Censorship

This 21:09 minute video debate has beenc republished from Attack on Freedom of Speech (19/4/19) | PressTV (but see note below - Ed).

During the 80 years following 1789 that it took for the French Revolution to acheive its aims as the Third Republic, the people of the third estate (that is neither church nor noble) launched many newspapers and founded many societies where they could meet and discuss matters.

UPDATE: 23/7/2018 Worldwide protests being organised against the eviction of Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian Embassy. See here and here.

We live in increasingly 'interesting' times. US Journalists and government employees are afraid to criticise their government's outrageously authoritarian move against one media outlet, because they are afraid of being harassed themselves. According to the US Department of Justice, RT is an agent of a foreign, even hostile, power. All the while, the United States Department Of Justice refuses to explain why this is the case or even cite what laws RT may have broken. But something else is in play: critics warn RT is a test case for a wider campaign of media suppression. The UK is following suit, with parliamentarians attacking journalists who write against its illegal foreign wars, because they are afraid of being pursued one day for war crimes. Julian Assange has rightly described Australia as being governed by Washington, so we Australians had better look out and stand up and defend RT and anyone who writes a different point of view.

CrossTalking with Lee Stranahan, Rocky Anderson and Marcus Papadopoulos.

In Syrian Girl's Facebook Ban Linked to Russia-gate Twitter Purge? - an Exclusive Interview (30/9/17) | Russia Insider, Charles Bausman reported that Facebook had blocked SyrianGirl's account after she had criticised Kurds.

Syrian Girl, the Australian activist, Youtuber, and social media powerhouse, tweeted on Thursday evening (EST) that her Facebook account has been blocked for her exposure of fraud during the Kurdistan referendum. She had 75,000 followers.

She also has 70,000 followers on Twitter, and 75,000 subscribers to her excellent Youtube channel.

She gave Russia Insider (RI) an exclusive interview on Friday, explaining that Facebook acted without warning, (which is unusual - usually they give people a chance to correct whatever is upsetting the censors), and so far have not responded to emails.

She speculated that perhaps her page had been caught up in the anti-Russian Twitter / Facebook purge currently unfolding. (Twitter removed 200 Russian accounts that targeted Facebook during election - USA Today)

…

This of course follows the evidence-free beat-up that alleged Russian interference somehow caused American voters to elect Russia's allegedly favourite candidate Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton the chosen favourite of the American corporate elite, including Zuckerberg himself.

As revealed by Julian Assange of Wikileaks, "Zuckerberg Colluded with Hillary Clinton Campaign":

Mark Zuckerberg's claims this week that Facebook was fair to Donald Trump during the 2016 election just took another serious blow.

The Facebook founder and CEO personally met with Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta a year before the 2016 election, according to an email released by Wikileaks.

The news comes a day after Wikileaks' Julian Assange dropped a bomb onto the heads of Zuckerberg and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, alleging they colluded with Hillary Clinton's 2016 election campaign.

Assange Tweeted Thursday, linking the emails sent back and forth between John Podesta and Sandberg which reveal Sandberg wanted Clinton to win "badly." Assange said the women met privately numerous times during Clinton's campaign.

Assange included one email from Sandberg to Podesta, Clinton's campaign manager, which is particularly damaging in which the Facebook executive pledged to help elect Clinton.

What can we do about it?

This outrageous attempt at thought control and censoring of political information by Zuckerberg, as well as Google, YouTube and Twitter, shows that in a true democracy, the news media upon which we all depend, must be taken out of the hands of the corporate owners and placed in the hands of the people.

Alternatively, rival newsmedia and social media that are run transparently, and with a charter to promote a free contest of ideas, should be established.

This could easily be done with public funds and with popular support within purportedly democratic countries like Australia, France, Germany and the UK. Should this not occur, then alternatives could be set up. One such alternative is the community-owned minds.com.

Another alternative is for sovereign countries like Russia and Iran, which are independent of United States' hegemony, set up their own alternatives to Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. If they were also run transparently and with a charter to promote a free contest of ideas, they would very quickly draw away much of the current audiences of Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Such an initiative would surely cost those countries only a fraction of what they are currently obliged to spend on defence.

In fact, Russia has already set up Yandex an alternative to Google. Hopfeully, Yandex will soon be expanded to include more in English. Hopefully, also, other alternatives to Google, Facebook, and Twitter will soon be established.

Over time their need for defence expenditure would be greatly reduced as more and more people in Western countries are able to see through the lies of the corporate newsmedia. We could well see the end of war altogether.

See also: "Russia Threatens to Ban Facebook" (2/10/17) | Russia Insider by Tyler Durden – Russia demands data of Russian citizens be kept on servers physically located in Russia, "The push to 'Fight Foreign Propaganda' is the same as government book burning" (28/9/17) | Medium by Caitlin Johnstone.

The Minister for Planning has publicly insisted [1] that Victoria has to fit 10 million people in Victoria with four more million in Melbourne and that that is the reason for the planning dictatorship he is trying to force on Victorians. If we did not 'have' to fit in millions more, no new plan would be 'needed'. Population numbers as a topic dominate the mainstream press,[2] but three residents' action groups in Planning Backlash - possibly trading on their marginal electorate status - reportedly held the rest to ransom for their presence at the Planning Backlash rally on the steps of parliament 8 June 2017. Their ransom was censorship of their fellow groups in a promise that no rally speakers would mention the role that population growth has in driving Plan Melbourne 2017-2050 and all the destruction it promises. Even though the Victorian Government has openly published several written policies for massive population growth, [3] the Yarra Residents' Coalition, Brunswick and Moreland groups of Planning Backlash have been identified as censoring debate about this on the very steps of Victoria's parliament.

In light of this censorship and division, Brad Marsh's statement at the end of his speech, as President of Yarra Residents' Coalition, was ironic, "We have 18 months. Lets work together and see if we can restore democracy to the political decision-making and restore residents' rights."

I protested to Mr Marsh about the censorship and his reply to me was that population was 'complicated' and that the real drivers were money and foreign buyers. My informed response was that the money is to be made through population growth-caused demand and that property is marketed to foreign buyers with the guarantee of population growth pushing prices up. It is extremely difficult for me to believe that Mr Marsh is unaware of this.

Apparently Professor Buxton, together with Mr Marsh, saw it advisable to remove the subject of population growth from those covered by this public meeting.

Well, now that the rally is over and the aim of getting population-discussion-shy groups to come has been achieved, it is important for people to know why population was not mentioned at the rally. It is important because the public are truly mystified by the suppression of real population numbers debate and they don't need more confusion. They suspect that something is going on in the background but rarely does an actual incident of discussion-suppression get reported. People go home with the false idea that they are alone in strongly questioning the state population juggernaut and this makes them less sure of their ground - which is what the growth lobby want.

Several politicians spoke at this meeting, including the Shadow Minister for Planning. One of the strategies in the meeting was the idea of ousting the Labor government for a Liberal Government, in hopes of more friendly planning. There seems to be some substance in the idea that the last Liberal Government, whilst pursuing a similar program of population growth, overdevelopment and deregulation to that of the previous Labor Government, did allow some protections in the form of residential zones, now predictably overturned by Planning Minister Wynne, using the excuse of population growth. Alternating Liberal/Labor governments are like a good cop/bad cop scenario. Mr David Davis, Shadow Minister for Planning (Liberal) made many promises of more friendly planning in his speech at the rally, but the subject of the population driver was not mentioned, of course. A man who identified himself as a member of one of the three groups mentioned above was later heard saying to David Davis (Shadow Minister for Planning) that he was in favour of immigration-fed population growth and David Davis reportedly replied that he was in favour of it too.

The groups that apparently (were they really representative?) wanted population growth left out of the speeches and banners are mostly in Labor and Green electorates, heavily networked by the Socialist Alliance. These north of the Yarra suburbs are already densely packed. Why would people in such overpopulated suburbs apparently be in favour of mass immigration? One explanation is that the Greens and Socialist Alliance activists tend to push open-borders views and to confound multiculturalism with open-ended immigration. Because they lack valid arguments for their positions, they tend to unfairly attack people as 'racist' who don't want mass immigration-fed population growth. This is intimidating and probably stops many people in these suburbs from speaking openly.

Whilst the open-borders ideology is an obvious influence in the inner suburbs north of the Yarra, we should be aware that these views have been covertly nurtured by the property development lobby, which has a record of infiltrating, manipulating and financing people in groups using political activism as a front. See a discussion of this kind of tactic in a Property Council of Australia forum here: Transcript of Growth Lobby video-shocker, "Straightening out B.A.N.A.N.A.S". Unsurprisingly, the Labor Party, which is truly little more than a property speculating corporation, doesn't seem bothered by this activity. (See "Australian Labor Governments or Commercial Corporations?" Many government departments (whether under Liberal and Labor governments) are members of the Property Council of Australia and fail to criticise its overt aims of influencing government to its financial advantage in matters of property and development tax, media influence, and mass immigration.

There are two parts to the attack on our democracy that a rogue Melbourne Planning System carries. One is the way the government 'streamlines' or steamrolls developers' interests over the civil rights and democratic interests of the people living here, citizens and residents. Another is the mass economic immigration that fuels the developers' interests and which the state government invites via its website https://www.liveinvictoria.vic.gov.au/. Since both phenomena are interwined and mutually dependent, one unable to exist without the other, neither should be left out in a public protest. This is particularly so when you have the opportunity of instructing the passing public about the role of government-pushed mass immigration in overturning our democracy and property rights in the planning system.

Note that the Victorian Government, in its population literature, has totally misled Victorians about its major role in causing population growth and driving overdevelopment, assigning sole responsibility for immigration to the federal government. The chief way that the Victorian government misleads the public is by denying its own role in economic immigration, although its role has been major and structural since the time of Kennett. See "Sheila Newman: Kennett population policy, numbers and flow-ons: Regional migration and industrial law under Kennett". [4]

NOTES

[1] Wynne expressed this imperative to 774 Drive Program host, Raphael Epstein on Friday 26 May 2017. See the following comments: http://candobetter.net/comment/214871#comment-214871, http://candobetter.net/comment/214873#comment-214873, and http://candobetter.net/comment/214882#comment-214882
The Victorian Government has published its population engineering policies for rapid population growth in multiple planning and other documents. See "Towards "Melbourne at 8 million" and beyond", which gives a history of the Victorian Governments' constantly increasing population targets. The Government's population growth policy is a moving target, ever climing upwards and the public have never been consulted, although they have many times expressed their rejection of what is happening.

[2] Although population growth is a constant topic on the mainstream media, expression of opposition to it is suppressed. True discussion of the pros and cons constantly suppressed in the mainstream media. See, for instance, "Yet again, ABC refuses to discuss population ponzi - by Leith van Onselen".
The gambit of mainstream media and politicians, is to pretend that the only issue in mass immigration is race. They thus racialise the 'debate' and excise the true costs of their ponzi scheme to the general public. When parliamentarians attempt to raise the population numbers issue among their fellows, they are frequently attacked.

[3] Victorian population growth policy document:
, "Beyond Five Million, The Victorian Government's Population Policy," December 2004.
Repeated here for regional Australia in a government funded 'independent' think-tank: http://inform.regionalaustralia.org.au/population-and-people/population-and-migration/item/beyond-five-million-the-victorian-government-s-population-policy
[4] Victoria in Future 2016, VIF Frequently asked questions: This Victorian Government 'population research' document pretends to educate the public about trends in Victoria's population, but obfuscates the fact that the government's population policy has greatly impacted these 'trends' in the past and plans to in the future - upwards. The chief way that the Victorian government misleads the public is by denying its role in planned immigration, although its role has been major and structural since the time of Kennett. See "Sheila Newman: Kennett population policy, numbers and flow-ons: Regional migration and industrial law under Kennett". Here is a statement by the Victorian Government which crucially misleads the public:

"Net overseas migration
Net overseas migration (NOM) is the difference between people coming to live in Australia and residents leaving to settle overseas.
In the past, natural increase has generally contributed more to Australia's annual population growth than has overseas migration. However, since 2004-05, overseas migration has overtaken natural increase as the major contributor to population growth. In 2014-15, NOM accounted for 54% of the annual population growth of Victoria (ABS cat. no. 3101.0).
[...] In discussing net overseas migration, it needs to be borne in mind that governments have much less control over migration than may be expected. State Governments have no control and can only influence Commonwealth Government through advocacy. In turn, Commonwealth Governments have chosen not to practice rigorous controls over the number of people moving in or out of the country. Numbers of permanent humanitarian and skilled migrants are capped by Commonwealth Government policy. On the other hand, Australian residents, and New Zealanders, come and go without restrictions. The numbers of long term but temporary migrants, such as students, working holiday makers and category 457 migrants, are not capped, nor are those coming under family reunion schemes."

US Congress Quietly Passes Bill Targeting “Russian Propaganda” Websites By Tyler Durden, Global Research, December 03, 2016, Zero Hedge 2 December 2016. On November 30, one week after the Washington Post launched its witch hunt against “Russian propaganda fake news”, with 390 votes for, the House quietly passed “H.R. 6393, Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017“, sponsored by California Republican Devin Nunes (whose third largest donor in 2016 is Google parent Alphabet, Inc), a bill which deals with a number of intelligence-related issues, including Russian propaganda, or what the government calls propaganda, and hints at a potential crackdown on “offenders.”

A quick skim of the bill reveals “Title V—Matters relating to foreign countries”,  whose Section 501 calls for the government to “counter active measures by Russia to exert covert influence … carried out in  coordination with, or at the behest of, political leaders or the security services of the Russian Federation and the role of the Russian Federation has been hidden or not acknowledged publicly.”

The section lists the following definitions of media manipulation:

• Establishment or funding of a front group.
• Covert broadcasting.
• Media manipulation.
• Disinformation and forgeries.
• Funding agents of influence.
• Incitement and offensive counterintelligence.
• Assassinations.
• Terrorist acts.

As ActivistPost correctly notes, it is easy to see how this law, if passed by the Senate and signed by the president, could be used to target, threaten, or eliminate so-called “fake news” websites, a list which has been used to arbitrarily define any website, or blog, that does not share the mainstream media’s proclivity to serve as the Public Relations arm of a given administration.

Read more of Tyler Durdan's article here: US Congress Quietly Passes Bill Targeting “Russian Propaganda” Websites

The two videos inside this article are Parts 1 and 2 of a seminar on "The Right of Blasphemy - No to Medieval Trials" which took place in Rome, Italy, on Sunday, October 30, 2016. The seminar aimed at raising awareness of the fierce campaign against the enlightening intellectuals in the Arab world. From assassinating the writer and intellectual; Nahed Hattar in Jordan, imprisoning the Islamic researcher; Islam Behery In Egypt, and the liberal blogger; Raif Badawi in Saudi Arabia, to sentencing the journalist; Mohamed Sheikh Walad Amkheter to death, to other, endless examples. “Blasphemy”is always a prefabricated accusation of anyone who tries to discuss or think differently. Of additional interest is the fact that the president of the secularist ADHOC organisation that held this very open-minded seminar was Syrian-born Randa Kassis, who recently met with Donald Trump Jr at the French 'think tank' the Center of Political and Foreign Affairs, headed by her husband, Fabien Baussart, to discuss US-Russian cooperation. (See "Hope for Syria! Trump's son at Randa Kassis pro-Syrian French think tank in October."

DR NADIA OWEIDAT: "I have felt personally in my entire ten years of being an analyst in Washington [...] that I am constantly accused of being not authentic enough because I'm not an Islamist.

So there's somebody has decided that if you from the region and it doesn't matter like I come from the biggest tribe in Jordan - my tribe goes back to the time of the Pharaohs - [...] but that doesn't make me authentic because I'm not religious. I'm not Islamist. Not just not really, just I'm not Islamist.

So I've had this accusation and its really irritating who has decided that unless an Islamist I'm not an authentic voice from the Middle East. [...]

We have to fight this because this sympathy is really costing the entire world, because it's a huge imbalance in siding with Islamist as authentic. [...]

Political Islamist parties have proven over and over that they are very authoritarian and there's enough of us in the Middle East that are really sick and tired of authoritarianism. We would like to see real human rights, would like to see real engagement. We want to play a role in building our countries and were excluded from from that engagement. [...] Islam is like returning regimes exclude everybody [...] who doesn't carry their vision. It's not even vision their narrow-minded ideology. So this really needs to be tackled [...]" (Dr. Nadia Oweidat: Modern Islamic thought professor.)

It has been very difficult to discover the list of participants and all their names. Below is a list advertised on the International Humanist and Ethical Union, IHEU site in England.

Speaker list:
1. Dr. Hamed Abdel-Samad: German-Egyptian writer and critic of Islamism.
2. Dr. Nadia Oweidat: Modern Islamic thought professor.
3. Dr. Saaed Nashed: Moroccan writer and intellectual, concerned with the issues of modernism and enlightenment.
4. Dr. Olfa Youssef: Tunisian writer, author, professor.
5. Dr. Elizabeth O’Casey: Advocacy Director of IHEU and representative at the United Nations Human Rights Council.
6. Mr. Majed Hatar brother of the assassinated Jordanian writer Nahed Hatar

Whilst one can obtain an automated transcript of the speeches via you tube's transcript function, the accuracy is poor. I have tried to transcribe parts of the first and the second speeches and may put these up later.

Previously published (3/5/15) on PressTV

Sister Diana Momeka

The US State Department has been criticized for its move to deny a visa to an Iraqi Christian nun planning to reveal ISIL atrocities to Congress.

Sister Diana Momeka was part of an Iraqi delegation that was scheduled to testify before the House and Senate Foreign Relations Committee later this month.

