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He will be remembered for his skillful use of nuclear brinkmanship to protect his tyrannical regime and how he starved and brutalised his people, whilst lavishing the country’s limited wealth on himself and the military.

Here are a few sites with collections of reputed crazy facts about his lunatic, eccentric and brutal rule:

• http://abcnews.go.com/International/kim-jong-il-dead-top-10-crazy-facts/story?id=15187293#
• http://www.11points.com/news-politics/11_craziest_kim_jong-il_moments
• http://listverse.com/2010/05/30/top-10-crazy-facts-about-kim-jong-il/
• http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/kim-jongil-school-days-of-a-tyrant-904130.html

His son Kim Jong-Un has taken over. No-one really knows what to expect – he is young and baby-faced, in his late 20′s. Some in the media hope that he may be more modern-minded as he was educated in Switzerland, and so he may liberalise North Korea. I don’t buy this type of wishful thinking.

I recall the case of another long-ruling dictator – Syria’s Hafez al-Assad. When he died in 2000, his son Bashar al-Assad took over. Prior to becoming leader, Bashar was an opthamologist who spent several years studying in the UK – a democratic society. People believed he would bring democratic ideals to Syria. They were proven wrong.

The fact is, Bashar had to maintain the loyalty of the old guard of military men and politicians, and act ruthlessly to prevent civilian unrest from toppling his regime, so he had to continue in his father’s tyrannical ways. It is only due to the momentum of the “Arab Spring” that began at the end of 2010 that Bashar’s rule is now at risk, with popular protests fueled by the Islamic movement.

The people of North Korea are far more isolated that the people of Syria and do not have a passionate political or religious movement to rally the population. Nonetheless, we will see what happens.

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You would have to have been living in a cave (pun intended) to have not heard this by now, but just in case, here are some fantastic articles with timelines, details and lots of photos:

• http://news.ninemsn.com.au/world/8244156/how-us-navy-seals-killed-bin-laden
• http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/osama-bin-laden-dead-us-has-the-body/story-e6freuy9-1226048335673

I wish to add my few cents to this ordeal.

No doubt that it was a disappointment that he was not captured alive, so that he could be interrogated and provide information on other terrorists, but considering the circumstances, this was an unlikely scenario.

I expected Bin Laden’s life to end this way – to be killed in a military operation and become a “shahid” or “martyr”. This is the way he would have wanted it. I am just surprised that it took so long. In the aftermath of the World Trade Centre attack on 9th September 2001, the US demanded that the Taliban government of Afghanistan hand Bin Lander over to them to prevent a military conflict. I expected the Taliban to relent to to guarantee their survival as the dominant force in Afghanistan, but they didn’t.

During the military operations in Afghanistan, he was apparently located several times by various parties (including the Australian SAS), but was tipped off by double agents, and was able to make his escape. I am shocked that the $25 million bounty on Bin Laden was not claimed by anyone. That amount of money could go a long way in Pakistan, which is a poor country by world standards. Sadly, I consider this to be an indicator of Bin Laden’s popular support amongst the people of Pakistan.

Like most people, I believed that he was likely to be hiding in the border area between Pakistan and Afghanistan, which is mountainous and poorly controlled. That is why it came as a shock when it was revealed that he was located well inside Pakistan, in a location that was not only close to the capital, but a town that was also a military garrison. It is reported that his hideout was a custom built house that was 8 times the size of an average dwelling in the area, and surrounded by 12ft high walls.

Pakistan is officially a US ally. I find it hard to accept the denials of Pakistan military leaders that they did not know that Bin Laden was living there, or that the distinctive appearance of this hideout did not arouse suspicion. Even here in Sydney, if someone built such a large unusual house with high walls around it, people would be asking many questions about who was building it and what it was being used for. If I were to make a guess, I would say that the Pakistan military is not one solid cohesive unit, and the people located down the chain of command may not share the official views of those at the top.

