Emoo & Mikey

Ross Garnaut had this to say on Friday:

Climate change policy remains a diabolical problem. There is a chance - just a chance - that Australia and the world will manage to develop a position that strikes a good balance between the costs of dangerous climate change and the costs of mitigation.

Kev had this to say today, narry two days after:

"OPEC need to open the production lines to a greater extent, increase global oil supply," Mr Rudd told Network Ten. "They've done it a bit in response to representations from (US) President (George W) Bush.
"The G8 provides an opportunity to apply the blowtorch to the OPEC organisation and it's time that happened."

Looks like I'm not the only one who has been walking around with a bag over my head, fingers in my hears, vomitting bile and singing: climate change's a myth, climate change's a myth lalalala climate change's a myth. Kev has been and Ross wants to (except he's got to write that darn report.)

As if this farce wasn't funny enough, here's a clown:

"This Government believes climate change is an economic issue, and the only way to tackle climate change is with real economic reform."

The Right Honorable Minister for Climate Change and Water seems to be the under the misapprehension that real economic reform means real economic reform, you know structural adjustment. At least PM Rudd wont have to comission an inquiry into bullying Arabs. There are several workable models already available courtesy of George W Bush and the residents of Camden.

No recent natural disaster has effected me more than the Sichuan earthquake. The images of collapsed school buildings and dead children being dragged from the rubble moved me to tears. For me, the ability to picture almost exactly the architecture and layout of the school buildings, and visualise the cramped rows of students crouched over their exercises or asleep under their identical school windcheaters has cancelled the distance and removed unreality from these pictures. I worked in school buildings just like those.

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I've developed a little crush on Barack Obama of late. He has just the right brand of centre-left politics to make this little liberal swoon. Plus, listening to Obama takes me back to the good old days of Kevin07. Before they won office and started dithering about trivial little policies like FuelWatch.

Once there was a house, and it was dark. At least it was a little bit too dark. It was also dirty and dusty and filled with insects.

This house although it sat upon a most spectacular location - teetering perilously over the edge of a valley within which passed dogs, people, kites and, just occasionally, a machine with 4 wheels and a motor - it was too often under-rated and over-looked. Such a beautiful building, stood in such a special site, deserved more. Yes! it deserved much more.

And then one day arrived a girl, who carried with her a history of baguettes and crepes and who dreamt of empanadas and pasteles de tres leches. She looked upon the walls withered by wanton neglect; upon the floors nearly invisible under layers of powder; upon the windows which barely offered a passage to the outside world so smudged were they with fingerprints. And toeprints! And she said to her herself

"I must do something"

And she did indeed do something. Setting to her work with fierce determination, she scrubbed baths and cleaned walls and crushed cobwebs, directing her friends as though they were servants. She bought a super-mopa (a super mop) and a super-tapon (a super sink-plug) and one morning spilled forward a utopian vision of such strength that her helpless house-mates were compelled to shake out the alfombra (rug) of doom.

And on it went, until one day there remained only one thing to do. In that moment, as the light of Cerro Alegre was ignited and the transformation of the once lonely house complete, everything seemed right in the world

Translation: Freedom for Mapuche political prisoners. And anarchy apparently.

I am now the proud owner of a neonate. It took me nine months to grow him, and an entire day to get him out. He is a very healthy baby albeit slightly serious. In this regard he takes after his Mum.

Now, I know we mothers are supposed to believe our creations to be the most beautiful, precious, splendid miracles and so on ad nauseam. Honestly, let me make this confession, mine looks like a koala. Which is why we call him Koala man.

And while this may not interest you, I thought it was a magnificent segue with Mikey's earlier post about the Koala dance.

I listen to a lot of music. From the time I wake up to when i go to bad a huge majority of my time is spent accompanied by music: clock radio, stereo, mp3 player, busker in the street...whatever

As a result I hear a lot of good music and a decent amount of crap. Every now and then I hear greatness. Usually i will be prepared for this greatness by something i've read or heard about the artist (Beatles, Bob Marley, Morricone or Bacharach for example) but just occasionally i'll happen on to an artist on my own and be completely blown away in a way that is not quite possible with the above, long established performers. Its not just the preparation thing, but that most in the former category have finished or are at the tail end of their careers. Those in the latter category are generally either on the cusp of or at their creative peak.

There is usually a moment of stunned realization, one single song which carries out the mind blowing, sending out an unmistakeable watch-this-space signal.

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Tragically, the numbers speak for themselves. From the world wide help blog via Global Voices

Today the picture is grim in the aftermath of Wednesday's Peruvian earthquake. The death toll has risen to 510. It is currently estimated that 85,000 persons have been injured, and 17,000 houses destroyed. Total chaos is reported in San Clemente, five km. from Pisco, and the situation is desperate. A series of aftershocks occurred during the night and early morning hours, further fraying nerves.

