Dikkii's Diatribe

Fun with libertarians

noreply@blogger.com (Dikkii) — Sun, 05 May 2013 05:15:12 PDT

I should start a webpage where people bait libertarians. I'll call it Loonbook. They're pretty easy, really. A lot of them paint themselves as moderates or centrists, but there's nothing moderate or centrist about them.

Pretty much without exception, they're all raving, ultra-paranoid, grasping right-wingers who see tax as theft and government spending as absolutely necessary if it's on them. And the moment that you suggest that government does something, you're a "statist" and as bad as the rest of them.

But you know, for the most part, libertarians do mostly the right thing, in standing up for people's rights. Strangely, though, where people are too weak to assert their own rights, libertarians are only too keen to ride slipshod over them. Get a load of this fine fellow:

Name Nazi New Zealand statists, doing what statists do best, outlawing harmless behavior. SMH holykaw.alltop.com/new-zealand-up…
— Chuck Baggett (@ChuckBaggett) May 5, 2013

OK. I had read about this earlier in the week, and shot off a response.

@chuckbaggett Like naming a child "Anal" is harmless. What kind of fantasy land are you in?
— Dikkii (@dikkii) May 5, 2013

The reason that we need the state to intervene on this and other issues, is that parents can't be trusted to not be cruel to their kids. Imagine that the NZ authorities had allowed the name "Anal" to be registered. What next?

Kid's going to get bullied, heckled and all sorts of things at school so badly that he (or she) will probably commit suicide before he (or she) graduates.

The kid is in no position to consent or approve their parents' selection of a name. Hence one of the reasons why we need a name-vetting process.

@dikkii "I can confirm... several people named Anal, including Anal Exceus. Anal Singh, and Anal Shah." vastpublicindifference.com/2008/08/urban-…
— Chuck Baggett (@ChuckBaggett) May 5, 2013

So it's a normal subcontinental name is it? So what? It's still not harmless, which was this guy's original claim.

@chuckbaggett Right. And that's harmless in an English-speaking country (NZ) how?Remember your original claim was harmlessness.
— Dikkii (@dikkii) May 5, 2013

I followed that up with this:

@chuckbaggett ... Incidentally, none of the Anal's you named were in NZ.
— Dikkii (@dikkii) May 5, 2013

So imagine my surprise when our libertarian friend tweeted this (Edit: to be fair, he's since deleted it, but I still have the text, and the permalink for the record):

@dikkii How long should a person be put in prison for naming their child something you disapprove of? Or do your favor the death penalty?
— Chuck Baggett (@ChuckBaggett) May 5, 2013

This is a popular red herring with libertarians. Apparently, the government just wants to lock you up. And the bigger the government is, the more people they want to lock away. So you better watch out!

With my stupidmeter off the scale and me carrying on several other conversations on Twitter, I dashed these off, and then jumped into the shower

@chuckbaggett The names are just banned. As in "refused to be registered". What is this nonsense about people being jailed?
— Dikkii (@dikkii) May 5, 2013

@chuckbaggett Are you even reading the articles that you're linking to?
— Dikkii (@dikkii) May 5, 2013

By the time I got out of the shower I was blocked, once again.

13 things that you can do to improve your privacy online

noreply@blogger.com (Dikkii) — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 20:37:36 PDT

I was asked by a mate of mine recently, 'Dikkii. Why don't you do a blog post about all the privacy stuff that you have done with your browser?'

Personally, this mate of mine is pretty switched on, internet-wise (I cracked a pun!) so I was a bit taken aback that he genuinely wanted to know about why he should get his web-surfing privacy under control. I thought that he might already have this sorted out.

The reality of it all is, that these days, it's a game with moving goal posts. To keep up with the companies mining your browsing habits really needs one to be on one's toes. But it's so difficult. Consider these:

Cleaning cookies, cache, history, and other browser profile settings is often recommended, but this page here tells you why it doesn't work. Plus, you have to remember to get in there and clear stuff on a frequent basis.
'Opt-out' cookies were invented to be like a reverse tracking cookie, but again, the page I referred you to earlier tells you why this is a bad idea.
For similar reasons, TACO add-ons/extensions (Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out) seem to be useless these days. Tacos were invented to take out some of the practical issues in using opt-out cookies, but it seems that they're pretty useless now.

But you have to be sensible as well. For example, do you use a free service? OK. If you do, how is it paid for? We all know that Facebook is ostensibly free to its users, but how does it continue to remain in business? Does it involve invasions of your privacy? Of course it does.

Finally, consider what happens with your personal data. In Australia, we have a very good Privacy Act. But of course, Google is not an Australian company and where they conduct business with you and where they hold your data is certainly not Australia. At least, that is how they would consider it.

Here is a list of what I did with my browsers (I use Firefox primarily, but I also use Chromium - the open source version of Google Chrome), but also, a couple of other things as well. Apologies to Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari users.

1. Enable Do Not Track

The 'Do Not Track' feature is an admirable function that is sneered at by more and more cynical users. Basically, this feature tells the website that you're visiting to not track you. Politely - it's done by way of an HTTP header, but has to be set to opt-out if you don't want to be tracked by a website.

The reason that it's sneered at, though, is that many websites simply ignore it. Plus, after Microsoft said that they were going to set the value to opt-out by default in Internet Explorer 10, many websites openly revolted and said outright that they would ignore it.

Still, some websites are honourable.

To set this in Firefox, go into Preferences, select the Privacy tab and then enable the top option, 'Tell websites I do not want to be tracked'.

In Chromium/Chrome, go to Settings and click on 'Show advanced settings...' and in the 'Privacy' section, enable 'Send a ‘Do Not Track’ request with your browsing traffic'.

2. Install Adblock Plus add-on/extension

I first knew there was a problem when she rang me and said, 'I have a virus on my computer.'

I asked her, 'Did you install Avast?'

She told me, 'No. I couldn't work out how to do it.'

I put the phone down and swore, saying all sorts of uncharitable things about her. Then I realised that maybe, just maybe, she wasn't as silly as I had made her out to be.

And it turned out that I did owe her an apology. Have a look at this:

If you look closely, you'll see that there is a great big red 'Start Download' button on the right, which is not the correct one. There is, below the box that button is in, the word 'Ads' writ very small. Scarcely noticeable. Probably deliberately so.

So you need to install Adblock Plus. Adblock Plus will remove most advertising from the webpages that you look at, together with any associated tracking that might have been attached.

For all your add-ons/extensions, do the following:

Firefox: Select Add-ons and then search in the 'Search all add-ons' up in the top right.

Chromium/Chrome: Select Tools then Extensions. Then select 'Get more extensions' down the bottom. Another tab will open up at the Chrome web store but your search (top left) will specifically search extensions only.

At both, search for Adblock Plus, and install both Adblock Plus itself, as well as the Element Hiding Helper for Adblock Plus (Firefox) or Adblock+ Element Hiding Helper (Chromium/Chrome).

Don't install Adblock - it's the old program what ABP was forked from. Also, don't bother with the Filter Uploader for Adblock Plus (Firefox only) unless you plan on modifying your filter frequently and wish to share.

You may want to install the Adblock Plus Pop-up Addon and the Customizations for Adblock Plus but these are only available in Firefox.

Also, follow the directions here (Firefox or Chromium/Chrome) at step 1, so that you have a subscription to both EasyPrivacy + EasyList in addition to Fanboy's List.

Here's what the offending page should now look like:

Nice and clean? You better believe it! Now there can be no confusion as to which 'Download' button to click on.

If there's one complaint I have about Adblock Plus, it's the 'Acceptable Ad' feature. I would prefer that a whitelist only feature was there instead. If you want to, there are forks of Adblock Plus that come without the Acceptable Ad feature that might be worth checking out.

3. Install BetterPrivacy add-on (Firefox only)

Thanks to Flash being embedded in Chromium/Chrome, you won't be able to use this one with it. I have no idea what removes Flash cookies from Chromium/Chrome at all (Edit: Click&Clean, apparently), but in Firefox, the removal of Flash cookies (Local Shared Objects, or LSOs) is deadly easy with this thing.

We'll deal with cookies themselves later on, but Flash cookies are also pretty evil things. BetterPrivacy will, by default, remove your Flash Cookies on exit. Here's what is says when you close Firefox at the end of a session:

Firefox: Select Add-ons and then search in the 'Search all add-ons' up in the top right for BetterPrivacy.

You may need to configure it. I suggest setting it up to remove Flash cookies on Firefox exit.

(Edit: Click&Clean is available in the Chrome Store for Chromium/Chrome users, however it only supports manual removal of Flash cookies at this stage.)

4. Install DoNotTrackMe add-on/extension

This one is another very popular add-on/extension. There are a number of these types of thing but basically, DoNotTrackMe prevents tracking cookies being set.

There is, however, exceptions made for cookies that if they were to be removed, might interfere with functions on a page. Hypothetically. I dislike this feature, as, although a page might need the Brightcove or Omniture tracking cookie to enable the comments section, for example, it's rare that I'm going to want to make (or even read) the comments.

Firefox: Select Add-ons and then search in the 'Search all add-ons' up in the top right for DoNotTrackMe.

Chromium/Chrome: Select Tools then Extensions. Then select 'Get more extensions' down the bottom. Search field up the top left for DoNotTrackMe.

Once you have it installed, you can get wonderful information like this about all pages that you visit:

Ghostery is another good one, however the issue of how it works (via blacklisting) may put users off. But if you're not put off by that, it works very well. I'm also hearing good things about one called Disconnect.

On the subject of Ghostery, apparently it works well with another add-on, called Collusion. I'm yet to try this combination out, but it does sound interesting.

5. Install Priv3 and ShareMeNot add-on/extension

I also use the Priv3 (Firefox only) and ShareMeNot add-ons which both work differently, apparently. Priv3 allows you to stay logged in to social networks (Facebook, Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn are supported) but not be tracked by any 'Like', '+1' or 'Follow' buttons that appear on certain websites. Yes folks, even if you do not click on these, you're still being tracked.

ShareMeNot does something similar, but works differently, apparently.

Priv3 is available for Firefox only through Add-ons. ShareMeNot is available for both Firefox and Chromium/Chrome here.

The next lot of edits come from an excellent page from the EFF - 4 Simple Changes to Stop Online Tracking.

6. Change cookie settings

If you haven't done so already, you should set it so that you are not accepting third party cookies. Third party cookies can be set merely by clicking a tracker's ad or visiting a tracker's website, such as Facebook or Google. The ability to block third party trackers works differently from browser to browser - Firefox's block feature prevents both setting and reading of third party cookies, but Chromium/Chrome, Internet Explorer and Safari only prevent cookies from being set.

Firefox: Preferences, then Privacy tab (thank you to the EFF for the annotised screendumps):

Chromium/Chrome: Settings menu, then Settings, and scroll to the bottom and click "Show Advanced Settings." Under Privacy, click Content Settings:

You're done! Now on to shutting off referers.

7. Turn off referers

Referers (sic) are HTTP headers which contain the address of the webpage that linked to the resource being requested. It means that the page you land on can look up the page you clicked through from. This creates privacy concerns.

To do this in Firefox, you have to get your hands dirty in the registry. Enter "about:config" into the address bar of your browser. You will be careful.

After negotiating the warning screen with the correct answer, scroll down until you find the network.http.sendRefererHeader item. Right click on it and change the value to 0 (zero):

It's slightly different in Chromium/Chrome. You need to install the extension Referer Control and then, after installing, scroll down and locate the text "default referer for all other sites" and click on Block:

It's that easy.

8. Install HTTPS-Everywhere

HTTPS-Everywhere provides encryption over HTTPS with websites, making your browsing more secure. This plugin is provided by the EFF in conjunction with the Tor Project, but is not available in the Firefox add-on repositories, nor in the Chrome Store.

Click here to add HTTPS-Everywhere to Firefox or Chromium/Chrome.

9. Install MaskMe add-on/extension

From Abine, the makers of DoNotTrackMe comes MaskMe. MaskMe is a rather awesome tool that will automatically generate a one-off email address whenever you sign up for something online.

Why is this important? Your personal details are often matched by advertisers online using your email address which is pretty unique. The random email address used by MaskMe redirects to your proper one. And periodically, you can log into MaskMe and remove the ones that you have no need for emails from anymore.

MaskMe is available for both Firefox and Chromium/Chrome here.

10. Install NoScript add-on for Firefox and NotScripts extension in Chromium/Chrome

Blocking Javascript, Java and Flash from running is popular with some. There are additional advantages to running these plug-ins, too - they make pages load faster in your browser as well.

NoScript is a popular Firefox add-on that also provides anti-XSS and anti-Clickjacking functionality and works on a whitelist basis which is perhaps a little severe for some. But once you get used to it, it really is quite powerful.

NoScript is available from a search in Firefox add-ons.

But what about Chromium/Chrome users? Up until recently, this functionality wasn't available, but someone managed to make this work. Thus NotScripts was born. NotScripts is also available for Opera and offers both a whitelist or a blacklist-based service.

The NotScripts extension is available from the Chrome store.

11. Use a secure cloud storage service like SpiderOak

A couple of years ago, I remember the interwebs freaking out when Dropbox added a clause to their terms of service that asserted a right over works that users uploaded:

By submitting your stuff to the Services, you grant us (and those we work with to provide the Services) worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable rights to use, copy, distribute, prepare derivative works (such as translations or format conversions) of, perform, or publicly display that stuff to the extent we think it necessary for the Service.

I remember complaining to someone about this, but was informed that "they have to do this to operate in the US," despite the fact that Canonical operates their Ubuntu One service in the US quite fine without such a clause.

Dropbox have improved their terms of service since this. It now reads like this:

By using our Services you provide us with information, files, and folders that you submit to Dropbox (together, “your stuff”). You retain full ownership to your stuff. We don’t claim any ownership to any of it. These Terms do not grant us any rights to your stuff or intellectual property except for the limited rights that are needed to run the Services, as explained below.

This is a bit better. But it's nowhere near as good as SpiderOak. SpiderOak uses encryption in both the cloud, and at the client end that means that even SpiderOak employees can't access users' information. And it is available for Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux, as well as the major phone OSes. Too awesome!

You can download SpiderOak here.

(Disclosure: If you click on this link, you get an extra gigabyte of storage data, and so do I)

12. Use DuckDuckGo or Blekko as your search engine

Whenever you use a commercial search engine, it's not just their paid advertising that shows up in the results that you have to look out for. Google, for example, make quite a bit out of sending your IP address off in a way that's not dissimilar to the story that this website from DuckDuckGo tells.

Fortunately, it doesn't have to be this way. Why not use a different search engine?

DuckDuckGo promises full anonymity. No personal information stored at all.

Blekko promises to erase their logs within 48 hours, but also provide the innovative slashtag search functionality that they're known for.

Give them a go.

13. Consider using 'Porn Mode' for sensitive browsing

This suggestion generally gets greeted with some childish giggling or even the odd snide remark. Nevertheless, porn mode, or 'Private Browsing' as it may be more grown up to refer to it as, is an incredibly useful addition to your privacy arsenal. I simply won't go near Facebook without it.

The sad thing is, that by suggesting that people might be irrationally part of the 'tinfoil hat brigade' by utilising these functions, it's probably more correct to say that most users of services like Facebook or other places where you're encouraged to provide a great deal of detail about yourself are maybe not valuing their own privacy enough.

But porn mode is exceptionally easy to use and it can be used for many purposes. Social media and porn are merely two.

Firefox: Select New Private Window.

Chromium/Chrome: Select New Incognito Window.

Enjoy some privacy

So there you go. 13 things you can do to improve your privacy online.

But don't rest on your laurels. Keep reading up, because this whole game is really about where the next privacy breach will come from. Please check out these websites for more information:

Tracking the Trackers: Self-Help Tools.

Google tracks you. We don't. An illustrated guide..

4 Simple Changes to Stop Online Tracking.

Fix Tracking!

Blocked again

noreply@blogger.com (Dikkii) — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 06:17:42 PDT

I've only been blocked on Twitter once before, that I know of. That was by Helen Razer and to this day, I have no idea why. I only know that I was blocked, because I went to follow her one day and found that I could not.

But I thought I'd regale you with this tale of more blockage. This time, it came about in a record quick exchange with some tetchy Belgians who run an online magazine that goes by the name of Side-Line Magazine.

Specifically, it was this article that suggests reasons why you can't re-sell electronic media files once you've bought them. It reads as a defence of DRM, because the reasons given is that once you have the file, you might copy it before you re-sell it. Just "might", mind you - we're not all pirates.

This, of course, means that you should not be able to re-sell CDs, which are totally able to be re-sold. Why not? Because, and here's the word "might" again, you might copy the files on the CD before you re-sell it.

Now the act of re-selling files is not necessarily illegal. However act of copying is, and so I pointed out in a tweet that there was a baby and bathwater issue, and an inconsistent one at that in a tweet. I also may have expressed some dissatisfaction with the notion that we all need to be protected from our inherently evil nature:

A crap argument which assumes piracy and accidentally, further rules out resale of CDs: side-line.com/news_comments.… via @sidelinemag
— Dikkii (@dikkii) April 10, 2013

Almost immediately, I got this back:

@dikkii No, you are wrong. That's also why there are laws and prisons. Because we can assume people do not always do what is correct...
— Side-Line Magazine (@sidelinemag) April 10, 2013

I'm quite curious who Side-Line Magazine are, now. Ostensibly, they're notionally a magazine about industrial and darkwave European music, which I still find interesting. It's not unheard of for record companies to shill for themselves with magazines, although whilst I'm not suggesting that Side-Line Magazine are a record company shill, a small part of me won't deny the possibility. And very few ordinary people (i.e. not industry types or the odd musician) take the approach that the precautionary principle must prevail in the battle against wholesale privacy. DRM is the precautionary principle with brute force - it's there to stop people copying files. But DRM stops a number of other things, as well. Things like resale of goods that you've paid for.

This is where the baby gets thrown out with the filthy suds. It's inconsistent to not apply this to media containing the same electronic files. We're now seeing licensing tightening up in software land to prevent electronic files and media being re-sold - witness the extraordinary lengths that Microsoft is going to with Windows 8 and Office 2013. But files are still easily copyable from CDs, and if you were to suggest tomorrow that people could not re-sell these particular items, there would be a resulting minor state of martial law.

So I pointed this out to them:

@sidelinemag Rubbish. You've assumed that people ALWAYS do what's wrong. Plus you've implied that resale of CDs is also wrong.
— Dikkii (@dikkii) April 10, 2013

to which I got the following response:

@dikkii didn't imply that at all. You imply they ALWAYS do the correct thing.
— Side-Line Magazine (@sidelinemag) April 10, 2013

which is, of course, a load of rubbish. Remember, the illegal act is copying. You prove someone is guilty first - you don't just assume that they're going to break the law:

@sidelinemag No I didn't, but I do have the presumption of innocence on my side.
— Dikkii (@dikkii) April 10, 2013

Of course, I also had to point out to them their inconsistency on the ease of copying files from CDs:

@sidelinemag And you did.What was that about copying the files before the resale?
— Dikkii (@dikkii) April 10, 2013

I wasn't expecting this in response:

@dikkii then leave the door of your house open all day long when you are away. Laws are there to protect. Not to assume like you do.
— Side-Line Magazine (@sidelinemag) April 10, 2013

@dikkii sorry, but you don't seem to grasp why there are laws in the first place. So this discussion leads nowhere.
— Side-Line Magazine (@sidelinemag) April 10, 2013

"Leads nowhere". Well, of course it does. They've assumed that users are always guilty. Then they've effectively ignored the issue of file storage media outright, denied the presumption of innocence and to top it all off, gone off on some bizarre victim-blaming rant where laws and preventative mechanisms are conflated and people are now responsible for having their own homes burgled.

