Sgt Hulka Uncut

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Archive for category Bad Ideas

Views On The Shape Of The World Differ

Jan 23

Posted by Sgt Hulka in Bad Ideas, Climate Change, Zombie Plans | Comments off

That’s the headline in the mainstream media when some complete nutbag wants to claim the earth is flat and they are heavily committed to providing “balance” to every conflict. In that environment, we get the current slide toward anti-science positions around the world, and the fact that the number of people questioning climate change is actually going up in stupider countries {cough, cough, USA, cough}.

So, we now are at the point where there is no way we are going to stave off the inevitable, and those on the side of empirical evidence and scientific theory probably ought to just focus on zombie plans, according to the latest UN Report on Climate Change.

Unfortunately, I don’t expect that effort to go much better. Sorensen has is spot on, I reckon . . .

Screen Shot 2014-01-22 at 8.01.32 am

Ever Feel Like A Mechanic . . .

Sep 20

Posted by Sgt Hulka in Bad Ideas, Economics, Evil Motherfuckers, International | Comments off

Reading the news this morning from the USA, “… House passes $40 billion cut to the food stamp program over the next 10 years”, and having seen the recent news from only a couple of days ago that was analysed across the business media across the political spectrum of perspectives, as represented in the following graph leads me to that position I am in occasionally with a client, where I end up saying, “See, now here’s your problem right here”

Productivity

Now, when I read that graph I arrived at what I believe to be an obvious conclusion. Clearly, however, many of the supposed experts who examined the same data arrived the conclusion: “Yes, that was pretty effective. Now what we want to do is make sure that the poor fuckers who have gained nothing for their input in increased productivity over the last 40 years now can’t even have the pittance that has been provided food assistance to keep them going when we heap out largess to the farming industry every few years. That’s the way you balance a budget.”

Really, at this point I don’t see how any other objective conclusion could be reached other than that this is one big natural experiment in psychohistory with the following thesis: How far can you push a (lower) middle class before they actually do start rioting in the streets and stringing up bankers they can find when they loot lower Manhattan?

I mean fucking honestly. There is no one I could find disputing the data in the graph above as I have been reading about the update in the research that I first read a year ago. Sure the WSJ puts quite a different spin on it than does The Nation, but neither dispute the facts. The middle class has lost any gains due to productivity for 40 years so that those supplying capital and those that run the major companies in the world can enrich themselves vastly. And, unless there is some significant outcry and political movement in the near future, the US may actually be at the point in society where they will let the poor and working poor starve (and freeze) to death. Fuck em, right? They won’t riot, they’ll be too hungry and tired from working their two fast food jobs. And fuck the new indentured class too – those students that thought they would get a leg up by borrowing to go to uni and instead found their aren’t any jobs in their field or anything similar, and they aren’t allowed to go bankrupt so they can just fight for a couple of those Walmart jobs themselves for 30 years to pay off their debt.

What will it take until someone says directly to the power, “See what you got here is a problem with your minimum wage. Unless you raise your minimum wage, you aren’t going to reduce the need for food stamps. And if you don’t raise that minimum to something like a living wage, your middle class (that drives 70% of GDP growth) is going to disappear.”

You might also want to consider the motivation and interest in continuing to participate in a civil society for folks in the middle and lower end of the spectrum. What would motivate someone to work a job at Taco Bell and a job at 7-11 for a grinding ability to just stay out of poverty their whole life as opposed to something illegal, when clearly those who are too big to jail would call it foolish.

Then consider how there always seems to be this exasperated search for motive when someone brings a shotgun into the office. I wonder if a society so steeped in inequity and so desperate to maintain access to guns doesn’t realise how close it is to an MO for a mass murder on a daily basis. Sure, you could say that all these people are random crazies, but then they aren’t covered for mental health care or even institutionalisation since Reagan’s time either. You are just getting used to how bad things have gotten for the majority, how disconnected ‘leaders’ are from subjects, and only lack a spark to set a lot on fire.

