And unfortunately most people do not have sufficient powers of discrimination to distinguish the artificial world of the media from the real world of everyday experience. The two worlds merge in their minds, and they can't tell them apart. What people see on the television screen is not just entertainment; it is a collection of artificial experiences which merges with their collection of real experiences and gives them a new and largely artificial basis for evaluating things and making decisions.
Dr William Pierce.
All that was coordinated, all that was lost, young bones striding along valley floors, laughter, the dazzling sunlight. Oh how much hope there was. We had celebrated everything, the mornings, the evenings, the nights, we had celebrated being alive and we had celebrated being of a different time. We wanted to tear down the ramparts. Now the country is run by stale old socialists who have subsumed and inverted the messages of the past, exploited social justice dogma for their own ends, built massive and pointless bureaucracies, and poured contempt on the common man, those naive enough to have voted for them.
In a system where tweedle dum and tweedle dee are just as bad as each other, modern democracies are creaking to a close. Our juvenile dreams were exploited, but they were so far outside the square, so far away from the circles of power, that we felt we genuinely held a new card. Now the dour sour face of dressed up modern communists hoover every last cent of the populace, tell us they're acting in our own good, sneer behind our backs, their putrid breaths, their aging flesh, wrapped in penguin suits and stalking corridors, it has all come to past. The worst possible governments. The previous Prime Minister John Howard introduced the GST and reaped yet more billions of dollars off the general populace, telling us it was all for our own good and the good of the nation.
No one, no one, can tell you how we're better off after the GST. The money disappeared into the pockets, all those billions and billions and billions, disappeared into the already bloated salaries of public servants. And while they live in their comfortable suburbs, send their children to comfortable schools, drive their comfortable cars at our expense, the rest of the masses toil in ever increasing despair. Ends just don't meet. This is Australia, you can do anything you like, parrot those on $300,000 plus, six times the average wage, parroting the triumph of the individual. All you have to do is get up and give it a go. The rest sit in fume filled traffic, their hearts breaking, the bills mounting.
Housing affordability is the catch phrase, but behind it lies a starker, more brutal story. They all got on the band wagon, I'll have some of that, when they could see the value of houses doubling, tripling, quadrupling in a matter of years and those first in, those who showed no caution or more likely just happened to have the cash or the family support, dived in and prospered. They followed, at the end of the school of fish; and now they're being eaten by the back tide of rising costs and falling house prices. Repossessions filter on to the news. Everyone blames everyone else.
He who must be loved and admired at all times, our Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, has had his week from hell and finally the honeymoon, perhaps the longest in political history, is coming to an end. The public service are turning on him, and that is a dangerous game. Policy wonks, they proudly promote, but anyone can shuffle paper and sound important, introduce new programs that do absolutely nothing, circle desperately while the floor falls out of the building. How much chaos looms. While one of the most enduring images of the moment is John Howard lapping up his retirement, sitting in the West Indies with Janette ever by his side, watching the cricket.
While his own party flounders in the myriad messes that he left; while Australia's notoriously self congratulatory and administratively hopeless left is in power from coast to coast, while the genuine socially progressive conservatives that represent the middle ground of the middle class have been utterly fully and truly betrayed. They have no conscience. They care not a jot. Other people's deaths are other people's faults. We shout and the voices disappear immediately in flat, echo-less chambers, and all is lost, all is lost.
Flat tack traffic will brutalise you, the noise of car engines will populate your soul, sea weed will rise up from the ocean floor, and everything, everything, will change. Old certainties will disappear. Old hierarchies will disintegrate. All those sour faced certainties will dissolve; and a different order will rise up. Not the one the government envisaged, bleating about the marginalised and the disadvantaged, the countries most vulnerable, but a different order of ordinary people, sick of the dysfunctional and the desperate and the welfare dependent occupying the entire field of public debate. Get up, go to work and get shat upon, those days would be finally, finally over. Cracked, chortled grins. "I told you so."
