There is a little Mugabe in every world leader

No-one should wonder at an UN conference on world food security which allows the attendance of a despot like Robert Mugabe who has reduced his own country to abject poverty and food shortages.
The fact that neither the UN or any other international organisation have found an answer to chronic food shortages or cyclical famine lies in the nature of modern societies and their leaders.
Each and every one is willing to make symbolic and one-off gestures to assist the world's poor and starving, but none are willing to abandon their single-minded pursuit of political power and economic dominance.
Like any despot they all only look to their own personal interests and that of their immediate entourage and ignore all else.
Like Mugabe they each point a finger of blame when they should be remedying their own failings.
So when Ban Ki-Moon calls for a 50% increase in world food production to help feed the 100 million food poor, you know it will only happen if major food exporting nations are able to reap substantial profits.
That many Western nations would prefer to write a cheque like Great Britain, rather than seriously look at how to increase the agricultural self-reliance of the poorest nations and reduce the world's reliance on energy intensive farming and the associated costs of water, fuel, fertilisers and copyrighted seed.

The shortsighted view relying on successive foreign aid fixes has resulted in above world map found at BBC News yesterday.

Link to International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), a specialized agency of the United Nations, website and debate on who pays the price.

Don't vote - it only encourages them

I seem to remember that during the 2007 Australian federal election campaign, both sides of politics promised us a civilised parliament this time round.
Polite and respectful.
Listening to Question Time this session and it seems that everyone is determined to keep ignoring this election 'promise'.
I had been hoping that (after it's initial cardboard cut out nonsense) the Coalition would have learnt something and altered its approach.
Instead, behaviour in the House of Reps is just as counterproductive to the passage of business as it always was and, Wee Brennie Nelson and his mates now have the hypocritical hide to accuse the Rudd Government of ramming bills through the House and cutting off full debate.
Tactics used by themselves when they were part of the former Howard Government.
However, Rudders and his gang do not get off free here. After all they appear to be using many of the very tactics they strenuously objected to when in opposition. The Australian Parliament is just as its always been - a place where political point scoring outranks any consideration of good governance.
A nest of snakes operating on basic species loyalty.

It's confirmed - NASA press office lied about climate change evidence

The Washington Post on Tuesday.

An investigation by the NASA inspector general found that political appointees in the space agency's public affairs office worked to control and distort public accounts of its researchers' findings about climate change for at least two years, the inspector general's office said yesterday.

The probe came at the request of 14 senators after The Washington Post and other news outlets reported in 2006 that Bush administration officials had monitored and impeded communications between NASA climate scientists and reporters----

From the fall of 2004 through 2006, the report said, NASA's public affairs office "managed the topic of climate change in a manner that reduced, marginalized, or mischaracterized climate change science made available to the general public." It noted elsewhere that "news releases in the areas of climate change suffered from inaccuracy, factual insufficiency, and scientific dilution."

Officials of the Office of Public Affairs told investigators that they regulated communication by NASA scientists for technical rather than political reasons, but the report found "by a preponderance of the evidence, that the claims of inappropriate political interference made by the climate change scientists and career public affairs officers were more persuasive than the arguments of the senior public affairs.

 

The million dollar question is whether a President McCain or President Obama will have the political will to stop presidential appointees trying to direct both science and government policy.

America is such an economic giant that if it does not squarely face the obligation to tackle climate change, there will be little incentive for those other emerging giants to do so.

The end result being that people the world over, in areas like the NSW North Coast, will then be faced with social and economic devastation. 

Google thinks people willing to pay for online content

Yesterday the World Association of Newspapers told us that:

• Digital and mobile advertising revenues are projected to grow to more than 150 billion dollars by 2011, a 12-fold growth from 2002.
• Wireless subscriptions continue to grow, from 1.1 billion in 2002 to a projected 3.4 billion in 2011, an expansion of more than three-fold.
• Broadband is expected to grow from 51.38 million households world-wide in 2002 to nearly 540 million households in 2011, a growth of more than ten-fold.
• The mobile customer base has grown from 945 million in 2001 to 2.6 billion in 2006.

According to Google these households will eventually pay for their mainstream online content.

The first question here is - what social and economic demographic do these numbers represent?
Those living in absolute poverty cannot afford the technology and, even individuals or families living in comparative poverty in OECD countries struggle to afford the most basic forms of this technology.
The second question is - will the fact that large Internet players are now thinking in terms of conventional economic models (when looking to expand markets and profits) begin to exacerbate the divide between rich and poor?
Thereby locking even more people out of the full range of news and information sharing sources.

If a petrol commissioner can't deliver lower fuel prices, what will the inquiry into grocery prices bring?

The Rudd Government's brief look into fuel prices led to the creation of a petrol commissioner and adoption of the Fuel Watch policy.
While being able to go online to find the cheapest at bowser petrol price nearest to you may go a small way to allowing consumer choice, it does nothing to actually bring costs down for an
extended period of time in what is supposedly a competitive market.
National implementation of this monitoring scheme may be difficult to achieve, and once the novelty wears off voter dissatisfaction is bound to resurface.

So what hope does Rudd's inquiry into grocery prices have when the ACCC's Graeme Samuel confesses himself at a loss to find any competitive edge between Coles, Woolworths and Metcash.
Although it has to be said that the degree of investigative fervour does not appear to be high, given that quite a bit of information received appears to be based on submissions and industry response seems almost casual to the outside observer.
There has been very little to show of Samuel's statement;
"We have the power to subpoena documents from parties who can assist us with inquiry, to subpoena witnesses to appear before us, because we will be conducting public hearings around Australia to obtain evidence from witnesses, that evidence will be given under oath.For the most part, it will be public, but in some cases, it may need to be confidential. So we have very, very extensive powers."
I'm afraid the National Farmers Federation may have hit the nail on the head when it called this inquiry a toothless tiger.

Kevin Rudd's early penchant for calling inquiries may quickly come back and bite his rear, if solid recommendations leading to realistic solutions are not forthcoming.
I very much fear that the result of the grocery inquiry will be an exhortation a la Wayne Swan for people to "shop around".

Regrets? I've had so few: John Winston Howard

If I were still prime minister, we wouldn't be withdrawing from Iraq says former Australian Prime Minister John Howard in a The Sydney Morning Herald article. 

 

Howard went on to say of his decision to unlawfully invade Iraq in the face of considerable opposition from the Australian people; "It was hard; very, very, very hard. It was very much my decision." It was a decision influenced "partly by the fact I had been in America at the time of the [September 11] attack and because of what terrorism represented".

 

John Howard is stuck with an eternal defence (no matter how simplistic or revisionist) of his decision to go to war because complaints to The Hague just won't go away.

ICCACTION ha reportedly sought a "legal brief" that it intends to forward to the court.

 

ICCACTION brief of May 2008 is here.

A perennial Australian favourite: let's beat up on welfare recipients

There is one thing a wide section of the Australian community can be depended on to display - a deep and abiding prejudice against any form of difference and an intolerance of people on the dole.
For some reason many think prejudice is acceptable when sent by email, as was this montage/photograph with the legend: Support the system that supports me. Centrelink.
This piece managed to capture at least one spiteful myth about welfare recipients; that they are all bludgers on the make.
When are these e-mail idiots going to grow up?