Tuesday 24th of December 2024
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the downfall of a "profession"...

netcatching spider...

The dreadful peculiarity of politics, as a business, is the amount of deceit by politicians and lobbyists to promote greater expediency and harbour loose standards for personal gain. The present rot comes mostly from the inside — as outsiders, the public, us, clamour for reforms, fairness and democratic truthfulness. But we elect the bastards... Makes our eyes water...

In the last twenty five year (say 4,000 years to be more accurate), almost every political actions in America and in the Western world has been marked by the paucity of proper actions to improve politics and by the prostitution of politicians. Much of this comes from the selfish purpose of these politicians trying to avoid the truth, by degrading the standard of the truth and by promoting a duplicitous hidden selfish agenda. To this extend, all the goodwill of the people is duded by such degradation. Such political profiteering is far from altruistic, and benefits only a few mates, to the detriment of the social greater good. 


In politics, like most crooked business, the protection racket is designed to promote the unscrupulous and minimise competition by using bully tactics. It becomes impossible to fight frauds, as the facts are never told, while the loud political mouths sing hymns of praise to their own glory — or tweet, or bomb something, including their own silly excuses.


Everybody should recognise that honesty in politics and its prostitute, the media, is essential for the success of societies as a whole. Politics must gain public confidence and every fake news shakes this confidence in politics. Politicians, as a group, need standards to encourage this confidence. Pigs will fly. The constant clamours of fake news of this and that do nothing to solve the problem as everybody fall into the trap of illusions and pigheadedness.


There are politicians and lobbyists who go much farther than the mere brown paper bag or the grand porkie with elegance. There are groups and individuals who influence choices of political will, in a scramble to make their mates cash in privately from the public purse or for themselves when they retire from the “profession”. The tricks are numerous including prostitution and lies using the godly moral values. This is where the Ishmaelites come in. 

Bugger. See, Abraham’s wife, Sarah, could not give birth to children. She pushed her own servant (slave) Hagar to get pregnant from Abraham... Thus starts a big mess, as Sarah became pregnant too with a son that was thereafter named Isaac... The politics of survival became imbued with jealousies, sex and devious god’s play.


See, the story goes that god established a covenant with Abraham’s son Isaac. As Ishmael grew to adulthood, there was dissension between him and Isaac. Hagar left Abraham’s harem taking her son Ishmael with her and went into the wilderness. The “angel of god”, probably a goat in need of milking, met them and predicted for the third time that Ishmael would be blessed too, and he would be the father of a great nation, beginning with twelve sons: Nebaioth, Kedar, Adbeel, Mibsam, Mishma, Dumah, Massa, Hadad, Tema, Jetur, Naphish, and Kedemah. The legend tells us it is from the Ishmaelites that the Arab nations descended. The world has been at war there ever since.

I suspect that god, bored with so much goodness, decided to revise his gift to Ishmael to create a bit of shit... So there. 

God thus made Ishmael stubborn, untamable, and warlike: 

He will be a wild donkey of a man 

his hand will be against everyone 

and everyone’s hand against him

and he will live in hostility 

toward all his brothers

Not a very nice narrative. God is such a bastard when it comes to His (god is a male) game of throne... 

Later in Israel’s history, the awful Ishmaelites were also engaged in the buying and selling of slaves. The Ishmaelites were also fond of gold, including gold earrings. To this day, the Jews hate gold and diamonds, and of course never had nor traded in slaves. You can snigger... Business is business. Any political and/or religious excuse for a buck will do.


During the reign of King David, the Ishmaelites joined a confederacy against god and against His (god is a male) people, Israel (Psalm 83:5–6). Their goal was to:

destroy them as a nation, 

so that Israel’s name is remembered no more (verse 4). 

Considering the current turmoil in the Middle East and the hatred directed against Israel by her neighbours, the “prophecies” concerning the descendants of Ishmael "continue to prove true". Yep. Self-fulfilling bullshit. This fight between these “godly” camel traders, all born from Abraham, is typical of the politician handbook in which one side declares itself better than the other with the grace of god while they all are as rotten as the next. 

