Category: Rant

On Politics
by Kimliatach

I have participated in two elections this year. I voted remain in the UK and Green in the Australian federal election for both houses. Both of those elections were close and extremely disappointing. Obviously the AU Greens were never in with a shot at many more seats in the house of reps but the LibLab battle was a close one. The depths of my dissapointment in the Australian electorate cannot be overstated. Yet another three to four years of corrupt, visionless, selfinterested nincompoops in charge.

As for Brexit… Well lets just say that I’m glad my UK passport is via Scottish heritage. UK Labor continues to shoot themselves in the foot and seems willing to spend decades in opposition rather than, you know, listen to their constituents and represent some progressive democratic socialism.

I obviously cannot vote in the US election.

Earlier in the year, back during the primaries I watched with bated breath as Clinton and Sanders battled it out. Even as a Clinton Candidacy became a forgone conclusion I predicted vocally that if it became Clinton V Trump, Clinton would lose.

I really, really hope I was wrong.

I backed Bernie and I think it is one of the great tragedies of modern politics that thanks at least in part to malfeasance within the DNC we didn’t get to see Sanders actually wipe the floor with Trump.

Depending on where you look the US presidential election looks either a sure thing for Clinton or scary close.

hillary-clinton-evil-woman-3-777x437

Until recently I  honestly wasn’t sure who the worst candidate was. It is very much a Beast vs Smiler affair and there was not an immediately apparent least worst option for me. Don’t get me wrong, I am saying that I don’t like either of them with fairly equal vehemence. Clinton is a neolib a warmonger and firmly represents the status quo, she has deep social and fiscal ties with the fossil fuel industry and the banksters. She will perpetuate some of the worst elements of American foreign policy through the next decade. Worst of all I have absolutely zero confidence in her willingness to act decisively on climate change, which is now beyond urgent.

nostradumpus

Trump though, Trump is a monster. He has clearly outed himself as the worst option. He is perceived as an outsider candidate, to paraphrase Michael Moore, he is the Molotov the poor, disillusioned and disenfranchised can lob into the parliaments that have failed them. He will of course, if elected, fail them in new, interesting and spectacular fashion. The fact that he was and is even given the dignity of attention represents a failure of the media globally. I mean this is a man who managed to bankrupt a casino, A Casino! That shouldn’t even be possible. He should be treated like the repugnant prolapsed sphincter that he is and forgotten.

The status quo is not good enough, but it is nowhere near as bad as a Trump presidency could be for everyone on earth.

 

The link that got me started:

“Also, the large number of people that was unable to interpret our tool as anything but an effort to support or oppose a political candidate — and that was true for both liberals and conservatives — speaks to me about an ineffective public sphere. And that’s something I think we should all be concerned about. This polarization is not just a cliché. It is a crippling societal condition that is expressed in the inability of people to see any merit, or any point, in opposing views. That’s a dangerous, and chronic, institutional disease that is expressed also in the inability of people to criticize their own candidates, because they fear being confused with someone their peers will interpret as a supporter of the opposing candidate. If you cannot see any merit in the candidate you oppose, even in one or two of the many points that have been made, you may have it.”

https://medium.com/@cesifoti/what-i-learned-from-visualizing-hillary-clintons-leaked-emails-d13a0908e05e#.b70rr743z

Discussing this tool: https://clinton.media.mit.edu

 

 

 

Racing Extinction
by Kimliatach

Watched ‘Racing Extinction‘ this evening.

It is a confronting and heart wrenching film. It is good for all that. Watch it.

Stylistically I had some issues with it, but I honestly don’t think I am the target audience. I’ve studied ecology and I know just how far up the proverbial creek we are if the Phytoplankton food chain collapses. That this threat is a real profound and present danger is something I and millions upon millions of others around the world have been doing our best to ignore for decades. I can’t ignore it anymore.

