they could hold to a higher standard of ethics and transparency, but these folks are in the bunker. Their credibility and intelligence is being challenged on a daily basis. They are fighting for the survival of their species. It’s only natural for them to be a little cautious about what how the data gets presented and to fight against the people who are trying to manipulate the data for nefarious purposes.

But there’s *nothing* I’ve seen that even suggests these scientists fudged data or even manipulated the data to prove a dodgy theory. If you’ve seen something like that in the evidence, point me to it.

This whole beat-up reminds me of when Michael Moore’s critics try to attack his films on the basis that he edits the footage with an agenda. No kidding.

(source of the melting ice photo is UNSW)

… these are an entire philosophy.

For my money, The Wire was the most intelligent television show ever made. I wasn’t just the depth of the analysis of what’s wrong with America, it was also the brilliant dialogue (as the below video demonstrates) and amazing cast of many young, black actors portraying the kids on the corners. If you haven’t seen it, make it a priority. Warning: it’s probably unlike any show you’ve ever seen in that it doesn’t really succumb to typical 40 minute story arcs. I watched the first episode and went “meh”. It was only through the recommendations of people like Ben Barren that I persisted through the first season. By the end of season one, my mind was blown.

If you don’t find this whole thing totally ridiculous and abhorrent, then I suggest you need to wake the hell up. It’s 2009 and you people still allow this kind of nonsense? Listen – the whole idea that some people are born “royal” and superior to everyone else should have died about centuries ago. I know, I know – most people still believe in the sky daddy, too. But come on, UK. We really can’t take you seriously while you still pander to some old bint dressing up in a crown and sitting on a golden throne. It’s not only foolish, it’s abhorrent.

Yvonne Adele (aka Ms Megabyte) is a Melbourne-based entrepreneur and founder of Ideas While You Sleep – an overnight brainstorming service for business utilising hundreds of clever global brains. It’s a brilliant idea for helping small and large businesses around the globe leverage the power of crowd-sourcing. It’s so terrific I’m embarrassed I didn’t think of it first. 

He may be an Anglican, but KRudd is “one of the boys” when it comes to protecting the religious establishments of Australia.

According to the BBC:

Australian PM Kevin Rudd has apologised to the hundreds of thousands of people, some British migrants, who were abused or neglected in state care as children.

(via BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Australia ’sorry’ for child abuse.)

I know from my interview with Dr Wayne Chamley from Broken Rites that the Catholic Church are alleged to have been the main protagonist in this child abuse in Australia but the Federal Govt won’t hold a Royal Commission into the issue like the Irish government did. To deflect the issue, KRudd would rather just apologise. But there’s no justice in an apology. It boggles the mind why the leaders of this country don’t think that the Catholic Church should have to answer for its crimes like any other criminal organisation. As far as I’m aware, the Australian Sex Party is the only political party in this country that has a policy calling for a Royal Commission into child sexual abuse.

Why? Because you don’t need all that shit. Really. You don’t.

Episode 1 of the new show!

The No Illusions Podcast examines the truth about how we’re living our lives.

Today’s guest is Fiona Patten, the founder of The Australian Sex Party. That’s a political party, not a tupperware party. And they are SERIOUS. They have a great set of policies that I endorse, including ending the internet filter and holding a Royal Commission into child sexual abuse by religious institutions. They have two candidates in upcoming elections and Fiona herself is running for Peter Costello’s old seat of Higgins in Victoria. Fiona is running against the Greens Candidate – THE Clive Hamilton, architect of the Rudd Govt’s evil internet filtering plan.

Keep up to date on their progress by following the Aust Sex Party on Twitter.

In 1949, 16 years after he migrated to the USA, Albert Einstein, probably the most brilliant mind the human race developed in the 20th century if not of all time, wrote a pamphlet endorsing socialism.

The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil.

I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society.

Read the rest of his pamphlet here.

Those people who think socialism is bad, need to put together a better case against socialism than Einstein put forward FOR it. Who are the leading intellectuals that have spoken out against socialism and what were their arguments?

Instead of these simplistic rants that I’m seeing bandied about, I’d love to see some intelligent discussion, IF you’re all capable of it.

Another criticism I have of Michael Moore’s “Capitalism” is that nowhere in the film did he discuss the alternatives to capitalism. There is one very short segment that discusses the attitudes of Americans about socialism in the lead up to the 2008 election, but there was no detail on what socialism is.

This morning I read this rant about the evils of socialism on “American Thinker” which claims:

“…the Achilles heel of collectivist dogma: for a planned economy to succeed, there must be central planners, who by necessity will insist on universal commitment to their plan.

How do you attain total commitment to a goal from a free people? Well, you don’t. Some percentage will always disagree, even if only for the sake of being contrary or out of a desire to be left alone. When considering a program as comprehensive as a government-planned economy, there are undoubtedly countless points of contention, such as how we will choose the planners, how we will order our priorities when assigning them importance within the plan, how we will allocate resources when competing interests have legitimate claims, who will make these decisions, and perhaps more pertinent to our discussion, how those decisions will be enforced. A rift forming on even one of these issues is enough to bring the gears of this progressive endeavor grinding to a halt. This fatal flaw in the collectivist design cannot be reengineered. It is an error so critical that the entire ideology must be scrapped.”

This guy obviously doesn’t realize that capitalism also requires a “total commitment to a goal from a free people”. We have laws in a capitalist society, just as they do in a socialist society. We even have laws (a LOT of them) that dictate how we operate economically. For example – try setting up a bank in your town without getting a banking licence from some government authority. Watch how long you last.

If the so-called “Achilles heel” or “fatal flaw” of socialism is that they have laws then capitalism has the same fatal flaw.

We have “central planners” in capitalist countries as well. They are called “government departments”.

This kind of stupid argument demonstrates how blinded many Americans are by the ideological programming they have been receiving for the last century.

Tonight we finally got to see Michael Moore’s latest film, Capitalism: A Love Story.

While it’s undeniably a powerful film that everyone should see, I have one major complaint with it – he let Obama off the hook.

Everyone knows that Moore isn’t a big fan of Bush and Cheney. That has been very clear in his last couple of films. So it isn’t surprising that in Capitalism, he continues to (rightfully) blame a lot of America’s current financial woes on the Bush / Cheney administration.

However Bush isn’t in office today. And Moore’s only critique of Obama is to mention VERY briefly that Goldman Sachs were the biggest private investor in Obama’s election campaign. Apart from that slight jab, he not only completely let’s Obama off the hook for the current crisis, he actually continues to paint Obama in a positive light, as a beacon of hope that things are changing in the USA.

Now while I know Obama wasn’t in power during the years when the Clinton and Bush administrations whittled away most of the regulations in the financial system, it definitely WAS Obama who, late last year, convinced Congress to pass the bailout vote - a disastrous piece of legislation that Moore spent a great deal of time discussing. Yet in all of his coverage of that event, he never once showed an image of Obama or mentioned Obama’s critical role in making sure the bill passed.

And I have to ask – why not? I know that Moore championed hard for Obama on the election trail. But I thought that would make sure that he would have determined to hold his man to at least an equal if not higher standard than the other guys. It looks like I was wrong. At least in this film, Moore has given Obama a Get Out Of Jail Free card. It saddens me.

There’s a great scene in the film where Moore debunks Ronald Reagan and explains how RR was just a pretty boy frontman for the financial cartels. It’s sad that he can’t see that Obama is EXACTLY the same.

On another note, I hope that Moore’s next film shines a light on his own religion. He says he’s been a practising Catholic all of this life. In this current film, he makes the Catholics out to be good guys. I wonder if he has the integrity to turn his keen eye on his own? He could start by interviewing Irwin Zalkin.

As G’Day World is five years old this month (it started life on November 29, 2004), I’ve decided to sort of retire it. A show that started as a tech news podcast has, over the years, become my personal exploration of what’s really going on in the world. Hence the new name: No Illusions. I don’t think the G’Day World name really tells people who have never listened to the show before what to expect. Hopefully the new name is more descriptive. The format for the show is going to stay the same and the old URL will point to the new site, so there shouldn’t be any drop in continuity.

Also you’ll have noticed the new site design. Xminds have been working on this for me for the last few weeks. The No Illusions logo is something I threw together quickly last night and I’ll get a better one designed soon. But I’d love to get any other feedback from you on what you like and don’t like about the design so we can get the template right and roll it out across TPN.

I’m having another attempt this year to promote my alternative celebration on December 25 “Anaxagoras Day”.

Anaxagoras was 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 was exiled from Athens.

According to Britannica: “About 480 Anaxagoras moved to Athens, then becoming the centre of Greek culture, and brought from Ionia the new practice of philosophy and the spirit of scientific inquiry. After 30 years’ residence in Athens, he was prosecuted on a charge of impiety for asserting that the Sun is an incandescent stone somewhat larger than the region of the Peloponnese.”

If you want to join us in celebrating the life of Anaxagoras, just join the Facebook group. I just see it as a day to celebrate the fact that we CAN be atheists without fear of persecution. It’s a great day to think up a way to spread a little bit of rational thinking.

I wonder how many Mormons know Joseph Smith was put on trial for being a conman a few years before he founded the church?

The story goes like this:

“For several years preceding the appearance of his book, he was about the country in the character of a glass-looker: pretending, by means of a certain stone, or glass, which he put in a hat, to be able to discover lost goods, hidden treasures, mines of gold and silver, &c. Although he constantly failed in his pretensions, still he had his dupes who put implicit confidence in all his words. In this town, a wealthy farmer, named Josiah Stowell, together with others, spent large sums of money in digging for hidden money, which this Smith pretended he could see, and told them where to dig; but they never found their treasure.

“At length the public, becoming wearied with the base imposition which he was palming upon the credulity of the ignorant, for the purpose of sponging his living from their earnings, had him arrested as a disorderly person, tried and condemned before a court of Justice. But, considering his youth, (he being then a minor,) and thinking he might reform his conduct, he was designedly allowed to escape. This was four or five years ago. From this time he absented himself from this place, returning only privately, and holding clandestine intercourse with his credulous dupes, for two or three years.”

The above account is taken from the first published telling of events, written by Abram W. Benton and published in the Evangelical Magazine & Gospel Advocate in 1831, about 5 years after the events occurred (via Omninerd).

The LDS apologists I’ve read online (including the author of the article on Omninerd) tend to try to brush it off by saying “well back then money digging wasn’t unusual”, missing the point that he wasn’t tried for “money digging” per se, he was tried (as far as we can tell from the surviving records) for being a conman, that is, he kept pretending he actually could locate buried treasure using his supernatural powers when, in fact, as far as the records show, he was totally unsuccessful in finding any treasure.