The success of this operation will do much to improve the popularity of US President Barack Obama and the Democrats, who had been waning in popularity in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis.

The other question is whether this will reduce or increase terrorism. In the short time, it is likely that there will be a reprisals from Bin Laden’s terrorist sympathisers. Nonetheless, Bin Laden’s death has shown that it is practically impossible for a terrorist to hide indefinitely, even an Islamic country like Pakistan, and this will perhaps make other Islamic terrorists cautious about following in Bin Laden’s footsteps.

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In a major pandering to her Greens Party coalition partners, she has backflipped on her pre-election promise to NOT introduce a tax on Carbon Dioxide emissions.

She has now announced that a carbon tax will be introduced from July 2012. The price per tonne of carbon will be fixed for a period of up to 5 years, after which market-based mechanisms will be used to set the price. Although the carbon price has not been announced, a popular figure thrown around in the media is $26/tonne. This will increase the cost of electricity across the nation, as Australia generates most of its power from coal and natural gas. The government has not announced whether petrol will also be subject to the carbon tax, but various Green party members have announced that they want it to. This will also result in an avalanche of other price increases as businesses pass on their increased costs directly to consumers.

Gillard has claimed that “low-income families” and the Agricultural sector will receive some form of compensation for the increased costs, but has not gone into details. Liberal Opposition Leader Tony Abbot has claimed that the carbon tax will result in an average electricity bill increasing by $300/year and the price for petrol increasing by 6.5c/Litre. Abbot has already pledged to repeal this tax if he wins the next election.

Regardless of one’s opinion of the causes of climate change, this tax is a stupid and pointless exercise that will needlessly punish the middle class and hard the Australian economy, whilst making no global impact on carbon dioxide emissions.

1. None of the tax money is being used to replace our fossil fuel burning power stations with non-CO₂ producing alternatives like Nuclear power
2. We will still be exporting coal that will be burnt and converted into CO₂ overseas, contributing to global emissions. No-one would ever dare suggest that we stop selling coal.
3. Even if Australia ceased to exist and emitted no CO₂, the growth in Chinese emissions would replace it within a few months.
4. Australian households have already been forced to reduce electricity and fuel consumption in the face of skyrocketing global crude oil prices and increases in domestic electricity costs. The fact is, Australians still need gas and electricity for cooking and powering appliances and in this 21st century, no-one should have to return to a pre-industrial age state of existence. People also need to travel to work and transport their children to school. There really is little scope for further drastic cuts
5. Australia goes to great lengths to protect its own agriculture sector from foreign competition, so that we can be self-reliant on food. Also, Australia is raking a fortune in from mining and resources, which generates a lot of tax revenue to fill government coffers. Both these sectors intrinsically emit a lot of CO₂. Do we really want to bite the hands that feed us?
6. There will be absolutely no indicator or measurement that can prove that this carbon tax is having any effect on either global CO₂ levels or climate events, so it will be impossible to tell whether this policy is working. Money is effectively being thrown into a black hole.

Daily Telegraph journalist Tim Blair brilliantly demolishes the case for a Carbon Tax in his article here where he addresses a series of rhetorical questions regarding the purpose and implementation of the “Carbon Tax”:

Regardless of the outcome, no-one will ever trust Julia again.

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I am also a Skype user and both my Windows client and Android client on my smart phone reported my status as being offline, with none of my regular contacts visible. It went back to normal for me when I logged in on Friday morning.

Skype’s Official Explanation

On Skype’s blog, their official announcement stated:

“Under normal circumstances, there are a large number of supernodes available. Unfortunately, today, many of them were taken offline by a problem affecting some versions of Skype. As Skype relies on being able to maintain contact with supernodes, it may appear offline for some of you.”

What is a Supernode?