The pressure is on I am feeling a serious need to alter parts of my lifestyle and even more seriously parts of my pedagogy. I know about meat and methane and I am only now trying to cut our household consumption significantly. I know about flights and transport and as I have mentioned previously I plan to physically offset our adventures by planting and caring for the appropriate quantity of trees. I don’t think I can continue to sugar coat, brush off or play down the seriousness of climate change to school children. I am not saying here that I have in any way ever really sugar coated it. I’ve shown whole grades of year six students significant portions of  ‘There is no tomorrow‘ for goodness sake. Just that I have always been acutely aware that I don’t want to be sending little zealous climate nazis home to hassle their parents saying ‘Mr Lang says climate change is going to end the world’. What I am going to say instead I am putting some thought into because it can’t just be an impassioned rant. I want to communicate some of the urgency just how dangerous the game we have been playing is. But I do not want to give children nightmares or foster powerlessness, apathy and indifference.

 

The election is called and the prime minister didn’t even mention climate in his announcement speech.

Vote Compass is up.

I maintain that Vote compass should be as much a part of the Australian democratic tradition as the sausage sizzle. The latter of which I will miss by voting postal this year. This also marks only 7 days left to register to vote.

 Vote Compass 2016No surprises in my results.

Sorry Omid
by Kimliatach

 

Flame-monk-stencil

Single layer burning monk stencil 2007. Flood damaged print.

 

I made a mistake.

When Kevin Rudd returned during the 2013 election campaign and announced the PNG deal including the use of Manus Island I regret to say I thought the plan had merit. I argued the point with friends and family members and I have to my shame since been proven categorically wrong. I thought negating the ‘Stop the Boats’ rhetoric by redirecting boat arrivals might remove the awful political football that refugees have become in Australia from the game. My caveat was that redirections had to be to a relatively safe if not developed neighbor and a sharp increase in our humanitarian intake is required as well. Obviously none of this was not to be. Manus was plagued with problems from the start and Nauru remained a monstrosity from its reopening in 2012. Mr. Abbot was elected and Operation Sovereign Borders declared all on water maters classified. Whether or not the boats continue to come will eventually come out in the now inevitable royal commission some day. But for for those like Omid, declared a legitimate refugee but left to rot and go insane in a tropical goal staffed by private contractors and cut off from the world. There is no adequate recompense our nation can offer. But for goodness sake take up New Zealand’s generous offer and let them go.

File:BoatArrivals.gif

I don’t think there is an easy answer to Australia’s political issue with refugees. For a start the argument is rarely based in facts. Few Australians who are not passionate about one side of the argument even seem to know the basics.  We should be taking more people, many more. We are going to have to when climate affected island nations come knocking and it pays to be prepared. There will be no turning them away, they will have nowhere else to go. The fact that we are not doing our part to keep the earth under 1.5ºC of warming will only add to our burden then. The question in the mean time is how many can we take in, support, educate and provide accommodation to? We accepted over twenty five thousand refugees direct from UN camps last year. I personally don’t think it is unreasonable to say we could take twice that, fifty thousand desperate people. Still only a tiny fraction of one percent of our population, a drop in the ocean of present refugees.

What do we do with the people who arrive after that arbitrary number is reached? How much infrastructure can we invest in making these people safe here. Am I asking it backwards? Should we instead be asking what wouldn’t we give to make these people safe. Is there a maximum that our society can absorb without risking creating ghettos and escalating racial tensions? How much help can we offer these strangers before the hypocrisy of how we already treat the poor and dispossessed in Australia causes a social meltdown or a fascist counter movement?

How do we convince people that paying a smuggler and risking a treacherous sea voyage is a bad idea? Until we have an answer to that the political right is going to keep winning this argument and beating the left with prospect of yet more deaths at sea. Until an alternative vision is articulated with clarity the LNP will retain power and the camps will remain open. Clearly shame, christian values or even simple economics are not going to convince the LNP that a humanitarian approach has merit. Only by making a convincing case for an ethical and sustainable humanitarian response is there any chance of removing this issue from the political playing field altogether.

Would Australian funded UN camps in Indonesia be enough? Would offering low cost flights to an onshore processing centre?  I don’t know.

I do know that system as it stands is abominable.

I’m sorry Omid.

I am sorry our government are such spineless jobsworth wankers. I am sorry that our press has used your fate and that of those like you as a bogeyman for illiterate bogans and as a stick for beating politicians they don’t like.

I am sorry I haven’t campaigned harder for the release of all detainees. Online petitions and the occasional rally that was convenient for me to attend don’t amount to much. I’ll be contacting my local National MP in person if possible for all the good it will do.