Momeka has been a frank supporter for the Christians who have been killed and deported by the ISIL ₁  terrorist group.

Other members of the delegation received visas to the US to speak in Washington about the persecution of minorities of the region.

The US consulate in the Iraqi semi-autonomous region of Erbil, Kurdistan rejected her visitor visa application earlier this week.

According to the US State Department, the Christian nun was "not able to demonstrate that [her] intended activities in the United States would be consistent with the classification of the visa."

The nun was the only Christian in the group that was set to head to the US on an invitation from American NGOs.

The criticism came from Nina Shea of the conservative Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom in an op-ed in National Review Online.

"She told me in a phone conversation that, to her face, consular officer Christopher Patch told her she was denied because she is an 'IDP' or Internally Displaced Person. 'That really hurt.' Essentially, the State Department was calling her a deceiver," Nina Shea said in the op-ed.

ISIL destroyed Sister Diana's home forcing her and 50,000 others to flee back in August.

ISIL destroyed Sister Diana's home forcing her
and 50,000 others to flee back in August.

Shea explained that State Department officials concluded from the nun's application process and interview to obtain a visa that Sister Diana "could be falsely asserting that she intends to visit Washington when secretly she could be intending to stay. That would constitute illegal immigration, and that, of course, is strictly forbidden. Once here, she could also be at risk for claiming political asylum, and the US seems determined to deny ISIS's (ISIL) Christian victims that status."

Sister Diana, who is from an Iraqi town of 50,000 mostly Christian residents, was forced to leave her home by ISIL in August.

Since then, she has received refugee status and has been an outspoken critic of ISIL and other terrorist groups creating mayhem in Iraq and elsewhere.

HDS/AGB

Footnote[s]

1. ↑  'ISIL' is generally considered to be synonymous with 'ISIL'. Elsewhere on this site, the term 'ISIS' is used.

‘I was to play Rachmaninoff, not preach politics’ – fired pianist Valentina Lisitsa to RT. This article first published April 07, 2015 22:19 http://rt.com/news/247297-canada-orchestra-pianist-ukraine/ The Ukrainian-born pianist Valentina Lisitsa has become even more famous than she's already been among the online community, after her political views cost her a job with a Canadian orchestra. And she doesn't plan on being silenced, she told RT.

See also: Toronto Symphony Bans Pianist Critical of Kiev Regime (9/4/15), twitter.com/ValLisitsa, Canada's Immigration Minister Delivers Pro-War Speech against Russia (18/3/15) and Kiev Becomes First European Capital to Openly Glorify Criminal Ideology (10/4/15).

"I always separated music from politics and tried to keep enormous distance between the two," the pianist told RT's 'In the Now' host Anissa Naouai on Tuesday, after news of how she's been treated by Canada's Toronto Symphony Orchestra has spread globally.

The hashtag #LetValentinaPlay surged in popularity on social media, and thousands of supporters spoke out for the artist, who was offered to be paid not to play.

READ MORE: Canadian orchestra drops Ukraine-born pianist Valentina Lisitsa over anti-Kiev posts

"I was about to play Rachmaninoff concertos with the orchestra, not to preach politics," Lisitsa, who was fired allegedly for her political views rather than lack of skill, told RT. The orchestra hasn't returned RT's requests to comment on the situation so far.

"I never expected my music to be silenced," the pianist said, adding that she's "totally for freedom of speech, freedom of discussion and freedom of heated argument."

"That's what I've been doing on Twitter," she said, explaining her extensive tweeting on Ukraine on the social platform, with her point of view not falling in line with the popular Western narrative, allegedly costing her a job.

Syrian UN ambassador Bashar Al-Jaafari addressing the press conference

Panel of experts, who observed the Syrian Presidential elections of 3 June 2014, appearing alongside Bashar Al-Jaafari

Yesterday (Thursday., 19 June 2014) at 11am, the Syrian Mission to the United Nations convened a press conference featuring people from the US who observed the recent elections of 3 June. 2 Five minutes into the opening comments of Syrian Ambassador Bashar Al-Jaafari, the UN webcast cut off. The thousands of journalists, political analysts, and others who view UN webcasts each day from all over the world were denied the ability to watch the press conference, and hear what was said.

This is not the first time this has happened when Bashar al-Jaafari is speaking. This occurred on June 7th earlier this year, and on numerous occasions throughout 2013. Reporters at Inner City Press reported that this is not accidental, but was ordered by Michele DuBach, Acting Deputy Director-News & Media Operations.

This comes in the context of other UN harassment of Syria. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon has met with Ahmad Jarba, a leader of violent insurgent groups in Syria, but has refused to meet with Bashar Jaafari. Though Syria pays over $1 million to the UN each year, it is not being treated as an equal member state.

Watch the important, UN Press Conference about Syria, that someone obviously doesn't want you, or anyone else, to see:

Footnote[s]

1. ↑ Examples of msm 'reporting' of the 2014 Syrian elections include: The Clever, 'Democratically Supported,' Bloodthirsty Tyrant (4/6/14) by Daniel dePetris of the Huffington Post, Syria Election: Experts Weigh In (2/6/14) – Voice of America, Landslide win for Assad in Syria's presidential elections (4/6/14) – Haaretz, Syrian election sends powerful signal of Assad’s control (3/6/14) by Liz Sly and Ahmed Ramadan of the Washington Post. (In comparison to the rest of the msm the report in Israel's Haaretz is surprisingly factual and balanced – Ed).

2. ↑ According to the report cited above from Haaretz which can hardly be accused of bias towards the Syrian government, 88.7% of the 73.42% of eligible Syrian voters who voted, voted for President Bashar al-Assad. So, of 15,845,575 Syrians eligible to vote, eligible voters 10,319,723 or 65.13% voted for Bashar al-Assad.

No-one who, elsewhere, chose to loudly dispute the legitimacy of that election could bring himself/herself to show the courage of his/her convictions by challenging the testimony of those observers at that press conference.

What other political leader in the world, particularly from nations hostile to Syria – the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Israel and Australia – can claim to have anywhere near as much popular support as Syrian President Bashar al-Assad?

The legitimacy rightly enjoyed by President Bashar al-Assad dwarfs that that can be claimed by of any one of his opponents: United States' President Barack Obama, British Prime Minister David Cameron, French President Nicholas Hollande, Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu and Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott.

"An amazing start to the supreme court case. It was a packed courtroom with standing room only, more than 100 of you came to show resident opposition to VCAT saying that our objections don't count. The outcome of this hearing will affect us all. Barrister Stuart Morris presented the case for the council. It has been suggested that if this case goes against the people that people should write to the Attorney General demanding that VCAT be abolished and they set up a proper simple appeal body for planning issues. The hearing continues tomorrow, Wednesday, and the barrister Chris Canavan will be speaking for the developer. If you have time do go to hear what he has to say for the developer. " (Mary Drost of Planning Backlash).

Stonnington City Council v Lend Lease Apartments (Armadale) Pty Ltd & Ors.

Well, an interesting day at the Supreme Court, conducted at the High Court building. This was the third venue given since the day before. Nonetheless the court room was packed, with standing room only for about 8 people, others sitting on a table at the back and another 8 or so allowed to sit in the jury box.

Another consequence of privatisation

You could say that all the trouble started with the privatising of public land, involving a building and site that used to belong to state water, which was later purchased by a corporation. Now, years down the track, Lend Lease and a partner want to build a series of massive towers on this site which seems to be located between two areas of parkland in an area largely without other green open space.

Stonington Council, represented by barrister Stuart Morris, was appealing a decision by VCAT which gave the green light to Lend Lease to build - if I heard correctly- at least 19 buildings ranging in size with 11 to be of 4-12 stories on or adjacent to parkland in a neighborhood where the highest residential buildings are around two or three stories.

Naturally the community objected. There were a total of around 618 or 627 objections and only 3 letters of support for the project. However, despite this manifest opposition to an obviously disruptive development:

"VCAT, in its determination of 10 July 2012 to grant, in full, Lend Lease’s Planning Permit Application, ruled that the extent of the community’s opposition to a planning application was irrelevant.

“We (VCAT) are exercising an administrative review power. It must be exercised in accordance with law. We
must not have regard to irrelevant considerations. The extent of the opposition per se in one of these” –
i.e. irrelevant.[Source: http://www.orronggroup.com/]

Whereupon:

"Stonnington Council, with support of the Orrong Group, recognised the implications that such a ruling would have on all planning applications for all Victorians. Council has succeeded with the first stage of the appeal – the Supreme Court [...] granted Council the right to appeal the matter to the full court on Tuesday16 April."

The Orrong group say, rightly:

The Council is commended for taking this brave step. Because of the widespread ramifications of the VCAT ruling this is a case that justifies the cost of the appeal. It has the possibility of being a “watershed case”. We must support the Council in its action."

The whites of their eyes

We are supposed to live in a democracy. A 'democracy' implies self-government and control over what happens in one's community. But reality in Victoria (and the rest of Australia) is that the corporate sector has far more influence over government than the people and usually wins over real communities. This is becoming more and more problematic in Australia, as open space becomes a civil battle field because of government- and corporate- engineered population growth that is driving unwanted development everywhere.

Economic theory behind our predicament

It takes being caught up in the undignified, expensive and painful reality of turbo development for people to begin to grasp just how mad our laws are and how weak our democracy. You can spend a lot of time trying to argue sensibly, writing submissions and getting nowhere. Meanwhile some corporation is making a lot of money out of your misery.

The economic theory behind this goes back to the 18th century in Britain, the time of the Restoration, where a particularly predacious kind of land-tenure law replaced an earlier kind that gave people more rights. Although enclosures had happened since the time of the Normans, the 18th century was particularly fierce.

“In the eighteenth century, when the British economy entered an unparalleled era of expansion, Britain’s Parliament began operating according to Coasian principles and reorganized property rights en masse. In the nineteenth century, when most common-law doctrines reached their modern form, doctrines of equity (enforced through the Chancery Court) dominated the conveyance of land. These doctrines were designed to protect beneficial interests, not to maximize productivity. Efficiency became a dominant doctrine in the English legal system only after Parliamentary intervention.”(Source: Bogart, Daniel E. and Richardson, Gary, 2008, June. "Making Property Productive: Reorganizing Rights to Real and Equitable Estates in Britain, 1660 to 1830."NBER Working Paper No. W14107, p.7)

Coasian economic theory was originated by Ronald H. Coase in “The Problem of Social Cost”, Journal of Law and Economics, 3: 144, 1960. The theory assigns value arbitrarily, according to the highest dollar profit probability. It takes no heed of non-monetary values and therefore is unresponsive to social cost or individual equity. [Extracts from book close to publication: Sheila Newman: Demography, Territory, Law 2: Land Tenure and the Origins of Capitalism in Britain, Countershock Press.]

And that is the key:

Coasian economics takes no heed of non-monetary values and therefore is unresponsive to social cost or individual equity

This works out to mean that big business can almost always claim to be benefiting the community because of large financial through-puts, and that residential or small business objectors are NIMBYs, with much lesser financial sums at stake. This method of appraisal of a situation almost completely ignores every non-monetary interest affected and lesser monetary interests of small businesses. Residents cannot claim financial costs that might be incurred, for instance through loss of sunlight rendering solar panels useless or vegetable gardens unproductive.

Importance and Elements of this case

So this case begs those conventions that dispossess us of our individual rights to enjoy our properties and our neighbourhoods and participate in local self-government - the very essence of democracy.

Below I list some of the issues I understood from Barrister Stuart Morris's arguments, which occupied most or possibly all of the first day. [Candobetter did not remain for the rest of the day and supposes that the Lend Lease barrister (Chris Canarvan) will present his case tomorrow.]

- Stonington Council had unanimously vetoed the Lend Lease project after receiving approximately 620 objections

- The parties to the proceeding should be taken to include people who made petitions, including those who were did not come in to the tribunal. The responsible authority must consider all objections not withdrawn.

-It must consider environmental impact and any significant social and economic effects. Environmental impact, particularly under the Planning and Environment Act could extend well beyond the immediate neighborhood.

- Participation is a key factor: The Tribunal must where appropriate take account of the extent of which persons owning land nearby participated in the decisions before granting the permit. It was suggested that this provision carries over from an older Act which actually goes back itself to the Planning Appeals Board Act 1980. It's all about participation. John Caine's (Victorian Premier from 1982-1990) ammendments in parliament form some of the history of this part of the law.

- In case the defendants seek to narrow the scope and leave no room for the actual operation of the principle, the scope has to be broad, the triggers to be generic in nature.

- The Tribunal is required to consider all objections.

- The substance of the objection can be important

- The number of objections can be important

- The number of objections plus the substance is relevant to the purpose of the Act to include embracing public participation and fairness

- There needs to be ability to participate in the objection procedures (noting the fact that it is commonplace for applicants to be exempt from third party rights and therefore not to advertise their projects)

- The fact of participation is crucial

- The extent to which persons participate makes relevant the number of persons who participate

- Evidence of social effects: suggestion that one is not lawfully considering a matter if one excludes the number feeling strongly enough to object

- There has been an error of law when a party who has made a written submission is ignored.

- A planning decision is informed by the degree of community response which may still be relevant if not determinant

The above points are a very sketchy rendition of some very detailed citations and arguments made over the course of several hours. The case continues on the 17th of April at the same venue. The counter arguments of the Lend lease barrister will then be heard.

Candobetter.net is interested in receiving opinions and notes on tomorrow's presentations.

Details of court and case

Supreme Court List for Wednesday, 17 April 2013
Hearing commences at 10:30 AM, but be there at 10:00AM. ₁
Court 2, Ground Floor
Old High Court
450 Little Bourke Street, Melb.

Justice Emerton
Valuation Compensation and Planning List
Stonnington City Council v Lend Lease Apartments (Armadale) Pty Ltd & Ors.

Footnote[s]

1.↑ Be there at 10:00AM to go through security screening.

In 2011, barely eight years after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, shown conclusively to to have been illegal and a monstrous crime against humanity, the same criminals were able to deceive a sizable component of public opinion into accepting the truth of their claims against Libya whilst sowing confusion in the minds of much of the remainder. That would not have been possible without the complicity of many supposed 'left-liberal' and 'far-left' organisations. The imperialists were thus able to complete their invasion and destruction of Libya and enable the plunder of its natural resources by oil corporations.

This article is a response to the censorship of discussion about the current Syrian conflict on johnquiggin.com, a site for discussion from a supposedly "social-democratic perspective". See also: Syrian Foreign Ministry: UNHRC Resolution rejected as it ignores support for terrorism in Syria of 25 Mar 2013.

Phoney 'left' cover-up of 2011 Libya invasion, attempted proxy invasion of Syria

For the past two years, at least, much of the supposed 'alternate' Internet has been an essential component of the government and corporate media machine to deceive public opinion about critical world-changing events. Two of the most notorious of a number of terrible examples include: (1) NATO's illegal invasion of Libya in 2011; and (2) the current terrorist war against Syria by the jihadist and mercenary proxies of the U.S. and its allies.

The same is now happening to Syria. Fortunately, a more sizeable proportion of public opinion has seen through the deceit, whilst the Syrian people, their government and their armed forces have demonstrated much bravery, skill and resourcefulness in fighting the terrorist invasion. However, no country the size of Syria can hope to hold out indefinitely against such large, powerful and determined enemies. Unless public opinion in countries which are waging war against Syria (or imposing sanctions in the case of Australia) can learn the truth, the prospects for the Syrians are not good.

Public wisdom about Syria possible with open Internet discussion

A good start to spreading the truth would be proper discussion and debate on Internet forums and the whistle must be blown on phony progressives on the Internet who refuse to allow free and open discussion.

I wrote a post, entitled Online forum: How to stop the Syrian 'civil' war?.

I wrote that post after two contributors to a discussion on johnquiggin.com posted questions to me on that site.

The article that the post was in response to is Sceptics and suckers: A look back at Iraq of 21 March.

Censorship of views contrary to war popaganda

After I had put myself to all that trouble, the post was promptly deleted by the site owner, Professor John Quiggin.

I consider the action taken by Professor Quiggin to have been grossly inconsiderate to me and to his other site visitors, in particular to the two to whom I was responding. I also consider such censorship of the expression of views, which are clearly relevant to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, unacceptable on a web-site that ostensibly exists to promote discussion and thought about current events.

The supposed justification for this censorship given by Professor John Quiggin was:

As previously advised, I don't propose to entertain this kind of thing on my blog. All comments should be directed to the candobetter site -- JQ

Exactly what he meant by "this kind of stuff," and how it differs from the material in his article and subsequent discussion, was not explained.

I can only presume that Professor Quiggin, and many who visit and contribute to his site, prefer to academically discuss events of the distant past, the outcome of which we cannot hope to change, rather than acting to help stop the wars and killing that are going on right now.

What you can do

If you agree that such censorship, on the supposedly free Internet, supposedly outside of the control of the corporate newsmedia, is unjustified and harmful to free speech, democracy and, ultimately, world peace, please make your views known on that site and post a copy here also. Should those posts also be censored, I expect Project Censored would be most interested to hear from you.

Appendix: Copy of "Online forum: How to stop the Syrian 'civil' war?"

The following is a response to questions put to me in a debate on the Iraq War of 2003 on johnquiggin.com. This post was deleted on 25 March 2013.

J-D (@ #41), Ken_L (@ #42)

Thank you both for your interest. My apologies, on my part, for my slow response. I was intending to write a sizeable article to publish on my web-site (candobetter -dot- net -slash- syria) in response to your questions. Please consider the response below to be only interim:

Whilst it could seem hyperbolic to liken the crimes, committed the New World Order against Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, Libya, and now Syria, with those of the Third Reich, given that the death toll of 3.3 million, so far killed since 1990 in Iraq alone, is barely an order of magnitude less than that caused by Nazi Germany and its allies in the Second World War, this likening is not unreasonable.