I think that I might have crossed the line, though, because the next thing I tweeted was this, in a fit of anger...

@sidelinemag Probably not. I hope that you don't tell rape victims who wear short skirts that they were asking for it.
— Dikkii (@dikkii) April 10, 2013

...and that saw me blocked for only the second time that I'm aware of. What do you think?

Alternate method - Linux, Calibre, e-books (epub) and DRM

noreply@blogger.com (Dikkii) — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 14:13:02 PST

You may already have read my previous post, where I examined the utterly ludicrous situation that Linux users are placed in if they want to buy, download and finally read an ebook on their ebook reader.

You may recall me mentioning that I had given you the long version. This post will cover off on the slightly less long version – this is the Calibre plugins version.

Same as before, note that for this exercise, I'm using Linux Mint 14 (Nadia) XFCE. Also, I'm assuming that the ebook that you purchased was DRM protected by Adobe's Digital Editions software and is in the .epub format. Most lending libraries use the .epub format for their ebooks, so if you plan on using a library, this will help. Sadly, if you have a Kindle, this will not help you. Apologies, however you may notice later on in this that we will be downloading a plugin for Kindle users. We'll pretty much leave it at that and go no further with that or any other plugins in this post.

Once again, please note that this process cracks DRM off .epub files. Linux users, there are no other ways to use files that you have paid for without removing the DRM, but this process can also potentially be misused. Misuse can be extremely illegal. Please, for the love of FSM, don't misuse this or the other process, because repeated misuse will mean that publishers and retailers will make things twice as difficult for us in the long run as they continue to rubber-glove both us, the consumers and most of the authors who provide them with content.

That out of the way, let's get started.

1.-11. Steps 1. to 11.

If you haven't already done so, follow steps 1 to 11 in my previous post.

We'll deviate slightly in step 12 onwards.

12. Download Tools v5.5.3

These can be downloaded from here.

Right click on the “Download” button on the LEFT and select “save as” and don't click the frankly fraudulent advertising link that says “Download Now” on the right. I had to have this one pointed out to me, as it doesn't show to me – I use ABP in Firefox and don't see much advertising anymore.

It's worth checking in with this page of Apprentice Alf's. He will generally have a link to the most up to date box of tricks in this collection.

13. Install plugin(s) in Calibre

See that .zip file that you just downloaded? It's got the plugins in it.

Extract the contents of the .zip file into a new folder – I recommend that you create a folder within the folder that you created to house the Python scripts from step 6.

Open Calibre up.

Click on Preferences. If you can't find Preferences, click on the right-arrows at the right hand end of the top row of icons. You'll find it.

The Calibre preferences screen will open in a new window. Scroll down to the bottom left and select Plugins. The plugins screen should open up.

From the bottom, select “Load plugin from file”.

Navigate to the folder that contains the freshly extracted files that were in the .zip file that you downloaded. There should be a folder there titled “Calibre_Plugins”. Go into that and select the ineptepub_v02.0_plugin.zip file that is in that folder. While you're here, you could do this for each of the .zip files in that folder – installation is similar, but we will not cover these today.

When you're finished, click on “Apply” on the top left, and “Close” in the Preferences window. Finally, close Calibre and restart it. And then, you should exit once again.

The plugins will not be useful yet. In this post, I'm going to cover off on ensuring that the Ineptepub one works, but we have a couple of things left to do first.

14. Run ineptkey.pyw (Python script)

The set that you downloaded in Step 6 included two Python scripts should be run in Wine. This process only needs one of these. Open a terminal and navigate your way into the folder that contains your Python scripts.

Start with the ineptkey script. Copy and paste this into your terminal:

playonlinux ineptkey.pyw

You'll see a few things happen, and even a couple of errors. Hopefully, though, none of these should be fatal. If all goes well, you should be met by this message:

Woo hoo!

But where's the key? Go into your virtual ADE drive, in the drive_c/Python26 folder and you should be able to find a file named "adeptkey.der". Copy and past this into both the folder where you kept Python, PyCrypto and the Python scripts, and also into your .config/calibre~~/plugins~~ folder in your home folder. It is absolutely necessary that it goes into the last one.

Edit (21/01/2012): Reader Arc has pointed out that the adeptkey.der file needs to go into ~/.config/calibre, not the /plugins folder that is within that. I did both and didn't notice.

At this point you should also go into your My Digital Editions folder, locate the .epub file that you just "decrypted" with Digital Editions in step 11 and copy it. Go back to your Books folder and create two new folders in that. I call one "Dirty" and one "Clean". Paste the .epub file that you copied into the Dirty folder.

15. Add file to your Calibre library

To ensure that the file is appropriately cleaned, you should do this from the command line as follows.

Open a terminal, navigate to your Dirty folder and type:

calibredb add filename.epub

Where "filename.epub" is the filename of your ebook. If you are successful, you should see this message in the terminal:

Inept Epub DeDRM v0.2.0: Encryption successfully removed.

(You may also see an error if you loaded the Ignoble plugin, but that's OK)

When you open Calibre, your new, clean file will be smiling back at you, as if to say, “Download me on to your ebook reader!”.

And that is that. Happy reading!

How to get round DRM issues with e-books in Linux (epub)

noreply@blogger.com (Dikkii) — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 20:05:45 PST

What a hassle this post was. You'd think that in this 21st century world that we live in, there would be less issues with using any kind of media. Sadly, no. Ebooks are still possibly the number one reason why I can find myself in the situation where I am likely to throw my computer across the room.

Downloading ebooks and using them via Linux is a diabolically difficult, stupid and possibly legally dangerous situation. You'd be forgiven for thinking that the reason is merely the reality that desktop Linux users are the one percenters and that the system is biased towards Windows and OSX users, but it's actually more insidious than that – copyright has sabotaged any kind of simplicity here.

This is a joke. Only in the land of intellectual property law (and possibly high end encryption) does one find that the world is actually getting more complicated, rather than simpler.

I've just spent the best part of the last couple of days attempting to try to load my computer with the usual fixes to ensure that my computer can have the DRM cracked off it, which is necessary for using Linux with DRM-protected ebooks. It's a time-consuming and wasteful job, and it's made worse by the fact that I totally fluked it the last couple of times and then didn't write the steps down. Oh sure, there are plenty of web pages out there that have the steps, but no one seems to have the order right.

Thus, there was a great deal of foul language as I faced error after error and glitch after glitch. In the end, it's still a time consuming job, but just getting each of these wretched steps done was an effort in itself. This time, I'm writing the little catches down, at least for me, if no one else.

So please allow me to show you the right way to go about ensuring that you're in a position to get your freshly purchased ebook in a fit state to read if you are using a Linux PC.

Note that for this exercise, I'm using Linux Mint 14 (Nadia) XFCE. Also, I'm assuming that the ebook that you purchased was DRM protected by Adobe's Digital Editions software and is in the .epub format. Most lending libraries use the .epub format for their ebooks, so if you plan on using a library, this will help. Bad luck if you've got a Kindle: none of this will help you.

Note also that this cracks DRM off files. This is necessary for fair use, such as in this instance, but can also potentially be misused. Misuse is very much illegal. Don't misuse this - just imagine what kind of moronic lengths publishers will go to next if they aren't getting paid. Goodness knows, most of their authors aren't getting anything.

Also note that this is just one method, possibly even the long method. I may blog in the future about Calibre plugins which are, in my opinion, way easier. But this is well and truly worth knowing.

Edit (21/01/2012): The method using Calibre plugins may be found here.

1. Install Calibre

Calibre is still the best ebook library manager, and you will need it for this. Make sure you get this installed – if you haven't done so yet, copy and paste this into your terminal:

sudo apt-get install calibre

2. Install Wine with a useful front end

Wine is a hateful program which has been solely designed to give me a nervous breakdown. I've hated it ever since I started using Linux. Nevertheless, there are easier ways to use this thing than liaising with the program directly. Like a good front end. So the first thing to do is ensure that you have a decent front end on it. I prefer PlayOnLinux, myself. I'm using version 4.1.1 of that but I think that this is one of the rare times that this could be unimportant. Of course, I say this now...

I'm going to assume that you're using PlayOnLinux all the way through this, but you could be using a variety of front ends, like Winetricks or something else. Or not.

If you're not using a front end, ensure that you are using nothing after Wine 1.3, because this will simply not work, otherwise. PlayOnLinux will allow you to select versions, but we'll get to that later.

To install Play On Linux and Winetricks, enter this into your terminal:

sudo apt-get install playonlinux winetricks

If you haven't already got Wine installed, this will install it for you, however for users of Linux Mint 14 (or any recent version of other distros) you will end up with Wine 1.4 by default.

Again, we'll look into version 1.3 of Wine a little later on.

3. Download the Windows version of Adobe Digital Editions 1.7

Folks, I cannot impress enough on you that you need to use specific versions of the applications that I am mentioning in this post. Get this wrong, and you end up like me, stuffing around looking for glitches that aren't there, installing patches that aren't needed and generally getting very ornery.

Adobe have moved on to version 2.0, now. It doesn't seem to like Wine much. Goodness knows that Adobe doesn't really care for Linux users terribly much, either. So do a search on Google for where you can download version 1.7, or click on the link below, which is one that I found.

Click here to download Adobe Digital Editions 1.7 for Windows

Right-click on the "Free download" link and save it somewhere where you can get to it when you need it. Your Downloads folder is quite fine. If you use the link above, note that it comes with the usual sponsored links and toolbars which you will have to de-select upon installation.

4. Install Adobe Digital Editions 1.7 in Wine

Again, I'm using PlayOnLinux, and you might like to do something else, but here it is, step by bleeding step.

(a) Start up PlayOnLinux.
(b) Click on the big, friendly + button with "Install" written underneath it.
(c) You will see the PlayOnLinux install menu. Move your eyes all the way down to the bottom left corner and click on "Install a non-listed program"
(d) You are now in the manual installation wizard. Click "Next"

(e) Select the "Install the program in a new virtual drive" and click "Next"

(f) Give your new drive a name. Something that you will remember that is easy not to misspell - I used "ADE" for Adobe Digital Editions. Click "Next"

(g) IMPORTANT: Remember how I said to use Wine 1.3, not 1.4 or later? Here's where you ensure that your new virtual drive is running on that. Select "Use another version of Wine" and click "Next"

(h) If you don't have version 1.3 available to you here, select "System" and speed through with the "Next" button. I'll cover off on an additional method for changing versions of Wine later.

(i) Wait for the virtual drive to be created - you shouldn't need to click on "Next" this time. You'll see some Wine dialogues pop up along the way. Browse for your Adobe Digital Editions 1.7 install file to run and then click "Next".

(j) Another Wine pop up will ask you to accept the terms and conditions of the download and install. Click "Next" within the dialogue. The next screen is a sponsored toolbar, and you'll need to wait until it loads fully or you will get delayed. Deselect everything and select "Install".

(k) It will have another bite at the cherry for installing the toolbar. Click "Cancel" only to the small pop up that appears next. If the small pop up doesn't appear, you've accidentally selected something on the previous screen. Never mind.

(l) Click "Next", then click "Install", then "Close". You should then be prompted with the licence agreement for Adobe Digital Editions. Click "I Agree". Adobe Digital Editions should then set itself up. You should be able to navigate your way through this bit, but read each bit carefully.

Edit (21/01/2012): Reader Arc has pointed out that if you deselect "make start menu item", PlayOnLinux has a cow. Don't deselect that. It doesn't reaqlly matter anyway, because Wine doesn't have a Start menu. (Neither does Windows 8, either, for that matter!)

(m) Close Digital Editions and then click "Close". PlayOnLinux will then finish installation. This may take some time, and is one of the annoying things that occupied my time. When it finishes, ensure that you select "digitaleditions.exe" and click "Next". Things get painful if you don't.

(n) Name it something. I strongly suggest "Adobe Digital Editions 1.7". Click "Next"

(o) Select "I don't want to make another shortcut" and click "Next". You're done.

5. Alternate step - Change versions of Wine

Remember in (h) in the previous step, I mentioned that if you didn't have the opportunity to switch your ADE virtual drive to Wine 1.3, we'd discuss what you could do later? Well, here we are.

(a) In your main PlayOnLinux screen, click on the cog button Configure.

(b) Over on the left, ensure that your ADE drive (or whatever you named your virtual drive) is selected, and then click on the + button nest to Wine version (in the General tab):

(c) Another screen will pop up. Select an option (1.3.37 is recommended) from the Available Wine versions, and click on the > button. An installer will take you through the steps. And then you'll be done.

Click on the x-boxes at the top of each screen when you're done until you are back at the PlayOnLinux configuration screen. Select your newly installed version of Wine (1.3.37) and then close out of that screen.

It's now time to install Python.

6. Download the Python stuff

More correctly, you need Python 2.6 (for Windows), PyCrypto 2.1 (for Windows) and two Python scripts that are in the following set:

Click here to download these.

Right click and save into your Downloads folder, and then open it up and extract the contents into a nice, new, clearly labelled folder that you are going to remember. We'll come to these in the next few steps.

7. Install Python 2.6 in Wine

Follow the same steps as in step 4 to install Python in Wine from PlayOnLinux, but do the following:

Ensure that "Install a program in a new virtual drive" is selected;
Type "ADE" (or the name of your virtual drive) exactly with NO TYPOS;
IMPORTANT: Select 1.3.37 as your version of Wine to run;
Select the python-2.6.2.msi file from wherever it was that you unzipped the files from Step 6 into;
Select the defaults for everything through the Wine screens;
Select "python.exe" to make a shortcut and name it "Python 2.6"; and
Finish by not making another shortcut.

OK. On to the harder stuff.

8. Run PyCrypto in your new virtual Wine drive

Click on Configure in your PlayOnLinux main screen. Ensure that your ADE drive is selected and then go into the Miscellaneous tab. Select "Run a .exe file in this virtual drive":

Select the pycrypto-2.1.0.win32-py2.6.exe file from wherever it was that you unzipped the files from Step 6 into, click "Next" to everything, and you're done!

9. Set file associations

This has to be done eventually, so you may as well do it now.

From the PlayOnLinux main screen, go up to Settings and select "File Associations" from the drop down menu:

You'll be met by a new screen, the Settings screen and you should be in the File Associations tab. Select "New" down on the bottom left and enter ".pyw" as the file extension before clicking "OK".

You will see .pyw appear in a list. Select .pyw and then, from the drop down menu that appears at the bottom, select Python. And then hit "Apply". You're done.

You'll need to restart PlayOnLinux. so do that and then exit again. It's time for the fun part.

10. Buy a DRM-protected ebook

I used Angus & Robertson online for this, but presuming that your online bookstore sells in the .epub format, you will need something from their stock to test this out on.

Note, I haven't included Barnes & Noble who use a different type of DRM encryption - I may cover theirs in a future post.

After you've selected your ebook and "purchased" it, you should be presented with an .acsm link. Right-click and select "Save as" - I find the .acsm file just that easier to work with once downloaded.

11. Download file to Adobe Digital Editions

Easy step this - open Digital Editions from PlayOnLinux and drag and drop your .acsm file into it. Digital editions will do the rest, as well as saving a copy of the "decrypted" file in a folder in your home folder, called My Digital Editions.

Simple? It's now time to run the Python scripts.

12. Run the Python scripts

The set that you downloaded in Step 6 included two Python scripts that now should be run in Wine. Open a terminal and navigate your way into the folder that contains your Python scripts.

Start with the ineptkey script. Copy and paste this into your terminal:

playonlinux ineptkey.pyw

You'll see a few things happen, and even a couple of errors. Hopefully, though, none of these should be fatal. If all goes well, you should be met by this message:

Woo hoo!

But where's the key? Go into your virtual ADE drive, in the drive_c/Python26 folder and you should be able to find a file named "adeptkey.der". Copy and past this into both the folder where you kept Python, PyCrypto and the Python scripts, and also into your .config/calibre~~/plugins~~ folder in your home folder. It may come in handy for the other method that I may discuss in a separate post.

Edit (21/01/2012): Reader Arc has pointed out that the adeptkey.der file needs to go into ~/.config/calibre, not the /plugins folder that is within that. I did both and didn't notice.

Now, the ineptepub script. It may be spelled "aineptepub.pyw" or "ineptepub.pyw" but either way, it's the script that will administer the coup de grace to your DRM-protected file.

Before you do that, go into your My Digital Editions folder, locate the .epub file that you just "decrypted" with digital editions and copy it. Go back to your Books folder and create two new folders in that. I call one "Dirty" and one "Clean". Paste the .epub file that you copied into the Dirty folder.

You now should start a new terminal session, again, ensuring that you've navigated to the folder containing the Python scripts, and enter this:

playonlinux aineptepub.pyw

You should be met with a window with three fields. Your adeptkey.der file should already be in the first field, as it's in the same folder as you are.

Browse to your Dirty folder for the second field (Input path), and to the Clean folder for the third field (Output path) and click on Decrypt whole directory. You can do this with a whole bunch of ebooks that Digital Editions has left for you.

Voila! Mission accomplished, and only one more thing left to do.

13. Add file to your Calibre library

You can do this a number of ways. You can add a file using the buttons in Calibre. You can drag or drop the file, or you can do it from the command line as follows.

Open a terminal, navigate to your Clean folder and type:

calibredb add filename.epub

You are now free to move the file on to your e-reader in Calibre.

Happy? Good, I'm exhausted. Happy reading.

15 things to do after installing Linux Mint 14 (Nadia) XFCE

noreply@blogger.com (Dikkii) — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 04:24:49 PST

When I did the last one of these after installing Maya, I got way more traffic to that post than pretty much most of this blog any time ever.

For those of you who are visiting for the first time, I don't actually normally blog about tech stuff. I blog about politics, religion, consumer affairs, pretty much stuff that is totally un-tech.

But I've just installed Linux Mint 14 (Nadia) XFCE on my little old Eee PC, so enjoy my guide to the first 15 things to do after installation. Please excuse the liberal copying and pasting from the previous version.

This time, for fun, I did an update to my father's netbook as well. Things went swimmingly for both and I'm pretty happy with how things turned out.

1. Change software sources

The first thing that you're going to want to set up your software sources. Like a lot of Australians, I have a download limit, however, my ISP quarantines some stuff in a 'free zone' which doesn't add to your limit. Wouldn't it be great if your ISP housed stuff like updates to your OS in this area?