Peace

 

 

 

 

Blue Oysters
by Kimliatach

Daily

Lots of driving, a tip run which yielded a much more limited supply of timber than hoped and some more unsatisfactory carpentry. I didn’t finish the second sawhorse today. Borrowed an old saw and wood plane from the farm today hoping to achieve cleaner cuts. Instead although finer the saw cannot cut straight and the wood plane needs new handles, disassembly and sharpening before it can be used, reverted to my own tools and am facing the same assembly stability issues as on the first, at least I am not having to do it squatting on concrete though.

We are eyeing up the creation of a fence dividing the front from the back yard so we can allow our hens to free range more and stop our youngest F from bolting straight out the front to rattle the gate whenever he has his boots on. The hen house needs a better handle for moving it because at present the mover has to be very close to its wall which is awkward. The dump has again furnished me with the timber required for this modification. I find the tip a terribly depressing place it is all so wasteful, the wall of green waste which could be enriching the local parched soils, the mountain of mixed metals and the disgusting fly blown scree of plastic is disgusting and filthy in more ways than one.

Finished ‘Career of Evil‘ while taking a crowbar to palettes and crates at the tip. It stumped me in the end as with the others. I was about half way though by the time I got around to googling Blue Oyster Cult lyrics from which are used in every chapter heading and elsewhere throughout the book. I was half convinced they were fictional as if I have heard before I have no recollection of it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdXfkkyI1nQ

Politic

Immediately began a book which has been on my need to listen list for months now ‘This Changes Everything‘ Naomi Klein. It is of course infuriating but very, very good. I downloaded it after reading this excerpt last year and have postponed or as she says ‘looked away’ since then.  I am self assessing my own political complacency in recent years already so we are of to a worthy start only an hour or two in.

Noticed that one of my former teachers and generally cool person Dr. Kristen Lyons has recently announced as The Greens federal candidate for Moreton. An area I have lived in repeatedly, getting the candidacy seems unlikely at this point but not impossible. As always I will be encouraging everyone I can in both left and right politics give their first preference to the greens or minor parties as I don’t believe either of the majors deserve the $2.50 in campaign finance a first preference is worth to them.

Creative

Began colouring the castle last night a little preemptively as the ink layer needs another pass. But it was cathardic to see such progress on a card that has taken such a long time already. Update picture soon.

Links

This lovely thing

Ma’agalim – Jane Bordeaux from Uri Lotan on Vimeo.

Thanks to this for reminding me that I haven’t touched my colouring project in a week or more.

 

Go home Hut. You are drunk.

A photo posted by @liatach on

Mass
by Kimliatach

Attended my first mass today. Church is church, they sang some songs, children fidgeted and ritual cannibalism was practiced.

What struck me though, was why is it that Australian churches are so ugly?

Maybe I’ve been listening to too much De Botton but the construction and layout of a space is very important to how we treat it and how we feel within it. Australian churches are from my admittedly limited experience overwhelmingly ugly.  Resembling as they so often do, municipal amenities buildings with ‘modern’ pipe framed steeples, or fiberboard 70’s spaceships dropped from considerable height. I have been in a generous estimate maybe fifteen Australian churches in my life and maybe to or three times that many elsewhere in the world. Perhaps my visits have not been characteristic but they are my anecdotal experience.

The Church I was in today is a lovely red brick classical nave with white crenelated turrets and a vaulted wooden ceiling. But… everything within it was shabby, kitch and often fake. Clearly the church has in the past had a wealthy and active congregation. These days however the impression is of hastily completed repairs and half measures, dodgy AC units sitting out of plumb on walls whose paint is marred by the cord marks and paint chips left by the removal of the previous and the the sagging conduit lazily tacked on to provide power. The tacky and now probably half a century old electric votive candle stand. The mishmash of Christ imagery. Here a screen printed British medieval madonna and child on a one piece vac formed plastic frame and canvas. There are poorly painted three quarter scale plaster of Christ offering benediction luridly painted but for his alabaster skin in a manner that recalls the recreation of how the Greek classical sculptures may have looked. The signs of the cross hung at uneven spacing around the hall. The whole set dish cast in waxy green/grey resin. All of left me kind of saddened at the state the building has been allowed to wallow into. Where is the glory?

true-colors-of-greek-statues-peplos-kore

 

It is not fair to compare the local church with far more impressive European equivalents many centuries older than the local but I still found the whole experience underwhelming. Compounded no doubt by having to repeatedly shush impatient and bored seven year olds around me.

