One obvious answer is that we wake up from dreams but we don’t wake up from reality. But does the dreamed person in our dreams ever wake up from the dream? Or does their ‘reality’ just end for them? One minute they are living inside their reality and the next it just stops. We wake up from that dream. As far as we’re concerned the dream is over. But what does the dream person experience?

Read more.

Booz Allen Hamilton released a statement on its website Sunday addressing Snowden: “Booz Allen can confirm that Edward Snowden, 29, has been an employee of our firm for less than 3 months, assigned to a team in Hawaii. News reports that this individual has claimed to have leaked classified information are shocking, and if accurate, this action represents a grave violation of the code of conduct and core values of our firm. We will work closely with our clients and authorities in their investigation of this matter.”

(source)

So what exactly do the “core values” of Booz Allen Hamilton say an employee should do when they discover that the US government is secretly spying on its citizens? And is “telling the truth” against their “code of conduct”? I, for one, would like to know more.

Curing Religious Feelings

It’s all about the brain. One day we should be able to use fMRI tools (or their descendants) to identify psychopaths before they hurt someone and offer to cure them. Can we also use neuroscientific tools to help cure religious fundamentalists? I’m not sure they would willingly submit to be cured and we can’t ethically force them. Would you stop believing in imaginary gods and monsters if you could?

An Oxford University researcher and author specializing in neuroscience has suggested that one day religious fundamentalism may be treated as a curable mental illness.
Kathleen Taylor, who describes herself as a “science writer affiliated to the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics,” made the suggestion during a presentation on brain research at the Hay Literary Festival in Wales on Wednesday. In response to a question about the future of neuroscience, Taylor said that “One of the surprises may be to see people with certain beliefs as people who can be treated,” The Times of London notes. (source)

Women Are Horny After All

I didn’t need journalist Daniel Bergner to write a book to tell me that my wife has a massive sex drive. She reminds me every day! He’s written the book anyway -  “What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire”. According to the research he did for the book, many popular ideas about women’s sexuality is wrong, wrong, wrong. For example, they aren’t made for monogamy any more than men are. And women become physically aroused to a much wider array of visual stimuli than men, even though they deny it. Read the interview. (source)

Nazis On Meth! 

No, that’s not the title of the sequel to Iron Sky, it’s the story about meth was invented by a German in 1938 and then distributed by the millions to Nazi soldiers. Makes me wonder what impact that might have had on their early successes – and their eventual downfall? We know Der Fuhrer didn’t partake of alcohol or cigarettes, but did he use meth?

…the Wehrmacht, Germany’s World War II army, distributed millions of the tablets to soldiers on the front, who soon dubbed the stimulant “Panzerschokolade” (“tank chocolate”). British newspapers reported that German soldiers were using a “miracle pill.” (source)

Gatsby

We saw The Great Gatsby in 3D last night. It wasn’t the complete disaster I expected from the bad reviews and the stories about its troubled production, but I didn’t like it. I’m generally not a fan of Baz Luhrmann. I loved Strictly Ballroom, but all of his films since Romeo + Juliet have been too over-the-top for my tastes. I don’t mind CG effects if they are required – sure, go ahead and use them in The Avengers if you must. I just think character-driven stories don’t need them. We also saw Joe Wright recent adaptation of Anna Karenina a few months ago and I’m sure it also used CG, but it was used much more carefully, enhancing the story rather than over-powering it. That’s my two cents, anyway. Chrissy, on the other hand, loved it.

Who Is The New Doctor Going To Be? 

The BBC has announced Matt Smith is retiring at the end of the year. Who will be the new Doctor (no, not John Hurt). My tip is Ben Whishaw

(he was Q in the latest Bond film), although he might be too big now. Cumberbatch is definitely too big – and he turned it down four years ago anyhow. It will probably be someone totally unknown. If I could choose, it would be Stephen Merchant.

Yeah the last season has been pretty dreary. It’s had a few cool moment (John Hurt) but nowhere near as cool as the first season of Eleven or the first couple of seasons of Ten.

How does the CEO of Evernote use Evernote?

Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote, shares how he organises his personal install of Evernote.

 As of the time of this answer, I have about 9,000 notes in my Evernote account divided among 45 notebooks. However, the majority of these notes are in my single, default notebook. (source)

A little disappointing to those of us who obsess over getting the right combination of Notebooks & Tags. At least he has more notes than I do (6617).

You haven’t heard of D-Wave? You will.

They sell the world’s only commercial quantum computer, and recently announced an impressive new customer: a collaboration between Google, NASA and the non-profit Universities Space Research Association. What are they doing together? Research artificial intelligence.

In May 2013, D-Wave published a comparison of their technology against regular top-end desktop computers running an optimization algorithm. Using a configuration with 439 qubits, the system performed 3,600 times as fast as the best algorithm (CPLEX) on the conventional machine, solving problems with 100 or more variables in half a second compared with half an hour.

Via the Guardian:

Writer and ex-crime reporter David Simon, who created HBO TV drama The Wire, speaks to John Mulholland about capitalism, Margaret Thatcher and how anti-drug enforcement has evolved into social control. Simon features heavily in Eugene Jarecki’s documentary The House I Live In, which explores the war on drugs in the US.

Alright, well maybe not a guru, per se, but someone who gets a little OCD about Evernote. As everyone around me knows, my memory sucks (probably a result of my brain damage). I may have a hundred great ideas every hour, but if I don’t write them down, I lose them forever into the mists of my grey matter.

Enter Evernote. I’ve been using it since Sep 11, 2008 and it’s without doubt one of the greatest software applications of all time. I seriously LOVE this application. I love it in the same way I love my Macbook Pro, iPhone and iPad. I love it because it truly empowers me. It makes me smarter, more productive and more effective. Without it, I wouldn’t be able to do half the things I do. When a piece of software makes you twice as effective as you would be without it, you better believe you’ll love it.

Anyhoo… for the first few years I used Evernote, I didn’t really have a system or framework for how I worked it. I just used it as a big bucket to save stuff to. Most people I’ve met who toy with Evernote use it in the same way. AND THAT’S OKAY. One of the great things about Evernote is that it’s internal search capabilities are so powerful that you can quickly find notes based on the text inside of them. It doesn’t matter whether or not you have a filing system. Evernote will usually find your note in a few seconds.

However, if you really want to squeeze the most out of Evernote, it takes a little bit of effort to build some STRUCTURE and SYSTEM into it. I’m pretty sure that, like most things, there’s not single right way to structure Evernote, but after helping a couple of clients and my wife recently to set up their Evernote system, I thought I’d share mine as one way of pulling it all together. As you’ll see, I use a combination of Notebooks, Tags, and Applications to turn Evernote from a big storage bucket into a Doc Brown DeLorean time machine.

