So I thought I’d watch Catalyst as they had a story on fuel cells, but it was unwatchable because of the silly and obtrusive background music. My wife alerted me to this trend a while ago. Background music has escaped from the establishing shots where it’s long been standard, and now continues throughout the program, even when people are speaking. The effect is that any added information from the visuals is more than offset by the added noise of background music, leaving TV providing less than radio, not to mention plain text.
Month: October 2007
More on mercenaries
This Washington Post article, describing the killing of Iraqi civilians by Blackwater mercenaries who are, under laws imposed by the US, free to murder whoever they want in Iraq without any fear of adverse consequences, and who have regularly exercised that freedom, makes it clear enough that Blackwater alone has been sufficient to doom the war effort in Iraq (not that the disaster wasn’t a certainty in any case, given that Bush was in charge). Blackwater is no better, and in important respects worse, than the rest of the militias and armed gangs that infest Iraq thanks to the efforts of the Coalition of the Willing.
With any luck, Blackwater will ruin the Republican party of which it is a creature, just as Sandline destroyed the government of Julius Chan in PNG.
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Slicing and dicing $1 million a day
Despite Costello’s supposed leak of a late November election date, it now appears Howard intends to hang on until his publicly-funded ad blitz turns the polls around, or, until it gets too close to Christmas to hold off any longer (8 December is mooted, but a sufficiently desperate government could go even later, into the New Year if necessary).
Sensibly enough, Labor has been pointing to what could have been done with the public money Howard is using for mass mailouts on “John Howard Writes to you on a Subject No Parent Can Afford to Miss”, ad campaigns on the theme “Footy fans back government” and so on. Here’s a piece from Tanya Plibersek
One way to keep this running is to say, every day, what could have been done with the million dollars or so the government is spending. But it could be sliced geographically instead of temporally. If I were running Labor’s campaign, I’d take the government’s total ad spending this term (around $750 million, IIRC) and convert that into around $5 million per electorate. Then find, for each electorate, $5 million of spending effectively foregone (two extra teachers at X High School, a local road project etc). Finally, promise to create a fund for worthwhile local projects like these, to be funded by a cessation of large-scale government propaganda.
The nice thing about this strategy is that would have some chance of locking Labor in to ending the downward spiral of ethics in which the bad behavior of one government justifies even worse behavior by the next.
Mercenaries
Mercenary soldiers have a deservedly bad name in history, both for their conduct and for the fact that they have not generally lived up to the expectations of those who hired them. But, under the more appealing name “private military contractors”, they have enjoyed a resurgence in recent years.
This piece in Salon by PW Singer concludes
If we judge by what has happened in Iraq, when it comes to counterinsurgency and the use of private military contractors, the U.S. has locked its national security into a vicious cycle. It can’t win with them, but can’t go to war without them.
Note: I omitted the link, but have included it now
Bad news for Howard
Most people are still treating the opinion polls, showing a big lead for Labor, with a grain of salt and sometimes more. They may be right – views can change a lot in an election campaign. But this poll undertaken by the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney (PDF over the fold) suggests that Howard will have a fair bit of trouble winding back Labor’s lead. It doesn’t ask anything about party preferences, but it does ask about issues that seem likely to drive quite a lot of votes, including attitudes to Iraq, climate change and George Bush. It seems reasonably to bet that someone who strongly opposes the war in Iraq, strongly supports action on climate change and strongly dislikes George Bush is going to put Labor ahead of the government, and vice versa. People who have neutral qualified views on these issues are likely to decide on other grounds. So, we can use the proportion giving “strongly agree/disagree” answers to get an idea of the core votes for the parties. So here are some results
Australias involvement in Iraq*; Strongly oppose 41, strongly support 10
Climate Change; More serious than Islamic fundamentalism 40, Less serious 20
Overall opinion of Bush: Very unfavourable 39, Very favourable 4
On all these questions, there are around 40 per cent of respondents with strong support for the position most strongly opposed to that of the government. Presumably, the composition of this group varies a bit from question to question, but still it seems fair to say that Labor is going into the election with a base of 40 per cent, while the government’s core support is 5-10 per cent.
* Asking after a question about Al Qaeda reduced this to 34
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Bush v Gore in 2007 (antipodean rematch)
My article from last week’s Fin is over the fold
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Changes
In hopes of improving the site’s woeful performance, I’ve made a few changes, including upgrading to WordPress 2.3. I also changed back to the red theme I had a while back. Most significantly, I’ve removed login requirements. I’m hoping that I’ve been inaccessible to spammers long enough to have reduced the flow to a level Akismet can handle. Please advise if problems with loading the page are better, worse or (most likely, I guess) unchanged.
Update 2/10/07 9pm After some ups and downs it looks as if things are working better. Please comment and advise either way
Monday message board
It’s time, once again for the Monday Message Board. As usual, civilised discussion and absolutely no coarse language, please.
John Quiggin 