by cameron | May 19, 2012 | Uncategorized
Aaron Sorkin, writer of THE WEST WING, THE SOCIAL NETWORK and the upcoming biopic on Steve Jobs, recently gave the Commencement address at Syracuse University.
The text is, surprisingly for a man of his talents, mostly blech – work hard, stay off drugs – but here’s a few lines that really resonated with me:
Every once in a while, you’ll succeed. Most of the time you’ll fail, and most of the time the circumstances will be well beyond your control. How you live matters. You’re going to fall down, but the world doesn’t care how many times you fall down, as long as it’s one fewer than the number of times you get back up.
As some of you know, the start-up I spent the last two years of my life building (Perdomo Cigars Australia) just went belly-up. Not because it was a bad business – it was doing quite well – but because the other guy involved in the business was involved in ANOTHER business that closed down and because of a whole bunch of things I won’t bore you with, it dragged the cigar business down with it.
In times like that, it’s easy to kick yourself for a bunch of reasons – like getting involved with the wrong people, not trusting your gut (or your wife) when it/she tells you “this guy doesn’t know what he’s doing” – but that doesn’t help. Hindsight is great later on when you are doing a post-game analysis of the lessons learned. But the most important thing you need to remember when the shit hits the fan and your life cracks is GET BACK UP.
I’ve got two questions I always ask myself when things go bad.
1. What does this situation enable me to do that I couldn’t do before?
2. How can I turn this situation to my advantage?
I’ve found that these two questions quickly re-program my brain in times of drama to think about the upsides and not worry about the downsides (or about how the downsides came to happen in the first place). There’s time for analysis later.
by cameron | May 18, 2012 | energy, environment
This video posted today by Get Up! got me thinking about “fracking”.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYd5_u6ehlA]
What is this “fracking” that I’ve been hearing so much about lately? It’s something I’ve been meaning to pay more attention to.
According to this excellent site put together by the ABC, “fracking” is short for “hydraulic fracturing”. It’s all about “coal seam gas” (CSG) or “coalbed methane” as it’s known outside of Australia. CSG is methane gas that’s trapped deep down in the earth under layers of coal. The objective is to drill down into the layers that contain the CSG and bring it up to the surface. Mining CSG is a fairly recent phenomenon and there are lots of environmental concerns about how it is extracted, the amount of water the process requires and what happens to the water afterwards. It is estimated there will be 40,000 coal seam gas wells in Australia – mostly in QLD.
So what is “fracking”? According to the ABC:
In the process known as ‘fracking’, a mix of water and chemicals is pumped at high pressure down the well and into the coal seam. This process creates a network of cracks in the coal, releasing the gas and water trapped inside it. Not all wells need to be fractured. In some places, the coal is permeable, meaning it already has lots of natural cracks. In others, gas companies drill horizontally into the coal seam as an alternative to fracturing.
So is that a good thing or a bad thing? The answer is – we don’t know. There is a lot of debate between the various interested parties. The CSG industry claims the water that is extracted during the process will be available for irrigation but first it will have to be decontaminated and that’s a costly process. The environmentalists and farmers (nice to see them on the same side for once) are worried about the effect this entrance of this water will have on our water ecology. The bottom line is that this is a new industry that the mining companies are rushing into and I’m betting the majority of Australians have given little thought about what the long-term effect is likely to be on the country. A lot of money is likely to be made by a relatively small number of companies in the next couple of decades – but what will the long-term cost be to the country? To the farming industry? To the health of the people? As water is already a precious commodity in Australia, it’s something that needs serious debate and discussion before the government just hands out CSG licenses.
by cameron | May 18, 2012 | science
I can’t tell you how excited I am about this news!
I’m a huge fan of the original COSMOS series by Carl Sagan. It had a huge impact on me as a kid when it first aired on TV in Australia and these days I own a copy of the series on DVD. Sagan paved the way for people like Brian Greene and Neil DeGrasse Tyson and for podcasts like Radio Lab and SGU.
We desperately need the younger generation to truly understand and appreciate science and the power of the scientific method. Hopefully Seth (who I’m also, of course, a huge fan of) can make this happen, although FOX seems like a very strange network to try to get it up on. He obviously has a good relationship with them, but c’mon – the network of O’Reilly, Glen Beck, Roger Ailes and the network who killed Firefly? Are they really going to get on board with promoting science?
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2d13CBSef8]
(Source: Universe Today)
by cameron | May 18, 2012 | Uncategorized
(Photo: Philippe Moreau Chevrolet)
French President Francois Hollande’s new Socialist-led government adopted a 30 percent pay cut Thursday, a gesture of shared sacrifice by leaders who must now reduce the country’s massive debts and tackle spiraling unemployment. (AP)
Can you imagine the Australian government cutting their own pay by 30%?
On the contrary, they recently awarded themselves a massive pay rise.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s pay will soar by $90,000 to about $470,000 – more than either US President Barack Obama or British PM David Cameron are paid.
I appreciate that we need to offer reasonable compensation for people who devote many years of their life to public service, but surely their pay packets should be in line with the salaries of people in private enterprise. In 1999, PM John Howard had to survive on a paltry $289,270. It’s amazing that he could even get by.
It seems to me that we should have salary caps for our politicians and executives from private enterprise. How much is enough?
by cameron | Mar 19, 2012 | geopolitics, US politics
According to Jeremy Scahill, the Obama administration (and President Obama directly) is running a campaign against whistleblowers and journalists (see article at RT.com).
Now it has been divulged that Obama even appealed with the president of Yemen to ensure that one of their own journalists would stay behind bars for telling the truth. Journalist Jeremy Scahill tells RT that Yemeni reporter Abdulelah Haider Shaye was instrumental in exposing the falsities of a covert war in Yemen. In December 2009, Scahill says the press reported that a Yemeni strike had killed 34 members of al-Qaeda. When Shaye went to investigate though, he soon learned through spending time on the ground that the US was actually directly involved in the attack — an attack which took the lives of civilians. Shaye was eventually put on trial for exposing the truth behind the event and allegedly the court introduced false evidence, which in the end yielded a conviction that potentially carried a death sentence. But since the entire case against the journalist was fabricated by his government, the journalist got off with a relatively mild sentence of just five years. Under pressure, Yemeni President Saleh intended to pardon Shaye. This is when he got a call from President Obama himself, personally requesting that Saleh switch his stance on pardoning the reporter.
Is this the Obama people thought they were voting for in 2008? Chomsky says Americans should vote for Obama again in 2012 because he is “the lesser of two evils”. Perhaps. But it’s also important that they understand who they are voting for. Look behind the Hollywood-written speeches and shiny images and pay attention to what his administration actually *does*, not what it says.
Democracy Now has an excellent interview with Scahill who has just returned from Yemen.
