7 thoughts on “Monday message board”

  1. It would be remiss of this old Port man not to describe the atmosphere in SA today. It will be a big welcome to Mad Monday for all those Fruit Tingles fans and their amalgamated team of many losers. We, proud of the past and confident of the future, loitering around the water coolers, photocopiers and smoko rooms, endlessly reliving those Motlop screamers and Tredders tackles, at our cocky, incorrigible best, while they mumblingly console themselves, buried with Rugby World Cup and the cricket articles, or dreaming of some new scientific fitness regime their coach can cook up. In the famous words of their beloved coach. ‘It’s all part of the process’ Crows fans, or it will be endlessly until they can get a forward line together. Yes, it’s the old Port Adelaide tradition! Pity I’m home with the flu and will miss all the fun. Oh we’ll never stop, stop, stop….!

  2. observa,

    Gloating is not pretty, but if I were you I’d get it in while you can. The Cats’ utter demolition of the Roos should have put the wind up anyone who couldn’t win by 4 points or who couldn’t put over 100 on the board. 🙂

    I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see Port in the GF, but I’d be gobsmacked to see them even come close.

    And don’t ask where my team came – suffice it to say that Carlton tanking in the last game was a real downer for me.

  3. There is a chilling description of the escalation of US air power in Iraq and Afghanistan at Foreign Policy in Focus. Extracts:

    ” According to Associated Press, there has been a five-fold increase in the number of bombs dropped on Iraq during the first six months of 2007 over the same period in 2006. More than 30 tons of those have been cluster weapons, which take an especially heavy toll on civilians”.

    “The number of civilian deaths in Afghanistan from air strikes has created a rift between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United States…Coalition forces are now killing more Afghan civilians than the Taliban are”.

  4. “Gloating is not pretty, but if I were you I’d get it in while you can.”

    We know that but what the hell! Crow baiting’s a favourite pastime hereabouts and we may as well make hay while the sun shines briefly. Speaking of hay, maybe that equine flu will mutate into a feline variety and knobble the Cats or something.

    On a more scientific note, just to refresh your memory, here is all the team rankings in order of percentage after Round 15 when every team had played each other.

    Geel 152%
    Haw 117%
    Syd, Adel 114%
    WC 107%
    Port, Coll 105%
    Bull 102%
    Kang, Dock 101%
    Ess 97%
    Bris 96%
    StK 92%
    Melb 79%
    Carl, Rich 77%

    You can see how 7 teams in the top 8 were already selected, with only the Kangas to join them over the next 5 rounds, albeit the order was shuffled about due to their points and percentage rankings. From their percentages then, you could predict close finals games between Crows and Hawks, Port and WC and Geelong to whack the Kangas (that healthy 51% average difference) while Collingwood’s win over the Swans seems a good result for the Pies. As well we might expect a Hawks/Cats GF, with a comfortable win to the Cats.

  6. Here’s an interesting moral dilemma which I confess I don’t know the answer to. Now the SA Govt is basically calling for more foster parents here-
    http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,22606,22393056-2682,00.html
    Basically the question is, if you did put your hand up as a foster parent would you be complicit in stealing children aka the stolen generation, or only if they were aboriginal children? ie does it only apply when you are one race/culture and the child another. I guess in my case it’s not quite true I don’t have the answer. I’d say bugger all that mumbo jumbo malarkey, it’s the kid’s welfare that’s important, but then wasn’t that true for my parent’s and grandparents generation?

  7. Please Note: formerly, for a short period of time, I used the account name of ‘cacofanix’

    —

    Klein : neoliberals are the world’s ambulance chasers

    This is from a review of Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine” by Brian Lynch and Georgia Straight. Any day now it will be onsale in Australia’s book stores.

    Klein explains that she first noticed this pattern during a trip to Sri Lanka in the summer of 2005 to report on the devastation the Asian tsunami had wreaked on that country’s shores six months before. What she saw there, she says by phone from Toronto, was “a sort of amping up of a corporate agenda from free-trade light to free-trade heavy, with no veneer of consentu2013just exploiting people in their deepest moment of vulnerability and disorganization, when there’s no possibility of democratic participation”.

    Within mere days of the disaster, Klein says, the Sri Lankan government passed a bill opening the way for the privatization of water and began creating legislation to sell off the national electricity company. Moreover, by the time she arrived in the battered country, government officials had set up a “buffer zone” that stretched the length of the island’s east coast, preventing traditional fishing communities from returning to the waterfront to rebuild their shattered homes. The ruling was ostensibly for the sake
    of public safety, in case of another monstrous wave. But, as Klein argues in detail in her book, the motives behind it seemed questionable, given that the tourism industry was exempted from such restrictions. Resort owners in Sri Lanka had long sought to have the fishing villages removed from the otherwise pristine beaches; in fact, they had increased the pressure in early 2003, when the government began touting an economic-growth program, formulated in part by the World Bank, that singled out high-end tourism as the key to the country’s future prosperity in the global marketplace.

    “The force of that natural disaster,” Klein tells the Straight , “was immediately harnessed by international lendersu2026and the need for tremendous aid was used as leverage to make many of the countries hit by the tsunami, including Sri Lanka, submit to what used to be called ‘structural adjustment’ – privatization and deregulation.”

    (daggett: perhaps we should look again at Austalia’s seemingly generous aid package to Indonesia for tsunami disaster relief in the light of this knowledge.)

    “When [Hurricane] Katrina hit New Orleans,” she says, “we started to see this very same pattern emerge instantly, and we started to hear immediately from the think tanks in Washington that this is really an opportunity to get rid of the public-school system and have a charter-school system, or to get rid of all those housing projects and turn them into mixed-use housing, which really means condos. Then I thought, ‘Okay, this is the thesis.’ But when I started to write, I realized that what I had thought was a new tacticu2013this use of disaster and crisis and trauma to impose these economic policiesu2013has actually been in play now for 35 years. And so I sort of traced the
    roots of this chapter of economic history.”

    According to Klein, the roots go back to 1973, when the US-backed toppling of Chile’s elected, left-leaning president, Salvador Allende, brought right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet to power. …

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