Chris Whiting Blog

Friday 7 September 2012

Will "The West Wing" Become Real Life in 2016?

SOMEWHERE IN the crowd at the Democratic National Convention is the next Democratic Presidential nominee. Not Barack Obama: the person who will follow him in 2016.

And I think I have seen him in the crowd. He keeps showing up in footage from the Convention, sometimes standing conspicuously near political stars and elder statesmen.

His name is Julian Castro and he is the 37 year old mayor of San Antonio in Texas, the seventh largest city in the USA.

What every candidate needs: teeth, great hair and a flag.

I discovered him a year ago, when his Facebook page was recommended to me as a Facebook template for an aspiring Mayor. He is photogenic, intelligent, charismatic and hard working. And obviously Hispanic.

No wonder he is being labelled “the next Obama”.

Now the prince’s crown is being set upon his head. Julian Castro addressed the Democratic Convention a couple of days ago, just like Barack Obama did in 2004. Just like Jack Kennedy did in 1956.

His story, his narrative, looks good for a Presidential nominee. He grew up in trying circumstances, raised by a single mother, and came out of a tough neighbourhood to go to Harvard Law School.

Having the name “Castro” shouldn’t be a burden for the San Antonio Mayor. An odd, jarring name didn’t stop the current resident of the White House. Still, you could safely bet Julian Castro will not be photographed wearing a beard or smoking a Cuban cigar.

What adds to his narrative is that he has a twin brother, Joaquin, who is running for the US Congress. That makes for a new twist and fresh images in a political discourse hungry for new sensations.

Julian Castro at the DNC. Photo Pat Sullivan AP

And there is a resemblance of his story to that of Matt Santos, the fictional “West Wing” character who became the first Latino President after Jed Bartlett.

With so many “West Wing” fans running politics behind the scenes all over the world, you start to wonder if they secretly fantasize about being Josh Lyman and taking Matt Santos / Julian Castro to the White House.

The succession of Julian Castro to the Oval Office may not come to pass. But someone has to be the next President. And Julian Castro looks good for it.

Click her for a Daily News Article about Julian Castro.

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Friday 31 August 2012

Why Leaf Blowers Vex Me

NOT FAR from me lives a man who slouches out from behind his remote controlled garage door, pulls out his petrol-driven leaf blower, and chases all the errant leaves off his driveway.

It is not the motorbike howl of the leaf blower that irks and bothers me.

It is not the fact that the leaves are simply left on the road for a publicly funded street sweeper to clean up what is a privately generated mess.

It is the fact that he is using petrol when a simple broom will do. Hey big fellah! A rake was good enough for your Dad and Grand-dad.

Peoples: treat oil with more respect. It is an incredibly rare resource.

Brewing up in the Oil Kitchen

Pour some new motor oil into a jar at home and hold it up to the light. Look carefully at it. You are looking at a very old and unique creation, the remains of living creatures that were alive millions of years ago.

These tiny organisms were plankton and algae that bloomed in the shallow prehistoric lakes and oceans between 300 million and 30 million years ago. When they died, they formed an organic mat on the muddy floor, and their fats and oils formed what we call kerogen.

Oil will only happen if kerogen-soaked mud becomes rock, and is covered by dried salt from evaporated oceans, or a rock blanket is folded over it by movements in the Earth’s crust.

Once trapped by this cover, kerogen has to be cooked under pressure by the Earth’s natural heat to become oil. But it has to be trapped between 7,000 and 15,000 feet.

Any lower and it is too hot. The kerogen gets cooked into methane and drifts away. Any higher, and it isn’t hot enough. This zone is the oil window, the oil kitchen.

More Layers than a Baklava

The special circumstances that create oil must keep coming. The pressure that cooked the oil then forces it upwards. But it can only reach us if the kerogen-rich rock is permeable, and there are fissures and cracks in the rock above to aid it on its way.

And then there has to be the right shaped, uncracked layer of clay, stone or salt higher up. It must trap the oil in a nice, cup shaped reservoir. If that’s not there, the oil simply dissipates.

As you can see, oil is a geological freak of nature. There are only 600 places round the world where it has been created.