The Wash Up

Sep 13

Posted by Sgt Hulka in Bad Ideas, Good Ideas, Politics | Comments off

It would appear that the Sports Party candidate, that received 1/3 less votes than the Australian Democrats at 1900 votes, will take a seat in the Senate for Western Australia. He will take a seat along side other micro-party candidates in NSW (Liberal Democrats), VIC (Motoring Enthusiasts) and QLD (Palmer United). Travesty? Comic Opera? Conspiracy?

Hardly. And all I can say is let’s hope our Sports Party single-issue guy from WA and the motoring enthusiasts guy from VIC bring enough of the crazy to replace Barnaby in the Senate, as NSW has moved that nut job to the House. Given that there was no website available during the campaign, and the only profile of the guy Wayne Dropulich is confined to a couple of newspaper articles in June, we are only finding out about him now slowly, and you can see him only now starting to clam up and start thinking about how to craft the rest of his policies to his party’s best advantage as he is interviewed on The 730 Report.

Now, I am certainly not saying there is anything wrong with the system we have, even if it amounts to someone basically winning the lottery on occasion, and requires us to find out what a guy like Senator-elect Dropulich thinks on matters such as macroeconomics, science, tax, equity and social issues, etc. after he takes his seat. That problem should be corrected by the fourth estate doing their fucking jobs during an election and not after. But I digress. No, the real problem that needs to be addressed is not single-issue parties, which you would hope the public could look past themselves, but rather the corruption of the existing system that is going on.

In short, I wonder if I am more scared of what I do know about Clive or the Lib Dems, or what I don’t know about Wayne?

Clive is doing exactly what I moved to Australia 22 years ago to escape, the purchasing of elected positions directly with large amounts of advertising resulting in a large amount of free media by rich individuals. I am sure I need not educate you on the average cost of winning a senate seat in the USA, and you will see directly the direct corrupting influence of too much money on public politics. Beware of the Jabba the Rinehart Party next election cycle.

The other serious corruption that is likely going on which is the generation of single-issue ‘feeder’ parties that purposely then funnel their preferences by design into the main party with a broad range of positions that may not be acceptable to the people originally casting their vote for an issue such as smoking, fishing or even fluffy bunnies. The Lib Dems have been most recently exposed for this behaviour by Crikey, which I don’t think meets the spirit of the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918, and obviously the libertarian single-issue parties appear to tend toward less government involvement in their model to a point that risks anarchy and takeover by autocrats. But the sunlight he gets should sort out David Leyonhjelm of the Lib Dems, the same way it did Steven Fielding.

Fortunately, I suppose, we have a healthy and sound enough democracy to withstand either of these corrupting influences, or whatever Wayne brings to the senate.

The real issue, then, is that the press really aren’t doing their fucking jobs during and before an election. When a party is registered in any state, someone in the press should build a scorecard on them, and require it to be basically a full one, or stop saying their name at all in free media that they cover as news. The Australian Democrats got exactly ZERO free media in the last election cycle except (to my knowledge) one radio interview in SA. Not complaining, just a fact. However, if the press actually did its job in the lead up to an election, people would know that a party is only running on one issue, and isn’t serious (unless they decide they are) and then not cover them further. Similarly, they should cover the Australian Democrats in exactly the same way, and then not mention us again unless our message is compelling.

I understand being excluded from most coverage if our message is deemed crap and people no longer want to hear it, but I don’t accept being excluded because we won’t be part of the freak show, or spend enough money to justify coverage as news.

Now, on to a bit of analysis and a potential taste of the way forward. I have been having a look at the polling place level numbers on the primary vote here in WA to see what effect, if any, the effort expended in the campaign was effective. We did election activities (forums, distribution of materials and retail campaigning work) in Brand, Perth, Swan and Pearce electorates, and here are some graphs (c’mon you know you love graphs) below with some discussion below.