Given that the rulers of the New World Order have, in their hands, vastly more terrible and sophisticated weapons of war than those possessed by Nazi Germany and the Japanese Empire, it is not hard to envision the death toll greatly surpassing the terrible toll of 60 million deaths in the Second World War should they triumph against Syria.

So, the whole civilised[1] world has a vital stake in the Syrian Army defeating the so-called "Free Syrian Army" and its New World Order controllers in the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany, Israel, the Arab monarchies of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, Israel, etc.

Given the effective abolition of the rights guaranteed in the US constitution by President Barack Obama, it will only be a matter of time before democratic rights, free speech, parliamentary democracy are abolished in Western Nations, should the Syrian people be defeated.

J-D wrote:

I am confused by your questions and wonder whether you could clarify.

J-D, I was simply pointing out that the history of which Professor Quiggin has written has been repeated in Libya and now threatens to be repeated in Syria and Iran. Surely, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, we need to consider whether that illegal invasion was a once-only occurrence or whether it was only one in a pattern of events which is now being repeated. If the latter, in the case of Syria, is true, then we should surely be interested in applying the terrible lessons of the Iraq war so as to prevent their repetition in Syria.

Ken_L wrote:

@malthusista, I would also appreciate clarification of exactly how you believe 'we' could stop the Syrian civil war? A little elaboration of who 'we' are would also be helpful.

Ken_L, The civil war in Syria could be ended simply if the U.S., Israel, etc., accepted the principle that any people have a right to national self-determination. It is obvious that President Bashar al-Assad and his government enjoy the support of the overwhelming majority of Syrians. Those, who have waged the terrorist war against the Syrian government, comprise, at most, a small minority of Syrians. The vast majority of the FSA is comprised of sectarian Islamist extremists from countries like Libya, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, mercenaries, the U.S. SAS, the U.K. SAS, the French Special Forces, the C.I.A., Mossad, etc.

Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and Israel should cease giving these killers sanctuary and passage into and out of Syria.

An unprovoked attack on the armed forces of Syria or on the armed forces of any sovereign country is a crime and, even more so, the murder of unarmed civilians. Supplying weapons to those killers by the U.S. and its allies is complicity in that crime and should cease. Were that to happen, the war in Syria would be finished in days.

Early last year, the Syrian government received overwhelming support (and, I might add, far more than U.S. politicians typically get in national elections with barely 50% of the population in participating in most) from its people in a referendum proposing constitutional reform. Part of the reform was to remove from the Syrian constitution, any privilege give to the Ba'ath Socialist Party. President Assad and every member of the Syrian Parliament must now stand for re-election. Any one of them will be voted out were they not to enjoy popular support.

Were there ever to be free elections in Syria, which cannot possibly be held in the middle of the war now raging, there can be little doubt that President Assad would win overwhelmingly and that the FSA would get a miniscule vote.

The war and killing in Syria only continue because the rulers of the U.S. and their allies wish it to continue.

Footnote to

[1] I don't mean 'civilised' in the sense of the European colonialists claims of bringing 'civilisation' to the 'backward' people of the Third World in previous centuries.

(This article also looks at related population, immigration and democracy issues in the West.) A film, Innocence of Muslims has been released of which parts available on you-tube portray the founder of Islam in a bad personal and political light, to say the least. A strong theme depicts Muslims as aggressively anti-Christian. Apparently largely as a response to this film, there have been widespread riots by Muslims against foreign embassies, particularly US embassies, including riots in Sydney on 15 September 2012, with police injured. Meanwhile warships from more than 25 countries, including the United States, Britain, France, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, are together launching a military exercise in the Straits of Hormuz, in response to threats to close it off. There is plenty of reason for Muslims to be angry with and frightened by the West apart from that film. And maybe Westerners should hold their own governments to greater account if we are to avoid World War Three.

In this youtube film Syrian Girl Partisan puts forward a thoughtful hypothesis surrounding the timing of the release of the anti-Islamic film.

A Wikipedia article, although incomplete and ongoing, shows that authorship of the film Innocence of Muslims, remains extremely cloudy and confused.[1] Jewish sources have denied involvement but some aggressive marketing of the film by US Christian militants seems well documented.[1]

The President of the United States has apologised to Islam for the film. In Australia some politicians have come out saying that riots by Muslims in response to the film have exposed a 'downside' of multiculturalism, but they seem mute on the contradictions between fighting oil wars in Islamic countries and causing displacement that creates refugees and immigrants seeking homes here. I have received correspondence highlighting that the ability to express views in art and media is preferable to expressing those views via war and that non-censorship is a Western value worth defending. I agree. Reacting to a Muslim demonstrator's sign calling for beheading of critics of Islam, Australian MP, Kelvin Thomson, made a speech in parliament declaring that Australians, including those of migrant origin, are expected to uphold all laws in this country, even those they disagree with. He meant laws against inciting violence.

Muslim reactions

Despite the rightfulness of the need to uphold the law and avoid violence, I can understand why some Muslims are very insulted. Australians are poorly educated in history, or more might be aware of the context of current military interventions and a history of western interference beginning with colonial takeovers in the late 19th century and the fostering of worse and worse governments by British, US, French and other colonial and corporate forces. All countries become basket cases after colonisation, some sooner rather than later. Australia is on the way. In the mean time, making 'the enemy' look ridiculous dehumanises them and makes it easier for them to dehumanise Westerners. Dehumanising by both sides makes war seem excusable, even irresistable, to each side.

Although I have heard the argument that Christians do not riot violently in the street every time a work comes out making fun of Christianity (Life of Brian, Piss Christ etc), I think that maybe they would if Muslims rolled into Western states in tanks, put us under curfew, told us how to run our countries and went about privatising our government oil companies. In fact, what the foreign Christian-and secular-backed western governments are doing to the Islamic countries is a hell of a lot nastier than rioting in the streets. [2]

The film is a symbol - not the main game

Because of these realities, I am reluctant to publish articles that unilaterally mock Muslims who reacted furiously to the film in question, without also mocking the hypocrisy of non-Muslim regimes which create refugees in one place and take them in for safety in another, whilst pushing commercial interests as if they were democracy. There is more to this than a film. The film is just a symbol, but wars are actually in progress and people in the Middle East are terrified, as we all should be. I also don't think it achieves anything for ants to stir up other ants' nests with a stick, especially when Russia and China are the traditional lords of the region and the angry ants are sitting on most of the world's remaining oil reserves.

How did we get to here in Australia and where is the anti-war movement when you need them?

On discussion pages attached to recent SBS programs about the conditions that create asylum seekers, (Re "Go back to where you came from" - what about the NON-asylum seekers?)" someone observed that we have very strong pro-asylum seeker and pro-refugee protests in Australia these days, but almost none against the wars we are participating in, even though those wars coincide with exoduses of people claiming persecution. The comment pointed out that significant refugee streams from such situations consist of people who worked with the invading armies, noting that, in the asylum seeker film, one man stated that he had fought on our side: "I helped you," and presented this as an argument for his being accepted as an asylum seeker. The comment thus raised a number of controversial issues not often discussed in Australia and seems to have been removed.

Wars and invasions present citizens or inhabitants in the embattled and invaded country with invidious 'choices' which notably include fighting the invaders or working for them. See Greg Muttitt's Fuel on the fire, Bodley Head, London, 2011, for a brilliant history of oil and politics in Iraq. In a country where most of the population usually have not agreed to have their government taken over by foreigners, anyone apparently working willingly with the invaders, whether or not the invaders see themselves as peace-makers, risks being identified by their compatriots as collaborators with the enemy.[3] For this reason alone a person working with foreigners will incur the wrath of their compatriots. Since 'our' armies [i.e. allies of Australia] and interventions are currently always purportedly in support of minority dissidents and revolutionary armies, perhaps anyone who can show they fought on Australia's side tends to have a well-founded fear of persecution.

We never address these illogicalities, these contradictions in our asylum seeker and refugee discussions, where at least some of the people seeking asylum here may be considered heroes by Australians but traitors by their own countrymen. What sort of responsibility do we have for nationals who took positions as salaried workers or occasional assistants for foreign officials in an occupation? Is it not more likely that people who are already on the outer in their own country will take their chances with the occupying army? In a country where food and shelter are luxuries, working for the occupying forces may be the only way of surviving at any particular time, and resisting those forces may verge on suicidal. It may also be necessary to work with the occupying forces in order to save what is left of the country, even though the occupying forces initiated the destruction. This situation is again described superbly in Greg Muttitt's Fuel on the fire, mentioned above.

Refugees from Algerian and Vietnamese wars

When Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, brought in Vietnamese refugees, many of these favoured the right wing government and fought against the nationalist wars in Vietnam. Years later the Vietnamese war is largely seen as a war for independence from colonial rule by the French, the Japanese, the British, the French again, then the United States. The Communist Party at the time was probably the largest of several political parties involved in the resistance. This observation should not be taken to label all Australians of Vietnamese origin here as right-wing, but the inference cannot be avoided that people who sided with Australia's allies during the war in Vietnam were not on the side that ultimately won in a war where Australia's participation is now widely seen as unjust.[3]

In the Algerian wars of independence against France the Harkis is the term given to those Algerians (mostly muslims) who were working for, either covertly or overtly, the French colonial government and who had an interest in defending that status quo. After the French withdrew - nearly one million of them, many who had been born and bred in Algeria going to live in France - the Harkis faced reprisals from their countrymen, who saw them as traitors. Many Harkis sought asylum in France, but the French government avoided what was seen by many as a responsibility to look after these people.

Where do militant religious sects fit in?

Where do militant religious sects, like the Taliban, or the less 'extreme' Hezbollah fit in? There are two ways that such sects serve a practical need. One is that they provide a cover for political action, organisation and resistance in countries where overt political meetings attract execution (both from national governments and from occupying forces). Another reason is that, in countries disorganised by war and occupation, they often retain some organising capability to meet local needs for food distribution, care for the sick, distribution of inheritances, care of orphans and widows. They also provide work, food and shelter. Some alternatives may present in the form of foreign aid organisations, including non-Muslim religious missionaries as well as the Red Cross or other non-sectarian samaritans. Seeking help from these non-local or alternative organisations may also carry the stigma of perceived collaboration with enemies, outsiders or poorly viewed minorities, and generally weakening local or national solidarity. Therefore seeking help from local organisations is likely to be safer. In Muslim countries, Western economic cultural practices which include banks that lend money with interest, buying, selling and consuming alcohol and incorporation of national assets and resources for private profit all run counter to religious and social philosophy. Siding with forces that market these practices is to accept the unacceptable and undermine your peoples' economic interests. Muslims share these values with many Westerners who do not, however, have the support of their social and religious communities or the local organisation to help them fight these economic ills.

Australia's silent anti-war movement, vocal pro-immigration lobby - what's the connection?

As well as Australia having a lot of protest about the need to take in asylum seekers and refugees, but little or no recent protest against involvement in wars in their countries of origin, Australia also lacks concerted protest against an undemocratic and unwanted policy of high immigration. Part of the reason for this is probably that high immigration is dishonestly marketed by government and commercial growth lobbyists as if it consisted largely of refugees and asylum seekers, although the vast majority of immigrants to Australia are wealthy economic migrants. You would think that this situation should still lead to protests against our involvement in unjust wars, but somehow it does not. One explanation could be that our mass media wants to promote both war and mass migration and therefore suppresses publication of contrary views, giving us the false impression that no-one cares about the other side.

Divide, conquer and grow

Another reason that protest is muted seems to be the doctrine of multiculturalism. This ideology is used covertly to engineer massive population growth by growing populations of different ethnic identities, at the same time dividing and conquering democratic input about high immigration. When people protest about the increase in immigration numbers causing inflation, and pressure on the environment and services, they are accused of attacking the ethnicity of those immigrants. Australian and state governments generally side-step the numbers issue and divert talk to how they welcome people from different ethnicities and races, implying that complaints about high immigration are really only about shifts in Australia's cultural center of gravity. In fact the official encouragement of multiple separate ethnic communities in Australia is obviously a source of concern to Australians of all origins. It seems that most people have a sense that after "Divide" comes "Conquer," and Australians feel they are being divided and losing their standard of living, quality of life and security. Housing inflation causing new levels of debt and homelessness is the most obvious example of the cost of population growth.

Look out for the enemy

Along with "Divide and Conquer" there is the policy of "Look out for the enemy". The enemy at the moment is identified as Islam. Since 9-11 the presentation of this old traditional enemy of Europe as an imminent threat has been ramped up to fever pitch and offered as a reason to enter Islamic countries - even where they were secular states - and endlessly seek weapons of mass destruction even after it has been shown there were none. At home in the Anglophone and other European states, harsh new anti-democratic policies have been brought in to counter threats of Islamic terrorism, making it possible to accuse people of terrorism without giving public proof. The wars for 'democracy' in the Middle East are eroding democracy in the West. At the same time new streams of Islamic immigrants (and refugees) have been welcomed to the very states making war on their homes.

Saudi Arabia - curiously part of the Western club

One Islamic state stands out for its exemption from foreign intervention and its collusion with the allies against its Islamic neighbours. That is Saudi Arabia. Saudi royal family members are legion. Jet-setting globe-trotters, they are members of an international power elite, founded on oil-wells. At the same time they are among the most repressive governments in the world, with astounding records of human rights abuse and slavery, crowned by their nation-wide enchattlement of women. These representatives of Islam seem to be the only Middle Eastern Islamic government friends of European governments and immune to revolution or NATO intervention.

Confusion from West to East

Should we be surprised that there is now confusion all round, with many Westerners convinced that Islam is out to destroy their way of life, and many Muslims convinced that Westernism is out to destroy their way of life? If you look at what is happening in the world today, the evidence seems to be weighted in favour of the Muslim perception, with a history going back to the 19th century. It is hard to say that Islam is persecuting the West when Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya lie in pieces after foreign 'intervention' and warships from more than 25 countries, including the United States, Britain, France, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, are together launching a military exercise in the Straits of Hormuz as I write.

In this context, riots in response to the release of a film, Innocence of Muslims, that seems extremely inflammatory and insulting to Islam and its popularisation by US Christian militants, seem predictable. I have not seen most of the film, but I have seen several minutes on you-tube and I can see what the Muslims are angry about. It may well be that the film makes justifiable criticisms of Islamic culture and beliefs, but, as Jon Faine recently said, "Why poke a stick in an anthill?" Under such circumstances, the launch of Innocence of Muslims looks suspiciously like a politically detonating device, so I am glad that Obama has apologised.

Real political pressures created by high immigration and wars to fuel big populations

The fact remains that, in Australia, as in Canada, the United States and Britain, high immigration and overseas wars are creating political pressures. The power and commercial elites responsible for the high immigration that is depriving incumbent populations of their rights are the same people who are pushing in the Middle East for control of oil production and infrastructure roll-out so as to be able to grow corporate profits and continue their population growth and economic 'growth' agendas at home. Although democracy is a word so often brandished in the Middle East by Western forces, what is more often meant is capitalism, imposed by force, incurring many deaths. Iraq is a sad example of this - see Oil on the Fire and The Shock Doctrine and Saving the Baghdad Zoo: A True Story of Hope and Heroes. Libya's atomization through foreign intervention, purportedly to bring democracy, is a more recent example of the same kind of activity. We are now watching on the world theatre, with our bags of pop-corn, the purported democratization forces gather in the Bay of Hormuz, ready to 'reform'.

Grass roots democracy on the internet - not so easy to keep us in the dark now

But the internet has broadened the information we can get about wars now. Syrians who don't like the war there are managing to get its own side out to the world. Syrian Girl Partisan is a notable example, and she has broadened her commentary and explanations now to include an interpretation of what happened in Libya on "US Ambassador Lynched like Gaddafi And Youtube Censors." as well as the later film linked a the top of this article.

Several Egyptian demonstrators have confessed that they were paid to protest about the Innocence of Muslims near the US Embassy in Cairo, the Middle East News Agency cites Prime Minister Hesham Kandil as saying. (Source: RT News Anti-US riots grip Muslim world," http://rt.com/news/anti-american-protests-live-updates-053/

Former Congresswoman, Cynthia McKinney

On 16 September 2012, in an email, Former US Congresswoman, Cynthia McKinney wrote:

"U.S. bombs continue to fall in Somalia, Pakistan, Yemen, and now it is reported that the US drones are flying all over Libya and are bombing from Benghazi to Tripoli. Reports from Libya today are that foreign oil companies have evacuated their employees and stopped operations and that U.S. troops are in various parts of the country.

Tragedy continues to unfold in Libya. [...]"

McKinney: Questions on killings in Libya

"Every loss of life is tragic and that is why I oppose the current US policy of killing. The US is currently regularly killing people in Asia and in Africa. Taken to its extreme, the Obama Administration even claims authority to kill US citizens on US soil!

The unfolding situation in Libya is troubling, not only for the bloodletting and carnage that is taking place, but also because of the murkiness that surrounds the events themselves. I have several observations and a few questions:

1. The scenario of an anti-Islamic hate film triggering a protest that leads to violence replicates the events that took place in the initial uprising in Benghazi in early 2011. At that time, the annual protest in Benghazi against the anti-Islamic Danish cartoons was taking place. The march was infiltrated by persons with an agenda, who used the event as an opportunity to seize military equipment from the Jamahiriya government and use it against the Libyan population. If it is known that Muslim protest on the streets can be touched off by attacking the Qur'an, then once again parties with another agenda can spark then infiltrate that protest and use it as cover. It worked before to launch an entire chain of events in Libya, why not again? The reports on who created and financed the film are very muddled.

