What the fuck is wrong with Tony Abbott

I don't know really, the dude must have been dropped on his head... repeatedly, as a baby, the guy is honestly a social dropkick. I have to preface the following by saying that since leaving Australia, I've been able to contemplate the goings on over there with less personal investment, in a way, whatever happens doesn't really affect my day too much. Formerly, it was at times annoying to live in Australia, being under a steadier stream of more in depth news about what our government gets up to. In many ways, I used to feel a sense of shame when issues like the TAMPA, or our inaction on global warming popped up, I always thought, "geez, how do other countries view us?"

The answer is, most other countries don't care, I've become well aware of this now. But recently, right at the moments when Australia finally has been getting a few great and might I add LOGICAL ideas right, like a Carbon Tax, and restrictions on poker machines, a small minded group of Australians are starting to make waves, waves that are reaching me here in Germany, and making me uncomfortable. This small minded group call themselves the Liberal Party, and the clown leading them is literally Chauncey Gardner.

I mean what the fuck, he is going on about rescinding a carbon tax and rescinding reforms on poker machines. What the liberals don't seem to know, yet understand how well it sells to anyone dumb enough to vote for them, is that in today's media cycle, words really do speak louder than actions. They say, with crocodile tears in their eyes, that they want to do something to reduce carbon emissions, and then propose some total trash like voluntary restrictions. They say that they are serious about helping problem gamblers, but claim a system like choosing how much money you are willing to lose reeks a bit too much of the nanny state.

I mean, here it is nutbags... You want a voluntary solution to carbon emissions, how about this. The Australian people went to the polls last year and elected the two parties that volunteered to enact some kind of financial deterrent for releasing greenhouse gases. In a sense, the people demonstrated to the parliament their willingness to volunteer a modest amount of their income toward tackling greenhouse emissions. This is exactly what Labor and the Greens seem to be getting down to. I mean, who do the Liberals think they are, suggesting that corporations voluntarily reduce emissions is a contradiction in terms in a capitalist society, they know this though, and to some dullards, wanting to reduce emissions through some dimwitted voluntary scheme sounds like caring policy without the need for some kind of (heavily scientifically backed) authority, like say the government, needing to step in to ensure emissions actually do get reduced.

I mean, people far more educated than most anyone in the Liberal party, like Sir Nicholas Stern or Professor Ross Garnaut have already done all the thinking for them. When the science and the statistics and most importantly for the Liberals, THE ECONOMICS add up, you get behind the fucking movement 100%. The voters of Australia need to understand that the Liberal party do not have your interest, or Australia's interest or the planet's interest at heart, they need simply to jump off this bandwagon because they can't stand the people driving it, and they will tear as many other people off it as they can through the kind of nefarious tactics we are seeing.

Next theme, pokies. Yet another eminently prudent and once more LOGICAL piece of legislation the Liberal party are dead set against. I mean, it's like this. Gambling has literally ZERO benefit to society, in a way it infringes upon the freedom of each and every one of us. The cost to society to reform problem gamblers takes money away from say, improving public transport, impinging on your freedom of movement just a little bit, it takes money away from people with other mental diseases, impinging on their right to proper medical care. Does anyone want an example of a society that knows how to deal with gambling? MONACO, residents of Monaco are forbidden from gambling in the principality's one casino. The richest (per capita) country in the world knows where it is at, maybe we should consider doing the same, opening casinos only for foreigners, after all, most of the clientele in the casino in Brisbane didn't seem to have english as their first language.

Honestly Australia, get with the program, show you've got something between your ears and vote for any party that would not abolish the carbon tax or oppose poker machine reforms. And moreover, smack that idiot Abbott down for the second time in a row, it's the only way he'll learn.

Anything to declare? The nightmares of travel.

Yes, I declare Belfast to be unworthy of visiting.

I have held off on talking about this for a few days, in order to calm down, and try to paint a more objective picture of the situation. So here we go. I was in Belfast from the 27th of July until the 3rd of August for the 2011 ICPEAC conference. I am not very keen on conferences, I just find that five days of mostly abstract foreign presentations and posters a little too much, Summer or Winter schools are usually much more informative than conferences ever will be.