For those that don’t know what a supernode is, any computer that is running the Skype client can be automatically appointed a supernode, in which it acts like a hub and helps other nearby Skype users to find each other. The reason for this is due to the fact that some of Skype’s functionality is decentralised, using a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) topology. so having supernodes improves the efficiency of network communication. Computers with broadband connections that are not behind firewalls are likely to be chosen to act as supernodes.

Why I don’t believe Skype’s Official Explanation

I do not believe Skype’s explanation for the following reasons:

1. As far as I know, all users were affected around the world, not just “some”
2. If the problem was limited to a single defective version, you would only expect some contacts to be unreachable, not all of them
3. If the problem only affected some versions of Skype, all the other clients running the good versions would still be able to operate as supernodes, allowing Skype to function
4. Why would the problem hit so many systems at once, at the same time? Surely, they are not implying that millions of people around the world suddenly switched to defective versions! Something must have triggered it

My Alternative Theory

If I were to make a guess at the cause, it looks more like a carefully planned Denial-Of-Service attack. A malicious person may have found a weakness in Skype’s protocol or software, obtaining a list of IP addresses of all supernodes who were on the network at that time, and then sending those supernodes specially crafted data to cause a software failure.

Perhaps their protocol has little or no redundancy to protect against supernode malfunction, i.e. all the skype users known to a single supernode will be lost to the rest of the network if that single supernode fails. This would not happen if the system were designed so that each user is registered with two or more supernodes.

The motivation would be to cause Skype embarrassment at Christmas time, when many people are making long-distance phone calls to relatives, friends and business associates. The perpetrator could be a business rival, online extortionist, or simply some troublemaker with nothing better to do with their time. It is known that Skype is trying to attract large corporations as clients, and an outage of this scale would really cause people to lose confidence in the reliability of their platform.

This is just speculation on my part. I have no direct knowledge of the Skype protocol, and I have no evidence of foul play, but I sure as hell do not believe Skype’s explanation.

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Diplomacy is a sensitive area and sometimes sensitive issues, especially where there is huge difference between both sides, or are controversial, need to be discussed quietly outside the public eye. For example, meeting with a belligerent force to negotiate a ceasefire, surrender or peace treaty.

But where is the accountability? When is it okay for our politicians and bureaucrats to tell lies, and when does it cross the line? How does the voting public know? How can the public judge the effectiveness and competence of our government without knowing the truth.

When Scotland released the Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, I knew that something was amiss. Although he reportedly was dying of prostate cancer and only had months to live, prisons do not usually hesitate to let someone die in prison, especially one convicted of mass murder.

It was clear that the West wanted to benefit from Libya’s petrol money (they have nothing else to offer), which is controlled by the whim of madman Muammar Gadhafi. Now, thanks to Wikileaks, we have some insight into the matter.

Other matters of interest are the fact that Arab countries wanted military action against Iran, Saudi Arabian royalty enjoy parties with liquor and prostitutes whilst ordinary folk get lashed or stoned to death.

Julian Assange is only responsible for publishing, but not the actual leaking. It is the people who are leaking the information that are deciding for themselves whether something should be leaked. The only controversy that Julian Assange could be legitimately questions about is if he is releasing some information but not others, then he could be proven to have an agenda. Kind of like when CNN admitted that they had kept quiet about the most brutal actions taken by the former Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein.

Also, isn’t it amazing how VISA, Mastercard, Paypal, Amazon and other organisations quickly stopped handling money transfers (or web hosting). Never before have I seen this kind of action by these symbols of capitalist freedom in any other matter, be it terrorism or child pornography.

Malcolm Turnbull had something interesting to say about making a martyr out of Julian Assange as well.