I know a lot of people say “I tried Evernote but I couldn’t get my head around it”. Hopefully this will help you get up and running.

STEP 1: Download Evernote Everywhere. 

Download Evernote onto your desktop, laptop, phone and tablet. The app itself is FREE, so just do it. In fact, the whole Evernote service is based on a freemium model where the apps are free, the basic account is free, and you only pay if you want more features or storage. I highly recommend getting the Premium service but there’s no need to rush into it. You’ll know when you need it.

STEP 2: Build A Structure Of Notebooks and Tags. 

Notebooks vs Tags conundrum causes a lot of debates in the Evernote user community and I honestly think there’s a few different and completely valid ways to use them. Personally, I have tried a bunch of different combinations, and I’ve settled (for the moment) on this system.

Here’s how I think of Notebooks and Tags. Notebooks are like buckets. Tags are like stickers. Notebooks are large buckets where you’ll store notes that are related to certain areas of your life. For example, you’ll probably have notebooks called “Personal”, “Work”, “Family”, “Study”, etc. Under those notebooks, you can “stack” one more layer of notebooks, so under the “Personal” notebook you might have a few separate notebooks such as “Health”, “Finances”, “Life Goals”, etc.

Tags are ways of connecting notes that have a common theme across disparate notebooks. I’ll explain as we go.

I recommend starting a new note inside Evernote and started mapping out the structure for your Notebooks. Create bullet points and start with the top level notebooks (Personal, Work, etc) and then think about the sub-notebooks for each category (Health, Finances, etc). Don’t worry about getting it perfect right now. You can improve the system as you go.

When creating tags, think of ideas or themes which might flow across different areas of your life. For example, I often save articles that I find online but want to read later into Evernote (instead of Instapaper or Pocket, I just prefer to have everything in one place). Some of those articles might be relating to personal issues, like health, and some might be work related. What they have in common is what I want to read them later. So I have a tag called “to-read”. When I save an article to Evernote, I will put in the appropriate notebook and tag it “to-read”. Later that night, when I’m ready to catch up on my reading, I can quickly pull up all of the notes with the “to-read” tag, and they will all appear in a list, regardless of which notebook they happen to be in. Why not just save them all to a new notebook called “To Read”? That’s one way of doing it but I’ll often want to save those articles for the long term in case I want to refer to them months from now. Having them in an appropriate folder makes them easier to find. I’ll often think “what was that thing I read ages about how to structure Evernote?” and a quick scan through my Evernote notebook will bring up the article.

A few tags I recommend are “task”, “to-read” and “to-buy”. The last two are self-explanatory and I’ll explain the first one shortly. Just set it up for now.

If you’ve been using Evernote for a while already and you have a crazy collection of notebooks and tags already there, don’t worry. Just set up these new ones for now and you can decide to delete, rename or merge the others later.

One more thing – Evernote will have created for you a basic catch-all notebook called “Username’s Notebook”. I recommend changing that to “!Inbox”. The exclamation mark at the beginning of the name is going to make it auto-sort to the top of your list of notebooks. This notebook is going to be your catch-all bucket.

STEP 3: Clean Up Your Inbox. 

If you’re starting fresh with Evernote, you can skip this step. But if you’ve been using it a while, you’ll likely have a bit of a mess. The inbox should be used like your email inbox – a catch-all that is kept empty. I believe in the “Getting Things Done” methodology of emptying your catch-all bucket once or more times a day and touching each thing once. That means you can dump anything and everything into your Evernote inbox and process it later. I recommend processing your inbox first thing in the morning and again at the end of the day. By processing, I mean looking at each note in your inbox and asking yourself the following questions:

Where does this belong? (As in, which notebook?)

What do I need to do about this? (e.g. does it require an action or do I just save it for later?)

If you’ve got a lot of notes already in your inbox, this process might seem daunting. But start slow and once you get the hang of it, you’ll tear through it quicker than you think.

While you might have lots of notes, they will all fall under a limited number of themes – personal, health, work, travel, etc – your notebooks. So start with the first note in your list and ask yourself “which notebook does this belong in?” Now you can go ahead and save it to that notebook but before you do, you might want to ask yourself whether or not there are certain keywords that might be common across other notes in your inbox which also should be filed into that same notebook.

For example, let’s say you have a note about a recipe. It’s likely that you will have other notes about recipes. So if you search Evernote for notes containing the word “recipe”, you’ll pull them all together. Select them all and then you can select “move to notebook” and move them all to the “Recipe” notebook (set it up first if you don’t have one created yet) in one hit!

Repeat this process for each note sitting in your inbox and in a short while, you’ll have realized that a few smart keyword searches will pull together the vast majority of your notes.

Step 4: Keeping Your Tasks Organised

These days I also use Evernote as my task organiser. I’ve tried a bunch of different systems and apps outside of Evernote, but as Evernote is my second brain, it just makes much more sense to keep it all inside here.

First, I have a “task” tag that I apply to any note which is a task. That way I can quickly search

across all of my notebooks to find tasks. I’ll talk more in the next section about how to save searches for quick recall. The key idea here is to tag your tasks. During my morning review, I will look at all of my tasks and then collate them into one big list.

I have a note template that I use to collate all of the tasks I need to work on today. I open it up in a separate window and keep it on one side of the screen.

I transfer all of my tasks from Evernote and other apps into this one note. That allows me to quickly run my eyes down the entire list and prioritise.

Every day I copy the previous day’s note and change the date. You could also just change the date on the same note, but I like to have an archive of what tasks I’ve been working on and which I’ve completed (in case I forget… I’m seriously like Guy Pearce’s character in MEMENTO… it’s a wonder I don’t forget my own name).

So to recap: saving notes with the “task” tag is a quick way of assigning a note as something that requires an action. When you do your daily review, you process that note and either copy the task into the Daily Tasks note or you decide to delegate it or archive it into a notebook.

Step 5: Using Shortcuts

A powerful tool recently introduced to Evernote is the concept of “Shortcuts”. You’ll find them listed in the top right-hand of the app.

Creating a shortcut is a bit of a clumsy mess at the moment (I hope they will address is in future versions), but it’s worth the effort.

In Evernote’s search field, you have the option of creating quite complex search criteria. Look for the “Add Search Option” dropdown. It will enable you to select different criteria, such as notebooks, tags, content, source, etc. You can create searches that will find, for example, all notes created in the last week that don’t contain the “task” tag. Or all notes created from a web page that contain the word “psychopath” (I’m researching a book about psychopaths at the moment). To save these searches – and this is where Evernote is a little clumsy – you can to first create a search and then go to EDIT > FIND > SAVE SEARCH. The search will then appear in the dropdown section of the search field under “Saved Searches”. You can drag and drop that saved search into the “Shortcuts” section of the left-hand sidebar. Now, you can easily bring up that search at a later date. This is useful, for example, for finding all of your notes with the “task” tags.

