28 May 2008

Outrage over nude children exhibition

"Public pressure has forced a Sydney gallery to cancel the opening night of an exhibition featuring photographs of naked 12 and 13 yearolds just before the doors were due to open.

Hetty Johnston, founder and executive director of Bravehearts, a child sexual assault action group, today called for Mr Henson and the gallery to be prosecuted over the images.

The exhibition includes large photographic prints of topless children, one of which was included on the invitation to the opening night."

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While our prime minister and other peddlers of crowd-winning emotional reaction congratulate themselves on the vehemence of their knee-jerk response to these images, which were not intended to titillate but rather to highlight the tenderness and fragility of adolescence, let us hope they extend their logic to address the real and increasingly parasitic sexualisation of youth by our advertising industry, fashion industry, and pop music industry, which are basing entire markets around the manipulation of children as young as 8 into a premature awareness of sexuality for the sake of commercial profit.

Commercial profit is fine. Enthusiastic and strategic people should benefit from their endeavours, but not if the endeavours are parasitic and drag society down. It is only a shame that this sort of focus on an issue is usually fleeting and sensationalistic under our current political design, and that intense discussion will most likely go no further than this artist, whom the conservatives will call a pervert and the progressives will call a hero of 'free expression'.

"Doctors say the eating disorder anorexia is showing up in Australian children as young as eight.

Dr Sloane Madden, the author of the study, found more children are presenting for treatment for anorexia and many are so sick they have to be hospitalised.

"Certainly there is the feeling around the world that children are presenting younger and some of the theories that have been raised are really that children are being exposed to images of thinness, at a much, much younger age. And also some concerns about children presented with sexualised images at an age when really they're psychologically unable to understand those images"."

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21 May 2008

Inflation & Economics as rhetoric and political point scoring

"THE Reserve Bank's strategy of raising interest rates to battle inflation is potentially dangerous, a Nobel Prize-winning US economist has warned. Columbia University Professor Joseph Stiglitz, a former chief economist of the World Bank, says countries that use inflation targeting are likely to get themselves into strife. "Most countries today face imported inflation," Professor Stiglitz, who won the Nobel Prize for economics in 2001, told ABC Radio. "To think that there is anything Australia can do to dampen global food inflation, or global energy inflation, is absolutely absurd.
[...]
Professor Stiglitz dismissed a suggestion that inflation targeting had contributed to Australia's strong economy. "I think one of the major reasons for Australia's economic prosperity are high commodity prices," he said. "Australia's been lucky about some of the things that it's exporting have gone up in price and it would have taken a very bad mismanagement of the economy not to be doing very well in those circumstances"."

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Stiglitz's comments suggest two thoughts. Firstly, that the current day profession of economics with its obsessive focus on inflation is sometimes akin to a self serving system of reasoning for its practitioners which simply chases its own tail around in complex circles of abstracted logic without actually doing real or beneficial things for society in the long term. Secondly, that individual politicians constantly mislead us into believing that they are responsible for the strong performance of the Australian economy in recent years when in fact the main bulk of this success has had nothing to do, in general, with them or any other player in Australian politics.

Both of these thoughts themselves suggest that despite democracy or the supposed 'power of the people' we are in fact all too often being manipulated for the personal gains of experts of mere rhetoric and also by liars.

18 May 2008

Will we learn from UK's social policies?

London: "During the evening rush-hour, a man was fatally stabbed just outside a fast food restaurant. Scores of tourists and shoppers fled in panic as the man collapsed in a pool of blood. This was just one of four series of stabbings during 48 hours of bloodshed in the British capital. Sixteen-year-old Jimmy Mizen died after having his throat slashed in a baker's shop, becoming the 13th teenager to be killed in London this year.
[...]
So where has all this anger come from? British society has undergone a radical change in the past decade, with an influx of immigrants from all over the world. There is a lack of social cohesion in communities around the country and Cindy Butts from the Metropolitan Police says there are numerous reasons for this... "There are lots of socio-economic issues - Poverty, family breakdowns, absent fathers, school exclusions, and what I call not just material poverty, but poverty of aspiration," she said. "Some young people feel they don't have a place in this society. They don't have aspirations, don't have sufficient role models, and those are the people who are really vulnerable to negative influences and to the very criminal role models that are in their communities."
London's newly-appointed deputy mayor for young people, Ray Lewis, says this societal breakdown has been a long time coming."

It is no secret. The UK is suffering from a lack of social consensus, not due to one particular group or section of society, but due to poor social design. The fanatical dedication to an economy which is seeing the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer is a significant factor. Multiculturalism is also an important factor: the cramming in of different ethnic groups (including Anglo-Saxons) with different values and takes on life under the 'one' banner. Pluralism is another and is accelerated by this multiculturalism, seeking in principal to turn public society into merely the place where the masses interact for material sustenance/daily survival and which promotes no higher set of shared goals among people. This can be called neither culture nor 'progress'.