2. Today, the Libyan/Al Qaeda/US/NATO/Israel government is bombing Sabha and the black Libyan Toubu people who constitute a stronghold of the vibrant Libyan resistance. Interestingly, no R2P is being invoked to do so here, but could this be covertly directed against the Green Resistance (self-described as well financed and ready to fight to the last bullet, the last man, the last dollar)?

3. A video is available of the 12 September attack on the US convoy that killed 2 US citizens and injured 14, indicating Day Two of an uprising/action.

4. There are photos published today of US special ops forces landing in Libya. If true, is this to counter the Green Resistance, or springboard into Egypt if need be, or worse? Foreign troops are in Libya already securing oil platforms. What might this have to do with Iran? Libyan oil was theorized to ensure oil to Europe in the case of a shutoff from Iran. Does this have anything to do with the impending Netanyahu visit to the US?"

NOTES

[1] Excerpt from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innocence_of_Muslims" describes known history of film production.
"Production

The cast and crew have publicly stated that they were deceived about the purpose and content of the film. In a statement obtained by CNN, the film's 80 cast and crew members disavowed the film, saying: "The entire cast and crew are extremely upset and feel taken advantage of by the producer. We are 100% not behind this film and were grossly misled about its intent and purpose." It further explained, "We are shocked by the drastic re-writes of the script and lies that were told to all involved. We are deeply saddened by the tragedies that have occurred." Cindy Lee Garcia, who played the mother of Muhammad's bride-to-be, said the script was for a movie about life in Egypt 2,000 years ago, called Desert Warrior (and possibly also Desert Storm), and that the character "Muhammad" was referred to as "Master George" on set. According to Garcia, "Bacile" claimed to be an Israeli real estate mogul. Later, however, he told her he was Egyptian and she heard him speaking in Arabic with other men on set. Garcia stated it makes her "sick" that she was involved in the film and that she is considering legal action against "Bacile." Sarah Abdurrahman, a producer for WNYC's On the Media program, watched the trailer and concluded that all of the religious references were overdubbed after filming.[30] The independent film was directed by a person first identified in casting calls as Alan Roberts, whose original cut did not include references to Muhammad or Islam.

In September 2012, "Sam Bacile" was initially described as a 56-year-old (52-year-old according to the Wall Street Journal) real estate developer from Israel who spoke by phone with the Associated Press. Israeli authorities found no sign of him being an Israeli citizen, and there was no indication of a 'Sam Bacile' around 50 years old living in California, having a real estate license or participating in Hollywood filmmaking. Though "Bacile" claimed the film had been made for $5 million from more than 100 Jewish donors, Hollywood Reporter described the film's appearance as unprofessional, bringing this claim into doubt. According to a man who identified himself to the Wall Street Journal as Bacile, the film was produced to call attention to what he called the "hypocrisies" of Islam.[40] After further reports suggested that Bacile was neither Israeli nor Jewish, Rabbi Abraham Cooper condemned initial reports that Bacile was Jewish and the movie was financed by "100 Jewish donors," saying that whoever told this to the Associated Press committed a blood libel and said that the media did not thoroughly research this claim. Cooper said that to "catapult what might be a nonexistent Jewish element could lead to violence against Jews," and called on the media to learn from this incident, while investigating who exactly created the film.

Later, "Sam Bacile" was identified as Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, a Coptic Christian immigrant from Egypt living in Cerritos, California, near Los Angeles. In 2010, Nakoula, who had served prison time on a 1990s conviction for manufacturing methamphetamine, pleaded no contest to bank fraud and was sentenced to 21 months in prison; he was released on probation from prison in June 2011. Authorities said Nakoula told the police that he had written the movie's script while in prison and, together with his son, Abanob Basseley, raised between $50,000 and $60,000 from his wife's family in Egypt to finance the film. According to CNN, the FBI contacted him because of the potential for threats, but he is not under investigation by the FBI. However, federal officials are investigating whether Nakoula violated the terms of his probation, which barred him from using the Internet for five years. According to The Smoking Gun, Nakoula had planned to produce the film as early as May 2009, when he first took out ads for crew members. However, he was arrested on the bank fraud charges a month later; after his arrest, Nakoula cooperated with prosecution to obtain a reduced sentence.

American non-profit Media for Christ obtained film permits to shoot the movie in August 2011, and Nakoula provided his home as a set and paid the actors, according to government officials and those involved in the production. Media for Christ president Joseph Nassralla Abdelmasih reportedly went into hiding after the violent response to the film.

Steve Klein, a Vietnam veteran who has been active in opposing Islam and has been associated with paramilitary style "hate groups" at his church according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, was asked by Nakoula to be the spokesman for the film. The movie's self-identified consultant, Klein reportedly told Nakoula: "You're going to be the next Theo van Gogh." Klein later told journalist Jeffrey Goldberg that "Bacile" is not a real person and is neither Israeli nor Jewish, as has been reported, and that the name is a pseudonym for about 15 Copts and Evangelical Christians from Syria, Turkey, Pakistan and Egypt; Goldberg questioned the reliability of Klein. Klein rejected any blame for the violent reaction to the movie, saying, "Do I feel guilty that these people were incited? Guess what? I didn't incite them. They're pre-incited, they're pre-programmed to do this."
Release

The film's screening as "Innocence of Bn Laden" was advertised in the "Arab World newspaper" during the months of both May and June. The ad cost $300 to run three times in the paper and was paid by an individual identified only as "Joseph". The ads were noted by the Anti-Defamation League. The Islamic affairs director stated: "When we saw the advertisement in the paper, we were interested in knowing if it was some kind of pro-jihadist movie." Brian Donnelly, a guide for a Los Angeles based tour of famous crime scenes, noticed the poster advertising at the Vine Theatre. "I didn't know if it was a good thing or a bad thing. We didn't know what it was about because we can't read Arabic. The earlier version of the film was screened once at the Vine Theatre in Hollywood California of June 23, 2012 to an audience of only ten people. The film had no subtitles and was presented in English. An employee of the theatre stated: “The film we screened was titled ‘The Innocence of Bin Laden’,” and added that it was a “small viewing.”

A second screening was planned for June 30, 2012. A local Hollywood blogger, John Walsh attended a June 29 Los Angeles City Council meeting where he raised his concerns about the film's screening. “There is an alarming event occurring in Hollywood on Saturday,” he stated. “A group has rented the Vine Street theater to show a video entitled ‘Innocence of Bin Laden.’ We have no idea what this group is.” The blog site reported that the June 30 screening had been canceled. A Current TV producer photographed the poster while it was being displayed at the theatre as advertising to later discuss on the program "The Young Turks." According to one attendee, "the acting was of the worst caliber," and he "had no inkling that that movie was anti-Islamic and did not recall the movie referencing the prophet Mohammad," but he did not see the whole film.

It was reported on September 14, 2012, that a planned screening by a Hindu organization in Toronto will be coupled with "snippets from other movies that are offensive to Christians and Hindus." Because of security concerns no public venue has been willing to show the film; it will be shown in private for a small audience of 200 people. Siobhán Dowling of the The Guardian reported that "a far-right Islamophobic group in Germany", The Pro Deutschland Citizens' Movement, has uploaded the trailer on their own website and wants to show the entire film but authorities are attempting to prevent it.

Two clips were posted on YouTube on July 1 (13'02", title "The Real Life of Muhammad", comment "Part of the movie, "Life of Muhammad"..... ????? ?? ???? ???? ????") and 2nd (13'50", title "Muhammad Movie Trailer", comment "????? ??????? ??????") by user "sam bacile". By September, the film had been dubbed into Arabic and was brought to the attention of the Arabic-speaking world by Coptic blogger Morris Sadek, whose Egyptian citizenship had been revoked for promoting calls for an attack on Egypt. A two-minute excerpt dubbed in Arabic was broadcast on September 8 by Sheikh Khalad Abdalla[65] on Al-Nas, an Egyptian television station, On September 11, "Sam Bacile" YouTube account commented in Egyptian Arabic on a video from Al-Nahar TV uploaded 2 days earlier "??????? ?? ???? ?????? 100%" which means: "Idiots, this is an American film 100%".

The film was supported by pastor Terry Jones, whose burning of copies of the Quran previously led to deadly riots around the world. On September 11, 2012, Jones said that he planned to show a 13-minute trailer that night at his church the Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida. Jones said in a statement that "it is an American production, not designed to attack Muslims but to show the destructive ideology of Islam. The movie further reveals in a satirical fashion the life of Muhammad."

[2] I realise that our governments are currently privatising our resources, encouraging overpopulation and making harsh laws, but so far the Australian government has not taken up arms against citizens, nor have the foreign corporate entities that have taken over Australian resources and assets - yet.

[3] An unusual source documenting the problems of survival in an occupied capital it the remarkable book by Babylon's Ark by authors Lawrence Anthony and Graham Spence
"Most of the Iraqi zoo staff who walked to and from work braved a daily gauntlet of bullets, looters, and murderous fedayeen [see definition end paragraph] keen to slit the throats of anyone associating with foreigners. Despite being senior-ranking veterinarians, Dr. Adel and Dr. Husham also trekked the hazardous miles from their homes, taking the same chances as the humblest laborer. We never knew who would pitch up each morning, and we never blamed those who deemed it too dangerous to make it that day." Anthony, Lawrence; Spence, Graham (2007-03-06). Babylon's Ark: The Incredible Wartime Rescue of the Baghdad Zoo (Kindle Locations 1932-1936). Macmillan. Kindle Edition. " "Fedayeen": The Fedayeen was first created by an Iranian from Qom named Hassan-i-Sabbah, who held the main headquarters in Alamut-- modern day Qazvin, Iran. Fedayeen are any of various groups of people known to be volunteers, not connected to an organized government or military, in the Near East. They are usually deployed for a cause where the government has been viewed as failed or non-existent. They are associated with the role of resistance against occupation or tyranny. The name "fedayeen" is used to refer to armed struggle against any form of enslavement with actions based on resistance." Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedayeen

[3] There is also a view that under the Fraser government they were encouraged to weaken the Australian union movement, notably the Australian Postal and Telecommunications Union in Victoria.

Dick Smith says he has been refused advertising space about his new magazine, Forbidden Ideas, by the Murdoch Press in Adelaide. Here is a film where he speaks his mind on what he perceives to be censorship. This is really a quite funny and very informative speech by an animated Dick Smith.

Thank you John Coulter for this video.

We were surprised to read an article in www.crikey.com attacking Dick Smith for "Vanity Publishing." This seemed such an odd thing for a supposedly alternative publication to be saying about a man whose efforts to air alternative views to the mass media have the necessary heroism of a David to Goliath - Goliath being Murdoch's news chains. The peculiarly snide article effectively defends Murdoch's hold over published opinion and attacks Smith on perceived personal faults.

Here is what one crikey.com reader has written about their strangely unaware article:

daveb
Posted Sunday, 19 August 2012 at 12:05 am | Permalink

"This article sounded like sour grapes and tall poppy syndrome. Sure most of the magazine was obviously trying to sell his re-launched Dick Smith Foods. But Why state the obvious? Perhaps you should try attacking Dick’s arguments and ideas, rather than attacking the man himself. Here is one of Australia’s most philanthropic millionaires, who has noble intentions and is passionate about the long-term environmental sustainability of Australia. He cares deeply about the environment and the two biggest crises facing it - overpopulation and the related anthropogenic climate change - and here you are being snide about it all. Why not focus on those disgraces Gina, Twiggy and Clive, who put their own billions and self interest ahead of the environment."

Good on you, Dick, anyway, from Candobetter.net!

If anyone needs additional proof of the tremendous censorial control wielded over corporate and alleged  "independent" media regarding Western powers' imperialist projects they need look no further than the thorough news blackout of the August 9 Tehran Consultative Conference on Syria.[1] As this censorship ensued, "progressive" news outlets continued their barrage of dubious and misleading information on the continuing turmoil within Syria.

The August 9 Tehran conference was sponsored by the Islamic Republic of Iran, attended by representatives from close to 30 nations, including Russia, China, India, Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Venezuela, Cuba, and the UN envoy to Tehran. Its express intent was to "strengthen all-out regional and international efforts to help Syrian people to find a way out of ongoing crisis and prepare a suitable ground for national dialogue in a peaceful atmosphere."

Given the meeting's suggestion of dialogue over force the conveners excluded the United States, Britain, France, Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Qatar--countries behind the program to destabilize Syria's al-Assad's regime.[2]

The discussion is anticipated to continue as a corollary to the Non-Aligned Movement meeting taking place in Iran in late August. Iran hopes the August 9 conference will be a genuine first step in a peace process between the Syrian regime and internal opposition groups.

Conference delegates emphasized a recognition of Syrians' grievances while also expressing concern over how "the entry of known terrorist groups and sects into the Syrian conflict" threatens regional peace and security.[3]

White House spokesman Jay Carney dismissed the meeting. "There is vast evidence that demonstrates that Iran has been engaged in an effort to prop up Assad as he brutally murders his own people," Carney asserted. In an interview on NBC television US ambassador to the UN Susan Rice similarly claimed how Iran was playing a "nefarious" role in the Syria conflict, and acting as leader of an "axis of resistance" that was "bad for the region."[4]

At a stage when the terrorist campaign in Syria appears to be faltering, the conference has likely caught US diplomats off guard. "I think the US State Department is freaked out because this is a huge defeat for Hillary Clinton," political analyst Webster Tarpley stated on Iran's PressTV. "What is Hillary Clinton's diplomacy worth when 30 countries--including about half the world when you get down to it--can come together on a pro-Syrian, pro-independence platform?"[5]

Since the Tehran confab's discourse was characterized with a spirit of national self-determination and clearly sought to contest NATO's deceptive imperialist designs, one might expect the left-progressive news media and blogosphere especially to be abuzz with extensive coverage of the event. Such coverage or commentary has yet to emerge.

In fact, progressive media outlets continued what was arguably a campaign of disinformation that for some time has championed the Western-backed, mercenary-infused Free Syrian Army while ignoring its now thousands of murders and atrocities. For example, on August 12 The Nation ran a story by Democracy Now correspondent Sharif Abdul Kouddous,[6] the Egyptian-American reporter with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood [7] who received accolades in left media circles for his 2011 coverage of Tahrir Square.

In the first of a three-part series, Kouddous related his recent foray to the Syrian city of Zabadani, "one of the earliest towns to stage demonstrations against the regime of Bashar al-Assad, with residents taking to the streets two weeks after the uprising in Deraa on March 15, 2011."

With vivid accounts of bloodshed perpetrated by the Syrian forces, Kouddous emphasizes to Nation readers how Zabadani's steadfast revolution derives from the grassroots, thus differing from the one being waged by ruthless NATO-backed death squads throughout the rest of the country. "People that were unarmed at first decided to arm themselves," one local activist tells Kouddous. "The regime made this happen."

The readership is told how the village is "controlled by residents and fighters with the Free Syrian Army--which in Zabadani are made up almost entirely of local volunteers and defecting soldiers hailing from the area."

In an August 14 Democracy Now interview highlighting the Nation piece, Amy Goodman asked Kouddous why he chose Zabadani to profile. "Well, I found a way into Syria," Kouddous replied.

As we know, the Syrian government does not really allow journalists in on official visas, or very rarely does. And so, there was a way in through Lebanon to reach this town. I was hoping to reach Damascus, but the number of checkpoints around Damascus prevented that from happening.

In fact, Zabadani is well known as one of the very few "rebel holdouts" in Syria. As the BBC similarly reported in January, "Zabadani is the only town near Damascus seething with rebellion. It's the only town where the president has ceded power."[9]

Thus the city is an especially ideal backdrop for a piece promoting the now-familiar NATO propaganda line of the popular indigenous uprising repressed by the brutal Assad regime, even though the scenario appears to be far from common.

As recently as late July, France 24 reported a less triumphant situation for Zabadani's FSA forces, with the Syrian Army making significant inroads toward retaking the city. "'Those who want to fight must come here!'" an FSA commander boasts. "'They [Syrian forces] are cowards and dogs - they just bark orders into their walky-talkies.' Despite the bravado," a France 24 correspondent observed, "Syrian forces have pushed the rebels back and many rebel-held areas are now under the army's control."

According to this account (and contrary to Kouddous' romanticization of the FSA), "Even the hardiest," of Zabadani's inhabitants "can't stand anymore fighting." One woman told the French journalists "she would rather take her family into the countryside, while the rest of the Free Syrian Army defends the rest of the district."[8]

Kouddous' reportage contributes to the progressive media's larger project of seemingly authenticating the mainstream news outlets' simplistic, NATO-friendly "popular revolution" news frame of the overall Middle East destabilization process.

Yet nothing makes the intent to mislead audiences more apparent than this deceptive amalgam of stifling coverage of a potentially productive and meaningful peace conference, denying a real voice to the victims of Western-backed mercenaries and death squads, and paying calculated homage to the Zabadani rebellion. The familiar formula seeks to prop up a now-transparently doubtful storyline begun in January 2011.

