Emptying the Haunted Air

An exemplar of Intelligent Design

One of the best things about coming to China is the extent to which I’ve been able to keep up with Australian politics, as well as the international issues that interest me. I was expecting it to be much more difficult – the firewall, my (mis)conceptions about the reliability of internet connections in Shanghai, as well as some vague idea that geographical separation would, somehow, disengage me from public debate in Australia.

In fact, it’s turned out quite the opposite. Being away from Australia has made me more determined to remain in touch which, in turn, has resulted in me spending more time on the internet. More time watching streaming video, reading articles, blogs and forums. (Of course, it helps that every media organisation in Australia is allowed through the firewall over here.) For some reason, the habit of tuning into politics via television made me complacent, for I always had the option of not watching my nightly dose of news and current affairs. If I missed Joe Hockey making a dick of himself on Lateline (now celebrating its 20th year with a series of fascinating archival videos on the website), it wouldn’t worry me. I’d be sure to see something equally interesting on tomorrow’s news.

Now, I’ve entered into an almost-unhealthy ritual of consuming each day’s current affairs in the early hours of the morning. And, because I am far less likely to watch news reports (preferring meatier analysis and commentary), I don’t get my little snacks from Australian Parliament. So, instead, I just go to its website and watch the whole gorram’ thing. Or, at the very least, much more than I used to watch. In Australia, I tended to miss the ABC’s Q&A, because the format is tiring a little and the panellists are frequently dull. Last Monday’s episode looked intriguing and, considering I was already on the internet watching old Lateline videos, I decided to watch it. So, when Steve Fielding made an absolute dick of himself, I was able to savour every moment.

Zhabei at night. Not pictured: My nonexistent photos of Nanjing Road

I’m eating at a little KFC on Fuzhou Road, mainly because I felt nervous about drawing too much attention to myself at the busier one on Nanjing Road. There are a few Westerners here, possibly for similar reasons. Walking down Nanjing Road, you get waylaid frequently by street-peddlers. They swoop in, making a respectable attempt to match my brisk walking pace, and all seem to offer the same thing: watches and iPhones. Presumably these are stored inside their coats, but I will never find out for certain, because of all the things I could buy off a chap in the street, watches and phones are the least appealing. Perhaps if one of them was offering old Super Nintendo games, I might be inclined to peruse their coat pockets. Instead, I simply mutter something that means “Don’t want”, and walk on.

I walked all the way down Nanjing Road tonight. I’m not terribly interested in shopping; I derive little pleasure from the indecision. In any case, my apartment is too small to fit anything else at the moment. So I just walked and looked at the enormous advertisements, the crowds of happy shoppers, and the distant buildings fading into the smog. A skyscraper that is invisible in the night if not for the neon-blue lines that join each of its vertices. All the while keeping track of the astonishing Tomorrow Square as a geographic marker. I walked all the way to the riverbank, found that it was inaccessible for some reason, then walked down to Fuzhou Road and headed back towards People’s Square.

And I found myself in a KFC. One of the first things I notice, aside from the fact that the burgers taste the same as in Australia, is one of those employee propoganda posters on the window to the street. ‘一起工作， 一起快乐!’ Work together, happy together. It’s not at all some Communist credo. I’ve been taking note of these posters in fast food chains in Australia for a few years. They’re clearly not for the staff who, consciously or not, regard the pairing of the words team and work as nothing more than corporate speak. The posters are just marketing, and are unremarkable in this sense.

The thing that strikes me is how the face of consumerism is so similar between these two, vastly different countries, right down to the smallest details. All this advertising, the brands and the familiar images are possibly the main reason I have felt at home in Shanghai. I can decode the semiotics of commercialism on Nanjing Road as easily as in Sydney.

At the same time, this familiarity worries me, for it exposes my profound ignorance and gullibility. Everyone knows KFC, McDonalds and Apple are global empires; they, as corporate entities, can’t escape it. I didn’t know that LJ Hooker, Century 21, Boost Juice, and dozens of others were all the same. But there they are, feeding off the crowds at Nanjing Road. And I realise that, however much I have regarded my cynicism as a Palladium against the effects of advertising, it’s clearly had a lasting impact on me.

All the ads (whose early 90s iterations I seem to remember best) must have resonated in a personal way. However, for me to assume that their products are uniquely Australian, when all commercial sense should indicate the opposite, implies something else entirely. Successful advertising doesn’t just appeal to one’s personal tastes or moods. It resonates in a part of us that sympathises with that elusive thing called national identity. It’s the part of myself that I find most irrational and cumbersome. The reason, perhaps, that I have found myself in Shanghai, of all places. But it is also a part of us that is impossible to resist or escape.

So I just finish my Zinger Burger, and return home.

TV is no less entertaining here than in Sydney.