I am looking forward to some days back in the secular system in term two. As grateful as I am for the work I’ve had and the days I’ve already locked in at the catholic for next term. I am very clear that religious education is not my home.

Creative

A reminder that the game I am working on as well as some others from the mind of Jack will be available for playtesting this weekend at this event. 

No creative output so far today other than designing a new art activity off the cuff in class this morning.  The plan called for colouring pre-printed .jpg artifact ridden grey mandalas during religion time. I had students draw their own by tracing around the edges of interesting shaped objects within the classroom in black marker to make mostly radially symmetrical patterns which they then coloured in. Some pretty results though I didn’t think to take photos unfortunately.

 

 

Juvenile #truebug with great #pareidolia on its back. 10mm #hermiptera #insect #macro

A photo posted by @liatach on

Crafp
by Kimliatach

The school Easter hat parade was this morning. Some lovely homemade entries but ‘crafp’ was as ever with these things a dominant feature. store bought disposable plastic hats with glitter covered Styrofoam eggs, plastic paper shreddings and synthetic and plastic puff ball chickens abounded.

The ‘crafp’ life cycle:

CRAFP lifecycle

It has crept into art curriculums nation wide. Insidious easily assembleable craft with no skill development, no creativity, no artistic merit, just disposable shiny busywork. It is particularly prevalent in activities which require parental involvement because it is often sold directly to parents as an easy way of meeting the expectation of involvement.

Going to have to face the music and make some art tomorrow. Heading to bed early tonight.

Link

The only April 1st post that caused me to do a double take this year. 

Sleep and chicken politics
by Kimliatach

A week of very bad bedtimes. Weening from the bottle compounded by sleep training and long and busy days have left both of the parents in this house worn down.

Depressing political maneuvers abound today. Federal regulation of free range eggs at categorical failure in all but one respect. Egg cartons must now display stocking density on the pack. 10000 hens in 1ha shed with a tiny caged patio they can choose to visit will continue to be called ‘free range’ in many states and will override the better requirements some states had maintained. I even went so far as to call the relevant ministers office yesterday,  for all that it accomplished. Despite now having hens it will be some time before they adjust and even at peak laying we will still need to supplement with purchased eggs. It is disheartening when the big supermarkets can essentially write their own regulations. 

That is hardly the worst thing proposed today but I don’t have the energy to really let rip on the monumental idiocy of this proposal.

I accomplished nothing last night and am not long for bed this evening looking forward to painting just as I am able. N has been making progress in the garden and restoring an antique table from degraded enamel whitewash. My birdbath is a failure until the interior of the dish is enameled the metal oxidises so quickly the water turns to a nasty orange soup in the course of the day. Going to start the sawhorse project this weekend.

NBN RAGE
by Kimliatach

I’ve said it before and I will say it again, the destruction of Australia’s National Broadband Network is corruption and incompetence on an unbelievable scale. One hundred Billion dollars over the next fifty years to pay for a degraded copper network twenty years overdue for retirement is a travesty. Combined with the bill for building the substandard and already obsolete MTM network. The whole project has been a monumental failure for all but the few who were lucky enough to get fiber from a skilled contractor while the roll out continued. If the next non coalition government don’t commission an inquiry to bring the people responsible to face the consequences of their decisions I’ll be very disappointed. Not that this should in any way be confused for me having genuine hope for this outcome being met. Why, just today I was linked evidence of our government’s interminable maleficence on climate action and even the concrete expectation of charges of criminal negligence for pollies who willfully obstructed climate action over the next few decades won’t make that feel any better.

Bandwidth is going to be like the weather within a few years and Australia’s virtual weather is going to be dismal, glitchy and shit. Today I found a perfect example of exactly why I make this comparison. Also an excellent demo of why I believe AR is going to out compete if not completely absorb VR as it becomes consumer viable. Test phase demonstrations of consumer grade virtual telepresence:

Going to have to move to NZ or South Korea if you actually want to use it. The Australian network even in metropolitan areas can simply not cope. In rural areas even with the better than average speeds I’m getting it is still like going back in time.

