Due to prolonged wet weather here on the NSW North Coast at least two of North Coast Voices regular authors are having problems with their phone lines and Internet connections.
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PERTH-headquartered ISP iiNet said it has sought legal advice on Communications Minister Senator Stephen Conroy's public commentary on its legal defence in a high-profile copyright case before the NSW Federal Court.
On Tuesday 31 March 2009 the SBS TV program Insight ran a debate/group discussion called Blocking the Net.
Whirlpool forums in their turn have been discussing this program with surprising results:
– mark (Newton)
It was an unfortunate and rather ironic lapse on Insight's part to censor the discussion on Internet censorship.
However, it was sheer idiocy for Senator Conroy (probably the most monitored federal minister in the Rudd Government right now) to blank out parts of his CommsDay Summit 2009 speech as delivered and post an amended version on his ministerial website.
This is a ZNet report on what Senator Conroy decided to omit:
"I thought a defence in terms of 'we had no idea' ... belongs in a Yes Minister episode."
As for the Minister's assertion reported on Monday:
That flatly contradicts what he said officially on the short-lived official DBCDE blog:
Australian consumers need to decide whether buying products containing GM ingredients is supporting biotech companies truly committed to environmentally sustainable and socially responsible agriculture production or is just supporting companies who put such sentiments on their websites and forget these principles thereafter.
She was the chief executive officer of the Birrigan Gargle Land Council.
The chairwoman of the NSW Aboriginal Land Council, Bev Manton, says she was a pioneer in the fight for justice.
"Christine's been involved with the lands rights network since its inception and I guess she has kind of grown up with that political background and fighting for the rights of her people," she said.
"She was just one of those lovely people who could negotiate and not be aggressive about it, but still be forceful and obtain the results that were required."
Christine Ferguson is survived by her son Jason and three granddaughters. She was also guardian to a young boy. (Indigenous Community News Network)
The authors of North Coast Voices will miss her friendship and, along with the rest of the Clarence Valley and the Northern Rivers region, mourn her passing.
** Post title is composed of excerpts from the many eulogies at the funeral service on Friday 27 March 2009 in Maclean, NSW.
First up, ACMA is already using its soon-to-be executive muscle to bully Australian-hosted websites into not linking to sites on its 'blacklist'. One of the sites disbarred — among many others — is a perfectly legitimate anti-abortion site that at worst could be described as 'cheesy'. ACMA's bullying is on the pricy side, too — AUD$11,000 a pop. The blacklist (as you would expect) has been leaked, while Conroy himself is now planning to 'monitor blogs'. Quite apart from the egregiousness of this exercise in censorship, it is important to realise that Ruddy is trying to bypass parliament with this stuff, so that they don't have to deal with that pesky Senate (Xenophon and the Greens as well as the Opposition in this case). Government by executive order, anyone? Skepticlawyer 23 March 2009
Is Conroy a fundy? Will this site be on his list 'cause we all know that you can't be good without religion. *Palm/Head*
You don't have to look online for sexual predators, look no further than your local church. Atheist Nexus 21 March 2009
Stephen Conroy is a Cnut 21 March 2009
STEVE CONROY BELONGS ON THE BACK BENCH AND FAILING BEING ABLE TO GET THAT RIGHT, MAY POSSIBLY FIND PURPOSE AND MEANING AS A DOOR STOP. Thinkers Podium 23 March 2009
It was only a matter of time, but it's finally happened. The DBCDE has alienated enough of its private sector partners that one of them has leaked the blacklist. Websinthe 19 March 2009
Apparently, Australian Communications Minister Stephen Conroy is wetting his bed over the thought that his fellow Australians might think somewhat less of him for so enthusiastically promoting the idea of an Internet filter. Kerplunk 23 March 2009
Guys, we're in trouble.
Attempts to rid the Internet of pornographic material are beginning to have a wider impact on freedom of expression online writes Julien Petley in the Spring 2009 article Web Control posted at Index on Censorship.**
** Due to the Rudd Government's recent entry into the strange world of Internet censorship I do not feel comfortable placing a direct link to the article, as linking directly to this academic critique would see North Coast Voices possibly risk overt bullying by the Australian Communications and Media Authority.
Update: Somebody Think of the Children reports that the residence of the owner of domain name Wikileaks has been raided.