It just so happens that a lot of ISPs do provide this type of arrangement, usually for some (but not all) Linux and BSD distros. Like most Linux distros, Linux Mint allows for this very eventuality. Simply go to the Menu, run your mouse up to Settings and select 'Software Sources'.

The main feature of this, is that you can select the software server closest to you for fast updating, or in the case of a cheapskate like me, cheap updating. In the dropdown menu next to “download from” in the Linux Mint Software tab, I recommend that you select your ISP.

I also like to select the tickbox for backported packages, which is left blank by default, as well as selecting any unticked repositories in the Other Software tab, except for the bottom one (file:///etc).

Once I've done this, I hit close. It should automatically update and tell you that you need to run an update.

2. Run an update

You can access your update manager from the Menu, under the 'System' submenu.

Install all updates and continue on. This time around, I was having issues with my father's cable (!) broadband which wasn't playing ball. So it took a little while - I had to let it run over night.

3. Sync Firefox, move files back

Same thing if you use Chromium/Chrome or another browser, you'll be looking to have your bookmarks and stuff back. We'll deal with installation of Chromium/Chrome later, but get Firefox sorted now. You should already be using Firefox Sync, which is available in your Firefox preferences.

I don't know why I didn't, but I would save time immeasurably if I set up Firefox Sync on my mobile phone. Stuffing around with the sync key caused a bit of grief.

Your old files should be moved back at this point as well. This would include your old emails which you might move back if you insist on using an email client. I don't use one of these. I'm happy enough to go through my browser.

4. Install Ubuntu One

I keep my emergency files in my Ubuntu One cloud account. Why don't I use Dropbox? I use that too – I use as much free cloud space as I can get my hands on.

You can either use the Software Manager, or run this from the terminal:

sudo apt-get install ubuntuone-control-panel-qt

You can run this from Settings in the menu. Get this set up now. It will take you through the steps. But it won't install the indicator in the tray. Use these commands in the terminal to get these up and running:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:rye/ubuntuone-extras

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install indicator-ubuntuone

Log out and log back in again. You should see a cloud-shaped indicator in the tray.

6. Amend Medibuntu repositories

The Medibuntu repos should already be installed in Linux Mint. However, it will be for the main server. In Australia, it should speed things along a little to change this to the New Caledonia server. It should be a piece of cake to go into Software Sources and amend the Medibuntu repo to “http://nc.packages.medibuntu...”

Exit software sources and then type:

sudo apt-get update

into a terminal. The other Medibuntu server locations are available from Medibuntu's website.

7. Firewall and antivirus

You need these. Don't let anyone convince you that Linux is completely safe. UFW is already installed but needs to be switched on. You can access UFW under Firewall Configuration in System.

ClamTK is a good viruschecker. Install this from the Software Manager, or type this into a terminal:

sudo apt-get install clamtk

It's worth doing a scan after this. And frequently afterwards, of course.

8. Dropbox

Don't even try to install this from the software manager. It will tell you that it's the wrong version and insist on a new one. Go to Dropbox' website and download the .deb file instead. It's available here:

https://www.dropbox.com/install

You should be right to go from here.

9. Install and configure XScreenSaver

Once upon a time, XScreensaver was installed as standard. No more. For some stupid reason, they've gone with GNOME Screensaver instead. Naturally, one's blood may be boiling at this idiocy, but help is at hand.

First we have to remove GNOME Screensaver. Paste this into your terminal, first:

sudo apt-get remove gnome-screensaver

Then, we need to install XScreensaver. I'm also going to do my usual thing of installing Electric Sheep and fitting it to work in XScreensaver as well. Paste this into your terminal:

sudo apt-get install xscreensaver xfishtank xdaliclock xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod electricsheep

And then you will need to follow the steps contained here to install Electric Sheep in XScreenSaver.

10. Enable MintMenu

This is very easy. It turns out that the fully functioning MintMenu that is available in the MATE version of Linux Mint is also available in the XFCE version. And it's already installed. So, let's get it operational.

Right-click on the bottom panel, or if you like, the taskbar. You should get, under 'Panel' in the first menu, an option for Add New Items. Select this and then select the Xfapplet option. Click on Add down the bottom and then Close.

You'll see a new Xfapplet icon appear at the far right end of the panel. Right click on this and select Properties. You will then get a window with only one option – MintMenu. Select this and OK. You'll see that it's ready to go. Right click on the Panel again and select Panel Preferences from the Panel menu. You will need to select the Xfapplet one (Items tab) and move it up to the top to get it to change ends.

Lastly, select Applications Menu and remove before hitting Close. Well done – you now have the MintMenu enabled.

11. Install Faenza icon pack

I was largely unimpressed with the fonts that came as standard in the last version of Mint XFCE. I'm a bit happier with them now, although fonts in Linux Mint are still not as smooth as they could be.

This time, I'm not thrilled with the default icons. So I'm resorting to the rather spiffy, yet still pretty conservative Faenza icon set. Strangely, a few of the apps use Faenza within them, already.

Plug this into your terminal:

sudo apt-get install mate-icon-theme-faenza

You can select the new icons from the Appearance option of what is now labelled your 'Control Centre' in your MintMenu.

12. Chromium/Chrome

Chromium is available in the Software Manager, and is worth installing. Chromium is the open source base for Google Chrome and has most of the functionality that Chrome has. I use Chromium in place of Firefox when I'm in a screaming hurry, however, I've never really warmed to it as my browser of choice.

You can also install Chromium from the command line in the terminal:

sudo apt-get install chromium-browser

If you want, you can install Google Chrome from Google's website. There is a .deb package and everything for easy installation. I don't really know why anyone would bother, though. Having said that, I did read once that this guy installed Chrome to get the more colourful Chrome icon, rather than the 'bluescale' of the Chromium icon. To each their own, I suppose.

13. Make changes

Since last time, I've noticed that there have been a few changes made. The number of media players has been drastically reduced. Banshee has been left in, but Rhythmbox and VLC have been taken out.

Whilst I don't really like Banshee, I'm going to try to like it. But I will install VLC, since I use it in a 'surgical strike' capacity with random music and video files. Just not all the time. I'll deal with that in the next section.

Another odd change is the one where they've go rid of Brasero and replaced with Xfburn. It's probably very good, but I don't need a burner in a PC which doesn't have an optical drive.

Lastly, I'm kinda over Hotot as a Twitter client. So, I'm not gong to be installing that. Instead, I'm going to install Turpial.

So. Just like last time, I'm going to install:

Gparted: Partition editor;
Vuze: Torrent client;
Skype: VoIP client;
Musescore: Music notation editor;
Calibre: E-book library manager;
Clementine: My music player of choice;

I found myself using Abiword and Gnumeric less and less this time around, so I'm giving them a miss. Plus, I ran out of time to play with Bristol (analogue synthesiser emulator) so I'm putting that on as well.

Plugging this shopping list in looks like this:

sudo apt-get install calibre clementine gparted skype vuze vlc turpial monobristol musescore fluid-soundfont-gm fluidsynth timidity fluid-soundfont-gs pmidi

14. Install codecs

You should have most of these by now. But you need more.

Run this in the terminal:

sudo apt-get install libxine1-ffmpeg gxine mencoder mpeg2dec vorbis-tools id3v2 mpg321 mpg123 libflac++6 ffmpeg totem-mozilla icedax tagtool easytag id3tool lame nautilus-script-audio-convert libmad0 libjpeg-progs flac faac faad sox ffmpeg2theora libmpeg2-4 uudeview flac libmpeg3-1 mpeg3-utils mpegdemux liba52-0.7.4-dev gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3 gstreamer0.10-gnonlin gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse gstreamer0.10-schroedinger gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly gstreamer-dbus-media-service gstreamer-tools

15. Add new users

~~Adding new users is still not supported out of the box, at least in proper GUI form.~~

~~So we still have to resort to the terminal for this one. Let's say I'm creating a profile for someone who we'll call 'barry'. Enter this in a terminal:~~

~~sudo adduser barry~~

~~It will prompt you for this user's password and then, it should be good to go. Enter through the other fields, and you should be good to go.~~

Can't believe I missed this. Users and Groups has been added from MATE and it's excellent. Users and Groups can be found under Administration in the MintMenu.

Before I go, also check out the new MDM features as well. Logins look so much better under this and the default is wanting.

Fixing the news

noreply@blogger.com (Dikkii) — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 14:19:11 PST

It's been a little while since the Finkelstein report came out, and we've since seen the Leveson report come out in the UK. We've also seen the response to Leveson by the British Prime Minister, David Cameron.

The same thing is pretty much happening here with Finkelstein. Thanks to articles like this, the hysterical reaction pretty much ensures that any government that wants to enforce standards on the news media will be considered to be recklessly trampling free speech beneath satanic jackboots in an Orwellian orgy of dictatorial facsism by the time that media is finished with them.

I don't support this at all. Leaving aside regulation for a moment, no one seems to have twigged that the problem is with news itself. In short, we don't really get it any more. We get something that looks like news, but is quite slanted and biased and, as I alluded to in my previous posts, we now are getting some pretty second-rate product that we, as consumers, don't really deserve.

In other words, the market is not providing and therefore, there is market failure. Which, in other industries, means that it's time to regulate.

So, I thought I'd have a good think about this. What is is that we would like a news service to provide us with? What is it that we, as consumers, think of when we think of news?

Here's a few things that I'd like to see. But first, what kind of principles should a news service aim for?

Principles

1. Newsworthiness

The news should strive to include coverage of events considered newsworthy. That is, relevant, in the public interest and noteworthy. The criterion of 'topical’ is cited as necessary occasionally, but this applies a filter that might normally prevent coverage of otherwise newsworthy events. Representatives of News Limited have been frequently quoted as responding to the question of, ‘is it in the public interest?’ with the answer, ‘if it sells, then obviously the public are interested, and therefore, it was in the public interest.’ This response is, of course, utter bollocks and Media Watch have been quite right to rake them over the coals for this bald-faced equivocation.

2. Fairness

This principle refers to reporting all angles of a story without fear or favour. That is, reporting everything fairly. But not to be confused with...

3. Objectivity

Where the fairness principle is reporting different sides of the same story, the objectivity principle refers to reporting as if one was a bystander. That is, the fairness principle reports the different sides of the participants. The objectivity principle would ideally, report what actually happened. And the objective report of a news event should be given greater precedence over the viewpoints of the participants or interested parties.

4. News purity

This principle sticks to what is classically referred to as ‘news’. While it is arguable that opinion, cartoons and other stuff has always formed part of a news package, this set of principles seeks to stick to the main content of a news package - the news itself.

But it's not really enough that one pontificates some ideals, which are probably going to be seen by some as pretty bland motherhood statements. Let's look at how these could be implemented.

Ideas for implementation

1. Neutral Point of View (NPOV) as per Wikipedia NPOV guidelines.

In striving for the fairness objective, trying to report without fear or favour requires some kind of NPOV policy. Wikipedia already has one of these, so why re-invent the wheel? Use theirs.

2. Scientific POV trumps NPOV

The unfortunate side-effect of NPOV is that kooky fringe arguments end up with prominence that does not reflect the level of seriousness that they deserve. For example, just because there might be controversy over the theory of gravitational attraction, this does not necessarily mean that gravity doesn’t exist, let alone that people can fly.

3. Only news to be labelled as news: Lose the Cs.

We’ve all cursed after seeing the Oz crossing the line between editorial and news. I completely lost count last year about how many times Media Watch pinged them for editorialising in news articles. But it’s also not enough that opinion articles themselves are placed in such close proximity to news articles. Ideally, opinion should not only be explicitly labelled as not being news, but should be removed to separate, or at least separately branded websites to avoid any confusion. But that wouldn’t be all: Crosswords, comment, classified advertising, comics, correspondence to the editor, celebrity gossip and celestial-flavoured woo would be removed to separately branded websites. Only news itself, would be allowed to be called news.

4. Presumption of innocence.

This is the fairness objective at its most strongest. The insistence on naming suspects by the media presently can only be defended where the implied presumption that the suspect is, in fact, guilty. However, this is not the normal defence used, and we saw in the last year instances such as the tales of Dominique Strauss-Khan and Casey Anthony where the media pretty much ensured that, in the court of public opinion at least, the defendants were guilty. Normally, (if not using the lemming-like “we’ve always done that") the defence cited is the precautionary principle - which would be OK, except that where offenders are charged with violent crimes (and where, presumably, the precautionary principle is an effective argument) the suspects are locked up and requests for bail are generally refused, anyway. In other words, all reasons for publishing the names of suspects presumed innocent are overwhelmingly weak. There are other areas where the presumption of innocence could be made more obvious, but there’s one example.

5. No gratuitous celebrity news.

An exemption to this rule exists if it can be shown that if an event involving a celebrity would ordinarily be covered if it involved Johnny Nobody. What does this mean? Very simply, it means that if one was to cover a report involving a celebrity, there would need to be something very newsworthy happening to justify this. Imagine no more stories involving Kim Kardashian? How awesome would that be?

6. No invasions of personal privacy.

"Personal privacy" should be extended to spouses, family members, mistresses/lovers, holidays on remote Barbadian beaches, sexuality or rumours who would be hereby, off-limits. Johnny Nobody exemption applies.
I was struck by the recent media coverage involving snaps of Lara Bingle in her home at Bondi where it was suggested that this sort of thing would not receive coverage if there wasn’t ‘demand’ for it. Bollocks. Demand or not, no one has a gun to anyone’s head enforcing satisfaction of this demand. ‘But people are buying.’ People won’t buy if no one is selling. This sort of rubbish needs to be kept from contaminating the news. If people really want to buy this stuff, they’ll go out and get New Idea or something anyway. (Funnily enough, I’d like to see a situation where invasions of personal privacy are banned outright. I don’t think that this or number 4 should be restricted just to what is contained within ‘news’)

7. No weasel words.

I consider this to be a difficult one to enforce. I admit, myself, that most of the time that where weasel words are embedded, I don’t tend to notice them and quite often need someone to point these out to me. What we don’t need are stories where courts ‘failed to find the defendant guilty’ which is clearly very biased, as opposed to simply (and neutrally) finding them not guilty.

8. The Steinem test to apply.

Gloria Steinem, if not famous for anything else (cue flamage!) was famous for her test where something would be considered sexist if a statement was applied to women, but wouldn’ t ever be used for men. The Steinem test is also an incredibly useful test that doubles as a bullshit detector when people try to play the sexism card as a sword, which gets done occasionally. If you think about it, the Steinem test is really just another variation of the Johnny Nobody exemption.

9. Modified Steinem test for racial (or similar) politics.

This is one I have long endorsed, however it comes with complications that are not present in the sexism version. Take the word ‘n!gger’ for instance. You would rightly never let a white person use it. A veritable Pandora’s box of controversy erupts, however, when discussing whether black people should use it. Words like ‘empowerment’ or ‘intent’ are thrown around, but let’s be honest: When you’re forced to defend something by using what amounts to double standards, in this case special pleading on, gulp, racial grounds, surely it’s better that no one gets to use the term at all?

10. Breaches of 5 and 6 are allowable upon specific evidence of hypocrisy.

The Rush Limbaugh coke exemption, as I call it, must be limited to a specific relevant event - no broad exemption to general misbehaviour. What I mean by this, is that just because a shock jock gets off on criticising single mothers, this doesn’t allow the press to go after them for unpaid parking fines. On the other hand, shock jocks who call for tightening laws on drug users deserve everything they get if someone finds evidence that they were habitual cocaine users.

11. No recycling of press releases.

News providers are not public relations outlets, and clever media staff have been manipulating news outlets for years to get free advertising, as well as some amazingly uncritical reporting. The state of financial and sports reporting in Australia is lamentably poor in this regard. If a foreign correspondent paraphrased press releases as copy in the same way as financial and sports reporters, they would be strongly censured. So why allow a practice that is frowned upon elsewhere to proliferate in financial and sports journalism circles, however? By all means use press releases as a possible sources for stories, but again, stories should just report the facts.

12. All of the above to be legally enforceable.

The accounting profession is a highly regulated one. And they report stuff. Their reporting of matters financial are governed by legally enforceable standards, set by the Australian Accounting Standards Board, or AASB. Again, they report stuff. What makes the honorable profession of accounting all that much different to the (presently) slightly disreputable profession of journalism? Not a lot. In fact, if you relaxed all accounting standards, the first people who would complain would be financial journalists, who reply on all matter of financial reporting to do their jobs. All hell would break loose if financial analysts could not be sure of the accuracy or comparability of financial information that they were using. And just like in accounting, journalists, editorial staff and consumers would benefit from a best practice framework that such a body of enforceable standards would assist in providing.

And that is that. Thoughts, anyone?

16 Things to do after installing Linux Mint 13 (Maya) XFCE

noreply@blogger.com (Dikkii) — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 15:38:30 PST

Edit 28/12/2012: I've just done one of these for Linux Mint 14 (Nadia) XFCE. You can see this here.

You may have just installed Linux Mint 13 (Maya) XFCE. What next?

This is a list of stuff I did to get my Eee PC into a state that I can use after installing Mint XFCE. It might not necessarily work for you, but hey. It's a kind of sequel of sorts to a post I did earlier today, and again, it's unlikely to appeal to anyone except Linux converts.

One of the things that has struck me about Mint XFCE since I installed it on this machine is its sheer reliability. XFCE has been around for a little while, now. While some have regarded it as a bit of a poor man's GNOME, it doesn't have the baggage that GNOME is presently dragging around.

So here are 16 things I did after installing Linux Mint 13 (Maya) XFCE on my Eee PC.

1. Change software sources

Now, the first thing that you're going to want to set up your software sources. Like a lot of Australians, I have a download limit, however, my ISP quarantines some stuff in a 'free zone' which doesn't add to your limit. Wouldn't it be great if your ISP housed stuff like updates to your OS in this area?

It just so happens that a lot of ISPs do provide this type of arrangement, usually for some (but not all) Linux and BSD distros. Like most Linux distros, Linux Mint allows for this very eventuality. Simply go to the Menu, run your mouse up to Settings and select 'Software Sources'.

The main feature of this, is that you can select the software server closest to you for fast updating, or in the case of a cheapskate like me, cheap updating. In the dropdown menu next to “download from” in the LinuxMint Software tab, I recommend that you select your ISP.

I also like to select the tickbox for backported packages, which is left blank by default, as well as selecting any unticked repositories in the Other Software tab, except for the bottom one (file:///etc).

Once I've done this, I hit close. It should automatically update and tell you that you need to run an update.

2. Run an update

You can access your update manager from the Menu, under the 'System' submenu.

Install all updates and continue on. I had three hundred and something, and am currently working on mobile (3G) broadband, so this took me a little while. I let it run over dinner.

3. Sync Firefox, move files back

Same thing if you use Chromium/Chrome or another browser, you'll be looking to have your bookmarks and stuff back. We'll deal with installation of Chromium/Chrome later, but get Firefox sorted now. You should already be using Firefox Sync, which is available in your Firefox preferences.

Your old files should be moved back at this point as well. This would include your old emails which you might move back if you insist on using an email client. I don't use one of these. I'm happy enough to go through my browser.