You can also simply drag individual notes and notebooks into the shortcut section. Once you start using it, you’ll find it dramatically improves your productivity.

Step 6: Using iOS Apps

One problems with Evernote on a mobile device is that it can take a little while to load. If you are in a hurry and you want to make a quick note on the fly, you don’t want to wait a minute to open Evernote, create a new note, tap the body of the field or take a photo, and hit save.

There are a bunch of Evernote-related apps for iOS that will make life easier. There are apps for Android and Windows Phone too, but as I don’t use either of those, I’ll stick to the ones I know.

The apps I currently use are:

QEver

- Quickly create Evernote memo
- Add reminders to notes, or create iCal events from notes
- Recurrent reminders: Daily, Weekly, Monthly

Everclip

+ Save texts and images from any apps by simply copying them
+ Make clippings from website, pdf, documents etc quick and easy
+ Work in background so that you don’t have to switch between apps

FastEver Snap

- FastEver Snap is a camera application that quickly and easily sends photos to Evernote.

These apps will help you get notes quickly into Evernote for later processing.

Step 7: Using IFTTT

IFTTT is a terrific site that enables you to connect a bunch of apps together, automating the sharing of data between them magically (okay there probably isn’t genuine, Westeros-level magic involved, but I don’t know how it works, blah blah APIs, who cares).

You can play around with IFTTT on your own time, but do yourself a favour and use this recipe for connecting Gmail to Evernote. If you get an email that you want to save to Evernote, just star it and IFTTT will automatically save it to Evernote for you. I love this recipe!

Step 8: Using the Menu Bar 

The recent update of Evernote for the Mac (I’m not 100% sure about Windows) puts a little elephant icon in your menu bar. You can use this to quickly jot down notes during the day. You can even drag files and images to it. Check it out.

Step 9: Using your Evernote Email Address

Everclip is my favourite way of getting stuff from my mobile devices into Evernote, but another way is to email notes directly into Evernote.  Every account gets a unique email address when you sign up. Add this address to your address book. Call it something like “My Evernote”. Then you can email websites, other emails, photos, etc directly into Evernote.

Another way I use the email address is with SIRI. See this post for more details.

Step 10: Using the Chrome Extension

Evernote has a powerful extension that you can add to Chrome which makes it totally simple to get webpages into Evernote.

=======================

Well there you have it. As I said at the beginning, this is just one way, not the way to becoming an Evernote guru. Hopefully it will help some of you get more value out of the Evernote ecosystem. Please let me know if you have any questions or know of a better way of using Evernote, because I’m always learning.

PS I’d like to thank the various bloggers that I’ve stolen Evernote tips & tricks from over the years. Too many to mention but THANK YOU. If I’ve stolen one of your ideas and you want credit, just leave it in the comments and I’ll amend the post. Thank you also, of course, to Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote, (@plibin) and the Evernote team. Keep up the great work!

So when we heard about Sunday Assembly a couple of months ago, we thought it sounded perfect and volunteered to start one in Brisbane. Last Saturday we had a chance to meet one of the founders, Pippa Evans, and she gave us more information on how it’s working in London and how she thinks we should start locally. The current plan is to put together a few people to join the organising committee with a view to kicking the whole thing off in a few months.

If you haven’t heard of Sunday Assembly yet, here’s the official description from their website:

The Sunday Assembly is a godless congregation that meets on the first Sunday of every month to hear great talks, sing songs and generally celebrate the wonder of life. It’s a service for anyone who wants to live better, help often and wonder more.

Watch this video by the founders, Pippa Evans and Sanderson Jones:

We have set up a Google Group where interested people can register themselves. So if you’re interested in being part of something like that, let us know via the Group and we’ll be in touch soon!

• First and foremost – they are not “illegal boat people”. They are “asylum seekers”. Australia is a signatory to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Convention and Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees, which means we have an obligation to treat refugees with respect and compassion.
• An investigative team was sent by the UNHCR to Manus Island where Australia has sent asylum seekers, and has concluded Australia is not complying with its responsibilities under the Refugee Convention. The report found that conditions on the island are inadequate, no processing is taking place and detainees are left in a legal limbo.
• The 1951 Convention specifically bars countries from punishing people who have arrived directly from a country of persecution (or from another country where protection could not be assured), provided that they present themselves speedily to the authorities and show good cause for their illegal entry. Monitoring (through reporting obligations or guarantor requirements) is often a perfectly viable alternative to imprisoning asylum-seekers.
• Figures show that developing countries accept the vast majority of the world’s refugees, with Australia 47th on the list of host countries in 2009.
• Of the 10.4 million refugees under UNHCR mandate between 2005 and 2009, the largest numbers were being hosted by Pakistan (1,740,711), Iran (1,070,488), Syria (1,054,466), Germany (593,799), Jordan (450,756), Kenya (358,928), Chad (338,495), China (300,989), Vietnam (339,300), Eritrea (209,200) and Serbia (195,600).
• Australia was ranked 47th, hosting 22,548 refugees between 2005 and 2009 (0.2 per cent of the global total).
• Australia was 68th on a per capita basis and 91st relative to national wealth.
• The industrialised countries with the largest number of asylum applications in 2009 were the United States (49,020), France (41,980), Canada (33,250), United Kingdom (29,840), Germany (27,650) and Sweden (24,190).
• Australia was ranked 33rd for total asylum applications with 6206 new applications in 2009.
• It was 41st on a per capita basis and 71st relative to national Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
• When an asylum seeker arrives in Australia, they do not get any Centrelink benefits. While their status is being processed, and if they meet certain criteria, they can be eligible for financial support from the Asylum Seeker Assistance Scheme, administered through the Red Cross. This amount is 89% of the basic Centrelink allowance. This means approximately $405.84 per fortnight – over $260 less than a pensioner. For an asylum seeker to qualify for any payment under the Asylum Seeker Assistance Scheme, they must have lodged an application for a visa 6 months before, not be in detention, and not get any other payment or benefit.
• Once an asylum seeker is recognised as a genuine refugee, after a long and highly scrutinized process, they are given permanent residency and are then entitled to the same Centrelink, schooling and health benefits as anyone else. No more, no less.
• To get a permanent residence as a refugee, the person has to prove they are a genuine refugee fleeing persecution, go through character, security and medical tests, and sign an Australian Values Statement.
• Since 1998, according to the SIEV X Committee, it looks as if well over 1000 asylum seekers have drowned trying to reach Australia. Their blood is on the hands of those Australian political leaders who have demonised, vilified, incarcerated, offshored and re-fouled refugees rather than massively increasing the intake and processing asylum seekers quickly in Indonesia and Malaysia to bring them here safely.
• Department of Immigration data shows 88 per cent of asylum seekers who arrived by boat in 2009-10, including those who were initially rejected, have been found to be refugees and now have a visa. Sixty-eight per cent of those arriving in 2010-11, including those initially rejected, also have a visa. Final approvals are expected to be higher as half of these people are awaiting review.

