I just stumbled across this.

As I flicked through the pictures on their blog/webpage it occurred to me that these two stunning women look familiar. In fact I was certain I’d seen them sitting on the knee of Bob Log III at the Meredith Music Festival two years ago.

I was then elated to see the above picture which confirmed my thoughts. Bob certainly has taste.

Town Bikes, you rock my world.

And by the way, my friend Sarah was the Boob Scotch Girl. We still call her Boob Scotch to this day – good times!!

Could those of you that know me please note the 482 blog

Pro-Bush computer games? Murdoch wants finger in $26bn digital game pie

Pure gold: Mr Gates the playboy!!

A few thoughts for the day.

Get a sense of humour

Firstly a note to those “soap-avoiding, pot smoking” hippies who have taken offence to Sam Kekovich‘s rant regarding the importance of eating a lamb chop on Australia day. You Wankers.

The revolution may not be televised, but it sure as shit should have a sense of humour. Kekovich is a very funny man who says very funny things and I for one can’t wait to see the ad. As my mother has always said: “You haven’t laughed until you’ve laughed at your self.”

The ethical conclusions of ethics

I recently read Raimond Gaita‘s Quarterly Essay. It is a particularly well written piece with really fantastic ideas in it – albeit a little academic from time to time. It is concerned with the ethics of many of John Howard’s policies and, not surprisingly, argues that they are largely unethical and highly contradictory. He takes a Kantian point of view.

Anyway, I asked a friend who is particularly concerned with ethics if he would like to have a read to which he replied that he didn’t want to because he just didn’t have time but also because he didn’t like Gaita. I asked him why, to which he replied he was too academic and not realistic enough which leads him to conclusions that this particular friend of mine didn’t like. I actually disagreed with the example given of what Gaita would argue but that was beside the point. I guess my friend’s point was that you need to take into account the circumstances, not the argument – pragmatic over dogmatic or something to that extent. I disagree with this (and dogma, incidentally – I couldn’t think of a better word) because I think that it is important to have a philosophical position who’s ideas can be tested and serve to inform your decisions on issues you are less familiar with. I’d suggest that everyone has such a philosophical position (as unique as it may be), it’s just that they don’t realise it or the significance of it.

Labor’s Leadership

Finally I can’t go past a few comments on the Labor leadership. I’m concerned that Beazley and others are comparing Beazley to Howard on many levels, most notably their rise to the head of the country. Surely Beazley’s mistake in the past is that he has tried a small target strategy which is Howard territory and a key reason why Labor has lost. Labor needs to be a big target and differentiate itself from the Libs – something it is particularly poor at right now.

Second, Labor does need to promote its economic credentials and point out that the Lib’s ones are really not as flash as they make them out to be. This is true but it means that the arguments become academic. That’s not to say they aren’t true, just not palatable to the average Aussie who doesn’t even know what the OECD is, let alone what their interest rates are like. Beazley suffers from being an academic, which is fine for someone who is reasonably academic like me but makes an education policy look like a bowl of spaghetti – as innovative as it may well be – to the media and the rest of the country.

Well Mark Latham just Quit.

I’m certainly not a Labor supporter (except in the two party preferred stakes) but it does say to me that the internal politics of the ALP is still in shambles – the full extent of which I cannot understand as a labor outsider. I had high hopes for Latham – well before he was even a leadership contender. The impression I got is that he was stifled in his vision because of the internal politics that have been crippling the ALP since the Keating days. I get the impression that the ALP is really into a culture of blaming and not taking a good hard look at itself like it needs to. The problems were the topic of much discussion back in the 2001 election with a Quarterly Essay written on it and the review done by Hawke and (I can’t remember at this point, was it Barry Jones?) and are obviously yet to be resolved which I think is due largely to the ALP being such a ‘boys club’.

Beazley is tipped to return as the leader which I hope he doesn’t because of the betrayal that was that 2001 election with the Tampa, Refugees, 11/9 (NOT 9/11!) etc. Again the boys club is hopeful that with the right leader the party will just magically unite and figure out what it is on about.

Latham was unique in that he was not factionally aligned. I believe that Beazley is part of the right faction. So in that sense Latham both should have been given a better chance and had much less of a chance. What ever the case may be I feel a bit the way I did about ATSIC. That it probably should just dissolve and start all over again. Perhaps this is yet another problem with the two-party system, that that could never feasibly happen.

Am I pissed off? Yep, I’m really pissed off. The ALP is so full of a bunch of thick headed, egotistic, male wankers that they can’t see the forest for the trees. While this isn’t true for all, it is true for most and particularly the factional power brokers. I’d also argue that their formal ties to the Unions should probably be cut as they only perpetuate exactly these sorts of people who are professional politicians and who are stifling the Union movement as well.

Of course for the same reasons this will not happen in the foreseeable future.

So my vote is for Gillard. I’d like to see a woman get involved and just outright fire half of these dickheads who are doing nothing more that feeding their own egos and keeping public enemy number one, Howard, in power.

It is selfish, stupid and tactically unsound. Hence I continue my distaste for the ALP.

This is worth a read: US pondered turning enemy gay

I love my house mate, but she watches a fair bit of TV which, by default, means I watch more than I’d like to. So in the mornings she’ll often get up and flick the Telly on to get the weather and then leave it on so that when I sit down to eat my breakfast I seem to get stuck in front of it. I know I should turn it off and put some music on or read a book but I don’t.

Anyway, it seems to be that these morning news and entertainment programs are getting more and more ridiculously ‘Andrew Boltish’. This morning a topic of discussion was the Sydney City Council looking to provide legal powers for Bondi Beach’s life guards to remove perverts taking pictures of little kids. So this particular program (not sure which one) reported this as not allowing cameras on the beach which, as the Mayor of Sydney pointed out, is not the case.

So the presenter (I won’t grace her with the title of ‘reporter’ or ‘journalist’ as she was certainly neither) then, continuing to insist they were banning cameras from the beach, said ‘When I was a kid, if my Dad had seen some pervert taking photos of me, would have just gone over and biffed him’ (or something to that effect). Well I nearly fell off my seat. She was saying this as though it was quite normal. Now she was condoning violence and portraying it as welcome return to the ‘good old days’ (which weren’t too long ago as she was obviously quite young).

As Lawrence Lessig recently remarked on his blog, ‘Just when I learn not to be surprised, I’m surprised’.

I love motorbikes: “It was long riding but I had tricks to stay occupied. Two hours beyond Norseman, there begun the longest stretch of straight highway in Australia, 146 kilometres. That straight drive could bore you out of your mind, but not if you rode it on a motorcycle with both hands off the grips.”

Thank you Mr Gates for your clarification.

(Apparently advocates of freer IP law, weren’t communists, they are communists.)