The year in polls

[Jovial Monk]

If anybody was overpopulated and poor it is India which now nearly has the same population as China.

China at least had the one-child policy. It has also been spending up big on armaments.

I think China might descend into civil war, with regions wanting to break away (not just Tibet & Taiwan) and a huge city-country split and now the cities will be in trouble with millions unemployed. The govt better get cracking with spending to keep the economy moving forward.

[cynik]

Yeah, I mean anything could happen in China EXCEPT the projection of power against modern state across oceans.

As for India...... what a fucking mess. In Utar Pradesh you have 100 million people eating rats, if they can get them. That isn't a joke, by the way. Google "the rat eaters of utar pradesh", see for yourself.

And all we get told on the news is how China and India are moving forward as "emerging powers". I fail to see how a country can be powerful if its ecology is swirling down the shitter at an increasing rate of knots.

Sure, China has a one child policy, but suspect that their population is already 2 or 3 times what can be reasonably sustained over the longer term. At a half decent standard of living, I mean.

It really annoys me the way professional politicians like Rudd (and Howard was just as bad if not worse) preen themselves in the spotlight of international affairs. Everything is about trade, because everything is about the economy as it affects the stock market. There is so little vision of anything that does not conform to the modern stock brokers world. It is as though the guild of stockbrokers have hostages from every politicians family locked away in a dungeon somewhere, and if the politicians don't report the world from their perspective, they'll kill em all.

The ALP are the most repulsive in this respect, because they are supposed to be AGAINST the fucking market ideology. Instead they fawn on anyone in a suit. But the libs are just as hypocritical, if you read their constitution. The liberal party is supposed to stand for the development of middle class australia, but like labour they fall over themselves to have their picture taken with anyone wearing a suit and gambling on currencies.

Underlying the sycophancy is the absurd reality that we don't NEED a globalized economy on the stock markets terms. I think that is what mystifies me the most. The idea that we NEED to pay our mortgages, we NEED to have large corporations or there will be no jobs.

"Need" is such a strong word. It implies you are going to fucking die if you don't have it. But in reality, all that is at stake is the possibility of getting rich. That's it. Not the certainty, but rather the very, very vague possibility. The slight chance of striking it rich. For the sake of that, people are willing to give the stock brokers absolute control of their world view.

[White Indigene]

Underlying the sycophancy is the absurd reality that we don't NEED a globalized economy on the stock markets terms. I think that is what mystifies me the most. The idea that we NEED to pay our mortgages, we NEED to have large corporations or there will be no jobs.

"Need" is such a strong word. It implies you are going to fucking die if you don't have it. But in reality, all that is at stake is the possibility of getting rich. That's it. Not the certainty, but rather the very, very vague possibility. The slight chance of striking it rich. For the sake of that, people are willing to give the stock brokers absolute control of their world view.

I sympathise with that perspective. Is it true the corporate analyst has identified this 'NEED' we all suposedly have? Or is it more to market and merchandising engineers who manufacture the notion of 'NEED" and flog it to the media. Note the generational influencers here again.

Some people/governments subscribe to the notion that modernity is un-sustainable. Yet look at India and China, and any rational person with some academic capability can tell that the cultist stylzed 'unsustainability' chant is just that, a chant. If it werent for this inconvient truth in market forces -that being tension ala Soros- China for sure and India would be heading in a good direction as far as modernity goes.

But we are all sold on this 'NEED" as Cynik points out, and therein lies a problem. And I would guess that diversity and pluralcy plays a key when it comes to market participation, and the making of competition. But consider some abstract points. Is it really sustainable to have a market that floggs stones and dirt and rubbish as a way of sustaining a market? Stuff that lasts a week, when it once would have lasted a decade. Product that is no more worthy of our attention, than is going to the dunny. And missed oppurtunity when it comes to human salvation. There lies greater problems in future.

The Arabs do it different. Perhaps there is something in that.

As for future battles, China has indeed given signal of its future intents. Though it is baseless, there are several Island states which I project will be crucial to future manouvers. I alledge the Maoists have conquered two of them, and assailed a third.

But there is a balancer, and India/Russia are them. And there is a power vertical out of the ME, which is as always, a fascinator and frustrator.

Beleive it or not.

[cynik]

Power out of the middle east?

Where? Israel is the only power in the middle east, and it is an American army base.

Regarding the world view that says that globalized corporate economic growth is not only good, but the ONLY good, I can't hear that story without thinking about the riddle about the bacteria and the yoghurt, which explains the consequences of geometric growth in a finite container.

Do you guys know that riddle?