So, today I arrived in Shanghai, after about two months of planning, and five years of dreaming on it. First impressions are that it’s an astonishing city, teeming with life and contradictions. Chinese militarism against the kitsch, neon Japanese katakana that illuminates some of the trendy downtown shops. Grey apartment buildings that look as deserted as something one might find in Pripyat, clashing with shiny hotels topped with jittering, animated signs. Shanghai seems more cinematic than picturesque – it’s all angles, foreground and background, shadows and light. The way colourful shadows get thrown about everywhere as cars drive past. The shadows of pedestrians getting swollen and mutated to epic proportions in the headlights of the bus that took me through the city. There’s light everywhere, reflecting and refracting in glass until you’re not sure that you can locate the source in the illusion.

There’s more trees that you’d expect, too.

I want to love you! But I just can't.

I guess I’m a little late with this one, but only because I still haven’t seen anything from the federal government that addresses the basic problems with the MySchool website. Tonight’s episode of Stateline NSW offered a fairly concise summary of some (but far from all) of the main arguments surrounding the issue, featuring generally nifty education-guy (but with no Wikipedia entry), Chris Bonner, and NSW Education Minister and Labor Party arse-hack, Verity Firth.

Here’s wot I think about MySchool:

1. It doesn’t assess schools based on predetermined benchmarks in the NAPLAN tests, but by comparing them firstly to ’similar’ schools (see below), and then to every school in the country. Primary and high schools are separated, naturally. Because there is no benchmark there will always, due to the arcane workings of arithmetic, be schools that are significantly below average (‘red’ schools on MySchool: danger, Hellfire, stagnation, blood) and ones that are significantly above average (green: serene, leafy, radioactively-good, healthy, progress, civilisation, order). Unless every student in the country gets exactly the same result in every test. Therefore, the endeavour to pull Hell-schools out of the red will be an eternal pursuit, with Australian students eventually ascending to such levels of genius that they attain the status of higher beings, and are such intelligent, informed voters in the future that they won’t vote for governments with stupid, shallow ideas like MySchool. Which, actually, might be kind of a good thing.

2. Using a lottery machine to determine ’similar’ schools is probably not a very wise. At least, that’s how it seems the ICSEA (Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage) is calculated. I can’t work out how else ACARA (the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and… Ah, forget it) concluded that my school, Kirrawee High Public School, was statistically-similar to a bunch of private and selective schools. Maybe it would be a good idea to only compare selective schools to other selective schools, and elite private schools to other elite schools where parents pay tens-of-thousands of dollars for their kids to attend, with all the extra support that implies (iMac Pros, sports cars, poodles, caviar, etc.). Just a thought.

3. League tables. Good for selling newspapers and getting ratings for Today Tonight. Utterly pointless for anyone else. Except people who like saying ‘name and shame’ a lot. Also, they are technically illegal to publish in NSW, but Kristina Keneally’s (aka KKK) state Labor government are such berks that they won’t enforce it. (In fairness to the most recent regurgitation from the ‘Generate-a-NSW-Premier-a-tron’, her government opposed the bill and had nothing to do with its formulation. Also, I don’t really take the legislation seriously, but this is outweighed by my desire to insult KKK.)

4. The website doesn’t actually gauge improvements in a cohort of students from one round of testing to the next. It simply assesses a school’s performance in NAPLAN against a shifting average. You could work out how much students are improving in comparison to their previous results, but that would require some mathematical skill and a calculator. Most parents lack the former, and only use the latter to work out which of the celebrity diets on the teevee is the cheapest. The federal government has stated, and Verity Firth repeated it this evening, that one of the main purposes of MySchool is to let governments know which schools are in need of more funding, more resources. However, it is perfectly conceivable (and highly likely) that students at a red school can make substantial improvements upon their previous NAPLAN results, and still be significantly below the national and ’similar schools’ average. The school doesn’t necessarily need more money, isn’t necessarily broken, and nothing short of far-reaching socio-economic reform will improve the school’s result. Again, it ties in with the problem of there being no benchmarks.

5. It will result, to one degree or another, in schools teaching the NAPLAN test, rather than just… Well, teaching. Haven’t you seen series 4 of The Wire? Is that not the simplest and cheapest way of improving a school’s ranking with the least possible effort?

6. Any school whose population is below the reporting threshold does not have their NAPLAN results reported on the website. Which is a shame, because ‘naming and shaming’ (I’ll never use that phrase again) the weirdos and recluses who home-school their children (who don’t live a thousand kilometers from civilisation) would be a good thing.

7. If MySchool is the first step in a broader political narrative on education reform (‘computers for schools’ was more of a 2007 campaign highlight for Labor, and its fruits shall not be borne in the short term), then Julia Gillard mucked up the sequence a little. Chris Bonner was right in the Stateline interview – MySchool shouldn’t have come first, not in it’s current form, anyway. It is a tool with enormous potential for misuse and misunderstanding, not a genuine reform. It gives the impression that Labor’s ‘Education Revolution’ will involve little more than deflecting responsibility to principals, teachers and schools. Performance pay would have been a much more substantial beginning to Gillard’s narrative, even if it would have taken longer to devise than cobbling together a website.