What makes this unique resource extraordinarily valuable is the energy it contains. The energy in one barrel of oil is equal to the energy expended by five labourers working 12 hours a day for a year

So when we hold up that jar of motor oil to the light, and see the amber glint, we would do well to remember how lucky we are to have it.

Oil is as rare as gold, but we do not treat it with respect. Think about that next time you see someone using petrol-driven leaf blower, instead of a rake.

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Friday 24 August 2012

Brisbane's Public Servants: Marching Since 1824

IT'S BEEN Marching Week in Queensland politics! The images dominating the political playbook are that of public servants marching, shouting, waving placards and, erm, their boots.

That’s followed by images of the State Treasurer with an air of worry, saying “we’re sorry, we had to let all these people go”. I think his worried countenance is for real, and is poll-induced.

Question: why are public servants mobilising so visibly? Why is Brisbane appalled on their behalf?

Answer: Brisbane has always been a public servant town, from its earliest days.


Thanks to "A History of Queensland" by Raymond Evans.

Getting rid of public service jobs undermines a very old part of Brisbane’s character, for the public service is a long-established segment of Brisbane’s economy.

Our First (Reluctant) Public Servants.

From 1824, Brisbane was constructed by those most unwilling of public servants – the convicts and the soldiers who guarded them. Brisbane was a prison they had to construct themselves.

It was the convicts who provided all of Brisbane’s early labour and constructed its infrastructure.

They carved the rocks out of the Kangaroo Point cliffs, cleared hundreds of hectares of land, then tilled it by hand. They even built a 1.2 kilometre palisade, five metres high, around the grain depot and Women’s Factory at Eagle Farm.

It was the start of a pattern where the state provided the funds and labour to make Brisbane. There was an expectation and a necessity that the public purse would provide.

And the Crown did provide that labour, right through to the 1850’s. In 1852, 35% of all white males in the colony were still ex-convicts and ticket of leave men.

Horses and Cattle: Keep Them Beasties Moving.

From the 1850's, the pastoral industry dominated the Queensland economy, but it relied on these unwilling public servants to be the labour for their capital ventures. The Leslie brothers on the Darling Downs needed 27 convicts in their workforce.

Another form of public servant did more to secure the future of the pastoral industry than any other group. This was the Queensland Native Mounted Police.

The Mounted Police was the military arm of the Queensland government. It “quietened” vast areas of Queensland and made it safe for cattle and sheep. They were young men who were brutally effective, and were brutalised in return.

It was in the latter half of the 19^th Century when the utter reliance on public service expenditure to build this city and this state really took off.

The huge wave of migration to Brisbane was a public service venture. Three quarters of all public money spent on assisted migration in Australia was spent on Queensland migrants. And there were 114,000 of them between 1860 and 1879.

It was a time of boom and bust, and a secure public service job would have been the goal of many of the migrants who lurched off the ships.

How Queensland (and its Pounds) Were Railroaded.

And then the public purse was really opened wide, its gullet exposed red raw, to provide the finance to make Queensland’s infrastructure. From 1887 to 1883, the Queensland government splurged on colonial railways, borrowing 7 million pounds to construct a shining 3,000 kilometres of it.

We had the highest per capita debit in the British Empire. And not a Labor politician in sight.

Yet if the government didn’t do it, the railways would not have been built. The pastoral industry would not have happened, nor Brisbane’s tea-stained ochre buildings been constructed, without public servants.

So we have the expectation that government jobs would be at the centre of the Queensland economy and its capital city. There was an expectation that the Queensland government would cough up its pennies and pounds to provide the workers and the infrastructure.

For the LNP government to undermine public service jobs, they are undermining the social expectation of many workers in this fair city, as well as a very old strand in Brisbane’s economy.

And that is why you get lines of ambos, firies, teachers and other respectable Brisbane residents lining up and throwing their boots at Parliament House. We are as big a public service town as Canberra.

* Thanks to Raymond Evan's "A History of Queensland". If you love this State, read this book.*

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Friday 17 August 2012

Patterns of Political Speech: Who Else Is Saying They're Broke

HERE'S A question for you. Which state has a leader who keeps saying “our state is broke”?

