My Sister's Birthday

On Friday I set aside 3 hours to take advantage of the late night shopping. I love friday nights in the city, there's so many drones walking about that I can jump behind two ladies in fur coats and use them to plough through the environmentalists, hobo's and people that want to tell me about Jesus.
I did take the most inefficient route around the town. Going from Route 66 to Sock Club to JB Hi fi to Myer's basement to boarders (where I bought something for myself true to my present buying form) all on foot, which I don't mind. There's nobody I look down on more than people who catch a tram from Bourke st to Latrobe st.
I eat some sushi rolls because I'm not that hungry because everyone thinks I'm fat I can tell even though they tell me I'm thin.
But I usually buy presents for people like a motherfucker, it's not my guesswho ability (see flip flop yo) but I'm usually good at stuff like that just in out and giftwrap in whatever wrappable material I have*, with few exceptions, buying stuff for Bryce. There just aren't enough Bryce oriented products out there to suitably cater to his ego and differentiate myself from the hampers of gay musical stuff he recieves. So I'm hit and miss.
And then there's my sister. I could get her a book or a DVD sure, but that's so boring I want her to know how great I am and how important she is to me.
So I see ten or twenty gift ideas and am wracked with indecision. It's the thought that counts is for losers.
But I can't think anyway. I start thinking 'who is my sister?' is she a shadowy imitation of me, is she an aspiring imitation of my dad. Do I get her something dad would love and reduce her to a little dad fan. Do I get her something I would love and reduce her to following my footsteps?
Is there something about her interests that is uniquely hers? Who is my sister I scream in dispair, she plays minesweeper and solitaire. Sits and watches DVD's on her days off. Apparently she cakes on mascara when she goes out clubbing but I've never seen that side at all.
My god I don't know who my own sister is I think. I head up to the surface of JB hi-fi and walk past a shop called imagination. I wander in and because I was in my knee hi's and brightly coloured pele shoes the girls behind the counter thought I was some queer buying shit for myself. Infact they asked me if it was for my girlfriend when I found a perfect gift, I said 'for my sister but I'll try it on first' asians are so backwards.
So are most Australians though. Anyway happy birthday sis for today have a good one and buyin a gift turned out to be easier than I thought.

*You should have seen my christmas gifts. I wrapped my brothers gift in cellophane like you wrap snot in a tissue then tossed it in a wine gift bag which I taped shut with the christmassy 'to-from' stickers and wrote 'to: Cunt from: Arsehole' on the label. I wasn't counting on grandma being there when the gifts were getting handed out.

Passion V Professionalism

Passion: 1.A powerful emotion, such as love, joy, hatred, or anger.

Ardent love.
Strong sexual desire; lust.
The object of such love or desire.

2. Boundless enthusiasm: His skills as a player don't quite match his passion for the game.
The object of such enthusiasm: Soccer is her passion.
An abandoned display of emotion, especially of anger: He's been known to fly into a passion without warning.

Professionalism: n.
Professional status, methods, character, or standards.
The use of professional performers, as in athletics or in the arts.

These are two different things and I was involved in a short space of time with two very different programs each based on one of the above qualities and both under the category of leadership and more importantly self leadership.
Now the program that largely involved Passion was a program called RYLA and one of the outcomes of that program was in fact this blog. I think. I actually think I decided to do this at my river, I'm not sure but I certainly had never been exposed to Johari before.
The other program was RMIT's Professional Skills Program (PSP) a program that dramatically changed my life, got me my job and has defined me largely as a professional and also in put me in touch with a lot of my aspirations.
So you may have guessed I am going to compare and possibly judge the two programs from the title based on Passion Vs Professionalism.
I do so at the risk of getting blacklisted and condemned and possibly even have my blog abandoned by a large proportion of my Audiance.
But let me explain: On Saturday I went to FLN to sit in largely to learn about strategic planning as you can guess how often the board at my work invites me to do so. Mark was chairing the meeting and his core business is strategic planning and it was a fascinating insight into the process even though it took 4 hours to achieve a short list of dot points, it was thorough, concise and thoughtful. I was extremely impressed by how it all came together and it will help a lot in planning my future.
But Mark at one point raised the subject of when he sat down to do a strategic plan with an environmental organisation in Victoria.
One of their stated company values was to be passionate about the environment, when the question was posed 'Do employees necessarily have to be passionate about the environment' the answer the board concluded on was 'no' all they really wanted was for the employees to do their job. It had infact become detrimental as incompetent employees could justify their existence by just being passionate about the environment whether they were helping the cause or not.
Infact you often here 'yeah but he is really passionate about x' x being whatever the fuck 'he' is supposed to do as an apology for someone who is no good at their job.
Competence is not nearly so often a value.
This got me thinking.
The other part of it was I recently met a bizarre person who has been to every school I ever went to and knows almost everyone I know but I had never ever met before and as such had also done RYLA, she raised an issue that the program had 'an expectation' on it, in that she felt an assimilate urge.
In the spirit of disclosure of my own opinion I have to agree. Now I went to RYLA with goals, I felt I needed it and literally had no idea what to expect. Which I don't know why the fuck that is, I mean when I look back on it I easily could have been given the itinarary a month before hand I don't think it would have detracted from the experience at all. But my attitude was alined that I would participate and I had learnt from my time in college and the PSP program that not utilising everything on offer is really cheating yourself. That being said I think I was old enough and mature enough to get a lot out of the program, and I did there was a diverse range of speakers, interesting and wonderful people to interact with and an artificially supportive environment.
I feel I may have to qualify that last statement, I got shitcanned at the camp for saying something to that effect but it was a sentiment amongst other participants I talked to during the week. At RYLA everything anyone says gets a clap, Personal attacks and criticism are by unspoken rule not welcome, everything you reveal about yourself is accepted. This is because for the most part everyone there are strangers. A bond forms, friendships begin but the environment nonetheless cannot be carried on into the real world, you have to stand up for yourself.
For those that recognise this RYLA is and was for me a great place to get everything onto the table. The theme is self discovery and self leadership as well as disclosure, like getting stoned you fix all the problems of the world and have fun too.
PSP was a twelve week program starting with an induction, Terry tells you what it is all about the moment you sign up for it and there's no strings attatched. You show up for orientation which lasts the first week. You get to know yourself and the others and do all sorts of activities, to pick up on the issue with RYLA the difference being none of the activities may push people out of their comfort zone in terms of how they interact.
Much of the material covered in the orientation was the same as RYLA, we also did MYER's BRIGGS psyche test and others the results of all I can give to you later. PSP also looked at the Native American Medicine Wheel Leadership model, identifying historic leadership role models and what they indicated about us, a personal development portfolio and how to go about it and a work placement 2 days a week at a company working on a project for them.
On top of this was the Executive lecture series which was pure stimulation, hearing from researches in marketing macro environment and demographic changes, the global economic situation and some CEO's. It was diverse and was something to mull over and take away from.
On top of that the Business Policy Game put everything into context by simulating running a company, strategising, learning and working as a team.
It was intense and I made some friends through it that I will have for life. My brother Jerry from China got so much out of it he talked to me for a day and a half about how it changed his life.
I have to admit PSP was gruelling but it equipped me so well for life in one semester that I can attribute most of who I am today to my participation in the program and was easily the best time in my entire life.
Ironically the skills I picked up in PSP are possibly what enabled me to survive and get the most out of RYLA down the track.
So the reason I fear I am already off the RYLA Alumni invite list and possibly to be injected with polio by Rotary is I have to say PSP - Professionalism wins.
Infact almost every experience in my life reinforces it.
Namely there was a girl the sister of my brothers friend who I had to debate against in high school. She was shit. She was shit at debating because she would bring herself to tears in her speech about the insensitivity of my arguements. She would not provide any substantiation or arguements but was passionate about it. Needless to say that even though it took my dream team several years to make it, she never got anywhere with this approach. Because passion can be a wholly alienating and offputting thing to observe, like the girl in Tasmania who read about how sickening homosexuality was when they decriminalised it.
That being said we all have our passions but they are something that sadly are unreliable, at the end of the day they are merely something we feel strongly about.
My friend one of the faciliatators described RYLA as a cult, I don't know if she was kidding or not but I would have to take her seriously. RYLA actually advocates a 2-week rule. That is make no dramatic decisions until two weeks after RYLA. Thats because your mind gets knocked in and out and shaken all about by what goes on their, what you discover about the world and yourself and peoples innermost, innermosts.
I mean some people after a while you just get sick of hearing from, some people never speak up, and some people blow you away.
That being said to me I enjoyed the RYLA program a lot but it's effects subsided and happily I am left with some handy seminar notes on leadership, communication and change management and have some lasting friendships out of it but my recovery didn't take two weeks or even 10 minutes, once I was headed home I felt level headed.
Being an intravert I guess I am lucky because social interaction for 12 hours a day for 6 days leaves me completely exhausted, so possibly unlike some people I didn't have the sudden clash of going from a completely energising experience into an unreceptive real world.
I'd also probably been approaching the camp as an ending rather than a beginning as it was my plan to go to the camp which would be the last time I'd ever see my ex- it neatly delineated my old life and new life and after the week I was ready to start living again.
What I needed to do was filter out and seperate the learning activities from the highly emotional and emotionally charged parts of RYLA. They are two distinct and seperate things and I'd be interested to hear any opinions on how the combination of the seminars and other practical activities might have been changed as an experience by the hyped up emotions of the week - which I presume I was not alone in experiencing, and I refer to the general atmosphere and not my specific circumstances either, I was well past grieving at that stage.

