Search the Web & Kaixin (Happy Heart)
Monday, August 22, 2011
Sunday, August 21, 2011
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Wheat Cockies Lament (still going strong)
I sit on my verandah, surveying the acres,
and wonder aloud,
where are the fakirs?
To whom can I sell,
all of my wheat now?
Which markets will takethe fruit of my plough?
They say it was needed,
it wasn’t a sin.
But I sit back and wonderat their hubris and grins.
Three hundred million,
that’s a mighty big whack.
It’d keep me still farm’ntill the bank got it back.
And the 600,000 they paid to that jerk?
You know …,
they told me it was one of the perks?
Straight out of my pocket.
From the sweat of my brow.
To a white collar executive.Where’s that bastard now?
A single desk trading was the answer they said.
We’d be so competitive,
on the world’s stage we’d tread.
Well, we’re bloody well there now,
Caught! do’in the deals,
besmirching the sweat from the wheat farmer’s brow.
So you Nationals and Liberals and Barnaby Joyce,
come out of y’ bunker
and give us a voice.
Stop grin’n, duck shovin’ and run’n around,
pretending you know nothing,
Not you, Joyce, we know your sound.
Sometimes your hard up for a rhyme you cant find,
So you grab any name,
even though it’s unkind.
I don’t give a bugger, I couldn’t care less,
what you bastards are up to;
how you clear up this mess.
So get on with it now. Try show some pride
for the honest wheat farmer,
you know, the one on whose back you bastards all ride.
and wonder aloud,
where are the fakirs?
To whom can I sell,
all of my wheat now?
Which markets will takethe fruit of my plough?
They say it was needed,
it wasn’t a sin.
But I sit back and wonderat their hubris and grins.
Three hundred million,
that’s a mighty big whack.
It’d keep me still farm’ntill the bank got it back.
And the 600,000 they paid to that jerk?
You know …,
they told me it was one of the perks?
Straight out of my pocket.
From the sweat of my brow.
To a white collar executive.Where’s that bastard now?
A single desk trading was the answer they said.
We’d be so competitive,
on the world’s stage we’d tread.
Well, we’re bloody well there now,
Caught! do’in the deals,
besmirching the sweat from the wheat farmer’s brow.
So you Nationals and Liberals and Barnaby Joyce,
come out of y’ bunker
and give us a voice.
Stop grin’n, duck shovin’ and run’n around,
pretending you know nothing,
Not you, Joyce, we know your sound.
Sometimes your hard up for a rhyme you cant find,
So you grab any name,
even though it’s unkind.
I don’t give a bugger, I couldn’t care less,
what you bastards are up to;
how you clear up this mess.
So get on with it now. Try show some pride
for the honest wheat farmer,
you know, the one on whose back you bastards all ride.
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Murray turns to Slurry – our grandchildren’s legacy
How can a once mighty river be reduced to an environmental nightmare?
The original inhabitants of this island managed to look after it for 50,000 years and it was in pristine condition when the British arrived to nick the joint by force of arms and a legal fiction found in the Blackstone Chronicles.
Then it has taken just over 200 years to turn the mouth of the river into slurry.
The theft of Australia was legally justified on the basis that there was no-one wandering around, terra nullius. That was a legal fiction, a construct of the mind. A way of seeing things that justified an action that was, ironically, against the very basis of Britain’s Common Law, property. A further irony is that many of those first reluctant colonialists had been sent to Botany Bay for the theft of a ridiculously small amount of property, the Common Law finding such theft so morally repugnant. Yet they were co-opted into the grand larceny of a continent. It is interesting that the legal fiction was upheld by the courts in Australia until 1993 when the Mabo decision in the High Court said, effectively, ‘oh, alright, fair cop, we nicked it, but we are not giving it back because the other great pillar of the common law is that possession is nine tenths of it.’
Possession: OED (On-Line): noun 1 the state of possessing something. 2 a thing owned or possessed. 3 the state of being possessed by a demon, emotion, etc. 4 (in sport) temporary control of the ball by a player or team.
The original owners of Australia would identify with 3. ‘the state of being possessed by a demon …’
1 & 2, the state of possessing something, a thing owned. The British arrived, took possession of a tiny bit of it and using a legal fiction they magically used that possession to own all of it, to gain legal title (note, it was legal title under British law not the Aboriginal Law, the only smoking ceremony the British understood emanated from the barrel of a gun). The concept of property is ridiculous if you think about it. That an ephemeral organism with a really, really short lifespan can ‘own’ something that has a lifespan measured in millions of years, the planet. That a really, really small organism can ‘own’ a really, really big thing, the planet.
Still, when you believe in ghosts and believe that a ghost gave you dominion over the planet, well, I suppose you will believe anything…… and the British laughed at the Aboriginal Dreamtime?
I think the Aboriginal Peoples had it right, the land owned them. They were of the environment, not separate from it. They were born, lived and died leaving a very light footprint.
Enter the British and ‘possession’, which boils down to, “We own it and we can do what we bloody well like with it.”
The Common law recognises a whole bundle of rights vested in the notion of property. What the Common law did not do is demand any notion of custodianship in return. The rights were all one way, to exclude others, to be able to lay waste if so desired. It took Legislative initiative to wrest such absolute control from the Common law.