Notes

[1] The news blackout is initially observed by Webster Tarpley. "Tehran Conference Belies US Syria Claims: Webster Tarpley," Press TV, August 10, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giTEnaAW2yY

[2] Syria: NATO's Next "Humanitarian" War? Online Interactive Book, ed. Michel Chossudovsky, 2012, http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=29234

[3] "Participants in Iran Conference on Syria Issue Final Statement," FARS News Agency, August 9, 2012, http://english.farsnews.com/newstext.php?nn=9104253537

[4], "US Raps Iran on Syria After Tehran Conference," Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha, August 10, 2012, http://www1.bssnews.net/newsDetails.php?cat=3&id=271302&date=2012-08-10

[5] "Tehran Conference Belies US Syria Claims: Webster Tarpley," Press TV,  See also, "Tarpley: 30 Nations Meet in Tehran for Alternative to Hillary Clinton's Attack on Syria," Voltaire Network, August 12, 2012, http://www.voltairenet.org/Tarpley-30-Nations-Meet-in-Tehran

[6] Sharif Abdel Kouddous, "On the Ground in Zabadani, a Syrian Town in Revolt," The Nation, August 13, 2012, http://www.thenation.com/article/169360/ground-zabadani-syrian-town-revolt

[7] Reporting from Tahrir Square in early 2011, Kouddous remarked, "One man who is sure Mubarak's time is up is my uncle Mohamed Abd El Qudoos. A leading opposition protester, Mohamed is the head of the Freedom Committee in the Press Syndicate, which has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood." Why does one of the progressive news program's foremost correspondents have ties to and tout the fiercely reactionary Muslim Brotherhood? "Live From Egypt, The Rebellion Grows Stronger," Democracy Now! January 30, 2011, http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2011/1/30/live_from_egypt_the_rebellion_grows_stronger_by_sharif_abdel_kouddous

[8] Jeremy Bowen, "Zabadani: The Town President Assad Does Not Control," BBC, January 20, 2012, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-16663264

[9] "Rebels and Assad's Forces Face-Off in Zabadani," France 24, July 28, 2012, http://www.france24.com/en/20120728-syria-zabadani-free-syrian-army-rebels-bashar-al-assad-troops-mortars

James F. Tracy is Associate Professor of Media Studies at Florida Atlantic University and an associate of Project Censored. More information is available at his blog, memorygap.org

Those who write about population overshoot or a coming population crash frequently find a cold reception from any of the current raft of “progressive” publishers whose self-proclaimed mission is to create an ecologically sustainable and “just” society, mobilize the “green imagination”, encourage grass roots community action and foster a sense of optimism in among the herd who carry that banner. Naturally, anything that smacks of “population control”, a challenge to “reproductive rights” or support for “anti-immigrant” causes immediately sets off an alarm. Up goes the shields and out goes the submitted manuscript.

It is apparent that for most of these social justice crusaders, “the environment” is something that they put up in the shop window to attract customers. Its the flavour-of-the-month that legitimizes an old-fashioned agenda by making it seem “relevant” to current planetary concerns. Scrape away the nauseating cant, and one discovers that it is not really about saving the environment, but about saving an ideology that should have died when the Berlin Wall came down. But alas, the Phoenix has arisen from the ashes under a new guise, “The Environmental Justice” or “Climate Justice” movement. “Justice” is the blade, the “environment” is the sheath. Case in point:

On such publisher, having reviewed a submitted manuscript whose topic was natural resource depletion, asked the author if he could provide corroborative testimony from a credible expert in the field. When he complied by forwarding a positive review by William Catton, this publisher of “environmental justice” books replied that she did not know who Catton was ! She demanded assurance that Catton was a not a member of the “Population Institute” or any “right-wing organization.” In other words, rather than treat the submission on its own merits, she seemed more concerned with the ideological orientation of the author. Despite providing such assurance, the author could not persuade this publisher to read his book. It was an experience he had over and over again---one shared by many of us who fall outside the box of green-left orthodoxy. It seems apparent that the “Smear Network” has succeeded in arming publishers with a blacklist of proscribed organizations and people. Ecological ignorance does the rest.

To vent my frustration, I wrote the following response. The names have been changed to protect the guilty.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
C. Noevil
Editorial Director
Blinkered Press
Dear Ms. C. Noevil,

As an ecologically illiterate ideologue of progressive politics, could you provide me with the list of proscribed authors and organizations which Betsy Hartmann, the Center for New Community and Southern Poverty Law Centre has provided you in order that I may not waste my time in submitting a manuscript?

I had intended to submit a manuscript that described the nature of our environmental crisis. But then I realized that I might violate your code of political correctness, so I purged it of math and logic, and any hint of any message to the effect that population growth was an ingredient of the problem. Trust me, there is no mention of the IPAT equation anywhere in my text. Population growth implies that there are women who are conceiving and giving birth to babies, and to cite overpopulation as an ecological problem of legitimate concern would seem to assign blame to these women and such an attitude would be simply unacceptable in this modern progressive age.

So I reviewed what I had written and was careful not to offend any sacred cows like for example:

"The Poor"
"Women"
"Women-of-color"
"Immigrant women of color"
"Indigenous peoples"

or simply,
"The People"

None of the above should be held responsible for ANYTHING, for ANY part of what ails the world. People are never the problem, they are always the solution. And the more of them, the merrier. The only time the population level should diminish is if women CHOOSE to have fewer children. But it must be their choice. If they want to have an unsustainable number of children and destroy remaining wildlife habitat, cause deforestation and poaching, more housing on farmland, more pollution and congestion and lessen the per capita share of precious non-renewable resources, then that is their Human Right. On the other hand, those human rights cannot apply to Islamic countries because we have no moral right to make judgments about other cultures. No, I was determined not to make any statement that would imply even the slightest criticism of any downtrodden portion of humanity. Except white European males who live below the poverty line. They don't deserve any sympathy.

So instead, I deleted reference to the above and substituted approved politically correct scapegoats. Eg.

"The rich"
"Rich white men who blame the poor for their excesses"
"The corporations"
"The Wall Street bankers"
" The greedy"
"The greedy rich white men of the northern hemisphere"
“Zionists”. If all else fails and no scapegoats make themselves available, there is always the Zionists. They are behind everything and always were.

I made a particular point to hold Israel up to standards that we should not apply to Islamic states. For example, I mentioned how badly treated Palestinians were in Israel, even the ones who are able to vote and sit in the Israeli Knesset, but I made no mention of how horribly treated the Jews of Iran, Egypt or any of the Arab states were. Nor did I mention any passages in the Koran about how women are to be treated. In short, I was careful to leave out any judgments of Muslim culture as that would be Islamophobic and racist. But I took a lot of shots against Israel, because they're fair game. Keep in mind, I am not anti-semitic, I am just against Jews....I mean, Zionists. There is big difference you know.

Zionists are Jews who took refuge in Palestine, the former home of Jews, after rumours about 6 million of them being gassed in Europe. Amazing what excuses people will resort to just so that they can go to a desert in the Middle East, turn it into a Garden of Eden with hard work, maintain a democracy despite rocket attacks and terrorism, and try hard to preserve quaint traditions of free speech and a free press in spite of all this. If they were to disappear, Palestinians could go back to the fabulous life they had before 1948, and with a fertility rate of 5 kids per woman, soon fill it up to the point where the region was chalk full of people trying find enough water to drink. Perhaps Israeli Jews can be relocated to the Moon. That would give an incentive to Arabs to develop a Space Program because no doubt they would come to believe that the Moon was Arab land.

I also conflated any arguments against the policy of mass immigration with being "anti-immigrant", and I made great pains to say that any environmentalist who mentions that mass immigration is damaging the environment of the United States (as did the founder of Earth Day, Democratic Senator Gaylord Nelson and three time Nobel Peace Prize nominee and Sierra Club director David Brower) is not really an environmentalist but a nasty nativist who is using environmentalism as a cloak for his nasty nativism. That includes guys like that light-weight socio-biologist E.O.Wilson of Harvard. On the other hand, I didn't mention anything about how big corporations were funding the mainstream environmental NGOs because that would have implied that pro-immigration environmentalists were not real environmentalists but shills for big business and cheap labour employers.

And I put in as many plugs for Bill McKibben as I could. He is an icon of pragmatism. Politics is the art of the possible, and if you can't achieve what you need from Congress to save civilization, then settle for half a loaf. We'll die, but not quite as quickly. Bill is the model for all of us who want to manage growth rather than stop it. Gotta keep the economy rolling, otherwise government won't have the revenue to fund all those entitlements that the poor, the immigrant poor, the poor immigrant women of color, the indigenous peoples, and The People deserve. Michael Moore says that these entitlements should be a constitutional guarantee. Lets go further and follow Isaac Asimov's advice, lets make "Freedom of the Bathroom" a constitutional right. Even if 20 people share a one-bathroom apartment, they can all have the same right to use it anytime they want just by passing a law. As the Soviets showed, all you have to do is enshrine something as a right in your constitution, and voila, the people will get what they deserve.

I hope, as a consequence of my sincere efforts to sanitize my manuscript of the truth, that I can get it published by Blinkered Press----possibly with some funding from the Carnegie Foundation, that beacon of behind-the-scenes manipulation. I hope you will receive my manuscript with the objectivity that you are famous for. It would be an honour to have my book published by your politically correct publishing house so that it could take its place alongside other magnificent books of scientific veracity that are found on your book list.

Tim Murray

PS Rather than submit my cv, it might be more efficient just to refer to the CNC or SPLC data bank, or phone the Department of Women's Studies at Hamphsire College. Say hello to Betsy for me, won't you? Didn't Senator Joe McCarthy graduate from Hampshire College? If he was a woman he might, I think, have headed the Department o f Women’s Studies.....

Feb. 6, 2012 - Last Wednesday, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Josh Fox was arrested after refusing requests from Republican committee members to leave a hearing on hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking." The hearing focused on a recent EPA report that suggested that hydraulic fracturing methods of extracting natural gas most likely caused contamination of drinking water in Wyoming.

The filmmaker, a noted critic of hydraulic fracturing, was removed after Republican members of the
Energy and Environment Subcommittee of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee asked his camera crew to leave the hearing because they were not accredited. Mr. Fox refused to leave and was arrested for "unlawful entry." The hearing continued despite the excitement, with Republicans questioning the scientific rigor of the report and Democrats and EPA official Jim Martin defending it.

The process of hydraulic fracturing has been heavily criticized by environmental groups because of its potential to contaminate drinking water, while representatives of the natural gas industry have repeatedly claimed that it is safe.

MapLight has conducted an analysis of campaign contributions to members of the House Science Subcommittee on Energy and Environment from interest groups representing Oil & Gas,
Natural gas transmission & distribution, Major (multinational) oil & gas producers and Independent oil & gas producers as well as Environmental policy and Alternative energy production & services.

• Interest groups connected to natural gas industries have given a total of $199,808 to members of the subcommittee, with 90% of those contributions going to Republican subcommittee members.
• Republican subcommittee members received 9.2 times as much ($180,308) from interest groups connected to the natural gas industry as did Democratic members ($19,500) of the subcommittee.
• Interest groups representing environmental policy and alternative energy have given a total of $99,568 to members of the subcommittee, with 93% of those contributions going to Democratic subcommittee members.
• Democratic subcommittee members received 14.3 times as much ($93,068) from environmental and alternative energy interest groups as did Republican members ($6,500) of the subcommittee.
• Republican subcommittee members received 94% more from interest groups representing the natural gas industry than Democratic subcommittee members received from environmental and alternative energy interest groups.

METHODOLOGY: Includes reported contributions to congressional campaigns of Members of the House Science Subcommittee on Energy and Environment, including Ex Officio members, in office during the 112th U.S. Congress, from
Oil & gas, Natural gas transmission & distribution, Major (multinational) oil & gas producers, Independent oil & gas producers, Environmental policy and Alternative energy production & services interest groups selected by MapLight, July 1, 2009 - June 30, 2011. Contributions data source:
OpenSecrets.org.

A link to this data release can be found
here.

MapLight is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization that reveals money's influence on politics.

Media Contact:

Pamela Heisey

c: 415-299-0898 | w: 510-868-0894 | e:

Connect with MapLight on
Twitter and
Facebook.

Paul Craig Roberts, who was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under US President Ronald Reagan and whose distinguished journalistic career, includes 15 years as an associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, has been banned, so far, for six years from the US mainstream media. He has been banned becasue he questions the myths used to justify US domestic and international policy - that offshoring of jobs and high immigration will bring prosperity to the US and the official account of 9/11.

Originally published on Information Clearing House on 24 Mar 10.

by Paul Craig Roberts

"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." George Orwell

March 24, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- There was a time when the pen was mightier than the sword. That was a time when people believed in truth and regarded truth as an independent power and not as an auxiliary for government, class, race, ideological, personal, or financial interest.

Today Americans are ruled by propaganda. Americans have little regard for truth, little access to it, and little ability to recognize it.

Truth is an unwelcome entity. It is disturbing. It is off limits. Those who speak it run the risk of being branded "anti-American," "anti-semite" or "conspiracy theorist."

Truth is an inconvenience for government and for the interest groups whose campaign contributions control government.

Truth is an inconvenience for prosecutors who want convictions, not the discovery of innocence or guilt.

Truth is inconvenient for ideologues.

Today many whose goal once was the discovery of truth are now paid handsomely to hide it. "Free market economists" are paid to sell offshoring to the American people. High-productivity, high value-added American jobs are denigrated as dirty, old industrial jobs. Relicts from long ago, we are best shed of them. Their place has been taken by "the New Economy," a mythical economy that allegedly consists of high-tech white collar jobs in which Americans innovate and finance activities that occur offshore. All Americans need in order to participate in this "new economy" are finance degrees from Ivy League universities, and then they will work on Wall Street at million dollar jobs.

Economists who were once respectable took money to contribute to this myth of "the New Economy."

And not only economists sell their souls for filthy lucre. Recently we have had reports of medical doctors who, for money, have published in peer-reviewed journals concocted "studies" that hype this or that new medicine produced by pharmaceutical companies that paid for the "studies."

The Council of Europe is investigating big pharma's role in hyping a false swine flu pandemic in order to gain billions of dollars in sales of the vaccine.

The media helped the US military hype its recent Marja offensive in Afghanistan, describing Marja as a city of 80,000 under Taliban control. It turns out that Marja is not urban but a collection of village farms.

And there is the global warming scandal, in which climate scientists, financed by Wall Street and corporations anxious to get their mitts on "cap and trade" and by a U.N. agency anxious to redistribute income from rich to poor countries, concocted a doomsday scenario₁ in order to create profit in pollution.

Wherever one looks, truth has fallen to money.

Wherever money is insufficient to bury the truth, ignorance, propaganda, and short memories finish the job.

I remember when, following CIA director William Colby's testimony before the Church Committee in the mid-1970s, presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan issued executive orders preventing the CIA and U.S. black-op groups from assassinating foreign leaders. In 2010 the US Congress was told by Dennis Blair, head of national intelligence, that the US now assassinates its own citizens in addition to foreign leaders.

When Blair told the House Intelligence Committee that US citizens no longer needed to be arrested, charged, tried, and convicted of a capital crime, just murdered on suspicion alone of being a "threat," he wasn't impeached. No investigation pursued. Nothing happened. There was no Church Committee. In the mid-1970s the CIA got into trouble for plots to kill Castro. Today it is American citizens who are on the hit list. Whatever objections there might be don't carry any weight. No one in government is in any trouble over the assassination of U.S. citizens by the U.S. government.

As an economist, I am astonished that the American economics profession has no awareness whatsoever that the U.S. economy has been destroyed by the offshoring of U.S. GDP to overseas countries. U.S. corporations, in pursuit of absolute advantage or lowest labor costs and maximum CEO "performance bonuses," have moved the production of goods and services marketed to Americans to China, India, and elsewhere abroad. When I read economists describe offshoring as free trade based on comparative advantage, I realize that there is no intelligence or integrity in the American economics profession.

Intelligence and integrity have been purchased by money. The transnational or global U.S. corporations pay multi-million dollar compensation packages to top managers, who achieve these "performance awards" by replacing U.S. labor with foreign labor. While Washington worries about "the Muslim threat," Wall Street, U.S. corporations and "free market" shills destroy the U.S. economy and the prospects of tens of millions of Americans.

Americans, or most of them, have proved to be putty in the hands of the police state.

Americans have bought into the government's claim that security requires the suspension of civil liberties and accountable government. Astonishingly, Americans, or most of them, believe that civil liberties, such as habeas corpus and due process, protect "terrorists," and not themselves. Many also believe that the Constitution is a tired old document that prevents government from exercising the kind of police state powers necessary to keep Americans safe and free.

Most Americans are unlikely to hear from anyone who would tell them any different.

I was associate editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal. I was Business Week's first outside columnist, a position I held for 15 years. I was columnist for a decade for Scripps Howard News Service, carried in 300 newspapers. I was a columnist for the Washington Times and for newspapers in France and Italy and for a magazine in Germany. I was a contributor to the New York Times and a regular feature in the Los Angeles Times. Today I cannot publish in, or appear on, the American "mainstream media."

For the last six years I have been banned from the "mainstream media." My last column in the New York Times appeared in January, 2004, coauthored with Democratic U.S. Senator Charles Schumer representing New York. We addressed the offshoring of U.S. jobs. Our op-ed article produced a conference at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. and live coverage by C-Span. A debate was launched. No such thing could happen today.

For years I was a mainstay at the Washington Times, producing credibility for the Moony newspaper as a Business Week columnist, former Wall Street Journal editor, and former Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. But when I began criticizing Bush's wars of aggression, the order came down to Mary Lou Forbes to cancel my column.

The American media does not serve the truth. It serves the government and the interest groups that empower the government.

America's fate was sealed when the public and the anti-war movement bought the government's 9/11 conspiracy theory. The government's account of 9/11 is contradicted by much evidence. Nevertheless, this defining event of our time, which has launched the US on interminable wars of aggression and a domestic police state, is a taboo topic for investigation in the media. It is pointless to complain of war and a police state when one accepts the premise upon which they are based.

