~ intelligence community edition

Yesterday, I was doing a little after-the-fact editing on the Cane Toads of Cthulhu post. This was, I think, between five and fifteen minutes after I originally posted it. I was trying to find out more about the North Carolina teachers busted for toad farming, when Google directed me back to my own post. It was not far down the search results page, just after the original Sunday Mail article I found pinned up in Nikki's toilet.

Was it five minutes? Fifteen? Even if it was half an hour, it’s still sensational.

I am no tech head, but I’m interested in how Google searched every page on the Internet within such a time frame. It had to have, didn’t it? It found the relevant text string nowhere but on the originating site and on Sails of Oblivion …but it must have checked every other page first. Mustn’t it? Or is there something Boolean and algorithmic I’m missing?

Now, I was a little potted at the time. The day I arrived in Point Lookout, I was doing something in the front yard when a notorious looking murri poked his head over the fence and inquired if I had any mull. I wonder how he pegged me? I found him a couple of small buds, he was grateful, offered to pay, but I refused. Well, yesterday, while I was out, he dropped back and left me something similar in return. I was kind of moved when Nikki told me. After all, I was a complete stranger to this guy. He had said, ‘What goes around comes around.’

Anyway, I was labouring under the effects of his gift when this Google thing came up.

I’m pretty sure I tested a couple of other search strings from my post with the same results. It’s amazing, isn’t it? But what power!

And what about the signals intelligence molemen at ASIS or the NSA? With their high level access to classified next generation search engines – for instance, Google Intelligence Community Edition 0.9? How quickly would the red flags be raised by a sentence like – I am going to break into Malcolm Turnbull’s palatial mansion, vacuum his Iranian rugs and assassinate his dust mites? Am I already doomed? Have they already vacuum-sealed a response team in rubberized thermoplastic, punched in some Google Earth data and blasted it my way? What’s that now? The door crashing in…?

*

Wentworth dog owners have got behind Malcolm Turnbull in the seat of Wentworth. Do they know of Conrad Black’s assertion that he is a pet-killer? That, in a fit of jealously and pique, he disappeared a woman’s cat? Do they care? See Dysthymiac for more of Conrad Black on Turnbull.

*

To follow up on a thread from an earlier post…

In the Courier Mail yesterday there was an article on a school stabbing in Mooloolaba. Scan down a little and it reads:

‘The alleged attack came days after the same school’s principal, Greg Peach, suspended five students for sucking potentially toxic beads at the school.

“The Bindeez beads were at the centre of a major medical scare this month after it was found they contained an adhesive solvent that could turn into the drug GHB or fantasy.”

This would be a good example to use when defining the phrase ‘with an air of inevitability’.

Now, cheers. Vote well.

~ in our dry cellar

Let me apologise for harping on the federal election, but the whole thing is looming like a big black cloud over everything at present. Hanging, indeed, like the Sword of Damocles.

I know what the pollsters and the bookmakers say, but there is still a chance that the reptilian fiend will be returned to power. Or should I say the grotesque misshapen puppet who jiggles hideously with his hideous fellows to the whims of his hideous, hideous wife.

Or ought I say - with apologies to T S Eliot - the hollow man, the stuffed man, headpiece filled with straw, whose dried voice is quiet and meaningless as wind in dry grass, or rats’ feet over broken glass in our dry cellar.

I hate it that this… vile, heartless, uncompassionate individual is still in a position to stress me out like this.

I hate it that in all probability, there are people out there who pay no heed to the legal travails of Mohammad Haneef. To the legal travails of Mamdouh Habib who at the hands of ‘Australian servants’ was ‘the victim of atrocities fit for a concentration camp, including being tied to the ground while a prostitute menstruated on him’.

And to the skein of cowardly lies that was the children overboard affair. To the man who today said he would allow nuclear power in Australia ‘if the economy demanded it’. The economy. The economy. Excuse me, but shouldn’t that be 'the imminent catastrophe of global warming'?

And to the architects of the GST that taxes rich and poor alike. To the architects of Work Choices. To the greedy plutocrats from the leafy suburbs who revile the union leaders whose calling is to speak for those who only have a voice if they speak together, for the masses disenfranchised by those very plutocrats. To the fatuous Chris Corrigan who, with the support of leading liberals, tried to break the MUA with his hired goons.

And to Tony Abbott who bulldozed a planned safe injecting room in Sydney by calling on his friends in the Catholic mafia. Archbishop George Pell spoke to future pope Joseph Ratzinger, [who at that stage was Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,] who obediently threatened to expel from the Church the dignified order of nuns who had planned to operate the room.

And to Kevin Andrews who trod out the euthanasia laws in the Northern Territory, who fought against stem-cell research and RU-486. To the men who aborted the heroin trials in Canberra with extreme prejudice. To the Prime Minister’s advisory panel on drugs, headed by the ignorant and intolerant Major Brian Watters, possibly the most calcified and backward looking voice on the subject available.