It speaks about the man’s character. And this trial happened 6 years after Smith claims that he had been visited by Jesus. I’d like to ask Mormons to engage their critical mind and ask themselves: is a conman who was going around the country trying to scam money out of gullible people the kind of person that you would put your trust in today? If someone who was a known conman turned up today and told you that he’d been visited by an angel or Jesus, would you believe him?

Newlight, the Brisbane web design firm I’ve been consulting to for a few months, has launched it’s new company site. I’m here as their “digital strategy” guy, which means I work on things like social media strategy and SEO strategy for Newlight’s Brisbane clients. So if you’re looking for a very reputable Brisbane web development firm, check these guys out. They’ve been around since 1999 and are very good at what they do. I’m also doing some blogging for them, mostly on social media and digital strategy stuff.

Huge news! Sarah Mac, who I interviewed on episode #352, emailed me tonight to let me know that Mercy Ministries has shut down all Australian operations!

She writes:

Hi Cameron,

I was looking back the other day and realised that it has been already a year since we did the interview.

I got some very good news today, Mercy Minitries Australia has shut down completely. Their statement is on their website.

I have been talking to some of the other girls since it has come out and we are all very relieved.

As I understand it ALL organisations have pulled out their support in the last few months, including Hillsong Church and Gloria Jeans.

This is such a great victory for all of us that were hurt and abused by Mercy, hopefully other countries will follow. (we can only live in hope).

many thanks
Sarah Mac

I’m very proud of the small role this show played in closing Mercy down. If you missed those episodes, you can find them here.

It just goes to show you folks – we CAN make a difference.

Bill Liao is one of those people who makes you realize that you aren’t trying hard enough. He chatted with me recently about two of his current projects – neo.org and WeForest.com. Bill explains how he is building a new organization with resources and partners to reforest 20 Million Square Kilometers of the Earth in order to cool the planet. Check out the videos on WeForest.com and the Voices Of Neo podcast as well.

If you want to support independent media and this show, please click on the link below to learn how you can become part of the TPN500!

The Podcast Network is supported by:

neo.org - a social network with a purpose – to transform the world by enabling people to transform themselves

and

our first TPN Patron – Tony Kynaston.

In March 2008 I wrote a blog post called “Who Does Obama Work For?” I was interested in where the funding for his election campaign was coming from. This was still early in the campaign, about 7 months before the election. At the time, his biggest single source of funding was Goldman Sachs and their employees. (The same source, OpenSecrets.org, now lists Goldman as only the second largest contributor, after the University of California). Apparently Michael Moore also makes mention of this fact in his new film, Capitalism (which I’m yet to see…. Rob Irwin, I’m looking at you).

I just remembered this today while listening to a recent episode of No Agenda where they mentioned that Adam Storch, a Goldman Sachs VP, has been made “COO of SEC Enforcement” under the Obama administration.

It looks like investing in Obama was a good bet for Goldman. Their stock value increased from $53.31 a share when Obama was elected to about $187.32 today. And they’ve skated through the financial crisis (which some people think they deliberately  created) and hold many powerful positions in the Obama administration.

Other high level financial positions held in the Obama administration by former Goldman Sachs executives are Neel Kashkari, heading the TARP bailout; Mark  Patterson, Chief of Staff for Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner; Gary Gensler, top executive at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission; and finally Goldman has its top lobbyist, Michael Paese, Rep. Barney Frank’s top aide, who is the chair of the House Financial Services Committee. (source)

This is one of the inescapable downsides of capitalism. The people with the money buy the power. They also buy the media which, in turns, indoctrinates people with a belief in how great capitalism is.

Go back to sleep, America. Goldman Sachs is in control.

A lesson in the power of having a network for those people who still snort when you mention Twitter (who are, I’m sure, the same people who still snort when you mention climate change).

About a year ago, I dropped my Macbook Pro – twice. Both times I was traveling and the shoulder bag I had it in slipped off of my shoulder while I was wheeling several suitcases around France. The result of the drops was pretty severe damage to the case of the Macbook. It still worked fine, it was just dinged up pretty badly. Until recently. A few weeks ago, I stopped being able to shut the case properly and then the piece of plastic that holds the screen in the lid cracked and broke.

I knew it was time for a new Macbook case.

So, I emailed photos to a couple of local Macbook repair places.

The folks at Next Byte were completely useless. All they could tell me was “you’ll have to bring it in for us to look at it”. If I had time to bring it in, I wouldnt have bothered sending photos, you useless morons.

The folks at The Mac Doctors in Annerley, were, as always, very polite, friendly and helpful. They emailed me back a quote – $2500 – and explained why it would cost so much (the screen comes with the case, no way around it) and suggested I’d probably be better off buying a new Macbook.

Instead, I posted a question on Twitter: “Does anyone have a dead Macbook Pro 17″ they’d be willing to sell me?”

Within an hour I had three “yes” replies. Adrian Lynch was the first and after a quick phone call, we’d negotiated a deal. I put the money in his account and had a courier pick up his dead machine (he’d drown his keyboard in wine).

Yesterday, when his dead unit turned up at my place, I took it into The Mac Doctors and today I picked up my perfectly good Macbook Pro – my drive and motherboard stuffed into Adrian’s old case and screen.

Total cost, including his unit, the courier and the hatchet job?

A little less than $500.

The power of Twitter.

I just watched this recent TED video of religious historian and author Karen Armstrong talking about the importance of the Golden Rule and how we need to re-engineer a world based on compassion. It’s excellent and I highly recommend it.

Speaking of compassion, I’m re-launching my charity “Geeks Who Care” in Brisbane this month and I’m hoping some people will join us for the first Brisbane catch-up. The idea of GWC (which I tried to get off the ground just before I left Melbourne in 2008) is that geeks have a special skill-set that I think can be used to improve people’s lives in ways that mere mortals cannot. We know how to make the interwebs work, how to promote things via social networking, how to build websites, make podcasts, refurb PCs, build mesh networks, etc. I want to see geeks doing more when they get together than just nerding out about new tech. We need to be giving back to the society that let’s us be geeks in the first place. So, anyway, details of the Brisbane meeting are here (yes it’s a Facebook page) and if anyone wants to gets stuff started in other cities, go for your life. Let’s share idea and learnings as we go.

I was an early follower of @GayMarriageAus because I’m a big supporter of gay marriage rights. I was delightfully surprised, though, to find out that the person behind it is a 17 year old high school student, Rebecca. I chatted with her recently about why she’s supporting gay rights.

We also talked about The Australian Sex Party (who will be guests on the show in coming weeks) and the current legislation in Australia pertaining to gay rights.

If you want to support independent media and this show, please click on the link below to learn how you can become part of the TPN500!

The Podcast Network is supported by:

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Oh no, Mormons aren’t trying to deny a minority group their basic rights. It’s the MORMONS that are a minority group who are being attacked. In fact, they are just like the African-Americans who lived in the South during the civil rights movement.

The fucking BALLS on these people!

Oh sure – they commanded their brainwashed hoards to spend millions promoting fear and lies in the lead up to the Prop 8 vote – but that’s just because they are a small, attacked minority.

Sure – in 1997 Time Magazine called them one of the wealthiest churches in the world per capita – but you can still be uber-rich and be a persecuted minority…. can’t you?

Sure – in 1967, Mormon Apostle (and later church President) Ezra Taft Benson, said “the Negroes” fighting for civil rights were getting their “planning, direction, and leadership… from the Communists”.

Sure – in 1954, one of the LDS “elders” tried to justify segregation, saying “I think the Lord segregated the Negro and who is man to change that segregation? It reminds me of the scripture on marriage, “what God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.” Only here we have the reverse of the thing — what God hath separated, let not man bring together again.”

Read some of the speeches of Mormon leaders during the civil rights battles and then compare them to this most recent speech about the gay rights movement and you’ll see the VERY SAME RHETORIC being used. “It’s God’s Law”, “It’s always been this way”, etc etc. It’s a disgrace and any Mormon who doesn’t have the integrity to do what Todd Whitaker did, deserves our contempt.

Here’s a transcript of a chat I’ve been having on a Facebook thread belonging to an American conservative. I think it’s a demonstration of a) how little some Americans have actually thought through this issue and b) how little some Americans are able/willing to hold an intelligent debate about the subject. They would prefer to rant, bully and abuse. It’s the typical response I’m used to when discussing religion with similar people. When they can’t put forward an intelligent argument, they just attack like rabid dogs.

Richard Yadon

This is a bad bill all the way around. It will not improve health care quality and will actually raise the cost of health care.

13 hours ago

Art Collins

We have a very GOOD healthcare system. There are some areas that need to be improved, but not replaced by Socialized Medicine. Anyone who thinks otherwise, needs to pack up and move out.

13 hours ago

Joanne Davis

http://finance.senate.gov/

12 hours ago

Christine Steele Gates

We have a mostly free market system that could use MORE free market, not less. Gov’t over-involvement will limit competition and limit innovation. NO THANKS!!!

3 cheap reforms needed to the current system:
1) Tort reform (loser-pays)
2) Legalize interstate medical insurance sales… Read More
3) End employment-base group insurance

These 3 ideas are no-cost to the taxpayer. We can’t afford $900 billion with 10% unemployment and a seriously declining dollar. We can’t trust this government either.

12 hours ago

Damon Dean

This is likely the decisive moment for action. Today will tell if we become a socialist state, or remain a republic!

10 hours ago

Cameron Reilly

Art, according to WHICH metric does the USA have a “good healthcare system”? Which country are you comparing the USA to? Zimbabwe?

Damon, what a load of nonsense. Is Australia a “socialist state”? No. Yet we have far superior healthcare to the USA. And nobody in Australia would swap our system for your system. You folks need to pull your heads out.

6 hours ago · Delete

Joanne Davis

Australian population update: According to an Australian Bureau of Statistics report in early June 2009, the Australian population had hit 21.6 million by the end of 2008.

U.S. Population 304,059,724 – Jul 2008 — 304,059,724 vs 21,600,000

Cameron – there is a “slight” difference in total population; Australia does not have “land borders’ with illegals flowing into your country.… Read More

This health care insurance/care bill that they are trying to RAM through against the majority of American’s wishes, will reduce care, cost more and they absolutely, in “their own words” are trying to force the US into a “single payer system” run by the Federal Gov’t. Single payer is filled with corruption, cost over-runs (Medicare and Medicaid). Our Gov’t states if this bill passes they will fix the corruption? If that is true, then they should have fixed the corruption long ago.

NO THANKS!

4 hours ago

Cameron Reilly

Joanne, what does population size have to do with it?

What data do you have that says the majority of Americans are against it? Wasn’t Obama voted in BY the majority of Americans on a platform for change?