Problem is, this was not just 5 days, but 5 workdays and 2 weekend days. This is really unusual for a conference, but I guess a rundown city like Belfast could have used the extra cash the conference delegates coughed up over the extra 2 days. Anyhow, here is how it all began. I left Heidelberg for Frankfurt airport on the 26th via the train. It was pretty hot on the day so I took my jacket off in the train, and left it there, with my British passport in the pocket. I have never done anything so dumb before, but even the best have their pitfalls.

Anyway, I realised this only 10 minutes after getting out of the train, but by then it was already too late to recover the lost jacket and passport. So I continued to the airport to begin the now much longer booking process. Although it took longer to check in, British Airways organised everything for me with immigration in Great Britain, and I got through without any troubles. I will add at this point that British Airways knew that my schedule was to Northern Ireland, and back to Germany, no one-way flight. I will also add at this point that I took no checked baggage, just my cross country bike as my checked baggage... remember these points.

Right, so on the plane without delays, not bad for forgetting one's passport I thought! We arrived in London and had about 4:30 between flights, so my counterpart Anton thought it would be a good idea to hop in the tube and check out London. He wouldn't have much time, but it can be done, the tube ride into London takes about 1 hour or so. Unfortunately Anton wanted to be certain that we would find each other easily when he returned, this did not need to be the case, but he didn't want to lose me I guess.

Anyway, suffice it to say, Anton did not get back in time for our flight, and it wasn't like I could just hop on the plane without him, because I was guarding his belongings. So we missed our connecting flight to Belfast... and spent the night in Heathrow, what a joy this was all turning out to be.

We were able to change our tickets without any problem though and catch the first flight the next morning to Belfast. We arrived in Belfast and I immediately went to the Youth Hostel, showered, unpacked my bike, screwed everything together and rode up to the university to take in the afternoon lectures. Later I went shopping, did the normal mundane things of life and went to bed.

Next day I noticed that my front brake pads were dangerously low, so I went to seek out a bicycle shop. It was at this time that I should have noticed, that I should have started taking more care in this town. It is actually extremely difficult to find a bicycle shop in Belfast, because there are perhaps three in total, all of which are somewhat out of town. I went into all three and only got my brake pads in the last one. I went back to the first shop to fit them because the guy there seemed nice and was willing to let me use his workshop. Austin was his name, and he was one of the nicer sides of Belfast I got to encounter.

So, pads fitted, off to the uni for day two of the conference. I locked the bike up in a very public place, on a bike rack, and after the afternoon session was finished, I returned to collect it. It was gone of course. Suddenly it made sense, there are so few bike shops in Belfast, and so few cyclists because everybody gets their bike stolen there. I went to the police, but they said that if they could find no CCTV footage, they would not pursue the matter any further, naturally they found none.

So that was that, my cross country bike, my most used of all my bikes, the bike that I train most often on, was gone. What's more, it had SPD pedals, what kind of crazy thief thinks he is going to look even moderately coordinated scarpering away on a bike with clip in pedals? He got away with it though I guess.

This pretty much ruined my mood for the remainder of the week. But things were about to get worse. The weekend was boring as shit, I wanted to go cycling but, yeah, no chance of that. I hung around the Hostel for a while but could not get any quiet to mope because outside the protestants were... protesting? marching? acting like idiots? All day Saturday and Sunday there was some kind of march going on were I was. Furthermore, it was pathetic, some people dress up fancier than the Queen, march down the street playing uncoordinated music, drinking themselves to death, and then when it's all over, piss all the grog out onto nearby buildings, the same applies of course to the onlookers as well. It's like it's a full on family activity as well, as there were literally all sorts there. Naturally, after not very long the streets were littered with rubbish, glass and cans. Belfast on a summer weekend is just not the place to be.