My thanks to the bloggers and journalists who compiled this data.

Sources:

http://www.blogotariat.com/node/553224

http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/1294102/At-a-glance-Who-takes-the-most-asylum-claims

http://www.smh.com.au/national/most-asylum-seeker-rioters-turned-out-to-be-refugees-20120306-1uief.html

Here’s a link. Feel free to use it.

What is the keto diet? Read this.

Now, I’m not a massive guy, but I’m still about 20 – 30 kgs heavier than I should be. I’m 186cms and was about 106kgs (233lbs).

In the first 30 days, I lost 10kg and 10 cms off my waist. That’s 10% of my body weight for those of you not great at maths.

In the second month, I’ve stabilised, which I’m not complaining about, but I still want to lose more, so I’ve been learning more about the diet.

Last night I finished reading a book called “Why We Get Fat” by Gary Taubes, a respected science journalist. Taubes believes that our whole approach to weight control since the 1960s has been fundamentally flawed. The food pyramid is broken.

Essentially, Taubes argues that the science demonstrates overwhelmingly that what makes us fat is eating sugar and carbohydrates (rice, pasta, bread, flour, etc). The cure? Stop eating sugars and carbs. Get most of your calories from fat and protein.

Sounds crazy, I know. But that’s how I lost 10kgs in 30 days. It’s how many people on /r/keto have lost 30 – 50kgs in a year. It’s similar to the Atkins and Paleo diets (which I knew nothing about before I started this).

Taubes’ book explains the science and history of obesity in great detail and it’s pretty compelling. I won’t go into it here in any depth, but basically it breaks down like this:

1. When we eat carbs and sugar, our bodies produce insulin.

2. Insulin tells your cells to store most of the calories that you’ve just eaten for later as fat and to burn what’s left to provide the body with energy.

3. Unfortunately, because most of the calories we’ve just eaten get stored as fat, we get hungry again quickly – and we eat more carbs. The cycle continues. More fat gets stored, we get hungry, rinse and repeat.

4. Exercise is good for you – but has little to do with losing weight. It’s mostly about hormones and carbs.

The solution, according to Taubes and /r/keto, is to eat a low-carb, high fat diet. Basically cut your carbs and sugars back to 20 – 50 grams a day from all sources – which equates to making carbs responsible for about 5% of your calories. The rest of your diet should be fat, protein and leafy greens. Think: eggs, bacon, steak, cheese, cream (instead of milk) and green veggies (lettuce, cabbage, celery, broccoli, etc).

This kind of diet will no doubt be old news to many of you but, for me, it’s already made a huge difference. I’m 10% lighter, have more energy to burn, fitting into old clothes, etc. If you’re the kind of person who struggles to lose weight, I suggest you look into it.

Everyone will have questions about nutrition and health, but Taubes deals with them all in the book. If you’re at all interested, either buy his book, spend ten minutes reading through /r/keto, or watch the first ten minutes of this video interview with Taubes.

One of the problems I’ve been dealing with lately is trying to record audio notes into Evernote while I’m driving. I don’t know about you, but for some reason I have lots of ideas while I’m sitting behind the wheel. And I need a quick way to record them before they disappear forever. Even though Evernote’s iPhone app has an audio record function, it’s too clunky to get to while driving. You have to

1. Turn on your phone.

2. Find the Evernote app and click on it to open.

3. Wait a few seconds for it to load.

4. Click the tiny plus button in the top right-hand corner to create a new note.

5. Click in the body of the note to activate the recording functions.

6. Click the tiny and almost invisible audio recording button at the top of the screen.

7. Record what you want to say.

8. Hit the tiny “done” button in the top right-hand corner of the screen.

9. Hit the “Close” button to save the note.

If I went through this process every few minutes while driving, I’d survive about a week.

So I was looking around for an iPhone audio app that would allow me to record and sync with Evernote with one click. And I think I’ve found it.

It’s called Siri.

First I made sure that my Evernote “Email Notes to” address was listed under my Contacts app as “My Evernote”. Now I can just activate Siri and say “Email to My Evernote……” and tell it what to say. Siri asks if I want to send it, I say yes and I’m done.

Added benefit: I don’t need to transcribe the note when I’m back in Evernote on my Macbook – Siri does the work for me!

Thanks to @jjprojects for the hint!

use siri to get audio notes into evernote

From what I can tell, Dorner was the embodiment of US foreign policy. He killed innocent people? The USA does that almost every single day. Dorner did it as part of his campaign against corruption and violence in the LAPD. The USA does it as part of their campaign against people who don’t like America’s control of the Middle East.

Do we have one set of rules for the State and another for individuals within the State?

Of course we do – the State is allowed to own an army. Citizens are not. Unless, of course, you are Blackwater / Xe / Academi, then you can own a private army and lease it back to the State. But that’s another story.

However even in these scenarios, where we (the people) grant the State the ability to have means of violence that are withdrawn from citizens, we expect the State to obey certain precepts – process, morals, ethics and integrity with how they use the violent forces under their command.

The United States government, however, tends to be pretty loose with how it exercises it’s forces. Up until recently, for example, the Obama administration didn’t even admit to using drones to kill civilians, let alone provide any transparency with the legal framework supporting it.

Of course, the fact that the US kills innocent civilians with drones or troops or private contractors doesn’t make it right. It does, however, provide US citizens with a moral framework to operate from. If it is okay for Uncle Sam to treat civilians as collateral damage and ignore legal process, isn’t it justified for citizens to do the same?

If the USA can assassinate Osama bin Laden without trial or proof of his alleged crimes, is it wrong for a citizen to assassinate corrupt cops?

In a country where a large percentage of the population argues for the right for individuals to own weapons so they can protect themselves against tyranny, Dorner tested the model. Here’s a guy with weapons, with military and police training, who still lasted only a week against the forces of tyranny. I didn’t see his brothers-in-arms rising up to defend him, either. What’s the point of having the “right to bear arms” against the forces of tyranny when you don’t use them to defend someone who is fighting tyranny?

Which is why I think they folks who love their 2nd Amendment are mostly full of shit and cowards to boot.

The media’s treatment of Dorner is interesting, especially when compared to their treatment of US foreign policy. For example:

CNN: Public fascination with and endorsement of an anti-hero is common in history and the arts, especially when the figure advances a political message that resonates with people, experts said. ”He’s been a real-life superhero to many people,” said Marc Lamont Hill, an associate professor of English education at Columbia University. “Don’t get me wrong. What he did was awful. Killing innocent people is bad.

Killing innocent people is bad… unless you are the President of the United States. Then it is justified.

