PRIORITIES

Compare and contrast …

Dwight D. Eisenhower, POTUS 1953-1961

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

“This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people…”

“This is one of those times in the affairs of nations when the gravest choices must be made, if there is to be a turning toward a just and lasting peace. It is a moment that calls upon the governments of the world to speak their intentions with simplicity and with honesty. It calls upon them to answer the questions that stirs the hearts of all sane men: is there no other way the world may live?”

Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Federal Defence Minister Marise Paine (2015-?)

Our decision to expand our submarine fleet to 12 regionally superior submarines [cost – $50 billion] is a decision driven by national security. Indeed as set out in the White Paper, by 2035 around half of the world’s submarines will be operating in the Indo- Pacific region. We need submarines with considerable range. We need the capacity to remain undisturbed and undetected for extended periods of time. We need submarines that are quiet, that have advanced sensor technology to detect other submarines. When we announced the CEP in February 2015 we made it clear that we required a submarine that had range and endurance similar to that of the Collins Class and superior sensor technology and stealth characteristics.

And …

The federal government would stop funding public schools while continuing to support private schools under a dramatic change to the nation’s education system outlined by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

And …

Not only is the Turnbull Government going ahead with the freeze on Medicare rebates, the government is also keeping in place its decision to cut the bulk-billing incentive for pathology tests. These two measures will ensure that patients are being charged a co-payment when they see their GP; and then they’ll be charged an up-front fee to get tests done. There is absolutely no way for the Turnbull Government to spin this other than it being an attack on the healthcare of all Australians.

Just when you thought it’s safe to go back in the water, they drain the pool.

TONGUE OF THE DAY

Jacked up on marijuana, she drops acid and is screamed at by a hot dog.

This is a 1969 educational film from Lockheed Aircraft. The horror. The horror …

THE IDIOT

When I wish to learn about a thing, I will seek out the teachings of those who have not only learnt that thing, but made it their career, perhaps their entire life’s work.

By communicating their teachings via whatever medium they offer and I choose to engage with, I may be informed on that thing, but it does not make me an expert on it.

It makes me a layman, or layperson if you want to be fussy, and I may have a few thoughts and theories of my own about this thing that I have learnt, but these are not expert thoughts and theories, just random interpretations of random bits of information rolling about my mind like little woody tumbleweeds stuck with beetle dung.

I am an expert in my own field of work, having done it for roughly 35 years now*, so if somebody who has not done this type of work tries to tell me how to do it and according to what rules, I will not so politely tell them to shut up and go fuck themselves with 40 sticks, maybe even a mallet.

This is not arrogance. It is confidence. I know what I am doing and how to do it.

I’d want to after 35 years.

Which leads me to this …

I am fed up to the bloody back teeth with stupid people talking nonsense about things they know nothing of.

I am fed up to the bloody back teeth being expected to admit the nonsense these stupid people are talking is not in fact stupid, but an alternative opinion or approach, and they have every right to talk this nonsense because freedom of speech leftie intellectual elitist oppression..

Which leads me to this …

Christopher Pyne has a Bachelor of Laws, was once President of Adelaide University Liberal Club, a research assistant to Senator Amanda Vanstone, President of the South Australian Young Liberals, and began practising as a solicitor in 1991. He was Shadow Education minister for 5 years. During this time, he asked only 3 questions in parliament, developed no education policy, and was expelled from Parliament a record 26 times for being “unruly”.

Why is he a “Federal Education Minister”?

Because fuckedifiknow.

Christopher Pyne is an elite repository of a very special kind of stupid. I mean this in the most literal sense. That his is an uninvolved, uncomplicated and base intelligence, frozen in adolescence and improbable ideologies, moved to childish taunts and giggles at fart noises, convinced he possesses talents he does not, and intent upon unleashing those “talents” as he, and only he sees fit in areas he has no experience in, or knowledge of whatsoever.

We get this …

“The federal education minister says he is too busy to sit down with an expert panel and have its needs-based school funding model explained to him.”

Then this …

“I am the national Education Minister, there needs to be a national model that is fair to all states and territories and that is equitable to students and that is what we will achieve.””