Anyway, that was about the last of the crappy things that happened to me in northern Ireland. On Wednesday morning we were due to leave, remember, my passport is at this time, sitting in Frankfurt station. I got on the plane successfully from Belfast to London, but the when I tried to get out of London back home, no way sir, you need a passport. Of course, nobody told me I would need a passport in order to get back to Germany, British Airways knew of my travel plans but never told me to bother about getting my passport sent to me while I was in Belfast.

So, I had to let my travel partner catch the plane without me, while I went in to the centre of London, to get an emergency passport. It is cool that it only took 4 hours after my passport application to get a new one, but on the other hand it is not cool to have to pay 125GBP for the privelige. Luckily, I got the new passport in time to get back to Heathrow, get another flight, at no cost (also decent of BA, although, they were the ones who screwed me over in the first place), and get back home.

I arrived back in my bed at 3am on Thursday morning and slept until 2pm. That was absolutely the worst week of my professional life. Hopefully I can avoid any sort of further disruptions next time I go to a conference.

Latest Update

Sad really that I've not made the time to make a contribution here lately. There hasn't really been a series of events that has conspired to keep me away from writing an update, but somehow I just haven't bothered myself to really do anything here for a while.

I would also like to, but won't, use this post to make a commentary about a few current events, such as Rupert Murdoch's chickens coming home to roost, the hysteria surrounding Australia's laudable if imperfect Carbon Tax scheme, Julian Assange in his third appearance before a British court, Germany's decision to kill nuclear permanently, Italy's resoundingly awesome participation in beating down Berlusconi in the latest referendum, I don't know, the list goes on. I keep track of everything I've always been interested in, it's just that I'm adding my voice to the milieu less often these days.

Instead of any of that, I'll try to emulate an excuse as to why nothing has appeared here recently. First of all, I got published, this is now the third official, noteworthy scientific contribution I have made in my life. This also means I am somewhere between one third and one half finished with my PhD.

The content of that paper was entirely evaluated using Mathematica, and unfortunately, from now on I need to start doing my calculations in Fortran. I was kind of hoping that the last half of my PhD would be easy sailing, but the need to learn yet another programming language has scuppered those ambitions. Still, I have time on my side I guess.

Otherwise, I have been doing a lot of mountain biking. I guess the season kind of started in May at some stage with the Saarschleife Marathon, I placed 47th out of a huge field of ~300; I had a broken rib and breathing problems on that weekend yet managed a result with which I was supremely satisfied. Next stop was the Rookies Downhill Cup in Winterberg, 19th out of 80 in both heats, my name is now entered for eternity on the ixs downhill cup website for the 4 points (2*2 points in each heat) I gained from that effort. Then I went to some stupid xc race in Hessen and finished last, mainly because I decided that it would be ok to catch the train and ride the 15km through hilly windy landscape to the town hosting the race. I was completely out of energy after 500m and knew I would be rubbish; at least I finished the race and the track wasn't too boring. Next stop was Austria for the first ever Brenner Downhill in Steinach am Brenner. That was a cool one, I finished exactly in the middle of the field 44th/90 but still I was happy with my performance, a 4.2km downhill track is punishing, and to finish it in 7 minutes I believe is somewhat of a decent achievement, although catching the starter before me cost a little bit of time. After that I spanked 'em at the Rhens Marathon, 32 out of 300 and an awesome average speed of almost 23km/h, I was pretty stoked about that one. And the latest adventure in this series happened the weekend before last in Ilmenau for the German Downhill cup, unfortunately I injured myself pretty bad during Friday training and just took it easy for the rest of the weekend, I wanted to get my money's worth instead of risking a trip to the hospital. The next race is the Rookie's Downhill Cup in Steinach on the 8th of August, after I return from a conference in Northern Ireland.

Otherwise, I have been hosting a lot of couchsurfer's, all of whom were very cool to me, but I have to say I regret not having the time during the week to fully enjoy their company when they stay, I really am only providing a couch and a bit of short conversation for my surfers at the moment instead of a fuller experience.