And single payer is NONE of those things you are suggesting. In Australia we have had a single payer system for 35 years and nobody complains about it. It works. … Read More

While I’ll agree that the US govt is corrupt, that’s got nothing to do with single payer healthcare. On the contrary – it’s the corruption in your system that’s trying to spin single payer healthcare as bad.

I would love to see those Americans who are against improving healthcare to compare the US system with Australia and tell me what’s so wrong with our system.

2 hours ago · Delete

Marcus McConkey

Delete/block the troll Obama operative Cameron.

2 hours ago

Penny Baird Mercer

It ain’t over till it’s over! We lost this battle, but we knew we would. Remember the ALAMO! Keep fighting!

about an hour ago

Cameron Reilly

Marcus’ comment basically sums up the lack of intelligent debate some people can put up for this topic. If I put forward a different argument, I’m a “troll” or an “operative” (which is amusing considering I’m a) an Aussie and b) a vociferous Obama critic) and should be blocked.

about an hour ago · Delete

Marcus McConkey

Cameron, it really comes down to (IMO) no one cares or should care what a non-voting, non-U.S. citizen THINKS, let alone ignorantly articulates here. It’s called “civilizational confidence”. Look into it, Australia will benefit.

WHO cares what you think of Obama, or the latest rounds of still unreleased healthcare legislation? Stick to what you know and can quantify with some actual experience. You’ve probably never set foot in a U.S. hospital, but again, NO ONE CARES IF YOU HAVE.

Joanne has gone to great lengths to share the ramifications of the last published healthcare legislation (which most of us here actually read and now understand) and you jump in here like an imbecile looking for attention. That’s what TROLLS do. … Read More

We don’t have the time or the inclination to educate you.

24 minutes ago

Cameron Reilly

Marcus, again, your venomous attacks don’t do you any favours. Are you completely unable to engage is intelligent dialogue?

Perhaps if some Americans, such as yourself, took the time to actually educate yourself about what citizens of other countries, who already HAVE a single payer healthcare system, think about such systems, you might cure … Read Moreyourself of your delusional attitudes towards the Obama legislation. Despite Joanne’s analysis of the theoretical ramifactions, there are 100 million people living in democratic, capitalist countries, such as Australia, Canada and the UK, who actually live quite happily under a single payer healthcare system and have for decades. If American’s current approach is to superior to a single payer system, you might ask why the people of these other countries aren’t demanding changes to THEIR healthcare system.

Here’s the recording from tonight’s live show where we discussed Satan, God the Separator, Iran, Obama, Chavez, Che, Fidel, and men wearing blackface. Oh and we performed a little Nick Cave duet. Twice.

Tune in to next week’s show here.

My guest today is David Nicholls, the President of the Atheist Foundation of Australia and the co-ordinator of the 2010 Global Atheist Conference which is being held in Melbourne in March 2010.

Do you want an independent media?

The Podcast Network is supported by:

neo.org - a social network with a purpose – to transform the world by enabling people to transform themselves

and

our first TPN Patron – Tony Kynaston.

I went looking for a house cleaner today and ended up on News.com.au’s TrueLocal site. I found someone in my area, clicked on their ad, then tried to send them an email. Up popped the below contact form. But I COULDN’T contact them because the verification captcha is broken.

When I mentioned this on Twitter, @truelocal replied

@cameronreilly Thanks for brining it to our attention, it’s an issue from our end with Firefox3.5 and will thankfully be fixed v soon

Well that’s all fine and dandy, BUT, I asked, are you going to be refunding your advertiser’s funds? It seems to me like you aren’t delivering your promised services.

So far, no response from @truelocal….

It’s not acceptable when billion dollar media companies can’t get a freakin website to work properly. My suggestion? Stop hiring monkeys.

If I was a journalist for Fairfax, I’d probably do a story on this.

Will people change their behaviour if you make it fun?

A great concept and great social media by Volkswagen.

Check out TheFunTheory.com for more. Those clever Germans.

The Crafty Hedgehog sells knitted version of dissected animals. Cool. See more.

Two years in and what are the major accomplishments of the Kevin Rudd government?

According to Leon Bertrand’s article “Rudd’s second year” – nothing. I’d be a little bit more complimentary and add the following:

1. His government has taken steps to curb Telstra’s power. That’s goodness… IF they follow through. And that’s a big IF.

2. They signed Kyoto – sure, since then they’ve done their best to make sure the earth burns to a crisp, but they at least signed it.

3. They said SORRY – sure, since then, they’ve done nothing to improve the living conditions of our indigenous population, but they at least said sorry.

Of course, I disagree with Leon that dumping Fuelwatch, Grocerywatch and delaying the ETS have been positive things the government has done – as far as I’m concerned, that just demonstrates their inability to deliver on anything they say they are going to do – but I do agree with him that:

Nevertheless, the Rudd government is unlikely to take bold reforms in the next year. In modern politics, the last year of a term in office involves focusing on winning the election and not upsetting sections of the electorate.

So, please remember this lesson come the next Federal election, my friends – voting for a major party is a WASTE OF TIME. Whether you live in Australia, the USA or the UK, voting for one of the major parties just delivers MORE OF THE SAME.

We need to start strengthening the minor parties or, even better, START A NEW PARTY – one that actually gives a shit and doesn’t exist to pacify the elite.

Oh and as a general rule, DON’T VOTE FOR A MILLIONAIRE. Do you really think a millionaire is going to do anything to upset the applecart? He or she is just going to try to maintain the status quo.Why would they do anything but?

Tonight I finally had a chance (thanks to Jason Nelson) to see Part 1 & 2 of Steven Soderbergh’s amazing film CHE, depicting the life of Che Guevara, starring (and produced by) Benicio Del Toro.

It’s an amazing film that, predictably, did very poorly at the US box office. I believe it opened in cinemas in Australia just recently so go see it if you can. If you can’t, try to pick it up when it comes out on DVD. The depiction of Che in these films is the most honest ever put into a major movie. It puts lie to the propaganda and lies told about Che by Americans for the last 50 years.

Jean-Paul Satre called Che "not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age" and the "era’s most perfect man."

Listen to the full 1964 radio interview with Che which appears, in part, in the first film.

The Vatican was kind enough this week to give yet another excuse to SHUT THEM DOWN PERMANENTLY.

Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican’s permanent observer to the UN, made a statement assuring the UN human rights council that Catholic priests involved in having sex with young boys aren’t really engaged in paedophilia, it would "be more correct" to speak of ephebophilia, a homosexual attraction to adolescent males.

"Of all priests involved in the abuses, 80 to 90% belong to this sexual orientation minority which is sexually engaged with adolescent boys between the ages of 11 and 17."

Ohhh that’s okay then…. you stupid fucking asshole.

Apparently Archibishop Clueless made this statement after an international representative of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, Keith Porteous Wood, accused it of covering up child abuse and being in breach of several articles under the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Archbishop Clueless also accused other churches of having an equally bad track record of child abuse, something that Irwin Zalkin refuted when I interviewed him earlier this year.

Clueless went on to say that “available research” showed that only 1.5%-5% of Catholic clergy were involved in child sex abuse. As The Daily Irrelevant noted:

Only???

And that’s your defense of what happened? Really?

The USA has easily the largest percentage of their population incarcerated or on probation of all countries in the world.
There are 1 in 32 people in the US either behind bars or on Probation, and that’s for ALL convictions combined.

That’s less than 3%. And the vatican has the fucking nerve to say it’s “only” 5%.

Folks, I ask again – when are we going to shut the Catholic Church down? It’s a disgrace. At the very least, in Australia, we should be having a Royal Commission into the levels child abuse perpetrated by the Catholic clergy in Australia over the last 70 years, like the one they recently concluded in Ireland.

When I interviewed Dr Wayne Chamley from Broken Rites a few months ago, he suggested that if we had a Royal Commission into Catholic child abuse in this country we would discover TENS OF THOUSANDS of victims.

Let’s do something about it. If we don’t, history will judge us as a bunch of spineless, assholes with no integrity.

Oh sure, everyone seems more than happy to throw the book at Polanksi, but go after the Catholic Church? Oh no, we couldn’t do that.

(link to the story via The Daily Irrelevant – thanks Russell)

It’s time for all of us to get rid of our credit cards, once and for all.

As if the "Global Financial Crisis" (or, as I like to call it, the "Greedy Fuckers Crisis") hasn’t already taught us that we need to wean ourselves off of this credit-based culture we’ve built for ourselves, then this story should. According to News.com.au, "one in five Australians is a victim of credit card fraud or computer hackers."

More quotes:

"Credit card crime is by far the biggest single fraud issue, with almost 10 per cent of those surveyed falling victim to card theft or skimming."

"The news will be an embarrassment to the banks, who repeatedly claim that their systems are secure."

The banks make BILLIONS and BILLIONS of profits every year and they STILL can’t stop credit card fraud. Why? Because they don’t care. It would cost more to fix it than it does to pay out the claims. It’s the same reason they can’t develop an e-banking system that doesn’t look like it was made my monkeys in 1993. THEY DON’T CARE ABOUT YOU. They care about profits, not people, not customers – PROFIT. That’s why their customer satisfaction scores are in the toilet.

Credit cards are just another way that the banks, corporations and the government manages to keep us up to our eyeballs in debt. They know that human nature means that if you CAN spend it, you WILL – eventually. And then they have you by the balls. And if you’re living on debt, you’re easy to manipulate. You can’t afford to quit your job – so they can screw you down a little bit more. You can’t afford to lose your job – so you put "the economy" ahead of other issues, like "the survival of the species" when you vote in elections. You dance to their tune.

Let’s get a campaign going to get a million people to cut up their credit cards this year. Along with my other campaign to get a million people to walk away from the "big four" banks and take their banking to a smaller, member-owned credit union.

Let’s take control of our destiny people.

UPDATE: Check out @mrshlee! He already decided to cut his up! (video)

(thanks for the link, Russell)

Recordings from tonight’s live show. It’s in three parts because uStream kept dropping out. Ugh. And the audio on the first two parts is peaking, but they aren’t very long.

