Welcome to a collection of political and economic observations that are non-conformist.

1. The current (2008, March) international credit squeeze has its origin in the sub-prime crisis in the United States. The latter is not hard to understand. Here is a powerpoint slide show you can download that explains the gist of it. You will see that it boils down to lying, cheating and swindling by the allegedly most "respectable" of American investment banks, rating agencies, hedge funds and the like. And as always, the taxpayers end up picking up the losses, the crooks in Wall Street who have been paying themselves multi-million bonuses in the last decade get to keep their crooked gains.
2. The Prisoners' Dilemma and the Nov 2007 Elections.

   	Prisoner B Stays Silent	Prisoner B Betrays
   Prisoner A Stays Silent	Each serves six months	Prisoner A serves ten years Prisoner B goes free
   Prisoner A Betrays	Prisoner A goes free Prisoner B serves ten years	Each serves five years

   
   The above is the classic prisoners' dilemma. Now think of the Liberal and Labor Parties in the lead up to the Nov 2007 elections as the two prisoners. Howard of the Liberals announced a bribe of $34 billion in tax cuts to the electorate -- the kind of money that should have gone to repairing the damaged infrasructures of health, education, transport, etc., from which the Liberals have been sucking out funding for the last 11 years. Labor had no alternative but to match the bribe. This is like ending up in the bottom right square of the dilemma.
   The SMH economics columnist Ross Gittings wrote an article on this bribe.
3. The so-called War on Terror is turning out to be a great boon for any authoritarian government that wants to crush dissent. All it has to do is to lock up people who disagree with it, accusing them of plotting with terrorists. However it is not as well-known that the War on Terror is also a very profitable business. Naomi Klein exposes the capitalist glee about this unending war.
4. Wealth (and therefore power) all over the world is getting more and more unequal. The gains of the middle class from the end of World War II have been reversed and we are now heading back to the times of Queen Victoria. How has this come about? George Monbiot, writing in the Guardian, has explained it. It is the "investment" made by very rich people many years ago to subvert the social democratic framework of the western democracies -- beacons to the rest of the world -- that has "justified" the kind of obscenity you see today in which public institutions like state schools and hospitals, and public utilities like transport, are starved of funds while huge tax concessions are given to millionaires. The abuse of monopoly to charge high fees at our privatised airports is glaring example of how de-regulation is used to rob you so that companies can pay their CEOs and top managers "salaries" that equate to $16,000 PER HOUR.
5. Ever wondered why the pay of top executives in big companies keep rising to stratospheric heights? And why you as an average wage earner seems to be struggling to maintain a halfway-decent lifestyle? Here are some typical pay ratios. The guys at top will justify their good fortune by saying that talent must be rewarded. Hmmm, so why was this not the case 20 years ago when the ratio was a lot lower? Well, they will tell you that executive performance is now so much better. The fact of the matter is that they have it both ways -- if the company does well, their pay increases (often by 30%, while your increase is around the inflation rate of -- in 2006 figures -- 2-3%), to reward superior performance you see. Now when the company does badly, their pay increases too, for now they have to work harder to turn the performance around! Nice job if you can get it. Here is an article that exposes this racket.
6. The most powerful recruiting scheme for Muslim terrorists is not the awful chaos and cruelty that is Iraq but the running sore of the Israeli-Palestinian cycle of violence and insesurity that is now nearly 50 years old. Iraq is merely an aggravation of this and a wonderful training ground for future terrorists, thanks to the neo-cons of the United States. Ex-President Carter wrote a book that describes this running sore and it has evinced huge hostility that borders on paranoia from lobby groups that should know better. He appeared at a seminar in UC Berkeley to explain the circumstances that led him to write the book. Judge for yourself after you see the: report of that seminar.
7. The Ausralian electorate which put the Howard government back in power in 2004 got its reward in March 2006 with the passage of the wonderfully named Workplace Relations Act. This suggests parallels with the notorious Race Relations Act of the now defunct Apartheid Govt of South Africa. If you recall, that RRA made inter-racial screwing illegal. Our WRA has a delicious twist on this. It made it illegal NOT to screw your workers. Now, the electorate is not stupid, but ignorant of history it surely is -- and this is why the lies and fraud of the Howard clique work.
   To see the immediate effects of the WRA, look at this letter to the SMH.
   And to see why the Howard clique is confident on the ultimate success of the WRA's goal of screwing workers to enrich the bosses, see Richard Glover's take on how the Media operates today.
8. One of the best speeches about the corruption of the democratic ideal by a country that has gone bonkers. Harold Pinter's Nobel Prize Lecture.
9. Clever Mr Howard.
10. A fable about Iraq.
11. A different take -- a deeper reason for the invasion of Iraq.
12. Funny browser error to have you in stitches, yet educational.
13. A ray of hope in this Iraq mess. Speech by Senator Robert Byrd.
14. Monty Python's Terry Jones writes a letter to the Observer.
15. My experience in the Peace Rally, 16 Feb 2003, Sydney.
16. Alan Blair took these cute photos at the Peace Rally.
17. Peter Slezak's draft musings.
18. Hypocrisy is the life-blood of the Howard policy on refugees and the Iraq war. See this exposed.
19. Why the U.S. needs to invade Iraq.
20. Miranda's Attack on the Peace Rally and my Response.
21. A prayer to Jesus that may help retain your sanity in these times when perhaps only the insane find normal.
22. If the baddest, biggest bully-boy in the school-yard beats up smaller boys, then what does one expects? The smaller boys beat up even smaller boys!
23. My country of birth Malaysia still exerts an emotional pull for me. I therefore said "Amen" after I read this very sensible article on education by a Malaysian professor.
24. Ever wondered why Islamic fundamentalism is on the rise? A summary of an article explaining it is:
    The earliest madrasah was founded in Baghdad in the 11th century to train teachers, leaders and judges to teach and administer Islamic law. Over the centuries, madrasahs have remained largely unchanged in their teaching and methods, even as colonial rule brought Western education to the Middle East and Asia. Today, there is still a polarisation between the affluent Western-educated and the faithful poor, who have no access to other schools. But while madrasahs are anti-Western in ideology, they remained largely peaceful until the Iranian revolution of 1979 introduced revolutionary ideology and military training into religious schools. Then, in the 1980s, with the help from the United States government. Pakistan's General Zia ul-Haq installed madrasahs in Afghan regugee camps, to breed mujahideen to fight Soviet forces in Afghanistan. The model spread to other parts of the world. Today, some 6 million Muslims study in madrasahs all over the world. The overwhelming majority are peaceful, but the few which are militant are deeply so, and the creation of a monumental mistake made in fighting the Soviet war in Afghanistan.
    The full article by Husain Haqqani has the details.
25. Mark Twain is better than Nostradamus! He foresaw it all!.
26. Norman Mailer is one of the most controversial and provocative writers in the United States. But sometimes, his insights and prognostications are just scary.
27. The new lyrics for the Australian National Anthem and the New Australian Flag (designed by Kerwyn Foo) to go with it:

    	O say can you see
    	By the dawn's early light
    	Our golden soil and wealth for toil
    	This home that's girt by sea
    	What so proudly we hailed 
    	At the last twilight's gleaming
    	Advance Australia Fair
    

28. Alan Paton's lament in his anguished novel "Cry the Beloved Country" goes like this: This is no time to talk of hedges and fields, or the beauties of any country. Sadness and fear and hate, how they well up in the heart and mind. Cry for the broken tribe, for the law and the custom that is gone. Aye, and cry aloud for the man who is dead, for the woman and children bereaved. Cry the beloved country, these things are not yet at an end. The sun pours down on the earth, on the lovely land that man cannot enjoy. He knows only the fear of his heart. Oh, how this also describes Palestine and Israel. The tragedy of Palestine is that it is the final victim of German Nazism in the most ironic way. See what British MP Oona King has to say about it.
29. The importance of a classical education is not often recognized. My high school did not offer Greek or Latin, much to my regret. So I had to read Plato, Homer, etc. in translation. However, the school provided a heavy dose of Greek history and myth. The power of myth was allegorical. In a brief legend it encapsulted perhaps centuries of wisdom, condensing historical experience and summarizing the ironies of the human condition. The legend of the Hydra was such an allegory. It was a multi-headed creature (up to 100 heads in some versions), and if you cut off one head it sprouted a replacement head. It's relevance to the politics of today? Well, unless we fix the root causes of terrorism (disposession, tyranny, injustice, starvation, poverty, etc.), no matter how many bin Ladens we capture and execute, many more will rise to take their places. By now Israel whould have assassinated the Hamas leadership several times over, but peace still eludes the mid-East. The Indonesian Army has executed the Acheh leadership many-fold, but it keeps re-juvenating. In legend, Herakles killed the Hydra only by assistance from divine forces. Unfortunately, the gods are rather inactive these days.
30. The Judeo-Christian Ethic is a deep undercurrent of the Western Intellectual Tradition. It is a precursor of the Enlightenment. Many allegedly irreligious liberals suffer enormous guilt occasioned by unconscious memory of Sunday School parables inspired by the Judeo-Christian Ethic. Guilt is what drives many lefties, who somehow feel that they are undeserving of the good life while there is so much deprivation and suffering in the world. This guilt is presumably what drove some Israeli Pilots to refuse to carry out bombing missions on Palestine.
31. The lies of John Howard in the Iraq war are in line with his other lies on the Tampa "children overboard" affair and the ethanol Manildra scandal. The newspapers are very kind, saying he "misled" Australians. BS! He LIED. But Australians do not know how much he has damaged our future security by going all the way with Washington. If you want to find out, read Geoff Kitney's article on the price of Howard's sycophancy.
32. Did you know that American and European government subisidies for their rich farmers breed Terrorists?
33. A very sad prognistication of Israel's Future by Israeli MP Avraham Burg, recently Speaker of the Knesset. I don't think you can read it and not feel a great sense of loss.
34. The now retired Malaysian ex-Prime Minister Dr Mahathir (he is a medico by training) is not as crazy as some prople might think. There is a perceptive analysis of him by Paul Krugman of the New York Times.
35. An interview with Mahathir by Iranian journalist Taheri is worth reading if you had only seen Western media reports on the Malaysian ex-PM.
36. Sometimes it is sport that brings out the good in people. Here is an example that should inspire all. An impoverished soccer team "funded" by a small Arab town in Israel won the Isreali State Soccer Competition. The team has no training field, not any real money, bugger-all equipment, etc. But while it has a majority of players of Arab ethnicity, it also has Jews and Christians! It will now represent Israel in the European competition. This news made me so hopeful that I quietly wept for joy. After all, both Jews and Arabs are semitic descendants of the Patriach Abraham (Ibrahim).