Other than that, there really isn't too much interesting to report, oh, I am sick at the moment which sucks, I have a cough that is producing some really bad smelling lung muck that I wouldn't wish upon anyone. Suffice it to say, I'm currently hoeing through the breath mints like there's no tomorrow. Oh yeah, and my cousin Murray has been here quite a lot recently, he's moving through Europe in an attempt to find some work to finance his next ski season. He's had, let's be honest, zero success, but I don't think his expectations have been that high. Still, his lifestyle is enviable, couchsurfing everywhere, hitchhiking and ride sharing through Europe and meeting a bucketload of awesome folk.

Anyway, Flyingspaghettimonster speed, and good luck

About that Chaser Royal wedding prohibition

I came to understand that the Royal wedding broadcast was not to be used for satire in any way shape or form. Well, that is not what I saw (for a limited time today) on spiegel online, it was pure satire and sarcasm from their commentators Martin Sonneborn and Matthias Matussek, both comedians, Sonneborn the chief editor of Titanic, a satirical magazine in Germany in a similar vein to what the Chaser newspaper used to be. It was a genuine piss take.

Both myself and my coworker were laughing ourselves silly at some of the commentary, for example: "Prinz Phillips Anzug mag ziemlich prächtig sein, aber hat nichts im Vergleich mit der Mainzerranzengarde." So, evidently, spiegel online must have signed on to the contract with the BBC promising not to take the piss, but then hired a couple of comedians and just went and did it anyway.

So tell me ABC, why didn't you just say, "sure, we'll treat the wedding with the dignity it deserves (wink wink)," and then just bring the Chaser boys in to spite our idiotic rulers???

A green government

I pretty amazing thing happened a few weeks ago in the state in which I live. As far as I know, and as far as I've been told, I am now living under the first ever Green state government, right here in Baden Württemberg. One can see a pretty cool graphic of the results here.

The greens were the second strongest party in the end and, with the presumed coalition with the third placed social democrats, will be eligible to choose the state premier. Obviously what happened in Fukushima played a role in motivating people to vote, but I would argue that none of the parties have really radically changed their platform over the time in which I have been here, rather, the people have become more motivated about the issues that matter to them or have reassesed their priorities and changed their minds.

Of course, the crassness of the violence displayed by the police in the protests agains the Stuttgart 21 plans certainly gave people pause to think about what kind of disrespectful leaders were in charge of the government in the state, but to go out on a limb and cast this election off as an opportunity well exploited by the greens is really a bridge too far.

I for one an excited, but I'm keeping my expectations in check, I think it is good that the Greens have been given a slim majority in their coalition, it could well have all gone to their heads if they had received a resounding ultimatum from the voting public. I should think that under the circumstances we have here, a smooth transition from over 60 years of conservative government into a Green government can be made without leaving a bitter taste in the mouth of too many folks.

I do look forward to seeing how the greens, with this mandate will go about implementing the Green economy, the rest of the political issues here (nuclear of course is obvious) are still a little bit foreign to me, or at least I feel like I have little stakeholdership in them. Hence the excitement to see exactly what changes will occur.

An overview of the last few months

I'll lay things out pretty simply, there are just a few things I want to cover here...

1) North Africa

2) Japan and nuclear power in general

3) Politics in general

First of all, North Africa. It was pretty damn cool to see the folk of Egypt and Tunisia rising up peacefully and effectively against their respective oppressive regimes. As someone who once was somewhat of a political rabble rouser, it was almost depressing to see how easily the people of these countries simply came together, without really any great organisation visible, and ditched their corrupt governments.

The fact is, these groupings of motivated, fed up and mostly young peoples simply decided they were sick of corruption and nepotism, and just grabbed democracy for themselves, unlike attempting to impose it in the way America have tried and continue to try to do. Time will tell in the end whether anything meaningful will come out of the amazing changes that have occurred Egypt and Tunisia (and now perhaps Yemen, Oman and Bahrain), but thus far things appear encouraging.