Read Megan’s thoughtful blog post here.

Like everyone else in my generation, i grew up watching violent films and playing video games. Obviously the technology has changes a lot over the last ten years, and playing Black Ops II is a world away from playing Frogger or Doom, Wolfenstein and Duke NukeEm which were available when we were in our 20s. But the same Chicken Little cries that video games are making kids violent is what we heard about Arnie movies and rap music in the 80s.

Now I love violent movies, the bloodier and gorier the better. I love rap music too, particularly of the NWA / Dr Dre / OG variety. Yet I don’t have a violent bone in my body. I also love classical music, art, poetry, philosophy, art-house films, Shakespeare and kittens. But perhaps I’m the anomaly?

So I keep an eye on the research every few years, looking to see if there is a conclusive link between violent movies and games and violence in real life.

I recently read a report on the Australian Government’s classification site called “Literature review on the  impact of playing violent  video games on aggression” from September 2010. I actually opened this report expecting it to be critical of video games, however it’s conclusion states:

Significant harmful effects from VVGs have not been persuasively proven or disproven.
There is some consensus that VVGs may be harmful to certain populations, such as people
with aggressive and psychotic personality traits. Overall, most studies have consistently
shown a small statistical effect of VVG exposure on aggressive behaviour, but there are
problems with these findings that reduce their policy relevance. Overall, as illustrated in this
review, research into the effects of VVGs on aggression is contested and inconclusive.

The report suggests that the evidence shows that kids with aggressive family situations or prior aggression of any kind may be more affected by VVGs than other kids, which makes sense.

If there was a correlation between video games and violence, we should see similar levels of violence in all countries where video games are popular – which is ALL of them. And that just isn’t the case. Levels of violence have been dropping in most countries over the last couple of decades – the United States being a major exception.

Dr Christopher Ferguson, associate professor of psychology and communication at the University of Texas,

recently pointed out that 

“in fact, in most countries youth violence has reached 40 year lows during the video game epoch.”

What are we to conclude from all this?

1. There is no conclusive evidence that violent video games lead to aggression or violence.

2. People suggesting that they do are either a) ill-informed or b) trying to distract people from the real issues driving mass shootings in the USA – easy access to semi-automatic weapons and ammunition and lack of access to mental health treatment.

Based on this data from The University of Sydney, you are safer living in Iran or Iraq than in the USA.

By the way, I included France because one justification I’ve heard for America’s gun obsession lately is that they fought a revolution and a civil war, so, you know, they, like, need guns.

Yeah well France had a revolution, too. Oh and they were fucking INVADED BY THE NAZIS. Was America invaded by the Nazis? No? Then shut up. The French actually have a very high rate of gun ownership. In a comparison of the rate of private gun ownership in 179 countries, France ranked at No. 12. However their access to handguns, semi-automatics and full automatics is highly restricted.

Here is how France’s gun homicide ranks against the USA:

I got into a Facebook discussion today with Rob McNealy, my guest on a recent podcast about gun control in the USA. Rob posted comparing gun laws in Mexico to America, suggesting that tighter gun laws in Mexico haven't made it safer. I pointed out that Mexico's GDP is about one fifth that of the United States and he should really compare the USA to a country with similar economics – like Australia.

Rob replied “You are trying to deny the fact that gun control don't stop murder from happening. You are a typical anti-liberty liberal that wants to create MORE murder victims.”

I explained that in the years after the Port Arthur massacre, the risk of dying by gunshot in Australia fell by more than 50% — and stayed there, quoting an article from CNN.

He then replied with this post, claiming that “the percent of murders committed with a firearm (in Australia) was the highest it had ever been in 2006″. His source even claimed this data was from “Australian Bureau of Criminology”.

Oh really? I googled “Australian Bureau of Criminology” and I came up blank. There is an “Australian INSTITUTE of Criminology” but Rob's source doesn't reference any particular report or website, so I don't know where they got their data from. In fact, it is likely they pulled it out of their asses.

This information about the high rate of 2006 gun murders is totally at odds with data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, which shows that in 2006, gun homicides in Australia were at an all time LOW.

Here is a graph from UTS. See that huge drop after 1996? That's when Johnny Howard introduced the National Firearm Agreement and the buy-back scheme that aimed to eliminate semi-automatic firearms in Australia. It appears that our gun homicide rate fell by 50% immediately and has continued to drop.

Tell me again how “gun control don't stop murder from happening”?

This second graph is from the ABS and shows the falling rates of guns homicides as a percentage of all homicides. Again – a big drop off after 1996. Although this chart stops at 2003, the ABS site for 2006 confirms that the percentage of homicides from firearms in 2006 was an all-time low.

Unfortunately, Rob's source was the “National Center For Policy Analysis” which, according to SourceWatch, is funded by conservative billionaires like the Koch brothers. You can tell people are desperate when they resort to making up bullshit to support their arguments. Of course, most of their readers are not likely to do their own research, much like Fox News viewers, and will just regurgitate the NCPA's claims.

The real question is whether or not the NFA had much of an impact on overall homicides or if they were already dropping due to other factors. What we *do* know for certain is that there hasn't been another mass shooting in Australia since 1996. However homicides have only demonstrated a slight decrease since then. The rise in sexual assault is thought to be an increase in reporting of sexual assault, not an actual increase in incidents.

By the way, here is a chart of America's gun homicides since 1998:

So, the next time you hear someone tell you that gun control didn't work in Australia, you can just send them to this post and facepalm.

Brad travelled to Iran in 2009 around the time of their Presidential elections and the riots. He spent a couple of hours at a dinner listening to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

We discuss the history of Iran, their current nuclear program and America’s history of invading countries to get at their natural resources.

Because it works.

Every time one of these hosts says or does something to outrage people, we see the same old process:

1. There’s lots of hype in the news media about it – not because it is news per se, but because a artificial scandal makes it easier for “news” organisations in Australia to fill up airtime or column inches than actually having to commit acts of journalism. As we all know, there are hardly any journalists actually working for news organisations any more in this country, but anyone can rent their garments and decry acts of bad taste. A scandal pulls in eyeballs and that means more money for the “news” organisation without actually having to do any real “news” work. Total win.

2. The stations and the hosts involved either claim they don’t know what all the fuss is about or put on a false act of contrition. The host is pulled off the air for a day or two. Advertising is pulled from the show for a few days. Station management claims the host will be counselled (while I suspect they are quietly all popping champagne corks in the backrooms).

3. Finally, the show goes back on the air and is rewarded with a ratings bump, which means more listeners, which means more advertising dollars. Everyone wins.

Thank you, capitalism. The idiocracy rules. To keep the public’s attention, radio needs to pull stupider and stupider stunts.

Let’s look at the data.