Humanity is in poor hands.

Altruism is very much lacking in god’s hand. He (god is a male) wants biffo. He wants the characters he has created to kill each other, while canoodling to “His” chosen people, the Jews — and should they go astray, he sends them a plague of frogs...

So if you are not a Jew, you’re not chosen, bugger you, so you’re doomed to be left behind on judgement day.  No need to be good or better that a gnat — all you need is to be circumcised and wear the offcut on your head as a little black hat.

It may appear that I have digressed from present politics into silly cynicism, but the old politics still drive the thinking of the morons in charge. The present awful Israelites, supported by the awful Americanites, will align themselves with one of the Ishmaelite tribe — the awful Saudis — against the others — the awful Persians — in order to divide and annoy the shit out of them — and us.

So come Persia, Syria, Libya and all other conflicts in which we are sold manufactured bullshit in order to justify WAR. 


In politics, to combat the efforts of unscrupulous politicians, a wave of reform is needed. Politics has gone downhill for the last 25 years (a bit longer as mentioned at the beginning of this diatribe), though politics never reach great heights of intelligence ever before, always being submissive to the religious mobs, despite revolutions. So going downhill means politics are reaching for the sewers. This industry, and its minion the media, continues to publish fake information and manipulate the public to believe in crap, in the same manner as the people of the Middle East, 2000 years ago, believe in the crap that had been manufactured 2000 years before this. We desperately need to let go of these illusions, but the religious institutions of all kind do not want the greater altruism of truer knowledge — that can be acquired mostly through sciences — to displace their grand PROFITABLE porkies. The fight between the religiosities is thus ONLY a dangerous and deadly smokescreen devised AND MAINTAINED to hide the reality of nature. 


This is the explanation for the spirit of war between nations in which god of whatever colour has given the handle of competition to death. The battles are designed to prevent the realisation we’re all monkeys and that we should help each others in removing the political nits — and the religious platforms — that plague all our social networks. 


It will come to this, eventually, but all the deviously religiously politically hypocritical profiteers will fight like hell in the meantime. It’s going to be a long haul, a dangerous operation like a surgical brain transplant, as the weaponry is gigantic and the political morons are fighting deviously mad.

Meanwhile the surface of the planet is warming up in accordance to what we’re doing to it...

Gus Leonisky

You local atheist...

possibly less devious than the others...

Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States, has repeatedly been shown to be the country's most polarizing and disliked leader in national polling, and now the world's high-profile media institutions are acknowledging what many have pointed out since the beginning of his term: that the president is mentally unfit to hold his post.

 

In recent articles posted from such diverse legacy outlets as The New York Times, The South China Morning Post, The Guardian and even US military watchdog Defense One, the language regarding the US president's mental health has shifted from offering the opinions of third parties to throwing down original content suggesting that Trump's behavior is "an emergency situation."

The South China Morning Post, Hong Kong's newspaper of record since 1903 and an ordinarily cautious voice, took the unusual step of asking "Is Trump an Idiot?" and, answering its own question, stating that "yes" appears to be the correct response, affirming: "monumentally so."

Founded in 1851, America's august media outlet The New York Times has now ceased to pull punches regarding Trump's ability to govern, posting that he appears to "be cracking up," while observing a growing avalanche of reports from within his own administration pointing to the US president's "increasingly unhinged and chaotic" speech, behavior, and actions.

The Guardian, a frequent publisher of anti-Trump rhetoric, has taken to actively detailing the dissolution of the US Republican party and its "miserable choice" of leadership, continually hammering on the fact that "No president has ever polled anywhere near as low as Trump."

Even US military stalwart Defense One is taking the plunge, as a recent piece strongly suggested that the president's favorite means of communication, Twitter, Inc., address what the media outlet refers to as the "ongoing national security threat" presented by Trump's often incomprehensible, and regularly bullying, tweets.

