The Concatenate

The excellent Asian Defence Blog has one hell of a story breaking from Kolkata.

Basically a C-130 Hercules flying out of the United Arab Emirates’ Air Force Western Air Command base in Abu Dhabi landed to take on fuel in India and was discovered to be carrying undeclared crates of weapons.

The plot thickens when one learns the plane was headed to China’s restive Muslim Xiangyang province.

If it turns out the UAE is arming rebels in China then seven shades of brown stuff are about to hit the fan.

It makes a film festival pale into insignificance.

The Age has a good wrap up of the strange and conveniently timed demise of the NSW Labor power broker John Della Bosca.

Two things raise questions here.

1) Resignation for adultery seems to be a little quaint in this day and age.

When the wounded party is Belinda Neal adultery begins to seem entirely understandable.

No laws were broken. There was a little bit of the high handed behaviour for which Mr Della Bosca has become known, but nothing that constitutes a big deal.

If resigning over adultery becomes the norm there are going to be a lot more holes in cabinets across the land.

2) Wonderful timing for Nathan Rees isn’t it?

Well one doesn’t come from nowhere to be Premier without knowing where at least a few bodies are buried. The NSW Premier Nathan Rees was going to have to try and sack Della Bosca in the next few weeks, possibly getting rolled in caucus in the attempt, effectively ending his leadership.

Beyond that though, Della Bosca’s quick reaction to the story breaking was slightly suspicious. It normally takes a few days between the publication of the revelations and the resignation. Sometimes it can be weeks.

Had he seen the axe coming and decided to find a way out that will make him seem more human? (And virile)

If this has been pushed out there for the benefit of Nathan Rees then there has to be a suspicion he’s got the dirt on more and worse things in Mr Della Bosca’s past. With the relatively harmless adultery revelations in the media the threat of further revelations might have prompted a very fast resignation indeed. As a hypothesis it ties up a lot of loose ends.

On the other hand if the story actually came from the Della Bosca camp that too would tie up a lot of things. Having crunched his numbers and come up short the big man might have decided now is the time to retire to the back bench and stitch up a transition to the lower house if he wants to realistically be Premier some day.

Labor may be a red hot certainty to lose the next election, but the chances of the NSW Liberals being a one term only affair are also high.

On the other hand this could just be the revenge of a young woman scorned. But if Della Bosca really hadn’t seen this coming and really wanted to hang onto his position one really would have expected a greater delay before resigning.

The Age has the terrifying news that, following their efforts to drown Australia’s eastern seaboard with their tsunami last week, the sneaky New Zealanders have edged 30 centimetres closer to us. In a sweeping piece of misdirection their dastardly scientists are trying to downplay the move:

With the countries separated by the 2250-kilometre-wide Tasman Sea, the 30-centimetre closing of the gap in New Zealand’s south-west won’t make much difference.

It’s Salami tactics all over again!

The excellent Asian Defence blog brings word that India is planning on launching it’s first nuclear submarine INS Arihant (destroyer of enemies) in the next two weeks.

Indians not being publicly keen on the demon drink, the wife of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s, Gursharan Kaur, will christen her with an auspicious coconut.

She’s planned to be able to fire nuclear tipped ballistic missiles and to be part of a three ship class.

One might speculate that with India already well practiced in aircraft carrier operations, and soon with nuclear submarines, that Australia’s planned naval build up is nothing to do with China, but rather our Indian friends.

Word has come through the Robert McNamara has died.

Anyone who wants to understand the history of the last 60 years has to have seen the documentary “Fog Of War”.

The architect of both the firebombing of Tokyo, and the worst of the Vietnam war, he was a rare monster, able to commit atrocities across history.

But he always justified it against his work in the invention of seat belts in cars, and the lives that saved.

It would be nice to know how St Peter has made the final judgment on this one.

With the demise of Michael Jackson at age 50 consuming the public imagination The Times of London has delivered an absolutely corking insight into the sad weird world of the star.

Daphne Barak’s long time personal friendship with the Jackson family’s nanny make for a fascinating read.

Old media are having a love affair with Twitter…

I suspect because it’s media in a format they understand.

They, the mighty, exposit. The adoring masses, in turn, become “followers”, hanging (in theory) on every update, hoping to discover if there were peanuts in the latest bowel movement.

With a 140 character limit on each “tweet” there’s a haiku like brevity, but also no competition between twitterers to make more substantial contributions.

It’s essentially ephemeral, and highly commercial. All the old men in the big media companies have leapt upon it shouting “At last, New Media I can understand”.

The problem is that everyone’s shouting and no-one’s listening.

A friend of mine in the process of building an online presence for his business recently bought 500 “followers” for $10 from a dodgy company. 5 seconds googling found me a mob offering 100,000 followers for $3,479.

So even at its inception the process is inherently corrupt.

And aside from a very small number of weird tragics most people don’t actually want to know what their local newsreader had for lunch. They just want the newsreader to read the news.

Now it’s true that if you live under a despotic dictatorship 140 character tweets might make for better news than no other news service at all. But after watching recent events in Iran you can be sure that in future events security services will be polluting the pool.

Announce a thousand events through a thousand channels all with thousands of bought “followers”. Have your goons lined ready at each place with the truck waiting to cart away the silly kids.