4. Install Ubuntu One

sudo apt-get install ubuntuone-installer

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:rye/ubuntuone-extras

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install indicator-ubuntuone

Log out and log back in again. You should see a cloud-shaped indicator in the tray.

5. Install Xubuntu Restricted Extras

Ubuntu Restricted Extras is a popular set of non-free extras you can install. You can find these in the Software Manager, however, we're running the XFCE version of Linux Mint, so look for the one named 'Xubuntu Restricted Extras'. Alternatively, run this from the terminal:

sudo apt-get install xubuntu-restricted-extras

Whilst there is already quite a few non-free stuff installed, this just adds to the set.

6. Amend Medibuntu repositories

sudo apt-get update

into a terminal. The other Medibuntu server locations are available from Medibuntu's website.

7. Firewall and antivirus

sudo apt-get install clamtk

Not long after I installed this, I did a scan and picked up three suspect files from a shared Dropbox. See what I mean?

8. Dropbox

9. Configure XScreenSaver

Thankfully, this is installed as standard. But half the stuff is missing. So let's go get it. Paste this into your terminal:

sudo apt-get install xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod electricsheep

And then you will need to follow the steps contained here to install Electric Sheep in XScreenSaver.

10. Enable MintMenu

11. Play with the fonts

Linux Mint 13 XFCE has this disconcerting fuzziness around the fonts. This can be fixed, but you will have to change fonts. I changed mine to Droid Sans and enabled 'Slight' from the hinting menu as well as 'RGB' from the sub-pixel order menu. The Fonts tab is found in the Appearance section of what is now labelled 'Control Panel' in the MintMenu.

12. Chromium/Chrome

sudo apt-get install chromium-browser

13. Get rid of some stuff

It's probably worth getting rid of some programs that you'll never use here. For example, my Eee PC doesn't have an optical drive, so I can easily get rid of Brasero. It might be an rather nifty burner, but I'm simply never going to use it.

I use this opportunity to get rid of half the media players that I'm never going to use, as well. I'm keeping Rhythmbox, but throwing Banshee, for example.

14. Install some stuff

Now that you have MintMenu up and running, you can do some neat stuff when installing new programs. You simply can't do without a partition editor, and Gparted is a rather good one.

Try this: Click on the menu button, do a search in the search field for 'Gparted' and then, above the search field on the right, click on the 'Install package Gparted'. You should be able to follow the remaining bits from here. I've gone ahead and installed Vuze and Skype (in addition to Gparted) this way as well.

Something different, anyway.

Here's some stuff for me. I do like the LibreOffice suite, but I generally prefer Abiword and Gnumeric for their lightness, especially on this Eee PC. So let's install those.

I'm also going to install a few other programs, too. I like to use a music notation editor called Musescore. It's pretty darn good, although I do need to have my Eee PC plugged into a larger monitor to use it effectively. I’m also going to install a few extra soundfonts, as the default ones are pretty basic.

Calibre is absolutely necessary to manage your ebooks as well.

Although I like the default music players in Linux Mint, I cannot do without Clementine. I use different music players for different things – just like when I use Chromium for quick browsing, I use VLC for quick listens, but Clementine is my Firefox.

Hotot is my Twitter client of choice, these days. Hotot also supports Identi.ca as well. I used to quite like Gwibber, but successive updates have stripped functionality out of it.

I'm fooling around with a few analogue synth emulators at the moment. This one is called Bristol. I've used it a few times and it's great fun. It comes with a GUI called MonoBristol which I've never tried before, so I'll install that and see what cooks.

If this was my desktop, there would be a stack of other stuff I'd install, but I'll stop there.

Here it is for plugging this shopping list straight into the terminal:

sudo apt-get install abiword gnumeric calibre clementine hotot monobristol musescore fluid-soundfont-gm fluidsynth timidity fluid-soundfont-gs pmidi

15. Install codecs

You should have most of these by now. But you need more.

Run this in the terminal:

sudo apt-get install libxine1-ffmpeg gxine mencoder mpeg2dec vorbis-tools id3v2 mpg321 mpg123 libflac++6 ffmpeg totem-mozilla icedax tagtool easytag id3tool lame nautilus-script-audio-convert libmad0 libjpeg-progs flac faac faad sox ffmpeg2theora libmpeg2-4 uudeview flac libmpeg3-1 mpeg3-utils mpegdemux liba52-0.7.4-dev gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3 gstreamer0.10-gnonlin gstreamer0.10-sdl gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse gstreamer0.10-schroedinger gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly gstreamer-dbus-media-service gstreamer-tools

16. Add new users

In what appears to be one of the sillier moves, adding new users is not supported out of the box, at least in proper GUI form.

So we have to resort to the terminal for this one. Let's say I'm creating a profile for someone who we'll call 'barry'. Enter this in a terminal:

sudo adduser barry

It will prompt you for this user's password and then, it should be good to go. Enter through the other fields, and you should be good to go.

And that should have you up and running with a reasonably good setup. Enjoy.

Linux Mint 13 XFCE. Why?

noreply@blogger.com (Dikkii) — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 18:00:02 PDT

This post is not going to provide any searing insight or anything like that. It's merely a documentary record, for me, if not necessarily anyone else. It's probably only going to appeal to the Linux curios, a diverse group who I can truthfully (and happily) say have completely different ideas about what an operating system should be. So consider yourself warned.

I've just installed LinuxMint 13 (Maya) XFCE onto my aging Eee PC. I have the Eee PC 1008HA Seashell, which is the model (together with the 1008HA) that started ASUS on the path to be a bit more adventurous in their design.

The PC has aged pretty well, although the single core Intel Atom processor and the 1GB of DDR2 RAM hasn't. But after sitting back and watching the bloatware that Ubuntu became with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin), I needed to investigate other options.

I should point out that Ubuntu 12.04 runs fine on my desktop. That's not the issue here. My desktop is a machine that runs rings around most other PCs. It ought to be able to run Ubuntu in its sleep. In fact, it does that too. However, it's just too big and bulky for my little Eee.

So I tried something different. After the success that I had with Linux Mint 12 on my father's little eMachines netbook, I thought I'd try with this on this PC. But where I'd installed the version of Linux Mint that came with the shortlived GNOME shell extensions (MGSE) – which seems to have formed the basis for Linux Mint’s wildly popular Cinnamon desktop, I went the opposite direction for my Eee PC and installed Linux Mint 12 (Lisa) LXDE.

Mint with LXDE went like a dream, but I was unhappy with the look of it. I tried a number of things to improve this, but I had no luck and started looking around for something else.

I have largely ignored Linux Mint MATE to date. MATE is, of course a fork of GNOME 2, but as with all forks, requires a little bit of time first to get the initial kinks ironed out. I might be interested in Mint MATE down the track, but I’m really willing to go there just yet.

It was around this time that one of my tweeps said something about XFCE that intrigued me – it was something along the lines of, “XFCE is improving. You wouldn't recognise it now.”

Those of you with long memories may recall that on my previous Eee PC, which was a 900, I did install a cut down version of Xubuntu that was designed for Eee PCs, more specifically, the 700/701 /2G/4G/4G Surf models that started the whole netbook phenomena. These all have solid state drives and not very big ones at that. So this version of Xubuntu was pretty darn light.

I didn't use Xubuntu very long on that machine – after Easy Peasy Linux came along which used GNOME and an early version of a Unity-like interface, I dropped it like a hot cake. I considered then, as I sort of do now, that XFCE, the desktop environment that Xubuntu uses, was an intermediate technology – a sort of GNOME-lite for those who lacked access to a lighter GNOME environment.

Easy Peasy lacked frequent updates. It was also clear that Easy Peasy was simply serving up Ubuntu's 'Netbook Edition' with some minor alterations in its few updates. So I switched my Eee PC over to Ubuntu Netbook Edition. Which became Ubuntu, when Canonical realised that having their product fragmented into desktop and netbook versions was costly.

Canonical promised to keep Ubuntu within the spirit of the netbook edition, but it really was only a matter of time before you were going to call bullshit on this. Microsoft are going to make the same mistake with Windows 8 and you know that, even though Windows Vista was a monumental fuckup which you'd think Microsoft would have learned from, the expectation from software companies that design operating systems, is for the hardware to keep up with the software. I'll go so far as to say that software companies who say that they are designing sleeker and more efficient OSs for lower-specced hardware are lying out their arses.

So after I cracked and had then gotten over Mint LXDE, I had a bit of a rethink. I had had a look at the Linux Mint (Debian Edition) that was running XFCE and was rather intrigued by this, however I still wanted access to the Ubuntu repositories. I also have this nagging voice questioning why there's even a Debian version of Linux Mint anyway – if I want Debian, and I might, some time in the future, surely I'd go straight to Debian and run theirs, rather than Linux Mint's version of Debian?

But in the end I installed Xubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) which, as the name suggests, is a derivative of Ubuntu using XFCE in place of Unity/GNOME.

Yes, folks, I was blown away. XFCE has improved a million miles from where it was previously. Xubuntu has improved a billion times on what it was, also. I was happy enough with this, so I happily went about my business. If there is only one criticism I have of Xubuntu, it's that it's starting to get bloaty.

I'm informed that this is common to all derivatives of Ubuntu, with the exception of Lubuntu, but I was off LXDE and not really intending on going back.

But then Linux Mint released their XFCE version of Linux Mint 13.

It was at this point that I did the Mint MATE versus Mint XFCE umming and ahhring. Do I take a chance on MATE, or do I stick with what is gathering respect as a rather nice desktop environment in a much lighter setting than Xubuntu?

In the end, I decided to go with Mint XFCE. In the next post, I'll try to record what I think are must haves and what I did to get mine running to my satisfaction.

Credit where credit's due

noreply@blogger.com (Dikkii) — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 21:09:30 PDT

Andrew Bolt (Hun/Tele/Advertiser) had a blog post pulled on Monday. Mainly due to the fact that his post could have been interpreted as muckraking by making a big song and dance about a fraudulent Glenn Milne article in The Oz. An interesting part is that some are suggesting that Bolt might have posted after Milne’s column was pulled. Not only that, but News left the post online for a considerable amount of time after Milne's article was removed.

Milne, of course, is best known for attempting to blue Stephen Mayne one year on stage at the Walkley Awards. I had absolutely no need to mention that, but I'm hedging my bets in case Bolt is correct about his post being 'fair, accurate and in the public interest'.

Today, in his column, he’s got me in stitches by squealing “censorship”. The problem with Bolt’s brand of satire, is that it’s often lost on his audience, who see his character’s flagrant racism and bullying as being the real deal. And this is where the problem starts.

I’m aware that Bolt’s blog is a bit of a testing ground for his wilder humour. What goes out there gets tested amongst the comments from the fruitcakes that dominate his readership and the eventually worked on a little harder. Eventually, Bolt creams off the stuff that’s silly enough to outrage and amuse, yet the stuff that’s too ‘out there’ gets forgotten about. What’s left gets written up as ‘proper’ copy in his columns in News’ south eastern newspapers.

Yes folks, newspapers still persist with the notion that if it goes online and doesn’t make it into the printed copy, it doesn’t need to have the same rigour applied to it.

News are a bit naughty posting Bolt's brand of satire as serious comment. Although I have no evidence to make any claims whatsoever and completely disagree with any sort of generalising, their audience is widely considered by some to be totally illiterate throwbacks who are gullible enough believe anything shovelled in the direction of their snouts. If this is true, News probably ought to move Bolt's column to the humour section.

Bolt had a bit of a holiday yesterday. Rather a lot of people pointed out that allowing Bolt’s post of yesterday to continue while Milne’s article was withdrawn was inconsistent and finally, News acted on Bolt’s article. Bolt himself tried this gag in the post about not believing one crucial issue – that Gillard had never lived in the house in question, but it was clear that it was never going to top the howler of tarring the PM in the first place.

Bolt put on a spectacular show of “principles” by refusing to write anything which I found hilarious. But eventually, he posted again. I am going to go out on a limb to point out that this is the funniest article that he has ever written. How much work went in to ensuring that the inconsistencies weren’t so obvious? Granted, the ludicrous appeals to free speech is ground that he’s worked before, but nowhere else has his work been as complete as it is here.

Check some of these out.

He comes out firing, livid he is, with the opening sentence:

The Prime Minister overstepped the line when she called the chairman and CEO of News Limited, John Hartigan.

‘Overstepped the line’. That’s gold, that is.

Almost immediately after, he’s peppering gag after gag, with:

...attempt at censorship...

...sinister overtones...

...threats of inquiries and forced sales...

All of these are from the second sentence.

You can almost hear the violins in the distance as he moans:

Yesterday morning I was considering resigning as a News Limited columnist.

Laugh? I nearly threw up!

Throughout this column, Bolt feigns annoyance with his employer, the supposed company he loves, and he actually pulls the, 'fair, accurate and in the public interest’ line out, showing that he’s neither prepared to tolerate his employer’s own freedom of speech, nor that of the commenters on his blog, with the odd complaint making it through the net.

The sentence that makes this the most complete column that Bolt’s aggrieved conservative has posted, though, is this:

As I made clear, the issue was not that Gillard had done anything improper.

As I clutched at my desk with one hand and my swollen abdominals with the other, I managed to pull myself back on to my chair after flipping backwards and falling to the floor, helpless in a kind of hysterical fug where I’m sure that I saw colours flying past me. I wiped away tears from my sopping face, amazed that one could laugh so hard.

A serious columnist/blogger, after all, wouldn’t have posted anything at all, if that was truly the issue. Bolt has surpassed himself and I don’t believe he’ll ever post anything quite so outrageous ever again.

On why the media should embrace more regulation. Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Dikkii) — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 00:36:33 PDT

In our first part, we heavily criticised News Corp for just being a bad news organisation. By that, I mean that as a news organisation, they are bad. Incredibly bad. (I didn’t mean that they just produce bad news, oh heavens to Betsy, no)

It should be pointed out, though, once again, that I was only singling out News as the worst of what appears to be a very bad bunch. I listed a whole bunch of crimes committed by the media in part 1, some of which were also committed by other media sources as well.

A really good example of disgraceful media practice that is committed across the board, is the tendency of the financial media to regurgitate media releases from companies, without any sort of objective research. Media Watch appears to have strangely left financial journalists alone to date, but will pursue other journalists who regurgitate press releases.

Another is celebrity stories – I once tuned to the Seven News one Sunday night to find that after the first news item, the rest was utter drivel about celebrities. Until the sport part of the news, that is. I actually think that there’s a market for a news agency to set up a news program with the slogan, “No celebrity stories!” It would just about have me in a heartbeat.

So I think that I can say that I’ve covered the non-News media, now. Can I move on? Can I get away with answering my own rhetorical questions? Can I even get away with asking them and not looking like a dickhead?

On to regulation. We’re seeing a strangely quick grab by the government for regulation as we speak at getting media privacy laws on to the agenda. This is suspicious, actually, because the government seems to have had something ready to go. And funnily enough, the rhetoric is being ramped up by the government on this as we speak, although the smell of other items on the agenda is starting to waft through – check out Stephen Conroy’s rant of a week ago against the bias of News Corp, in particular, News Corp's own shrill coverage.

But privacy is an issue. I maintain that with some decently drafted privacy rules, we’ll see less stupid ‘Celebrity buys carton of milk!’ stories, less Milly Dowler infringements and less barefaced disregard to the presumption of innocence.

Bias is a completely different topic.

I did discuss this only briefly in the first part. It should be noted that where News publications seem to be getting so far out to the right that they are probably around Fiji at the moment, there is bias in the stables of the ABC, SBS and Fairfax. The Fairfax double act of The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald as well as SBS would rightly be categorised as centre-left and the ABC is very much centre-right, these days. Some would say, well at least these are close to centrist, although I maintain that it would be better if they actually were centrist. I think that getting the politics balanced is another step in the right direction.

But these agencies seem to be batting a lone game. Yes, there are very minor publications that play way out in left field, such as the Green-Left Weekly, but no one pays any attention to these seriously. Yet where we know that the Green-Left Weekly is an amazingly unbalanced piece of claptrap, News has done a wonderful job of marketing papers like the Tele and the Oz as “mainstream”.

Folks, the Oz is much further to the right than the Green-Left Weekly is to the left. People need to wake up to themselves: These are not the mainstream even less than the GLW is not the mainstream.

Some of you are probably wondering why I categorise the ABC as “centre-right”. Way back in the late nineties or early noughties, John Howard, the then Prime Minister, bemoaned the left-leaning national broadcaster, with the immortal line about how it needed right-wing versions of Phillip Adams there to balance out the supposed left bias. I agreed with some of the sentiment of this, but where Howard was advocating voices on the right to balance the voices on the left, I disagreed with adding the rightist voices and questioned the need to have Phillip Adams at all.

Disregarding the utter boringness of Adams, would it not have been better to eliminate the leftist (and rightist) voices and replace them all, left or right, with centrist ones?

Howard’s idea won, and significant efforts were made to balance out the supposed left-lean of the national broadcaster. But where the majority of the left-leaning voices were only situated marginally left of centre, Adams notwithstanding, voices on the right now seem to come from the mostly lunar right.

I will never forget the morning I woke up and flicked on Insiders to find Barrie Cassidy sharing the studio with Andrew Bolt (who isn’t as funny outside of print), Gerard Henderson and Janet Albrechtsen. It was that point that I realised that as far as the ABC went, the rooster had been put in charge of the henhouse.

It seems to be hammered home whenever I tune into ABC News Breakfast and see people reading the news headlines like Tim Wilson of the Institute of Public Affairs, a seriously right-wing bunch of fruitcakes with an ultra-libertarian bent, or that guy who used to be the mayor of Stonnington Council. You know, the bloke who comes across as a caffeine and Asperger’s-driven boy scout who knows the Liberal Party’s policy book line by line.

Of course, I'm now just bagging the ABC. How about the Nine Network, known by some as the "propaganda arm of the Liberal Party"? Radio stations like 2GB and 3AW?

Recently, John Howard was dismissive of accusations of bias in News' papers. 'Suck it up,' he's reported to have said, having been greatly critical of the ABC during his time as Prime Minister, yet he was given an enormous free kick his whole career from channel Nine, as well as from people like Alan Jones on 2GB. Hypocrisy is huge.

It’s fair to say that bias is a major problem, just like privacy.

It’s clearly a lost cause expecting that market forces will take care of this, so it’s time to regulate, as the late Nate Dogg said to his homey Warren G.

So what kind of regulation should we be looking at? Just the word ‘regulation’ itself is going to get the media all frothy with disapproval, but it’s fair to say that the media have had more than enough time to show us that they can do their jobs properly. They have obviously failed to do this.

I propose that the best place to start is to look at the regulation which applies in the most similar profession to journalism: Accountancy.

No, you are reading this correctly. Just like in journalism, the accounting profession reports. Journalists report news. Accountants report financial news. I don’t think that it’s too difficult to argue that financial reporting is any less important than any other type of reporting, yet no one argues for ‘freedom of the accounting profession’.

