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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Now many years ago my boss made me write our cinema’s column for the company newsletter. He wanted something funny that would stand out and despite already working me 80 hours a week getting his popcorn sold he also wanted 250 words of news from our front for the rest of the company.

The first two went out to rave reviews. The third I tackled angry and sleep deprived. It went through a manager in our workplace who approved it. Then it went to the editor of the company newsletter who approved it.

When the publication was out and the CEO of our large multinational read it word went out that a head must roll.

So as a non-sacred cow in the organisation I was forced to publicly state my contrition and fall upon my sword.

As luck would have it I’d already resigned to claim a redundancy package so other than some smarting about the unfairness of it all I really wasn’t worried.

The point is that by sacking the head for failing to control the talent, rather than sacking the talent, the ABC have really shown that it’s the Chaser puppet master, Andrew Denton, who’s really wearing the pants in the organisation.

Good luck to future heads trying to reign in the sacred, but ever tireder and more forced, cows.

Collider has since been smashed off the internet by the weight of interest but Tvsquad has the gist of it.

If ongoing fan interest can bring back Futurama there’s hope yet for Firefly surely.

Vast sums of money are being spent and there’s widespread disruption which doesn’t come free either.

And yet the disease itself is by all accounts an extremely benign form of flu.

So at the risk of being accused of conspiracy theorising, one has to wonder if the over-blown response is being used as a practice for something more serious.

It would be nice if someone could say “This is a drill” somewhere along the way.

Which leaves Labor promising to do it without having to explain the economic dislocation that will ensue to the electorate.

Smart politics, but perhaps a little too slick?

So we have a shiny new defence white paper.

There’s also a very large number of media releases outlining bits they want to draw attention to.

Of striking interest seems to be a lack of interest in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) mentioned just seven times in the whole paper and almost entirely for a surveilance role. One has to wonder if this has something to do with the Air Chief Marshall currently running the ADF, and it’s a great concern. We seem to be planning to use manned helicopters, so very slow, expensive, and vulnerable for weapons delivery at sea when UAVs could do the job better, cheaper and more safely for no reason other than the pilot’s club needing to justify their ongoing ability to get a job with Qantas and marry an air hostess. There is one very hazy media release which might suggest some hope in future.

The biggest shift from the current force structure is a huge expansion of the navy.

The “20 new Offshore Combatant Vessels” could end up being anything, but with the capacity to embark a helicopter sound suspiciously like a frigate.

12 new submarines is a serious strategic force, bear in mind that submarines aren’t just useful for sinking enemy shipping, they’re also a very important tool for the sinking of other people’s submarines.

That will go nicely with a force of 8 larger frigates, a fourth air warfare destroyer with enhancements to the weaponry of that class will give us a very interesting force.

But what are we going to spend these billions on?

From the white paper here’s the second priority to good old “Defence of Australia”:

“Our next most important strategic interest is the security,stability and cohesion of our immediate neighbourhood, which we share with Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor, New Zealand and the South Pacific island states. While we have a wide range of diplomatic, economic, cultural and other links with those countries, from a strategic point of view, what matters most is that they are not a source of threat to Australia, and that no major military power, that could challenge our control of the air and sea approaches to Australia, has access to bases in our neighbourhood from which to project force against us.”

And here’s what the proposed force will be good for: Stopping a major power to our north (China) deploying troops into these countries in our region, preventing the re-supply of any that do make it across, and allowing for our own troops to be landed to intervene decisively.

It appears to be predicated on a collapse of American power in the Eastern Pacific, which is why we’ll need to be able to do these things for ourselves.

The China lobby will be upset, but our Chinese friends are more likely to negotiate in good faith on a range of issues when faced by a deterrent to adventurism like this.

The hard part will be paying for it all, and convincing the public that they want to.

Indian Express has an interesting article joining an avalanche of concerned coverage about the regional tooling up of blue water navies.

What was news to me and of some interest was the new Japanese aircraft carrier Hyuga. As the Japanese have a constitutional restraint on building aircraft carrers they’ve cunningly called it a “Helicopter Destroyer”.

With a flat top and a 20,000 tonne displacement they’re not fooling anyone.

Apparently the Japanese have plans to build four of these beasts.

It’s a good thing the economy’s heading south or we here in Australia would have no hope of finding crews for all the ships we want to build to join in the fun.

Well first off it finds that it can afford to make its army much bigger than it could possibly afford otherwise.