Then this …

“The Abbott government has performed another U-turn on school funding, indicating it will substantially retain Labor’s Gonski-inspired model over the next four years.

Pyne, who last week said the Labor model was “unimplementable” and flagged the development of a new model to apply after next year, now says the Coalition has “no plan to alter the way that the model will be delivered in the signatory states into the future”.”

The man is a complete fucking idiot.

I have no qualms in encouraging the career aspirations of eager little fellas like Christopher, but if you want to be an astronaut, you can’t just whack a suit on and jump into a rocketship and off to Mars without putting an awful lot of work into it first, and knowing a whole bunch of things about space and planets and science and facts and shit.

If Christopher wants to pass his exams, he needs to pull his tightly-coiffed head out his tidy little arse and start paying attention to the grown-ups in this world, or he’ll find himself not just spending a whole heap of time in the naughty corner, but getting his head repeatedly dunked into the dunnies by the senior boys at break until he learns to fucking well behave.

 

 

*Shit.

TONGUE OF THE DAY

Malala Yousafzai with Jon Stewart from “The Daily Show” …

16 astonishing minutes with an extraordinary 16 year old.

FARTLEBERRY FINN

Whenever I hear one political party or politician accuse another of “pulling stunts” or “playing politics” I am, in an instant, removed to a faraway time filled with humid memories of a series of dark, dusty and morbid rooms; little boxes, all characterless, and coloured pelican-shit grey that lay within the red brick walls of the late 20^th century Brutalist stalag that was my high school during the 1970’s.

It was a place where boys gleefully gambolled and strutted and chattered their way toward eventual manhood, their minds for now still hovering between the simple life of a child and the complexities of adult existence, hovering within the clammy and indecisive recesses of adolescence, where hitherto unthought-of dark and dirty desires were ever-present, and sudden, dangerous impulses lingered whose potential consequences were never considered of import.

Within these rooms were we taught, on little wooden chairs at little wooden desks, how to correctly answer questions that would one day be asked of us, and how to answer those questions to the satisfaction of those asking, so that we may one day be judged whole and receive grateful permission to proceed to the next level of our game.

Within these walls did we not-quite-children whisper naughty things to one another; we giggled at fart noises and threw erasers across the room when the teacher was out and called each other names. We were teased and tormented and we teased and tormented in return, in accordance to our pecking order in the tribe – Ralph or Jack, Piggy or Simon or Sam – young, apprentice savages studying hard the harsh lessons of survival; by day we pushed at each other, by night we mostly pulled at ourselves, our bodies having been gripped by lustful fevres that had no thought of place, time or propriety, slaves to the spurting cream seizures of fuck.

Within these walls did we also imagine Grand Worlds for ourselves – Where We Could Be Heroes, If Just For One Day – the lofty heights we would attain, and the treasures we would accumulate – whether they be by talent or Machiavellian appropriation – Grand Utopian Worlds of societal perfection and order, where neat and tidy people lived neat and tidy lives in accordance with the Righteous Will of an Anointed One, a Grand Master of Beneficence and Mercy, and that person would be us, imagined only as every piece of Teenage Wildlife can, fuelled by hormonal narcissism and an unshakeable certainty in their own infallible judgement and immortality, as they are.

I do not often think of these days, those lazy, hazy, crazy days of high school, as my memories of them are not fond, and hold nothing of value to me.

I was glad to leave it all behind, happy to leave all those childish things best left to childish people, and move into the wider world of adult life, and it is in this world I still reside, with no desire to whisper naughty things to another or call a workmate names or throw erasers at them, no desire whatsoever.

And yet, whenever I hear a political party or politician accuse another of doing something they have themselves done, or would do; whenever I hear one call another a name, or conjure some slogan or soundbite they believe bless’d with biting wit or daring comedic invention – which they never are – or whenever I hear one refuse to answer a direct question with a direct answer in the manner of a child refusing to eat its vegetables with a quivering-lipped “Because!” as its only reason, I am toss’d back through time to these musty days of high school and its horrid memories of horrid children behaving horridly whilst thinking they’re funny and clever, which they weren’t, and I do wish not to be reminded of such things …

It Giveth Me the Willies and It Maketh Me Want to Scream.