After Alan Jones’s most recent scandal, the comment about Gillard’s father, his show actually increased its lead. And his lead has continued to increase since then.

Kyle Sandilands’ much maligned show continues to perform well, although apparently Kyle & Jackie O’s show has taken a small rating slide of late, so expect another “scandal” from him, as soon as this whole royal affair has blown over.

The recent scandal-created suicide is a tragic outcome to this marketing tactic. Of course, the corporate media who bleated about it incessantly for the first couple of days haven’t taken any responsibility for the tragic denouement. It’s almost as if they had absolutely no involvement in the story blowing up.

What can we do about it? Is more media regulation the answer? It wouldn’t hurt. But the real answer is STOP LISTENING TO COMMERCIAL RADIO. Listen to podcasts. If you MUST listen to radio, listen to the ABC or Triple J.

I haven’t listened to radio for close to a decade. My life is much better off as a result. Commercial media can only continue to plumb the depths of idiocy while people keep listening to them. I seriously don’t understand what value people get our of radio in 2012. In an era of ubiquitous iPhones and podcasts and Spotify, radio is, more than ever, a dinosaur. I know I’ve been predicting the imminent demise of radio for a long time, but seriously…. what is wrong with people?? I really don’t understand how people put up with the ads. After ten years with no ads (I don’t have a TV either), they drive me nuts when I accidentally hear one. How do people allow their brain to be constantly polluted with that shit?

TURN OFF – TUNE OUT – TAKE CONTROL

Hidden under an old cane plantation outside the Queensland sugar city of Bundaberg lies an awful secret.

Beyond the weeping fig trees the bodies of 29 South Sea Islanders are buried in an unmarked grave.

(Slavery buried in Qld mass grave: Islanders)

They were called “Kanakas“. Growing up in Bundy I was taught that they were “workers”. Wikipedia claims “Of the more than 60,000 Islanders recruited from 1863, the majority were to be “repatriated” (that is, deported) by the Australian Government between 1906-08 under the Pacific Island Labourers Act 1901 legislation prompted by the White Australia policy.”

Or, as the above story suggests, just murdered and thrown into mass graves.

Seriously though – my dear Mormons – your book is so far removed from historical fact – how do you take it seriously?

I’m guessing it goes back to worshipping bronze age gods and deciding to sacrifice a prized calf or first-born daughter in return for a bountiful crop or success in the battlefield. The person willing to sacrifice their child (or themselves) was doing it for the good of the tribe and we learned to treat them as holy figures. Fast forward a few thousand years and people still go weak for the idea of “he died for our sins”. It seems to have a very powerful effect on their Paleomammalian brain.

I was thinking about the Mormons yesterday and postulating that one of the reasons their particular cult survived was because Joseph Smith was assassinated and martyred. Religious types like nothing more than a martyr.

Sam Harris wrote about blood sacrifice in his afterword to “Letter To A Christian Nation”:

Humanity has had a long fascination with blood sacrifice. In fact, it has been by no means uncommon for a child to be born into this world only to be patiently and lovingly reared by religious maniacs, who believe that the best way to keep the sun on its course or to ensure a rich harvest is to lead him by tender hand into a field or to a mountaintop and bury, butcher, or burn him alive as offering to an invisible God. Countless children have been unlucky enough to be born in so dark an age, when ignorance and fantasy were indistinguishable from knowledge and where the drumbeat of religious fanaticism kept perfect time with every human heart. In fact, almost no culture has been exempt from this evil: the Sumerians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Hebrews, Canaanites, Maya, Inca, Aztecs, Olmecs, Greeks, Romans, Carthaginians, Teutons, Celts, Druids, Vikings, Gauls, Hindus, Thais, Chinese, Japanese, Scandinavians, Maoris, Melanesias, Tahitians, Hawaiians, Balinese, Australian aborigines, Iroquois, Huron, Cherokee, and innumerable other societies ritually murdered their fellow human beings because they believed that invisible gods and goddesses, having an appetite for human flesh, could be so propitiated. Many of their victims were of the same opinion, in fact, and went willingly to slaughter, fully convinced that their deaths would transform the weather, or cure the king of his venereal disease, or in some other way spare their fellows the wrath of the Unseen.

The Ca$holics of course take it a step further. They literally believe (well, they are supposed to) that they are eating the actual flesh of Jesus when they take communion. Holy Cannibalism, Batman!  It’s a wonder there aren’t religions devoted to Hannibal Lecter. Oh no, wait, he’s the eatER, not the eatEE.

So anyway, I’m interested in understanding more about the evolutionary reasons for our fascination with blood sacrifice. If anyone knows anything about it, please educate me. Oh and I’ve started a Branch on the topic, too.

Brad and I discuss the life of the founder of the Mormon religion, Joseph Smith – I especially wanted to focus on his trial for being a conman (he was found guilty), his polygamy and the reasons behind his eventual murder. We also discuss the methods by which we search for Truth.

I’d like to thank Brad for having the balls to come on the show. He was a good sport and I hope he takes me up on my offer to come back soon. You can follow him on Twitter @bradheitmann

If you’re interested in the Mormon religion, here’s a few links I recommend:

MormonThink.com
Wikipedia’s many entries on LDS
Reddit’s Ex-Mormon Group
The Annotated Book Of Mormon

If you haven’t been following the story, just after the U.S. election, Anonymous claimed they prevented Karl Rove from hacking the result in Ohio – which is why, they say, he was so convinced the result was going to go in Romney’s favour. A number of people claim that Rove pulled this trick back in 2004 – that is, he used electronic vote counting services which were linked to the GOP to alter the result of the election in Ohio in Bush’s favour. Adding concern to the story, there were “last-minute, uncertified” software patches made on the Ohio voting machines just days before the election. Sounds dodgy to me.

Of course, there are plenty of stories of the GOP “stealing” or “rigging” elections as far back as Nixon that are also worth reading.

In fact, this article in Harper’s, published weeks before the election and worrying about election rigging in 2012, has stories about elections being rigged in the U.S. as far back as 1932. This same article also explains the connections between the two companies that dominate the electronic voting machine market in the U.S. and their connections to the GOP and the Romney family.

Unfortunately, Australia is also moving towards electronic voting systems. Will we see the same kinds of scurrilous behaviour in future elections too?

And yet… most people don’t seem to FEEL lucky. They bitch and moan constantly. They have been imbued with this sense that they don’t have enough, they should have more, they aren’t keeping up with the Joneses. It’s a sign of a sick society.

Anyhoo, the point being that we, as the luckiest people who have ever lived, have a responsibility to help out the less fortunate.

Here’s a great video that demonstrates how far we, as a species, have come in the last 200 years.

She is an investigative journalist with a background in social activism who worked at the University of Technology for 21 years. Although no longer teaching at UTS, Wendy is still a Professor of Journalism at the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism.