Lawmakers, military chiefs and those in business and finance, as well anyone with access to the internet, appear to be watching with eager interest as — to quote comedian John Oliver — Trump's method of communication increasingly resembles "a drunk driver crashing a pickup truck."

If the increasingly likely possibility of impeachment does occur, however, the US would get Mike Pence as its 46th president, a man described as "quite possibly more dangerous" than Trump, cited by the Huffington Post.

read more:

https://sputniknews.com/us/201712021059642739-media-goes-for-the-throat/

 

See also:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/33643

 

Please note that Hilarious Hillary could have been worse... Read from top.

 

what do we see?...


...The screams of victims ring loud in our ears

The screams and tears of terrified and unhappy victims ring loud in our ears all over the world in all Continents, whether caused by murder or rape or mutilations or kidnappings or extortion or the death of a baby because the family does not have access to basic sanitation. Collectively, we have the means to redress our problems and rectify the imbalances inherited from centuries of imperialism and the Holocaust of the Negro peoples, slavery.

But what do we see? We see two geo-political blocks, one composed by the Russian Federation, the BRICS bloc, the CSTO and another centered around NATO and the GCC - the Gulf States, principally Saudi Arabia, whose own links to terrorism are to be investigated, whose own human rights records are deplorable but who is welcomed by the UNO as brothers and equals in the Human Rights Council (HRC). One look at what Saudi Arabia is doing in Yemen - committing atrocities without even a UN mandate to conduct military operations against the al-Houthi, and we may question whether the HRC deserves to exist.

Yet NATO countries are happy to queue up and shake the hands of those who sign agreements with terrorists or who cavort directly or not with those who finance ISIS and other extremist groups. Some even train their toops and sell them weapons. And here lies one of the evils: the defense industry is a fundamental source of income of the economies of most (developed) countries. While the CSTO/BRICS bloc concentrates on using the UN Security Council as the proper forum for debate, discussion and diologue - the fundamentals of democracy - as the proper forum for crisis management, the NATO/GCC bloc is hell-bent on confrontation, arrogance, belligerancy and chauvinism, exporting violence through terrorism and using terrorists as their lackeys. To sell weapons, you need conflicts.

The Western media does not report this, they report lies, then classify those who expose these lies as fake news and try every trick in the book to close them down. The social media today is winning the battle and those who have pioneered internet journalism over the last twenty years can pat themselves on the back. Or can they? What is looming in the future is something sinister, namely a plan to control the content of the internet and close out "alternative" media platforms. Watch this space.

Western doping claims

Instead of coming together, we see one side, it is obvious which one it is, pushing for confrontation, peddling insolence as its modus operandi, using sports organizations as a means to highlight cases of doping against Russia while their own register is not so squeaky clean. Just a few minutes' research on United Kingdom doping cases reveals: Ali Adams (Boxing, Stanozolol); David Allen (Rugby League, Metabolite of cocaine); Ijah Anderson (Soccer, cocaine); Chris Armstrong (Soccer, cannabis); Michael Banbula (Boxing, Performance enhancers); Ryan Barrett (Boxing, Methylhexanamine); Alain Baxter (Alpine skiing, Methamphetamine); Terry Bridge, Rugby league, Steroids); Ian Brown (Rugby, Testosterone); Johnathan Bullough (Weightlifting, Methylhexaneamine); Ian Burnham (Water polo, Cocaine); Danny Cadamarteri (Soccer, Ephedrine); Neil Campbell (Cycling, hCG); James Comben (Rugby Union, Methylhexanamine); David Cookson (Rugby Union, Methylhexanamine); Kofi Danso (Basketball, test tampering); Ceri Davies (Rugby, Drostanolone); Tony Dodson (Boxing, Performance enhancers); John Donnelly (Boxing, Benzoylecgonine); Terry Dunstan (Boxing, Performance enhancers); Jamie Durbin (Rugby league, Stanozolol).