As part of this leader’s strategy to sort out the debt, he focuses on the pay and conditions of state employees, including limiting collective bargaining rights for employees.

His government cuts staff spending in schools and technical education, and freezes programs to keep the elderly out of nursing homes.

Thinks it’s your state, Queenslanders? Guess again.

The state is Wisconsin in the USA, and the state leader is Governor Scott Walker.

Once again, the rhetoric and framework of ideas in Australian politics has been pinched from our friends the Americans.

Governor Scott Walker at his victory party. Photo AP.

Governor Scott Walker has been using these themes longer than Premier Campbell Newman. In Walker’s budget speech from March last year he said:

“The facts are clear: Wisconsin is broke and it’s time to start paying our bills today – so our kids are not stuck with even bigger bills tomorrow…. [The] time has come for us to make the tough choices necessary to put our state back on the path to prosperity.”

“We must work together to bring our spending in line with reality. We were elected --not to make the easy decisions to benefit ourselves -- but to make the difficult ones that will benefit our children and grandchildren.”

It’s a theme that must be working for him, because he’s sticking to it. Here is what he said in a more recent fund raising email:

“Spending is too high, our business climate isn’t what it should be and … voters gave me a mandate to turn our great state around.”

As Yogi Berra said, it’s deja-vu all over again.

I’m not writing this blog post to pass judgement on LNP policies. I am an ALP member, and I have strong views on what is happening.

The point in this post is about political language and the mental frameworks they are meant to evoke.

The cries of “goodness, we’re broke!” is not a spontaneous reaction. It is a considered political response using political language and frames of reference that have been proven to work elsewhere.

Need convincing? Have a good read though of Scott Walker’s speech in March 2011 and see if you recognise any of the language.

Expect to see more campaign material like this in Queensland soon.

Our political parties have been tapping into the latest thinking and techniques from the USA for a while now. Both parties send a small stream of bright people over to US elections to watch and learn.

The pattern for the pushback against the LNP’s budget cutbacks will come from US as well. Queenslanders will not be surprised to hear that there has been a massive union reaction against Governor Scott Walker’s policies.

In June there was a recall election in Wisconsin: one of vagaries of American politics is that if enough people can sign a petition saying “um, we’ve changed our minds … ”, the governor goes to election again.

The recall election was prosecuted by a grass roots union campaign, but was successfully defeated by Governor Walker. My guess is we will see the themes and rhetoric from that campaign in Queensland soon.

From the Wisconsin Democrats website.

For a sneak peak at the languages and ideas that will be used by the unions and the ALP, go the website of the Wisconsin Democrats.

And if you are one of the stream of political workers who is shipping over to the States for the Presidential election in November, please bring me back an Obama wobble-head doll.

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Friday 10 August 2012

Judging the Beautiful Game: Can soccer be made more interesting?

THERE ARE ample reasons why football is called “the beautiful game”. It is played by the fittest and quickest people from all corners of the planet.

Football, or soccer, is a stage for men and women with impossibly snappy reflexes, whirring in insect-like precision. Football is bio-mechanical poetry, and it demonstrates the best the human body can achieve.

What’s more, the football field is just the right size and space, just the right dimension for spectators. We can sit close enough to see every strain and grimace, every dive and struggle. A top-class soccer match can be a fishbowl of human drama.

But let us put it to a lounge room trial and judgement. I want to mention two things, m’Lord. The highest level has more than socially-permitable numbers of tossers. And it can actually be boring: you hardly see any goals.

The Case against Football

We can’t do too much about the first thing. Football has great potential to show off individual skill and brilliance, so it will attract the show boats.

It is a blokes’ catwalk, with teams stacked with the male equivalents of supermodels. Watch them posturing and posing when goals are scored, or strutting in various degrees of undress when the final whistle blows. Player avarice approaches the Naomi Campbell high water mark – only their agent could only tell you how much money they get before they arise from bed.

Yet we can do something about the second. If you want to see how football can be improved, have a look at a similar game, a quieter one, albeit one where the players are armed with curve-topped clubs.