Just like journalists, accountants report to a variety of end users. Management, directors, shareholders, regulators, auditors, financial journalists, etc. Financial journalists, eh? How much fun would it be to be a financial journalist if accounting was unregulated?

Accountants are regulated by a number of enforceable rules. There are rules on reporting contained in the Corporations Act. There are rules on reporting contained in ASX listing rules. But the best fit for journalists would be a layer of regulation that accountants are subject to in the form of accounting standards, issued by the Australian Accounting Standards Board (AASB). Standards issued by the AASB are fully enforceable. The AASB issues the standards, however enforcement is undertaken by the corporate regulator in Australia, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC).

It’s worth keeping the example of accountancy in the back of one’s mind. Worth it, because the more you compare journalists to accountants, the more that you see that what passes for regulation in the media is almost completely idiotic. The newspapers like to say that they’re regulated by the Australian Press Council. This would be like an accountant saying that they’re regulated by their professional association – which would, of course, be ludicrous.

At least with news that is broadcast, there is a broadcast regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), however ACMA does not have any say over what is news, and what isn’t.

Self-regulation works in some industries. Usually, these are industries that are closed shops, where the industry is regulated by an entity that also acts as a licensing authority. Yet the media is not a closed shop and it would be a joke to rely on self-regulation any longer.

I think I’m going to have to go to a part 3. Stay tuned.

On why the media should embrace more regulation. Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Dikkii) — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 20:55:18 PDT

Over the last few weeks we’ve seen some rather interesting stuff in the media involving the media. We’ve seen all hell break loose in the UK with what appears to be becoming known as ‘Hackgate’. We’ve seen the Herald-Sun publish a call to assassinate the Prime Minister. We’ve also seen the media circuses around the cases of Dominique Strauss-Khan and Casey Anthony where the media essentially judged these folks guilty before their cases had even been heard. In Anthony’s case, they then screamed hysterically about the jury being wrong, even publishing questionable articles where jurors allegedly disclosed a preference for going home rather than finding someone guilty.

I think I'll avoid the issue about concentrated media ownership – it’s probably outside the realm of what I want to blog about here, but what I will add is the sheer, unmitigated bias that passes for journalism in anything that comes out of News Corporation. Although, it's fair to say that 2UE are probably much worse.

And we’ve seen the spectacle of a majority-owned media not publishing stuff in one area that is newsworthy that relates to the owner in another jurisdiction. Yes folks, I'm going to give News a flogging in this post.

I’m not intending to only bag News in this post, as I am aware that other media outlets have also sinned, and sinned in quite a big way as it happens, but the sheer drivel that News publishes is so incredibly worthy of bagging it isn’t funny. I will point out that I did find it funny, once, but as one of my old schoolmates once pointed out to me, there’s a point when dumping in the shoes of the maths teacher ceases to be funny and starts to be smelly. I’ll further qualify this by acknowledging that I continue to acclaim the Andrew Bolt character by his eponymous author to be one of the funniest satirical creations in any newspaper anywhere.

To put that another way, I will attempt to bag other media outlets in this post, but News is such a disgrace that I’m not even certain that I’ll get around to it. But the two of you who will object, I’ll point out that I’ve bagged the ABC, SBS and Fairfax plenty of times before. So there.

News is just so extremely bad an operator, that we as consumers really should be asking about our consumer rights. And by ‘bad’, I’m not even certain if I mean ‘incompetent’, either. I think I might possibly even mean bad as in ‘malevolent’. It's quite hard to get my thoughts on this down in type, but it looks like in some papers, News are filling up pages with stuff that is totally not newsworthy, like celebrity puff pieces and in others, its painfully one-sided commentary and opinion.

Don't get me started on the disgraceful exhibition that is Fox News.

But what actually is 'news'?

The term ‘news’ has a particular connotation in the minds of most people. We want to be informed and we want to be informed as objectively as possible. News (the company) has been repeatedly pinged for bias by Media Watch this year – particularly the Daily Telegraph, with editions of the Australian singled out for complaint repeatedly on the odious subject of editorialising in news items.

Mere mention of Media Watch is enough to start a News fanboi frothing away. 'It's biased!' they scream, as they segue into a rant about how Media Watch never pings ABC, SBS or Fairfax. The suggestion is clear that Media Watch has an anti-News slant. I will point out that based upon current history, it's more likely that News are just generally incompetent and deserving of the rich spoonfuls of creamy pwnage that Media Watch regularly metes out on News.

Ever notice that News fanbois ask you about why you're not criticising these three particular organisations, but they never ask you about the myriad of other news organisations which exist? News fanbois (and fanboiettes) are even more obnoxious and annoying than the type we normally associate with this tag. But where the other type at least seem to be aware of the obvious discolouration that only highly concentrated powdered drink flavourings laced with house or garden-variety poison leaves on their lips. Even when smugly regurgitating signature Kool-Aid flavours such as, 'new interface paradigm’, ‘retina display’ and ‘headphone jacks are totally consistent with an end-to-end wireless solution’ while vainly attempting to defend Apple’s mystifying tendency to demand that you pay extra, Ryanair-style, for stuff that should come as standard (or more worryingly, defending their willingness, nay, aggressive zeal to part with that much extra cash). News fanbois have absolutely no idea, nor would they seem to care that the sweet refreshment that they’re imbibing is a somewhat disconcerting poo-brown colour. With an odour to match. Yummy!

And it's not just Media Watch, either. Check out the comprehensive smackdown that Crikey puts on the Tele here over what is, and I don't think I'm exaggerating, a vicious and unobjective series of articles criticising the new tax package.

I used to bag the Herald-Sun repeatedly, but compared to other papers in the News stable like the Tele and the Oz, the Hun comes out miles in front. This really says nothing at all about the Hun’s reputation, although I will point out that it has been consistent. The Oz, on the other hand, has moved out so far to the right that even some of my conservative friends get a sick feeling reading it. Oddly, this mostly appears to affect those who self-identify as significantly to the right. Some, who identify as ‘centre-right’, amazingly still see the Oz as fair and balanced. It seems like a slightly unusual manifestation of an alternate form of Dunning-Krueger, perhaps, if you can substitute moderate/extreme in to replace the incompetent/expert continuity.

But I have digressed as I’m prone to do. I haven’t even raised the small issue of the Oz editorialising about the supposed need to destroy the Greens, as they did.

See, there is a pattern emerging which can only be described as a tradition of unspeakably bad journalism from News. Once again, it’s possible that I’m using ‘bad’ in its ‘wicked’ connotation compared to the other variety, but the issue is largely identical, anyway. And at the end of the day, if News are being bad as defined by the evil aspect, then this is bad objectively. Some may disagree, but with about two thirds to three quarters of Australian print media provided by News Corp, it is way wrong of News to be allowing this ultimately dodgy copy through. I am aware of certain voices questioning the public outpouring of ‘hysteria’ about News, but in this case, this time; I think that the criticism is completely justified.

This is almost a textbook example of market failure here, and the normal action in fixing market failure is to legislate or regulate.

In the cases I'm discussing here, it isn’t even years of bad behaviour. Most of this has only happened very, very recently. It might even be excusable, if I had needed to scramble for examples over a couple of decades. Sadly though, this is clearly routine misbehaviour. And although most of this may be legal misbehaviour, Blind Freddy would be questioning the average News editor’s ability to live with themselves.

What's that, there's still a News trouser-wearer who has read this far? I am impressed at your stamina and I thank you for sticking with me. But I do notice you wondering why I am bagging News when just about every news agency was crossing all matter of lines when the Strauss-Khan and Anthony stories came up.

On top of this is the small issue that the same firm of private investigators hired by the News of the World to engage in nefarious activity is the same firm that was hired by non-News newspapers such as the Mirror and the Daily Mail. I expect that we'll see some interesting revelations here before the end of the month.

Well, when I originally wrote that part, I was going to stick it to the media generally, but more importantly, would you think that News should be allowed to do the sensationalism that everyone else was doing just because everyone else was doing it? Unfortunately, a lot of people do, but this is a very difficult position to justify. The circus that enveloped the Strauss-Khan court case was a million miles removed from what might have happened in Strauss-Khan's native France.

In France, the media are subject to some pretty serious privacy legislation. These laws prevent the media from getting the kind of sensationalism out that the US media did and what we think is ordinarily fair game, but in France, this would be a serious breach of one's presumption of innocence.

In the American media (and ours too, I might add), we then saw all manner of commentary, some of which was horribly racist, being thrown around commenting on the unwillingness of the French media to get involved. Racial stereotypes of randy Frenchmen abounded. Again, it wasn't just News who were doing this, but does this make it OK that the rest of the media were doing it?

This story is pivotal to this post. The day before yesterday, we saw our Prime Minister, Julia Gillard discussing changes to the law that would enshrine a right to privacy. It was probably more suggested by malfeasance in Hackgate than anything else – particularly the disgusting tale of phone hacking present in the Milly Dowler case – but it would be nice if we were to consider things like our supposed presumptions of innocence in any new privacy rules. Already, the media is taking up arms against such a move, pointing out that there is no evidence that what went on in Britain has ever happened here.

Of course, the moment that you mention restricting the actions of the media, the hacks start bleating about 'freedom of the press'. If you think about any kind of pro-privacy legislation in this context, this argument really quite hard to argue against. Although, as I have repeatedly blogged about, whether it's free will, free speech, free media or free market economics, people are routinely dishonest about the word 'free' and woefully inconsistent in their usage of it.

Yet, I would really like to go one step further in all of this. Well, maybe not one step, but an entirely new regime, actually. Funnily enough, I think that this is a heck of a lot easier to argue for than arguing for the odd privacy provision. I'll get to that later.

Basically, I’m arguing that what news outlets are allowed to do or not, or how they are allowed to report or the practices they are allowed to use, or not, should be governed by a set of guidelines in a much clearer format than what they are currently. There should be a central, overriding duty of 'newsworthiness'. Would this take out the gratuitous celebrity articles littered throughout? Maybe, maybe not, but at the end of it all, we should have something a little better than what we have now.

I notice that this post is getting kinda long, so my apologies. I will conclude this sometime in the next few days.

A note to me, just so I don’t forget: If I find time to complete this, I may still need to write about the following things:

Gratuitous bagging of the non-News media so that our News fans who read this don’t feel so personally slighted at willingly reading such tripe;
Why an overarching set of regulated standards is easier to get on the agenda than a couple of piecemeal changes specifically addressing privacy;
The lameness of the Press Council of Australia and the utter fraud that is self-regulation;
What you as a consumer can do to improve things;
What can be done about market failure in the media;
Why journalism has less in common with other written communication and more than just a passing resemblance to accounting; and
It would be fun to examine concentrated media ownership in Australia, but would this be just too huge a steaming pile to take on?

Here we go again...

noreply@blogger.com (Dikkii) — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 20:29:28 PDT

Hope that you’re all having a great new year, folks.

Like a festering wound, this one has been annoying me for a bit, but I thought I’d put this out there and see who bites. With Wikileaks now relegated to the pages in the middle of the newspaper (at least where it doesn't relate to Julian Assange's extradition problems), I thought I’d come back to a subject that I really don’t understand at all: Freedom of Speech.

Yes folks, Freedom of Speech.

One of the things that I find interesting about this topic is the sheer unmitigated drivel that people utter whenever this topic comes up. Me included. But I live in the forlorn hope that someone will find something to correct me on this. So far, it has been a stretch.

Wikileaks has been quite interesting on this matter. It has been said by a number of people that those attacking Wikileaks are attacking free speech, but I want to look a little further into this. Granted, I do love the leaking of top secret communications – especially when it makes people look like idiots – and I especially love it that government and media in the US who attack Wikileaks are traditionally proponents of this particular concept to an insane degree and thus look grossly hypocritical at the moment. But I also love the hypocrisy of those who defend Wikileaks on freedom of speech grounds.

Ask any American which freedoms they prize above all others, and I think that you’ll probably find that they rather like the bit in their constitution that deals with freedom of speech. This is rather good, I agree.

Here in Australia, we have no constitutional right to freedom of speech. We do, apparently have some ‘implied rights’ buried within our constitution that allows us to comment on matters political, but by and large, there is no explicit right to free speech.

But what is ‘free speech’?

I take the view that free speech is, gulp, ‘free’. That is, it should come unencumbered and unrestricted, with no penalties, legal or otherwise, on one’s usage. That is all.

At this point, someone usually will point out to me that, ‘Well no, Dikkii. With freedom of speech comes responsibilities.’

Unfortunately, this now places tacit restrictions on ‘free speech’. In a world where words should frankly mean what they ought to mean, this statement is, unfortunately, 24 carat bullshit. If we wanted speech to come with one or more restrictions (which responsibilities are), then we would call it ‘restricted speech’, not ‘free speech’.

It also begs the questions, where is this list of ‘responsibilities’, and who in the name of Frigga is the person who came up with this list? If it even exists at all?

How do I get on the panel that gets to change or amend this list of 'responsibilities'?

Is the English language the poorer for people stuffing around with it like this?

There are other bits of special pleading that people will come out with which effectively says, ‘Dikkii, it isn’t really ‘free’. We just use the term to sell a particular package of speech guidelines that we like and use of the word ‘restricted’ is not clever marketing.’

Well, no one will use those exact words, but you get the idea.

My favourite item of special pleading also comes from the States and involves that old chestnut, ‘Free speech doesn’t mean that you can yell fire in a crowded theatre!’

Well, yes it does, actually. Placing yet another restriction on freedom of speech, we gradually move further and further away from the dictionary definition of what ‘free’ means. In its purest form, and I’m using the Oxford here, the adjective ‘free’ means:

“...able to act or be done as one wishes; not under the control of another.”

I’m sorry, but a restriction, whether it be crowded theatres or anything else, has been imposed by someone, and therefore not only can one not act (in this case, speak) as one wishes, someone has imposed a control. And the English language is indeed the poorer for this.

It gets worse, too.

Some of my old school buddies are fond of getting nice and condescending with the lovely old cliché, ‘I may not agree with what you’re saying, but I’ll fight for your right to say it.’

It’s nice in theory to say that you’ll fight for someone’s right to say anything they like, but frankly, I think they’re lying out of their arses, because here are some things that they will never fight for. Not only that, but these are just some reasons why freedom of speech is completely unachievable, either in my lifetime or anyone else’s:

Contracts. Where you go to get something enforced on a contract of sale, and the person who sold you something said, ‘Nah, I was just saying stuff’, is it possible that anyone would fight for this? Doubtful.
The news. The meedja are awfully fond of attempting the free speech line, although they would never in a million years try the line that, ‘No, the Prime Minister didn’t really have sex on a crowded bus in front of kiddies. We made that up because it was tremendously funny, and you believed us like the gullible twats you are!’
Peer group pressure and cultural taboos. When was the last time in any jurisdiction did anyone try to sue a group for imposing their groupthink on them? It’s unthinkable. There are certain things that you cannot say because you will be ostracised – freedom of speech means that nothing is off the table, even jokes about terrorists of particular ethnic persuasions rooting kiddies. This has a different flavour to it - although we don't think of social punishments the same way that we think of legal or illegal punishments (such as physical ones), social taboos (restrictions) and ostracism (punishment and deterrent) is still a major barrier to free speech.
Section 52 of the Trade Practices Act. This is my personal favourite. Anyone who would fight for this to be repealed (“A corporation shall not, in trade or commerce, engage in conduct that is misleading or deceptive or is likely to mislead or deceive.” At subsection (1)) is not fit to walk the earth.

Just once, I’d love to have a conversation that started with, ‘Dikkii, you know that I may not agree with what you’re saying, but I’ll fight for your right to say it,’ and finished with, ‘Well, at risk of calling you a liar, Dikkii, I was out in front of Parliament House the other day, protesting for, not just section 52, but the entire Trade Practices Act to be repealed.’

At least this prick would be being truthful.

And you know, having seen the damage that verbal bullying and harassment causes, I don’t think that there would be many takers for having these particular laws done away with, either.

If we go to jurisdictions where that highly marketable term ‘free speech’ is enshrined in law, we can see that the restrictions start to mount up. Which makes the term highly loaded at best, and downright dishonest at worst.

In the UK, for instance, the British Chiropractic Association's infamous libel lawsuit against Simon Singh was a disgraceful attempt to stifle free speech. However, in Britain - which is a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights and thus has freedom of expression, apparently - the case went through two courts and not one judge (there were three on the bench for the appeal) saw fit to throw the case out on those grounds. We can add libel laws to the list.

I should be reasonably obvious by now that free speech is completely unachievable.

And don't get me wrong, I object wholeheartedly to someone resorting to the courts to silence someone. It doesn't seem to occur to anyone though, that the Singh libel case might have been a symptom of a far more further reaching problem, although it's outside the scope of this post to address it.

The fact is though, that whether the issue is alleged libel/slander, bullying, breaching contractual terms, publishing government secrets or a decision that dinner with friends is the perfect time to let them all know about that taste that you have built up for the kind of santorum that only their mothers can produce, you cannot call speech 'free' unless you allow the whole lot.

I have been watching the US news with interest at the moment. The assassination attempt on a US Congresswoman on the weekend brought this theme back. Sarah Palin has been roundly criticised for drawing rifle crosshairs on a map and using trigger happy metaphors when her lunatic Tea Party supporters are frankly incapable of differentiating between fact and fiction.

Palin has also called for Julian Assange's assassination, too. By rights she should have been charged with incitement to murder over this, but...

I never thought that I’d ever defend the lamentable Palin, but if the USA was totally serious about freedom of speech, she wouldn’t have a case to answer. And I wonder about how many in the media are now certifiable hypocrites on this matter?

Having said that, criticising critics of Palin runs into the same problem, but under free speech - such criticism is fine. So is criticising those who criticise critics of Palin.

Why can't people just be honest and say that what they'd really like is restricted speech?

My Christmas mix tape

noreply@blogger.com (Dikkii) — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 20:31:37 PDT

Hi folks. I hope that you're all enjoying the time of year that's upon us.

You know, originally, Christmas time was a bunch of different pagan festivals, most notably Yuletide, that got co-opted by Christians keen to embrace stuff that future audiences would love.

These days I acknowledge that Christmas has morphed into a secular display of undignified commercialism and gluttony. Naturally, of course, I love this.

But there is a more serious side to the season. I talk about the unmitigated drivel that pours from speakers all over shopping centres at this time of year. There's only so much "Jingle Bells" or We Wish You a Merry Christmas" that I can take. And if it's not those pepped up and insanely cheerful American odes to capitalism, it's those thoroughly unfathomable one hit wonders Slade and Wizzard. Or those horrid efforts from Cliff Richard or George Michael.

Yes folks, Christmas songs blow dog.

But I'm not naturally a pessimist, so I said to myself, "Dikkii," I said. That's what I call myself. Which is not that weird, although the talking to myself thing could be regarded as potentially dodgy.

"Dikkii," I said, forgetting completely that I'd already called myself that, "Surely it's possible to create a mix tape of songs which don't suck?"

So I did. And here it is, for your enjoyment.