12 May 2008

Girl gangs, violence on the rise

"The number of underage girls linked to crime has soared by 58 per cent in the past decade, with new statistics revealing unprecedented numbers of girls suspected of assault, vandalism and shoplifting.
[...]
There were 3622 girls aged 10 to 17 allegedly involved in criminal incidents in 1998 - a figure which rose to 5724 last year. And the past 10 years have seen significant average annual increases in the number of girls suspected of malicious damage to property (8.5 per cent), disorderly conduct (7.6 per cent), shoplifting (5.9 per cent) and assault (5.5 per cent).
[...]
Adolescent psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg blamed the phenomenon on "appalling parenting", saying adults were becoming less and less involved in young people's lives. "Because there are no adults around, the kids basically run themselves."
[...]
"They are just far more brazen, they're just not afraid," he said. Dr Carr-Gregg said busy parents were now "outsourcing" the parenting of their children to teenaged peers. "What we have is a generation which is raised in an environment where there are no limits, no boundaries, no moral compass," he said. Teens saw anti-social behaviour as the way to win notoriety and approval from their peers, Dr Carr-Gregg said. To progress up the hierarchy the girls had to "out-bloke the blokes ... drink and take drugs and have sex and commit crime". Dr Carr-Gregg said inappropriate role models offered by TV and music videos fuelled the perception that "guys are attracted to tough chicks"."

This is no doubt one result of the pressure being placed by society on girls to be 'masculine' and aggressive in a superficial and misguided attempt at 'equality'. More generally its also what happens when we work so madly to keep up with the materialistic mega-machine called modern society while we increasingly ignore such important intangible things as raising, not only our children, but the future citizens of this country.

06 May 2008

Qld water use rises again, nation-wide drought persists

"The Queensland Water Commission says there has been a worrying increase in consumption in the state's south-east despite tight water restrictions being in place. Commission spokesman Gerald Tooth says the average hit 138 litres per person per day last month, just two litres below the level six limit. He says over the last nine months the average was 130 litres a day and residents need to start cutting down again. "It's more important than ever that people do those little things like maintaining short showers, putting plugs in sinks when they're washing vegetables, etc," he said. "They need to do those little things around the home so that we can be comfortable that we'll have enough water to get through the next wet season and beyond."

With the nation-wide drought continuing with national rain fall being less than hoped for and water consumption worries like this one, can we coherently support domestic population increase and also the mass annual net-migration of 134.000+ bodies onto our shores, simply in the name of the economy?

03 May 2008

Nurse suspended after smacking unruly toddler in the ER

"AN experienced nurse has been suspended after allegedly smacking an unruly toddler in a hospital emergency department.
[...]
The girl, who was in the emergency department with her mother and a sibling, is said to have been running around and misbehaving when Ms Stewart allegedly grabbed her, smacked her on the bottom and yelled at her to sit down. It is understood Ms Stewart had feared the child would injure herself or interfere with patient care. Under mandatory reporting rules, the hospital alerted DoCS, which referred the matter to its joint investigation-review team and police. Wagga Wagga crime manager Detective Sergeant Dale Holmes said officers expected to interview Ms Stewart in coming days.
[...]
Nurses Association local branch president Tanya Gleeson said the emergency department was a dangerous place and Ms Stewart had acted in the child's best interests. "It's my understanding the child was basically running amok,'' she said. "There are sharps and all sorts of things there. It can be a very dangerous place.''

Our society is disfunctional. With rules like this in place It really is no wonder that kids like Corey Worthington are increasingly becoming the norm in our society, kids who do what they want when they want. Kids become adults eventually, too.

02 May 2008

Govt pledges $30 million in food aid for global food shortage

"Australia will provided $30 million in emergency aid to help meet the critical food shortage in developing countries. The Federal Government is responding to an appeal by the United Nations World Food Program for extra money to counter a steep global rise in the cost of food.
[...]
The Government says it is also boosting its efforts to address the causes of food insecurity in developing countries."

This is a perfect illustration of the short sightedness and anti-realism that will make issues like the global food shortages worse in the long term. Food is getting more expensive and the poorest are missing out because of a simple fact that can be reflected in economic terms: Demand is outstripping supply.

We are nearing 7 billion people on this planet, predicted to reach around 9.5 billion by 2050 if the planet's oil/food/resources don't run out before this. This is insane and reflects a humanity out of balance with its sorroundings, which is reflected by the current food crisis. The only thing that temporary band-aid solutions like throwing millions in food money at those most in need does is reward a hideously out of balance state of human affairs, creating more demand, higher prices, and ultimetaly more suffering and war for the long term. There needs to be less people on this planet, especially in regions where population is most out of control.