That’s just what I think. Unfortunately, as long as the teacher’s union at large is adamantly against any change in education, the federal government will be free to dictate the terms of reform – a little like the the 1998 Australian waterfront dispute… Maybe Julia Gillard will get ex-SAS blokes to train scab NAPLAN examiners in Dubai!

Tony Abbott - Leader of the Coalition

I call the process Moncktification, and it can be applied to any picture that is wanting of eye-googliness.

So, Lord Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, is visiting Australia to give talks on climate change, and also presumably to have his desiccated penis massaged by his staunchest allies in Australia. Alan Jones – who, in spite of multiple breaches of the broadcasting code of conduct, has managed to keep his particular brand of bullshit on the air – was among them. The footage that was shown in the otherwise uninformative 7.30 Report, uh… report gave me a good idea of what this presentation was all about: basically a couple of hours of Lord Banana of Brenchley preaching to the converted, replete with PowerPoint slides and jokes.

From transcript:

(to audience) As you can see the houses of Parliament would disappear, to which my saying is, and your problem is?
(audience laughs)

And I along with them!

Of course, the silliest thing about Monckton is still his charge that the global warming lobby is actually contriving to bring the world under a single government – Illuminati style. Unelected sponge that Monckton is, he even had the stones to emphasise the point that these shadowy rulers would be vilely unelected. All the drama around this – Monckton’s visit, Tony Abbott’s questionably-funded green policy, the stirrings of a Sceptic Revolution, of an empire on the brink of collapse – masks a fairly mundane political truth.

I don’t spend a lot of time going around talking to ‘the people’. Recently, in fact, I’ve spent most of my time talking to deliciously-animated space vixens. However, if gauging the public mood through politics is an endeavour that has any validity, it seems that things have changed a bit since before the Coalition leadership spill of late 2009. As a political issue, climate change is losing momentum. Here, Andrew Bolt might claim some sort of personal victory, attributing the stagnation to the daily truths that he ejaculates onto the face of Australian politics via his blog. He wouldn’t be entirely wrong, and an ALP federal election campaign that dodges the issue would be a major victory for sceptics.

But it’s not because the science is, somehow, ‘falling apart’. The relationship between man-made carbon emissions and the global climate remains well-founded, and scientists and researchers will continue their work in this regard for a long time. All we are seeing is an Australian public with a relatively short attention span getting bored of the politics, in a mediascape teeming with distractions.

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Forget Andrew Bolt – graphs on climate change are so 2009. Tony Abbott’s recent attempt to soften his public image with lewd and nigh-incestuous photographs has triggered a flurry of research into the alarming trend of skyrocketing silliness on the conservative side of politics. The findings of this research have been assembled into a handy graph:

Click Here: Silliness is on the rise in conservative politics!

"But wait, there's... Oh, no. There isn't really."

Naturally, I watched tonight’s Lateline interview with Ian Plimer and George Monbiot. It was, if nothing else, entertaining, and revealed nothing of the two men (or the issue of climate change) that we do not already know. The thing that stuck with me was the peculiar contrast of Plimer’s ‘I’m just a scientist’ argument, and the image of him holding up (on at least three occasions) a copy of his book, Heaven and Earth, in the manner of Tim Shaw with a set of Demtel steak knives.

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Ian Plimer stopped being a scientist the moment he set foot on the climate sceptic warpath. Which isn’t to say that he lost any of his credibility, or any right to speak his mind. But he is now effectively a politician and lobbyist, and his performance on Lateline (as well as one earlier in the year when he released his book) made this starkly apparent. A genuine scientist is a thrall to empirical evidence, and will change their findings to suit it, but Plimer’s reluctant to answer questions because, as a politician, he cannot concede any such territory – in the same way that Paul Keating could not admit to his broken promise with the LAW tax cuts, or Howard with the ‘children overboard’ deception. In politics, a concession to one’s opponents is a tangible step towards death. Whether he has put himself in this position, or because he has been hauled atop the shoulders of the climate sceptics, Ian Plimer is no longer a scientist, in spite of his regular assertions to the contrary.

What’s particularly strange – and my brother, who is far less inclined to take these debates in earnest, pointed this out to me – is that Plimer, aside from his corpulant appearance and slightly weak voice, resembles a classic pro-wrestling heel. From his ever-smug countenance, to the part of the interview in which he told Monbiot to mind his manners, “young man”, I can imagine him marching to the ring, in full suit-and-tie, holding high a copy of his book – all to the glorious boos of the audience.