Hockey has been called soccer with sticks. The field is just about the same, and it is played with eleven in a side. It has a centre forward and a goal keeper.

Yet it doesn’t have the legions of followers. The fit young players exercising their impossible reflexes for their country still need day jobs, perhaps working in a paint shop like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever.

The Case for Hockey

Yet hockey is creating a new future for itself, for it has made a gut-swooping change to their rules.

Hockey has simply abandoned the off side rule.

Yes, a goal can be scored by a forward who spends the game lurking around the goal post.

Forwards can roam all over the field, waiting for a ball like a seagull for a chip. Full backs have to cover vast new areas of real estate, looking over their shoulders to see who is behind them.

This rule modification has changed the game, and for the better.

One: it has spread the game out along the length of the field. The whole field of play now goes from back line to back line.

Previously, the action was compacted within the zone on the field between the two opposing full backs at the rear, just like football. Any opposition player stepping outside the zone was off-side, and had effectively removed himself from the game.

Two: the rule change makes the game more unpredictable. If a player can get the ball up the other end, their team can suddenly score. Goals against the flow of play become more common.

Three: more goals can be scored. Or more precisely, a goal can come at any time, from any set play or unexpected mistake.

A Trial of New Rules, Your Worship?

Can you imagine if soccer went the same way? Can you imagine the increased excitement, the watchability of the game, if a player like Cristiano Ronaldo constantly roamed around the penalty box, pouncing on any ball lobbed up to him?

Gaps would open up as players marking their opposite numbers follow them to the more remote corners of the field.

Hockey hasn’t finished with picking over its rules and flinging away ones that slow down the game or make it boring. The game of the curved stick is now experimenting with modifying more rules.

Legendary hockey coach and player Ric Charlesworth is one of a group of people who have developed some new possible rules. They’ve tried out games with just nine a side, and made the goals a metre wider. The penalty corner is modified so as so the attacking side is more likely to score.

And the Verdict

Still, even if a new magic formula is developed that makes hockey better viewing than Question Time in Parliament, I’m not predicting it will overtake football in popularity.

There is no case, m’Lord. Football will always have more advantage. It is easier to play, and kids can strike up a game anywhere in the world. Hockey needs some expensive investment in specially-crafted sticks, and the best hockey is played on artificial turf.

However, we don’t have to suffer an hour and a half of scoreless draws when we watch the best football matches in the world. Changes can be made to make things ... happen. Like goals.

And consider this: if you have concerns about your son becoming a Maradona prima-donna, consider putting a curved stick in this hand.

Disclaimer: the author still plays hockey, and is the goalkeeper for the Buccaneers in the Sunshine Coast Masters hockey competition.

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Friday 3 August 2012

From Woody Guthrie to the Arab Spring

It is one hundred years since the birth of Woody Guthrie, the dusty-voiced 1940’s Oklahoma folk balladeer who has held a strong fascination for a generation of American musicians.

There’s a new album released of songs based on his lyrics, curated once again by his daughter Nora, featuring artists he inspired such as Jackson Brown.

Yet Woody Guthrie has inspired many people who have never listened to his music, or probably anything vaguely folkish. His greatest gift to lefties and try-hard rebels is the slogan he stuck on his acoustic guitar in the 1940’s – this machine kills fascists.

Woody Guthrie, photo Lester Balog, Woody Guthrie Archives

The audacity and confidence of this statement should send a chill up your spine, if your politics is anywhere to the left of Genghis Khan. It should give you a surge of empowerment, a tingling sense that you can do something.

I thought the slogan would look great on my computer. I could make it into a sticker for my laptop! It would be a signal that words –my words - have power, that the keyboard is mightier than the sword.

So I googled “this machine kills fascists sticker laptop”. And there it is. In fact, there is a range of laptop stickers featuring this slogan. It looks like a whole cadre of geeky activists have got it covered.

Folks, you can buy the stickered slogan through Amazon. Along with the tee shirt, skateboard, posters, hat, and bumper stickers.

The discovery that “this machine kills fascists” is now at the centre of a whole range of consumer products dampened my spirits. It undercut the impact of the slogan.

And after some more silent pondering, I’ve decided the slogan may be somewhat presumptuous for a computer.