DICKTATORHEAD

Now …

Federal education minister Peter Garrett has been banned from visiting Queensland schools, with the Newman government saying it will not allow kids to be used as “props in a political campaign”.

On Tuesday night, however, the office of Queensland Education Minister John-Paul Langbroek sent Mr Garrett an email informing him he was not welcome at the two schools.

It is the latest salvo in a bitter dispute sparked by Queensland’s refusal to sign up to the federal government’s school funding reforms.

Queensland insists some of its schools will be worse off under the Gonski plan.

A spokeswoman for Mr Langbroek said the decision was made after Ms Gillard visited a primary school in Bracken Ridge and ‘‘did nothing but criticise the government’’.

‘‘We have had enough of Queensland schoolchildren being used by the Federal Government as props in a political campaign,’’ she said.

‘‘We will not allow Queensland schools to be the venue for the Gonski media roadshow. If the federal minister wants to come to Queensland and discuss Gonski, he is welcome to make time to meet Minister Langbroek.’’

Previously …

SCHOOL students will be asked to learn about Campbell Newman‘s Queensland Plan in a move the union says squeezes an already crowded curriculum.

In a letter to all MPs obtained by The Courier-Mail, the Premier has revealed how his Government’s 30-year vision for the state would become a study topic for students.

In-class activities, including lesson plans and contests, will be introduced to ensure the plan is seen by more than just politicians and public servants.

Teachers have questioned whether there is enough room in the curriculum to allow time for Queensland Plan lessons and whether teaching a document produced by a government is appropriate.

However, Education Minister John-Paul Langbroek yesterday insisted the initiative was no different to the former Bligh government involving students in Queensland’s 150th anniversary celebrations.

Campbell Newman, Mr. DicktatorHead.

Hypocrite doesn’t quite cut it.

TONGUE OF THE DAY

Jeff Bliss, an American student from Duncanville High in Texas, unloads on his “teacher” for being slack …

 

This young man, I feel, would make quite the brilliant teacher himself. And his delivery is perfect. A little James Franco, a little Crispin Glover.

What’s not to like?

Four stars, Margaret.

On another subject entirely, this piece from former Liberal Party member, Andrew Elder on Tony Abbott, “the bullshitter”, as Elder calls him, is essential reading …

“Tony Abbott is not his own man. There is no link between what he says and what actually happens. You can calibrate your assessment of him on the basis of what he says, and do so fairly. I don’t care how David Marr or Mia Freedman feels about those descriptions, or about the following as it regards their (former?) profession. To come up with unflattering assessments like those about Abbott you need to free yourself of the mushroom-cultivation techniques that pass for media management. Media management only works if people believe what’s in the media, and when content-providers link their words to what actually happens. It breaks still further when you have a man who will generate “wall-to-wall blah-blah-blah” simply to attract attention. You kill it by refusing to engage.”

Abbott is not just a “bullshitter”, he’s a complete fraud.

TONGUE OF THE DAY

Kurt Vonnegut Jr…

For example – Morris Iemma, former Premier of NSW was a student of the high school I went to during the 1970’s. A couple years before me, I never met the guy, but … well … as above.

(Photo via Dangerous Minds)

I’VE GOT THE SHITS

Three weeks ago, I receive a phone call from my father, and he tells me, “Your mother has cancer, she has to go in for an operation in four to six weeks.”

“What?!”

“She has cancer. Liver cancer”, he says, wheezing and gasping down the line. Turns out it was kidney cancer, but he’s 84 years old and unable to care for himself, and he gets a little confused, if you know what I mean.

“Shit”, I say.

A couple days later, he phones again and he tells me, “She’s going in next Thursday. They had a cancellation.”

“Okay. I’ll be down on Wednesday”, and so I was. Booked a flight to Sydney, rented a car, and took her to hospital on Thursday morning at 10.00am, the time we were told to be there, even though she wasn’t admitted to prep ’til 2.00pm.