1. "Troika" - Sky

Sky were an interesting project of legendary classical guitarist John Williams. Williams was intrigued by prog rock and wondered if you could do classical music in a rock style. Their biggest hit was a rather awesome cover of JS Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in D minor" but this one is a cover of the fourth movement from Prokofiev's Lieutenant Kije Suite. It sorta rocks.

2. "Fairytale of New York" - The Pogues

Oh the Pogues. Or "drunkenest band ever" as one of my mates describes them. This song is possibly my favourite Christmas song and tells the tale of a bickering couple whose hopes and dreams in New York are crushed by alcoholism and drug problems. Originally written by banjoist Jem Finer and vocalist Shane MacGowan to be sung by MacGowan and bassplayer Caitlin O'Riordan, O'Riordan had left the band when they recorded this, so the Pogues gave the female part to the late Kirsty MacColl instead. The addition of strings gives it some added oomph.

3. “The bells of St Mary’s” – Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans

A track of A Christmas Gift for You aka Phil Spector’s Christmas Album. Spector is best known for his over the top production work, and while he’s probably better known these days for bizarre wigs and homicide, his “wall of sound” production technique was monstrously groundbreaking stuff in the sixties. The Blue Jeans featured Darlene Love who also got a Guernsey on Christmas Gift, but ultimately, this is a tad better than the lameness that pervaded most of the Blue Jeans’ (and, let’s be honsest here, Spector’s) work. “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah” anyone?

4. “In Dulci Jubilo” – Mike Oldfield

Oldfield played everything other than the recorder on this. Which is interesting, considering that the recorder part is the most distinctive. It’s worth noticing that, as a multi-instrumentalist who sees himself as primarily a guitarist, Oldfield goes completely nuts on the guitar parts on this. Strangely enough, though, it seems to work. If you can say anything about Oldfield, he does know quite a bit about proper contextualising of his arrangements.

5. “Little Drummer Boy (Up the Khyber)” – the Hoodoo Gurus

This is an old b-side of the Hoodoo Gurus and is possibly the greatest rendition of what is one of the most boring and turgid Christmas carols ever. The Hoodoo Gurus infuse what is basically a surf guitar instrumental with a sitar melody line – or, more likely, a guitar effected to sound like a sitar. And it rocks.

6. “Ukrainian Bell Carol” – M. Leontovych

A frankly scary piece of Christmas that frightens kiddies with the bell parts and the minor key, not to mention the ¾ timing that takes off like a bat out of hell and switches back and forth between ¾ and 6/8 later in the tune. Leontovych intended this to be sung a capella, but this arrangement (which features the Vienna Boys Choir) is quite good.

7. “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” – Darlene Love

Another of the high points of A Christmas Gift For You. This one has been covered to death but, I actually love the sadness in it as Love sings of how much Christmas blows now that her lover has gone. Love was pretty much a backbone of Spector’s empire, as part of the Blue Jeans, the Crystals and working on records featuring the Ronettes. The production is subdued by Spector’s standards, which is not saying much, but possibly one of the reasons that this is a little less lame than most Spector material.

8. “I believe in Father Christmas” – Greg Lake

“They sold me a dream of Christmas/they sold me a silent night/they sold me a fairy story/till I believed in the Israelite”. Although this gets a guernsey on a lot of Christmas compilations, there’s a cynicism from Lake in the lyrics that’s directed at a lot of targets: Religion, commercialism and the loss of childhood innocence. The main theme from Prokofiev’s Troika makes a reappearance throughout.

9. “For unto us a Child is Born” – G. F. Handel

“Hallelujah Chorus” was a little obvious so I went for this one, also from Handel’s Messiah. Actually, Messiah is not really just about the birth of Christ, it’s about His whole life, but it gets played a lot at Christmas. This one has a lovely build through the verses until they get to the chorus which, depending on the version that you have of it, is mixed altogether way too loud considering how soft the soft bits are mixed. And the chorus is actually bitching and kinda catchy. Charles Jennens was the uncredited lyricist. And this arrangement features the London Symphony Orchestra.

10. “Merry Xmas (War is Over)” – John Lennon

You all know this one, so I won’t bother explaining it, except that although it’s also pretty obvious so why did I include it? Maybe I was feeling nostalgic around it being 30 years since Lennon was assassinated. I don’t know.

11. “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” – P. I. Tchaikovsky

Look, it’s Christmassy, but it’s also just that little bit creepy. The Nutcracker is almost totally devoid of plot, and I really don’t understand ballet at all, but I love the music and I do wonder what drugs Tchaikovsky was smoking when he wrote this. But it’s a triumph, nonetheless. The fairy-like celesta used throughout is something quite extraordinary.

12. “What Child is This?” – Reverend Horton Heat

The Reverend Horton Heat is a rockabilly band from Texas, but this is a wicked surf guitar instrumental version of a famous tune, better known to fans of Mr Whippy everywhere as “Greensleeves”. It’s quite well done. Apologies for the sound quality - the studio version is much better, but you'll get the idea.

13. “Christmas with the Devil” – Spinal Tap

A fictitious band, I guess, Spinal Tap had already made a name for themselves on Saturday Night Live by the time their mockumentary flick This is Spinal Tap came along. This was originally aired on SNL and apparently resulted in lots of mail from irate Christians. And why not: “There’s a demon in my belly/and a gremlin in my brain/There’s someone up the chimney hole/and Satan is his name.” Hilarious and naturally, it goes all the way to 11.

14. “A Christmas Duel” – The Hives featuring Cyndi Lauper

“I bought no gift this year/and I slept with your sister/I should have thought twice/before I kissed her.” Rather a hilarious yet rollicking singalong uniting one of the noughties most important rock acts with the legendary Lauper. The lyrics are rather amusing, but appear to have some form of closure as the warring parties “Spend, spend spend this Chris, Christmas together.”

15. “Christmas” – The Who

This is from the Who’s somewhat polarising concept album, Tommy. And as you would expect, it’s about our deaf, dumb and blind hero, but set back when he was a young child. But it’s a savage attack on religion, as Tommy’s parents wonder “How can he be saved?/From the eternal grave?”. Keith Moon’s frenetic drumming shows exactly why Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend touring as “the Who” minus the late Moon and the late John Entwistle is utterly fraudulent.

16. “Christmas card from a Hooker in Minneapolis” – Tom Waits

From Waits’ Blue Valentine album, this song tells the tale of a hooker talking about her new life on the straight and narrow, before revealing the truth at the end. From Waits’ early period, before he decided to expand his instrumentation beyond the piano and strings stuff that he’d done beforehand. Sublime.

17. “Red Water (Christmas Mourning)” – Type O Negative

You can just imagine Type O Negative, goth metal exponents, giggling hysterically at the thought of doing a Christmas tune. This is a little ponderous, but it sorta works. Mind you, it wouldn’t if it didn’t have the snippets of “Ukrainian bell carol” and “God bless ye merry gentlemen” contained within.

18. “White wine in the sun” – Kate Miller-Heidke

It’s a cover of a Tim Minchin tune, a comedian/singer who has become a bit of a cause celebre and pin-up boy for atheist performers in recent years. He does write a good tune – this is about the Australian Christmas experience and is clearly dedicated to Minchin’s ”infant daughter” and it’s covered well by the almost slightly unhinged Miller-Heidke who manages not to lose the pathos throughout.

Well I hope that you enjoyed this. Have a great holiday season, wherever you are and remember to drive safely and under the limit.

Post election post

noreply@blogger.com (Dikkii) — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 20:32:15 PDT

You have to love parliamentary democracy. Even better, you have to love the comments on this article in the Herald-Sun that proves my point that I made several weeks ago about Australians: We all know bugger all about our own system.

The article itself begs some pretty powerful questions.

Firstly, how illiterate actually is the Herald-Sun's readership?

Secondly, is our system actually broken?

There is a subtext in a lot of this that suggests that the electorate is not happy unless one of the major parties has an absolute majority. It possibly should be borne in mind that of the parties in what we term the Coalition (now 4 parties and counting), none of them has had a majority in the lower house in their own right individually for many years.

Are there people actually freaking out now that we have a hung parliament? Clearly there are and it goes to the nub of what I indicated in my first post in this series: You don't vote for the government. You vote for your local member. It is then, really, up to them as to who governs.

The fact that there is going to have to be deals done as to whom ends up getting power is largely irrelevant to the Australian people, much as they might hate it. I'd really love to say, "If you don't like this, then move somewhere else," but I loathe that phrase as it suggests that people should not even attempt to make a difference. It basically says that trying to make a difference is "un-Australian".

Let's look at some of the events of the last couple of years:

1. Tony Abbott becomes Opposition Leader. Not a squeak from the media. No one writes outraged comments to the Herald-Sun saying, "I didn't vote for him." Compare this to:

2. Julia Gillard becomes Prime Minister. Media goes crazy. Cue deluge of irate writers to the tabloids about how she wasn't elected by the Australian people.

The fact is that we don't elect our leaders. End of discussion. Hence my disgust at Australians who seem to be happy with one and not the other.

But it's actually more than that: We actually have no say in which parties form our government ends up being. This is pretty important.

We now have a hung parliament. Both major parties could end up doing a deal with, at last count, four independents, one member of the Greens and just to throw a spanner in the works, a member of the Nationals who points out that the WA branch is not actually a part of the Coalition. In fact, they're another party altogether.

Personally, I love this. I think that this is how the Westminster parliamentary system is supposed to work.

So did you blindly vote for a party member on the basis of who you would have liked to govern?

Not I. I voted according to whom best to represent my electorate. This is how our system is structured, and this is how things are intended to happen. Mind you, I should point out that going into the election, I didn't really have a clear preference for which party should run the country.

So how do we resolve this? Does it need resolving? Should partisan party politics always be the basis for governments in Australia?

Let's look at some of the other issues.

3. Three independents clearly are going to be instrumental in getting a potential future government across the line. Cue more irate texting, commenting on blogs, letters etc.

These independents were elected by their constituents. If their constituents wanted a member of the major parties in office, they would have voted for them. They didn't, they voted for independents.

After election night, Tony Abbott carried on like a bit of a tool. In a moment of frustration, he pretty much told the independents to side with him. The message was clear: The Labor Party don't have a majority, therefore, we (the Coalition) are the rightful rulers.

The only problem with this was that the view of the electorate is far from convincing on this – Abbott's crew was also not granted a majority.

The fact is, that the independents can do whatever they like. They're independent. If they side with the ALP, then good on them. If they side with the Coalition, then good on them as well. It's probably now important to mention that Tony Crook, the new member for O'Connor has indicated that he will sit on the crossbenches, despite the fact that his party has 'National Party' in its name.

This may now mean that there are six crossbenchers. What happens if three of them side with the ALP and three of them side with the Coalition, assuming that the majors get 72 seats apiece – not counting Crook as part of the Coalition count?

The Herald-Sun readership appears to think that, "Oh we didn't elect the independents. Why should they have this much clout?"

The reality is that if we had never had a two party environment in our parliament, this would probably not be an issue. If more independents were elected, I personally think that Australians would have a much better idea about how Westminster works.

You see, this is essentially it. You vote for your member on the basis of who should represent your electorate. Should you consider the "bigger picture"? Absolutely, but consider this:

4. The voters of Bennelong didn't elect previous member Maxine McKew for a second term. McKew almost does a 'Kernot' by dumping on the party campaign on national TV. It turns out that the reason she was dumped by Bennelong was because she was never there.

That's right. McKew was only interested in the bigger picture. McKew completely forgot her primary responsibility, which was to represent Bennelong to the federal parliament. How could McKew be expected to do this if she never even bothered to turn up in her actual electorate? Talk about taking your electorate for granted.

Fortunately, McKew was punished for her arrogance when her electorate turned on her. Which, by the way, was the only seat that Labor lost in New South Wales.

5. Adam Bandt, the new Greens member for Melbourne, has indicated that he will support Labor. Yet more outrage.

I almost feel sorry for the voters in the electorate of Melbourne who voted for Brandt on the strength of his non-affiliation with the major parties. But Bandt can do whatever he likes now that he is in parliament. He probably won't be re-elected by the voters in Melbourne. And you know, if he keeps up this act and doesn't learn when to keep his mouth shut, he might find himself disaffiliated by his own party, although I expect that he might find preselection tougher next time round if the Greens don't disaffiliate him.

6. Fact: If voting informal was a vote for a political party, then the 'Informal Party' would have been the fifth highest polling party on primary votes.

This is a nationwide stat. It probably beats the Werriwa by-election after Mark Latham vacated parliament which was the previous record-holding election for informal votes cast, although I couldn't say for certain. And because it's a nationwide stat, the informal vote count in some electorates is probably enormously high – I know that in this election, Werriwa recorded a 10.59% informal vote as at 22 August.

Compulsory voter registration is the core reason for this. You can bang on and on about voter apathy, disengagement, jadedness or whathaveyou but really, compulsory voter registration needs to be seriously looked at. How many trees went into the paper voted on? How much petrol was burnt by voters coming and going from polling booths for this little wasted exercise? How many person hours could the Productivity Commission add on for this?

I do get grumpy about this topic. And when I do, I get a chorus of the same old lame excuses about why compulsory voter registration is a great idea.

"It's your civic duty," says one. Congratulations, Einstein – you've just justified conscription.

"You can't opt-out of paying taxes," says another. Apart from indirectly linking tax evaders with people who don't vote, this person has also managed to suggest that some people manage to magically avoid roads, schools and a defence force that's there for them. Which still has to be paid for.

"You have a moral obligation to vote," says yet another. That's great, I say. How does removing the legal requirement impact this? No answer was what I got, but the correct answer is, "It doesn't. You would still have a moral obligation to vote regardless." It's only the very lazy who would cough up this tired 'reason'.

"Our forefathers fought and died for the right to vote." This is one of the silliest ones I've heard yet. A legal imperative to vote is not a goddamn right, it's a legal requirement. A right is something you can opt-out of, it is not an obligation, despite what another correspondent thinks may or may not be in the Magna Carta. In any event, here's a few other things our and other forefathers fought and died for: The Inquisition, Jerusalem in the Crusades, ruling royal families, the right to keep slaves, a golden stool, someone's ear, the list goes on and on. It's probably fair to say that voting is one of the less idiotic reasons for a battle.

7. Rob Oakeshott, independent member for Lyne has the nerve to suggest that the ALP and the Coalition begin discussions about forming a coalition. Much mirth and ridicule ensues from the press gallery. Voters who know nothing about the Australian parliamentary system start muttering the words 'dictatorship', 'communism' and 'no one voted for that'.

This has got to be the a high water mark in press idiocy. For one thing, Oakeshott is right when he says that this is a good idea. What if a party got the magical 76 seat count in the House and then lost that majority in a by-election? This has worked in other democracies - I can think of Norway and Israel being two - and would merely require parliamentarians to work together to sort their problems out.

Which is precisely the job that we pay them to do! We don't elect governments, really, as I mentioned before. We elect local members to do that for us.

So how does our newly elected House of Representatives stack up?

Currently, it appears that the ALP and the Coalition have 71 almost certain seats each. I say 'almost certain' because I'm going by Antony Green's excellent coverage on the ABC's website, and he still has three seats in doubt.

The Coalition actually consists of four parties - the Liberal Party, the National Party, the Liberal National Party of Queensland and the Country Liberal Party.

Green has not subtracted Tony Crook of the WA Nationals and newly elected member for O'Connor, who believes that the Nationals of the rest of Australia doesn't include the WA Nationals. So really, that's 70 seats to the Coalition.

The members for Kennedy, Lyne, New England and Denison are independents, and the member for Melbourne is a member of the Australian Greens. The members for Kennedy, Lyne and New England are ex-National Party members who are completely unpredictable (especially the certifiable Bob Katter) and may end up not siding with either the ALP or the Coalition. Adam Bandt appears to think that he'll side with Labor, which just leaves Andrew Wilkie, newly elected independent for Denison.

Wilkie is an ex-Greens member and former spy who was shafted by the Coalition when they were in power, however he has no love for the Labor Party either.

There are three seats that still appear to be in doubt - Brisbane, Hasluck and Corangamite.

Where this goes is really anyone's guess. In any event, I expect any government that forms to not last very long before the Governor-General tells all involved to call fresh elections.

Ironically, in sorting this out, this could make our much loved Governor-General, Ms Quentin Bryce, a very disliked individual indeed.

Obligatory election summary post

noreply@blogger.com (Dikkii) — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 20:05:12 PDT

As I'm prone to do, here is my Jagajaga-centric summary of election posts. It may provide you with a guide to assisting you with voting in this election. Or it might not. Learn some stuff, like:

Or alternatively, you could just go to my Election 2010 tag page.

Happy voting!

How to vote below the line easily (Election post number 9)

noreply@blogger.com (Dikkii) — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 20:32:42 PDT

And now it is time to look at The Senate.

I've found this great webpage, by the way, which helps you put together your own how-to-vote card for the Senate. But more on this in a moment.

The Senate is the house of review in Australia. Each state elects 12 senators, and the NT and ACT get two each. Of these, 6 from each state and 1 from each territory come up for election each election.

As a result, voting for the Senate can confuse your average punter senseless.

At some stage in the past, some bright spark said, "Hey, let's make it easier for voters and allow them to vote for one bunch of candidates."

Naturally, this has led to possibly the silliest scenario in Australia where you only need to number one box when voting in the Senate, oblivious to what your vote will do if you don't get your first preference. And it discriminates against the ungrouped independents, because they don't get to be regarded as one of these groups.

It is up to the party that you vote for as to where your preferences go. This is where you can find out how they have directed their preferences.

But you can still vote below the line. Using this method, you can determine your preference for each of the candidates for the Senate. In my state of Victoria, there are 60 candidates, which means that I will have to number 60 boxes. This sounds a bit full on, but you sorta have to do this - I notice that looking at the one for Victoria, the major parties have made preferences that I am grossly uncomfortable with.

Belowtheline.org.au is a wonderful website that you can use to assist with this tedious and error-prone task. I'm going to generate my own how-to-vote card for the Senate now, just to show you how easy this site is to use.

You select your state to get started.

This takes you to a page where you can see each party's group ticket. I don't want to look at these, so I'm going straight to generating mine from scratch.

Now you now will find yourself looking at a list of the different groups. Don't be too dismayed that you can't see the candidates - you'll get a chance to play with these shortly.

Drag and drop the groups into the order that you'd like. I'm going to talk about the basic order that I would like to use, so while you're having a play, allow me to get started. To assist you at this point, there's a great list of links to information about each party on this page.

Post-majors

It helps me to start off by considering who I definitely DO NOT want in the Senate first and dragging them down to the bottom.

Into this group go the kooks, nutbars and theocrats. I certainly won't be considering these.

I'm dragging the following down to the bottom part of the ballot paper:

Very bottom (dangerous nutters)

Citizens Electoral Council - extreme right-wing conspiracy theorists
Shooters and Fishers - gun nuts
Socialist Alliance - extreme left-wing nutjobs

Nearly bottom (theocrats)

Family First - ECP fundies
Democratic Labor Party - catholic fundies
Christian Democrats - traditionalist protestant fundies

Almost nearly bottom (not quite so dangerous kooks, but kooks nonetheless)

Joseph Toscano ticket - large-A Anarchists
One Nation - considerably right of centre racists
The Climate Sceptics - anti-science global warming deniers
Liberal Democrats - extreme free-marketeers

Other independents

Grant Beale
Glenn Shea

Sorry, folks. You independents might be great, but it's very difficult to find any information out about you guys.