We talked mostly about the implications of the discovery that Hitler’s skull belongs to a woman and about how to overthrow the Obama Nation.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Todd Whitaker, the Mormon who bravely spoke out against LDS bigtory inside the church and had uploaded his speech to YouTube, added some background to the story in the comments section to my post. He said:

Todd here…WOW What a Great Thread this is, I Guess speaking the truth in my ward seems to have caught on to many other wards here in california. The church is trying to Silence what is happening just as they tried to silence me but I have had several phone calls in reference to My testimony and how it has inspired so many to think outside the box and see how wrong this church was in participating in a political election. So Many are waking up Now to LDS Policy and are having their names removed from all church records by the Hundreds, As a 7th Generation Pioneer Heritage Mormon with family that died at the hands of Indians settling in southern Utah under the direction Of brigham Young in a Ghost town called “Grafton” My Family has shed Its Own Blood for this Church, Im Very Glad To have brought So Much Truth and uncovered an Evil Act Towards Minority groups in America, as I have stated on several other posts, I Only video Taped this event so that My Father who is Very Old and Ill, could witness this event as he is so very proud of his children for Not allowing Bigotry into their lives…This WAS an Honest Testimony and With my tithe dollars and fast offerings They Still shut off the Mic…Im glad the world has a chance to see the REAL MORMON CHURCH in action for a change’….Todd Whitaker

Once again Todd, you have my respect for taking a stance against this bigotry. With a family background such as this, I’m sure it was a difficult thing to go through, but hopefully it will give other Mormons the courage to follow in your footsteps. Sure – most will stick their head in the sand and just repeat their mantras over and over to justify their actions. But history has taught us that it only takes a relatively small number of people who have the courage to speak out against intolerance to start the snowball rolling. Hopefully you’ve started something.

I know you’ve all seen this video before, but here’s my translation:

The white team are the Democrats trying to push through health care.

The black team are the Republicans trying to stop it.

And the moonwalking bear? He’s America’s Military Industrial Complex, selling 70% of the world’s arms, overthrowing countries, and stealing natural resources from developing countries.

Wendell Potter, former Corporate Communications Exec at insurance giant Cigna, was on Bill Maher’s show last week talking about how Big Insurance are screwing Americans. He talks, among other things, about how he worked when at Cigna to discredit Michael Moore’s film "SICKO" when it came out but how the film was "exactly right". Watch the interview here.

In a related story, it seems that the woman who came up with the "death panels" rhetoric, Betsy McCaughey, is the same woman who worked with Big Tobacco to develop a disinformation campaign to kill health care reform under the Clinton administration.

I just watched the Microsoft "Courier" Tablet video on Gizmodo (see the bottom of this post if you haven’t seen it already) and it really looks amazing… until you realize that Microsoft has been making amazing looking futuristic videos for a decade and what have they delivered? Nada.

I was working at Microsoft back in 2000 when they came out with the infamous "Steve Masters" video. Check it out below.

Pretty impressive, huh? That was NINE YEARS AGO. And what does Microsoft have in the market that looks ANYTHING like that today?

You tell me.

So I’m sorry Microsoft. Deliver something cool, deliver on your vision just ONCE (outside of XBOX 360 of course, that *is* cool) and I might believe your futuristic videos again. But until then, why not be more like Apple and actually invest your energies into actually MAKING cool products instead of videos telling us how cool your products will be one day?

Here’s the Courier Tablet video if you haven’t already seen it:

Here’s a short snippet from last night’s live show – Chrissy and I playing a violin / guitar / vocal duet. The song is "Once" written by Glen Hansard and from the film of the same name.

There’s a fascinating post on Dissident Voice about the battle going on in the UK between the BBC and corporate media who are apparently threatened by the breadth of the Beeb’s online offerings.

Quotes:

"The Murdochs of this world are naturally unable to conceive that corporate sponsorship compromises news reporting, showering pound and dollar-shaped sticks and carrots that inevitably cause journalism to slither in corporate-friendly directions."

"In his dystopian novel, 1984, George Orwell described the art of thought control called “Newspeak”:

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”

We are offered a “debate” confined between two false poles: the claim that the BBC is a threat to the “independent news” provided by commercial interests, and the claim that the BBC is a rare source of “independent, truthful” reporting. Modern journalism acts to “narrow the range of thought”, thus serving the powerful interests that control the mass media."

This idea about "a debate confined between two false poles" is something that Chomsky has been talking about for decades. In the West, we’re told that we have a ‘free press’ but, in reality, we have a press that’s owned either by wealthy individuals (Packer, Murdoch, Stokes, et al) or the Government… whose hold on power is often regulated BY those wealthy individuals and their control over the way the population thinks due to their media assets. And so what tends to happen is that our media discusses the happenings of the day in a limited fashion, always confining the debate between two false poles, making it LOOK like we have choice and healthy debate, where in reality we’re only given a small range of options to discuss.

My favourite example in Australia is to look at our election coverage. What is the range of debate and discussion given in the Australian media, during election cycles or any other time for that matter, to alternatives to our consumerist capitalist economic model? Where is the open discussion about the benefits of Socialism or Communism? It doesn’t happen. Why? Because the aforementioned wealthy owners of the media companies don’t want the people thinking about Socialism or Communism unless, of course, it’s to talk about the failures of those alternative models. The reason they don’t want us thinking about these alternatives is that if we moved towards them, they would lose their wealth, power and privilege.

This is why we need a NEW media that isn’t controlled by corporate interests.

Joshua Levi Galleries, located in Woolloongabba, is an art space revamped from an old antique shop. Josh, an artist himself, seeks out emerging artists that he can explode into public awareness by combining a funky “dero-chic” gallery space with live music and attention-grabbing stunts.

Brisbane Confidential 13 – Joshua Levi Galleries from Brisbane Confidential on Vimeo.

Look for more weekly episodes about the best of Brisbane at brisbaneconfidential.com!

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, has written an excellent post up on CBS (surprisingly) about America’s addiction to war:

"The U.S., with $37.8 billion in arms sales (up $12.4 billion from 2007), controlled 68.4% of the global arms market in 2008. Highly competitively speaking, Italy came "a distant second" with $3.7 billion. In sales to "developing nations," the U.S. inked $29.6 billion in weapons agreements or 70.1% of the market. Russia was a vanishingly distant second at $3.3 billion or 7.8% of the market."

And here is what I think is the killer line:

"Few Americans are comfortable thinking about this,"

But the end of the sentence has it back to front:

"… which may explain why global-arms-trade pieces don’t tend to make it onto the front pages of our newspapers."

Perhaps if more newspapers wrote about America’s warmongering more often, then more people might be comfortable thinking about it. It’s been my experience that nearly all Americans I’ve spoken to – including those that are intelligent, well-read and anti-war – find it almost impossible to conceive that America is the cause of many of the world’s tensions instead of the last great salvation. They have been drinking to Kool Aid for so long it’s next to impossible for most Americans to even CONSIDER the alternative view.

Engelhardt finishes with two powerful paragraphs:

"And peace itself? Simply put, there’s no money in it. Of the nearly trillion dollars the U.S. invests in war and war-related activities, nothing goes to peace. No money, no effort, no thought. The very idea that there might be peaceful alternatives to endless war is so discredited that it’s left to utopians, bleeding hearts, and feathered doves. As in Orwell’s Newspeak, while "peace" remains with us, it’s largely been shorn of its possibilities. No longer the opposite of war, it’s just a rhetorical flourish embedded, like one of our reporters, in Warspeak.

What a world might be like in which we began not just to withdraw our troops from one war to fight another, but to seriously scale down the American global mission, close those hundreds of bases — recently, there were almost 300 of them, macro to micro, in Iraq alone — and bring our military home is beyond imagining. To discuss such obviously absurd possibilities makes you an apostate to America’s true religion and addiction, which is force. However much it might seem that most of us are peaceably watching our TV sets or computer screens or iPhones, we Americans are also — always — marching as to war. We may not all bother to attend the church of our new religion, but we all tithe. We all partake. In this sense, we live peaceably in a state of war."

Read the entire article, it’s well worth it.

The one thing I love even more than 50s SF stories are advertisements from the 50s for Space Age promises. I bought a few copies of "Astounding Science Fiction" at a secondhand book store in Paddington (that’s a suburb of Brisbane) today. The owner told me that she picked them up in a deceased estate. They are all from the 50s and in near perfect condition.

I love this back cover of the November 1954 edition which promises "A Bona Fide Opportunity to have your name "On File" with the first company embarking on commercial flights to the moon!"

Working in advertising these days, I’m often trying to think up innovative prizes to offer people for taking part in competitions but I’d never thought about guaranteeing a trip to the moon. These guys were WAY ahead of their time. I wonder if the Science Fiction Book Club in NY still have those names on file? Maybe they will pass them onto Virgin Galactic? Assuming, of course, that the people who added their names to the list in 1954 still want to travel to the moon….

The inside cover offers readers a copy of the book "Across The Space Frontier" written by "seven of the greatest living space experts", including former Nazi and then director of NASA Dr Werner von Braun.

One of the other copies of ASF I picked up (December 1950) had this advertisement on the inside front cover which reads:

"Dianetics – the first true science of the mind. Dianetics started in Astounding Science Fiction. It is not the first, nor will it be the last time, Astounding Science Fiction precedes science generally."

for those of you who couldn’t make it last night….

Do you really think America wasn’t involved in torture, secret prisons or wanton death and destruction before 9/11?

The record shows that they existed before. In fact, 9/11 was in many ways a REACTION to those things, not the cause of them. The USA has NEVER lived up to the virtues Temporal Flush mentions here. Read Zinn’s “People’s History”. The myth of America may survive in the minds of many Americans who don’t read the history of their own country, but outside if the US borders, many people know the other side of the story.

All 9/11 provided was justification to be more aggressive with programs that had been running for many decades in one form or another and continue today under the Obama administration.

There are two Americas – the mythical one that most Americans seem to believe is real, the country that are the good guys, the white knight, the protector of democracy and freedom – and then there is the real America, the one run by corporations and the wealthy elite, the one that, for the entire country’s history, has oppressed the poor and the weak in countries around the globe and at home. The one that stole land at the point of a gun, first from the Native Americans, then from the Mexicans, then from the Cubans, then from the Alaskans, then from the Hawaiins. The one that built its power and wealth on the back of the slave and segregation and imported Chinese labour. The one that did and does deal with the most despicable dictators around the globe to protect American corporate interests.

9/11 may have brought some of the other America to your attention, but it’s a mistake to think that it started then. It’s always been there. You just weren’t paying attention.

Assuming the nice people at Macdoctors fix my Macbook Pro tomorrow, here’s a list of links that @fddlgrl and I will be talking about / playing / performing on tomorrow night’s gdayworld live show. Tune in here about 8pm Brisbane time.

As some of you may know, my girlfriend Christine (aka @fddlgrl) is a “formon” (that’s an ex-Mormon, I have to thank Mr Deity himself for introducing me to that term). She grew up in Utah in a tiny, mostly-Mormon town, the full deal but she broke away from the church when she was about 18.

Anyway I know she’s had lots of debates with active church members about Prop 8 (the Californian law, sponsored in large part by the Mormons last year, which banned gay marriage) and whether or not Mormons are allowed to speak out against it without being ostracized. This clip supports her argument that Mormons can’t speak out without fear of retribution. This guy tried expressing his disappointment with the LDS’ church’s support of Prop 8 and watch what happens.

