True face of 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill

People may suffer financially from British Petroleum's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico - now in its 60th day with the damaged well only temporarily capped - but the true face of this environmental disaster is found in images of the affected wildlife.....

Seal and seabird overwhelmed by oil June 2010

More photographs here.

How the betting is running for NSW North Coast electorates in July 2010

The bets are starting to be laid down on individual seats in the Australian federal election and Page on the NSW North Coast featured in Possum's probability calculations based on where the money was going last week.
Page was calculated on a two party preferred basis at 52.36%, with a win implied probability according to Sportingbet at 53% and Sportsbet at 49% - combining all comes in with an overall implied probability of a Labor win at 51% for Janelle Saffin.
It seemed that local money mebbe riding almost neck and neck as the horses approach the barrier.
This week Possum has the money running this way across five markets:












Political tragics can find the Betfair current odds for all federal electorates listed so far in the lefthand sidebar here.
This is how a sixth player Betchoice saw the NSW North Coast race on Friday 16th July 2010:

Cowper Win Only - NSW seat
1.60
NAT - Luke Hartsuyker
2.25
ALP - Paul Sefky
15.00
GRN - Dominic King
26.00
Any Other Party

Page Win Only - NSW seat
1.75
ALP - Janelle Saffin
2.00
LIB - Kevin Hogan
26.00
Any Other Party

Lyne Win Only - NSW seat
1.02
IND - Rob Oakeshott
13.00
ALP - Frederick Lips
15.00
NAT - David Gillespie

Richmond
No details yet

When it comes to the North Coast, only in Cowper are Betchoice odds favouring the Coalition.

The Silver Bodgie & The Lover versus The Versace-Clad Clock Collector

One has to hand it to the Australian Labor Party - it certainly knows how to destabilise its own political agenda in an election year.

First it ditched many of the policies which saw it garner strong electorate support in 2007, then it changed leaders in a somewhat spectacular fashion.

Now we have former Labor prime minister Bob Hawke and his second wife the author Blanche d'Alpuget shamelessly grubbing for more money by publishing yet another biography of teh great man and going on the book promotion trail just in time to cash in on heightened political awareness this near to what will probably be a closely contested federal election.

The utterly tasteless characterization of Hazel Hawke by this pair is beneath contempt and so unnecessary to their central aim of improving the bank balance.

While Hawke's inviting himself into the current political debate by opining on the recently deposed Kevin Rudd will have some party members wishing he had as much sense as he has hair.

Given the incredibly self-serving contents of this book as displayed in extracts currently online, it is no wonder that hyper-sensitive former Labor prime minister Paul Keating should immediately send a copy of his letter to Hawke to the media.

The letter ends thus:

This letter is written now, not simply to express my disappointment but to let you know that enough is enough. That yours and Blanche's rewriting of history is not only unreasonable and unfair, more than that, it is grasping. It is as if, Narcissus-like, you cannot find enough praise to heap upon yourself. In hindsight, it is obvious yours and Blanche's expressions of friendship towards me over the last few years have been completely insincere. I can only promise you this: if I get around to writing a book, and I might, I will be telling the truth; the whole truth. And that truth will record the great structural changes that occurred during our years and my own as prime minister, but it will also record without favour, how lucky you were to have me drive the government during your down years, leaving you with the credit for much of the success.

After watching the recent ABC TV 7.30 Report interviews with Hawke and d'Alpuget I have to say I am somewhat sympathetic to the Keating position. However, the timing of all three bitter snipers is unfortunate to say the least.

Already selling at three-quarters of its ticketed price, I'm betting that Hawke, Prime Minister will quickly find itself in the discount bin at major bookstores.

UPDATE:

LET'S get one thing clear at the outset: I am fond of my stepmother, Blanche, and feel genuine pleasure at the happiness my father now shares with her.
Current publicity stimulated by her new biography covering dad's years as prime minister, and the forthcoming telemovie about those years, has, however, generated a fair bit of noise and heat and has, sadly, dragged into the limelight matters that are essentially personal.
Having declined previous opportunities to provide a "family" perspective, or represent my mother Hazel's, for the very reason that I think there are such things as a right to privacy, I am now persuaded that it is timely to say something.
The reason for this is that things have been said, and people portrayed, in a manner that fundamentally misrepresents their character. I have observed what I believe are fair and respectful boundaries about commenting publicly on the personalities and complex relationships of my family life or anyone else's. I am loyal to both my parents. But a line has been crossed, a legacy hijacked, and a lot of people are seriously unimpressed. The part I take particularly personally is a suite of comments and insinuations about my mother Hazel. Their effect is to invite a rewriting of history on the basis of a series of inaccurate premises. Forbearance extends only so far before it becomes a complicit silence, and I think it's time that, as someone who has known her well for 53 years and spoken previously on her behalf, I set a few things straight.
My mother is entitled, on the basis of the life she has lived and the way she has lived it, to be recognised as a person of deep conviction and principled choices. She was consistently motivated by far more noble concerns than money, where she lived, or the "reputation du jour" of her ex-husband.

More from Sue Pieters-Hawke writing in The Age on 17 July 2010 here.

On the media, readers and political misconceptions

One perspective.........

From the pen of xkcd

Yet another...........

