The Abilene Zoo, in Texas, has a new baby Ocelot. Born 9 September, to proud Ocelot parents Hotrod
and Ellie
, little Lucy
is now old enough to be out on exhibit with her mother — via ZooBorns
Australia’s 21st prime minister and a titan of the Australian Labor Party, Edward Gough Whitlam, has died, aged 98.
Mr Whitlam leaves a legacy of unprecedented and unmatched change in Australian politics.
Arguably, he was as much lauded for his reformist leadership and eloquence as he was lambasted for his autocratic style and profligacy.
But it is for being at the centre of Australia’s most ferocious political storm, the Dismissal
, that Gough Whitlam will forever be remembered — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Photo credit: Australian Information Service, National Library of Australia collection
Carol Milne, an artist in Seattle, knits glass. These incredible sculptures have every appearance of being translucent yarn wrapped around knitting needles — via Neatorama
— via Corg Life
There are three drivers in Australian politics — the parties, the voting system and the media — that are all connected and self-supporting. And all are conspiring to hollow out our democracy, writes Tim Dunlop.
To listen in on any halfway serious discussion of politics these days is to eavesdrop on a cacophony of dissatisfaction. Issues come and go, but the underlying unease remains no matter how much we vent or how many logical arguments we make about a given issue.
The reason the whole kabuki is so unsatisfactory is because we spend too much time worrying about the day-to-day issues rather than addressing the underlying drivers of our problems.
There are a number of these drivers, but three in particular need our attention if we are ever to move out of the rut we are in. All three are all intimately connected — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Yardbird from Bridle Path Films on Vimeo.
A young girl with a secret past comes out of hiding and is forced to take on the town bullies with the thing she fears most — herself
On 2 October, Zoo Berlin’s Black Rhino, Maburi
, gave birth to a healthy baby boy — via ZooBorns
The children of refugees who fled Lebanon’s civil war for peaceful Australia in the 1970s form a majority of Australian militants fighting in the Middle East, according to about a dozen counter-terrorism officials, security experts and Muslim community members.
Of the 160 or so Australian jihadists believed to be in Iraq or Syria, several are in senior leadership positions, they say.
But unlike fighters from Britain, France or Germany, who experts say are mostly jobless and alienated, a number of the Australian fighters grew up in a tight-knit criminal gang culture, dominated by men with family ties to the region around the Lebanese city of Tripoli, near the border with Syria.
Not every gang member becomes an Islamic radical and the vast majority of Lebanese Australians are not involved in crime or in radicalism of any sort. Australian Muslims say they are unfairly targeted by law enforcement, especially after the surge in fighting in Iraq and Syria, and that racial tensions are on the verge of spiralling out of control.
Still, there is a clear nexus between criminals and radicals within the immigrant Lebanese Muslim community, New South Wales Deputy Police Commissioner Nick Kaldas told Reuters.
It is good training,
said Kaldas, himself an immigrant from Egypt and a native Arabic speaker.
The ease with which some hardened criminals from within the community have taken to militant extremism, and the prospect of what they will do when they return home from the Middle East battle-trained, is a major worry for authorities, he said.
Kaldas oversees the state’s Middle Eastern Organised Crime Squad and was the United Nations-appointed chief investigator into the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafic Hariri in a car bomb attack in Beirut in 2005.
In recent years, he said, the divide between criminal gangs and radicals in Lebanese community, who were driven by different motives, had narrowed.
I do worry about those who may be extremists infecting more people who were just pure criminals,
said Kaldas — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The National Museum of the Middle Ages, Cluny has an exhibition about the sword, customs, myths and symbols. This video recreates battles with the treaties of the fifteenth century — via Youtube
New South Wales now: the new state of business.
Really? Could they have found anything clunkier? Could their graphic be more redolent of some rock-jawed 1950s Texas oil-co?
Yet it is disturbingly apt, for a state so rusted-on to last-century values. A state ruled, it now seems, by an elephant-shooter, whose parliamentary office grins with the stuffed corpses of his victims. A state whose best chance now of a green future lies with China.
Excepting Sydney City, Clover Moore’s Sydney sits in Abbott’s Australia like an oasis of spring growth in a slag-heap. While Abbott snubs United Nations climate talks, scraps the carbon price and deliberately undermines renewables, the city has reduced its emissions by 21 per cent, retrofitted much of its building stock, installed LED streetlights throughout, pioneered trigeneration and, despite relentless derision, built bike-lanes.
Measured by achievement, Clover is hands down the best mayor this city has had. But she, too, is firmly in the elephant shooter’s sights.
Robert Borsak’s City of Sydney Amendment (Elections) Amendment Bill, known colloquially as the Elephant Shooter’s Bill, became law last month. It is designed to maximise the business vote by replacing one optional vote per business with two compulsory votes.
The government says it is not about Clover. They said that, too, about the last law they passed, two years ago, to oust her from parliament. (Clover jokes grimly that she is probably the only person in Australia to have provoked two statutes designed to bar her from public life.)
Yet the gentlemen protest too much. During one day of parliamentary debate on the bill, the lord mayor scored fully ninety-eight mentions. No other local politician was mentioned once.
Borsak himself is less coy, telling parliament in his second reading speech that he wanted to remove Ms Moore as Sydney Lord Mayor
.