On the other hand, in its lust to prove that yes, freedom can arrive from the barrell of a gun, western nations have now gone down completely the wrong path with Libya. There are two reasons why what NATO are now doing in Libya is wrong. Nothing more than the words, "civilian casualties" needs to be said to show the lack of foresight in these actions, but for some sick people this argument simply doesn't suffice. The situation in Libya is markedly different from that which occurred in Tunisia or Egypt, what is happening there is definitely an armed revolution, not an extreme type of general strike as in the case of Egypt. Furthermore, do we even know who we are helping in Libya? Could these rebels actually be more extreme than Gaddhafi? The old saying goes, "better the devil you know than the devil you don't," right? Furthermore, what are these leaderless rebels going to do with Libya if they seize power? Some of them have already started persecuting Gaddhafi supporters in the same kind of manner that Gaddhafi pursued his political enemies, who is to say that Libya won't get a new face to an old system? And finally, if the Rebels win, since they consider themselves as fighting within a war, they are far more likely to view their potential assumption of power as a reward for the sacrifice of ousting Gaddhafi, question is though, how long will they reward themselves with the trappings of power in much the same way Gaddhafi has given himself a 40 year long reward for doing away with the dictator before him?

So, onto Japan. I am of course extremely concerned with the situation in Japan, my sister lives and works there so I have a greater interest in what happens in that country than most, fortunately she is far enough away from the disaster zone that I don't need to worry to much. It is a tragedy not so much that the disastrous earthquake struck, caused an epic Tsunami and killed thousands of people, rather the greater tragedy is the nuclear danger that has been left behind and the fact that the government in colluding with the nuclear industry, have endangered Japan's economy, people, environment and honour by foisting their filthy technology on their countrymen.

One of my first postings on this blog was actually in support of Thorium oriented nuclear reactors, due to the benefits of far less waste, greater abundance overall less danger than traditional Uranium reactors. I just wanted to get that out of the way, but I have always thought that in comparison to every other clean source of energy available, even this form of nuclear power is entirely unnecessary, unless you live in a place with no sun, no waves and no wind.

Japan's worsening nuclear problems have thankfully given the world the wake up call it needs with regard to nuclear power, except of course America, who probably aren't receiving any news of it at all. I mean, shit if the dumb-arse right wing tools that run America need any greater sign than the oil spill in the Gulf and now this to finally ditch all forms of filthy energy, then they ought to be sent to a hospital for a lack of heart and brain.

Finally, yesterday and today was/will be a pretty odd day for politics in Australia/Germany respectively. Labour got caned in NSW, and the Greens didn't come through as strongly as one could have expected there. On the other hand, the Greens in NSW are kind of different to the Greens everywhere else in Australia. It is good that NSW have finally given their corrupt Labour government the flick, but they are really going to get the government they deserve now that Fred Nile will be bargaining for a ban on abortions in return for cooperation with the government. The NSW voter was stuck between a rock and a hard place I guess.

Where I live, today voters in Baden-Württemberg seem likely to ditch the right wing CDU party that has ruled here since Germany was re-formed after the 2nd world war. The atmosphere is rather excitable at the moment, and given Germany's appreciable (but not over-) reliance on Nuclear power, the Greens and other left wing parties here are expected to create a bit of history. I certainly hope they can, the events of Stuttgart 21 (google it) and the blatant disrespect that Premier Mappus has shown over the last year or so should be enough to put them in opposition for at least the next four years.

Indeed, what all of this has shown (and in NSW I am sure will be proven) is that it's only when the situation gets really really bad when the reluctant among us finally show a bit of guts and do something. A situation that happens all to rarely in my opinion.

An important phone call?

The toilets at the office can be a pretty funny place sometimes. We have had in the past some weird instructions like, "bitte im Sitzen kacken" which got translated as "Sit in the Shit," though it should have been "remain seated while shitting." Not only was the need for such an instruction funny, but the translation topped it right off. Nonetheless, today was the crowing moment of toilet hilarity. I was in a cubicle doing my business when one of the Chinese staff members came into the toilets, chatting on his mobile phone. It must have been a pretty important call, because he did not interrupt his conversation to whip his junk out, purge and zip back up again. If I could have managed to finish my toilet task before him, I would have shaken his hand (after he had washed it of course), because those kind of skills you can't learn, you have to be born with.