(source: skepacabra)

So what does this tell us about religious organisations like the Latter Day Saints? They don’t appreciate it when people inside the church start thinking for themselves. Why not? What do they fear? That one person actually thinking for themselves might start a trend? If they aren’t scared, why not let the guy speak his mind? If they are so sure of the moral superiority of their position, why not allow, in fact ENCOURAGE, free and open debate?

Because, my friends, religion is an act of mind control. It exists to pray on the minds and the wallets of the weak.

This is the same reason Father Peter Kennedy was defrocked from the Ca$holic Church earlier this year and why Father Bob Maguire in Melbourne has been told to resign. They had the temerity to think for themselves instead of obeying orders and sticking to the script.

If you are a member of either of these religious “institutions”, I invite you to argue with me in the comments section below.

The author of the Bread From Heaven blog wrote a post recently trying to suggest that there is some historical credibility for the myths contained in the New Testament by comparing it to other ancient documents. Following is my discussion with BFHU in the comments section of his or her blog.

Cameron Reilly, on September 10th, 2009 at 5:47 am Said:

The main difference between the NT and the other documents in the table is that the other authors (except, of course, Homer, and it’s well understood that The Iliad is a myth) claimed to be documenting the life of a supernatural being with superhuman powers. The more ridiculous the claims of ancient documents, the more skeptical any intelligent person is likely to be. Especially when those claims aren’t supported by a single eyewitness or any other evidence. And, let’s face it, the NT is full of ridiculous claims.

bfhu, on September 10th, 2009 at 5:04 pm Said:

The New Testament claims ARE supported by eye witnesses. As for “ridiculous claims” all I can do is quote St. Paul:

I Cor 1:18

For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 19For it is written:
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise;
the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.”
20Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. 22Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, 23but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 24but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25For the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength.

Cameron Reilly, on September 10th, 2009 at 5:28 pm Said:

@bfhu – so who are these eye witnesses that support the NT? Name them.

bfhu, on September 11th, 2009 at 7:43 am Said:

The names of some of the eyewitnesses:

All of the disciple of Jeus:
1. Simon (to whom He gave the name Peter),
2. James, the son of Zebedee, and
3. John the brother of James
4. Andrew
5. Philip
6. Bartholomew
7. Matthew
8. Thomas
9.James the son of Alphaeus, and
10. Thaddaeus
11. Simon the Zealot;
12. Judas Iscariot
13. Mary, Jesus’ mother
And many others named in the various Gospels and letters that make up the NEW TESTAMENT.

St.Luke wrote the Gospel of Luke and the early history of the Church in his book of Acts. He consulted eyewitnesses in order to make an accurate account of the events surrounding the life of Jesus and later the Church He founded.

Luke 1

1Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, 2 just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word.

Luke again in Acts 1

In my former book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and to teach 2until the day he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles he had chosen. 3 After his suffering, he showed himself to these men and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive. He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God.

Of the disciples of Jesus, who were the closest eyewitnesses to all that Jesus did, who wrote a book or letter preserved for us in the New Testament: Peter whose memoir was written down by Mark in the Gospel of Mark. Also, Peters two letters, I & II Peter. The apostle John in his Gospel and three Letters.

1 John 1

1That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. 2The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. 3We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. 4We write this to make our[a] joy complete.
Walking in the light
5This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light;

Revelation 1 (John)

1The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place. He made it known by sending his angel to his servant John, 2who testifies to everything he saw—

Cameron Reilly, on September 11th, 2009 at 5:59 pm Said:

Can you find anywhere in Luke where he says that he spoke directly to those people? I think you’ll find he doesn’t. All you have in Luke is a document written by an anonymous author (the name “Luke” was given to it by Papias in the mid 4th century), who, although claiming to have spoken to eyewitnesses, in fact copied in large part from earlier works, namely “Mark” and the Q Source. At least, that is the dominant hypotethis in biblical scholarship currently. How much credibility can we give an author who makes false claims? Very litte, I’d say.

bfhu, on September 11th, 2009 at 6:48 pm Said:

That is your opinion and the opinion of he so called higher textual criticism which I do not accept. And neither do many other scholars. Those who do not want to accept the ancient faith and would rather debunk it have found an excuse with the faithless, doubting German higher criticism. This is the fruit of Luther’s Rebellion. Thanks for your comments but they are unconvincing.

Cameron Reilly, on September 11th, 2009 at 8:11 pm Said:

And therein lies the problem with your argument that there is some kind of historical evidence for Jesus. Your evidence falls apart at the slightest inquiry. You choose NOT to accept the position of historians and instead choose to “accept the ancient faith”. You are unable to provide any critical evidence to support the claim of an historical Jesus.

Comparing the New Testament or Old Testament documents to other ancient documents that are equally unsupported by evidence only serves to lead us to the conclusion that the Bible documents are EQUALLY AS UNRELIABLE as the other documents. We should be skeptical of all of them, especially though of the documents that claim to be a testimony of supernatural persons.

For example: an historical document that says “John went down to the shop and bought a loaf of bread today” is probably more reliable than a document of the same age that says “John waved his fingers in the air, muttered a secret incantation to the God Ba’al, and 12 loaves of bread appeared in a flash of light in front of him.”

So, for that reason, the NT and OT are likely to be MUCH less reliable historical documents than other ancient documents that make more reasonable claims.

Here’s an ad campaign I doubt we’ll see in Australia. Click on the image below to watch the video. Pretty disturbing stuff. I like it a lot.

A good summary from Lee Salisbury, a former Pentecostal pastor: History’s Troubling Silence About Jesus.

Angie – you are my new hero.

Angie goes online and chats with Mormon missionaries – then posts the whole discussion on her blog, complete with witty and acerbic asides. You go, girl.

Angie the Anti-Theist: Chatting with a Mormon Missionary: Take 8.

According to InventorsSpot.com – it’s called “A Twinkle in the Eye” and these lenses have been fabricated with an LED, a small radio chip and an antenna.The unit is powered wirelessly by the RF electrical signal and represents the start of research that could eventually lead to screens mounted onto contact lenses inside your eyes.

This reminds me of Vernor Vinge’s novel, RAINBOWS END which was set about 20 years into the future when everyone wore contact lenses that had the net and all sorts of augmented reality overlays. I did an interview with Vinge about it which you can listen to here. Sign me up for this shit NOW.

This reminds me of Vernor Vinge’s novel, RAINBOWS END which was set about 20 years into the future when everyone wore contact lenses that had the net and all sorts of augmented reality overlays. I did an interview with Vinge about it which you can listen to here. Sign me up for this shit NOW.

Need help trying to visualize how much money is being spent on things like war and the financial crisis? Check out The Billion Dollar Gram by Information Is Beautiful.

(via Anonymous targets Australian Government over Internet Censorship.)

Unlike Duncan, I *am* in favour of this action. Surely when basic rights such as freedom of speech are being threatened, the public have a right and indeed a responsibility to fight back against oppression with whatever non-violent means are at their disposal? How is this any different to blockading Parliament House in protest? It seems to be it’s just the digital form of a traditional protest.

Here are the recordings of last night’s GDay World Live with myself and the lovely @fddlgrl.

Part One

Part Two

My Chuck Taylors are falling apart at the seams and since Converse were bought out by Nike a few years ago (which makes them evil), I wanted to make sure I bought some shoes that are made by a Fair Trade manufacturer and that are also eco-friendly. Morgs at Urban Grind recommended Etiko and that’s good enough for me. So I picked up some Etiko high tops today. From Etiko’s site:

Produced in Pakistan by the same licensed Fairtrade manufacturer who produces our Certified Fairtrade Etiko sports balls, these sneakers are based on a classic design. They also feature a rubber sole which has been certified sustainable by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) …..making the sneakers ethically and environmentally sound. A fair trade premium ensures that the workers who actually produced the sneakers are paid a living wage and are entitled to benefits and conditions which are a rarity in the footwear and garment industries in most developing nations. A trust account that we contribute to helps fund a health care program for the workers and their families as well as a micro credit program for any one that wants to set up their own small business.

I originally went to Bliss Ecowear in Paddington to get them but they ended up being almost TWICE as expensive as they were at Happy High Herbs in New Farm. What’s that, the Paddo yuppy tax?

Today my guest is Mike Snyder (@mambomike282), a listener of the show who owns a security firm in Washington state. As a Christian, he wanted to challenge me on the subject of evolution and religion, and so we went for it.

Do you want an independent media?

The Podcast Network is supported by:

neo.org - a social network with a purpose – to transform the world by enabling people to transform themselves

and

our first TPN Patron – Tony Kynaston.

I’ve been trying to explain to people for 20 years that free will is an illusion. I’ve covered the subject on a few podcasts, including this one and this one with Dr Susan Blackmore. I even mad a simple flowchart explaining why it must be an illusion. Now, finally, some neuroscientists have agreed with me.

According to Wired:

Long before you’re consciously aware of making a decision, your mind has already made it. If that’s the case, do people actually make decisions? Or is every choice — even the choice to prepare for future choices — an unthinking, mechanistic procedure over which an illusory self-awareness is laid? Those questions are raised by a study conducted by Max Planck Institute neuroscientists and published Sunday in Nature Neuroscience. Test subjects chose whether to push a button with their right or left hand; seven seconds before they experienced making the choice, their brain activity already predicted their final decisions.

(via Cameron Collie via Is Free Will an Illusion? | Wired Science | Wired.com)

You may say “who cares?” Well you should. It’s incredibly important to understand. It’s easily as important as understanding that the Earth orbits the Sun and not the other way around. It will change your life. At least, that’s been my experience and the experience of lots of people I know.

Wendell Potter sez: “…the higher up the corporate ladder I climbed, the more I could see how insurance companies confuse their customers and dump the sick – all so they can satisfy those Wall Street masters.”

via Wendell Potter: Rally Against Wall Street’s Health Care Takeover | Center for Media and Democracy.

I wonder how closely the names on this report map to the Bilderberg Group?

A recent analysis of the 2007 financial markets of 48 countries has revealed that the world’s finances are in the hands of just a few mutual funds, banks, and corporations. This is the first clear picture of the global concentration of financial power, and point out the worldwide financial system’s vulnerability as it stood on the brink of the current economic crisis.

A pair of physicists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich did a physics-based analysis of the world economy as it looked in early 2007. Stefano Battiston and James Glattfelder extracted the information from the tangled yarn that links 24,877 stocks and 106,141 shareholding entities in 48 countries, revealing what they called the “backbone” of each country’s financial market. These backbones represented the owners of 80 percent of a country’s market capital, yet consisted of remarkably few shareholders.