PSP is getting axed, and I could almost cry thinking about it, RMIT is not known for doing much right in the past years but PSP is just one of those trgically brilliant products that is poorly marketed.
That being said when it was announced almost every student wrote extensive letters to the RMIT Business board demanding an explanation. I wrote one that became a phone book sized pile of angry letters that I'm sure were never read.
PSP has probably put through less people than the RYLA program, unlike RYLA PSP explicitely grades people and I duxed the program which is my proudest achievement in life. Paul and Terry changed my life and what I want to live for. The program allowed me to build dreams and express myself in the real world. It built my esteem up. Jerry who had poor broken english and got placed at an unglamorous auto wreckers with no marketing experience what so ever got his proposals accepted and got a near perfect score for his presentation, he quit smoking too, felt respected by westerners for the second time in his life and proved his shit.
Don my friend from PSP that I have to thank for a fixation on Alicia Keys didn't get a job out of it and wasn't anywhere near dux like I was yet he and his girlfriend both lobbied to save the program. Our efforts bought it another 6 months, which may not seem like much but if another 60 kids get to do it then thats another 60 who'se lives will change for the better.
And it boiled down to Mark's point about the environmental organisation: being able to do it, to know how to approach it, to learn from the attempt and redifine it is much more important for achieving your dreams than being passionate about it.
You may say passion is the chicken that lays the egg. But when I think about it my worst performances are my most emotional ones in anything I do, I get my best emotions from my best performances, the ones where I'm focused on competently doing the task.
Cynics too often dismiss my view point but I'd turn it around and say you are the ones being cynical. There are almost no instances where being emotionally involved yields a better result. Passionate people too often dismiss professionalism as a distraction or detractor from a cause, it is concieved as as a cold hard ideal versus the warm and fuzzy-ness, the sickly sweetness of being passionate. Yet look at the most inspiring speakers, the wordsmiths that move you to tears, they captivate the imaginations by crafting arguements and imagery together to 'make people feel the feelings that make them think the thoughts that will lead to the decisions I want them to make' I have heard it said.
Arundhati Roy, Marcos, Noam Chomsky they all make people think and through that feel. Passion can be validating because it's a collection of feelings, but ironically at RYLA one of the speakers said 'People don't realise that they can make feelings happen'
Passion is a way to exclude people, knowing your passions is certainly part of self discovery but needn't be glorified, as was pointed out a lot of companies value their employees being passionate about the product or industry very few actually bother to specify competence. It can be alienating and frightening in the hands of a fanatic. It is ultimately why we do things, but once known should be recognised so it doesn't cloud our judgement, and remove us from mindfully and consciously living a life and achieving a dream.
If I had to redesign RYLA I would probably just replace 'Passion' with 'Dream' or 'Vision' and restructure the activities so you know everyone is comfortable with them, I mean RYLA will never get as many mainland chinese and indonesians as PSP does but I see her point. I mean I can smell pretty bad.

Used and Abused

It is a rare thing indeed for Omar to call me to vent his spleen. I gotta admit I am in completeness agreeness though over his call on thursday.
Omar likes basketball, tupak shakur, fried chicken, unpc humour and reading so we get along real well. He barracks for essendon so he will always be a loser in my eyes as I must be in his. He also is technically Palestinian. He is of palestinian decent. He's even been there.
To me everything I like about Omar and all the reasons we are friends are wholeheartedly not related to him being an Arab.
Yet Omar is hot property to lefty groups, he's a palestinian which is as arab as you can get in most peoples eyes and he's not a crazy terrorist motherfucker.
So every leftwing group wants him as their pin up boy to combat the stereotype that all arabs are terrorists. Now that's certainly a picture that needs unpainting, I got another moron friend that was afraid to catch trams because an arab might blow it up on him. What the fuck? I thought he was intelligent, and more to the point doesn't have that much to live for anyway.
But here's the thing, you commodifying a positive rolemodel is a form of racism as seditious as villifying a race. Because your simply combating one stereotype by trying to argue another.
Specifically Omar was complaining about those cocksuckers the Socialist Alternative. The one's that put up a bazillion posters to announce a night on any indiscriminate issue that pops up in the daily news and then hold a meeting atended by 10 people and don't even dignify relating the said topic of discussion to the armed international revolution that's going to happen in the next 5 years.
It's a shallow insubstantial group that probably has more to do with people trying to pick up other socially inept people.
So one of these fuckers according to what I can recollect of Omar telling me did the 'I've got a palestinian friend that would be great for this I'll pass on his details to this group on his behalf' and in the environmentally unfriendly inefficient way they stick up posters began bothering Omar regularly.
Omar is a nice guy, if he was a christian and carried on like he does with the platitudes and niceties I'd probably hate him. So Omar goes to a meeting so he can say he gave it a try.
And had much the same experience any other socially competent person has with the socialists.
I gotta admit I'm jealous of Omar a lot of the time because his liberal pin up boy status means he gets given a lot of credibility and attention I feel I don't, but at the same time I feel sorry for him on both fronts. Certain people in the world with whom the only common link is their favorite book have meant he leads a life trying to convince sound minded people that arab culture has something to offer. On the other hand he cant learn and experience and be taken seriously by organisations that are sympathetic because they want him as a display item, a commodity to make them feel valid. Omar's invited to listen more often than he is given the chance to speak to these groups, like their doing him a fucken favour.
Whereas I can go along and say 'Impress me' and at least offer a critique that will either score me an invite back or send me off packing. Which is cool by me.
Because as an Australian, in Australia I am not reduced to a commodity or stereotype, (sure when I was in japan and a white boy a reaped the benifits of being hailed like some kind of movie star but at the end of the day being liked for being me was an uphill battle) One Australian can look at me and I can look at them and we know we have nothing in common.
What is Australian? Is it being into Rock or Country, Is it voting Liberal or Labour, Is it Holden or Ford, Is it liking AFL or hating it, is an Australian a fan of Ken Done or Brett Whitely? Are they Yellow, White, Black or Brown?
Australia is not that culturally diverse, it has no where near the regional flavours of the US or Europe yet we know stereotypes are just about useless.
But one thing the lefties have in common is the love to leesh up a sane arab, to argue against a subconscious arguement that never gets voiced and people don't like to admit they believe 'All Arabs are Terrorists'
I do it, I like Japanese people, not malaysians, am scared of Zionists, find Spanish sexier than French and Italian sexier than French and if I heard enough welsh I'd probably prefer that to French too.
Generalisations help us pick holiday destinations but if you really want to make a change in this world keep this little excerpt from Shantaram in mind:
'I have more in common with a reasonable Jew, than I do a fanatic of my own religion. I have more in common with a reasonable Christian than I do a fanatic of my own religion. I have more in common with a reasonable Hindu, than I do a fanatic of my own religion. I have more in common with an athiest, than I do a fanatic of my own religion.'
No matter the nature of the character (a Moslem) I think this stance should be adopted by all. Consciousness is the best way you can serve yourself and your religion, political beliefs etc. Mindful giving and doing, no matter who you are think about why you're doing it.
I mean seriously you Socialist Alternative, fuck.

Extreme makeover

Okay, time to get up off my arse and start making my way back out onto the athletics track. Time to eat right and sign up for that capoeira class, time to get cardio through drumming and start living day to day for whoever I think me is. Keep up the riding and the basketball but maybe do something other than typing for my upper body once in a while. The daylight is sticking around for longer and the schoolbooks are packed away for a long time.
I sincerely hope to post less, and in six months transform myself into Smush Parker:
I'm like 80% there
That's going to take effort, possibly time. All because all I've ever wanted is the physical experience to destroy my body through exertion rather than neglect. To learn and express physically. The dance motherfucker that's what it's all about.
I'll post sure but I got work to do.
I don't know if the makeover is healthy, possible or necessary but it's not the destination, it's the journey.
See you on the flip side.

Damo = Lamo

Today is Damiens birthday, happy birthday Damo. Damo would be one of the most useful people in the world if he hadn't decided to pursue academic philosophy.
He is worthy of his own special day though a 'damian you've touched us just not where I like to be touched...no here you homophobe...that's right, there, yeah...yeah...yeah sweetness' day.
A mediator and debator, he can talk circles around anyone even remotely full of shit. He can make black white, but won't abuse his power because he is both pussy and extremely moral.
He would refuse to walk on grass to take a shortcut even when all the cool kids are doing it. He would tell our crappy catering company prospects that 'the food isn't normally that good'. He would run out of a room rather than see the sequal of a movie that he hadn't seen the prequal too. Even when I demanded he watch Evil Dead 2 for full enjoyment before ruining it by watching the tamer first one.
And after all is said and done, damo is real superficial with the ladies, or maybe just wholey unrealistic. He wants Jim Lehrer in Jessica Alba's body. That's all he wants, he wouldn't acceot Jim Lehrer in like Ashley Simpsons body either.
Yay to Damo, you superficial homophobic fuck.