RATM New Album confirmed

Read about it here

It's taken me over 3 weeks to find this piece of news, which is unusually slow for me when it concerns RAGE news. I only wish I knew about it sooner, that way I could have been acting like a nerd sooner among my circle of friends.

Hazaa, another victor for musical justice around the world, if there is some kind of line up for the Album here in Germany, I'll be there at midnight for it.

Ice skatering!

Another new experience was had today, I did a training session on the outdoor, 400m long track. This was the first time I have ever worn long track skates, skated on ice outdoors and skated on a 400m track.

I have to say that after this morning, I can fully understand why the Dutch are so mad keen about skating, of course I love the short track skating that I do, but in spite of the cold temperatures, it was rather dream like to be outside, at 8:30am skating around, watching a very red sun rise.

That being said, it did take a little while to get used to long track skates, in comparison to short track skates, there is a distinct lack of side support in these shoes, typical engineering idiocy if you ask me though. Why typical? One needs of course a lot less side support in the shoes for long track skating, but it doesn't mean that just because one needs less of it that it wouldn't be nice to have it there anyway. Nonetheless, after adjusting my style for about 20 minutes, the rest of the session was pretty enjoyable.

One observation however does need to be made about long track speed skating. I'm the type of guy who keeps his eyes open all the time, it's always informative to observe which activities attract which personality types. Long track, like road-cycling, like golf, seems to have drawn in a larger than average number of older gentlemen. This is of course a great thing, I think it's fantastic that there was a 75 year old out there on the ice this morning mixing it with the best of them. But, on the other hand, any activity that attracts the older among us needs some closer scrutiny. If old people are tempted into doing something outdoorsy, what are the conditions that usually need to be met before the elderly are convinced to give this activity a burl. The answer is safety.

Despite some perceived instabilities at the beginning, I would have to say that for anyone with even a modicum of skating ability, it is impossible to fall over and do yourself serious harm with long track skating. No doubt I enjoyed what I did this morning, but let's face it, the fact that there is only one place within 100km I can really do this would ensure the shine of the novelty of skating outdoors would wear off sooner or later. Then what would be left? Basic, simple excercise, that in essence I could achieve by, well, riding a bike, plus it's safe! After a while I am certain that long track skating would tarnish the motivation I have for skating in general if I did it too much.

I already get all the technique training and adrenaline from short track, so I think that is where I'll stay for a while to come. But it's at least good to know there is something a little different that can be done every once in a while.

Wow, look at the cobwebs around here

Jeebuz, it's definitely been a while since I wrote anything here. What's to say really? Well, in the meantime took a journey back to Australia to catch up with everyone, but more importantly soak up my friends Brad and Rosie's wedding.

I have to say it was pretty cool to see everyone again after nearly 2 years of being away, but, a piece of advice if you ever find yourself in my situation, that is, living and working a long way from home. Be prepared for when you return, everyone will want a piece of your time, although that is a damn good thing, it's no small amount of effort.

My housemate just got home and I asked her about an MMS I sent to her, we are planning to create some stencils for our newly renovated house, I sent her this pic...

I actually forgot that today, she and her boyfriend were at a burial service, and I sent, that, of all things to them while they were in attendance, how embarrassing.

Yeah, anyway, work is epic busy at the moment, we were just about to publish something to a physics journal before we discovered we need to make a series of alterations. Yeah, so the next few weeks I doubt I'll have any time to do any of the things that need doing around here. Plus on top of that I'm learning Dutch and as mentioned the renovations around here are sucking up a decent portion of time.

Unfortunately my camera has been broken for a while so there has been a total dearth of photos from my adventures. I'd would have been really cool to show some pics of some of the many downhill and cross country races I attended this year, but yeah, I'll get it fixed soon enough, or maybe buy a new one, we'll see.

By the way, anyone have any ideas why such a wave of racism has suddenly swept Germany, normally when Switzerland, France, Belgium and the Netherlands start acting like idiots with racism, Germany is pretty good at keeping its head, but not so at the moment.