Creative

Managed another sketch draft last night trying for more this evening.

 

 

 

Ishtar and Missinformation
by Kimliatach

A lovely Easter Sunday, egg hunts, family lunch and success welding and attaching wheel mounts to the hen house.

First egg from our own hens!

Epic bedtime battle with F won at 9:58PM.

On the subject of eggs… I have seen this picture show up in my feed more than once lately. I may even have ‘liked’ it at some point.

Neither Reasonable Nor Scientific

A cursory google produced this well articulated deconstruction of the idea. They claim that the image originated on the Richard Dawkins fbook page. Which necessitates sharing this pertinent flow chart.

I am really interested in the origin of modern mythologies and could easily write long form about the few that I am actually familiar with. I am also very frustrated with the way people keep producing and sharing such blatantly misleading factoids in this the age of information.

But it is too late to write essays it is time to paint.

 

 

 

 

Crappy Wrappy Snacky
by Kimliatach

Fighting a cold today and I’m blaming snack packaging.

After a few years teaching I have become a fastidious hand washer but there are situations in which it is impossible to keep hands decontaminated. One of the worst is lunch duty, particularly so for the junior school. The problem is that the majority of lunchbox snack packaging is difficult for children to open. If my hands are wet or in any way greasy they can be difficult even for me. The quality and nutritional value of such snacks is not at issue here. I for one know full well the daunting horror of a pantry without good lunch materials and therefore maintain a constant stock of a variety of fillers including the now illicit tree nut varieties as well as backup corn kernels and ancient crispbreads.

The real issue is packaging. It is simply bad design to wrap a single serving of chocolate biscuits in a wrapper which requires pliers and a blowtorch to open and then market the product to the parents of school children. I contemplated all this as a line of infectious little darlings approached me for aide in freeing their rations of sugar and salt from their plastic confinement, each having quite clearly tried everything up to and including their teeth prior to approaching me.

Let’s not even get started on the fact that this whole town much less the school has no recycling whatsoever, let alone for the soft plastics that make up the bulk of wrappers. Let’s not even discuss the ability of children to pick up easily wind blown rubbish after themselves without prompting. But do let’s dwell for a moment on poor design, poppers (small tetra pack juice boxes) straws in a design unchanged in thirty years still come either blunt or deadly sharp wrapped in a useless cellophane sleeve ubiquitous to playgrounds right across the country. Tetra packs themselves are an abomination, layers of plastic, paper and foil irreversibly bonded for eternity. Yogurt and fruit squeezy packs many of which still come with the small rasp like and easily swallowed cap, which thanks to the ratchet seal is impossible for little fingers to open. Crisp and biscuit pillow packs with heat sealed seams of greater than an inch. Single serve biscuits and dips with impossible to separate foil and blister packs, let’s not dwell on the grossly inadequate proportions of sickly ‘cheese’ to biscuit. Fruit leathers that come in a pillow pack and in hot weather chemically bonded to a nearly indistinguishable cellophane sheet. Biscuits and lollies that come in not only a pillow pack but also a completely unnecessary plastic tray. Boxed snacks with pillow packs inside. Wrappings which require fingernails, wrappings which require great strength and dexterity, wrappings which to be perfectly honest should not even exist. All will be brought before me and I will indeed open all for how can I turn children away to starve.

I blame the packaging industry for many things, but most of all today for feeling like crap. I’ll beat this cold and be ready for exposure to new and interesting infections on Monday.

Creative

Not a lick of creative work accomplished aside from some daydreaming about projects I would like to start but cannot until the present horde of projects are dealt with. Taking the evening off and retiring early.

Daily

Finished Mr. Robot last night. full review forthcoming, highly recommended with minor caveats. ‘Consolations of Philosophy‘ continues to impress. Discovered Michel de Montaigne through De Botton today, feeling particularly taken with his views on education. This view happens to align quite well with the latest in major toy company funded research incidentally.

A couple of metres of paving and a whole lot of digging in the soft damp soil of the orchard. New paths are coming and the brick piles are finally dwindling. Scheming even more tank garden beds and a couple of additions to the orchard to utilise the bare earth remaining.