Four hours, just sitting around.

That’s your public health system, right there.

Some may think that would be cause enough for complaint.

It’s a public health system. It’s free.

Complaint? Blow it out your arse.

Hell, it’s not as if the four hour wait to go in would see the cancer metastasize into her brain.

She came out of the theatre at 8.00pm, doped to the hilt on morphine and looking like white death on a stretcher.

I watched these people, these nurses and interns, cleaners and trolley pushers, doctors, all manner of people, God only knows what most of them do, as they went about their business during the four days she was in the hospital, in a mixed ward of four (two men, two women), and each and every one of them knew exactly what they were doing, why they were doing it, and they did it brilliantly.

These are our public servants.

They are not our public slaves, or serfs.

They are not, as our politicians often infer, disposable, weedy, sunken chested little dweebs, clad in short-sleeved, white polyester shirts with four pens in the top pocket, wearing a visor, and beavering away under green lamps on a foot-high pile of papers and forms, like the Jonathon Pryce character from Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil”.

A couple weeks ago, on Linda Mottram’s morning show on ABC702, the topic of a teachers’ strike came up.

I understand the primary reason these teachers decided to take strike action was this  (my emphases) …

“Children with special needs in NSW public schools are losing specialist support and classroom teachers are needing to fill the gap according to the NSW Teachers Federation. The Federation says that changes to the system of supporting special needs students is about saving money. Specialist support staff have been removed and classroom teachers are expected to train in those specialist areas and support those students in class as well as delivering general classroom education.”

“Saving money”.

Such a noble pursuit.

If we’re going to start ripping money from services for the intellectually and physically handicapped, why not just revert to practices of ye olden times, and shove them all in asylums.

That way, they soil ‘emselves or get rowdy, we can just hose ‘em down and give ‘em all a thrashing ‘til they quieten down some.

A couple people rang in to Mottram’s program to discuss the matter of this strike, this one day strike, and common among them was how terribly “inconvenienced” (yes, that was the word used) they would be by this day of tumultuous industrial action. Why, they would have to rearrange their whole day just to cope with the upset, maybe miss out on that extra twenty minutes at the gym, skip the afternoon latte, or a beer with the boys after work in order to accommodate the not-so-special needs of their own overindulged offspring, like pay them some fucking attention for a time instead of fobbing them off on the poor bastards who are paid two-fifths of fuck-all to deal with the brats five days a week for twelve fucking years.

God help us all, I thought, if somewhere in this world of almost seven billion people, a fair dinkum Aussie bloke or sheila is bein’ “inconvenienced” for a brief period of time over sumfin’.

Aw, jeez.

It’s almost enough to warrant a complaint to the U.N., bigger than the bombing of Dresden, shall we call in the Marines?

Poor buggers.

At what point was it, precisely, when the most defining characteristic of the Australian national identity became one of a squealing, pants-wetting, fist-clenching, foot-stomping, soft-bellied, spineless, yowling little child – the spoilt brat with screwed-up baby face, its automatic expectation of privileged entitlement to anything, everything, right now?

Because it’s giving me the shits.

Here were these people on the radio, banging on and on about how “the teachers oughta be doin’ this, they oughtn’t be doin’ that, and if they wanna strike, why can’t they do it durin’ school holidays, they get enough of ‘em, the bludgers. They are our public servants, y’know, it’s our taxes pay their wages.”

I’ve never rung a radio station, but on hearing all of this, I was sorely tempted to ring in and suggest, in far more polite terms than these, that perhaps these people may like to take a good, close look at the circumstances of their lives in this, the most troubled nation on the face of the planet, and the difficulty they believe they are facing as a result of this ONE DAY of industrial action, and then go fuck themselves with forty sharpened sticks.

I resisted that temptation.

God only knows why anyone in their right mind would want to devote their working life to serving the needs of the Australian public by becoming a teacher or a nurse or a doctor or cop or a bus driver or train driver in the public system, when the only thing they ever seem to face is this constant barrage of whiny complaint about any damn thing, no matter how trivial, from the “ME! ME! ME! NOW!” generation that seems to typify the average Australian, in this, the 21^st and a bit century.