And a few more, on the USA:  Andre Agassi (Tennis, Methamphetamine); Darell Alderman (Drag racing, cocaine); Stephen Alfred (Cycling, Norandrosterone, Testosterone, hCG, refusal to submit to doping control); Sadam Ali (Boxing, Cathine) ; A. J. Allmendinger (Auto racing, amphetamines); Lyle Alzado (Football, anabolic steroids); Chris Andersen (Basketball), Frankie Andreu (Cycling, EPO), Abdallah Anwar (Boccia, Hydrochlorothiazide); Lance Armstrong (Cycling, EPO, Human Growth Hormone, Testosterone, Cortisone, Blood transfusions); Sarah Baham (Swimming, refusal to submit to a test); John Barnett (Mixed martial arts, Boldenone); Phil Baroni (Mixed martial arts, Boldenone, Stanozolol metabolites); Doug Barron (Golf, Performance enhancing drugs); Bryan Berard (Ice hockey, 19-norandrosterone); Adam Bergman (Cycling, EPO); Dale Berra (Baseball, Cocaine); Alan Bogomolov Junior (Tennis, Salbutamol); Barry Bonds (Baseball, amphetamines); Stephan Bonnar (Mixed martial arts, Boldenone); David Boston (Football, Gamma-Hydroxybutyric acid); Ryan Braun (Baseball, human growth enhancer); Matt Bricker (Swimming, Ephedrine); Emily Brunneman (Swimming, Hydrochlorothiazide, Triamterene); Rebekkah Brunson (Basketball, Salmeterol); Rachael Burke (Swimming, Boldione); Enos Cabell (Baseball, Cocaine); Mike Cameron (Baseball, Stimulants); Ken Caminiti (Baseball, Steroids); Jose Canseco (Baseball, Steroids); Roger Clemens (Baseball, Anabolic steroids); Chris Cooper (Football, THG); Kit Cope (Mixed martial arts, Boldenone); Joey D'Antoni (Cycling, EPO); Lindsay Devaney (Swimming, refusal to submit to testing); Jerramie Domish (Ice hockey, performance enhancers)...

But these are the ones pushing for bans for Russian athletes, as they are pushing for sanctions and confrontation and printing negative stories about Russia over Georgia (Georgia attacked Russian peace-keepers after refusing to hold referenda in South Ossetia and Abkhazia as per its obligations under the Soviet Constitution, upon the voluntary dissolution of the Union). Then they complained about Ukraine when Russia is as directly involved in Ukraine as the UK or USA is with ISIS: claiming that Russia is involved because a few Russians were caught there is the same as claiming that London is a sponsor of Islamic State because of Jihadi John.

It was not Russia that invaded Iraq based on barefaced lies, it was not Russia that invaded Libya and used terrorists to destabilize the African country with the highest Human Development Index, in Syria Russia is helping the government, not siding with terrorists to overthrow it.

How much more could be done if these two blocs came together? How many problems could be solved if we spent on development projects or conservation of nature a fraction of what we are spending on defense on one side and war on the other?

Let us be honest, Planet Earth 2017 is sick and moribund. We have polluted space, we have polluted the air, we have polluted the land and today we learn that our oceans are contaminated with plastics to a frightening extent, some say we are past the point of no return. Yet the plastics lobbies control elected representatives in so-called western democracies which are in fact nothing more or less than hang-outs for lobbyists working to earn a buck in return for favors. Meanwhile animals are becoming extinct as we encroach on their habitat and others are living in mysery, tortured by our inhumane policies if not by abject cruelty, such as the dogmeat festivals, bullfights, slaughter of dolphins and everything surrounding these acts of barbarity. Meanwhile the food we eat is toxic to a large degree, meat containing anti-biotics, hormones and other substances, while fish is full of microplastiocs and poisonous metals, vegetables are contaminated by Genetic Modification. (Not in Russia, here GM is banned).

We live in a world in which nobody is responsible and nothing is accountable, in the NATO/GCC bloc, whereas there is in fact far more freedom of speech and expression in the BRICS/CSTO bloc and where people are far more engaged in the rule of international law. If anyone has to change, it is the former.