One way to achieve nothing

The time is Saturday 1.30 pm and the State Library is awash with Lebanese flags. Most attention is directed towards the front where speaker after speaker says the exact same thing one after another. I sent Omar a text to say it was a 'lebo bonanza' in town and he called me up to say he was in the protest ten minutes later he wandered across the street to me, we determined the whole protest might get a thirty second spot on the news, have no effect on Isreals position, would not cause hezbollah to disarm and not hurry up the evacuation.
For the record I am not a Zionist and oppose the war vocally but wars on shaky premisis and bad overreactions have become somewhat a fact of life.
The crowd was smaller than the group that assembled to protest the decleration of war on iraq and Australia's involvement. The monash student union president actually got up on that occassion to talk about VSU, one of the worst lapses of judgement I've ever seen. The crowd was also filled out by a bunch of unionists from trades hall that were shouting things like 'anarchy, yeah let's have anarchy' so I'm not sure if they were there for the right reasons or rather were just leaping on an opportunity to walk out on the job.
Still that protest was a pretty decent size for such short notice. But on that occasion the government simply chose to ignore and then eventually public opinion came into line or at the ver least headed down the apathy line.
So it's not good enough and I'm not singling out the Lebanese, but any group to wait until you are personally effected to jump on the bandwagon of No War! I Love Life bring Peace. You can't do it, a whole community can't not show for a protest for one middle eastern country and then turn up and say the exct same things, and the exact same arguements with an expectation of a different effect.
Isreal percieves the world as hating it and how it has managed it's 'conquest' of Palastine, protesting it's decisions to use full military arsenal against whole nations that contain a terrorist cell are the kinds of overreactions you can come to expect.
On the other hand if I threw a rock at a cop and he shot me dead with a rifle, that cop would have a lot of questions to answer.
What's really needed is empathy, the noble morality of Nietzche where you actually identify with your oponents rather than painting them as alien, expendable and less than human. The fact that the victims of the holocaust can do what they do to the palestinians or anyone regardless of provocation is saddening.
So it's something for everyone, Cyprus community try imagining what it would be like if Cyprus was getting bombed, or the maltese, or vietnam, or china (we'll that meditation school is protesting every weekend) and maybe get out and support another nation.
Unfortunately, protests are just ineffectual, or easily dismissed in this age of AC Nielson Poll Politicians, I've stopped signing petitions since discovering politicians either bin them or use your contact details to send you junk mail. Particularly the Socialist Alternative that as far as I know is the single most self alienating alternative ever. Those dudes who recently within thirty seconds of a refugee protest march arriving at fitzroy had set up tables to sell badges and their magazine for 5 bucks a pop where there trying to recruit a new ethnic group.
Yet I've never seen them achieve anything. More so they are so easily identified and discredited that of course their petitions are going to be binned.
I mean who would verify a petition? who's got the time? whereas AC Nielson can reputably and unbiasedly measure the all important "relative" approval. As in two party preferred and preferred leader. This means rather than coming up with the best possible policy and stance all our government has to do is have a dearth of competition and they can do what they want. That or fuck up the economy badly.
Even then when the economy fucks up and you can no longer afford your petrol or your mortgage or your airconditioner in your no eaves triple garage house with no garden in the middle of fucking nowhere. That's when you kick up a stink. Not when our actions are stripping another country of infrastructure and replacing it with a fractured and insessent stream of insurgents. Not when your prime minister has managed the sparkling achievement of having the closest relationship to a US President in History even though that President is heading into the Nixon league of Presidents and is widely regarded by his own constituents as the worst president since Nixon.
No the government will be held to account when fountain gate has to sell it's Holden Sports Utilities. So if you want protests to have some meat to them when you need them join in when you don't need them (& believe in them).

I want to be Black

As much as I hate mobile phones the predictive text on mine has been the first spelling tutor I've had in years. I used to always spell want 'wan't' with that unnecessary apostrophie that I never ever thought to expand out and discover just how unnecessary it was. I also learned how to spell banana or at least how many n's are enough. The sad irony is there's probably 20 spelling mistakes in this paragraph already.
Far too late in life I am getting into the whole copulating black culture thing. I never was into it before hand. And just for the record I have met black africans who still try to be 'black' what we're really talking about is being a bad ass ghetto pimp, I mean there's so many black people on earth and when I say copulating black culture I'm not talking wearing bill cosby sweaters and Masai body paint. I'm talking the Doc J fro, listening to Run DMC, A Tribe Called Quest..., using unnecessary hand gestures to talk, wearing clothes that are too big and getting basketball frustration instead of sexual frustration.
That being said it's from hanging out with Asians that I've gotten into the I wanna be black thing. Wearing basketball boots again. Admittedly they all think I'm a fag, but do I really want to be black or do I want to be asian. And if being asian means wanting to be black then why bother wanting to be asian, why not skip the middle man and just be black?
I certainly am not into all this emo fashion shit, even the skate punks are wearing tight jeans. I don't get how you can play sport in tight jeans. If basketball shorts had trustworthy pockets I'd never wear anything else.
But seriously my faggy post about labradorian values I think the point about eating with gusto is a major advantage to my late blooming in black culture copulation. I can just run at it full tilt now. I'm at that age where people my age have just plain stopped being cool. Just getting a short hair cut and slipping into drab office culture and that is the end of that.
One thing I thought I'd never embrace is the destinctly asian fureeta culture from Japan. That is the latest generation of workers is hitting the office staying 6 months if that, then quitting to become full time surfers.
I was chatting to Pink Ranger in the car the other day about the dirth of motivation to work our way up the lader given most of our managers lead empty work oriented lives.
I have a good work ethic, I would even say a great one. Like Allen Iverson I might get a tattoo to commemorate it. 'Work smart not hard' the way I see it I start of sleeping 8 hours a day, 8 hours work and then 8 hours recreation. that's a starting point, efficiency should mean I should start reaping greater time returns from working hours channeled into increased r&r each day. So I always try and automate everything I do and become more efficient at work. I got it down to like 2 hours a day I need to cover my entire job description then I stick around for another 5.5 hours to do whatever else it is I'm paid to do.
I'd seriously be pissed off if my efficiency expert worked overtime, tell me you wouldn't fire them?
I actually think I've wasted my life. I should be pursuing the real American dream. Being good at basketball. There's a game that means something. And rap. I mean almost all my reasons for ultimately working and existing is to enable myself to engage in some form of play (basketball, sex, music etc) I realise I shouldn't narowly define some of them terms as "play" there's a whole complex range of emotions and intamacy, interralation and love involved in basketball, and maybe sex too.
That being said there's a double entrendre (I mean 'meaning' whatever fucking french, nobody ever says italy) to saying I want to be black. I was unfortunately born a wealthy white westerner, a male wealthy white westerner and very ambitious. Very ambitious. That being said the world is at the feet of a young attractive wealthy white westerner. Fortunately I'm not religious so all the good I do comes from me and isn't required by some extarnality like my vengeful god.
That being said my achievements in context are much less than If I was born into a downtrodden minority, nor could I benifit from reverse racism (ie. given more credibility because I'm from a minority) when I make an insightful comment about the nature of racism and paint a bold and thoughtful vision for the world our children should live in, it never goes down as well as some chilean dude to my left who mouths off 'love and peace...blah blah...I hope we can embrace as brothers Australia and my people who have suffered...blah blah...George Bush is a criminal.'
If I was black I could come at it from a new angle and be listened to. Although maybe in the long run being black preaching to the lefty pinko do gooders may have less impact than being white and a reformist CEO of a big bank, or the Yakuza.
Mind you then there's Eminem one of the most repetitive and respected hip hop artists out there, everyone admires his achievements because he's from a downtrodden hip hop minority.
Word to your mother.

Buddhists vs Labradorians

So I'm so efficient now at work I could come in for an hour a day. Today I literally had a massive project dumped on my lap. I still couldn't panic. Infact I knew if I worked hard on it I'd have no reason to come into work next week.
I'm on top of things like a latino lover.
So some good things to break up my day where some of them emails that get sent around offices that aren't that funny or creative but highlight the mediocre existence that is office life by being more interesting than whatever the fuck it is you're paid to do.
One was ironically titled good karma and consisted of 'The Dalai Lama's message for 2006' it had all these tips like 'when arguing with someone you love don't bring up the past but focus on the present moment' stuff like that, yet this email still praid on peoples fundamental superstition with a -

If you send this to 0-4 people you will recieve a pleasant surprise
5-10 people two pleasent surprises
11-20 three pleasant surprises
96+ your life will improve dramatically and all your dreams will come true.

Now I could be happy to send this on to my superstitious friends which puts pressure on them to send it to yet more friends and given that it has been proven that everyone knows everyone via 6 degrees of seperation by that stage there's probably nobody with internet access left to send this message to and spread the good karma with superstitious paranoia driven greed bundled in.
I love shinto because it's a user pays religion, this 'karma' thing didn't tickle me too much. btw from selecting 0 from 0-4 I've had three pleasant surprises and not insignificant ones already today, possibly 4 infact today everything has gone my way.
The other stupid email I got today was from someone who knew I was a dog lover and possibly outlined the entire labradorian belief system. It truly is a dogs life. This one didn't come with any catches.
I remember my sis yo Madoka telling me off when I started speaking to her like she was my pochi pet but I can't think of a purer more loving relationship I ever had. Madoka use to shake her fists and stomp her feet I ticked her off so much. I miss my sis yo.
Anyway I was not obliged to send it on to anyone but I probably should instead I may just post it in it's completeness here:

GOOD ADVICE
If a dog was the teacher you would learn stuff like:
When loved ones come home, always run to greet them.
Never pass up the opportunity to go for a joyride.
Allow the experience of fresh air and the wind in your face to be pure ecstasy.
When it's in your best interest, practice obedience.
Let others know when they've invaded your territory.
Take naps.
Stretch before rising.
Run, romp, and play daily.
Thrive on attention and let people touch you.
Avoid biting when a simple growl will do.
On warm days, stop to lie on your back in the grass.
On hot days, drink lots of water and lie under a shady tree.
When you're happy, dance around and wag your entire body.
No matter how often you're scolded, don't buy into the guilt thing and pout..! run right back and make friends.
Delight in the simple joy of a long walk.
Eat with gusto and enthusiasm. Stop when you have had enough.
Be loyal. Never pretend to be something you're not.
If what you want lies buried, dig until you find it.
When someone is having a bad day, be silent, sit close by and nuzzle them gently.
I AM THANKFUL FOR TOO MUCH E-MAIL BECAUSE IT MEANS I HAVE FRIENDS WHO ARE THINKING OF ME!
SEND THIS TO PEOPLE YOU CARE ABOUT. . I JUST DID

SO yeah it's probably overly effectionate but what the fuck just cause your father made you lick the area between his scrotum and his arsehole doesn't mean the rest of us can't be sentimental once in a while.