The most pared-down backbones exist in Anglo-Saxon countries, including the U.S., Australia, and the U.K. Paradoxically; these same countries are considered by economists to have the most widely-held stocks in the world, with ownership of companies tending to be spread out among many investors. But while each American company may link to many owners, Glattfelder and Battiston’s analysis found that the owners varied little from stock to stock, meaning that comparatively few hands are holding the reins of the entire market.

via Research – ISNS.

this is amazing – let’s hope it manages to get commercialized soon

Chrissy and I did a live show last night, where we talked some politics, some religion, and then played a violin / viola duet.

We’re going to get back to doing a live show every Tuesday night, 8pm Brisbane time. Tune in here.

Bronwen has written a great piece explaining, once again, why newspapers (and the companies behind them) are at the end of the road.

Of course the argument for paid content is about defending commercial news organisations and not journalism. Problem is the two aren’t mutually exclusive anymore.

For starters, it excludes the competition from government subsidised media – SBS and ABC – who probably can’t wait for News Corp and Fairfax to start charging for their content. A senior news person at SBS told me just yesterday that he “WANTS those sites to charge!” – not because he believes in paid content, he doesn’t, but because it certainly brightens his future.

read more: bronwen clune » Blog Archive » Bad news for newspapers, great news for journalism.

I enjoyed Oliver Stone’s “Looking for Fidel” documentary so I’m pleased to hear he’s got another one out.

Oliver Stone heads ‘South of the Border’ to chat up Chavez and others — latimes.com.

This would be him.

Is the Federal Trade Commission in the United States getting ready to use antitrust and copyright laws to protect mainstream media from New Media?

This is to be expected.

Everything you need to know about how social media works from Zappos’ own social media guru.

This track came on my iPod today and I had to watch this clip again. Classic.

Pick any mainstream news brand site – News.com.au or TheAge.com.au – and take a look at the front page. Now, tell me – if you had to pay to read each of those articles, how many of them are SO RELEVANT to your life that would you pay to read them right now?

Here’s my quick analysis for today’s sites (click to zoom):

A few days ago I had a chance to chat with Jon Dee, founder of Planet Ark and the new Do Something! initiative, about his life and goals. We talked about everything from his involvement in Rock Aid Armenia (where he pulled together a list of top Brit Rockers to perform a charity concert and record a new version of Deep Purple’s “Smoke On The Water” to raise funds for earthquake victims in Armenia) to deciding, with friend Aussie tennis pro Pat Cash, to start Planet Ark, and his new venture Do Something!, which aims to create positive social and environmental change.

Here’s the version of Smoke On The Water that Jon produced back in 1992!

Do you want an independent media?

The Podcast Network is supported by:

neo.org - a social network with a purpose – to transform the world by enabling people to transform themselves

and

our first TPN Patron – Tony Kynaston.

That’s the allegation made by Hal Turner’s lawyer in his defense. If it turns out to be true – and I’m sure the FBI will deny it until the cows come home – it’s just more evidence that Governments like conflict. If they keep us fighting amongst ourselves about Right vs Left, it leaves us less time thinking about how to get on with building a fairer and more just society. 

It reminds me that we often need to scratch the surface of news stories – sometimes there is a story behind the headline – people who stand to profit from an event, people who were manipulating an event.

It’s like the current rash of angry, outraged women speaking out at the "town hall" meetings in the United States who get lots of coverage on Fox News. I’ve been wondering whose payroll they are on.

According to Comscore, nearly 9 million Australians visited a social networking site in June.

A post from Arianna Huffington worth reading. US_based figures but the same principle applies here. 

My favourite line is “what happens in Vegas, stays on Flickr.”

Data sourced from socialnomics.com (follow @equalman).

Hat tip to Nathan Bush for the link to the vid.

I just read this fascinating report on the narcosphere (Millennium Challenge Corp. poured millions into Honduras in months leading up to putsch) that describes the activities of a US aid entity set up by Bush (the MCC) in Honduras leading up to the coup against President Zelaya.

It’s well known that aid agencies are sometimes used as a front by the CIA for spying and funding regime change activities (such as its involvement with USAID, famously documented in the “Family Jewels” documents, which details a joint USAID-OPS operation concerning training foreign police in bomb-making, sabotage, etc).

Narco raises a lot of interesting questions about the timing, motivation, recipients and utilisation of the funding that MCC sent into Honduras just prior to the coup.

I was doing an email interview with a journo this morning about the introduction of digital radio in Australia and I was asked if I thought, as the radio industry is apparently claiming, that the introduction of digital would lead to an increase in radio listenership. I explained that this certainly hasn’t been the experience in the UK, where radio listenership is STILL in decline five years after the introduction of digital.

(source)

I remember a few years ago when the radio industry in Australia wanted the Howard Govt to give them an exclusive license for “digital radio” in return for their investment in the infrastructure to roll out their digital stuff. This had some folks predicting podcasting would be outlawed. Telling the radio folks to go to hell was one of the Howard Govt’s better decisions.

SpiralFrog was the music industry’s attempt to defeat iTunes. It failed miserably. Here’s a fascinating post-mortem. As a start-up guy who had no funding, these stories of start-ups pissing tens of millions of dollars up against the wall always make me sick. Why do these clowns get so much money? I know what I could achieve with just a single million to spend on my business and to see them waste $26 million just makes me furious.

Anyway, there are some interesting facts in here… such as “in order for a tier-1 account to place ads on a site like SpiralFrog, (it) needed a minimum of 5 million monthly unique (visitors).” Even a start-up with the amount of funding SpiralFrog had, struggled to make money from advertising. They bought their traffic through search engine marketing and had to keep spending to maintain it. Lots of lessons in here.

Read the article:

Inside the short, troubled life of a music start-up | Digital Media – CNET News.

Here’s a 2007 interview with SpiralFrog founder Joe Mohen:

According to the quiz, I’m a Centrist. What are you?

OMFG. I must have one of these. It’s a ring that turns into a bluetooth earpiece. The company behind it is Hybra Advance Technology.

(via If It’s Hip It’s Here)

August 6 and 9 are the 64th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, perhaps the greatest single acts of terrorism committed in human history.

Here are some links worth reading.

• The Lies About Hiroshima by John Pilger (recent Sydney Peace Award winner)
• Chronology on Decision to Bomb Hiroshima and Nagasak
• HIROSHIMA: WHO DISAGREED WITH THE ATOMIC BOMBING?

I’m running a twtpoll today about the launch of ‘digital radio’ in Australia. Of course, as far as I’m concerned, ‘digital radio’ is a pretty silly concept. Podcasting has been around for five years and with iPhone and iPods and the like becoming pretty mainstream, podcasting already gives audiences a digital experience. Why would you want to go out and buy ANOTHER device?

Let’s see what exciting benefits digital radio offers, according to the industry’s own site, and compare that to podcasting:

• Clearer sound and improved reception – Check. If you’ve downloaded a podcast onto your own device, you have PERFECT reception.
• Extra features such as extra channels – Check. There are tens of thousands of podcasts.
• pause and rewind radio – Check.
• downloadable music - Check. It’s called “iTunes”, bitch.
• more details about the advertised product - Hmmm. I’d say “Bonk” to think one as we don’t carry much advertised product.
• slideshows – Check. Podcasts in Apple’s AAC format contain slides, if that kind of thing excites you.
• scrolling text – Check. Ye old iPods scroll, but iPhones are far sexier.
• Electronic Program Guides - Check. It’s called your iTunes playlist.
• updated news, sports and racing information - Check. It’s called “the web” and it comes fully-integrated into iPhones.
• Extra channels potentially doubles the number of commercial stations – Oooh “doubles”! That’s twice as much Kyle Sandilands! Podcasting has released tens of THOUSANDS of new ’stations’.

What do you see in that list that is innovative? Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last five years, you already have most or all of these features on your iPhone, iPod or mobile phone. And, if you don’t, you will when you buy one. And you’ll have a far wider choice of options that digital radio will offer you.

So far on my poll, 87% of respondents say they are not interested in digital radio. What about you?

David Horn works with Microsoft in Seattle and is one of the organisers of the 2009 Space Elevator Conference. What is a “space elevator”, I hear you ask? Only the coolest idea you’ve ever heard! Imagine a day in the not-too-distant future where getting into space involves jumping into something like a luxury train that travels VERTICALLY – up into the air – traveling along a ‘ribbon’ made of carbon nanotubes – for a week until you get outside of the earth’s gravitational pull and THEN you jump in your space vehicle, which is attached to the other end of the ribbon, detach, and get flung into space via centrifugal force!

Links:
Wikipedia entry on Space Elevators.

Book your ticket for the 2009 Space Elevator Conference here.

Music:
Chris Garneau
“Fireflies” (mp3)
from “El Radio”
(Absolutely Kosher)

Buy at iTunes Music Store
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More On This Album

Reports today about the AFP arresting 4 men in Melbourne who were allegedly planning to attack a military base in Victoria is being called "terrorism" by the Prime Minister and the mainstream media. For example, News.com.au claims the attack, if it had gone ahead, would have been "the worst terror attack on Australian soil".  However, if they were attacking a military target, does that qualify as terrorism? Wikipedia states that there isn’t an internationally agreed definition of terrorism, but I normally associate it with attacks on civilian targets outside of wartime. A small group of Somali and Lebanese labourers and taxi drivers attacking a military base doesn’t sound like the definition of terrorism to me. It sounds more like the definition of "stupid".

(UPDATE: in discussion with @napper, I said I think an attack by citizens of a country on its own army and inside the country’s own borders is more accurately defined as “revolution” or “insurrection”.)

So – why is it being referred to as terrorism by the Govt and the media? Are we back to the days where The Great Corporation feels the need to frighten the masses? What should we be watching out for? Is there a new law coming soon that will disappear more of our civil rights? Will Rudd use this to help push through his Internet censorship?

UPDATE: I also meant to add – as Terry did in the comments – that I hope the AFP have actually done their job this time, unlike in the Haneef debacle.

Wolfgang Puck is one of the most famous chefs in the world.

Antony Van Couvering is the founder of Minds + Machines.

On today’s show they chat with me about their bid to own the new “top level domain” – .FOOD.

Do you want an independent media?

The Podcast Network is supported by:

neo.org - a social network with a purpose – to transform the world by enabling people to transform themselves

and

our first TPN Patron – Tony Kynaston.

Iran? North Korea? Cuba? China?

No – the United States of America.

If President Obama and the Democratic Party aren’t willing to prosecute the people responsible for torturing and imprisoning a 12 year-old child, without a trial, without hope of defense, then what does that say about the current American administration?

Brisbane Confidential 07 – The Da Vinci Machines Exhibition

I don’t I’ve plugged the Brisbane Confidential show much in this blog, but I thought this episode might interest y’all, because it’s about Da Vinci – and who doesn’t love Da Vinci?