Perth:
Screen shot 2013-09-13 at 10.58.35 AM
Swan:
Screen shot 2013-09-13 at 10.58.55 AM
Pearce:
Screen shot 2013-09-13 at 10.59.16 AM
Brand:
Screen shot 2013-09-13 at 10.59.37 AM

Basically I see this:

•  Where we were able to have a person working polling places, we doubled our vote (or possibly even tripled it if you take into account the slant of the overall vote at the location.
• Where we were able to get signs and information up through the 5 week campaign we tripled out vote (basically just on name recognition.
• There are pockets of Australian Democrats support out there that we need to focus on as a critical mass to move us forward

So, all in all some encouraging findings that point to identifiable things we can do in the next three years to get us back to polling in the 3-4% range at a minimum next time round.

The Cruelty Index

Sep 4

Posted by Sgt Hulka in Bad Ideas, International, Politics | Comments off

Well, the campaign period is winding down, and I have to work during the week, so I can’t be out doing face to face campaigning during the day, so I have decided to keep putting out videos on issues of importance to me in the campaign. Today’s video it’s about asylum seekers.

I have been interested in this subject since the Howard government started making a big issue of asylum seekers arriving by boat and attempting to emotionally affect my vote by lying about things like children being thrown from boats. Back then, I used to write long e-mails to the opposition leader to no affect. Now I put my research on film.

All data in my graph (below) are drawn from statistics available from the Department of Immigration fact sheets and annual reports. Data on costings comes from the current budget, and government records of mandatory detention offshore under the Howard government. Column #2 is the total number of visas issued in the humanitarian intake portion of the program. Column #3 is the total number of migrants to Australia, or the current quota for the last two years. Column #4 is the total number of persons held in mandatory detention at year end, and Column #5 is the percentage of migrants as a portion of the population.

Screen shot 2013-09-04 at 12.50.36 PM

The values, when plotted, remain pretty stable and boring, except for the numbers held in mandatory detention, of which several key points must be made:

• It is not illegal to seek asylum in Australia, regardless of the manner by which you arrive
• It costs between 5 and 10 times (up to $500,000 per person) the amount to manage an asylum seeker offshore as it does onshore.
• Money wasted on treating people cruelly has exactly ZERO effect on the criminals that they pay to transport them to Australia. People smugglers are criminals, yes, but punishing their victims is not addressing the root cause.

Campaign Launch

Sep 1

Posted by Sgt Hulka in Bad Ideas, Economics, Good Ideas, Politics | Comments off

Well, Sgt Hulka officially launched the campaign in Perth this morning with a hearty eggs on toast breakfast while answering questions from interested constituents in East Perth, followed by developing a campaign launch video and then did some one on one campaigning and distribution of policy materials. Although, I still need someone to explain to me why launch typically occurs with just one week to go in the election cycle.

Its been a hard four weeks and my feet are killing me, but plenty yet to do in the last week, including maybe a couple more of these:

Campaign video 1

We need to have a chat about Syria

Aug 29

Posted by Sgt Hulka in Bad Ideas, Evil Motherfuckers, International, Other Topics, Politics | Comments off

Hey, I was downtown at the Senate Forum last night, but didn’t get to share my view on what action we should take in Syria to counter the abominable response by the worst candidate I have met for election to the Senate this cycle, Sue Lines (LAB).

See, the Labor government is now ready to rush to support military intervention in Syria, and Sue attempted to pull our heart strings with ‘I am not sure the children of Syria can wait for the UN or the Australian Parliament to deliberate’.

Once again, a government with no real answers is ready to dance to the tune of the US or Britain with respect to military strikes that will do more damage, be indiscriminate in their effect (surgical strikes, my arse). Like the Coalition before them, then aren’t willing to do the hard work for years, then rush to some populist travesty in order to prove they are doing something.

Now I care as much about human beings as the the next guy, but we didn’t get here in a couple months in Syria, lots of people are already dead or dying, and unfortunately many more are to come, regardless if military action is taken now or not. If you want to do something about genocide, you need to support a change in the definition of the term by the UN, and to put fast action triggers in the UN plan for addressing it when it raises its ugly head. Addressing issues like this with violence in the short term is virtually never effective, doesn’t really save that many lives in the overall scheme of things, and leads to problems of regime change and occupation (who do you support amongst the dozens of rebel groups? Sunni, Shia, Alawite, Druze, Christian, etc?). You can only grow a representative democracy, not impose it, and this is a country that has had more than 40 years of dictatorship, since Assad’s old man Hafez used to compete with the Shah over the title of Most Evil Motherfucker on the Planet.