V is for Victory

A small thing today, but a potential great step forward in Maoist of Maoism. I love my new manager. I wanted to try something new and show some fucking initiative aswell as a little faith in a near discarded employee. I thought this will either get me recognized as an inovator and natural leader or getting me fired for being a seditious upstart.
I've been teaching Carole how to complain. I couldn't believe how long it took me to listen to her complaint that nobody listens to her and listen to her. So I came up with a framework that forced confrontational complaints into a consequential assertion model. We just sat and started with a bitch or a gripe and ended up fleshing it out into a proposal and then afterwards presenting it to our manager in a sit down scenario.
Just doing simple things like removing generalisations and taking ownership of the problem made it flow easily, and instead of upset and the overused accusations of sexism Carole was actually laughing and by the end of the session I didn't have to say anything the dialogue was firing between my new manager and her.
It saddened me that in my interview for the position I have they had written Carole off, someone who complains is more valuable than someone who suffers silently, fundamentally too she has a good work ethic which younger people given opportunities (myself included) don't have. She's an untapped resource.
Hopefully two successes from the first two swings at it too. My manager to his upmost credit did all the right things, clarified, empathised, came up with an answer and checked that Carole was happy.
Which makes me happy.
Of course I'm still bored out of my fucking mind at work but should be entirely redundant in about two or three months, hopefully by then Carole will have the new habits and enough confidence to run the bitch sessions without me, my manager will be encouriging the other team members to do likewise, continuos improvement will be achieved and I can ride off into the sunset, like some kind of cowboy.

You can always make an enemy

My boss, Roberto pointed out to me I can always make an enemy, that I'd never know when I'd get a manager that doesn't like long hair and where's wally socks.
I solicited some nightmare housemate stories and heard some other's the past couple of days and the scripts I'm writing at the moment touch on a lot of pretty unpleasant experiences yet they do represent experiences I'm glad I had and cherish.
Yet it can be fucking hell. I was lucky to move to a college I'd commend to anyone being International House, the International experience if anything taught me that white's the best and the UN are never going to work out but don't be disheartened. College's at least have support staff and bodies that can protect you. Your private space is secure and you can get help at 2.00 am any night of the week.
In my first year I was living it up, completely insulated from the real world in IH. I had a ground floor room in Scheps wing, one of the ugliest buildings ever created by the hands of man and my mates and girlfriend could throw stones at my window with ease when they wanted me to open the place up for them. I had nice thick brick walls and a cupboard I could hide in to scare my girlfriend who would yell like a man.
Morley once got me to go into his room which had identical layout yet had no room for anything and a tv set sitting in a drawer. The trapazoid rooms were versatile you could say that.
I signed my name TΩ in the cupboard with an '02 next to it, so I got the full experience.
My girlfriend was a different story, I met her in Japan where she was on exchange from Austrlia, she had dated this Japanese guy in her year 12 before coming to Melbourne, in such a rush was she to find a house she managed to move in with her ex boyfriend and a bullemic girl. On top of this she stuffed up her uni preferences and picked a degree she actually had to study for.
The ex took an instant dislike to me. I wasn't really given any warning. I thought he was a cool guy. I probably got off on the wrong foot by killing the small talk with 'I've never fucking heard of Shizuoka' anyway this guy had done some clever shit like stab his tattoo when she'd dumped him and taken to drinking.
Bogan as I called her (I love bogans) decided it was best not to tell me he had aquired the aluminium bar from a shopping trolley handle which he had said was 'for tom'
In the meantime I had gotten sick of having to hide whenever Yoshi was around and tiptoe around Yoshi and generally act like I was scared of Yoshi.
So I forced bogan into the position of having to make Yoshi deal with the fact that I was dating his ex now.
Yoshi decided to get drunk and bring a bunch of friends around and play loud music till 1am.
When she asked him to turn the music down, Yoshi took his pole and smashed up his own stereo. then he chased his friends out into the night and I spent the night barricading the door with bogan until morning came.
They had to evict Yoshi who cleaned himself up a fair bit got a new girlfriend and as far as I know was a decent guy, I always thought he was pretty cool.
Bogan dumped me about two to three months down the track. I was mortally devestated but learnt (I think) that it takes two to tango and never really saw her again.
In the end though having a dickhead housemate is still a destructive relationship and the reality of rent can force people together long past boiling point. If I'd known Yoshi was planning to kill me I probably wouldn't have pressed the issue, but evicting him was easy and they got a replacement housemate pretty quickly too. Even though Yoshi lived in a closet more or less.
I don't think rent is the trap though in the end picking housemates is the same as picking sexual partners, friends and employees, there's only so much you can know about a person and you do require the good old double coincidence of wants. People still stuff up all said decisions more often than not, there's even ones you have to see coming like the good old Palestinian and Zionist match. Or the Rugby player and anyone match. Or the creepy guy at the workplace, how the fuck do they get past the interview?

Addict behaviour

I wasn't going to write anything today, because I am almost certain nobody reads this on a daily basis. But I been yet again at my desk writing this fucking script and managed to knock off two pages that I'm happy with. That being said much like this blog or any of my paintings going back and deleting or rewriting or even rereading something is unholy and unnatural to me. Speaking of which a friend of mine should have gone to get breast implants today. Now there's something you never imagine happening to someone you know, and I thought they were kidding.
Anyway here's a picture I love, I put it here because I intend to put up more but most of the artists paintings I love are reckognised and I think it's a side of me I neglect and really wish I had some scans or prints of my work.
carcrash by r.s.conett there's a link to the artists site in the post entitled 'my god' which refers to another post I am partially eager to get off the main page so people can safely read this blog at their workplace again.
The dude drew this with his eyes closed erratically. Lately I've been looking at Yantra's and Escher prints too often I forgot about the influences of the totally free artists like conett and whitely
brett whitely's
My year 12 folio was made up of a huge cityscape triptych which I had bolted together with piano hinges (Vicky my art teacher come surrogate mother would smack me for making out that I was practically helpful in any way, I couldn't nail the frame together and couldn't stretch the canvas at all) that I free hand sketched the cityscape with charcoal on canvas then went over those lines with red acrylic, then painstakingly taped every edge and area to paint a tesselation of polygons that made up my impression of ballarat.
Miles said to me one day 'So what's this mean you're fucked in the head?' Miles did a piece on masturbation from memory.
After 3 months and a lot of weekends of coming up with the finished background I then went and free hand painted on some citizens to destory the freehand-begets- structured-begets-freehand-begets-structured feel. But I did the freehand painting using some stencils and free hand then the inspiring and dominating Vicky touched up my work for me because she didn't feel it was complete.
The more I think about it the odder the piece was in the end, I probably did win that voucher after all.
My other influences include Magritte, Jeffrey Smart, Dali, Picasso, Botticelli, Francis Bacon blah blah and yet I don't actually paint much. I can't remember the last time I picked up a brush.

Two Dogs

Often whilst procrastinating the answer comes through inaction. I decided I should read other peoples blogs, out of curtesy so I plugged Travis into the blogs above me and found this guys blog which had another link to religion of peace if there was ever a way to look at the world through a prism of hate these two sites offer the perspective.
Controversial? No, stupidity isn't controversy. You have to read particularly the first site to believe, I implore you check them out. The Holocaust is one of the most severe and brutal forms of genocide enacted on a people in history. The tragedy has been portrayed with sensitivity and beauty time and time again and the grief is never ending.
Then there are other attrocities, like the invasion of palestine and the treatment of it's people by the Nation of Isreal. I have reproduced Arundhati Roy's speech on September 11 in part:

September 11th has a tragic resonance in the Middle East, too. On the 11th of September 1922, ignoring Arab outrage, the British government proclaimed a mandate in Palestine, a follow-up to the 1917 Balfour Declaration which imperial Britain issued, with its army massed outside the gates of Gaza. The Balfour Declaration promised European Zionists a national home for Jewish people. (At the time, the Empire on which the Sun Never Set was free to snatch and bequeath national homes like a school bully distributes marbles.)

How carelessly imperial power vivisected ancient civilizations. Palestine and Kashmir are imperial Britain's festering, blood-drenched gifts to the modem world. Both are fault lines in the raging international conflicts of today.

In 1937, Winston Churchill said of the Palestinians, I quote, "I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place." That set the trend for the Israeli State's attitude towards the Palestinians. In 1969, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said, "Palestinians do not exist." Her successor, Prime Minister Levi Eschol said, "What are Palestinians? When I came here (to Palestine), there were 250,000 non-Jews, mainly Arabs and Bedouins. It was a desert, more than underdeveloped. Nothing." Prime Minister Menachem Begin called Palestinians "two-legged beasts." Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir called them "grasshoppers" who could be crushed. This is the language of Heads of State, not the words of ordinary people.

In 1947, the U.N. formally partitioned Palestine and allotted 55 per cent of Palestine's land to the Zionists. Within a year, they had captured 76 per cent. On the 14th of May 1948 the State of Israel was declared. Minutes after the declaration, the United States recognized Israel. The West Bank was annexed by Jordan. The Gaza strip came under Egyptian military control, and formally Palestine ceased to exist except in the minds and hearts of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian people who became refugees. In 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza strip.

Over the decades there have been uprisings, wars, intifadas. Tens of thousands have lost their lives. Accords and treaties have been signed. Cease-fires declared and violated. But the bloodshed doesn't end. Palestine still remains illegally occupied. Its people live in inhuman conditions, in virtual Bantustans, where they are subjected to collective punishments, twenty-four hour curfews, where they are humiliated and brutalized on a daily basis. They never know when their homes will be demolished, when their children will be shot, when their precious trees will be cut, when their roads will be closed, when they will be allowed to walk down to the market to buy food and medicine. And when they will not. They live with no semblance of dignity. With not much hope in sight. They have no control over their lands, their security, their movement, their communication, their water supply. So when accords are signed, and words like "autonomy" and even "statehood" bandied about, it's always worth asking: What sort of autonomy? What sort of State? What sort of rights will its citizens have?