These trillion dollar wars have created financing problems for Washington's deficits and threaten the U.S. dollar's role as world reserve currency. The wars and the pressure that the budget deficits put on the dollar's value have put Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block. Former Goldman Sachs chairman and U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is after these protections for the elderly. Fed chairman Bernanke is also after them. The Republicans are after them as well. These protections are called "entitlements" as if they are some sort of welfare that people have not paid for in payroll taxes all their working lives.

With over 21 percent unemployment as measured by the methodology of 1980, with American jobs, GDP, and technology having been given to China and India, with war being Washington's greatest commitment, with the dollar over-burdened with debt, with civil liberty sacrificed to the "war on terror," the liberty and prosperity of the American people have been thrown into the trash bin of history.

The militarism of the U.S. and Israeli states, and Wall Street and corporate greed, will now run their course. As the pen is censored and its might extinguished, I am signing off.

Editorial Comment: Whilst Paul Craig Roberts' despair expressed at the end of this article is understandable, we remain hopeful that it will be possible for the people of the US, Australia and the rest of will be able to see through the lies and act to stop them from pushig human civilization over the precipice.

Footnotes

1. ↑ Paul Craig Roberts is correct to oppose the scam of emmissions "cap and trade", or what is known in Australia as the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. Nevertheless, to draw the conclusion that global warming is not a threat as many who oppose of the agenda of the world's rulers do, would be seriously mistaken.

According to software engineer Arved von Brasch the danger posed by Senator Steven Conroy's Mandatory Internet Filtering is that it will confer upon the Federal Government the capacity to censor internet content it considers a threat, in exactly the same way that the Chinese Government now uses the same technology that Conroy proposes to introduce to censor views of its critics. Arved von Brasch also shows there are overwhelming reasons to reject the legislation on technical grounds alone.

Originally published as "The consequences of filtering", with discussion forum, on 4 Mar 10 Online Opinion. Republished under the terms of the Creative Commons License. See also: Internet censorship, Citizens Initiated Referenda and the Greens - an open letter of 23 Dec 09, Online Opinion forum discussion contribution: Why won't Greens move motion to put filtering to a referendum?

The Government is proposing a system to filter the Internet. The proposal is a complaints-based system that would block specific URLs only after they have been brought to the government's attention and also deemed to be Refused Classification. It would operate using a secret list and make it mandatory for all ISPs to block sites on the list for all Internet users in Australia.

"Refused Classification" and "illegal" are not the same thing, and the problems of having a mandatory, secret blacklist should be readily apparent. The consequences to the wider Australian society if this filter proposal succeeds do deserve discussing. This proposal doesn't have a single redeeming feature that will make Australia any better than it currently is.

There are also obvious known drawbacks to the proposal. The first is the cost of the system. Filtering products are expensive to purchase and run. Smaller ISPs will not be able to easily carry the cost, and will be forced to immediately pass them on to customers. Larger ISPs, with more capacity to absorb the cost, will be able to strongly compete on price for a short time. This will force competition out of the market. It will mean even more expensive Internet for Australians, especially as the government intends for ISPs to carry the entire cost of the proposal. Access to the Internet in Australia is already among the most expensive and inadequate in the developed world.

While the technological issues are minor compared to the political and civil liberties issues, they should be enough themselves to scuttle this proposal. The Internet is currently running on a backbone of IPv4. Every computer connected to the Internet has a unique number assigned to it. IPv4 only allows for 4 billion computers to be connected simultaneously, and the pool of available numbers is rapidly diminishing. IPv6 is already starting to take over, and within two years almost every ISP will be forced to support IPv6. The trouble is that most current filtering systems are incapable of supporting IPv6. The proposal will saddle ISPs with expensive, inadequate equipment.

The next technological issue is latency. The government is making big claims about speed, but it is confusing itself on the difference between speed and latency. While it may be true that speed decrease for individual website loads is negligible, the compounded effects have not been measured. This is particularly important in high bandwidth applications, such as video games, film distribution and teleconferencing. Minor reductions in speed have a cumulative effect, and this could dramatically affect performance in such applications.

This issue is particularly important given the government's proposed National Broadband Network. The maximum speed tested in the Enex trial was 8 Mbps. The NBN's speed is expected to be 100 Mbps. There is little reason to think that the trial results are applicable to a higher speed network. Additionally, at least one participant in the Enex trial reported they had less than 15 households in the trial. Telstra didn't even bother to test using any real people. There is no reason to think that such a small sample is representative of the result of filtering the millions of connections across Australia.

High traffic sites cannot be blacklisted as there will not be the capability to deal with the huge number of requests for sites like YouTube. There is a lot of material on YouTube that would be considered Refused Classification because the rest of the world doesn't attempt to ban such material. As recent events have shown, Google is not keen on the idea of removing such material. This means that only sites that have softer voices will be blacklisted. This is inherently discriminatory.

There is also the Streisand Effect to consider. On the Internet, attempting to censor something inherently focuses attention on it. A site that is considered low traffic at the time it is added to the blacklist may quickly become a high traffic site when its presence there is discovered. Slashdotting is a similar effect. This is when an extremely popular site links to a far less popular site. The large number of people who then visit the low traffic site often bring it down by their volume. Both effects could significantly degrade Australian Internet performance as low traffic sites become high traffic to the point the filtering equipment may not be able to cope.

There is no real possibility that the blacklist will not eventually be leaked again. Mandatory censorship of this scale will motivate large numbers of the tech-savvy to reverse engineer the list. It is relatively easy to do. If the list truly is the "worst of the worst", and its security can't be assured, its publicly availability is unconscionable. If the list is as poor quality as the current ACMA blacklist, then leaks will do little more than be a continuous source of embarrassment to the government as the edge cases are brought to light by the media. A more disturbing thought is that the list is reconstructed but not made public because those who reverse engineered it were seeking out the illegal material which is also encompassed by Refused Classification.

The government has not provided any figures on how much of the total Refused Classification material on the Internet it expects to block. This is an important consideration. If the government only ever expects to cover a small percentage, then there seems little point in even having the policy. The web contains more than 1 trillion unique URLs. The current ACMA blacklist contains less than 1,500 URLs. And the government has admitted that performance will degrade if the list becomes too long.

The unintended social issues this proposal will create are deeply concerning. The filter is being sold as a way to protect people, particularly children, from accidental exposure to offensive material. There is no evidence of impending societal collapse from the decades at the current level of exposure. The reality is that a list of a few thousand will have a negligible preventative effect. It will, however, mean that parents will become complacent and oblivious to online dangers. If this proposal succeeds, the government will claim that the Internet is now "safer" in its advertising. That will be the sole message mums and dads will take away from the entire debate. This will mean less parental supervision, and will actually magnify our children's exposure to age inappropriate material. It will cause the very problem it attempts to solve.

The ACMA has conducted numerous studies over the years that show that Australian parents are well aware of online dangers and are happily managing their children's access. There are currently ISPs in Australia that specialise in providing filtered access, like WebShield. These companies have a filtered Internet service as a core component of their business model, rather than the cheap bolt-on after thoughts that reluctant ISPs will implement. Such companies do have low take up, despite the massive amount of free advertising the government has just provided. The previous government's NetAlert scheme similarly had low take up. It is clear that Australians understand the risks and deliberately choose to have unfiltered Internet. It is laudable to try and make their job easier, but this proposal will not do that.

Then there is the matter of privacy. Authorities require extenuating circumstances to eavesdrop on the telephone conversations of Australians. Intercepting private mail also requires a good reason vouched for by the judiciary. What the government is proposing, however, is a system where every packet of information sent by Australians is opened and inspected, before deciding if it should be allowed to reach its destination. It is not enough to say that those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear. Most people close the door when they go to toilet. While they aren't doing anything illegal there, that does not mean they particularly want to be observed doing so. Privacy is, and must be a fundamental right in a civil society.

There is also the future reaction of users when they encounter material which is potentially Refused Classification. If it isn't already blocked, are they to assume that the material is sanctioned by the government? Sexual explicit material, which isn't, and never could be covered by any blacklist is not Refused Classification. This is clearly material that is age inappropriate for children. Also, as a complaints-based system, the majority of complaints are going to be registered by our nation's biggest wowsers. Are we content to have what we see decided by the most easily offended? Such people will also be the loudest voices to keep increasing the scope of what is blocked.

Even more bizarrely, the government is proposing outsourcing censorship decisions to foreign countries. Incorporating foreign lists into the Australian blacklist without reviewing the content is handing another country the power to decide what Australians can and cannot see. Foreign lists have had their own embarrassments. The British Internet Watch Foundation, for example, has blacklisted material our Prime Minister might consider "absolutely revolting", but wouldn't bat an eye at the Classification Board. Properly incorporating foreign lists will turn into an expensive exercise. It already costs over $500 per URL for review by the Classification Board.

If the filter proposal passes, Australia would be the first and only Western democracy to introduce such broad and far reaching censorship on the Internet. Our actions thus far have already given comfort to more authoritarian regimes. Our filter model will end up justifying limiting freedom of speech among the most despicable governments. It would blacken our reputation, weaken trade, discourage discerning would be migrants and constrain our moral authority. Respected international human rights organisations are already expressing concern about Australia over this proposal.

There is a saying: "The Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it." The whole concept of the Internet was to have redundant means of communication should any number of nodes be destroyed. Circumvention is thus not only possible but also exceptionally easy. Both the Enex and Telstra reports made this very clear. Even WebShield was unable to prevent circumvention and this is their core business. Thus, the filter proposal will do nothing to stop those who want illegal material from seeking it out.

The unavoidable conclusion is that the government's Internet filter proposal will be no more than an expensive waste of resources, delivering no benefits and having little or no value to show for it. It will magnify the social problems it claims to be attempting to solve, and destroy Australia's reputation into the bargain. It is well past time this idea was killed off once and for all.

Appendix: Online Opinion Forum discussion contribution Why won't Greens move motion to put filtering to a referendum?

The following was posted to the forum discussion in response to the originally published article.

Excellent article.

Of course, I agree with Arved von Brasch that the main threat is the power that it gives to Governments to censor, at will, sites that it considers a threat, and that should be the major focus of the anti-Internet Filtering campaign.

Nevertheless it is most helpful to also understand the technical problems posed by Filtering and Arved must be congratulated for having explained them so well. Now, we can all understand what the truth behind Conroy's claims that the tests is.

---

Have any polls been taken on this issue? I believe I heard once that the overwhelming majority were opposed. Even if not, that would change very quickly if there was a proper public debate on this. So there is no way that this legislation should stand any chance of becoming law in a properly functioning democracy.

About three weeks ago, I learnt from a member of Scott Ludlam's staff that they are, in fact, expecting the Liberals and Nationals to back away from their previous strong opposition.

I had put in an e-mail to Senator Ludlam early last year that they simply move a motion in the Senate that it be put to a referendum. However when I phoned his office around September last year, I was told that opposition by the Coalition to filtering was practically guaranteed. Implicilty it seemed that there was not urgent need for a referendum motion to be put. This still made me nervous that at a coming election many voters would face an impossible choice between the Coalition on the one had with its past record of Work Choices, the Iraq War, Telstra privatisation, etc. and the Labor party on the other hand with Mandatory Internet Filterin. Nevertheless, I did not pursue further my request that a motion for a referendum be put at that stage.

Now, that has changed.

The serious risk that Internet Filtering could soon become law should be considered unacceptable, even, if, for example, the rough edges were to be softened by, for example, Labor Senator Kate Lundy's proposed amendments.

Yet, when I put to one of Scott Ludlam's staffers, two weeks ago on the phone that they should go ahead and move a motion for a referendum, as I had urged earlier, she told me that Scott Ludlam would not.

Why I asked?

Because, she told me they did not expect that it would be carried.

I should have asked her how she knew that.

Furthermore, since then, Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard has suggested that her Government's health system reforms be put to a referendum at the Federal elections. Surely, especially now, a motion for a referendum on Mandatory Internet Filtering at this year's Federal Election could hardly be depicted as unreasonable.

If the Coalition were to vote against such a motion, then surely that would give the Greens a perfect opportunity to differentiate themselves positively from the Coalition and gain a large number of votes at their expense as well as at the expense of the Labor Party.

And if the Coalition were to agree, then better still. The public would assuredly drive a large blunt stake through the heart of Mandatory Internet Filtering at the referendum. The Greens should still expect do very well from a grateful public and certainly would do a lot better than if they were to remain on their current trajectory.

How could the Greens lose?

Why won't they seize this opportunity with both hands?

See also: (As mentioned above) Internet censorship, Citizens Initiated Referenda and the Greens - an open letter of 23 Dec 09.

Update, 18 April 2010: After numerous e-mails to Mark Bahnisch and his moderator, a request to Mark Bahnisch in person on Saturday 10 April 2008 at a forum on the $15 billion Queensland fire sale at which he spoke, a further e-mail and my writing about the censorship of my views on johnquiggin.com here (14 Apr), here (16 Apr) and here (4 Mar), a comment of mine finally appeared on Larvatus Prodeo today, but only after it had been first placed in their moderation queue. The comment announced the meeting called by Concerned Residents Against Milton's Excessive Development to be held this Thursday 22 April. Hopefully, at least I will be free to put my views on most issues (if not subjects deemed taboo such as 9/11) from now and more hopefully without my posts being singled out for moderation.

Update (3 March 2010): Larvatus Prodeo moderator tells me she is "comfortable with how [she's] represented," but I am still waiting to be advised if I have been intentionally banned and why. See Appendix 3: Further Correspondences with the Larvatus Prodeo administrators from 2 Mar 10.

Introductory explanation for update, 2 March 2010

This article was first posted on 29 December 2009. When I originally wrote it, I was given the assurance that I would not be banned from Larvatus Prodeo and I acknowledged that in my article. However, shortly after I found that my posts were being blocked again. Other priorities prevented me from following that up until now. On 1 March 2010, when I found that my posts were still being censored, I felt motivated me to update this article with two appendices in order to better substantiate the original article.

The appendices are:

Appendix 1: Excerpt from Larvatus Prodeo Forum: This contains some of the exchanges which occurred shortly before the discsussion was suddenly ended on 28 December 2009. I believe those exchanges clearly demonstrate that I was winning the argument. They comprise what I think is a good case study in dishonest debating techniques and how to overcome them.

Appendix 2: Correspondences with the administrators of Larvatus Prodeo This concerns the abrupt ending of the forum, my being smeared as an anti-Semite by a moderator and my subsequently being implicitly scapegoated for the abuses that others had perpetrated by being banned from that site. Should those I corresponded with believe that they have been unfairly dealt with by this article, they are more than welcome to state their case by posting comments to this article.

Main article

In the last three months of 2009 a discussion on Larvatus Prodeo, about the controversy surrounding 9/11, turned into the online equivalent of a lynching. On 28 December at the point at which the intended victim (myself) was able to turn the tables on his tormentors, the moderators abruptly closed the disccussion. I have been barred from contributing to that site ever since, as if I had been blamed for the abuses of others.

The following is a brief response to what was written (be warned before you click this link, the total size of all the files comprising that page is now 5.3MB) posted by someone I will call 'Barry' on the "Saturday Salon -- The Truth is Out There! edition" on the Australian forum discussion site Larvatus Prodeo. I initially asked that a post that this article is based upon be posted, but that request was refused.

After I pressed with my complaint, the offending words, included below, were removed to the credit of the Larvatus Prodeo administrators and they have assured me that I am welcome to continue contributing posts to (in fact, it turned out that I was not welcome after all -- see footnote)Larvatus Prodeo₁. However, a number of concerns remain. These include the fact that I have been asked not, at least for a while. to raise the issue of 9/11 on that site, even though the official myth of 9/11 remains the justification for the current "War on Terror", including in Afghanistan. Barely a week goes by, when this justification is not repeated₂ in at least one of our major daily newspapers.

The attack below was the last of a long line of nasty personal attacks that I have been subjected to as a result of my choice to put and defend my views on the controversy over the 9/11 attacks. The latest of the personal attacks, BTW include being accused of advocating the views contained in the anti-Semetic forgery of the Russian Tsarist secret police known as "The Protocals od the Elders of Zion". Now that that forum has been closed, I am no longer able to defend myself against such smears on that forum.

'Barry' wrote:

Daggett, whatever personal or emotional problems you are avoiding by transference onto this weird little obsession of yours, you'll be a much happier individual if you just confront your own demons instead of insisting that there are demons "out there" that we must all confront.

This is the kind of put-down that political activists have become accustomed to, We are told that there is nothing essentially wrong with the world and all that needs to be fixed with the world lies within ourselves.

Well, tell that to the million-plus dead who died as result of wars, for which 9/11 was used as a pretext.

Also, why assume it is me and not those on the other side of the discussion, who is avoiding his/her own demons?

'Barry' continued:

This is not the kind of discussion that Mark set up this blog to encourage, ...

It's not the kind of discussion I like to participate in either --- a dozen plus people, attacking me personally, just as you did last night, doggedly and tenaciously, over many long months, employing every conceivable dishonest debating technique that was ever devised, whilst generally avoiding discussing the facts on hand. As I wrote, last night to [two Larvatus Prodeo Administrators]:

In a way it would be a relief if you were to confirm that I had been [banned], but I think principles of open and free discussion are more important than my personal convenience, particularly when we are all facing the threat of Mandatory Internet Filtering.

I didn't want to get involved in such a long, time-consuming discussion, but I believe it is important to defend one's views when they are attacked, and not run away (of which I was accused on more than one occasion when I momentarily ceased contributing to that forum) in the way that they were.