You want real short term action. How about the NSA using its powers for good instead of evil for a change? How about the NSA publish all it knows on Syria in as transparent a fashion as possible, and keep at it worldwide through all its available propaganda organs? Frankly, that will scare the shit out of all of us, including the Assad regime if they know that they will get no safe harbour anywhere unless they immediately surrender to the International Court of Justice. We can also continue to press the General Council and the Security Council to take joint action as and when we can get it through. Prepare for humanitarian assistance to refugees in neighbouring countries, and do what we can to ameliorate the worst of the negative effects.

That’s reality, and what we should be pursuing.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not a complete pacifist wuss, and I have a long history here of appropriate use of the dogs of war, but we ain’t there yet.

Today’s conversation

Aug 29

Posted by Sgt Hulka in Bad Ideas, Economics, Good Ideas, International, Science | Comments off

The following is the issue of the day as requested by email. I think it is indicative of how to provide cruelty free leadership toward Sustainable Prosperity. I will publish more of these as they come up.

Hi Anthea -

Thanks for voicing your concerns. I believe they are fully addressed in well established policy on the issue, as attached. However, I will elaborate for you briefly so I can demonstrate to you that I understand the issue, AND how to fix the problems you identified. Live export of animals must be eliminated with a preference for the shipment of frozen meat products (including halal conforming meat). Further, we need to address conformance to acceptable behaviour through random audit of Australian meat processors, and insure they have systems in place to meet those requirements. Those that demonstrably cannot or will not conform with be closed. Those that can meet requirements will thrive with new business in processing additional frozen meat for export.

With respect to battery farms, and any other animal production activity, I support the development of an independent and scientifically overseen standards for labelling of “free range”, “organic” and other terms that are misleadingly used in advertising. See the National Carbon Offset Standard for an example of what works in this type of area.

Long term, it would be nice if we could all be vegetarians, but that isn’t going to happen, not even to me. However, I have a long history as a problem solver, including the invention of pollution control devices and development of systems of controls to minimise environmental, safety and health risk in industry, and for the public. Please check out my profile if you want to know more. I and my company practice what we preach, as the first voluntarily carbon neutral consulting firm in the country, we have been carbon emission neutral since 2008. We support communities where we live through things like Wakakirri.

I truly believe I will be the most competent and effective representative you could elect this election, and ask for your support.

Regards,
William Thiel, Australian Democrats Candidate for Senate (WA)
william.thiel@australian-democrats.org.au

EA_CPEngineer_Member_SPOT

NPER 2043071

australian-democrats-logo-2013

On 29/08/2013, at 6:25 AM, Anthea wrote:

Hello fellow Australian,

I am writing to enquire about your policy towards Animal Welfare. I hope if successful your party will give serious consideration to this problem. I am a very serious activist in this area, and disgusted how our poor animals are treated, not only in the live export practice but also in the farming area.

I have watched many videos of how our poor sheep, cattle, hens and pigs are treated. Recently it has been uncovered how sows are forced to lay down permanently to feed piglets, whilst bolted in place, this is happening at a piggery in NSW. This and all the other cruel practices should be abolished and free range farming enforced as in New Zealand and other countries. We are supposed to be a first world country but have practices that not even third world countries allow. Not very Australia.

Today In Schadenfreude

Aug 28

Posted by Sgt Hulka in Bad Ideas, Science | Comments off

Apparently, even the Flying Spaghetti Monster has a sick sense of humour.