In 2011 she published a report on the bias in Australian newspapers over their coverage of climate change. The results of this report BLEW MY MIND.

I chatted with Wendy yesterday about the report and the state of journalism in Australia.

You can find Wendy’s website here and her Twitter account here.

Links:

Destroy The Joint on Facebook

Destroy The Joint on the Web

Saltillo
“A Necessary End” (mp3)
from “Ganglion”
(Artoffact Records)

Buy at Amazon MP3
More On This Album

Dyme Def
“Get Down” (mp3)
from “Space Music”
(Soul Gorilla Monopoly (SGM))

Buy at iTunes Music Store
More On This Album

Take this one example – The Ford Falcon, which has been manufactured since 1960 and is currently on life support. Sales last year were 74% less than its best year ever, which was in 2003.

Ford, which has about 3000 employees in Australia, has received an estimated $1 billion in government subsidies since 2000 in an effort to prop up an industry in decline.

The Labor government has committed $5.4 billion for car making from 2008 to 2020.

Meanwhile – the number of small businesses that went bankrupt last double increased by 48% – and none of them received government handouts. Why? My guess is because there aren’t any votes in it.

To explain why the government is spending billions of our dollars to prop up foreign-owned companies, I’m very pleased to be joined today on Skype, by Nicholas Gruen, all the way from San Francisco, who is a prominent Australian economist, the CEO of Lateral Economics, the Chairman of Peach Financial, the Australian Centre for Social Innovation and Online Opinion, the founding chairman of the Aussie start-up Kaggle, and a board member of Innovation Australia.

You can follow Nicholas on Twitter and check out his new start-up HealthKit.

Music:

Dyme Def
“Get Down” (mp3)
from “Space Music”
(Soul Gorilla Monopoly (SGM))

Buy at iTunes Music Store
More On This Album

So today I read some of a document published by the Department of Immigration and Citizenship in June 2011 – “A Significant Contribution: the Economic, Social and Civic Contributions of First and Second Generation Humanitarian Entrants - that seems to confirm my intuition.

This research examines what are the economic, social and civic contributions to Australia of first and second generation Humanitarian Program entrants by the analysis of Census data, interviews with families and in-depth discussions with organisations such as employment, education and refugee service providers.

In the introduction summary to the report, they state:

The research found the overwhelming picture, when one takes the longer term perspective of changes over the working lifetime of Humanitarian Program entrants and their children, is one of considerable achievement and contribution.

The Humanitarian Program yields a demographic dividend because of a low rate of settler loss, relatively high fertility rate and a high proportion of children who are likely to work the majority of their lives in Australia.

It finds evidence of increasing settlement in nonmetropolitan areas which creates social and economic benefits for local communities.

Humanitarian entrants help meet labour shortages, including in low skill and low paid occupations.

They display strong entrepreneurial qualities compared with other migrant groups, with a higher than average proportion engaging in small and medium business enterprises.
Humanitarian settlers also benefit the wider community through developing and maintaining economic linkages with their origin countries.

In addition, they make significant  contributions through volunteering in both the wider community and within their own community groups.

I wish I heard this perspective being used more liberally in the media and by politicians from all parties when we discuss “The Pacific Solution”. We, as a nation, need to realize that we stand to benefit far more from refugees arriving on our shores than we will need to provide them.

Episode one was launched today!

I’m as confused as Penn is about how otherwise intelligent-sounding people can just spout crazy stuff and act like it’s totally normal. It’s especially scary when you hear it from politicians, the people who are supposedly running the country. Surely there should be a sanity test that you have to pass before you can be elected to public office.

Step 2. Make sure you are the only person in the company who sees the bank statements.

Step 3. “Using a combination of Photo Shop, Excel, scanners and both laser and ink jet printers… make very convincing forgeries of nearly every document that came from the Bank.”

At least, that’s how Peregrine CEO Russell Wasendorf Sr. did it – for over 20 years.

He wrote a suicide note explaining the whole scam before attempting suicide. He failed at that and has now pleaded guilty to fraud and embezzlement.

What about the Regulators? Why didn’t they catch him?

“It was relatively simple to deceive the Regulators” according to Russ. Good to know.

He ended his suicide note with “I am ready to die. I guess this is the only way out of a business I hate so much.”

It’s a far cry from his most recent “Chairman’s Letter”, where he wrote

“At PFGBEST, our consistent hallmarks remain: respectful and conscientious care of customers and their accounts; a keen sense of their evolving needs; and, the talent and resources to provide analytical, flexible and customized solutions.”

Guys like Wasendorf are fascinating to me. How high would he score on a test for psychopathy? Surely he would score highly on many of those factors.

You have to wonder how many CEOs, politicians and entrepreneurs are psychopaths? And what is it about capitalism that allows them to prosper?

Of course, the history of socialism and communism has it’s fair share of psychopaths as well. Why is it so hard for us to design a socio-economic system that weeds out psychopaths?

The final thing the comment suggests is that Romney knows nothing about ambition and motivation. The formula he sketches is this: People who are forced to make it on their own have drive. People who receive benefits have dependency.

But, of course, no middle-class parent acts as if this is true. Middle-class parents don’t deprive their children of benefits so they can learn to struggle on their own. They shower benefits on their children to give them more opportunities — so they can play travel sports, go on foreign trips and develop more skills.

People are motivated when they feel competent. They are motivated when they have more opportunities. Ambition is fired by possibility, not by deprivation, as a tour through the world’s poorest regions makes clear.

If rich people really think benefits don’t help you, then they wouldn’t send their kids to private schools and elite universities. They wouldn’t use their personal networks to land their kids high-paying jobs in friends’ companies. They wouldn’t buy them a car, or give them a credit card or a mobile phone.

And we know this isn’t how it works.

So the next time one of your wealthy right-leaning friends tells you that the welfare system destroys ambition, you might want to point our their hypocrisy. If they really believed it, they would send their own kids to live by themselves in Kabul for a few years.

I grew up on the poverty line (by Australian standards) and I’m grateful that we had healthcare and education made available to us. If we hadn’t, I’d probably still be living in Bundaberg, either unemployed or doing some kind of manual labour. I’m not suggesting there is anything wrong with those things, but it was only because I had a decent education that I could explore other opportunities.

Yes – growing up poor made me hungry. And in my 20s that was a hunger to be rich. In my 30s and 40s that turned into a hunger to improve the system.

What people like Romney don’t understand is that altruism is about enlightened self-interest. If you build a strong society of people with a decent education and decent healthcare, you will get rewarded a thousand-fold. These people will become the next generation of doctors, inventors, engineers, artists, authors, journalists, film-makers, musicians, scientists and historians that improve society for all of us.

(HT to @NikolasKozloff for the NYT link)

Steal a loaf of bread = five years hard labour in Australia.