If you had examined the discussion, you will notice how it was those on the other side of that discussion, and not me, who insisted on needlessly bloating the size of their own contributions, and who added trivia against my objections, for no better purpose than to make the forum reach some new unprecedented record for this web-site and who openly welcomed the opportunity that it gave them to publicly humiliate me:

"Welcome to StoushGym TM."

"Let's face it folks, this thread has turned into StoushGym TM with Daggy as a multfunctional piece of workout equipment.

"So far Fyodor's been hogging it but at least he's not leaving any sweat behind on the seat."

"WE really all should club together and buy Daggy a yearly StoushGym TM pass."

"100 comments to go! [until the 2,000th post]"

"I really don't think M. Fyodor is looking to change Daggy's mind here so much as to work out the kinks in his left jab. Gotta work on not dropping the shoulder so slightly to telegraph the punch."

Well, in the end, it was those people, and not me, who were humiliated, simply because I persisted, amidst the torrent of smear, abuse and ridicule to patiently put the facts and expose the illogicality and outright deceit of my opponents' case. My two main detractors have said little in 10 days and nothing over the last four, and I somehow doubt if it was just because of Christmas.

Anyhow, no-one need take my word for it. They can check for themselves (but see above warning about the 5.3MB size of the page).

'Barry' continued:

... and we've indulged it faaaaaaar too long. ...

As I have just pointed out, I am not the person who has been indulged by this forum.

'Barry' continued:

... Start your own blog, patiently build up a large audience over many years and maybe you'll get a readership. ...

I have already done so and achieved precisely that. Why not follow the link to my own home page, and see for yourself?

'Barry' continued:

... But your days of attempting to leverage off our audience are over.

Why assume that I was attempting to do that? I saw no evidence of any sizable numbers of your audience that were particularly worth my effort.

I persisted in the argument only because I believed it important to win the argument and show that it had been won. The fact that it was won by me remains on the record, however much my detractors try to pretend otherwise.

Footnotes

1. ↑ In fact, contrary to the assurances given, I have found that my posts to Larvatus Prodeo have all vanished without trace. My latest attempt to post to Larvatus Prodeo on 1 March 2010 failed.

E-mails to the administrators even to simply ask if I have been banned have been ignored by Mark Bahnisch the owner of Larvatus Prodeo and moderator Anna Winter. I include below correspondences with them.

If you agree with me that free speech, democracy is not best served by the banning from the pages of Larvatus Prodeo my views on a large range of topics including 9/11, then please consider making them known, perhaps by saying so on the pages of Larvatus Prodeo or by contacting the Larvatus Prodeo administrator by e-mailing vodkandlime at gmail dot com. Please be sure to send us a copy, perhaps as comment to this article.

2. ↑ See, for example in "We must stay the course in Afghanistan" of 17 Aug:

It is all too easy in the face of this appalling human loss to question why Australia and its allies should continue to dedicate so much precious human capital to a country so far away. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's answer to that vexed question was to note that the mission to defeat the Taliban was essential to his country's security because "three-quarters of terrorist plots against Britain come from the border areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan".

Essentially the same argument can be mounted for Australia's continued military involvement in the country. Australians are all too aware, courtesy of vile and deadly bomb attacks in five-star hotels in Indonesia or alleged terrorism plots here in Australia, that the web of al-Qa'ida-inspired extremism is truly global. We have little choice but to attempt to confront this violence at its source, and to help Afghanistan restore a semblance of stability and security.

An editorial "Taking on the Taliban" in the Australian, another of Rupert Murdoch's newspapers, of 23 Sep 09 stated:

NATO nations must pull their weight in Afghanistan

...

And what would be a catastrophe for Afghanistan would be a disaster for the rest of the world. The last time the Taliban controlled Afghanistan, it harboured Osama bin Laden. It seems certain a second Taliban state would be a safe haven from which to launch terror attacks across the globe, including at Europe. Mr Obama and Mr Rudd say they have always understood the dangers of Taliban rule. It is time they convinced the Europeans that they have no choice but to join the US, Australian and Britain in taking the terrorists seriously.

Political leaders such as Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and US President Barack Obama, frequently repeat the lie of 9/11. Here's Kevin Rudd speaking to US news presenter Jim Lehrer as reported on the ABC radio's The World Today of 26 Mar 09:

... the bottom line is this: [Afghanistan is] the right place to be.

When you think about Afghanistan, think about this. I cannot remove from my mind the image of the twin towers coming down₃. We are there because terrorists, operating out of the safe haven of Afghanistan, caused that to happen. They also, having been trained in Afghanistan, were responsible for murdering nearly a hundred Australians in Bali a year later.

We have therefore a combined responsibility to do whatever we can to make sure Afghanistan does not become a safe haven for terrorism again. It's going to be tough, it's going to be hard, and it's going to be difficult and dangerous.

3. ↑ See article "Why Prime Minister Kevin Rudd should take another look at the 'image of the twin towers coming down'" of 30 Dec 09.

Appendix 1: Excerpt from Larvatus Prodeo Forum

Explanatory introduction: I have copied below just a very few of the 1979 posts comprising the Larvatus Prodeo forum dubbed by the moderators as "Saturday Salon - The Truth is Out There! edition". Before anyone clicks on the link, please bear in mind that its sizes is 5.6MB.

The critical posts are mine (daggett's) numbers 1929 and 1944 at the end. The posts I was responding to precede those. In turn others of mine that they responded to are included. It may be easier to understand the discussion by starting at the end and working backwards. I don't expect anyone to find reading my detractors' posts any less gruelling than I did, but they are included here to better allow people to form their own judgement.

The dates at the start of each post link back to the original post in the forum itself. Anyone is welcome to check the original forum itself, although as it is, overwhelmed with bloated posts (simlar to Bob's posts on this forum) and all sorts of irrelevent and trivial comments, most obviously intended to disrupt the discussion, it would be quite a challenge to navigate through. If time permits I woud like to extract more useful content and make it more accessible, either as additions to this page or elsewhere.

My Main detractor "Bob" changed his identity at each post. Not knowing what his actual identity was, I decided to refer to him as "Bob" because his gravatar image was that of the Simpsons character, Sideshow Bob Terwilliger.

1889 daggett
Dec 22nd, 2009 at 1:25 am

Bob,

Can you explain the following?

On Page 18 of "Chapter 1 INTERIM FINDINGS AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS" at http://wtc.nist.gov/progress_report_june04/chapter1.pdf we find this:

Around 4:45 p.m., a photograph showed fires on Floors 7, 8, 9, and 11 near the middle; Floor 12 was burned out by this time. (my emphasis)

Yet in "Figure 3-6 : Progression of Simulated Fire on Floor 12 of WTC 7" on page 30 of the "Final Report of the Collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 -- Draft for Public Comment" (aka NIST NCSTAR 1A, WTC Investigation) we find a raging out-of-control fire at 5.00PM barely 15 minutes later. There is also a raging fire at 4:00PM

.

How could a fire raging at 4:00PM have been "burned out" by 4:45PM and be raging out of control again at 5:00PM?

--

BTW, a very illuminating post on WTC 7, sadly buried amidst the spam and trivia, but well worth going back to, is Andrew's at 1042 . My most recent somewhat substantive post is 1873.

1890 Nick
Dec 22nd, 2009 at 3:45 am

"How could a fire raging at 4:00PM have been "burned out" by 4:45PM and be raging out of control again at 5:00PM?"

1) You compared a statement from an interim report released in June 2004, up against the final report released four and a half years later in November 2008. If you'd cared to download and read Chapter 5 of NIST NCSTAR 1-9, and examined all the additional photographic evidence collected and analysed since that June 2004 interim report, you would have come across Figure 5-152, which showed that fires were still burning on Floor 12 at 5pm +- 10mins. They were not found to have been "burned out" by 4:45PM.

2) NIST stated very clearly above Figure 3.6:

There were far fewer photographs and videos of WTC 7 than of the towers; and, thus, the details of the WTC 7 fires were not as precise as for the fires in the towers. However, the imagery was sufficient to guide the WTC 7 fire simulations. Unlike the computations for WTC 1 and WTC 2, the fire simulations for WTC 7 were conducted for each floor individually, as there were no obvious pathways for the flames and heat to pass from one floor to another, aside from the debris-damaged area in the southwest corner of the building (NIST NCSTAR 1-9, Chapter 9). The fires on Floors 7, 8, and 12 were simulated using input from the visual imagery and established fire physics. The fire on Floor 9 was similar to that on Floor 8, and the simulation was derived from it. For the same reason, the fires on Floors 11 and 13 were derived from the fire on Floor 12. While use was made of the appearance of flames and window breakage in photographs and videos in formulating the simulations, the Investigation Team realized that the absolute timing of the simulations might not align exactly with the timing of the fires on September 11, 2001.

Let me take a wild guess: you didn't read any of it, did you, dags.

You ripped this straight from a troofer site and threw it up here without any questioning or attempting to verify the information for yourself.

You're the best.

1892 A clear-headed, critical-minded thinking person
Dec 22nd, 2009 at 9:26 am

It seems as if Bob, in his last post, is attempting to imply that, because, in the following sentence:

Any number of competent measurements using a variety of methods indicate the North-West corner of WTC 7 fell with an acceleration within a few percent of the acceleration of gravity.

...David Chandler omitted the qualifying phrase "in that 2.25 second period", he was therefore must have meant over the whole observed collapse period.

No, Daggy, I'm not "seeming" to "attempt to imply" that David Chandler omitted the phrase. I'm stating it, because he did not qualify his statement.

This is what any clear-headed, critical-minded thinking person will recognise as pedantry used in a desperate ploy to avoid having to admit what a pathetic, miserable liar he has been through the long course of this discussion.

How would you know what a "clear-headed, critical-minded thinking person" would or would not recognise? You've shown yourself totally incapable of clear thinking or critical analysis. You're the muddle-headed dupe of some dopey conspiracy theorists.

There's no pedantry, no avoidance and no lying from me, Daggy.

YOU are the one who has been caught lying.
YOU are the one avoiding questions.
YOU are the one caught up in pedantry and trivia.

The fact of the matter is that you claimed I was lying about Chandler and challenged me to quote the guy, and I have.

I'm right. You're wrong. Get over it.

Anyone who watched and understood those videos would have to know from the overall context, in which he was measuring the acceleration in that 2.25 second period of free-fall, that the qualifying phrase was implied.

Bullshit. There's no implication or inference required or indicated -- THAT IS WHAT HE SAID. As I told you, if you have a problem with WHAT HE SAID, tell him.

The fact was, whether Bob chooses to acknowledges it or not, that in the earlier draft reports, NIST attempted to conceal the 2.25 period of freefall by averaging the acceleration over the whole period.

Rubbish. As I told you, they hid no such thing. They found, correctly, that WTC 7 took longer to collapse than a free-fall. That's an incontrovertible FACT, Daggy.

The rest of his post consists of similar games with the meaning of words designed to keep this discussion going around in circles or indefinitely or until I give up.

Squib. The only nitwit going round in circles here is you, Daggy, returning over and over again to debunked and discredited arguments.

Again, I can only suggest that others read my previous post and decide, for themselves, whether it makes more sense than Bob's.

As your comment contains no evidence, why should they even bother?

1895 daggett
Dec 22nd, 2009 at 2:55 pm

Bob demands to know:

How would you know what a "clear-headed, critical-minded thinking person" would or would not recognise?

Once, again, because of the context, Bob.

The whole point of his measurement of acceleration is explained towards the end of "WTC7 in Freefall" that I linked to above:

Notice that a little after the three second mark on our graph. abpit two and a half seconds after the building begins to drop, the acceleration ceases to be uniform. This indicates that the falling building is starting to encounter more resistance. Any measurement of the of the average acceleration that contains more than the first two and a half seconds[1] of fall, will show that for a significant two and a half seconds, the building was in literal free fall.

The article in which the video is embedded states:

Contrary to the August 2008 NIST report on WTC7, the acceleration of Building 7 has been measured and is found to be indistinguishable from the acceleration of gravity over a period of about 2.5[1] seconds during the fall.

How velocity and acceleration are measured of that about 2.5 second interval are clearly shown by David Chandler.

Given all this, I would have thought the question that should be asked is why anyonewould insist that David Chandler's quoted statement could have been mistaken for meaning:

Chandler claims that the building fell at free-fall acceleration over the total observed period of collapse.

... as Bob wrote and as I responded to earlier.

Footnotes

1. I have taken the free fall period time to be 2.25 seconds, David Chandler has taken it, here to be "around 2.5 seconds". Given that it is not easy to establish, with great precision, using the video evidence, where this interval began or ended, this is not important. It was certainly at least 2.25 seconds.

--

Nick,

Figure 5-155 on page 239 taken at 5.13PM shows no evidence of fire on Floor 12.

Figure 5-151 on page 236 taken at 4.40PM shows no evidence of fire on Floor 12.

Figure 5-150 on page 235 taken at 4.39PM shows no evidence of fire on Floor 12.

Figures 5-148 and 5-149 on page 234 taken seconds at aroound 4.38PM show no evidence of fire on Floor 12.

Figure 5-147 on page 233 taken at 4.37PM shows no evidence of fire on Floor 12.

Figures 5-148 and 5-149 on page 234 taken seconds at aroound 4.38PM show no evidence of fire on Floor 12

.

Figure 5-147 on page 233 taken at 4.37PM shows no evidence of fire on Floor 12.

Figure 5-146 on page 232 taken at 4.20PM shows no evidence of fire on Floor 12.

The only evidence of any fire at all is Figure 5-152 on page 237 shows only one small fire in the North Western corner burning, and nowhere else, supposedly at around 5.00PM.

That is no doubt why in 2004 the NIST interim report stated as I cited above:

Around 4:45 p.m., a photograph showed fires on Floors 7, 8, 9, and 11 near the middle; Floor 12 was burned out by this time. (my emphasis)

Now again, I ask Bob, or you, if you like, to explain this massive discrepency between the evidence and the computer simulation that supposedly explains the first and only 'collapse' in exactly the same manner as a controlled demolition, of a steel-framed building, caused entirely by fire.

1896 A ginger-headed, personably-minded thinking critic
Dec 22nd, 2009 at 4:54 pm

Bob demands to know:

How would you know what a "clear headed, critical-minded thinking person would or would not recognise?

Once again, because of the context, Bob.

Nope. Context doesn't affect your assessment of the recognition ability of people with clearer heads and more critical minds than yours. As I implied, you simply don't know what such people would or would not recognise. The context of the situation has no bearing on your incompetence in assessment.

The whole point of his measurement of acceleration is explained towards the end of "WTC 7 in Freefall" that I linked to above:

Notice that a little after the three second mark on our graph. abpit two and a half seconds after the building begins to drop, the acceleration ceases to be uniform. This indicates that the falling building is starting to encounter more resistance. Any measurement of the of the average acceleration that contains more than the first two and a half seconds of fall, will show that for a significant two and a half seconds, the building was in literal free fall.

The article in which the video is embedded states:

Contrary to the August 2008 NIST report on WTC7, the acceleration of Building 7 has been measured and is found to be indistinguishable from the acceleration of gravity over a period of about 2.5 seconds during the fall.

How velocity and acceleration are measured of that about 2.5 second interval are clearly shown by David Chandler.

Given all this, I would have thought the question that should be asked is why anyonewould insist that David Chandler's quoted statement could have been mistaken for meaning:

Chandler claims that the building fell at free-fall acceleration over the total observed period of collapse.

...as Bob wrote and as I responded to earlier.

There's no mistaken meaning -- that's WHAT HE SAID. Let's look at it again, shall we? Chandler's assertion to the NIST hearing was:

Any number of competent measurements using a variety of methods indicate the North-West corner of WTC 7 fell with an acceleration within a few percent of the acceleration of gravity. Yet your report contradicts this, claiming 40% slower than freefall based on a single data point. How can such a public, visible, easily measurable quantity be set aside?

There's no qualification there. There's no mention of 2.25 seconds -- or 2.5 seconds, for that matter -- of freefall. The meaning is clear: Chandler asserted to NIST that the building fell with an acceleration equivalent to gravity. He even refers to NIST's (accurate) calculation of total observed collapse taking 40% longer than estimated freefall time. He is thus CLEARLY referring to freefall over the whole period of collapse. There's no other meaning in that statement.

Now, Daggy, you may have found instances -- unsurprisingly -- where Chandler contradicts himself and, as I suggested to you, you should take up those inconsistencies with him.

However, you cannot refute the fact, and the fact is that he asserted to NIST that the building fell at gravitational acceleration. It didn't, obviously, but that's WHAT HE SAID.

As I said, get over it.

Now again, I ask Bob, or you [i.e. Nick], if you like, to explain this massive discrepancy between the evidence and the computer simulation that supposedly explains the first and only 'collapse' in exactly the same manner as a controlled demolition, of a steel-framed building, caused entirely by fire.

First, there is no "massive discrepancy". As Nick pointed out to you, photographic evidence from NIST NCSTAR 1-9 shows that fires were still burning on Floor 12 around 5pm. Let me quote from the report (page 245):

[Regarding the 12th Floor] An image taken around 5:00pm showed that the fire had continued spreading West, and intense flames were coming from windows on the North face at the Northwest corner.

Second, the building did not collapse in exactly the same manner as a controlled demolition. Collapse was progressive, not instantaneous, and there was no evidence of any explosives or controlled demolition of any kind -- no material evidence and certainly no audio evidence.

Third, as I pointed out to you before, the WTC buildings were not the first or only steel-framed buildings to collapse due to fire, and nor did WTC 7 collapse solely due to fire -- it also withstood damage from the collapses of WTC 1 & 2.