Is our world a perfect place? No it is not. It is a pillar of injustice, hypocrisy and mismanagement because governance has been taken over by lobbies, which in turn spend their time creating tensions and conflicts, creating Planet Dearth. 2017. Forgive me, but this planet revolts me.


See more at http://www.pravdareport.com/opinion/columnists/29-11-2017/139258-planet_...

hopeless obsolescence of politics...

...

When people outside politics ask me to explain what is going on, I generally start by saying the political and media class didn’t all wake up one day and just decide to be hopeless. There are seismic things going on.

Technology has disrupted the media cycle, with massive impact. Instead of amplifying long cycles of deliberation –deliberation being the central business of politics – the waterfall news cycle now gobbles up and spits out short cycles of outrage, posturing and contention.

Everything has speeded up to the point where there now seems to be an inexorable obsolescence about everything in public life. Debates get old before they start. Leaders are cannon fodder in this febrile, fretful, environment. Australian prime ministers have become biodegradable courtesy of the coup culture.

So far, I’m in reasonably familiar territory. Readers who have been with me throughout the year will know I try to turn these issues around in my mind in different ways to see if there’s some mysterious code we might be able to crack.

Thus far I certainly haven’t cracked it. But in the spirit of the festive season I thought we might end 2017 with a lighthearted thought experiment rather than talking ourselves relentlessly into a funk.

Regular readers will know I care a lot about climate change and I’m moderately obsessed with energy policy.

Knowing something of my professional obsessions, a friend suggested to me that we might be able to fix politics by bringing the approach economists bring to wicked problems such as climate change. Economists talk about pricing negative externalities.

But before we get to pricing externalities, let’s set the scene. Let’s start with an assumption that politicians are rational actors, responding to clear incentives. (Don’t laugh, bear with me.)

Let’s also acknowledge that we in the media like to have everything both ways. We moan constantly about how crap everything is while the beast we feed 24/7 sends a very different set of messages.

The contemporary media cycle rewards politicians who emote (thinking in the current period really is strictly optional, how else do you explain Donald Trump?), disrupt (the contemporary currency of everything) and go negative – or even better – go full ad hominem (because it works more often than it should).

Voters say they are repelled by negativity, and I think some people genuinely are, but it cuts through. While I was sitting in Canberra bemoaning the cartoonish debate playing out about whether the Labor senator Sam Dastyari was a double agent, wincing about a serious issue being reduced to a potboiler, Labor MPs were telling me they were being approached in their electorates about Dastyari being some new cold war operative.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/dec/22/how-about-a-tax-o...

the theatre of politics...

How much reality is there in modern politics? Yes, the narratives rolled out are almost routinely false, at least in part, but what about the personalities presented to us as movers and shakers? How real are they? We’ve all seen David Cameron cringingly forgetting which soccer team he allegedly supports, and it’s pretty easy to figure out this is not because of “brain fade” but because Cameron’s love for Aston Villa/West Ham is just a creation of his PR team. We’ve all seen the video about Obama and the water bottles.

read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2017/12/30/are-our-political-leaders-any-more-r...

a crocodile custard pie...

Our politicians are back in Canberra. It is tempting to say who cares?

But the stakes could not be higher.

We begin our political year with democracy under threat globally; identity politics dividing societies; erosion of human rights; rising inequality; a wave of populism shaking up the global order.

People are turning away from politics as usual, and the future in many ways is uncertain.

 

Read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-02-05/stan-grant-democracy-in-the-fight-...

 

-------

 

THE CIRCUS is back in town!

That's right parliament resumes this week. So get your popcorn ready, find a good seat and strap yourself in, because politics is a circus and there's no way out of the freak tent.

 

Last year, we had the dual citizenship saga, marriage equality postal vote and Bob Katter hitting us all in the face with a crocodile custard pie.

 

Read more:

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/parliament-fa...

 

Read from top.

lumen and political hope...