It’s easy to see Borsak’s motives. He likes limelight, couldn’t care less about the city and wants revenge for the 28 parliamentary years through which Clover steadfastly opposed the gun lobby. She doesn’t support us, we don’t support her,
he says. Bush justice.
Government support is more mysterious. Business itself was content — even Alan Jones noted they weren’t exactly marching in the streets — and many Liberals, including Sydney Business Chamber head (and former MLC) Patricia Forsythe, believe the new law undemocratic
.
The Melbourne model, on which it is based, has few defenders. Melbourne mayor Robert Doyle insists that city planning is just about property rights and 50 new towers are now pending, but a recent review by former federal Liberal MP Petro Georgiou describes this two-votes-per-business model as deeply flawed, and recommends its abandonment.
In NSW parliament, Premier Mike Baird also seemed embarrassed by the blatant breach of the one-entity-one-vote principle. Former premier Barry O’Farrell was openly derisive. Yet they both voted for it. So where is Borsak’s power base?
Rogue media. Here again, Borsak is disarmingly frank, explicitly thanking both Alan Jones and the Tele for campaigns waged on his behalf. The man may not be sophisticated, but he knows how to stiffen a floppy premier.
Needless to say, however, Borsak did not hatch this ugly duckling alone. It was brought to him, already mangled, by failed Liberal mayoral candidate and current city councillor Edward Mandla — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Canada Lynx kitten, Jasper
, was out enjoying the fall atmosphere, recently, at Point Defiance Zoo in Tacoma, Washington. The six-month-old was helping the zoo promote their upcoming annual event, Zoo Boo
, a special fall themed weekend that will be held 18-19 October — via ZooBorns
A mysterious drifter and his young friend must save a frightened, forgetful old lady from a memory eating ghost.
A short film by Toby Meakins and Simon Allen (2008) — via Youtube
— via Lunarbaboon
tephen King once wrote that horror and humour were two of the most difficult story forms to master, because funny gone wrong is almost always horrifying, while a bungled horror story runs the risk of eliciting shrieks of laughter in place of terror.
It didn’t take long for the narrative threads of Death Cult in the Suburbs
to unravel and the snickering to begin. And so we find, a few weeks after September’s terror raids, that the mystery sword that featured so prominently in everybody’s fever dreams of jihad come to Martin Place was not in fact the mighty blade of slashening; woe be unto the infidel. It was just a plastic toy, according to its owner. A replica artefact, as common in Shiite Muslim households as sun-faded happy snaps of Pope St John Paul II in the homes of Polish Catholics.
I guess it’s a lucky thing the raids only turned up a plastic sword then. What if those 800 cops had found a toy light sabre? The headlines would have screamed ISIS develops terrifying Stars Wars capability
. The SAS might have been despatched to Tatooine.
There was always something dodgy about the scale of those raids, especially given the thin pickings they seemed to turn up. Very few arrests and now a prime piece of evidence
negated.
Note the air quotes around the term evidence
, though. The sword, which promised such horror in so many published, shared and retweeted photos, never made it into court.
If all the world’s a stage, it was a prop and the hundreds of citizens whose homes were raided weren’t even players. They were extras. Not even bit players, like the sailor whose story of being attacked while in uniform, perhaps because he was in uniform, was revealed as a bizarre fantasy, but only after that story had turned the crank on tensions a few notches further.
There’s something at play here that isn’t as simple a narrative as good v evil. For instance, in the month that Daash killers cut the heads off three captives on the internet, our Saudi Arabian allies publicly decapitated eight for various crimes including adultery, apostasy and sorcery. Woe be unto you, Harry Potter.
Our particular malady is not even a politics as theatre, however. Although Tony Abbott and the media are playing the terror card for all it’s worth and more, there are legitimate security issues buried somewhere beneath the witless hysteria, fear-mongering and click bait.
It’s fraught and complex, and the pity of our current derangement is that it not only prevents us from seeing this and dealing with the threat, it aggravates the condition — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Rowan Machine, a resident of Albury.
Originally aired on ABC TV: 16/10/2014 — via Youtube
In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour working week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people in the Western world spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.
Why did Keynes’s promised utopia — still being eagerly awaited in the 1960s — never materialise? The standard line is he didn’t predict the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true. Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and industries since the 1920s, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones or fancy sneakers.
Huge swathes of people in the Western world spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed.
So what are these new jobs, precisely? A recent report comparing employment in the US between 1910 and 2000 gives us a clear picture. Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers
tripled, growing from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment
. In other words, productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away (even if you count industrial workers globally, including the toiling masses in India and China, such workers are still not nearly so large a percentage of the world population as they used to be).
But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the service
sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries such as financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors such as corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza-delivery drivers) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.
These are what I propose to call bullshit jobs
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
When someone comes into my office, I want that person to adopt an attitude most conducive to a productive working relationship. And now I know what is the perfect design for that purpose: the Scorpion Chair (translation) by Vyacheslav Pakhomov. It costs 230,000 rubles, which is about US$5,749 — via Neatorama
A little tinkering from me that shows what you can do with 3D printers today. Most parts of this paper airplane machine gun had printed by fabberhouse.de (the rest of them are to buy via Internet or hardware store). By the way, I use a cordless screwdriver from China for driving — via Youtube
— via Beatrice the Biologist
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