After all, not many are using Apple’s finest to battle dictators.

Computers don’t kill fascists, dictators, or authoritarian regimes. Despite excitable claims, social media doesn’t threaten them. In some places, ruthless leaders use it to preserve their own power.

Take the case of the Arab Spring, where the true impact of portable computing devices and social media do not fulfil the hype.

Yes, social media helped accelerate the change of government in Tunisia and Egypt, but it has slowed it down in Syria, where Twitter and Google reportedly agreed to a Syrian government demand to enforce rules that censor tweets and blogs.

Large companies making money in the online world acquiesce with such states. Vodaphone apparently agreed with a request by the former Egyptian regime to suspend their mobile phone network during the turmoil in Egypt.

Google initially tried to co-operate with the Chinese government, but Google broke free from that awkward embrace after the rest of the world criticised it for being co-opted into self-censorship.

Social networks in China track the IP addresses of their customers on behalf of the government. Behind the “Great Firewall of China”, access to 2,600 websites is impossible.

So the message I have downloaded from my pondering is this: the laptop sticker looks cool, but don’t fool yourself. This machine annoys fascists.

Or: this machine is used by fascists. Used against you.

So what machines kills fascists? Look at the sentiment behind the slogan.

Woody Guthrie knew the message from music can inspire people to take up the fight against oppression.

Look at the photo again, and look at the direct and determined expression on Woody Guthrie’s face. He knows his music has power to move people into action.

The guitar is just a tool to deliver the music, the computer is a tool to deliver the message. It is human mind that does in fascists and dictators.

So relent. Get the sticker and the T shirt, and be inspired.

And most appropriately, get the hat. Because what lies under the cap is truly the machine that kills fascists.

Sources.

http://socialcapital.wordpress.com/2011/01/26/twitter-facebook-and-youtubes-role-in-tunisia-uprising/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Arab_Spring

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2011/07/springtime_for_twitter.html

http://travel.nytimes.com/2012/06/02/world/asia/google-to-alert-users-to-chinese-censorship.html

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Friday 27 July 2012

Robbed in my own house

Something was taken from house the other day, something I will truly miss. I feel it as a mind numbing loss, and it seems I’m living at the scene of a burglary.

I lost the last month of work from my computer. And it was a true criminal that stole it, one as real as a bloke who knocks in a window and steals my TV. It was someone who designed and sent a vicious computer virus.

I’d never seen a virus like it before. It attacked suddenly and without mercy. Everything crashed and disappeared, replaced with a black screen. And in the aftermath of the assault, the only message on my screen was an official looking one telling me I had to run a system restore program.

However, it said I only had a test version of the program. Just click here, fill in your credit card number, the program will be uploaded and your computer will be fixed….

As I said, a criminal attack. The computer had to be stripped back to its most basic factory settings to kill off the virus.

In the hours I have spent reloading programs onto my computer, I have thought about all these consumer goods that I would not miss. Take the juicer, one of our two coffee machines or two DVD players, just give me back my damn work.

It’s a prickly lesson that in world of expensive household toys, there are things without physical substance that are a lot more precious. What I lost has no physical substance; it was digital information stored on something that is the size of my fingernail.

It is the products of the mind that are truly irreplaceable.

No. There is something else that is honestly and truthfully irreplaceable. These are the things that house fire victims always regret losing - the photos and videos of our families. These things are the memories of the mind, made real.

I seethed, sulked and wailed over the loss of my work, but felt enormous relief that I had not lost the photos and videos of my first-born child. Work I can do again. I cannot record Guy at his first birthday party ever again, nor at his first Christmas.

I still have the digital photos and movies because I did a serious back up a month ago. All the photos and videos of Guy were on the portable hard drive.

Once again, adversity and loss reveals what is really precious.

Still, what I had lost was precious. I laboured long and hard at it, and it was the product of many late nights of deep thinking.

I lost all of the research I had done for my work, for my blogs. Yet I can do both again. I know where to find the research articles, and I can remember what I had written.

It will take me days to do it all again, so what was really stolen from me was time. I was not robbed of the stuff that will feed the memories in years to come.

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