Young Palestinians who cannot control their anger turn themselves into human bombs and haunt Israel's streets and public places, blowing themselves up, killing ordinary people, injecting terror into daily life, and eventually hardening both societies' suspicion and mutual hatred of each other. Each bombing invites merciless reprisal and even more hardship on Palestinian people. But then suicide bombing is an act of individual despair, not a revolutionary tactic. Although Palestinian attacks strike terror into Israeli citizens, they provide the perfect cover for the Israeli government's daily incursions into Palestinian territory, the perfect excuse for old-fashioned, nineteenth-century colonialism, dressed up as a new fashioned, twenty-first century "war".

Israel's staunchest political and military ally is and always has been the U.S. The U.S. government has blocked, along with Israel, almost every U.N. resolution that sought a peaceful, equitable solution to the conflict. It has supported almost every war that Israel has fought. When Israel attacks Palestine, it is American missiles that smash through Palestinian homes. And every year Israel receives several billion dollars from the United States - taxpayers money.

What lessons should we draw from this tragic conflict? Is it really impossible for Jewish people who suffered so cruelly themselves - more cruelly perhaps than any other people in history - to understand the vulnerability and the yearning of those whom they have displaced? Does extreme suffering always kindle cruelty? What hope does this leave the human race with? What will happen to the Palestinian people in the event of a victory? When a nation without a state eventually proclaims a state, what kind of state will it be? What horrors will be perpetrated under its flag? Is it a separate state that we should be fighting for or, the rights to a life of liberty and dignity for everyone regardless of their ethnicity or religion?

Palestine was once a secular bulwark in the Middle East. But now the weak, undemocratic, by all accounts corrupt but avowedly nonsectarian P.L.O., is losing ground to Hamas, which espouses an overtly sectarian ideology and fights in the name of Islam. To quote from their manifesto: "we will be its soldiers and the firewood of its fire, which will burn the enemies."

The world is called upon to condemn suicide bombers. But can we ignore the long road they have journeyed on before they have arrived at this destination? September 11, 1922 to September 11, 2002 - eighty years is a long time to have been waging war. Is there some advice the world can give the people of Palestine? Should they just take Golda Meir's suggestion and make a real effort not to exist?

Furthermore genocide is not new at any rate, think Maya, Mexica, Inca, Australian Aboriginies (sighted as 'blacks' by Winnie the Pooh above), Native Americans, Germans in Wallachia, Tibetans and too many tribes of Africa and the Middle East to Name.

It is hate pure and simple, there is not a single people on this earth I hate, not even a single person on this earth I hate or even consider worth hating. I firmly believe that when you want to keep a man trapped you trap yourself in the trapping of him, a handcuff binds the arrestor and the arrested, a guard and prisoner both are in a prison at the end of the day. The Zionists could learn from the Hindu Yogi's and expel violent thoughts from their minds, because violent and hateful thoughts can do you more damage than the damage intended by them.
Isreal at the end of the day is at war with itself.
In the Emperors New Clothes, the emperor cruised the streets in the nude and everyone was afraid to admit they couldn't see the clothes even the emporer himself, I think the true test of a leader is to walk around exposed and see if the people accept him. Everyone is entitled to a home and Isreal/Palestine is infact a sacred place to almost all people on the earth that everyone should have access too, I say lay down the borders, let the settlements go to whoever wants to live there, how can you conquer a nation that doesn't defend itself? obviously the problem goes deeper there are irreconcilable political interests in each religions self validation seeking tendancies, the uncompromising 'we want it all' position, why not let both have it all I'd say? It's not a fucking cake that needs eating, it's land that is going to be around for a while, whereas the people on both sides are not.

I picked up a daredevil comic which featured wolverine, he was telling a story to Echo who had known the Native Chief Wolverine knew:
'There are two dogs inside you, one that loves & one that hates, one of them has to win, which one?'
'The one you feed the most?'
Anyway the Chief had some new take on it picking up a minor technicality or something and the implications are lost to me now, but wolverines guess is the traditional answer to the riddle. It's right there and it's probably the answer to a lot of questions dividing the world at any given time.
I have a dog inside me that wags it's whole body giving it a duck like gait, it sniffs and snorts so hard it sneezes when it greets new people. it lays down for scratches at any given opportunity, that's my answer to the below post.
Morley would say I need hugs or a beating. I'd take both.

Shavin Cravin

I'm flip flopping like the fish in FNM's Epic. I got hate in my heart and I admit it, yet plenty to rejoice about, and then again maybe not.
Random memories will crop up like at mittagundi in a cabin in the dark that felt like 5 star luxury after being shat upon by snow gods for the two previous days. Jasper said 'Do you ever get lazy wiping your arse?' the talking went on and on that night even when we had exhausted all amusing options. 'I'm talking about pulling your hand away and the paper is fucking black and you say "it'll be right"' or back in ballarat before the age of mobile phones when I liked someone but couldn't concieve of when I'd actually see them again I'd wander up and down the street because fortunately ballarat teenagers are pretty predictable you'ld always bump into someone you know. I never recall bumping into any of the girls I liked though.
I want the hate out because I don't understand it, but the other night lying in bed wondering what it was all about it struck me like that, like an alcoholic seduces his wife, 'I got hate in my heart'
Questions and self doubt, I have no work to do at work so I'm working on my work, I go home and am overworked in playtime where there are no deadlines at all.
My hair I want to put in ballarina buns and sihk topnots and pretty ribbons yet the shaving craving has set upon me fierce, especially since Liam shaved his head and I seek reassurance my head hasn't gone a weird shape since last time I saw it. My scalp probably needs it to.
I think about all the haircuts I want to have and the likelihood of my work letting me slide by with them, the fro, the mohawk, the braids, the tetracube.
I think about my community work, paranoid now that I am one of them and not what I thought I was doing. You get two types of do gooders: function over form and form over function. I don't know which one I am.
Marc is definately a function over form, he just does shit for people because they are people and he helps them out.
Then you get institutions and cliques that help out people because they view them as a lower caste and help them out to feel good about themselves.
I don't believe in selfless acts at all, I guess I mostly do what I do because I need to. I forced Zaman into the Fitzroy library and went ten minutes overtime in the lesson tonight because I have not ten inches from my face right now a reminder that Zaman's dreams are a subset of my dream (which is to help people achieve their dreams) and to put the effort in. It helps me more in seeking validation, being worthwhile and building esteem probably more than it helps Zaman. I also just plain like to not fucking give up on things, Zaman was going to send me home due to no venue to study in so I made him read the library opening times 'oh it is 8 o'clock' then we sat in kiddy town and I did relax.
That is until I went cruising the streets hoping to run into someone that would make my life make sense. Like that Sikh dude who was decked from head to toe in orange except for his shoes. I now have identical shoes and for three days in a row, store attendants were overly friendly giving me discounts for being both a student and a teacher (of which I am now neither). None of them gave me their number although I didn't ask either probably because I wasn't really interested because I just wanted to buy shit, except for that curry girl she was hot but the line wanted me to shuffle on.
Too many buttons are being pushed too weakly and I feel stretched as a result of late. I need something to happen to make it worse or better or whatever so I can deal with it.
Right now just got this fucking twister wheel going 'Left hand blue' inside me and that just makes no fucking sense.
Apart from the Sikh guiding me to the perfect pair of shoes, I also had this dream that has been unravelling in a vividness so uncanny that I keep forgetting that the dream had almost no practical indication of what it actually meant whatsoever. I would write it out for you here but it's too incriminating.
'Right hand pizza' is what I am being told right now, I should eat pizza. If you're in a self congratualatory clique still and reading this kill yourself now, I'm talking to you Trinity Alumni.
I'm glad I got that all out.

Ten Canoes

If you love the Australian bush, you should see ten canoes. Tonight as I was out on a hot date watching ten canoes I thought how beautifully they captured the ominous nature of the outback, the bush. There is nothing like straying from the path in the wilderness and turning around in the deathly quiet of the bush and finding everything around you chaotic and peaceful.
In practicing deep ecology one notices there is far more life teaming in a square patch of bush than there is in a city block. Yet amongst all this action and life force interacting with eachother is enough peace to meditate on fundamentals. Enough peace until you catch an ant crawling up your leg hole or a mosquito* buzzing in your ear.
There is something enchanting and terrifying about the Australian landscape. Something the Jindabyne previews and ten canoes captures. Furthermore it makes the lifestyle of the indigenous all the more exciting and appealing even though their most prestigious consumer good is honey and you can talk about women or wallabies. Furthermore there is an obvious reason to see ten canoes, it is aboriginal culture freely expressed once we can accept the rich cultural traditions of their oral histories we can start having a real national identity, we can have rocks as exciting to visit as the Vatican, more so if we really learnt and appreciated the histories and origins of Australia.
Furthermore in accepting it it means we can progress towards expressions that aren't a commercialisation of culture but are inspired and progressive too, that is an indegenous artist can have as much right to push the boundaries as a maggot white one.
So see it, there's also plenty of talk of turds, pricks and fart jokes it's good.