This description in a book i'm reading, Travelling on the edge: journeys in the footsteps of Grahame Greene, does a good job of capturing how I felt the other night at Ache Havana , mutely sitting, watching all my housemates and friends salsa through the night. The scene takes place in the real Havana, at the Tropicana nightclub, featured in Greenes brilliant novel Our Man in Havana:

Yet the evenings climax was even more impressive. The goddesses launched themselves into the audiences, trailing their ruffled sleeves over our heads and looking for a victimto dance with them on stage. English men and women would have stared into their drinks or hurried to the loo but the Cubans jostled for attention like the class swot. they were middle aged, paunchy and dressed in Bulgarian lounge suits, but on stage, grinding their hips and gyrating their buttocks they were transformed into socialisms answer to John Travolta. The pale, gawky, porky tourists gaped enviously. Here was proof that if God gave with one hand, he took away with another.

In the end though, im more optimistic than the author; I have to be.

For all our dollars we would never be able to acquire an ounce of their grace.

A selection of slogans i've seen around the streets ( as remembered roughly.)

Lea Marx Bakunin (Read Marx Bakunin)

Ni Bush, Ni Chavez, hasta una America Latina liberada
(Neither Bush nor Chavez, towards a liberated Latin America)

Viva la revolucion social (Long live the social revolution)

There was one more which I can't remember right now, something to do with voting informally. And another one, more tangentially related, about the only good religion being a burning religion, thoughtfully scrawled on the side of a church. I don't really know what to make of this except that the anarchist are out in force; as is evidenced by the post structuralist nature of the above scribblings and the ubiquity of their A for Anarchist symbols. Not exactly an anarchist but with a tendency that way, I would usually be kindly disposed to such a group.

The fact that, as well as putting their political views on public, these guys appear to enjoy defacing public architecture and public art (pictures to come) makes me think that they (or at least some of them) are dickheads.

A little while ago I came across this great, detailed and level-headed piece on Chavez and on Venezuela in general. This is noteworthy because so much half-baked and so little balanced analysis of this subject makes the english-language press, a point Ivan Briscoe makes in his own way:

The frenzied impasse over Chávez's democratic credentials or digitalised Marxism, however, utterly fails to capture the contradictions of the Venezuelan street. Just as the president's socialism jostles uneasily with the habits of an oil-rich state, the conviction that a new tyranny is settling into place ignores abundant evidence that the government's greatest battle, which it may be losing, is to keep control of its own proceso.

There is a body of english-language (gringo) press which touts itself as the balanced truth about Chavez, which thinks itself enlightened and beyond political tribalism by arguing that social democracy, tackling inequality and combatting imperialism is good, but Chavez is bad, because of his methods mostly. Which is laudable as far as it goes. However in my opinion this analysis suffers from at least 3 fatal flaws:

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Did you ever have one of these days,
where you love the town that you live in?

That which doubles for the Devil,
Is only powder

Blue Marble Girl - Giant Sand

Actually I had one of those days yesterday, and today is shapng up pretty good too. The town I live in is Valparaiso, in the 5th region of Chile, or, as its more affectionally known, Valpo.

Below is some stuff that I wrote as part of a project on development in Valparaiso. It was written as objective analysis, but also kind of works as homage I think.

Geographically Valparaiso is split into two sections: the plan (the flat section adjoining the coast) and the Cerros (the manifold hills which rise up from this flat.) Very broadly, the Plan contains the city's commercial and tourist districts while the Cerros are mainly residential but also house some cultural neighbourhoods.

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but the following youtube is too good not to share. Jimi Hendrix riffing around Auld Lang Syne. Shame the live video footage doesnt continue.

It feels to me like we've entered a new stage in Australian electoral politics. First we had Rudd being taken seriously as a potential pm, then this moved into Howard needing to pick things up quick smart or risk losing it all. Now I tend to think that JWH and the Coalition have gone past the point of no return...and this was before i read about the latest rates rise.

Never, say never, but Labor's definitely a real good thing at this point (in horseracing terminology that is. In general terms im not nearly so sure that description holds.)

Thsi morning I was flipping through the dictionary (such a diligent student...) and I came across the entry for:

Puta

f (vulg) whore
Hijo de ___ (vulg) bastard (GB) son of a bitch (US)
de ___ madre (vulg) brilliant, great
ir de putas (vulg) to go whoring

in addition puta is used not just as a positive adjective (the third definition above) but much more commonly as a negative descriptor. You hear it everywhere. I use it, my friends use it; you hear it so much it basically rolls of the tongue. Plus its alliterative.

In (australian) english we use words like damn, bloody and fucking for this purpose, none of them at all specific to the female condition. Sure we also use words like bitch and pussy, but the spanish have equivalents to these too, indeed son of a bitch is translated above as son of a whore.

But there is something disturbingly and revealingly misogynist about the use of puta in Spanish. It's not all that surprising given Chile obviously suffers from an hispanic-gifted machismo, though not as much as some of the hotter (both in temperament and temperature) latin american countries. I can only imagine what the language is like up there.

I think I'll try and stop using it as far as im conscious of doing so, though there's probably a counterargument about how the word has taken on a meaning of it's own.