.......people typically receive corrective information within “objective” news reports pitting two sides of an argument against each other, which is significantly more ambiguous than receiving a correct answer from an omniscient source. In such cases, citizens are likely to resist or reject arguments and evidence contradicting their opinions – a view that is consistent with a wide array of research.... [When Corrections Fail: The persistence of political misperceptions]

And another again.......

A large majority of Australians believe that most forms of media in Australia are ‘often biased’, a special Roy Morgan telephone survey finds.
The survey also finds a majority of Australians believe newspaper and TV journalists and talk-back radio announcers ‘often get their facts wrong’. Large majorities believe that newspaper and TV journalists ‘invade people’s privacy unnecessarily’. However, they are divided on whether the media are ‘too left-wing leaning’ or ‘too right-wing leaning’. [Roy Morgan Research 2007]

Where I decide to go fishing and almost miss Barry O'Farrell making a right twit of himself...

Looked at the sky early yesterday morning and decided it mightn't be a bad day to wet a line.
Imagine my surprise on returning to shore to discover it wasn't only the fish that had been taking the bait - NSW Lib leader Barry O'Farrell had also been swiftly reeled in by the Twitterverse.

benraue: Did @barryofarrell just accidentally tweet a 'deeply off the record' comment to @latikambourke? http://twitpic.com/25b9bk
via Twitpic 20+ recent retweets

stilgherrian: Is "Rangatweetgate" a word? Well it is now. #rangatweetgate #rtg via TweetDeck Retweeted by benraue and 2 others

Bazza's loose lips explain why Coalition candidates on the NSW North Coast are so lacklustre - only second stringers are applying!

The concept of a dysfunctional life and the national e-health database

Ever since medical doctors such as John D'Arcy first began to appear on television screens, be heard on radio and be quoted in print commenting on social, economic and political aspects of Australian life it became apparent that medicalisation of the media and everyday life was well underway in Australia.

All behaviour commonly thought of as unacceptable (and even some behaviours previously falling within 'normal' ranges) quickly became defined as some form of deviance, psychopathology or physical illness. Nevermore so than when applied to those without a large measure of social or political power ie., children and the poor, which had previously only suffered under moral labels such as "lazy" and "bad".

If you are under voting age or come from a socio-economic band found at the bottom of the pecking order then it is highly likely that many aspects of your life are now considered to be so dysfunctional that the state must step in to regulate your behaviour - as instanced by the Australian Government's staged national roll out of a scheme quarantining at least half of the fortnightly cash transfer amount received by certain welfare recipients.

That Australia was not alone in experiencing this domination by the world view of health professionals was obvious when one noticed that internationally this phenomena was being debated, including such issues as the cross-over between moral and medical explanations of criminal behaviour, the medicalisation of sleep and fads in diagnosis which saw some previously rare diagnoses cluster in ways that surprised many epidemiologists.

One only has to look at the increased incidence of multiple personality diagnoses (an estimated 10 per cent of the 1991 North American adult population had a DSM-III-R dissociative disorder of some kind) in the years since The Three Faces of Eve was first picked up by the world-wide media to realise that something may be amiss.

Much of this past discussion was confined to the halls of academia and often only broke free of those constraints via humour, instanced in the late 1980's by an early version of The Etiology and Treatment of Childhood which can now found on the Internet and, more recently by George Monbiot's A Modest Proposal for Tackling Youth.

In the current century this medicalisation of the human condition is so entrenched that some in the principal offending professions became a mite uncomfortable and now posit the theory that we are all to blame for this state of affairs:
Originally, the concept of medicalisation was strongly associated with medical dominance, involving the extension of medicine's jurisdiction over erstwhile 'normal' life events and experiences. More recently, however, this view of a docile lay populace, in thrall to expansionist medicine, has been challenged. Thus, as we enter a post-modern era, with increased concerns over risk and a decline in the trust of expert authority, many sociologists argue that the modern day 'consumer' of healthcare plays an active role in bringing about or resisting medicalisation.
However, this concern has not halted the inexorable march forward of this universal redefinition of life.

In 2010 it seems that children are being further defined by the concept of criminal behaviour and in June this impressively titled study was released by the British Home Office; Experimental statistics on victimisation of children aged 10 to 15: Findings from the British Crime Survey for the year ending December 2009, England and Wales.

This study seeks to define the following scenario as a crime in law:
At home, two siblings are playing and one of them deliberately smashes the other's toy.

Now before you start shaking your head or roaring with laughter (because after all everything is so normal and sane in your particular corner of the national garden) think about the ramifications of this penchant for defining so much of the human condition as deviance, dysfunction, congenital defect or criminal activity.

Think about what the Gillard Labor Government's e-health national database of all Australian citizens (privately endorsed by the Federal Coalition Opposition ) may actually permanently contain by way of label or opinion concerning your own health, lifestyle decisions and family dynamics.

These digital records will not only affect how you are viewed today and tomorrow by officialdom in all its many guises, they might also affect how competent the state deems you to be as you enter frail old-age and whether control of your assets/financial affairs are assumed by another.

Scared yet?

Ratio of national leader's pay to their country's GDP per person

When you don't get what you pay for?

The Economist on 5th July 2010