How to look like the reasonable candidate

Aug 27

Posted by Sgt Hulka in Bad Ideas, Economics, Good Ideas, Politics, Science | Comments off

Today’s observations from a campaigning novice come from my participation last night in a Senate candidates forum in the northern suburb of Perth. When trying to attract votes of engaged community members there are strategies that I think are obvious winners and losers, including:

Winners:
• Get some input on your uniform. If, like me, you have virtually no fashion sense and generally do not look in a mirror before exiting the house, check with someone who does. As mom used to say, it’s easy to be underdressed, but difficult to be over dressed.
• If you get 10 minutes to talk, use 5 and hand back the rest. I tend to over-explain things, especially when they are complicated issues, so trying extra hard to be concise has become very important to me.
• Try to talk last. This one has been very useful to learn. If you steer it such that you speak last, you can say in relation to the filibusters that have come before you, “I agree with X, but . . .” and save some time, as well as come off sane in relation to a point that might be right minded, but wrongly explained or too extreme.
• Study up ahead of time, but don’t use notes. I didn’t get to 95% of what I knew from my preparations, but referring to notes would have been tedious.

Losers:
• Overwhelm. For instance, both Wikileaks candidates showed up at the forum, as did 3 or 4 of their supporters, all in uniform (the black Wikileaks hoodies). Comes off like a gang or less than savoury political party in a room of maybe 30 audience members.
• Avoid polemic, and don’t even use the word, even if you know what it means (I’m looking right at you Socialists)
• Have one idea or policy. I mean honestly, some of these single issue parties really do give the elections for the Senate a carnival feel. As an environmental engineer, I surely do recognise the problems with overpopulation and resource use
• Filibuster. Yes Wikileaks, each party does get 10 minutes to present their case, but not 12 minutes, and not 12 minutes per member of the party at the meeting.
• Present your favourite conspiracy theory. Always entertaining, and I do love me a good one over the water cooler, but probably not a real good idea in front of a public you have not met before, with no evidence, and presented very emphatically (see polemic above)
• Don’t show up. The Coalition, Labor and the single owner Katter and Palmer parties didn’t even send a person along. Clearly their messages are better delivered through paid advertising and they need not actually engage with small groups of the public organised locally.

Given my accent and proclivity to drop the odd topical F-bomb when I get going, if you would have told me that I would come off as the reasonable, thoughtful alternative out of a group of 8 minor parties (including the Greens), I would have paid about 5:1.

So, this is where we have come to . . .

Jun 14

Posted by Sgt Hulka in Bad Ideas, Politics | 1 Comment

. . . when a DJ on a local station in Perth can ask, and then press the question, to the Prime Minister of Australia, about whether her partner is gay.

The question would certainly be based on no more evidence than the fact that Tim Matheson is a hair dresser, and that he is “living in sin” with the Prime Minister rather than their being married. Plus, he is a quiet reserved guy that certainly won’t defend himself, given how much he is likely to care for his partner and her career. Makes me wonder.

See, back when I was in the US Army, and came to realise thousands of miles from my birthplace, in a setting selected at random based on a date, that I was actually a shitload more intelligent than some of the people giving me orders, a wise sergeant said to me, “Son, I know he’s a douchebag, but you are saluting the uniform and the rank, if not the man.”

And that is really the point is it not, that by going there, a man who has no respect for a woman, or a prime minister because of her party affiliation (or both, who knows), is willing to attack her like that in public because he isn’t even willing to show respect for the office. He’s a dick with a microphone, and without a shred of proof is willing to smear with rumour a hard working woman and her defenceless partner. What a cunt.

I suppose then that means that a man I believe to be my intellectual inferior, with demonstrably bad views on government policy, culture, ethics and theology could be questioned as such when he is prime minister. Shouldn’t I, based on the factual evidence available, be able to ask Tony Abbot, and then press him on the matter, “Tony, when were you first anally penetrated by one of the priests that you have been in the care and custody of many times in your young life? No, come on Tony, we all know it happened, just based on statistical evidence, and let’s face it, you act like a man who has been fucked in the arse before, so tell me, when was the first time?”

I’d be willing to take the jab that I would expect coming if I had the opportunity to do ask Tony that in public, but you know what, I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t do it out of resect for the office he held and the fact that he has worked his whole life in a career I hate, but none the less respect someone’s need to do it, and I am not a publicity seeking radio whore in a small market on a small station with a very small mind.

PS: in tagging this article, 6PR’s dickhead doesn’t even get a “evil motherfucker” because he isn’t smart enough to qualify.