The post-2000 derivatives explosion was also aided by American monetary policy. Greenspan reacted to the bursting of the dotcom bubble by steadily lowering official interest rates. In 2000-01 they dropped rapidly from 6.5% to 3.5%. By 2003 they had reached 1%. Effectively, at least for bankers, as Charles Morris puts it in his book The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown, money was now free. At this time the explosion in the derivatives market intersected with the explosion in another market, sub-prime mortgage lending, which rose from US$145 billion in 2001 to $625 billion in 2005. On the basis of a housing bubble, which increased the price of houses by an annual 7-8%, borrowers with low incomes and no assets were encouraged by banks and mortgage brokers to purchase houses worth several hundred thousand dollars. Derivative traders saw these sub-prime mortgages as a splendid opportunity. They bundled up the mortgages and created from them esoteric derivatives products - like collateralised mortgage obligations or collateralised debt obligations - which were then sold on in their trillions to investors and pension funds. In an article for Portfolio, Michael Lewis gives a telling example of how the racket worked. Big Wall Street firms took piles of sub-prime mortgages with a BBB rating. They bundled them into new products and divided these products into tranches. The top 60% of these tranches were rated AAA. Lewis's informant, Steve Eisman, who made his fortune by 'shorting' the corporations and the products involved in this trade (that is, gambling on their failure), kept asking himself: How is this possible; why is this allowed?......
The systematically phoney evaluations of the derivative products and the corporations which dealt in them, pocketing substantial fees with each contract, arose as a result of a straightforward but fatal ratings-agency conflict of interest. The profits of the agencies derived from the Wall Street banks and investment businesses they were supposed to rate. The continuation of their own very healthy profit growth relied on their willingness to turn a blind eye. Yet the fraudulent behaviour of Wall Street rested on another, even deeper, kind of blindness: the ideological blindness of the regulators. Most important here was the regulator-in-chief, Alan Greenspan, the most enthusiastic derivatives cheerleader, who believed with regard to derivatives (and everything else) that the invisible hand of the market was an infinitely more reliable and intelligent guide than any regulatory action by the state........
It is obvious whose interest all this served. Before the recent crash, the average taxable income of the top 15,000 American income earners was US$30 million; their annual income in total, US$441 billion. In the mid 1970s the wealthiest 1% of Americans owned approximately 20% of national assets. On the eve of the financial collapse they owned some 40%. Very many of these people derived their income and their wealth from the financial sector. In 2008, even after the sector had begun imploding, the executives of the Wall Street corporations that were eventually rescued by taxpayers rewarded themselves with US$18 billion in bonuses. Vast riches had apparently come to be seen by this predatory class as an entitlement.
The full essay here.
How much the Australian Government has borrowed because of the global financail crisis to date is here.
"We've accomplished nearly everything we set out to do," ex-Vice President Dick Cheney says Sunday about Iraq.
In a wide-ranging interview with CNN's "State of the Union," Cheney said the harsh interrogations of suspects and the use of warrantless electronic surveillance were "absolutely essential" to get information to prevent more attacks like the 2001 suicide hijackings that targeted New York and Washington.
"President Obama campaigned against it all across the country, and now he is making some choices that, in my mind, will, in fact, raise the risk to the American people of another attack," he said.
Critics said the Bush administration's "alternative" interrogation techniques amounted to the torture of prisoners in American custody, while the administration's warrantless surveillance program violated federal laws enacted after the Watergate scandal.
Since taking office in January, Obama has announced plans to close the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to halt the military trials of suspected terrorists there, and to make CIA officers follow the Army field manual's rules on interrogations. Cheney said the administration appears to be returning to the pre-2001 model of treating terrorism as a law enforcement issue, rather than a military problem.
"When you go back to the law enforcement mode, which I sense is what they're doing, closing Guantanamo and so forth ... they are very much giving up that center of attention and focus that's required, that concept of military threat that is essential if you're going to successfully defend the nation against further attacks," he said.
One gets the general impression that Cheney can't wait to complete his own memoirs and wants to start massaging the historical record right away.
Still, the poor man is being sorely tested by the blogosphere which saw Slate earlier this year posting 'exclusive excerpts' from these same memoirs after Cheney announced that he was writing his version of events.
Some of which were oddly prescient of his current attitude:
