Quit or die

The first thing that would make me feel a little bit better towards them is if they follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow, and say I’m sorry, and then either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide

- Senator Charles Grassley, Iowa

This kind of “guts or glory” hyperbole is the missing link in Australian politics, and has been for some time. Despite Big Kev’s careful placement of such words as “shitstorm” into recent interviews, it is quite apparent that Australian politicians are still a long way from suggesting that senior executives should top themselves.

So where did we go wrong?

I was born during the reign of Malcolm “pants-down-in-Memphis” Fraser. Soon after we had Bob Hawke, with his famous “any boss who sacks an employee is a bum” America’s Cup victory speech. Keating’s insults were by and large limited to big words that noone else could understand, and Howard was too busy looking over his shoulder at Costello to come up with any truly brilliant pieces of invective.

Big Kev cannot and will not save us; his vocabulary is strictly limited to statements such as “we’ll be very cross with companies closing down after taking our subsidies”.

None of these figureheads of Australian politics come even close to the levels of potential controversy achieved by our good friend Senator Grassley.

Australia doesn’t want political correctness any more. We’ve had the Keating years, we’ve had the apology to the stolen generation. We all acknowledge that we are living in a diverse and exciting society where everyone has an equal place. Now let’s get back to calling apples apples.

Top finance executives who steer their companies towards collapse and then take multi-million dollar payouts should not be encouraged to kill themselves. It should be mandatory. Compulsory corporate seppuku, that’s what I’m talking about.

Furthermore, in order to raise the capital required to get these companies spending again and restart the economy, each business should hold a charity-style shareholder’s auction. The winning bidder will be able to nominate the method by which their overpaid office-bearer dispatches him/herself from this plane of being.

We could even sell the rights to the live auctions (and subsequent deaths) to Channel Ten.

I look forward to my proposal being debated during the next session of parliament.

Some headlines we’ll never see

Bush commits US$700b to emergency environment rescue package

K-Rudd flies to New York for emergency environment summit with G20 leaders

Economic rescue on hold while major polluters reduce emissions

Man from the Central Coast scores an IQ above 85

An Euler diagram

Is this really that difficult to understand?

Economy ∈ Environment.

The rise of the survivalist

Financial markets are tumbling. Share prices are moving in the opposite direction to sea levels. Banks are collapsing left, right and centre. Is it time for the revival of the survivalist?

David Grayling seems to think that it is time we all started learning to love deep-fried cockroach. Myself, I prefer a nice roast earwig.

Meanwhile, our good friends over at AusSurvivalist.com have literally pages and pages of useless information, including a detailed table of suggested vaccinations and antidotes against potential biological warfare agents.

Of course, Clover had us going with her “go bag” last year, but no one does survivalism quite like the Americans. The man himself, Tom Cruise, is supposedly leading the way with his $10M underground bunker.

But what if we introduced a new definition of survival? Or, to be more precise, an old definition.

Progress sucks. To date, the three major achievements of technological progress are as follows:

1. The ability to extract large quantities of resources from the earth
2. The ability to generate large quantities of energy from the earth’s resources
3. The ability to manufacture massive plasma televisions using the the aforementioned two items

Meanwhile, Joe Officeworker is sitting in traffic for 2+ hours per day in order to get to an air-conditioned box in the city and perform a job he hates for 9 hours before getting home too tired to do anything more intelectually stimulating than watching Australian Idol, and thinking about how he is going to save up enough money to buy a bigger television than Frank Jones next door.

Why are we stuck on this corporate roundabout? It is because the exits are cleverly hidden. Giant dollar signs point us ever onwards, and milestones along the side of the road count down to the next rung up the ladder. Exits flash by, and the few journeymen who are game enough to take them are reviled as seditionists, outcasts and just plain wierdos.

Survivalism isn’t building a concrete bunker and ferreting away the last 6 seasons of Big Brother on DVD. Survivalism is giving the big finger to capitalism, and going to live on a farm somewhere where you can grow your own food, compose ditties to your collection of chilli plants, and enjoy the company of your fellow travellers without being interrupted by alarm clocks, petrol fumes or margin calls.

Some say the end is near
Some say we’ll see armageddon soon
I certainly hope we will
I sure could use a vacation from this
Bullshit three ring circus sideshow of freaks

– Maynard James Keenan

Rio Tinto

There are too many competing forces, and I think it’s important to recognise that saving the environment, dropping carbon is almost a luxury of affluence if we see difficult economic conditions priorities to begin to change and that will put more challenges on coming up with a solution.

Tom Albanese – CEO Rio Tinto

It is people like this that are starting to convince me that I should be going into the houseboat-building industry. This comes just two months after Rio were protesting that the WWF unfairly gave their power generators zero stars in terms of positioning for a low carbon future.

Affluence is a luxury of having a functioning environment, not the other way around. No environment means no economy. Is this really that hard to understand?