Given a choice between subsistence farming, cleaning up after foreign tourists, or a glove trotting career in uniform one can see why the better and brighter in a small, poor country might gravitate to the army.

When you’ve got a proud warrior tradition in the indigenous peoples and a arriviste merchant class (in this case Indians imported by the British) the tensions between civilian government and the military are doomed to eventually spill over.

The tragedy is that if the UN hadn’t solved its manpower problems, essentially by turning Fiji into a mercenary nation, then the tourism interests in the country would have had the power to knock heads together at least for their own good.

But there are two reasonably quick ways to fix this.

1. Firstly Fiji needs to be forever banned from contributing to peace keeping operations. The military will eventually shrink to something of a more suitable size. And all foreign military exchanges need to be contingent on the maintenance of the rule of law.

2. They need to be kicked out of all international sporting competition. I’ll miss watching Fijians play rugby, but it seems to be the only way to get through to upper classes.

Why is this?

Basically we get refugees in Australia in three ways:

1. They fly in on a tourist visa and lie about their reasons for entering the country.

2. They sit on their backsides in a refugee camp until their number comes up and they get assigned a random country for which they have no affinity at all.

3. They decide that Australia is the country for them, travel half the world and brave a perilous ocean crossing to get here. On arrival they honestly declare that they are refugees seeking asylum.

And yet for some reason it’s that third group, in many ways the most admirable of all, whom we vilify and cage?

Sometimes this isn’t a very pleasant country at all.

Basically the Government has announced it is going to set up a new, majority government owned, company to build a national optical fibre information network.

A new Telstra, only with newer infrastructure funded by the taxpayer.

I like the idea of the open infrastructure.

But I’m glad I don’t own shares in the old Telstra.

I don’t know if it’s the Russian perspective of his employers at The Exile, or just that he’s spent too much time reading statistics in Jane’s and not enough time talking to real people who actually fight wars.

But rather than ad-hominem attacks let’s have a look at his argument, that a scare document put out by the US Naval Institute to pull in some more funds, is proof of the demise of maritime power.

In this case it’s the Dong Feng 21 ballistic missile, a bug bear much beloved of the same doom mongers who thought the submarine, and then the bomber, would spell the end of maritime power. Heck shore based gunnery had the same cachet once.

I’m sure the Dong Feng 21 is super. If it’s fuelled up ready to go and the crew is ready when a carrier battle group is found, and if the battle group is still at the same coordinates when it gets there.

Because the nerd is in high dudgeon he doesn’t mind that he then goes on to raise the ghost of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse. Nevermind that the absence of an aircraft carrier was what saw them on the bottom of the sea. A carrier that was planned to accompany them but which ran aground in the West Indies. The broader failure of Imperial foreign policy which saw us trying to simultaneously fight the German, French, Italian, and Japanese navies is not an argument against maritime power. The failure of all the world to finish us off is more a testament to it.

Yes it may be true that there’s “no defence” against ballistic missiles. But they have to hit their target. Ships moving at over 60kmph, and performing random zig zags, need not fear anything with a 12 minute flight time, even assuming that the missile is fired the second the ship’s (then) position is known.

The nerd goes on to make more uninformed comments about matters naval. Hanging his hat on the sinking of the INS Eilat in 1967 as proof of the useful end of large surface combatants.

He’s being really selective here. Learning their lesson, just six years later at sea in the Yom Kippur War the Israelis completely negated the zoomy soviet missiles through a new found enthusiasm for Electronic Warfare (EW).

Over 52 missiles targeted Israeli ships and none found their target. That doesn’t include the number of times the Arab navies should have been able to target missiles but their screens were full of white snow.

Here’s where the nerd falls down, and very badly. Every Western surface unit is covered in antennae and modules not one of which have their purpose published for small boys, and newspaper pundits, to argue loudly about.

So he might know all the published statistics of the Harpoon missile, but what none of us in civilian land know is whether it will be able to lock on its target and hold the lock through flight. I’d hazard a guess that against top notch EW it won’t.

A visceral hatred of handsome naval aviators also colours the piece, but it’s worth noting that the future of the aircraft carrier is flying swarms of un-manned planes off its decks. The fly boy is dead, but the carrier will live on.

In fact the future looks bright for large surface units. Between acting as a UAV launchpad, and being the only mobile platform for large lasers and railguns needing megawatt power supplies, the future seems to be full of big ships.