L-R: Ludvig Borga, Jerry 'the King' Lawler, Ian Plimer, The Repo Man, I.R.S, Yokozuna, Ted 'the Million Dollar Man' DiBiase

Sexy-smoldering Barnaby

The title is a reference to a Kurosawa Akira film, and the post isn’t about Barnaby Joyce – it’s just such a wonderful picture. I was just reading Andrew Bolt’s blog (which I do fairly regularly, in spite of myself) and wondering, for the hundredth time in my life, how a person can become such a wretched, conservative ideologue – or any ideologue at all, for that matter. The right wing/left wing spectrum is so ludicrously artificial, yet it remains a compelling way to pigeonhole those whose views about the world are passionate. Someone like Bolt selects his political causes as though completing a checklist in a Political Spectrum for Dummies book – he is a climate sceptic, an apologist for Israel’s foreign policy (and for the Howard government, as for Keith Windschuttle), and seems to have an unhealthy infatuation with Sarah Palin (I can’t quite work that one out). He posits himself diametrically opposed to ‘the left’, and presumably ‘the lefties’ as well.

I’ve often wondered whether the whole thing is self-perpetuating; that a person, through parental influence or a prejudicial stance on a particular issue, comes to adopt indiscriminately the values imposed by history and society. Or, perhaps the whole edifice is maintained by self-perpetuating mutual dislike. Bolt’s writing style is embattled and self-righteous; he’s no journalist, and doesn’t pretend to be, as he wages his daily assaults on a real-or-imagined enemy.

It’s either one of those two, or else there is some essential, biochemical characteristic that motivates an ideologue. An irrepressible awareness of, and sympathy with, all worldly things (that’d be the ‘bleeding heart lefties’, I suppose), or a complete lack of it in the case of Bolt. That is, an obsessive love for one’s own immediate locality – the foregone memories that create geography and culture. A fear to step away from it. There’s nothing wrong with that sort of fear, which I suppose is wholly natural and sensible, but it is a little pitiable. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to live without an expansive mind.

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Arcology

This evening’s report on that nirvana of news and current-affairs, Lateline, about population growth and urban sprawl in Australia’s major cities, made for bonerifically nifty viewing – and not only because it featured a debate between two of Australia’s most intelligent, erudite former leaders, Bob Carr and Steve Bracks, both of whom possessed the rare quality in politics of knowing when to jump ship.

The report was framed in light of comment Kevin Rudd made weeks ago, in which he expressed his idiosyncratic, bland pleasure about the forecasts for Australia’s population growth: 35 million by the middle of the century. He wants Australia to be a ‘big country’.

It is the geographic and social implications of this ‘big country’ that are at the centre of the debate. Carr was, as ever, doubtful of the necessity for feeding a population boom. The most interesting point he raised questioned the practice of boosting immigration to satiate skill shortages. New citizens bring co-dependents, who in turn create other skills gaps. Bracks was far more optimistic, speaking of the opportunities afforded by population growth. To this, Carr replied that population growth will increase urban density and sprawl.

It is in quarter-acre sparsity that Carr, and many others, it seems, locate Australia’s quality of life. The problem is, this notion has been living on borrowed time since the beginning of Australia’s port-WW2 migration program. Naturally, a decade of uninterrupted economic growth and countless government hand-outs and tax-cuts have acted as a sort of saline solution to this dying ideal, but the arguments to maintain it now seem really scant.

This is all really precious, coming from somebody who grew up in this lifestyle, so I leave the rest to city planners, environmentalists and economists. Watch the report. Suffice to say, now the most popular Prime Minister in Australian history has signalled that the Federal Government will take a bigger hand in city planning, the time has never been better to realise my dream of the Sydney Arcology!

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Coalition Fiscal Policy

The appointment of Barnaby Joyce to the Shadow Finance portfolio may well be Tony Abbott’s biggest mistake for the coming election year. Regardless of how many times the guy reminds us all that he’s an accountant, Joyce has the heart of a market interventionist. He has proven, time and again, that his loyalties lie only with his electorate, that he scarcely understands what a tax is, that he sees national debt as akin to household debt. The man is an economic illiterate – even if a thoroughly entertaining one – and he will really struggle against Lindsay Tanner. He’s never been one to tow the party line, either – his interview with Annabel Crabbe (linked above) showed us that he doesn’t quite understand that the price of promotion to the front bench is to limit your opinions to your own portfolio. It already looks like an Opposition with two leaders – far from a sound election strategy.

In other news, I composed a song about Christmas beetles! All in AudioMulch; loops of recordings from my modular synth, granulators, and pulsecombes, which I’ve only started using recently. The pulsecombe’s rhythmic possibilities are incredible – it’s just a shame that you can’t program LFO-like contraptions to modulate parameters, because I still find the automation system a little clunky. There are no words, but then again I’ve never heard a Christmas beetle sing.

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