From Victor Hugo's poem "Lux". This poem (written in 1853) is somewhat delusional (though amazing) as Hugo bases his views on a universal religious ideal (וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים, יְהִי אוֹר; וַיְהִי-אוֹר — And God said: 'Let there be light.' And there was light) while adding progress and freedom. 



Yes, I tell you, yes, I repeat,
Because the bugle says what the trumpet touts,
All will be peace and day!
Freedom ! No more serf and no more overlords!
O smile from above! From heaven for the earth
Majestic love!

The sacred tree of progress, formerly elusive,
Will grow, covering Europe and covering America,
On the destroyed past,
And, leaving the pure space shining through its branches,
The day will appear full of white doves,
Full of stars, the night.

And we who will be dead, dead in exile perhaps,
Bleeding martyrs, while men, without master,
Will live, more proud, more beautiful,
Under this great tree, love of the heavens that adjoins,
We will wake up to kiss her root
from the bottom of our sepulcher!

-----

At the end of the skies a point twinkles
Look, it’s growing, it shines
It’s coming, immense and golden
O univeral Republic
you are only a spark,
Tomorrow you will be the sun!...



The last part of the poem is from a different section of "Lux". Translation by Jules Letambour.

Read from top. Read also:
http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/33728

Favours, grey gifts and rezoning...

Favours, grey gifts and mutual back-scratching can be profitable when you're part of a loyal circle; Dr John Jiggensexplores the highly lauded book, Game of Mates.

GAME OF MATES: How favours bleed the nation has been acclaimed as one of the most insightful analyses of what many mislabel "corruption" in contemporary Australia, examining how the regulators of the common wealth and political insiders co-operate to mutually enrich each other in a "game of mates". Authors Dr Cameron Murray and Professor Paul Frijters began as environmental economists, investigating land rezoning by the Queensland Government agency, the Urban Land Development Authority. The land rezoned by this authority increased in value by hundreds of millions of dollars as a consequence of the rezoning — a very generous "grey gift" to the successful developers.

In examining the characteristics of landowners whose lands were rezoned by this Queensland government agency, Murray and Fritjer discovered that you were far more likely to be rezoned if you had connected relationships; common business connections, membership of lobby groups or had directors with business connection to the regulating board. In the successful group, 90% were clients of professional lobbyists. The lobbyists had a 100% success rate, with no landowners who employed lobbyists missing out on the rezoning. And 70% of rezoned landowners were political donors. These donors gave to both sides of politics — they were "equal opportunity" donors.

Murray and Fritjer concluded that success in land rezoning in Queensland depended on how well you played the "game of mates", which was a process of joining the club of insiders who were connected to the regulators. The book, Game of Mates, extends this analysis beyond land rezoning to many other major parts of the Australian economy, including mining, banking and public health. A "game of mates" can be described as a complex favour exchange network that evolves among operators who have overlapping careers in politics and business, and as regulators, where they control and distribute what the authors call "grey gifts".

They identified three core ingredients in the political favouritism that contribute to the "game of mates". The first was that there must be a honey pot – a grey gift – a valuable economic gain able to be given to private entities with a degree of discretion about who receives it. In their original study, this was the untaxed wealth gained through the process of rezoning, but there are many other discretionary gifts.

Consequently, they argue that one of the best ways to prevent "game of mates" is to remove the various honey pots that they form around. For example, in land rezoning, the A.C.T. successfully implemented such a system in 1971, where they charge landowners 75% of the value gained from the rezoning. They also do not allow private developers to convert land from rural to urban uses, ensuring a public agency captures these value gains as well. The A.C.T. raised $183 million from these systems last year. Scaling up, that could be $1.8 billion in revenue in a single year to the Queensland Government and councils that is currently given away to landowners through planning decisions.

 

Read more:

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/game-of-mates...

 

 

Read from top. Of course, in the poem above this comment, the line: "O univeral Republic" should read "O universal Republic". One should read Freud's explanation for bad spelling and slip of the tongue... including the need for glasses, a brain scan and earing aids...