And to Kevin Ruddock. And to Amanda Vanstone.

And to the arsehole whose twee vision of Australia in the fifties – with no drug addicts, no homosexuals, no sophistication and governed by the regiphiliac Menzies - led him to fatally and arrogantly sabotage the referendum on the republic …

I’m sorry to regurgitate all this stuff. It’s sickening, I know, but it frightens me that there are people out there who will offer their vote to this… man.

And, well, just shoot me, please, if he gets reelected.

~ the horror

the horror ...

~ complaint to the australian ombudsman

Dear Sir/Madam,

I would like to express serious concerns regarding a television advertisement placed by the Australian Federal Police which encourages Australians to report suspicious activity in the community.

The phone-voices of Australians are heard communicating their fears to the AFP, so providing examples to the viewer of what may be considered questionable behaviour or speech. The spoken words are transcribed on screen, superimposed, moved about, and ultimately gathered together into a map of Australia composed entirely of the fear, uncertainty and suspicions of the callers.

To my sensibilities this is an unnecessarily extreme image which - if effective - would have the potential to degrade the general wellbeing of our society. It appears to urge the dissolution of trust and solidarity in a community which defines itself as open and content. How the image sits with regard to the typical Australian opinion of the 'dobber', I could only speculate.

The concerns of the AFP may be real, and the assistance of the community may be helpful in addressing them, but this advertisement employs imagery that is well beyond the pale. It seems to encourage the kind of behaviour we associate with communist East Germany, in which neighbour is pitted against neighbour in their fear of the secret police. At least that was my first reaction.

I hope that by drawing your attention to this advertisement, some reassessment of the AFP's approach may occur.

Additionally, I would ask that the timing of their campaign be considered. During the lead up to an election, the incitement of fear in a community is often used as a tactic by certain political blocs. With this in mind, the AFP advertisement would seem dangerously close to being political in itself.

sincerely,

Sam Sejavka

~ I am the lorax. I speak for the trees

Thoughts on the looming election.

We are exceedingly complex organisms, evolved from an exceedingly complex biological system. It is said the human brain is the most complicated thing in the universe, but the brain itself is a component of a thing far more intricate and vast: nature, the totality of life on this planet considered as a whole - on which we remain entirely dependent for our continued survival.

As we have proliferated and developed as a civilisation, we have increasingly isolated ourselves from our ecological matrix, from nature. We have acquired tastes, desires, needs that exist in a place apart from nature, and which are sometimes directly at odds with it. Consider electricity, computational power, mechanical assistance, recreational assistance, medical technology. We are so deeply immersed in this artificial superstructure that we frequently forget that we are, as ever, as always, wholly, of the Earth.

When we travel off-world in our magnificent machines, however briefly, we must take a portion of our atmosphere, food from the soil, the bacterial flora in our gut, the microscopic monsters that tend our eyelashes….

Some of the instincts that served us in pre-history have found new focus in a civilised world. They have transmuted into such things as greed, the urge to acquire far beyond one’s actual need. Many of us consume simply to be seen consuming more than our neighbour. We expect, almost as a right, a standard of living which would have astonished our forbears. In a world of gross unrestrained consumption, the pack instinct, refocused, can lead to the rape of the Earth.

The urge to power leads to ultra-violence - against each other, against other animals, against the fabric of nature herself. And it can lead to slavery in everything but name. And discrimination. Prejudice. The loss of contact with the fundamentals of our existence can lead to the perversions of torture and the tools of mega-death …

In the last decade, we have acquired sufficient evidence to know, without doubt, that our civilisation is destroying its foundation. Nature is no longer swinging with the punches. Soon, our planet, our mother, will be a hostile place that will no longer abide our excesses. Of course, I am speaking of climate change here, the greenhouse effect, the mass extinction of species... Humanity, we have learnt, is literally a plague upon the Earth.

I ask the reader to keep the above in mind, if you are voting in the upcoming [Australian] federal election.

The SBS programme Insight, in a recent episode, corralled an audience of undecided voters. I did not see it all, but over the period I watched not one of them counted environmental degradation among their concerns. They spoke of house prices, interest rates, taxes, the economy … they spoke for themselves, for themselves only, not for the community, and not for the ultimate provider of the air they breathe, the food they eat, the body and the mind they inhabit - though that provider is under dire threat. To my mind, hip-pocket voting is an abomination. The act of indulging the hip pocket voter is an abomination. [Certainly the suffering of many people could be eased by better government policy in the economic realm, but not at the cost of the planet]

We have come to a time in which only one issue counts - and beneath its rubric, the sub-issues of social equity, education, research/development which may give us the ability as a community to save ourselves.