I promise I'll write something a bit more structured and sensible here soon.

Another kick ass legalization video

Distant thoughts on the election and preferences

Unlike previous years, I've barely said a word about the upcoming Australian election. I don't have too much to say mainly because, from what one can see from so far away, this time it would appear like the Greens are getting a fairer run in the media, the campaign has otherwise been boring, and the idiotic, ill-framed debate about preferences and its accompanying shit came and went in the first week of the campaign.

I'm well aware that Mark Latham has played a stunning, but strange role in the campaign, Tony Abbott is surprisingly and disappointingly more popular than I thought he would be, and the electorate is more disengaged than ever with this election, but in spite of all of this, it is still preferences about which I'd like to focus.

Bob Brown was interviewed on Lateline about the fact that the Greens had managed to rather quickly arrive at a preference deal with Labor, subsequently he was criticized using the usual vein of attack, selling-out being a sop to the Labor party blah blah blah. Bob did a pretty good job defending himself, but he didn't quite hit the nail on the head.

What he really needed to say, was essentially rubbish the fact that questions like "why did you do a deal with Labor" are even asked. These questions are placed to candidates from the perspective that the Australian electoral system has somehow been bestowed upon us from a divine intellect, and that it is infallible in every way. So when people criticize the Greens for coming to preference deals with the other parties (The shit only hits the fan with Labor though, the media never mention that we would receive preferences from other parties before we get them from Labor), one has to respond by saying that the question is idiotic.

Preference negotiations must, stupidly if you ask me, be done. Senate elections REQUIRE every party to submit a preference sheet. This means that the Greens and every other party will have to play this stupid game of exhibiting a preference for some parties over others. I mean, let's look at it this way, there are basically 4 big parties in Australian politics, Green, Labor, Liberal and Family First. It doesn't matter in which order the Greens decide to allocate their preferences to the other 3 parties, criticism will be made.

The media need to get their head around the idea that our electoral system is imperfect, and instead of ever criticizing any party ever again for doing WHAT THEY ARE LEGALLY (but idiotically) COMPELLED TO DO, by doing preference swaps with other parties, they should come out in full force behind the Greens and relate to the Australian public what a great idea it is to reform our electoral system from the broken, and frankly distracting one that it is. I say distracting because there is usually a disproportionately large degree of debate about preferences when the debate could be about policy and ideas for the future.

I know that in the distant future, if I ever come back to Australia and stand as a candidate again and someone disses me about preferences, I'll do my best to contain my rage and attempt to enlighten them, but if it doesn't work out, there'll be a good degree of ear bashing and name-calling going on.

Marajuana Prohibition

I'm not going to fill up too much space with words here, I figure this video does a good job of explaining the salient details, enjoy...

MegAvalanche

One of the advantages of being settled in Europe is that, well, there is more opportunity to do more of whatever my interests are, I mean, there are approximately 500 million people within the same size as Australia, so the chances are that there is some event somewhere happening catering to whatever one's interests may be.

My current interests are, in winter, speed skating, and in summer, downhill mountain biking. So when the opportunity arose to take part in probably the biggest single mountain bike event in all of Europe, the MegAvalanche, I didn't require too much convincing.

Let's lay down the rules first up. There's 1800 participants in the men's version of the event. Of these 1800, we are all divided up during qualifying into one of five main races, the qualifying and main race are held on different tracks and of course with so many participants, time trialling is out of the question, it's mass start madness!

We arrived last week on Tuesday afternoon, and went immediately to the race tent to collect everything that we would need, race number, lift pass etc. Wednesday and Thursday were pure training, as a first timer, one needs this, the tracks are far longer than any downhill track you've ever seen.

Second thing to mention is that a lot of this race, unless you are a professional with a license, is actually down to luck. I know that sounds like a total excuse, but let me explain it. You see, the qualification runs determine in which of the 5 main races you will run. The starting order of the qualification runs depends on your number. The professionals recieve the numbers from 1-25, 200-225, 400-425 and so on in each group. These guys start on the front row of their qualification runs, and thus have a free run. The rest of us have our names put in a hat and, well, whatever happens happens. I had the fortune of getting startnumber 565. This meant that I started on the penultimate row, and for the entirety of my qualification run, I was in a queue.