To say nothing of the reason teenagers use Facebook and not Twitter. Anyone can be reading what you post. Hundreds of Iranian government workers are no doubt hard at work right now identifying Twitterers. Teenagers are more concerned their parents will find out they’re planning to get smashed on goon in the park on Saturday night.

Today’s confusion with twitter posts claiming Harrison Ford and Jeff Goldblum had died on a movie set joining the genuinely deceased Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett was a case in point. With legitimate news sources crapping out under celebrity overload people turned to Twitter and they got crap back.

So yes, Mark Scott at the ABC might get an ego boost Twittering to his troops. But he could just as easily have sent them an email.

Forget Godwin Grech, forget misleading the house, or not.

Annabel Crabb in the SMH has put her finger on the real implications of the whole weird sorry business:

“The chief of the Motor Trades Association, Michael Delaney, insists Grant got no special favours.

Delaney’s remarks were repeated with enthusiasm about a gazillion times by both the Prime Minister and the Treasurer, which tended to confirm suspicions about what this episode has done for the trustworthiness of politicians in general.

It is understood to be the first time a prime minister has sought a character reference from a car salesman.

The NY Times has an excellent article explaining what could really be happening in Iran.

Basically their suggestion is that Ayatollah Khamenei, faced with a splintering of his support in the Guardian Council has cast in his lot with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the revolutionary guard.

Essentially Iran is being transformed from a theocracy into a military dictatorship.

There’s a coup going on here as well as a revolution.

The Register explains the furore surrounding The Times outing a prize-winning blogging policeman.

At issue is that having discovered his identity the courts refused to injunct to prevent publication of his name.

While I might quibble as to there being a public interest in revealing his identity I’ve never thought that anonymity was a right.

Having been in the blogging game for more years than are healthy I can’t help but sympathise with the judge.

It’s also worth noting that with sufficient research and effort it should be possible to reach a level of anonymity that is beyond the capabilities of journalists to uncover, and possibly even law enforcement agencies.

If it matters that much then start using proxy servers from internet cafes. And if you get lazy and get caught then you’re just going to have to accept putting your name next to what you write.

It’s braver to quit and write a memoir than to hope to tell all and keep the position of trust.

To seek an injunction against any other publication in the interest of freedom of speech is ridiculous.

The New York Times’ Roger Cohen is on the ground in Tehran and has put together vignettes from the crushing of dissent following the election.

London’s Times had a story in the last few days which I sadly can’t find, but they claimed to have seen polling by the ruling party showing they were going to lose big.

Instead, within two hours of the polls closing, a bizarre victory was announced with the winning margin weirdly uniform across the whole country.

Cohen also has this claim from a man in the street:

“He was from the Interior Ministry. He showed his ID card. He said he’d worked there 30 years. He said he hadn’t been allowed in; nor had most other employees. He said the votes never got counted. He said numbers just got affixed to each candidate.”

So there’s a lot to suggest Iran can no longer lay claim to being a democratic Islamic Republic.

How 58% of the population who’ve had their votes stolen reacts to this is going to be interesting. With a large US army just across the border some might think they can be braver than they might otherwise be. For all that an intervention would be the very last thing Barack Obama will be wanting to undertake.

Considering that Iran’s burgeoning youth population couldn’t even vote it’s probably going to be worse than in the ranks of the young and the brave.

One always have to put the money on the apparatus of State, especially when its as ruthless and religiously inspired as the Iranian State.

But stranger things have happened, and bludgeoning people rarely wins them over to one’s point of view.

So Peter Costello has announced he’s leaving politics.

One suspects he reached this decision after his colleagues failed to beg him to lead them.

So what was Peter Costello?

He was one of very few Liberal MPs able to understand the benefits of genuinely liberal policies (both social and economic). Sometimes he even advocated for them.

He had some ability to deliver a line. In the dross of parliament this made him appear at times to be funny.

He did what Treasury told him to do, the mark of all treasurers considered successful.

And finally if he’s remembered at all it will be as a warning to other aspiring politicians that they need to be ruthless if they want to get to the top. Outside of royal families no-one just gets handed the crown.

If he seriously wanted to be PM he should have gone to the back bench early in John Howard’s last term.

When the Liberal polling collapsed he probably would have been able to do six months in the top job and had some chance of winning the election.

But in the end he lacked the guts for it.

The Australia is gleefully reporting that Fairfax is at long last beginning the consolidation of its redundant offices in the federal Parliamentary press gallery.

Four separate Fairfax press gallery bureaux currently cover The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Canberra Times and The Australian Financial Review.

A fifth office services Fairfax’s Sydney Sunday, The Sun-Herald, and Rural Press papers.

Michelle Grattan must be losing her mojo for this piece of sanity to finally get up.

Many trees have died, and many electrons have been squirted telling the tale of Senator Bob Brown’s legal woes and the risk he could be expelled from the Senate were he to become a bankrupt.

Firstly, it probably is distasteful for a parliamentarian to be as litigious as Bob Brown. He’s in a big party, itself part of wider movements. He can offer support without signing up as a plaintiff himself to everything.

But we probably do need to look at barring bankrupts from parliament. In the 20th century as a number of countries slid into dictatorship bankruptcy was used to remove inconvenient parliamentarians and disbar difficult lawyers.

Garnishee a parliamentarian’s wages if they owe you money sure. But distasteful as bankruptcy is we might well need one in parliament one day.