KRUDD’s Army of Volunteers Not What We Need

I note with trepidation that Kevin Rudd has copied Obama with his “Army of volunteers” (see here) to police the environment and look after the elderly among other throw-aways.

Both Obama’s idea and Krudd’s copy are very scary. It reminds me of The Third Wave experiment conducted by Ron Jones in 1967 in order try and show his students why the German public allowed the atrocities of World War II to happen right under their noses. A mass of disciplined followers aligned to an idea or ideology are a dangerous thing in the hands of a political leader as it can easily usurp constitutional institutions and the rule of law as happened in Nazi Germany.

Blind faith in a leader is plain wrong. Check out this unbelievable video where Obamaphiles make a series of pledges. It begins as somewhat reasonable then gets really quite creepy with pledges to “serve our president” and so forth. It is so scary it beggars belief that it is real until you see that they are celebrities so it must have actually been created to shift opinion. The President for Americans and our politicians here are TO SERVE US. That’s why were “Constituents” they were once called “Civil Servants” but now we’re “Civilians” and they are “Government Officials”.

Our job is to treat all political leaders with extreme suspicion and to criticise everything they do and try, at all times, to limit their control of us and minimise the amount of OUR money they get to waste. If you do not do this you get tyranny.

Visiting Peter and Mount Tomaree

Last weekend I went to see my mate Peter at Shoal Bay. We climbed Mount Tomaree and got a great view of the whole area of Shoal Bay, Nelson Bay, Hawke's Nest, Anna Bay etc.

Christmas Presents!

Grace and Tayla's Birthday

We combined Grace and Tayla's birthdays and had dinner at the sporto. Jane and Mark came along too. Note that only the girls wanted to come because it was a Saturday night and the teenagers had other social engagements!

The Grizwalds

Our house with the Christmas lights up. And the kids wanted more!

World Champions and Wales

Well I should have gone with my hunch and put some brass on the Kiwis. Everything pointed to a big upset the way the Sydney press was crapping on that it was going to be a walkover. It reminded me of the tri-nations triumph in England in 2006.

I sat down with Melsy to watch the match but assured her it would be turned to another channel after 15-20 minutes if it was going to be the usual pounding the Kangaroos give us. Sadly Mel didn’t get to change channel and I got to see a very entertaining game in which we actually won.

The recriminations are going down here in Sydney with Ricky Stuart dreaming up a number of conspiracies against his team by the ARL to keep the people’s interest in the game. You can’t call the ref’s decisions marginal, they were pretty spot on. And you certainly can’t rig the bounce of the ball for that last try. Perhaps the only one that was dodgy was Slater’s wing and a prayer pass but then that’s his trade mark and usually they’re 50 points in the lead so it doesn’t matter anyway.

Bottom line: Kiwis didn’t run out of steam like they usually do combined with Aussies believing the TAB odds. Great game. Oh, and we're the World Champs at something.

Wales Game

I watched this game on replay and was mildly worried by the lack of SMS messages from the UK and NZ. It worried me that there were not the usual celebratory text messages even at the end. Melsy teased me by saying she knew the final score and I’d be surprised. Didn’t fool me but caused unnecessary concern shall we say.

The first half was the usual with a pumped up Welsh team doing their very best and the All Blacks doing just enough to make sure they were within a converted try. The Welsh had the majority of the possession and made some good plays. I liked their team and their aggression at the breakdown. Awesome crowd even better Haka theatre!

With Mel’s little tease still in the back of my mind I went into the second half expecting it to go down to the wire. But then out came Richie and the boys and gave the Welsh a lesson in how to prevent the other side scoring simply by keeping the ball and grabbing it back every time the other side got it.

Highlights:

Richie looks to be taking the mantle of world’s best referee from Fitzy. I was most impressed with how Kaplan deferred to him a couple of times and conceded that he was right but unlucky. All good stuff to have in the bank next time there’s a 50/50 situation.

Soalo is also showing signs of being an excellent ref.

Jimmy Cowan is starting to show Marshall-type traits. He’s starting to be an all round player with sniping runs, good defence and barking orders at the forwards.

What’s with Kaplan suddenly policing the put in at scrum time? They’ve been throwing it into the second row for several years now! I had assumed that everyone was on board that the put in was no longer a contest. I’m going to start watching that more closely.

The Obama Lapdance

Now that you’ve put the collective Kleenex back on the bedside table and you are feeling the afterglow of Obama winning the US election its time to have a reality check: The Obama Lapdance, not unsurprisingly, is about to leave you without satisfaction after a really quite exciting campaign in which he promised soooo much change but told you soooo little about what that change would actually be. But you got all caught up in the excitement and thought, as a lot of people did, that surely a black man in charge is enough to bring change to the Whitehouse after 8 years of a hick cowboy (the fact that Dubya was never a rancher and lived most of his early years in the cities of Midland and Houston - with holidays in Maine - should not get in the way of a good image).

I had hoped for change but I suspected there would be no change and, now that he has announced some of his cabinet, I know there will be no change.

As I told my son last week, listen to a person’s words but judge a person by their actions. Obama certainly has the words and the best speech writer going and it was all made considerably easier because his message of change matched 50% of Americans belief that they needed change. The fact that only 50% of Americans wanted Obama is a bit lost on the international community as they sit back and get entertained by the Obama Lapdance but I digress….

The way I judge Obama is by his actions and from what I can see he’s the same as Bush but potentially worse because he’s sucked in a huge amount of goodwill from meaningful progressives and liberals both in the US and around the world which he is about to crap all over. The first actions you should judge Obama by are the appointments in his administration. FAIL. It’s basically a shocker of insiders, war hawks and people with very dodgy histories. Some are recycled from the Clinton years and still more from the George H. W. Bush term. So we are in keeping with the “Bush-Clinton” theme of the last 20 years.

Here’s an article on the appointments so far. Its pretty scary reading.

I note that Israel’s stranglehold on policy will continue if not simply by the number of dual citizen Israelis in the cabinet. How they can allow a person to hold high office with ANY other citizenship other than US is beyond me!

Given all the lip service paid to change surely Obama could have put one or two progressives in his cabinet just to keep the bastards honest, but alas, he hasn’t. I guess the $1Bil he spent on his campaign needs to be paid back in favours some time.

PS: And before you say Obama had donations from the little people let me tell you that was in the beginning of his campaign (see “Inflating the numbers” in the article above). After that it was all BIG MONEY. Wall Street paid more to Obama than they did to McCain. These people invest money for a return. Obama will give them their return.