Tom goes to Hell

How does hell even work? So I die and go to hell, where Satan tortures me for all eternity. So what? Really, I can't even concieve of what it would be like to live to 50 let alone eternity. And you know what is torture. If I was to be tickled till I vomit every day it would wear thin as torture at some point during eternity. By extension if I imagine having every layer of skin routinely grated off with a cheese grater and my fingernails pulled out with plyers and my eyelids cut off with rusty scisssors at some point I'm just not going to care.
I mean it's really the problem with the whole Henry Ford style of thinking. You haave a bunch of demons or goons or whatever doing these little jobs that achieve nothing and don't add any meaning to their eternal lives. What do they get out of torturing us? sadistic pleasure. You can jack off everyday sure but not all day. No I am sure if these are enteties themselves being punished they would have better things to do with eternity than simply torture people.
I mean why even torture someone, even in the worst possible way it's not going to yield any useful information, there's no way we can go back and change our behaviour to any great effect once dead. So why? as a deterrant to the still living to lead good lives of honesty, piety and modesty. If so why not punish people were people could see the causality between being a sinner and suffering for your sins, like while their still alive. Instead of the obscure alternate dimension of the afterlife.
See I know Chuck Norris, Hell sounds bad conceptually.
But conceptually it doesn't fucking work. People will aclimatise to inhumane heat when they cant die and have all eternity to do it, the mind has a certain threshold for pain before it switches off or dissapears, we can't be killed when we're dead, and hell has a constantly expanding population.
Sure A fuckload of evil sentient entities are doing a job more repetative and meaningless than a machine these days could do twice as effectively and with no unionisation.
So here's what happens, I die, I go to hell, hell is hot, I am in desperate pain and anguish for let's assume it takes me a long time 50 years to acclimatise. After 50 years I aclimatise. I find that I still have all eternity to engage in the more meaningful market driven economy and labour force that is utilising the resources of hell to answer the key economic questions. What to produce? For Whom do we produce? And another one I can't remember.
Maybe the demons have actually got all the sinners to work with them to try and escape the confines of hell? I imagine so, they have all eternity and it is in all residents interests to find a way out, if it is even that bad.
I imagine if we could witness hell, the naive and gap filled system it is designed on (whilst effective at scaring children, and young adults whose minds have been protected from sin) isn't that scary nor would it work under core conditions. After 100 years of torture I would have stopped caring. My mind would implode and I would have accepted my fate.
I realise there are more sophisticated and even more gruesome forms of torture out there and torture is by no means funny or appropriate in any circumstances but seriously if we could see into hell to test out this theory I bet you could also get a contiki tour there by now.

Arundhati Roy

For the official word on this Amazing woman click here. I had never heard of Arundhati Roy, I just saw her in a documentary and as I am prone to do fell in love. I feel compelled to write about her because I've probably been giving woman a bad run of late talking about D.u.f.f.'s and the Dumb bitches driving me towards Mike Patton ever firmerly.
I won't go into the background seriously click the fucking link to get an overview of her but she was immeadiately inspirational as a voice of reason amongst masses of voices of hollow affirmative noise. I like small people who stick up for themselves and more to the point others. There is nothing more inspiring than when a little old lady shames a neo-nazi into shutting up and being quiet on the tram.
Arundhati was like that.
Her dedication and activism to singlemindedly exploit her public image and put herself in danger, to just like Ghandi destroy the fear of jail by making her arrests such positive news stories for her causes is what ultimately makes me gravitate towards Arundhati and her style.
And then to see her celebrated by the villagers she speaks for in the Drowned Out documentary makes me love her all the more.
Moreover she articulatly and beautifully destroys the arguements that are nothing but a heinous manifestation of escalation of commitment.
Almost all organisations and individuals on some scale manage to trap themselves through this psychological catchall. I think it's why I love Musashi and his book changed my life. The imperative that needs to be reinforced is success. In swordfighting it is clear cut - you go in with a strategy and success is determined by whether you walk away or not. Musashi would advocate running away the moments it looks like you're going to lose. The indian government would advocate that you press on until you fail.
Most people in fact do because they attatch the useless value of shame to admitting a mistake and revising their strategy. People are prideful and attatched.
So when Arundhati puts up meaningful statistics to indicate the massive dam project wont work as was proposed, that thousands of people have been displaced and a couple of private citizens benefit the solution of the government and most organisations is to simply not measure the effectiveness, deny all secondary reports and plow on ahead.
She said at the world convention of water management 'People asked me why I came here today, I came here to see what power smells like and I can tell you it stinks.' I would feel soiled and shit if somebody described me that way I don't know how you could deal with it.
Arundhati like so many others has found a way to expose governments at their weakest point, the beauracracy that leads to escalation of commitment strategies. Yet somehow they keep surviving simply because they have learnt a tried and true technique to deal with it, not an empowered and effective one infact quite a dangerous one: Make irrelevant comments and just continue doing what you where doing.
Our governments have done it, America does it and it works by one virtue alone, often the human cost of creating an alternative system of government is greater than the human cost of what they are doing. So long as this equation is in balance I guess you can say democracy works.
Escalation of commitment always involves an investment. You or anyone outlays some money, this is used to purchase equipment, clothing, infrastructure etc. whatever benefits where to be derived from the investment just never substantiate. It doesn't work. However rather than except the loss of the invested funds and find one that does if say you were eating apples out of a bag and found one of them was bruised, most people naturally try to try their hardest to make the investment work. Companies run themselves into the ground more quickly using this mentality than by any other means 'we already spent so much on advertising' 'all the promotional material is printed' so sad too bad.
But you have to look at the big picture. To cut your losses so to speak. Synacism gets a bad wrap at most do gooder parties and clusters, people don't like how unenergetic it is. However let me tell you this with papal infalability no single perspective has caused more waste, grief and embarassment than the can do attitude, the 'we can take on ipod if we just try harder, we're bigger afterall' of Sony. IBM vs RCA 'Our computers are better, head to head we have to win' Warren Buffet recently histories biggest ever philanthropist said of managerial princes and corporate toads 'we are not in the business of kissing toads and turning them into princess, few managers have the natural talent and were we to put them in strong performing companies it would be better for all.' okay he didn't say that it's not an exact quote but the moral was don't invest in the 'can do' spirit.
And so Arundhati's protest is one motivated by love of her heartland, that is on the tried and true path to mediocraty which is building a massive dam that doesn't work that was intended to impress the world with your engineering capabilities but when it ceased to do that you spent more money as part of a propaganda campaign to promote it to your own people. Because the world isn't fucking impressed. And as soon as a company starts promoting itself to it's employees instead of it's customers it is already dead. It may be a long time coming but the can do spirit isn't an entreprenuerial, high risk one. It is an increadibly low risk because you are more or less gaurunteed to burn up all your resources and fail.
Yet despite having all this brought to the attention of the Indian government still they press on. So should they be surprised when their officials start getting stabbed to death in their car? I would argue no. Should Mugabe start to worry when the displaced people of his own nation start saying 'I have nothing left to live for' yes.
The real tragedy is the only sane person in so much insanity can come across as insane, I've experienced that first hand when I pointed out our Ad campaign was structured around a meaningless feauture and not a benifit. I got stared down because all the work had been done already and they then presented it to the sales department which out of form is meant to be impressed that marketing managed to spend some money. Yet benifits sell not features is a proven working strategy that even the most basicly trained salesperson knows.
Anyway read her wikipedia entry, I don't think she's insane I think she's beautiful.

Wholesome Muffins

I figure I need about 2 weeks to just fucking sleep. Maybe even nap through a whole month. I saw a depressing add by commonwealth that depicted a teenager splounging in bed and the caption 'future workaholic' how the fuck? I used to be that lazy. I used to sleep in till fucking 8 every day, sure I missed out on a whole bevy of cartoons but I can live with that.
Yesterday I cycled for an hour or so around all the hoods that get my skin crawling, you know Toorak, St Kilda, Prahran were cool people go for good times. I cycled for hours because I was trying to get to my friends place and was using a conceptual map in my head of where I thought the place should be rather than a map that indicated where it is. I'd actually been looking forward to the bike ride for the few days I had notice of the shindig so I didn't mind.
But eventually in the home of company cars, and asian drivers a cyclist will get on edge. Chapel street was the one part of the journey I didn't see a single other rider whereas my side of the train tracks I now have to share the tiny 'special people' area with 5 cyclists any day of the week. It's like being in china or some shit.
I mean there's other places that get to me like Canturbury and pretty much all of Sydney (though I haven't seen much) in the same way, and the people I was visiting are pretty cool, like at least a 6.
But I'm a pyker it's what I fuckin do and by the time I got there not only did I feel like someone had stepped on my grave already but I'd managed to turn up after I had intended on leaving. So I stuck around and then unfortunately had to ungracefully cut and run whereas I'm more into dissapearing like Batman in commisioner gordon's office.
The joke is I got home and wasted another 2 hours of my life playing the sidemost scrolling action of stinkoman. I admit it has all those elements of early megaman games plus engrish galore so I was easily sucked in.
But it caused me to wake up late today, I also enjoyed the rain before I knew it I had to desperately rush into town to let the gang know basketball was cancelled which as far as I'm concerned means I may as well not have been alive this week.
Which brings me in the longest sense to what my blog is about, my recent descent into wholesomeness.
Now all my fucking life I've been regarded as a black fucken sheep. A bad influence, a touchy recruit. A reputation I don't think I deserve in the slightest, caffeine (via coke) is the only drug I do (my consumption of cola is well below most males my age the nutritionist tells me) and did start drinking post VCE exams for a highly unsuccessful 2 year drinking career and have since stopped again.
I'll take the black sheep reputation because I believe it makes me more appealing to the ladies but what causes me the most difficulty about it is explaining to friends and colleagues that I don't really like to party, when someone says 'I bet you're the first to pass out tonight' and the sheer unbrideled bewilderment and dissapointment on their face when I say 'I don't really drink' and when people assume I get all my creative ideas from smoking and injecting various drugs, I just can't back it up. I don't even know what they are meant to be like.
So generally I pike because I ain't drinking and don't want to witness the ugliness.
In year 12 I got real good at being sober around drunk people and you know could even interact with some degree of success.
But I was overly concerned when I realised most of my friends don't drink, and don't really speak english I got into a conscious effort to catch up with my old mates and was doing so. I realised I fucking love catching up one on one for dinner or something that's great. But a lot have been like 'yeah we gotta catch up for beers' and the whole thing just falls apart.
It put's me in mind of my marketing lecturer that pointed out what a massive problem drinking is in Australia. It has to be our major social failing. Non drinkers have to explain and apologise for not drinking. Companies market premix drinks to underage kids in underage magazines.
So why have I become so uncool, so fucking wholesome. I never wanted to be. Fuck I don't even get why you would drink. I really don't I've never enjoyed it even in my heyday back when I could tell you how many standard drinks you could get for any dollar amount.
So yeah, I guess for most people it provides a context for socialising and it's been called a social lubricant for many a year. anyhoo though I actually have concluded I am more at ease with basketball or cycling or just fucking food as the context in which I socialise. I'll still make token appearances. Maybe even more than that if there's cake or muslims.
Now I'm going to bake some bran muffins.
I'm proud of who I am, it's like I'm gay or something.