Anyway, I managed to overtake just enough people to scrape into the 3rd main race, the Mega Amateurs, any worse and I would have been assigned to the rubbish class, but all things considered, the fact that I got into the Amateur class turned out to be a disadvantage, because I only just scraped in, I started from the very last row of that race. Much overtaking to be done, AGAIN!

So anyway, there was about 280 people in the Mega Amateurs race, and somehow, after overtaking probably about 200 people, I finished 90th. I was pretty chuffed, although it did take me 101 minutes to complete the course, but shit, that is what happens when you have the world's heaviest downhill bike underneath you.

My evaluation of the event can be summed up in one word, exhausting. This thing isn't your garden variety downhill race, I mean, I was pretty well prepped for it too, fit, bike in order, all the proper prerequisites, but man, it's a commitment, it is one week out of your life, where you will do nothing but ride your bike for 8 hours a day for some 6 days. I know that sounds like fun to some of you, but believe me I have never wanted to go home more than on Sunday afternoon. What's worse, is that I can't get the damn event out of my head, it was really a major milestone in my life. It's hard to concentrate at work, it's difficult to sleep at night. I dunno, I am not saying I want to undo the last 2 weeks of my life, no way, I'm just saying, if you wanna do the mega, get ready, it's not just the event, the aftertaste will do a good job of smacking you down too.

Sean.

Don't mention the war

No you idiots, not that war, I mean, the war that is never actually mentioned. Although we all tend to think of ourselves as reasonably well clued in, some things inevitably slip under the radar. I would consider myself to be within the top 1% of clued-in-ers, so when it happens that I could miss something like this, a war with unprecedented brutality, for more than a decade, I have to say I feel pretty ashamed.

It says two things though, this feeling of shame is probably exactly what the larger commercial news media would want us to feel, in order to absolve themselves from any responsibility of bad reporting. After all, we live in a democracy where information and news is readily available whenever we want it if only we put the effort in to search for it, and if we discover something like this, about which we really all should be much more informed, we should rightly point the finger at ourselves first rather than shooting the messenger. But, in this instance, I just cannot accept it has taken me so long to hear anything from any major news outlet about this. And in this case, it really is the suckful commercial media which is to blame.

Go to "The Australian" website, type in "Great African war" and you won't see anything. Type in "Congo," and you'll be hit with how the board of an Australian mining company (Sundance) were killed in a plane crash, Ken Talbot was on board incidentally, he of Gordan Nuttall bribery fame. Not a word about a war that is easily the biggest since WWII. Apropos, I'm not quite finished on the mining aspect of this story, because as it turns out, it is mining that has been funding the war. What's worse, it is mining that has extracted exactly the kind of matériel for which I am able to write this post. Talk about your cases of depravity.

A lot of what I try to do here is to provide perspective. I've always considered myself reasonably broad minded, able to see things from countless angles. But the only way I can get perspective is by, well, reading other perspectives. And if there is no news coming out of a region for whatever reason, it won't be able to shape my perspective on other issues. Essentially, I am questioning exactly how "well rounded" I am if I am living in a world that doesn't report on a humanitarian disaster of such magnitude, how can my perspective on the world be well formed when I am being selectively fed my news from selectively chosen sources?

It may be difficult to grasp how reading the above articles has made me feel, the only thing that alleviates the outrage is that, well at least I joined up with Amnesty International a few weeks back and through that, have some limited amount of power to make some sort of change. But really, what I am feeling could probably best be described somewhat mathematically. We live in a 3D world, within this world there are the options of left, right, forward, back and up and down. The shadow of a 3D object is 2 dimensional, if shadows were sentient beings, they would probably be quite content with their 2 dimensional existence, never bothering to question how it is that they are projected on to their 2 dimensional plane, but we know what enables the shadow to exist. Today, I've realised that I too am a shadow.