But what about the nukes? Well if the big toys are coming out we can assume there won’t be many satellites left in the sky.

And if we’re talking survivability, would you prefer to invest in ships steaming at 30 knots (1 knot = 1.852 kmph) in an unknown direction? Or fixed air fields and slow moving land units?

A failure to regulate banks and insurance companies might see a collapse of American power. The death of the aircraft carrier will not.

“As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren’t hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.”

If you thought AIG was just an insurance group fallen on hard times you really need to read this article and think again.

1) Defence has run a security once over across their Minister Joel Fitzgibbon. I’d be more alarmed if they hadn’t.

2) It turns out that Fitzgibbon has had a relationship of some sort with a well connected Chinese woman. This might be of some concern or might be completely innocent.

3) Someone inside Defence has leaked this information.

Point two is a little bit interesting. Even without realising it, or having done anything wrong, there’s a chance Fitzgibbon has been groomed by the Chinese here. As a smart young operator in the ALP he certainly would have been a prospect 16 years ago. On the other hand these revelations pretty much remove blackmail potential.

Point three is where it gets explosive. The Defence bureaucracy is despised by pretty much every sector which intersects it. The uniformed ADF and the Government are now in conflict with them. They needed their minister on their side.

Even if they do manage to get Fitzgibbon moved on can you imagine how a new minister is going to view the Department.

Someone very, very thick was behind this leak. It’s a worry that they had access to it.

(Email reader will need to click the story link.)

Pictured is the exact moment when Barack Obama got Kevin Rudd’s title wrong and started calling him “Secretary Rudd”.

Look at those beady, beady, eyes and the laser-like intensity!

Other questions:

1) We appear to have been downgraded from an ally to a friend. For all that we’re “one of the best friends” that’s still not great.

2) Anyone know when and where Barack went in his extensive time in Australia? It appeared to be news to everyone.

There are a few interesting things here deserving further exploration:

1) According to Laurie Oakes, Nigel Scullion missed the first vote because he was having a “stairwell meeting” with the retired Senator Natasha Stott Despoja.

2) The confusion here comes from a criminally lazy form of law-making perfected by the Liberals but carried on by the ALP. This is where tax changes are announced via a media release and are immediately effective, with enabling legislation to follow. It’s a disgusting bastardisation of democratic norms and its defeat in any form or manner is a good thing.

3) The ALP is going to have to stop holding Senator Steve Fielding in contempt. I disagree with Senator Fielding on pretty much everything. But every Senator should be treated with respect.

4) There was never any health upside here. Kids will still try and get drunk and free-pouring their own mixers is vastly more dangerous than the spew-before-you’re-poisoned alcohol concentrations of the alcopops.

5) The biggest bunch of binge drinkers you’ll meet are making these laws. But they can afford the extra excise. The rank hypocrisy of all commentators here other than the Salvation Army stinks to high heaven.

In my current period of reflection a friend sent me a link to F*** My Life.

If you ever need cheering up its constant running commentary of the humourous suffering of others will surely do the trick.

The concern goes on that by printing more money to solve the short term budgetary problems of Governments could lead to run away inflation, even hyper-inflation.

This basically is what happened in Germany in their response to the great depression. The solution in the end was to invade all their neighbours to steal their gold reserves. (Make no mistake, the Nazi’s were flat strap broke. Kicking off global conflict was easier than dealing with the economic problems they faced).

But when faced with an asset bubble too painful to deflate suddenly hyper-inflation has some up sides.

Basically the rest of the economy bubbles up to the point that the inflated assets resume their usual proportions but no-one has to take a paper loss.

Sure, the comparative de-valuation of your house won’t be much fun from an investment point of view. But when the same wheel-barrow full of cash you were going to use to buy a loaf of bread can also pay off your entire mortgage things aren’t entirely bad. You’ve still got somewhere to live and you’re mortgage free.

All too often Government’s don’t explain the real reasons for their actions. The 2007 changes to superannuation were a bi-partisan de facto raising of the retirement age, but did anyone mention that to the public at the time?

Other than a period of hyper-inflation is there any way out of the current crisis? I can’t see it.

Will the current government actions around the world create that hyper-inflation? Quite possibly.

So maybe, just maybe, that’s the plan. Shame they can’t tell us about it.

We might soon be looking at a very good time to stop hiding money under the mattress, or in cash accounts.