My God

I wasn't going to blog tonight I swear, I was even kind of on a roll writing scripts. I hit a log jam though and needed to look something up on the net and then I decided I needed to add a link to Sally's blog on my blog so I went out of my way to look it up again and do that, that done I went to check that the link came up okay and worked (incidentally I haven't been sleeping with a lot more people lately it's just more people I've slept with have started blogging).
Anyway I opened it up and was immeadiately confronted with the graphicness of my blog below and thought I have to write something to get it moving offscreen. What was I thinking? then and now.
Anyway I don't really have anything to write. I bought a bolognese pizza that was pretty tasty. I been watching One Piece again in the mornings it's cool. I tried to fit a headlight to my bike. I picked out some toejam today. I almost have made myself completely redundant at work.
Ran into a dude I hadn't seen for three years. That was pretty cool. We chatted, no strong association but you know it wasn't too awkward.
Anyway that's that. Hopefully now you have to scroll down to see the graphic graphicness of my adolescent drawings. If you really want to know how amatuer we were click on this link. I used some of this guys compositions as inspiration for my year 12 folio even though my works looked nothing like that. I was an artist by the way go figure.
I should feature more of my inspirations of the visual arts persuasion.

Duff and Wingman

Every now and then I discover that whilst I was preoccupies with drawing pictures like this one of my friend Brenton in highschool:
early filth contest entry
feeling all special about how much more perverse my mind was than brenton's I may have missed out on some essential concepts that make my life easier or harder. One such one I found out today. I never knew about girls keeping 'DUFF's' or 'Dumb ugly fat friend' to make themselves look better when out nor that I should have a 'wingman' a co conspirator. I mean I always suspected about the Duff's it's just too common an occorance. But I didn't know I needed my robin, my wingman to take out the duff to bring the whole battle back to even stevens. Until now I had relied on my relative clean cutness at Bryce hosted functions to attract attention. Now I realise I can produce results anywhere with a little help from a friend.
By the same token I think I'd make an excellent wingman I mean a lot of the time I'll be conversating with what I must presume was a duff thinking I was simply conversating and naively thinking I was looking good for my compassion and well meaning to all living creatures.
In fact I'd be the best wingman, I can talk to anyone. I did fucking door to door sales charming women in flannel shirts and spandex tights to the point where they laughed out loud through the brown remnants of their teeth.
Although like always maybe I'm not as good as I think I am. I still cherish what is possibly the finest work of art ever produced on paint... not by me but by brenton. Truly archibald worthy and so sensuos you'd swear brenton was gay.
Anyway enough defamation.
tomas

Hey I'm No Hero

He's not a hero! He's just Steve. Steve is my mate, on the train and he is worthy of my highest praises. Steve can come across as a little scary, he's missing part of one finger, has a broken nose, food stains on his jumper, wears ACDC and The Rock T-Shirts and is loud and persistent.
I met him on the train, he came up to talk to me about my bike. Crazy people often talk to me, I don't know if it's because of my long hair or the crazy glint in my eye but people can interrupt me whilst I'm listening to music through headphones, eating a subway sandwich and reading a magazine which generally says 'I am not interested in conversation' Steve was one such person to interrupt me on the train in the morning whilst I was enthusiastically writing scenes for a TV show idea.
Except Steve isn't crazy at all, he loves his mum, would never cheat on his girlfriend and likes to tell jokes and say g'day to random people on the train.
I was immeadiately touched by Steve's requesting permission to sit with me, to which I said it was fine, even though I really just wanted to write and listen to music.
Steve proceeded to tell me his 'big secret' he made me swear never to tell anyone which I did, as to this day I still have no idea what he whispered to me because I had left one of my ipod earphones in.
Steve became a regular and we always liked to chat, he gives me rare insights into what is happening in Brunswick and allows me to connect to a world that too many are cushioned from. He is honestly the most loving guy and I do feel protected by him. Because I look like such a fag most of the occa people who get off the train take an immeadiately couragous dislike to me. I have repressed my sociopathic tendancies so I never miss the train to start a fight that would probably be purely to my detriment but when I ride with Steve I never get bothered and that is pretty fucking sweet.
Too often there is a wonderful service I can do which is just listening to people. Sure Steve slurs alot, has trouble getting food in his mouth when he talks and eats at the same time and sometimes drifts off to sleep mid sentance. His jokes often don't go anywhere and I find it hard to keep up conversations about cars and 80's shows about cars either of which I know nothing.
But sometimes like today it is something you really can do some good over. Aparantly the owner of one of Brunswicks 2nd hand stores and a good mate of Steve's had his throat slashed open one night and Steve was really going to miss him.
It was really beautiful and sad.
Steve I would guess has had plenty of run ins with the cops, with gangs and bruisers, but he has a strong sense of values that easily transform him into teacher.
Still it's an odd pair we make on the train, he thinks I'm beautiful and at the same time wants me to go to the RSL club to see Rodney Rude for $44. Maybe I should.

A Love that isn't Beautiful revisited... already

Last night as I drifted out of consciousness my housemate was watching an SBS documentary after he had already passed out of consciousness. As far as I could deduce it was about a homosexual kid taking on his catholic school to be able to bring a date of his choice to the prom. Powerful stuff.
But I think what I didn't address when I first wrote about homophobia is that many gay people are profoundly religious. Their religion makes them feel guilty and sinful for who they are. Angel an evangelist christian that use to pray for the souls of a couple of my friends once said 'I have a gay friend and he asked a priest about homosexuality and he was told that the orientation itself is not sinful but the practice, so my friend has decided not to practice.' it was meant as a gracious 'see Christianity does have something for everyone' but was properly summed up by my current housemate as 'incredibly sad'
This guy on the documentary said 'I believe in a god who loves everyone for who they are' then broke down crying and I think that says it all. As a godless, soulless individual I forget that some people not only have to deal with their parents inability to accept their lifestyle but also their god's who's supposed to be all benevolent and all powerful.
It's yet another issue religions have to address as Gods become less and less impressive every day. If people have better attitudes generally than god, god's going to go from a someone to a noone very quickly (speaking in terms of centuries) meanwhile the Beatles popularity lives on.

I can dance all day

Some Videos worth checking out:

Skip to my Lou

Sanji vs Bon Clay

Air Canada

Les Claypool

Song to make love to your lady by

and by the time you watched those this could be my longest blog entry ever.
The wonders of outsourcing to people with actual talents.
Regardorino's

Tom.

A Love that Isn't Beautiful

I can't believe it's taken me this long to write about this subject. Homophobia is actually illegal yet it is also illegal for same sex couples to marry. The arguement is that marriage is sacred, John howard argues that marriage is exclusively for between a man and a woman. Yet as Chris Rock is quick to point out a) marriage isn't sacred. Not when you have the Bachelor, the Bachelorette, Joe Millionaire, Who Want's to marry a Millionaire, Australian Princess, Outback Jack. And even in the words of the Great Chuck Barris 'The premise of the Newlyweds game was that any couple would gladly sell eachother out for a chance to win some modern kitchen appliances' if you are afraid of the legal status and welfare entitlements causing a drain on taxpayers money, worry about fucking negative gearing, a tax incentive of no benifit to anyone but the already wealthy and an economic burden on everyone else.
If you believe in any justice at all, the same justice that has lead us to say you can't make employment choices based on someones sexual orientation then what about protecting these individuals that are living as married couples anyway yet if their relationship is irreconcilable after 20 years living together there's no defacto status, no dividing the estate we send one faggot up the river and let the other sit pretty.
If gay men and women can't marry they also can't divorce or seperate which just isn't just.
I guess my real question is 'what is everyone afraid of?' I mean seriously, I am so fucking sick of it. We know you can't catch homosexuality or lesbianism. We know you can't cure it, it's someones nature, someones soul. It is how they choose to love.
I forget who it was but I'm pretty sure it wasn't Shania Twain but anyway one of those lesbian american singers when she was growing up in the south and had determined she was a lesbian she went to fess up to a priest and the priest said 'I can't believe that god could make a love that isn't beautiful'.
What about beastiality Tom? or Peadophilia Tom? I agree with you, but at least your acknowledging the love. But what about Heterosexuality? think about it, Paedophilia and Beastiality are detestable not because they are a form of love but all to often are expressed as Rape. Just like it isn't love in a heterosexual relationship when one party is 'in love' and the other party isn't, that is called rape, statutory rape, molestation, stalking, sexual harassment, abuse etc. A huge percentage of girls in Australia are in abusive relationships, an understated figure because only a small percentage of them overcome the shame and get help. So there's a fucking love that isn't beautiful. I love ducks, but I'd never fuck one. Because ultimately loving and fucking are two different things. The only thing that would make me reconsider my position is if a duck maybe cracked onto me at a party one day.
Like that's ever going to happen, I'm not that lucky.
So seriously, what homosexual in history has ever hurt anyone? versus hetero initiatives like the sacking of troy, the death of king arthur, the ottoman empire vs Wallachia, the Hiroshima Bombing, the Holocaust.
Maybe you can blame the Holocaust on Hitler if you think he was gay, but if he was would he have done any of it if he wasn't a repressed homosexual.
The only time it can harm someone that I can accept is in the religious sense, but there viewpoint is weak to me. Religions assume homosexuality is a choice, they also believe it can be cured. I don't think it is. I think people are gay if they are gay the day they are born. Which to me means that if one's everlasting soul is fucked from square one, then god (and this is a big truism) is a racist prejudice fuck. I don't fucking care, I would no more eat at a restaurant that refused my homosexual friends than I would spend an eternity in a self proclaimed 'paradise' that refused my homosexual friends.
I am ashamed to be a member of a nation that will not bestow equal rights and dignity to my homesexual friends, yet just like my homosexual friends I had both the fortune and misfortune of being born that way and by 'that way' I mean Australian. fortunately I can do something about being Australian. I can move to Brazil, get citizenship, tear up my Australian passport and never again return. My gay friends aren't so lucky.
Yesterday I wore my army cam stockings to basketball under my shorts, when changing out of my shorts after the match Omar my palestinian friend finally clicked that my stockings were fucking stockings and he a fucken arab and proclaimed victim of prejudice said 'do you want people to think you are gay?' to which I should have retorted 'what's with your fucking beard do you want people to think your a fucking arab terrorist mother fucker?' which is generally how I actually speak to Omar so he probably wouldn't have gotten my point but I think I said 'we can't all pretend to be blackmen'
It's all to fucken common, homophobia is a new thing. All over the world, the Greek and Roman empires celebrated it "women are for babies, boys are for pleasure" the higher ranking roman official you could do the more prestige to you.
That was the foundation of western civilization until the church came along, Japan's beaf under the Bushido system against homosexuality was: 'Any samurai who is in a relationship with a man has loyalty to two men, his master and his lover and this can create difficulty.' that was it, none of this burn in hell shit that comes from the church, the same church that would have us believe Jesus never did anything but hang around with 12 other men.
Homophobia was introduced to Japan. Homophobia has been introduced by the Church to most of civilization and we are all poorer for it.
When I was 6 I wasn't interested in girls, I wanted to play transformers in the playground with the boys. I devised a new lifestyle that made perfect sense to me. What if two guys fell in love, that have more in common and you know wouldn't have to put up with girly things like barbie and my little pony and shit.
In other words I thought I had devised an alternative lifestyle, I had invented homosexuality. Like most boys at the age of 6 I was well behind puberty and understanding how fun women can be, but at the same time I still think guy guy and girl girl relationships actually make a lot of sense.
I come from Ballarat, the capital city of homosexual repression. Families with a repressed homosexual kid lead a tragic pretend life. Families with kids who have gone to melbourne and come out of the closet end up having broken homes as parents struggle to 'deal with it' which they wouldn't have to if every majour institution wasn't out there espousing homophobic shit.
Like all things you've got to reverse it. You've got to imagine what life would be like if throughout history all major institutions, churches, governments, courts where heterophobic. That is the only legally recognized relationships where gay ones and reproduction was a civil duty carried out once or twice in a lifetime, no relationship ensued.
What kind of fucking life is that? It probably wouldn't work. It would collapse. Just like homophobia also doesn't work. People are still gay despite it being just about the worst thing you can be in terms of opportunities apart from being aboriginal. It still exists because the best thing you can have is requitted love. The powers that be within the church are honestly and with absolute finality a piece of shit, we need more priests of the 'god would not create a love that isn't beautiful' calibre in charge and less of the homophobic conservative ones that preach abstinence only sex education (which if you want to talk about success, abstinence only ed. states and nations having the highest rate of STI's, Teen pregnancies, and small minded arseholes of anywhere in the world).