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5huwECNWFJHbvOgIgWHReW7Dfq9BwD9106K2GB
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Bush White House is known for secrecy and strict message control, and a new book by its former press secretary details extraordinary measures it has used to manage what information gets out.
Keeping the chief spokesman — and thus the news media and the public — out of the loop at times is not unheard of, but President Bush has taken it to new lengths, Scott McClellan writes in his insider account.
Bush told McClellan's predecessor, Ari Fleischer, that he would purposely not tell him things at times. Then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice cut off Fleischer's authority to read notes on Bush's phone conversations with fellow world leaders. This attitude filtered to other top advisers, who resisted filling in the press secretary, McClellan said.
"No one charged with keeping the press and the public informed about the workings of the government should have to play such frustrating games," McClellan writes.
White House press secretary Dana Perino says it was his own fault if McClellan was an outsider. "You can be as in or out of the loop as you choose to be," she said.
Current and former White House aides, unaccustomed to someone from their famously tight circle spilling the goods, have reacted to McClellan's explosive — and immediately best-selling — book by trying to discredit their old friend. In the kind of seemingly coordinated lockstep familiar to reporters who have long covered the Bush White House, they have suggested in similar language that he is betraying his former boss for money or rewriting history to vindicate old grudges.
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23784843-5000117,00.html
Laurie Oakes
May 31, 2008 12:00am
IN his early months as opposition leader, Kevin Rudd remarked that it would be fun to play with John Howard's mind for a while.
Suddenly it's as though someone is playing with Rudd's.
The Prime Minister, as everyone knows, is a control freak who likes to micro-manage everything.
But leaks take control away. Real leaks, that is.
Not the kind of deliberate daily "drops" of information Rudd's office engineered in the lead-up to the Budget. They were part of the control process.
Genuine leaks can't be planned for. They can undo the work of spin merchants and micro-managers in a flash. They create chaos and suspicion.
So the kind of leaks we have seen in the last week will be messing with Rudd's mind big time.
If this can happen twice, he will be thinking, it can happen again.
What will leak next?
Publication in The Australian of a confidential letter from Resources and Energy Minister Martin Ferguson to colleagues, warning that Rudd's FuelWatch scheme could actually hurt the suburban battlers who swung to Labor at the last election, was bad enough.
But the document leaked to me - the co-ordinating comments from four key economic departments on the FuelWatch Cabinet submission - was devastating.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1810335,00.html
I paid a visit a few weeks ago to Bethel, a very small town in upstate New York where I had been once before. As soon as I got there, it started raining. I wasn't surprised. The last time I was there it also rained quite a bit. That was in August 1969, when I was one of the 400,000 or so people who converged on the place to attend something called the Woodstock festival. I had headed there that time by instinct, like a salmon swimming upstream to spawn, because I was 17 years old and anything involving guitars or hippies demanded my immediate attention. The opposition of my parents, the discouraging weather forecast and traffic so heavy it closed the New York State Thruway meant nothing compared with my need to get in on whatever this thing was going to be.
What it turned out to be, of course, was something none of us foresaw: not just a concert but a spontaneous utopian community. Now I was back, 39 years later--cue the wistful music--to visit the Museum at Bethel Woods, which is perched on the edge of the festival site and dedicated to telling the story of Woodstock and of the 1960s generally. A museum about Woodstock was probably inevitable. Those three days of peace, love and mud have become the baby boomers' version of the Trojan War, their collective foundation myth. It was only a matter of time before the whole thing was commemorated with interactive displays, a replica hippie bus and a gift shop.
The museum, which opens June 2, has been a consuming project for Alan Gerry. Long ago, he was a high school dropout who ran a business selling and repairing televisions in nearby Liberty, N.Y. But eventually he founded Cablevision, which he sold in 1996 for $2.7 billion to Time Warner. At 78, he's a venture capitalist who wears an American-flag pin on his lapel--which makes him an unlikely guy to devote himself to the legacy of a place that had a freak-out tent. But he does have a daughter who attended Woodstock (against his wishes). And another who missed out but persuaded him much later to buy the land where it all happened.
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