But they do. Bless ‘em.

As for the taxes we pay them to put up with this nonsense from all these penny-bunger, one-pot screamers, as far as I’m concerned, we should be paying them fucking double, and you can raise my taxes twenty bucks a week to do it.

Fifty. Take fifty.

And take a hundred from him over there, the one earning two-fifty grand a year. Fuck him.

In her 73 years of life, my mother had never been under the knife before, and the last time she was in hospital was 1959, when I was born.

The cancerous kidney was removed and the operation was declared a success, but she was shaken and upset and unnerved by it all, as I would be, I suppose. As anyone.

Her local G.P. paid a visit this morning, looked over the notes on the procedures, the medications, and said, “Yes, this is very good. This means they are very confident everything is now fine, and you should recover very quickly. So, nothing to worry about now. It’s very good.”

He walked in the front door while I was trying to get some work done, and I looked at him as he came in and I thought to myself, “You have got to be fucking kidding me! You have got to be kidding! I need to get myself a phone with a camera in it, ‘cause no one is going to believe this.”

For he looked the spitting image of Giancarlo Esposito as Gus Fring from “Breaking Bad”, only with gray hair and more of it, and thick-rimmed glasses.

Seriously.

No, seriously.

You have to believe me.

Please.

Would I lie to you? …

PYNIN’ FOR THE FJORDS

From “Lateline”, February 17^th, 2012  …

Christopher Pyne, Opposition Education Spokesman: “The Government is throwing money at education through things like school halls and laptop computers, that’s where the extra spending has come. What they haven’t done is focused on what really matters, which is traditional methods of teaching” (my italics).

I do not know what this means.

I work for a publisher, a book publisher. Most of what we do is for the secondary and tertiary education markets.

I’m not in any way involved in the content or the marketing or production of what we publish, I’m more “middle-middle-meh management” over there in the corner, adding things up and such.

Around the middle of the last decade, a secondary school textbook would typically comprise a hardcopy book and a CD-Rom that was either stuck on the cover or one of the inside flaps.

I haven’t seen a CD-Rom in years.

What happens now, I believe, is that the high-school student goes to a website, and then types in an address, and then types in a registration code or whatnot to log-in, and the student does all this via a computer, a not unusual device to encounter in this day of modern marvels not powered by steam, think modern refrigeration and the bagless vacuum cleaner or the fax. The student will then have access to all manner of educational material and exercises, interactive this-and-that, links to here-and-there, resources to explore and studies to study, and all of this is accompanied by a book made of paper as well. With words and pictures in it.

This is how the kiddies learn their “readin’, writin’, ‘n’ ‘rithmatic” nowadays.

Yes, this is “how our children is learnin’”.

Once they’re done with learnin’ ‘emselves how to make chicken scratches on ruled sheets of paper with pens and pencils, write their names, add some, and wipe their arses and wash their hands, they set about other subjects, more complex things requiring substantially more complex thought, and in the learnin’ of all this confoundin’ complexity, tools need to be employed on a regular basis, tools that can only be employed on a computer, one of which each and every school student needs in order to be (at least) a half-clever bastard of some worth.

This is how we work now. How we learn. How we do business. How we find stuff out. How we communicate.

Computers. Computing things. Giving us answers to questions.

It is the “traditional method of teaching”.

Not sitting about in a dusty recreation of a classroom from 1964, on a too-small rickety wooden chair at a too-small rickety wooden desk with a hole for an inkwell, a frayed and ratty textbook from 1954 in front of you. “Read chapters 15 and 16 and keep quiet”, says teacher, and you look down at the textbook and some student from two generations before you has scribbled penis’s across the photograph of African tribesmen on page 137.

Back in the days, those glory days, when children lived out their sweetly innocent and uncomplicated lives in a Ginger Meggs world, making billy-carts from orange crates on weekends, back in those days of “traditional methods of teaching”, when you took your own saucepans to the local Chinese for takeaway and milk came in fucking bottles.

That’s bollocks, all that.