It goes like this: I have a bottle of yoghurt, and a single celled bacteria. The bacteria double itself every 24 hrs.

How much yoghurt do I have left, the day before I have no yoghurt left?

The answer, of course, is half a bottle. That is the nature of geometric progressions. They sneak up awful fast, and then they stop.

I think one of the most important books I have ever read is "Collapse", by Jared Diamond. I recommend it entirely. You have to be a bit scientific, but not too much, to dig it.

As I spend my days with people who are ever so cultured and ever so knowledgeable about the "world" and its problems, compared to the rat eaters of Utah Pradesh, I am constantly struck by the utter ignorance of the frailty of our world. And that is why I say the stock brokers have stolen our world view. Or, we have given it to them, or something. I don't get it, I really do not understand how it is possible. i mean, people love nature. They love to walk their dog, to go hiking, to go skiing. Even just to sit and watch the wild animals. They love it.

And yet, when they turn on the television, nature is entertainment and business is news. Even when politicians talk abut the environment, they are talking about business. It is never "OK, we are going to do THIS, and business is just going to have to work around that." It is always "OK, we would like to do THIS, but let us first see what the stock brokers say."

As if they have a fucking clue about it.

I don't understand that, because there are quite a few pieces of our lives where the stock brokers still do not have control of our worldview. Consider the law of families. You can't sell and buy babies. Yet. And the law of elections. You can't buy a political seat. Openly. And the law pertaining to crime. You can't kill people to make money. Unless you are an American defense corporation like Haliburton.

I suppose it is not accident that the USA is currently pushing the boundaries of all these exceptions. That society is sick, sick, sick. The stockbrokers have infected every nook and cranny of their lives, to the point where babies are for sale, where senate seats are traded openly, and where millions are butchered for corporate profits. Shit, they even have a jail industry that is privatized and based on profits, rather than human rights law.

So, yeah, I guess the USA is sick and twisted in a really weird way, in a way the world has never seen before. Market economics has created a belief that greed for money is not only good, but that it is THE only good. Greed for money has not just taken over professional life, but political and family and public life. And it is all based on the idea that the world can sustain infinite economic expansion by multinational corporations.

No wonder the yanks fantasize about colonizing space. Their ideology needs that fantasy, or it runs into the problem of being utterly flawed.

[White Indigene]

But. I would poll against the America being the main man in all this. Auslund for example, has its fair share of corporate miscreants, though perhaps our size limits their arrogant capability. Let us flower like a thousand blossums, and perhaps then, we might see corporate mayhem be our nations worst enemy.

For me, I too am growing in frustrated disgust at the way we are developing; not in the material sense per-se, but in the social or moral sense. As an extension of market ideology -as you suggest Cynik-, we here are making leaps and bounds into space occupied by little except perhaps brutality, certainly arrogance, biggotry, selfishness and ignorance.

This is an outright abomination. Project that into the cosmos, and fight the God/s with it in their realm, and whatch the shit hit the fan, I bet.

No, I am bitter now, and have been smashed once too often by this not too insignificant paradigm. I would work to stop some relovutionay element from rolling the ball of humanity to the brink, but once on the precipice I might only have the energy for one last push. Let the balance of power roll where it may.

But on nature, I find the best thing for some R&R is Funniest Home Videos; animals can be quite humerous and fun.

But the corporate wizkids who get paid to do research on human patterns may in the end not be so funny. Sure, there are other forces at work in society and on the market (the Mafia for example). These all contribute and contest for the dominant thought of the day.

Perhaps the social engineers have overun society already, and we are now seeing a backlash of sorts, where the latent energy of years of positive effort now overuns the human will to resist tides and ebbs. I for one reckon that Big Inc tends to think with one mind across the board and the world, pushing the limits of endurance and capacity to resist demand thus supply, thereby tapping into the potential energy of the spending customer.

Force fed consumption, from birth to death, it may be the emerging god of our time, the one that makes the econoslave of our world.

[Jovial Monk]

Possum has written another article, Rudd v Howard in their respective first years.

http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollytics/20 ... eathmatch/

[skippy]

"Rudd is definitely a far more popular Prime Minister than Howard was during his first year in office, he’s enjoying much higher satisfaction ratings than Howard, is experiencing much higher overall polling numbers on the two party preferred front, is a more preferred Prime Minister compared to their respective oppositions – yet where Rudd’s current opposition of Malcolm Turnbull is experiencing far higher satisfaction ratings than Howard’s opposition of Kim Beazley."

God, if these numbers keep up for kevvy he may rule till he's 80.