And after this, I put the majors. Wow - that's half the order already sorted out. Not bad, huh?

The majors

After all these, above the lunatics go the majors. This forms two functions: It pretty much prevents my ballot paper going any further, and, well, frankly, the majors don't have much separating them. I still can't decide in which order I'm going to place the ALP and the Lib/Nats, so I'll leave them as they are, but they always seem to go in the middle.

I will be doing something slightly different with a certain Labor senator, though. See if you can guess who he is - you'll see that there are pretty cool things to voting below the line.

Pre-majors

Above the majors go the ones that I do agree with, that I would like to see in the Senate. Let's talk about these now, because I rather like some of these.

They can be separated into two categories: Desired, interesting and a category that I haven't noticed before - industry representatives.

Desired (the ones who go up the top)

Australian Greens - campaigners on green and social justice issues
Secular Party of Australia - fighting for separation of church and state
Stephen Mayne ticket - seasoned shareholder activists and corporate transparency campaigners
Australian Sex Party - civil libertarians who have impressed lots throughout the campaign
Australian Democrats - still their to keep the bastards honest, although not so influential these days

I've provisionally put the Secular Party up the top, but I could change my mind on this. I blogged about the all-important first preference spot here.

Interesting (almost up the top - I found their platforms intriguing)

Senator on-line - undertake to put all votes for internet approval if elected. Interesting.
Socialist equality party - moderate left of centre bunch

I'm curious about these guys, so I'm putting them up there to see how they go.

Industry groups (I have a soft spot for those who believe in their industries, up to a point)

Carer's Alliance - represent those who care for the disabled and the disabled themselves
Building Australia - represent the building industry, curiously both employers and union groups.

Now once you've got all these in order, hit the "Next" button to continue.

You'll now see a list of all candidates, in order of how they appear on the ballot paper. You can continue if you like the order, but I'm going to do one more thing:

Move Stephen Conroy to after all the rest of the majors

This guy is an embarrassment and is not fit to hold office. On top of this, if Conroy is not elected and Labor get in, they will not be able to claim a mandate on internet filtering. This is another really cool thing you can do when voting below the line.

After this, I'm going to stuff around with the order of candidates some more - for example, I might order Labor from the bottom up, randomise the kooks a little. Why do I do this?

Because I'm a complete bastard, that's why. Someone has to count this paper.

Now, I just have to click on "Create ticket".

I can see the names in order, but if I want something a little easier to read, hit the "Download PDF" button and marvel at the results.

This is just brilliant.

Enjoy the election, folks.

How-to-vote cards (Keeping your member "local" part the last)

noreply@blogger.com (Dikkii) — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 20:33:16 PDT

I have been amazed by some things this election. I was rendered speechless when I heard that Family First, the not-yet-militant Christian extremists, had been attempting to do a preference deal in the Senate with the Australian Sex Party. Laugh? I nearly spontaneously combusted!

I still hear staunch Liberal voters who claim that economic management will be better off with them than the ALP. That would be worth voting for, if it wasn't for the fact that the current bunch of Libs have promised spending out of control and the leadership sees economics as a tedious footnote to political administration.

More hilarious still, is the fact that the ALP really don't get how they got it right on economic management during the global financial crisis, whether by fluke or design. Why not make this an election issue? It's a guaranteed vote winner, although it might be evidence that the ALP isn't really interested in economics either. I would think it amazing if the ALP felt that voters were turned off by stuff as mundane as economics.

One of my first year economics lecturers, by the way, said that politics is merely applied economics. He was, of course 100% right. He then went on to crack a joke about the professor of the Animal Husbandry Department who was caught doing exactly that, which had us lewd first years rolling in the aisles. Those were the days. He now pops up on ABC Breakfast News occasionally to read the newspaper headlines.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about voters in Australia is their inability to think for themselves. Voting has become a popularity contest in Australia, where if you like a political party, or even just a political leader, people just blindly follow how-to-vote cards. I've already blogged at length about this, but the number of people who's opinions and thought processes that I respect who seem so blasé about the whole thing is really annoying.

So this last part of my series looks at how much impact that these have. And why you should pay absolutely no interest to them whatsoever.

It has been said by some that we have an electoral process similar to the US electoral college. You elect your local candidate according to who you'd like to see in power. Someone suggested to me that the local member should really not give two shits about their local electorate, because they are there for "the greater good" of this nation. Now this is all well and good, except that in the US electoral college, they pack up and go home as soon as a president is chosen. They don't stick their neck into voting on legislation and can't put forward private member bills. Nor do they do this for a full electoral term.

So how important are these?

Obviously, they're pretty important. Unlike tobacco companies, political parties have no pretence about why the pretty pictures, slogans, branding and colours are displayed so prominently: If they didn't work, then the question should be asked, why bother spending the money?

So with that in mind, let's look a little closer at them. And a final look at Jagajaga in the process, going into the election.

How-to-vote cards are designed to captivate one's attention, focussing on the party putting them out and relegating the local candidate to "incidental". It's even worse in the Senate, where by voting above the line, one doesn't even need to see the names of the candidates being put forward.

Parties and candidates do deals to get up the preference ladder on each others' how-to-vote cards. It is here that I will focus today, because some of these deals simply should not be being done.

Let's look at Jagajaga.

Joe Sgarlata, Family First

Family First have not put their how-to-vote cards online. I'm tipping that theirs reads 1 Sgarlata, 2 Bauch, 3 Macklin, 4 Kearney, 5 Harris.

So I'll regale you with this rather informative video that Family First put out. It looks all rather good, until they poke in a gobsmackingly scurrilous lie about heroin injecting rooms:

Family First: 0 stars.

Jenny Macklin, Australian Labor Party

Big picture of Julia Gillard on Macklin's how-to-vote card and right up the top, too. Disappointingly, Macklin has gone for Family First over the Liberal Party.

This is something that I hate about preference deals. While it may be expeditious to do a preference deal with wingnuts like Family First, you're effectively saying that the policies of wackos are preferable to those of the relatively more balanced Liberal Party:

Disappointed.

Joh Bauch, Liberal Party

Bauch has preferenced Family First second. He is a DISGRACE!!!:

Disgusted.

Chris Kearney, Australian Greens

The Greens also haven't uploaded their how-to-vote cards. They might surprise Macklin with 1 Kearney, 2 Harris, 3 Macklin, 4 Bauch, 5 Sgarlata. Although I doubt it. The Greens and the ALP sew up preferences tighter than Bornwyn Bishop's hair.

So I'm putting a video in for them, too. The Greens advertising has been pretty boring, but on Gruen Nation, a contestant in The Pitch did this:

Much better than their advertising. A classic, in fact: 5 stars.

Peter Harris, Secular Party

Harris has almost gone for the reverse donkey vote. No real surprises:

Expected outcome.

Well that's it from me on Jagajaga. Enjoy your electioneering, think before you vote and tune into my next post which will be on the Senate.

Interesting things about preferential voting (Keeping your member "local" part seven)

noreply@blogger.com (Dikkii) — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 20:34:35 PDT

This is where I almost finish up with my investigation of preferential voting using my case study of the seat of Jagajaga. I will look at the Senate soon, I promise.

I learned a lot after my last post. For starters, I learned that votes in a safe seat aren't quite so much wasted as what I thought. As it happens, party coffers are guaranteed funding from the AEC on the basis of primary votes, so, although this is going to go mainly the way of incumbent parties, there is a chance for you, the voter, to ensure that even if your first preference is going to be discarded, you may get to have the taxpayer contribute part of the gravy train that is electoral funding towards a smaller party. This is a valuable piece of information.

I also was reminded, courtesy of commenter Peter that we don't really have compulsory voting in Australia. This observation I made, incidentally, prompted some rather wild comments on the Twittersphere, emails to me and other media suggesting in some small part that I might have lost my mind. I don't really shy away from it, although I admit to some hyperbole: The fact is that, unlike what one correspondent suggested, non-compulsory electoral enrolment (thanks Peter for your correction) would not and never would (and has no valid link to the suggestion that it might) nullify one's moral obligation to vote - this wasn't you Peter, by the way, this was another correspondent. I don't really understand why this connection might be made.

I learned that apparently, moral obligations get enshrined in law eventually. This will, of course, be fabulous news to an ethics panel that I have some involvement with, although I certainly will understand if they feel more lukewarm than I about this suggestion.

And from another correspondent, I learned that what most of us understand as rights aren't that at all, unless they're enshrined in law and have some set responsibilities attached to them. There's apparently a statement in the Magna Carta that supports this, although I was unable to find it. Curiously, I did find a statement in the Magna Carta that specifically limits discussion around rights (the translation I looked at also used the terms "liberties") to the ones contained in the document itself, leaving the question about whether others might exist elsewhere somewhat open.

I also learned that a right, using the now slightly questionable definition of "anything that one can freely do" doesn't exist at all if it is not in existence in Australia. I have a feeling that this might be news to the majority of western democracies where one can freely not vote or not enrol to vote if they choose, but I don't appear to have any say in this.

I learned that people don't really comment on blogs anymore. They like Twitter and Facebook too much. I learned that people comment about blog posts on Twitter without actually reading them. And I learned that Google's Chrome browser does weird things to my post truncation facility which normally works a treat in Firefox and IE.

So. On to this post itself.

I finally received some correspondence from Jenny Macklin MP, the incumbent Member of Parliament for Jagajaga in answer to my query of a few weeks ago. This came in two somewhat unusual pieces of correspondence.

The first one appears to answer my query. It was a four page glossy delivered to my letterbox confirming that, amongst other things, Macklin:

Consults regularly with groups such as playgroups and friends of Lennister Farm;
Speaks to locals about environmental sustainability;
Is a Queen's Guide with Eltham Guides group. As Macklin grew up in Wangaratta, I suspect that Eltham Guides' claim to her Queen's Guide award may be somewhat tenuous, but at least she's getting out there;
Has supported the Olivia Newton-John Cancer and Wellness Centre at the Austin Hospital;
Supports Eltham Lacrosse Club; and
Supports Diamond Valley Prostate Cancer Support Group.

This was pretty good stuff I thought, and almost looked as though her office had cooked it up in response to my email.

But there was more. In the mail addressed to me the following Monday was a number of photocopied web pages confirming stuff that Macklin had had a hand in within the electorate. I won't go into these - most of these appeared to relate more to government initiatives and her role as the Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs.

Apart from the fact that the generic response was more relevant to my original question than the photocopies, I wonder a little why Macklin's office felt the need to look me up on the electoral roll and post single-sided printouts of webpages rather than just emailing me back with a series of links, but this is pretty minor.

I also finally got a response to the query I sent to Joh Bauch, Liberal Candidate for Jagajaga:

Hi Dikkii,

Many thanks for contacting me and my apologies for the delay in replying. In regard to your questions about my contribution in Jagajaga over the last 3 years. I currently, do not live in Jagajaga, however, I do have friends in the electorate and am familiar with the area as I visit my friend regularly every few weeks.

However, in the current electorate that I live, I am involved with Neighbourhood Watch. I am also interested in local business traders and have set up a part time business assisting local traders with promotion and marketing.

I live at home with my elderly parents and my father has had some health issues over the past few years so this has impacted on my abilities to do more in the community.

I am attaching my official biography for your perusal. I hope this answers your questions satisfactorily.

regards
Joh Bauch

Which pretty much confirms my suspicions about Bauch. The bio, incidentally, wasn't attached, but I didn't really need it.

But anyway, preferential voting. We vote our candidates in order of preference. After each round of counting, the person with the least number of primary preferences gets eliminated and the votes they've received go off to the other candidates via the secondary preferences on the ballot papers. The process is then repeated until one of the candidates is able to claim a majority.

But after the first round, an interesting thing happens: Anyone whose second or subsequent preference was for a candidate that was eliminated in the first round or later then finds that this preference may be disregarded as the vote counters go down their preference list, disregarding subsequent preferences for previously eliminated candidates along the way.

Let's look at a fictitious electorate, which we'll call Smallville. Yes, I know it's unoriginal, but humour me.

Let's say that you have an electorate which has five candidates, and a ballot paper is submitted that has vote 1 for candidate A, vote 2 for candidate B and so on until you get to candidate E who gets vote 5. If candidate A makes it through round 1 (where candidate D gets eliminated), but gets eliminated in round three, and candidate B gets eliminated in round 2 what happens to the vote?

The ballot paper counts as a vote for candidate A in rounds 1 and 2. In round three, candidate A gets eliminated, so the vote counters look at the ballot paper. Candidate B has been eliminated in round two, so the vote counters go straight past the second preference to the third which is for candidate C. Suddenly, your paper in the electorate of Smallville has gone to its third preference, bypassing the second preference outright.

This is a pretty important thing. Those of you who, like me, like to put the little guys first before the big guns of the major parties might like to consider this, because it could mean that your ballot paper isn't worth quite what you think going in to be counted.

It does mean that your first preference becomes more important.

So have a bit of a think about this before casting your vote.

Why am I even bothering? (Keeping your member "local" part six)

noreply@blogger.com (Dikkii) — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 20:37:20 PDT

People probably wonder why I bother with this. Right about now I'm having thoughts of that nature myself.

"I know who I'm voting for," they might say.

"Why don't you just follow a how-to-vote card?" some might ask.

"Get a life!" order those without a shred of originality, finesse, style, sense of irony or, strangely, a life of their own.

The fact is that, even though I live in an safe Labor seat where any vote is essentially a wasted vote, I strangely want to do things properly. At the end of the day, I will know something about my candidates. How many of you can say the same thing?

How many of you even bothered? How many of you just blindly expect to rock up to your electorate and say, "I'm voting Labor," or, "I'm voting Liberal" or even "I don't really give a toss about either, so I'm voting informally."

The fact that I'm doing research makes me superior to each and every single one of you. If just one person walks away from reading this series and says, "Yes. I'm going to vote for the best person who will represent my electorate, based upon how much they care for the voters in my electorate and maybe their party-political platform as well," well then, I think that I may have made a difference.

The fact is that as we have seen throughout this whole thing, with only a few exceptions, your candidates could not give a flying fuck about you, the voter. You live in an electorate. Your electorate is merely a stepping stone to be trodden on by self-obsessed wankers who hunger for power. And if it's not power, it's some "greater good" that requires us great unwashed to be trampled underfoot in the fight to get that across the line.

And you, the Australian public, just bend over and take it time after time. You rejoice in your ignorance. You bathe in your self-righteous belief that you're doing something for Australia, even if you forget that this is the one opportunity to ensure that your district has representation. You blindly follow how-to-vote cards, spoon fed to you as you congregate like cattle in feeding lots about to be slaughtered.

You may even be one of those sheep who vote for the same political party year in, year out without a care in the world. Or a decent shred of objectivity.

Some of you possibly even think that by voting informally, your rebellious protest at wildly identical platforms will be heard and your dissatisfaction will register somewhere. News flash, pal: It won't. Your "protest" will end up in the same basket as those informal votes from the illiterate, the innumerate, the apathetic, the mentally incompetent...

And then there was this one ignorant prick of a man that I communicated with today, a total DISGRACE!!! who thought I knew about the algorithm that poll counters use to remove the inherent bias of donkey votes. An algorithm so top secret that no one knows about it, and yet, so accurate that even if he donkey voted (the genuine definition, folks, not just an informal vote), it would mysteriously spot this and weed it out. "No harm done," he said. NO HARM DONE!!?! ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR FREAKING MIND???

I could go on and on, but I won't. I've never been so pissed off at candidates (generally) or the voting public (generally) as I am right now. Am I having a mood? I probably am. I don't care.

OK. You're not all like this. But most of you are. Probably even some of you reading this blog - I do recognise that I may be preaching to the converted a little bit and that some of the ones who should be reading this are either parachuting into a convenient electorate on the other side of town wondering how many people they can confuse or how best to promote their 'brand' while others are just wondering how long it is before Brangelina break up for real.

Well I for one am sick to death of it.

I remember one story - the name of the electorate escapes me.

A local independent candidate was campaigning for election somewhere up the Queensland coast - I don't know where. He was widely known and respected throughout his electorate. He'd done work for a few clubs and local charities and was considered an all-round good guy.

Then the parachute candidate comes in from either the ALP, the Libs or the Nats (might have even been the LNP - I don't know how old this story is) and with the well-funded political machine behind them, kick's all-round good guy's arse.

The electorate is just as much to blame for this debacle. And it is a debacle: They had, on a silver platter, the perfect guy to represent them, and they fucked it up.

Wouldn't you like to look at yourself in the mirror before you go to bed on Saturday, August 21 and say, "I made a properly informed decision when casting my vote. I'm proud of myself."

Yes. I acknowledge that compulsory voting is fascist. But if you have to do it, why on earth would you do a half-arsed job? What kind of idiot is going to rock up to have their name ticked of on polling day and then switch to autopilot?

If you sympathise with this, get the word out there yourself. By all means tweet this, or write your own post. Get Australians thinking. Think yourself. You have a brain - use it!

No the donkey voter was not the straw that broke the camel's back, folks. This communication back, in response to my previous email, from Peter Harris, Secular Party Candidate for Jagajaga did it:

Thanks Dikkii. The 'bigger picture' doesn't equal a singular platform in this context, and, like the greens, the Party's platform is rooted in a couple of singular ideals (secularism, humanism), but come out through many social/other policies (refer web site). My 'snide' comment is as it is. I'm not out there right now to collect a mountain of votes. I'm helping get the party some exposure in its early building phase. Even if I was interested in appearances, I personally do not equate volunteering for a local community org. with understanding local issues - but yes I know that many would. At this stage of my life personally, I work damn hard, but my leftover time is best spent with my family, and a percentage of my income donated directly to my chosen charities and local organisations. Regarding the engineering, I work in road safety helping review safety of designs, remodel work or existing conditions, and conduct risk assessments, on anything to do with the road (I'm X-VicRoads). I recently conducted reviews through Eltham and Yan Yean, and Greensborough (in response to a massive truck crash off the Highway into a property). Also, I am the lead external consultant assisting VicRoads rewrite its "Worksite Safety Code of Practice" which is the "Bible" for how people conduct roadworks on the road safely. Got to run. Seeya.

As a response it's informative, exploitative, exploited, revealing, guarded, tasteless, cynical, helpful, unhelpful, wasteful, frivolous. Possibly even un-local. Certainly not serious about even having a red-hot go at representing Jagajaga.

Utterly frustrating. At this point it has occurred to me that only one candidate (one that is above contempt, anyway) is serious about representing his electorate responsibly. It doesn't appear to be Harris.

Click here if you want to see my election posts so far.

Candidate responses - Jagajaga

noreply@blogger.com (Dikkii) — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 20:35:31 PDT

You might recall that I sent a communiqué off to some of the candidates who will be standing for election for the seat of Jagajaga.