Rachel Carson kicked the whole environmental thing off in the 1960’s following ‘Fallen Spring’. People started to become aware that the environment could not be trashed indefinitely, that there was a tipping point.
For nearly 200 years we had calculated the price of bounty wrested from the land based on an economic model that did not include the ‘externality’ of environmental degradation. It was another flawed human construct. If you can’t see it then you don’t have to include it in the price. Economists and accountants really struggle with the concepts of price and value.
The hidden cost just kept adding up and up.
Now, ‘suddenly’, it is a big problem we have to solve. It is a huge cost we have to pay as a society. The Murray River has been allocated 10 Billion dollars. That’s a lot of money! It is almost a house in Zimbabwe (an economy the West seems to be trying to emulate at the moment).
The trouble is, it was economists who calculated the 10 billion dollar price tag, yet it was economists who got us into this mess in the first place. Then the price was ‘sanitised’ by politicians who hate to be the bearers of bad news, which is not good for their ‘Superannuation’ fund.
What is the true cost of ignoring environmental degradation as a function of price? I fear our grandchildren will find out, if not our children. How moral is that?
I once heard an economist justify ignoring environmental degradation as an externality on the basis that mankind keeps on coming up with solutions when they need them, and they will this time. Let’s hope so.
The Aboriginal dreamtime spirits must be laughing at us.
The original inhabitants of this island managed to look after it for 50,000 years and it was in pristine condition when the British arrived to nick the joint by force of arms and a legal fiction found in the Blackstone Chronicles.
Then it has taken just over 200 years to turn the mouth of the river into slurry.
The theft of Australia was legally justified on the basis that there was no-one wandering around, terra nullius. That was a legal fiction, a construct of the mind. A way of seeing things that justified an action that was, ironically, against the very basis of Britain’s Common Law, property. A further irony is that many of those first reluctant colonialists had been sent to Botany Bay for the theft of a ridiculously small amount of property, the Common Law finding such theft so morally repugnant. Yet they were co-opted into the grand larceny of a continent. It is interesting that the legal fiction was upheld by the courts in Australia until 1993 when the Mabo decision in the High Court said, effectively, ‘oh, alright, fair cop, we nicked it, but we are not giving it back because the other great pillar of the common law is that possession is nine tenths of it.’
Possession: OED (On-Line): noun 1 the state of possessing something. 2 a thing owned or possessed. 3 the state of being possessed by a demon, emotion, etc. 4 (in sport) temporary control of the ball by a player or team.
The original owners of Australia would identify with 3. ‘the state of being possessed by a demon …’
1 & 2, the state of possessing something, a thing owned. The British arrived, took possession of a tiny bit of it and using a legal fiction they magically used that possession to own all of it, to gain legal title (note, it was legal title under British law not the Aboriginal Law, the only smoking ceremony the British understood emanated from the barrel of a gun). The concept of property is ridiculous if you think about it. That an ephemeral organism with a really, really short lifespan can ‘own’ something that has a lifespan measured in millions of years, the planet. That a really, really small organism can ‘own’ a really, really big thing, the planet.
Still, when you believe in ghosts and believe that a ghost gave you dominion over the planet, well, I suppose you will believe anything…… and the British laughed at the Aboriginal Dreamtime?
I think the Aboriginal Peoples had it right, the land owned them. They were of the environment, not separate from it. They were born, lived and died leaving a very light footprint.
Enter the British and ‘possession’, which boils down to, “We own it and we can do what we bloody well like with it.”
The Common law recognises a whole bundle of rights vested in the notion of property. What the Common law did not do is demand any notion of custodianship in return. The rights were all one way, to exclude others, to be able to lay waste if so desired. It took Legislative initiative to wrest such absolute control from the Common law.
Rachel Carson kicked the whole environmental thing off in the 1960’s following ‘Fallen Spring’. People started to become aware that the environment could not be trashed indefinitely, that there was a tipping point.
For nearly 200 years we had calculated the price of bounty wrested from the land based on an economic model that did not include the ‘externality’ of environmental degradation. It was another flawed human construct. If you can’t see it then you don’t have to include it in the price. Economists and accountants really struggle with the concepts of price and value.
The hidden cost just kept adding up and up.
Now, ‘suddenly’, it is a big problem we have to solve. It is a huge cost we have to pay as a society. The Murray River has been allocated 10 Billion dollars. That’s a lot of money! It is almost a house in Zimbabwe (an economy the West seems to be trying to emulate at the moment).
The trouble is, it was economists who calculated the 10 billion dollar price tag, yet it was economists who got us into this mess in the first place. Then the price was ‘sanitised’ by politicians who hate to be the bearers of bad news, which is not good for their ‘Superannuation’ fund.
What is the true cost of ignoring environmental degradation as a function of price? I fear our grandchildren will find out, if not our children. How moral is that?
I once heard an economist justify ignoring environmental degradation as an externality on the basis that mankind keeps on coming up with solutions when they need them, and they will this time. Let’s hope so.
The Aboriginal dreamtime spirits must be laughing at us.
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