New episodes of Brisbane Confidential are available each Thursday on ourbrisbane.com, BrisbaneConfidential.com and through iTunes.
Join our Facebook Group and tell us which cafes, restaurants, shops, bars, events, and locations in Brisbane we should cover on Brisbane Confidential!

Brisbane Confidential is a production of ourbrisbane.com and The Podcast Network.

Dilbert author Scott Adams has a GREAT idea for reducing health insurance premiums:

First, 80% of healthcare costs go toward chronic diseases such as diabetes, cancer, and heart disease.

Second, a huge study on diet and its correlation to disease, called The China Study, found that chronic diseases, particularly the ones I just mentioned, only get triggered if you eat a plant based diet, for the most part, regardless of your genetic propensity. (CR Note: I think he meant to write "DONT get triggered if you eat a planet based diet".)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_China_Study

You might say it is unfair for the insurance company to charge a higher premium for earthquake insurance to people who actually live on a fault line. But I say that’s just good business.

What do you think? Should health insurance companies have better plans for vegetarians? And would YOU become a vegetarian if you knew your health insurance would be cut by 75%?

Following on from yesterday’s story about Goldman Sachs as the root of all evil, today we get the information that:

Nine banks that received government aid money paid out bonuses of nearly $33 billion last year — including more than $1 million apiece to nearly 5,000 employees — despite huge losses that plunged the U.S. into economic turmoil. … The nine firms in the report had combined 2008 losses of nearly $100 billion.

(Source: WSJ)

And if you think things are going to change, don’t be deluded. Here’s what the Obama White House had to say:

"The president continues to believe that the American people don’t begrudge people making money for what they do as long as…we’re not basically incentivizing wild risk-taking that somebody else picks up the tab for," said White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs.

What happened to Obama’s feigned outrage last year before the election? It’s all gone, baby. It disappeared to the same place as his promises about Gitmo, prison camps, climate change and health care.

If the NBA has a salary cap, why can’t American corporations? One of the key problems with capitalism is the open-ended nature of the upside. It breeds unlimited greed. Surely we can combine the good aspects of capitalism – eg incentives for creativity and effort – but restrict the upsides? I know we have tiered taxation, which effectively acts as a way of channeling some of that upside back into the system, but it doesn’t stop companies and individuals trying to bleed the economy for as much money as they can get their hands on, despite the negative consequences.

It still seems to me that we need another system, one that limits the greed but retains the incentives. 

I’ve been using Google Reader as my default RSS reader for a few years and, like all Google server products, I love it. However I also like to use a clients for some of my services, such as mail and calendar, because they allow me a deeper level of customization of the user experience.

A few months ago I went looking for a Mac RSS client that would act as a front-end to Google Reader but I couldn’t find one. I ended up moving to NetNewsWire instead as an interim measure, exporting my Google Reader OPML. Unfortunately, though, the NNW iPhone client keeps crashing on me, so I had to use Google Reader on the iPhone – not a great experience either, because everytime I leave Reader to view a full post, then return to Reader, Safari refreshes all the feeds takes me back to page one, even if I’m on page ten!

Anyway, Newsgator CTO & Founder Greg Reinacker announced via email today that they are releasing new versions of all of their products (some today, some, like the iPhone client, soon), that will use Google Reader as the back-end. Great news! I’ve already upgraded my NetNewsWire Mac client. Thanks Greg!

Download the new versions here.

Rolling Stone magazine has a Hunteresque story about Goldman Sachs:

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who’s Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.

Just because this is Totally Cool.

(via Amnesia)

The most anticipated film event of the year! (IMHFO!)

I want to give a huge shout-out to TPN’s new network sponsor – neo.org.

Neo is a team of global volunteers and partners who have powerful Declarations and a wish to have a world that works for everyone. It is a social network with a purpose – to transform the world by enabling people to transform themselves.

One of the people behind neo is Australian entrepreneur Bill Liao. I interviewed Bill early last year and you can hear him talk about neo (which was then called Declare!) and the vision for bringing together people around the world who want to make a positive difference.

Neo proves that social networking can be about more than just talking about the weather. As I’m fond of saying – the Internet is just a tool, like a hammer. And we can use a hammer to hit someone on the head – or to discover the statue of David inside a discarded block of Carrara marble. It’s just a tool. Neo is one way we can use this particular tool for good.

And so – I would like each of you to support TPN’s new sponsor – and figure out how YOU are going to make the world a better place – by visiting neo’s site and signing The Declaration.

Zombie Time has this great report on a book co-authored by Obama’s new science ‘czar’ John Holdren (with Paul and Anne Erlich) back in 1977 called "Ecoscience" which predicted that the world is going to become overpopulated which will in turn  lead to massive famines.

A snippet from the post:

In a book Holdren co-authored in 1977, the man now firmly in control of science policy in this country wrote that:

• Women could be forced to abort their pregnancies, whether they wanted to or not;
• The population at large could be sterilized by infertility drugs intentionally put into the nation’s drinking water or in food;
• Single mothers and teen mothers should have their babies seized from them against their will and given away to other couples to raise;
• People who "contribute to social deterioration" (i.e. undesirables) "can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility" — in other words, be compelled to have abortions or be sterilized.
• A transnational "Planetary Regime" should assume control of the global economy and also dictate the most intimate details of Americans’ lives — using an armed international police force.

This reminds me of a talk I heard on the ABC a couple of years ago by Melbourne neuroscientist Dr John Reid where he talked about overpopulation and what we are going to have to do about it. ABC host Robyn Williams actually quoted Paul Erlich’s most famous book, The Population Bomb, in the introduction to the show.

Reid quoted Elliot Morley, Britain’s Special Representative on climate change, by saying the human race is on a ’sleepwalk to oblivion.’ I like that phrase.

He goes on to say:

If we do not delude ourselves, and if we accept the calculations made by the Global Footprint Network and WWF (and I know of no scientific analysis that refutes the basic validity of the model) there is only one ineluctable conclusion. The population of the world must be very quickly reduced to 5 billion (that is, if 6 billions equals 120% of capacity, then 5 billions equals 100%). And then, as the average level of affluence rises, fairly quickly reduced further to, say, 2 to 3 billion.

The urgent discussion then becomes, how do we achieve these targets? Leaving aside uncontrollable natural events, such as a collision with a large asteroid or comet, or the eruption of a super-volcano, there is only a limited number of ways population decrease can be achieved. These ways are all painful, and most are brutally painful in their effect.

He has some pretty scary recommendations. I remember bring horrified when I listened to the talk but then again, he’s right – unless we significantly change the size of our global footprint, it’s hard to see how the human race is going to survive the 21st century. Perhaps Kurzweil is right and nanotech will save us. I hope so.

Brisbane bus drivers are given DNA kits to track down expectorators?

Seriously, what is the point of this? Okay so let’s assume your typical bus driver knows how to use a DNA kit. I assume they are just collecting a sample of spit to send off to a lab for PCR-based testing and not doing it at home in their own labs. But then what? To the best of my knowledge (?!) my DNA isn’t on file with any of the authorities. So what good will it do them? If I *do* get caught in the future for a crime, and I’m DNA tested at the time, they will be able to say "hah! you also owe us $50 for spitting on a bus!"???

Or is this a pre-cursor of a day in the near future when we’ll be subjected to a swab every time we want to ride on public transport in Brisbane?

What’s next? Taxi drivers scraping semen stains off of the back seat and turning up on my doorstep? Imagine if Travis Bickle had one of those? 

I recently moved from Westpac to CUA. This guy pulled $190,000 out of Westpac (in $20 bills) and moved to a Building Society. I want to see ONE MILLION Australians pull their money out of the "Big Four" banks and move to either a smaller bank or credit society this year. We have the power to shape corporate behaviour, but we need to start using our power with focus and intelligence.

This is what Chrissy and I watched this morning in bed. Not your usual breakfast TV. It’s a terrific talk. (via Beyond The Fringe)

There are a huge number of chess applications for iPhone these days and, as I’m a bit of a chess nut, I’ve been trying to test them all out to find out which are the best chess apps for the iPhone or iPod Touch. There are apps suitable for beginners through to grandmasters as well as apps that will let you play a quiet game by yourself on a plane, through to games that let you play against other iPhone / iPod Touch owners online.

These are the ones I suggest you take a look at. Prices and ratings are from the Australian iTunes store.

Hard Core

If you’re an avid chess player, you probably already know about Fritz and Shredder from their PC apps which have been around for many years and are battle tested against world champions. You might not have heard that they now have iPhone versions.

Fritz

The PC version of Fritz has beaten grand masters from Kasparov to Kramnik. Not enough ratings in the Aussie appstore for an average, but seems to be getting 4 and 5 stars so far, which isn’t surprising.

The Good:

• Suitable for beginners through to very, very, very advanced players
• Claims to have the strongest chess engine on the appstore
• Game analysis
• Allows you to send games to other players via email.

The Bad:

• No online play.
• At $8.99 it’s one of the more expensive chess apps.

Shredder

Another chess app that’s been around on the PC for many years, Shredder claims to be "the most successful chess program ever". It has an average rating in the iTunes store of 4.5 stars.

The Good:

• Comes with 1000 in-built chess puzzles.
• Game analysis.
• Coach for beginners.
• Huge opening book.
• Send games via email.

The Bad:

• $12.99, it ties for the most expensive chess app for iPhone currently.
• No online play.

Best Free Apps

What options are out there for people who want a serious game but don’t want to fork out the big bucks?

Deep Green Chess Lite

Deep Green Chess Lite provides a solid game of chess for beginner or intermediate players. Average rating 3 stars.

The Good

• The best interface of all of the apps tested, IMHO.

The Bad

• Doesn’t resume or save your game if the app is closed down mid-game. Considering how often I receive calls on my iPhone, this is annoying. Might be better for Touch owners. 

iChess

iChess allows for online play on FICS (freechess.org) servers as well as standard play against the AI or human opponents. Average appstore rating 2.5 stars.

The Good

• It has the best of all worlds – online play AND AI play AND it’s free.
• It resumes the game you are playing if you take a call mid-game.

The Bad

• There have been reports of the AI making illegal moves.
• The app has crashed on me a few times.

Best Online Play

Chess With Friends

I’ve been using CWF since it first came out and it’s a terrific asynchronous chess  experience. It will set up games for you with random players or allow you to invite friends via email. Average rating of 2.5 stars doesn’t do it justice.

The Good

• It’s free!
• Works over 3G, Edge & WiFi.
• Also allows for local "pass the iPhone" games.

The Bad

• Doesn’t have push notifications for when your opponent makes a move although I imagine with the release of OS3.0 that will be coming soon.

Cyber Chess

If you want real-time online play, then Cyber Chess might be your best option. It connects to both FICS (freechess.org) and ICC (Internet Chess Club) servers. Only one rating on the Aussie appstore, which is for 3 stars. Price $1.19.