Steal an entire country with incalculable wealth = it’s good to be the King.

Of course, he did go mad, have to deal with the American revolution and Napoleon. Karma is a bitch.

Scientists think within 20 years there may be no ice left at all at certain times of the year. The ice acts as a giant mirror to deflect heat, so less/no ice means the earth gets hotter.

And still governments prevaricate over whether or it to act and the media perpetuate the debate. We are like the citizens of Pompeii, with scientists trying to tell us that Vesuvius is going to blow and we are all telling them they are crazy. Or we are like the citizens of Kypton, not listening to Jor-el. You decide.

The obituary of the human race will read “well it's not like they weren't warned, but they were too stupid to listen.”

His actual words are:

“So I’m not disputing that increasing CO2 emissions in the atmosphere is going to have an impact. It’ll have a warming impact. The — how large it is is what is very hard for anyone to predict. And depending on how large it is, then projects how dire the consequences are.”

I discovered this video in an article by Bill Blackmore on the US ABC News about how American news directors just aren’t covering the latest stories on climate change – possibly because of political and corporate agendas but also possibly because it’s TOO BIG TO HANDLE. It’s worth a read but I think it’s letting news directors off the hook. The real reasons they aren’t talking about the new data is due to corporate agendas. Yes, the story is huge. Of course it is. But that’s only MORE reason to give it the coverage it deserves.

Where’s Will McAvoy when you need him?

I don’t know who created this, but I first saw it on this Facebook page. I’m not sure the top of the tree should be the banksters by themselves, as there are plenty of wealthy individuals that aren’t part of the banking system. But you get the general idea.

I’ve watched the entire series three times and it gets better with each viewing. Chrissy and I are constantly quoting from it… “Imma get dressed. We go see Bodie.”

Anyway, my guest today is Peter Honig, a high school teacher from New Jersey who actually teaches The Wire to his English literature students as well as writing The Wire Blog and tweeting from @thewireblog.

LA TERRORISTA Princess Leia Star Wars Revolutionary by MrMahaffey

Posted with Blogsy

The guy who has helped them make it a reality is Stu Campbell. On today’s show, I talk with Stu, Max & Maverick about The Love Punks, Neomad, and life in a small Aboriginal township.

NEOMAD : EPISODE 1 : SPACE JUNK : FILM from Yijala Yala Project on Vimeo.

Link for Neomad, the iPad comic.

Also check out Stu’s other comic, Nawlz. It’s amazing.

We understand and accept this fact in sport. I tell my kids all the time “every member of the team is important”.

The same is true in socio-economics. The CEO can’t run a billion dollar company without the rest of the employees. The brilliant entrepreneur can’t bring that new gadget to market without the people who sweep the streets, pick up the garbage, grow the food, staff the supermarket, wait tables, and manage the petrol station. It’s all a giant web of interrelation. If we all need each other to make the whole damn thing work, then we should share the profit as well. This whole bizarre idea that the people who run companies or invent something deserve the 1% because they worked harder or are smarter is complete bullshit and easily falsifiable. I love Ayn Rand’s book, but the premise of Atlas Shrugged works both ways. Yes – when the entrepreneurs pack their bags and move to an island, society feels their loss. But if the rest of society up and left the entrepreneurs alone on the mainland, how long do you think they would survive on their own, without anyone to sweep the streets, grow the food and, by the way, BUY THEIR WONDERFUL PRODUCTS?

We all need each other. As Lester Freamon might say “All the pieces matter”.

Today the news out of South Africa’s third-largest platinum producer, Lonmin‘s Marikana mine, is the most chilling of all. Thirty striking miners were shot dead by police.

Al Jazeera has horrifying footage of the slaughter:

This is on top of the 8 workers who were killed last week at the same mine.

As of the time of posting, there is no mention of the latest round of violence on the (British owned) Lonmin website.

According to Al Jazeera, the miners were getting paid about $500 a month and wanted a pay rise to $1500. They wanted Lonmin management to come down to negotiate with them but the management refused.  Possibly because their CEO, Ian Farmer, has recently been diagnosed with a serious illness. Lonmin has a market cap of $16 billion.

There had been a stand-off between the protestors and the police for a week and today it came to a bloody end.

The footage only starts with the protestors, who were wielding machetes, running towards the police when the shooting starts, but we can see what looks like tear gas behind them. Is it possible that the police shot tear gas into the crowd, who then panicked, and were mown down?

The AMCU (Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union) claims that Lonmin management might have been behind the initial violence via their indirect support of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), a rival union. Management setting up rival fake unions to create tension and conflict in the workforce isn’t a new tactic. See here and here.

http://www.miningweekly.com/article/amcu-blames-lonmin-management-for-mine-unrest-2012-08-14

I wonder how this incident maps to Lonmin’s stated corporate mission and values?

My guest on NIP#51 is Josh McDonald (aka Sophistifunk), software developer in Melbourne and a former cigar buddy of mine when he lived in Brisbane.

Josh’s love of guns is something I’ve known about but we’ve never delved too deeply into it. When I chatted with him last week, I asked him to explain his reasoning to me. I’ll let you decide whether or not his arguments are compelling.

BTW, this is definitely NOT his blog.

Gundjeihmi hand stencil

My guest today is Justin O’Brien, Executive Officer of the Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation (www.mirarr.net). The Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation (GAC) represents the Mirarr traditional owners of the Ranger uranium mine area, the site of the proposed Jabiluka uranium mine, much of Kakadu National Park and parts of Western Arnhem Land. They are the royalty receiving entity for the Ranger uranium mine and intimately associated with the political and social advancement of Indigenous rights.

We talk about some of the factors relating to indigenous youth suicide and the general need for more non-indigenous Australians to spend time with our indigenous citizens so we can better understand their situation.

Rob McNealy is back on the show (see gdayworld #329 for his last appearance four years ago) and he’s talking about gun ownership. Rob is a huge believer that citizens need to have weapons to defend themselves against a tyrannical government and for self-defence.

Just in time for the show, here’s a quote from a recent article by former PM John Howard:

Research published in 2010 in the American Journal of Law and Economics found that firearm homicides, in Australia, dropped 59 per cent between 1995 and 2006. There was no offsetting increase in non-firearm-related murders. Researchers at Harvard University in 2011 revealed that in the 18 years prior to the 1996 Australian laws, there were 13 gun massacres (four or more fatalities) in Australia, resulting in 102 deaths. There have been none in that category since the Port Arthur laws.

(Thanks Angus for the link!)

Other Links:

• Rob’s Facebook page
• List of countries by firearm-related death rate
• The history of gun politics in Australia
• Robbery Stats in Australia 1995 – 2007
• Number of U.S. Deaths Due to Firearms per 100,000 Population by Race/Ethnicity, 2008
• Robberies by country
• List of countries by intentional homicide rate