My Left Testicle

could this be my future left nut?

I watched a documentary called drowned out on friday night. It was about a massive dam project in india started in the 1960's that presented some subsistence agrarian villages with the choice of relocating (to land they felt they were incapable of living off), taking a cash payment (that was small enough to not even cover the cost of relocating to the slums) or staying in the valley and drowning when the monsoons submerged their ancestral homes.
Naturally they chose to drown. Now the evening was sponsored by way of Prosper Australia & earthsharing which has the link over to the left of me. Over the past 6 months when I can I've been doing some reading on the whole thing and whilst sitting through my economics lectures wondered why nobody's done the simple price v quantity supply demand curve model on land, as far as I know nobody still hasn't (?).
But this is the thing, as foreign as the concept of removing all income and consumption taxes in favour of resource rentals goes when I try and 'find the holes to fuck it' I just cannot, I cannot fuck the theory.
So here are some examples:
You got a subsistence community living in a valley with no claims to their land. They consume only what they produce and don't engage in trade (due to there being no surplus) presumably someone owns the land and I am presuming it is the government since no bit of land on earth currently doesn't have a private owner. 500 km away you got a drought stricken area of an even greater amount of subsistence farmers. Under utilitarianism ethos the displacement of 10,000 people to divert water to 1.4 million or some such number. The government offers the displaced population the aforementioned deal (although they don't offer drowning as an option) So the question is how does taxing people land tax help out subsistence communities? It works every which way - first and foremost the big problem with the damn is that it won't work, the water will never make it to the drought stricken area but will travel through the canal system to benifit an industrial region, namely already wealthy chemical companies etc as per the world banks assesment. So at the moment all income tax of all indians is financing the damn and an industrial sectors land values have appreciated greatly because of it. If there was land tax the infrastructure improvements would mean that the benificiaries of the mega damn would actually have to pay for it by way of the land value and as such land tax appreciating. The lack of land for the subsistence farmers would dissappear because unused land would be left vacant for relocation, in india even the slums are owned by someone who generally benevolently allow millions to live there, if they were paying land tax on it it would force them to develope these areas creating more employment and creating habitable places. Furthermore in the drought stricken area the government would have to build 'mini dams' which collect monsoon waters between plots and have proved much more effective at relieving the drought as opposed to mega dams the first of which provides water to only 5% of it's intended area at huge taxpayer cost. One criticism was that a land tax would be unsupportable by subsistence communities, destroying them and devaluing them.
But even if you sit down and model it you have land with no infrastructure, no electricity, no pipes, no fucking nothing, so land tax would be low as compared to melbourne CBD. The communities would not actually have to rent the land but a) they would have the option of doing so, and b) if not what else is the land going to be used for, if I were to rent it my most logical work force to produce the little surplus necessary to pay the land tax would be the existing community. Let's face it I'd have a hard time luring professionals out to work in my ultra minimalist work place.

Another fucking example Australia, Australian housing is overvalued by 22% making it unattractive for foreign investment as it is currently an asset bubble. This problem is compounded by our ageing population. They are getting huge superannuation payouts and looking for an income generating asset that is simple enough for them to understand, bricks and morter. Now if you read LVRG's report bricks and mortar is a bad investment because the actual bricks and mortar are deteriorating all the time and cost of housing materials has held pretty much steady all the time. Furthermore land is overvalued because of urban sprawl, whilst people subscribe to the lex luthor maxim of 'they can never make more land' there is no limit to how many Fountain Gate communities they can make on the outskirts of melbourne. It is also a renters market due to the shear volume of investment properties out there there are more places for people to rent than there are tennants to rent them. But as my mum explained you don't make money on rent it's the capital gain. Infact it is all too common for people to make a loss on rent even when they are fortunate enough to have tennants because they can claim a tax deduction on any loss should rent not cover the interest on their loan.
This is called negative gearing.
So look at the situation, we are about to have a large proportion of Australians retiring, they wont be producing any economic surplus. The surplus of their lives have been used to buy up all the land, this has been amplified by negative gearing making the market more overpriced because you don't actually have to make an income form an investment property. I also see news report after newsreport on how underfunded the public health care system is, how underfunded the education system is, how public transport is running at a loss, how bad Australian infrastructure is etc. The most likely place for my income tax to go really is in a deduction for a multiple property owner. So my income tax goes to the ATO then someone rich enough to have an asset like an investment property can claim back their taxes and then rent me a room in their property to pay off the mortgage.
If there is say a 10% annual tax on the NPV of any property in Australia you would think the answer is simple simply increase the rent by that much. And possibly I could afford it because you get rid of income tax at the same time. So then two things happen all the houses that don't have tennants can't have the land tax covered by non existent rent, if they want to keep the property as an investment then they have to reenter the workforce and earn an income to cover their taxes or put the property on the market. Which will happen in a lot of cases because all of a sudden 'You make money from the capital gain not the rent' doesn't work anymore because ten percent of the value of the house if it is appreciating you actually have to cover each and every year. Every decade you have paid for the house again.
So land values drop because I who was once a renter can now buy a whole bunch of houses on the market if I like but faced with the same problem am only going to buy as many as my income can cover. Which will probably be one. Unless I also want to buy a property to start a business and start employing people. Then all of a sudden the pensioners with no income but land tax are screwed? but there not the depreciation of land values means the land tax they pay also reduces. Presumably to the point where they can draw a pension (based on minimum survival income) which both covers their land tax and there food, clothing etc. But that wasn't the retirement I planned I want to be rich and travel. So you fucking baby boomers have finincial planners now what are they going to do hand you a gun to shoot yourself. No they'll tell you to invest in the sharemarket and instead of living off the rent and income of the young generation actually bankroll them to start businesses and turn a profit. There isn't a single company in the world that won't grow if they got a massive influx of finances to invest in capital, research and development etc. Moron's running companies will go bust but that's why you have fund managers to dodge this shit. Furthermore instead of making money off capital gains you are making it off income, profits, dividends, the work of the younger generation that wants to work. You recieve dividends for investing in them rather than charging them to be alive which will cover the cost of rising land taxes as the government desperately improves and repairs infrastructure in order to increase revenues.

In development most issues regarding poverty revolve around land, My friend said in her honours thesis (or maybe just talking about it) in Vanuatu people where occupying land that was unused but owned by other people and the government would not redistribute because they simply thought the squatters would just 'go away' ie do nothing and hope they go away. A lot of subsistence and drought stricken development regions could do with resource rentals and land tax rather than the current set up which is lock down the wealth poverty gap.

There is not a single case study in history that disproves this resource rental tax. There are quite a few that do prove it. I have come up with many more scenarios than these two and not a single one of them is better off under a different taxation method. Even a world where land is in infinite supply. So here's the deal, I am willing to bet my left nut you can't fuck this theory. At the very least you shouldn't because it obviously represents the greatest gain to me and my generation.