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Several American food chains that are big overseas ended up closing their doors or winding back their operations in response to poor patronage or low profitability in Australia. These include:

• Taco Bell, which closed their doors in 2005. I once sampled one of their tacos in the George St store, near the Sydney CBD cinema district. I could describe that taco as resembling ground-up roadkill with grated cheese in a cheap, squashed, cracked shell. That was my first and last visit.
• Starbucks, which closed 64 its Australian stores, representing three quarters of its total operation, leaving only 23 running. Even now, Starbucks Australia is still unprofitable and is only operating due to the financial backing by its parent company in the USA. For me, their coffee was tolerable, but vastly inferior to the many small cafes which have coffee machines operated by trained baristas, who offer good coffee at a cheaper price.

Now, Krispy Kreme donuts has gone into voluntary administration. They blame expenses, but the fact is, if their product was popular enough, it would pay for those expenses. The fact is, their product is a nutritional bomb, high in sugar, saturated fat and carbohydrates – amongst the worst of its class. Picturing a box of those in my head makes me feel sick. It is telling that one of their largest stores is in Penrith. There are other local chains like Michel’s Patisserie that offer better much better quality fare.

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Following the Australian election, Labor PM Julia Gillard managed to form a fragile minority government by the skin of her teeth, by forming a coalition with a rag-tag group consisting of independents and greens party members with irreconcilable policy differences. For the time being, things are still working out, but I think it’s only a matter of time before there’s a serious clash that will destabilise the government and result in another election.

She abandoned her crazy idea of an unelected group of 150  citizens to determine how to “tackle climate change”. It is uncertain how things are going to proceed. Hopefully, they won’t.

She appointed the ousted former Labor PM Kevin Rudd as Foreign Minister in order to appease his anger and that of his supporters over the way in which he was ousted and sidelined.

Despite identifying herself as an atheist, contrasting herself with the religiously observant former PM Kevin Rudd and current Communications Minister Senator Conroy, she has expressed support for continuing with Conroy’s idiotic Internet Filtering scheme, but she has baulked on setting a deadline for its implementation.

Regarding the handling of boat people, she is back in talks with the East Timorese government over the establishment of a new “refugee processing centre”, after they had previously expressed reluctance. I guess the money earning potential for East Timor was too much for their government to refuse. Good on them. I still reckon reopening the existing facility on Nauru would’ve been better value for Australia. Nonetheless, to placate her Greens party coalition partners, she has agreed to a plan to release some asylum seekers, who are currently in detention, into the community. It is not clear yet who will be released and who won’t be.

All in all, I will say that she is taking all the correct measures to ensure her political survival in the current climate.

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Nothing.

We are in a modern age where men and women have equal opportunities. Whether they choose to take up these opportunities is a separate matter.

I will judge Julia Gillard the same way I judge any politician or person in a leadership or managerial role – through his or her policies and competence as a leader.

At the moment, I do not expect much to change, after all, she was a key policy maker under her predecessor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. Perhaps now that she has a fresh start, she can change her mind and abandon bad policies without losing face.

Since taking up the role of PM, she reached a compromise with the big miners on the controversial Super Profits tax. A compromise was expected, considering that Kevin Rudd was brought down after adopting a hard-line stance. I never knew what the truth was about the need for a Super Profits tax – all I heard was propaganda coming from both sides, so I cannot say whether a compromise is a good thing or a bad thing. Time will tell.

I do like that she in an atheist, unlike religiosly devout Kevin Rudd. Perhaps religious lobby groups and ministers like Stephen Conroy will have less influence and his could spell the end for the stupid Internet filter.

She also appears to have taken a leaf out of former Liberal PM John Howard’s successful “Pacific Solution” as a means of deterring people smugglers and their boats. She has proposed the establishment of a processing centre for boat people in East Timor, instead of the former Nauru location. Naturally, this has already generated much controversy amongst her party, but it clearly will be popular amongst voters.

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Men at Work is to pay 5% of all royalties on their song “I come from the land down under” earned from 2002 onwards, to Larrikin Music. This was far less than the 60% share that Larrikin were seeking.

In my opinion, this is a just outcome, because it upholds copyright law, but acknowledges the opportunistic nature of the case, which I described thoroughly in my previous post.

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