The Good

• Allows for real-time chess against human opponents.
• Training mode.
• Support multiple chess variants.

The Bad

• Currently doesn’t support FICS tournaments.

What’s Missing

What I’d really like, but haven’t found yet, is a chess app that let’s me play against another human iPhone to iPhone on the same network. The same way that apps like Bump set up a private network, I’d love to play chess against the person sitting next to me in a cafe without having a real board. I’d love it if we could both whip out our iPhones and start a real-time game against each other. If anyone knows of an app that has that feature, please let me know in the comments section or on Twitter.

A great summation by David Swanson on AfterDowningStreet on his post about all of Obama’s broken promises so far:

The lesson is not that you voted for the wrong guy, given the choices. The lesson is not that rightwingers who hate Obama are right about anything. The lesson is not even that Obama has betrayed you. The key lesson should be that change does not come from electing someone. Change comes from forcing our culture to change, creating better communications systems, and disrupting the pleasant existence of our representatives in Congress. But we’ll never stop cheering for nonviolent activists in other countries and become them ourselves as long as we believe our role consists of loving or hating an elected official, and one whose job was supposed to consist of merely executing the will of the legislative branch.

With the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, I’ve been reading up on the conspiracy theories, for and against. I personally don’t think it *was* faked, although it’s an interesting idea.

Apparently a 1999 Gallup poll found that 6% of Americans doubted the Apollo 11 moon landing happened.

What made me think of this lately was the incredible news that NASA taped over the original moon landing footage! And then they recently had Hollywood "clean up" copies of the footage, George Lucas-style. I wonder if this time, we’ll see Buzz Aldrin shoot first? Anyway, I read that and thought "OMFG the conspiracy theorists are going to have a field day with this news."

So I posted up a quick (and yes, badly worded) twtpoll today asking people what THEY thought about the moon landings – fake or not?

Yes, yes, I *know* it’s a small sample size (to all the haters out there) – when did you think a twtpoll was a scientific research methodology?

What’s interesting to me is how the attitudes of the Twittersphere differ from the general public. If this is an accurate sample of the Twittersphere in general (and not just my followers), does it suggest we are more skeptical of our governments that the general public? Or is it a product of the past decade since the Gallup poll? Or it is Australians (who probably make up at least 25% of my followers) are more skeptical than Americans about the event?

For all of the people who replied that the folks who think it might have been faked are morons, let me ask you – why do you believe so strongly? What evidence do YOU have that they DON’T have?

Let me also ask:

Do you think the USA *could* have faked it if it wanted to? Seems possible to me. People say "how could THAT many people keep a secret?" but how many people REALLY needed to know the truth? Let’s face it – the US has been doing LOTS of dirty shit over the last 60 years that they’ve managed to keep mostly quiet… who shot JFK again?

Do you think the USA had motivation for faking it? Sure – the cold war, space race, investment in the military industrial complex, etc. JFK said they were going to do it before the decade was out – how would it looked if they failed?

Do you realize all of the moon landings – ALL OF THEM – happened during Richard Nixon’s White House? Do you believe anything ELSE that came out of Nixon’s White House?

A few people asked me what evidence there is to suggest it was a hoax. I don’t have any and I don’t believe it *was* a hoax. HOWEVER… it got me thinking… if it WAS a hoax, what evidence WOULD there be? What evidence would we be searching for?

For that matter, it if was genuine, what evidence would it take to convince the skeptics?

I didn’t come up with any good answers. Do you have any?

Most of the media coverage of the recent bombings in Jakarta seem to be skirting around the edges of… something.

It seems that the target of the Marriott bombing was a regular business meeting held there – but a regular business meeting involving which companies and organisations?

From combing the various reports, it appears that it was a meeting run by a US-based  consulting company called CastleAsia "a Jakarta-based consultancy helping multinationals access local markets." Several mining-related companies were involved, including:

• Chevron
• Husky Oil
• Thiess
• The head of the ANZ Bank’s Natural Resources dept in Indonesia
• Rio Tinto
• Verity HR (mining-related recruitment)
• Austrade
• Freeport–McMoRan Copper & Gold

Considering the recent attacks on employees at the Freeport mine in Papua, which have been linked to the country’s own security forces, and Freeport’s history of paying huge amounts of money to members of the corrupt  Indonesian military for "protection" and it’s shocking human rights record, perhaps the media and our governments might somehow start to connect these acts of violence with the actions of foreign-owned mining companies in Indonesia?

There are lots of suggestions that Jemaah Islamiyah (or a JI splinter group) is behind the bombings but, as far as I’m aware, they are yet to claim responsibility. On top of that, some analysts are suggesting that JI has been wiped out.

Who stands to benefit from the bombings?

Perhaps it *was* JI and perhaps it *is* a senseless bombing of innocent civilians by a group of crazed religious fundamentalists. However it might also be an easy escape goat, a diversion tactic, a neatly-packaged up scenario to stop most of us thinking further about the issue.

Who stands to benefit from the bombings?

The Marriott share price went down.

The Freeport share price went UP.

Who might want to cause trouble in Indonesia?

The guy who lost their recent Presidential election, Prabowo Subianto, a former General and son-in-law of former President Suharto? Let’s remember that Suharto, friend of Australia and the USA, was an incredibly corrupt and evil man. He was also a great friend of Freeport – as was his son-in-law, Prabowo.

Is there some connection between the election result and the recent violence? Have Freeport changed who they are paying protection money to and this is the payback?

I am privileged today to have, as guests on the show, the director and subject of the film that won the Grand Jury Prize award in the U.S. documentary category at the Sundance Film Festival this year (which makes Ondi the first and only two time Grand Jury Prize winner in Sundance history!).

The film is called “We Live In Public”, “the story of the Internet’s revolutionary impact on human interaction as told through the eyes of internet pioneer and visionary Josh Harris. As far back as the early 90s, Harris predicted a future dominated by life online and created the companies that were direct predecessors to MySpace, Facebook and YouTube. The tale turns ugly when his underground NYC bunker housing dozens of permanent “citizens” and outfitted with hundreds of surveillance cameras is busted by FEMA as a millennial cult — Harris decides to take the experiment a step further and in doing so becomes a media casualty.”

We Live In Public (Official Site)

Do you want an independent media?

Delicate Noise
“Filmezza” (mp3)
from “Filmezza”
(Lens Records)

Buy at iTunes Music Store

Yet another Catholic leader turns out to be a paedophile – Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado. The only problem is that he’s dead and he escaped punishment. He also apparently had an affair with a woman, fathered her child, and misused funds.

Maciel was the founder of the Catholic congregation called the "Legion Of Christ", which claims to have 70,000 members.

The Independent has a length article on him.

Tim Freke is the co-author (with his writing partner Peter Gandy) of many books about the Jesus myth – including THE JESUS MYSTERIES and THE LAUGHING JESUS. I chatted with him recently about one of their books “The Gospel of the Second Coming”, a marvelous book that manages to combine humour and insight – it explains the Jesus myth as a Gnostic parable. As Tim points out during our chat – nobody really thinks there was an historical “good Samaritan” or “prodigal son”. They are understood to be parables. Tim explains that the whole Jesus story is a series of parables wrapped up in another parable – the parable of Jesus himself.

Click on the above image to order your copy today from BookDepository (free shipping!).

Do you want an independent media?

I’m very excited today to release the news that I’ve partnered up with ourbrisbane.com to co-produce the "Brisbane Confidential" series that I’ve been talking about for the last year. Brisbane has a surprising number of cool, funky places and I want to show them to you. Each week the series will showcase some of the funkiest cafes, bars, restaurants, boutique stores and events in Brisbane. New episodes will be available each Thursday on ourbrisbane.com, BrisbaneConfidential.com and through iTunes.

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.

My guests today help me explore some of the alternatives to the “Big Four” banks in Australia. Let’s say that you, like me, want to completely disassociate yourself from the Big Four – where do you turn? Are there alternatives in Australia?

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

According to this story in the Washington Post, the banksters are going to try to create sneakier ways to make you spend too much money and find yourself being hit with newly created fees in order to prop up their revenues. Expect the same thing to happen in Australia.

Excerpt:

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.

I’ve been talking about why we hate banks. It might be because they hate us!

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.

At the moment I am still missing the following list of G’Day World episodes. This dates back to the server crash we had six months ago when we also discovered our backup system had been misconfigured. If anyone has copies of these podcasts and would be prepared to upload them for me, I would be extremely grateful.

Gdayworld shows missing from ftp:

59
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In this, the latest show in my series trying to show that the Jesus story is probably a myth or hoax, my guest is a PhD student at the University of Helsinki in the field of biblical study. He chatted with me recently about the evidence to support the theory that there once was a man called Jesus about whom the stories we know of as the Christian bible were constructed around.

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

Interesting… 2 weeks ago I started a big campaign to get people to vent their anger about banks via Twitter and what story did News.com run today?

"Bank Customers Deposit Their Anger On The Internet".

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

Seymour Hersh writing in The New Yorker magazine, July 2008:

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.

I just got off the phone after a very annoying phone call with a Three "customer support" person.

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.

"Aboriginal people are 13 times more likely to be locked up than other Australians."

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".

Tomorrow is my 2nd Twitter anniversary so it’s the perfect opportunity to take stock of what it means to me.

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

My guest today is Jabiz R. Born in Iran, raised in America, now living in Qatar, Jabiz is an educator and blogger. I’ve really enjoyed some of his posts about Iran lately so I invited him onto the show.

Last week I wrote a post on the recent report out of Ireland about the true extent of child abuse committed by the Catholic Church from the ’30s through to the ’70s.

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.

Hey folks, apparently I screwed up the track alignment in show 381 (about banks) so there is a fair amount of overlapping of voices. (Thanks to Anthony Voevodin for letting me know!)
I’ve re-edited the show and fixed it up, and I’m attaching it here.

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!

Continuing our theme about banks this week, a friend sent me a link to the ChangeThis site which has a manifesto from Douglas Rushkoff. Here are a couple of excerpts:

“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.

The Commonwealth Bank announced that it is raising interest rates by 10 base points (which is 0.1% to the rest of us). Deputy prime minister Julia Gillard called CBA “selfish” and Community services minister Jenny Macklin said mortgage holders had every reason to be furious with the Commonwealth Bank.

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.

June 14 is the birthday of Ernesto Guevara de la Serna known to most of us by his nickname "Che".

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.

UPDATE: The original audio for this show had a problem (overlapping tracks) so I’ve re-uploaded it here.

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:

Scott Adams tells us about the illusion of time:

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?"

The reason no record label knows how to market anything to new media is they don’t live there. They don’t get it because they don’t use it. – Trent Reznor

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.

Today I’m recording a podcast about why people hate banks so much – and what we can do about it.

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.