I have in my hot little hands responses from candidates Kearney and Harris. Chris Kearney, as you may recall, is the Greens candidate for Jagajaga and Peter Harris is the Secular Party's candidate.

So what did they have to offer? Let's look at them one by one.

Chris Kearney responded first. This what Kearney had to say:

Dikkii,

Thanks for your interest at the local level. Over the years I have lived and raised with my wife our two children I have been on their local State School Council, Macleod Tennis Club Management Committee and President of the Banyule Hawks Basketball Club. Restricted my answer to just the last three years well over that time I have played a non-executive role at the Tennis Club on maintenance and upgrading of the tennis courts surface to ones requiring no watering in response to the changing climate. As an active member of the Eltham & District Amateur Winemakers Guild I have taken on the role managing the Logistics sub-committee for its upcoming Annual Amateur Wineshow being held on 28th November 2010 at the Eltham Community Centre from 10:00 a.m. until 3:00p.m.. You can read more detail of the Guild's activities on their website at www.amateurwine.org.au. If you or any of your friends are interested in wine and the making of it I would encourage you all to get in contact with the Guild and join to learn from the wealth of experience in its members.

Regards,

Chris Kearney

Kearney is clearly a local and cares about local issues so I sent a standard response thanking him for his time and effort in responding. I resisted berating him for addressing me in the opening without a salutation.

Peter Harris was next:

Hi Dikkii, thanks for the email. Answer: "Not too much, and I don't
care for token voluntary roles that are nice on the eye and satisfy
somebody's 'feel-good' faculty". I believe in the bigger picture.

If you want a more meaningful summary of myself, in recent times I
have been managing an engineering company and undertaking project
managing roles that benefit my electorate, as well as many others,
and, raising a bubbly 16-month-old, and setting a great example to
friends and family about how to live a healthy life through eating
well and exercising plenty. I have a degree in civil engineering and
business administration. In the past, I have worked in voluntary roles
in India, Israel, and Vanuatu. My follow-up volunteer work in
Australia went on for about 5 years and covered several federal
electorates. I got too old for that 'youth' organisation and have more
recently got tied up in family and work and using my brain to try to
understand the world.

I hope to use what I have learnt, living, working, and travelling
Australia, the Middle-East, Asia, North Africa and the South-Pacific,
to benefit Australians, and others.

I would be happy to liaise on more specific questions/topics at a
mutual time. I'm glad that you are considering your options and hence
Australia's and the world's future.

Regards.
Peter.

Whilst I appreciate his direct response, I can't help shaking the notion that Peter might be being parachuted in to Jagajaga. This is a shame, because I would dearly love to put a member of the Secular Party first. I sent this in response:

Hi Peter,

Thank you for your response. I very much appreciate your honesty, although I would like to point out that as you are potentially representing the community of Jagajaga to our federal parliament, one would expect that you at least care for local issues, your project and engineering work included. Whilst I too also care for the "bigger picture", I should point out that there is not a lot of voters out there who would appreciate what could be seen as somewhat snide references to one's "feel-good faculty". It could be seen as particularly grating if what you refer to as a "bigger picture" could be seen by some as representing a single platform, i.e. secularism. Whilst I very much support secularism in this country - it is a particular passion of mine, funnily enough - the bigger picture for me at this election, at least as far as the lower house is concerned, is "which candidate will best represent the interests of the community of Jagajaga?"

As it happens, what I was after didn't need to be limited to what you might describe as "feel-good" activities, which is why I would very much like to know more about the project and engineering work that you clearly take some pride in. I merely just need to know that you're not a carpetbagger, as two of your opponents appear to be.

I like your "liaise" idea and welcome your initiative and willingness to talk to your potential constituents. I will consider some appropriate times to chat.

Cheers,

Dikkii.

I wish that I hadn't used the term "carpetbagger". I'm not sure that it's widely used in Australia for parachute candidates.

What is a donkey vote? (Keeping your member "local" part four)

noreply@blogger.com (Dikkii) — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 20:36:13 PDT

Well the candidates are all in as far as both the House of Representatives and Senate are concerned. I will do a post in the future on voting for the Senate, but at the moment I'm looking closely at how to get a local candidate into the House of Reps.

And although this series looks at the electorate of Jagajaga specifically, I hope that those of you who live in the rest of Australia can get something out of it.

First of all, it's interesting, but I thought that there would be more candidates for Jagajaga. I thought maybe the CEC might field a candidate. And that maybe there might be an independent or two.

But it does appear that as far as Jagajaga goes, all the candidates are going to be representing political parties.

The draw for the spots is very important: Anecdotal evidence suggests that the all important donkey vote makes up a large portion of votes received. But what is a "donkey vote"? And how much impact does it actually have?

I would never in as million years suggest that you do this without good reason. A donkey vote is where you number down the ballot paper from top to bottom. It would stand to reason that this might be used by a number of voters: Disenfranchised or dissillusioned voters, ignorant voters, illiterate voters and possibly even a core of voters who wrongly see this as a protest vote.

But there is another core of voters who might use the donkey vote - these are those voters who actually do want to vote from top to bottom because that is the order of their preferences.

It should be noted that a lot of Australians erroneously refer to good old ordinary informal voting as "donkey voting". This is incorrect, but I'm happy for them to have that opinion as donkey voting arguably skews the vote. Informal votes, thankfully, do not.

I can tell you right now, a donkey vote won't be the order of mine in Jagajaga. Let's look at the candidates in order, starting from the all-important number one spot:

Joe Sgarlata, Family First

Truthfully? Family First, or "Fundies First" as most people I know call them, are extreme religious ECP* zealots for whom nothing short of total theocracy will be acceptable. The history of religious creeps getting together and ruining for office around the world is a long one as indicated in this document that a Facebook friend of mine sent to me today.

On the other hand, there are Christians around for whom religiousness isn't enough and these (normally religious moderates) will take the time to consider candidates in a balanced fashion. It's unlikely that religious moderates will consider extreme kooks such as Family First when casting their vote and this article from the Sydney Morning Herald, forwarded to me by the same Facebook friend appears to back me up on this.

Nevertheless, I'm quite surprised that Family First put up a candidate out here in Jagajaga. I would have expected them to focus their efforts on the bible belt of Victoria and not bother with a backwater like Jagajaga. The bible belt of Victoria, last I checked, seemed to be located in the outer eastern suburbs of Melbourne and the La Trobe Valley.

It is expected, although by no means assured, that this time around, FF will direct their preferences at the Liberal Party. This could be quite valuable for the local Libs candidates.

Being as disgusted as I am with Family First's platform will prevent me from bothering to ask Sgarlata about his community involvement in Jagajaga. In fact, I am grateful to the CEC for not fielding a candidate - it saves me from having to decide who will go last on my ballot paper.

Jenny Macklin, Australian Labor Party

I have discussed at length my efforts to date in finding out what Macklin has done for Jagajaga. While I await that, I should clarify my issues with the ALP's platform.

The leader of the ALP is the current PM, Julia Gillard. Gillard has seriously drawn some disrespect from me for pandering to the racial vote with her stand on boat-people, and the intent on getting the internet filter through will be the main breaker for me on an ALP vote.

Having said that, it's possible that Macklin has added to Jagajaga during the last term, so the jury is out on her at this point. Sadly, Labor voters will not care about this, and the fact that she is a federal minister might just increase her primary vote.

Joh Bauch, Liberal

Bauch has,I suspect, been parachuted in by the Libs to face what would be, for a Liberal candidate, a hostile electorate.

The Libs have really not presented well to date during this election campaign. The electorate is suspicious about WorkChoices coming back and to be honest, leader Tony Abbott hasn't done a great job of defusing this issue. They've also been silent on a few things.

And now a note to those thinking of voting Liberal on the basis of Labor's proposed internet filter. The Libs have been silent on this. One of the things that should be noted is that as a possible future government of Australia, it is in the interests of the Libs to see this measure get up. I very much doubt that the Libs would counteract a measure that gives them power over what Australian internet users see.

Anyway, if I find out that Bauch isn't local, I will be putting him very low down my preferences. Any political party that treats this constituency with that sort of contempt deserves to be paid back in kind.

Chris Kearney, Australian Greens

I have to be honest: I tend to sympathise with the Greens these days more than any of the other political parties.

In addition, as I outlined in my previous post, Kearney appears to have runs on the board as a local.

So far, the stand out candidate in this electorate.

Peter Harris, Secular Party of Australia

I am thrilled to bits that we will have a large-s Secularist running in Jagajaga. I don't think you need me to explain why I support their platform.

But I will be sending the same copy of my letter to Harris as I did to Bauch and Kearney. I will, as I'm sure you also understand, be considering any sort of non-localism unfavourably when it comes to considering my vote in this election.

Ideally, I'd like to put Harris at number one. But I won't be doing that if it turns out that he's also a skydiver.

So how would a donkey vote look in Jagajaga? It would look like this:

(1) Sgarlata
(2) Macklin
(3) Bauch
(4) Kearney
(5) Harris

And without having heard back from any of the candidates, I can assure you that right now, I do not recommend a donkey vote in Jagajaga.

I will start to look at the Senate soon.

*ECP = Evangelical/Charismatic/Pentecostal. Yes I know that the Anglican Church has their own internal definition of "evangelical" but could you use the one that the rest of the world uses for once, please?

Keeping your member "local" part three

noreply@blogger.com (Dikkii) — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 08:48:22 PDT

Folks, nominations have only just closed for all those who are running as candidates for the 2010 election. It's a little early to see exactly who are all the candidates are, but thanks to the ABC, we can already see who three of the candidates are in the electorate of Jagajaga.

Presently, it appears to be incumbent member Jenny Macklin, standing as a member of the ALP, Johannes Bauch (another Joh!) standing as a candidate for the Liberal Party and Chris Kearney who will represent the Greens.

I'll have to wait until the AEC fixes their webpage to catch all the candidates - no doubt that there'll be more - but until then, I thought it would be good to find out about Bauch and Kearney.

Incidentally, the letter I sent to Macklin nearly a week ago still hasn't been answered, yet. I'll give her staffers another week to answer it, then I'll follow it up.

I'll be honest: Bauch and Kearney don't stand a chance. Jagajaga is an ultra-safe Labor seat, and Jenny Macklin is a shoe-in. But still, even though in the grand scheme of things my vote is worth diddly-squat, if I'm going to rock up to the polling booth and cast my vote, I'd rather do it properly.

It's either that or vote informally, which I have to admit, I've done before.

Allow me to digress just for a moment: I have had a discussion with someone who thinks that the above sentence may be interpreted as advice to vote informally which is illegal in Australia. Obviously, only a complete idiot would interpret that sentence this way, but am I wrong? Do courts apply a "what would an unreasonable person with half his faculties missing think" test?

[/digression]

So, in keeping with that theme, I thought I'd take the opportunity to grill Bauch and Kearney about their community involvement. I strongly suspect that Bauch has been parachuted in, as his profile on the Liberal Party's website is devoid of detail, but Kearney on the other hand might be a little more interesting. Kearney appears to have runs on the board according to the Greens' website:

He's lived in Macleod for 32 years. OK, he's clearly local.
"Many local schools and sporting committees". I need specifics.
"Active" member of Macleod Tennis Club. "Active" could mean anything.
Member of Eltham & District Amateur Winemakers’ Guild. Very interesting.

Kearney is clearly a standout candidate at this point, assuming that I end up disregarding the candidates' policy platforms of their political parties (a lot of "P"s) which I won't.

I need to ask the candidates individually what they have done for Jagajaga. To keep this fair, I will only make it for the term elapsed since the last election in November 2007:

Dear Candidate,

I notice that you've declared as a candidate for Jagajaga. May I congratulate you on your preselection and wish you the best of luck for what will be, I'm sure, a rivetting contest in Jagajaga.

So that I can vote properly and not roll a dice or blindly follow a how-to-vote card like so many Australians do, I thought I’d ask the question: Is it possible for you to send me a summary of what your contributions to the community of Jagajaga have been during the period covering the last electoral term?

Please note – I am not looking for your achievements personally, nor am I looking for your qualifications of which I'm sure there are a few. I am simply looking for what it is that you’ve done to benefit the people of Jagajaga specifically during the current electoral term and nothing more.

Community stuff is what I'm after. For example I note that the current Member for Warringah is a member of a surf lifesaving club in his electorate and although he doesn’t get rostered on terribly often, he has a record of turning up to do his shifts. So stuff like that please.

Although the election is still a little while away, please be assured that I will consider every syllable of your response when I get to the polling booth in August.

Thank you in advance for your assistance.

Yours sincerely,

Dikkii.

I bet they'll be faster than Macklin at responding.

Quick follow up keeping your member "local"

noreply@blogger.com (Dikkii) — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 08:18:08 PDT

Just thought I'd follow up the previous post I made about local members.

Whilst I'm yet to receive a response to my letter which I only sent on Friday, I received two junk mail items in my letterbox tonight from my local member, the Hon. Jenny Macklin, MP.

The first one is a four page glossy leaflet filled with "news" articles and photos (lots) of Macklin titled "New Financial Year Update". It's subtitled "Jagajaga News | Jenny Macklin MP" so it's clearly been made to suit the electorate, however, the articles can be summarised as follows:

Letter to "Resident" that may also be read as an executive summary of the rest of the leaflet;
Details of the paid parental leave scheme (18 weeks at National Minimum wage, or $570 per week);
Details of quarterly Pension Supplement payments paid in advance up to $1,005.70 (singles) or $758.10 (each member of a couple) per six month period;
Small bit about rise in government pension rates from September last year of $100 (singles) or $74 (each member of a couple);
Small bit about one-off Carer Supplement of $600;
Small bit about contacting Macklin's office for free information kits;
Full page trumpeting tax cuts;
Small bit about 50% Child Care Rebate being available as a fortnightly option; and
Half page on health reforms and other health initiatives.

The other one is one sheet with details of Labor's Renewable Energy Fund on one side ($652.5 million) and an invitation to come and meet Macklin at Eltham Town Square on Saturday 31 July between 11.15 AM and 12.00 PM on the other.

Neither of these, it should be noted, contain any information on what she's done for Jagajaga specifically in the last electoral term.

Now I am curious.

Keeping your member "local"

noreply@blogger.com (Dikkii) — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 23:34:53 PDT

One of the downsides of not having a proper civics syllabus in our secondary schools is the fact that Australians know bugger all about their own system. This is a DISGRACE!!!

Our kids learn about civics the same as we did – bits and pieces of it are carved off and farmed out to subjects as unrelated as legal studies, economics and history. And really, it’s not good enough.

So I thought that I’d get something out there that has been bugging me ever since Julia Gillard became PM: Folks, (and I may be preaching to the converted here) we do not elect our Prime Minister.

The first I heard about this, was a few disgruntled souls voicing their opinion that Kevin Rudd’s rolling by Gillard was undemocratic as apparently, Australians elected Rudd as PM for this entire term of government.

As a reminder, again, we do not elect our prime ministers. PMs get the job by virtue of being the leader of the government, normally formed by a group of members of the House of Representatives who hold the majority of seats. When a political party, defined as a group of like-minded people campaigning under a single platform, form a majority in the House, they get to be the Government. Currently, this is the ALP. Their leader, who is elected by the party room, is the one who gets to be the PM.

Likewise, the group of members who don’t consent to join this first group get to be the Opposition. The dominant political party in this group is the Liberal Party, so their leader gets to be Opposition Leader. Funnily enough, I don’t hear a squeak from Australians about supposed democratically elected Opposition Leaders when they get rolled by their party room. Anyone remember when Malcolm Turnbull got rolled in favour of Tony Abbott? Even further back, what about then Brendan Nelson was done away with? Bueller? Bueller?

In other words, elected politicians replacing their leader is entirely democratic within the context of Australia's parliamentary system.

Adding to the noise on this, consider the following.

Julia Gillard as PM is entitled to live in the Lodge in Canberra, as well as Kirribilli House whenever she’s in Sydney. She has since said that she will not move into the Lodge (or Kirribilli for that matter) until she’s democratically elected by the Australian people as PM.

Let’s call this an election promise, because assuming that Labor wins and Gillard sticks to her word, she obviously may not move into the Lodge.

The media also likes to call this a battle between Gillard and Abbott, or as they like to call them, “Julia and Tony”.

(As an aside, I don’t think that a single news outlet in the States would ever, in a million years, have referred to the last presidential battle as being between “Barack and John”)

The simple fact is that punters are ill-educated in this country and they think that this is between two prime ministerial candidates. The best thing that the media can do is be a little more responsible about the news that they put out there.

In reality, as far as the lower house goes, the only electing that you do, is for your local member.

I live in a safe Labor seat and my local member is Jenny Macklin. If I were to vote for Macklin in this next election, I would be voting for Macklin and no one else. Certainly not Gillard, even though her policies would affect my decision making in this regard. I’m not even voting for Macklin in her role as Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, just for her primary role as the Member for Jagajaga.

So again, you vote for your local member. Obviously, this means that it does pay to know a little about the candidates. Nominations don’t close until the 29th of July, so at this stage, I only know for certain that Macklin will be running but even then, it’s possible that there may be a pre-selection battle in the local branch of the ALP that I don’t know about.

Your local member. What does this mean?

Your local member should represent your community. Oh sure, there are many Australians who just see a vote for their local member as a vote for who you think should be prime minister, but those people need to frigging well wake up to themselves and consider who is going to best represent them, because that’s who they’re voting for.

With that in mind, I thought I’d compose a letter to my local MP and ask her what she’s done for Jagajaga during the past electoral term. I may have potentially missed something, but I simply don’t know and I suspect that I’m not too different to a lot of Australians in this regard:

The Hon. Jenny Macklin, MHR
Member for Jagajaga
149 Burgundy Street
PO Box 316
Heidelberg VIC 3084

Dear Jenny,

I do hope that you don’t mind me addressing you as “Jenny” in this letter and not the usual “Minister” as your position befits. I am writing to you as my local member of parliament and not to you in your capacity as a minister of the Crown.

As I’m sure you would be aware, there is an election coming up and I am of the understanding that you will be re-nominating as a candidate for Jagajaga, if you haven’t done so already.

So that I can vote properly and not roll a dice or blindly follow a how-to-vote card like so many Australians do, I thought I’d ask the question: Is it possible for you to send me a summary of what your achievements have been in the last electoral term?

Please note – I am not looking for your achievements in your role as the Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, nor am I looking for achievements that the Rudd and Gillard governments have managed. I am simply looking for what it is that you’ve done to benefit the people of Jagajaga specifically during the current term and nothing more.

This list of achievements doesn’t need to be limited to stuff related to your parliamentary duties. For example I note that the Member for Warringah is a member of a surf lifesaving club in his electorate and although he doesn’t get rostered on terribly often, he has a record of turning up to do his shifts. So community stuff would be a pretty nice thing to have written in this list as well.

Although the election is still a little while away, please be assured that I will consider every syllable of your response when I get to the polling booth in August.

Thank you in advance for your assistance.

Yours sincerely,

Dikkii.

It would be really good if we all did the same thing with all our local members.