Fourth, Nick was right: you ripped this crap straight from a troofer site without bothering to verify the information yourself. [HINT: reading the NIST report would have saved you the embarrassment, AGAIN]

1905 daggett
Dec 23rd, 2009 at 2:11 am

Bob is attempting to put a different meaning to David Chandler's words to the meaning that is abundantly clear from the context that I described, by isolating them from the context.

If Bob is so adamant that David Chandler could only have meant from these words that WTC 7 fell at free fall speed for the whole observed period, then why was that ridiculous meaning not also abundantly clear to Shyam Sunder at that briefing about the NIST preliminary report?

Why, instead of refuting Chandler's argument, which would surely have been so easy to do, did he, instead, make a complete fool of himself?

The only conceivable reason can be that Sunder, as had everyone else who was there or who had watched his videos, took the meaning of those words to be exactly as I said they were, that is, that WTC 7 fell at free-fall acceleration for around 2.5 seconds and not for the whole observed period.

This, of course, makes Bob not only a liar, when he claimed,

Chandler claims that the building fell at free-fall acceleration over the total observed period of collapse.

... but also a time-wasting pedant.

And he remains a liar for having claimed that I have produced no evidence and that I have been debunked in places where I clearly have not.

The part of Bob's post dealing with the discrepencies between the photographic evidence and the simulated fires contains nothing new and has all already been answered in the posts he is purporting to respond to. They are 1889, 1895.

His (implied) claim that other steel-framed buildings have been totally destroyed by fire has been shown to be a lie early on.

His implication that the collapse of the North Tower somehow contributed to the structural failure of WTC 7 has already been acknowledged by NIST itself to be false.

1910 What a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away
Dec 23rd, 2009 at 9:56 am

What a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away
Dec 23rd, 2009 at 9:56 am

Bob is attempting to put a different meaning to David Chandler's words to the meaning that is abundantly clear from the context that I described, by isolating them from the context.

Nope, I'm just quoting exactly WHAT HE SAID. You are the one trying to imply he meant something different to WHAT HE SAID.

If Bob is so admant that David Chandler could only have meant from these words that WTC 7 fell at free fall speed for the whole observed period, then why was that ridiculous meaning not also abundantly clear to Shyam Sunder at that briefing about the NIST preliminary report?

I agree that Chandler's meaning was ridiculous, but it was also clear, to me and to Sunder. Let's look at Sunder's response [from 1:41 onwards] in this video:

Chandler [as read by some dude at a computer]: Any number of competent measurements using a variety of methods indicate the North-West corner of WTC 7 fell with an acceleration within a few percent of the acceleration of gravity. Yet your report contradicts this, claiming 40% slower than freefall based on a single data point. How can such a public, visible, easily measurable quantity be set aside?

Sunder: Can you repeat the question, please?

[Repeated]

Sunder: Well, um, first of all, gravity is the loading function that applies to the structure, applies to every body, all bodies on this particular...on this planet, not just on ground zero. The analysis showed there's a difference in time between a freefall time -- a freefall time would be an object that has no structural components below it -- and if you look at the analysis of the video it shows that the time it takes for the 17...for the roofline of the video, to collapse down the 17 floors, that you can actually see in the video, below which you can't see anything in the video, is about 3.9 seconds. What the analysis shows, what the structural analysis shows, the collapse analysis shows, the same time that it took for the structural model to come down from the roofline all the way for those 17 floors to disappear is 5.4 seconds, it's about 1.5 seconds, roughly 40%, more time for that freefall to happen, and that is not at all unusual because there was structural resistance that was provided in this particular case and you had a sequence of structural failures that had to take place and everything was not instantaneous.

Now, Daggy, Sunder isn't a particularly eloquent or confident speaker, but we do know he heard the question correctly, as he asked for it to be repeated.

We also know that Sunder clearly addresses the TOTAL OBSERVED PERIOD OF COLLAPSE -- the 5.4 seconds, or freefall plus 40% -- questioned by Chandler. There is no mention of 2.25 seconds or 2.5 seconds of freefall by either Chandler or Sunder -- the whole discussion, both question and answer, addresses TOTAL OBSERVED PERIOD OF COLLAPSE, not some discrete period within the overall collapse. Clearly, Sunder took the obvious meaning of Chandler's assertion and question.

Not only that, but Sunder explicitly reaffirms that the collapse of WTC 7 took 40% longer than estimated freefall time, REFUTING Chandler's assertion that WTC 7 fell at gravitational acceleration.

Why, instead of refuting Chandler's argument, which should surely have been so easy to do, did he, instead, make a complete fool of himself?

As noted, he refuted Chandler's assertion. As for making a fool of himself, I suggest that you're not competent to judge the foolishness of others, for the obvious reason.

The only conceivable reason can be that Sunder, as had everyone else who was there or who had watched his videos, took the meaning of those words to be exactly as I said they were, that is, that WTC 7 fell at free-fall acceleration for around 2.5 seconds and not for the whole observed period.

I've just demonstrated that Sunder took the same meaning I did, because THAT'S WHAT CHANDLER SAID.

This, of course, makes Bob not only a liar, when he claimed,

Chandler claims that the building fell at free-fall acceleration over the total observed period of collapse.

...but also a time-wasting pedant.

I've just proved, again, that I did not lie and the only pedant wasting time here is you, with your ineffectual blather.

And he remains a liar for having claimed that I have produced no evidence and that I have been debunked in places where I clearly have not.

Nope. You have produced no evidence and you have been debunked, each and every time I say so. Every single time, you have been defeated by the facts and logic and anyone reading this thread can see for themselves.

The part of Bob's post dealing with the discrepancies between the photographic evidence and the simulated fires contains nothing new and has already been answered in the posts he is purporting to respond to. They are 1889 1895.

I didn't claim I was presenting anything new on the photographic evidence. Indeed, I noted that Nick had introduced it in his refutation of your assertion. And, no, Daggy, you did not "answer" Nick's evidence, which showed clearly that fires were observed on Floor 12 at or around 5pm on the day in question. He proved you wrong, and I simply reminded you of that.

His (implied) claim that other steel-framed buildings have been totally destroyed by fire has been shown to be lie early on.

No, it hasn't. Produce the comment where you claim this occurred.

His implication that the collapse of the North Tower somehow contributed to the structural failure of WTC 7 has already been acknowledge by NIST itself to be false.

Nope. From NIST NCSTAR 1-9, page xxxvi:

The fires in WTC 7 were ignited as a result of the impact of debris from the collapse of WTC 1, which was approximately 110m (350ft) to the south. The debris also cause structural damage to the southwest exterior of WTC 7, primarily between Floors 7 to 17. The fires were ignited on at least 10 floors; however, only the fires on Floors 7 through 9 and 11 through 13 grew and last until the time of the building collapse. These uncontrolled fires had characteristics similar to those that have occurred previously in tall buildings. Their growth and spread were consistent with ordinary building contents fires. Had a water supply for the automatic sprinkler system been available and had the sprinkler system operated as designed, it is likely that fires in WTC 7 would have been controlled and the collapse prevented. However, the collapse of WTC 7 highlights the importance of designing fire-resistant structures for situations where sprinklers are not present, do not function (e.g. due to disconnected or impaired water supply) or are overwhelmed.

Now, NIST states later on that it was the fires that brought down the building, not the structural damage done by the nearby collapse of WTC 1. However, the fires were ignited by the collapse of WTC 1, and it was the collapses of WTC 1 & 2 that impaired the water supply to WTC 7, preventing the sprinkler system from working properly in containing the fires that eventually brought down the building. The collapses of WTC 1 & 2 most definitely "contributed to the structural failure of WTC 7".

If you had the read the report, you would know this, and would not have embarrassed yourself. Again.

1914 daggett
Dec 23rd, 2009 at 11:02 am

Bob wrote:

Nope, I'm just quoting exactly WHAT HE SAID. You are the one trying to imply he meant something different to WHAT HE SAID.

I would have thought that "what Chandler said" isolated from the context I described was ambiguous.

If Bob insists that David Chandler must be held to the literal meaning of that sentence:

Any number of competent measurements using a variety of methods indicate the North-West corner of WTC 7 fell with an acceleration within a few percent of the acceleration of gravity.

... in isolation from the context, how can he know what period that Chandler was referring to, if he did not qualify it in that sentence did not refer to the whole period of collapse and not just the observed period of collapse?

He cannot, nor can he claim that the meaning of the words did not apply to the 2.25 second period.

Of course, if we put the sentence back in context the meaning is clear.

So, as I wrote, Bob is a time-wasting pedant.

And there is nothing in that last post that adds anything to this discussion.

I would concede that I have not yet directly answered Nick's latest piece of sophistry regarding the supposed behaviour of the Towers as brilliantly efficient 'pistons' during the 'collapses', which had not been put at the time Bob falsely claimed I had been thoroughly debunked on that question, but I don't see why I should be obligated to respond to each and every piece of sophistry by people who have shown themselves to be disingenuous at best and liars at worst.

Besides, Nick has not responded to my latest post in regard to the claimed 'piston' effect either.

The rest of the post is yet another pretence aimed at the willingly gullible on this forum and casual vistors who don't have the time to wade through it all that the previous post has in some way answered, when they have not been.

If any of the individuals here can show me anything new in Bob's latest post, then I will respond to it.

If not, I don't see why I should risk having by broadband choked by furhther responding to this forum, now that I have used up 8Gig of my allowed 10Gig, largely thanks to the spam and trivia posted here by Bob and others.

My previous posts that Bob has claimed to have responded to include 1905, 1895, 1889, 1873, 1870, 1868.

1915 daggett
Dec 23rd, 2009 at 11:31 am

...

As I wrote, I don't consider myself obligated to participate any further in this circus, except on my own terms.

So don't be too surprised if I only post every other day, or even less frequently, from now on.

At least this forum stands as a record, from which people can learn
a lot about various online contributors, including at least one historian -- and I very much doubt if it will be to their credit in the eyes of
critical thinking and open-minded people -- as well as, in between, 9/11 itself.

1918 What a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away
Dec 23rd, 2009 at 2:36 pm

Bob wrote:

Nope, I'm just quoting exactly WHAT HE SAID. You are the one trying to imply he meant something different to WHAT HE SAID.

I would have thought that "what Chandler said" isolated from the context I described was ambiguous.

Yes, you've already said that you thought that, and you're wrong. His meaning was unambiguous, as evident from Sunder's reply, as I showed in my last comment.

If bob insists that David Chandler must be held to the literal meaning of that sentence:

Any number of competent measurements using a variety of methods indicate the North-West corner of WTC 7 fell with an acceleration within a few percent of the acceleration of gravity.

...in isolation from the context, how can he know what period that Chandler was referring to, if he did not qualify it in that sentence did not refer to the whole period of collapse and not just the observed period of collapse?

How can I -- and thus we -- know this? Because of Chandler's sentence after the one you quoted, which you left out for a reason not impossible to fathom.

Here's the full quotation of Chandler's statement/question to Dr. Sunder of NIST:

Any number of competent measurements using a variety of methods indicate the North-West corner of WTC 7 fell with an acceleration within a few percent of the acceleration of gravity. Yet your report contradicts this, claiming 40% slower than freefall based on a single data point. How can such a public, visible, easily measurable quantity be set aside?

As highlighted in bold, Chandler was referring to NIST's timing of the TOTAL OBSERVED PERIOD OF COLLAPSE, to which sunder replied, as I noted in my last comment.

He cannot, nor can he claim that the meaning of the words did not apply to the 2.25 second period.

I can, to both. Chandler CLEARLY referred to the TOTAL OBSERVED PERIOD OF COLLAPSE. There is no mention of the 2.25 second period.

Of course, if we put the meaning back in context the meaning is obvious.

The meaning is obvious regardless of your spin. It was the meaning that Sunder replied to.

So, as I wrote, Bob is a time-wasting pedant.

Says the twit who's just received another lesson in English comprehension on the same bit of text.

Honestly, Daggy, have you considered taking lessons in literacy? It's one thing debunking your garbage, it's another having to teach you the fucking language while I'm at it. And you have the gall to accuse me of wasting time?

And there is nothing in that last post that adds anything to this discussion.

Apart from debunking your dopey assertions yet again, squibber.

I would concede that I have not yet directly answered Nick's latest piece of sophistry regarding the supposed behaviour of the Towers as brilliantly efficient 'pistons' during the 'collapses', which had not been put at the time Bob falsely claims I had been thoroughly debunked on that question, but I don't see whay I should be obligated to respond to each and every piece of sophistry by people who have shown themselves to be disingenuous at best and liars at worst.

Squib. Nick demolished your arguments and the fact that you have failed to rebut his arguments says all we need to know about who is the disingenuous liar on this thread.

The fact is that you're not under any obligation to substantiate your assertions, Daggy. Nobody's holding a gun to your head. Of course, if you fail in this, as you have repeatedly, we'll form the natural assumption, correct to date, that you have no case and your arguments are bunk, as they are.

The rest of the post is yet another pretence aimed at the willingly gullible on this forum and casual visitors who don't have the time to wade through it all that the previous post has in some way answered, when they have not been.

If any of the individuals here can show me anything new in Bob's latest post, then I will respond to it.

Yeah, that's right, Daggy: keep squibbing on the same stuff over and over again.

If not, I don't see why I should risk having my broadband choked by further responding to this forum, now that I have used up 8Gig of my allowed 10Gig, largely thanks to the spam and trivia posted here by Bob and others.

*plays world's tiniest violin for poor widdle Daggy*

Boo-feckin'-hoo, Daggy. This thread is so long because you insisted
on recycling discredited and debunked troofer garbage over and over
again. Your case was destroyed more than a thousand comments ago and
yet here you are, moaning about the length of the thread. Grow up. The
ONLY person responsible for using up your 8Gig is YOU.

As I wrote, I don't consider myself obligated to participate any further in this circus, except on my own terms.

So don't be too surprised if I only post every other day, or even less frequently, from now on.

The only surprise coming from you, Daggy, would be a solid argument.

At least this forum stands as a record, from which people can learn a lot about various online contributors, including at least one historian -- and I very much doubt if it will be to their credit in the eyes of critical thinking and open-minded people -- as well as, in between, 9/11 itself.

Heh. Oh, it'll be a record, alright. I warned you it would be more than a thousand comments ago, but you wouldn't listen.

You should ask yourself, Daggy, what you think people will think of you when they read it. Better yet: why don't you ask some of those critical thinking and open-minded people you keep mentioning?

1929 daggett
Dec 26th, 2009 at 1:22 am

Bob wrote:

[HINT: reading the NIST report would have saved you the embarrassment, AGAIN]

No, Bob. We both know that out of you and me I am not the person who need feel embarassed. We both know that there is nothing in that the claptrap in your post that answers my previous posts (@ 1895 and 1889), however much you and all your sycophants here choose to shout and scream otherwise.

And we also both know that my reading all the NIST reports from one end to the other as well as the 9/11 Commission Report and any other piece of lying US Government propaganda would not alter one iota your refusal to argue logically and with due acknowledgement of the evidence I have presented.

Bob wrote:

How can I -- and thus we -- know [how can he know what period that Chandler was referring to]? Because of Chandler's sentence after the one you quoted, which you left out for a reason not impossible to fathom.

Sure, Bob. I left out the second and third sentences, hoping that no-one else, least of all, you, would see that when you quoted it in your previous post (@ 1910), there was another sentence following that I didn't want others to know about.

Bob then goes on to insist that those two sentences:

Yet your report contradicts this, claiming 40% slower than freefall based on a single data point. How can such a public, visible, easily measurable quantity be set aside?

... must somehow qualify the literal meaning to the previous sentence.

No, Bob. It does not. The literal meaning, in isolation remains ambiguous.

If you want to add implied meaning to words, you just can't just broaden the context to an arbitrary degree that suits you, but refuse to allow the context to be broadened any further.

Bob wrote:

Not only that, but Sunder explicitly reaffirms that the collapse of WTC 7 took 40% longer than estimated freefall time, REFUTING Chandler's assertion that WTC 7 fell at gravitational acceleration.

Sure, Bob. David Chandler can only have meant that WTC 7 fell at free fall speed for all of the 5.4 second period of 'collapse', even though that contradicts his statements and all the measurements demonstrated in those YouTube Broadcasts and repeated many times before and since that free fall occurred only for (around) 2.5 seconds.

Anyhow, even if David Chandler inexplicably tried to make the claim on that one occasion, that Bob insists that he was, the fact remains that free-fall did occur for 2.25 seconds during which WTC 7 fell through 8 floors.

This brings me back to that other glaring piece of idiocy that Bob and Nick try to pass off as a rebuttal of the controlled demolition hypothesis. Here it is again (and, no doubt, Bob will moan and groan that we have "been over this" before, but, of course, 'neglecting' to show anyone where we have "been over this' before):

I wrote:

If all the structural strength in those 8 floors had been lost before the observed free fall period began, then free-fall would have commenced at that point.

Then Bob wrote:

Yes, free-fall commenced in Stage 2 after the structural strength had been lost in Stage 1. We've been through this.

I had also written:

Until a structure begins to fall at free fall acceleration, then, logically, something, namely structural strength, is preventing that structure from falling at free fall acceleration.

To which Bob responded:

Yes. As noted oh-so-many times now structural strength was lost during Stage 1. AFTER Stage 1, during which structural strength was lost, Stage 2, a period of gravitational acceleration, was observed.

This, we are told, "thoroughly debunks" my argument, but it doesn't even acknowledge that argument.

"[S]tructural strength was lost during Stage 1" he tells us.

But how much? And for which floors?

Clearly it could not have been all the structural strength and it could not have been for all 8 floors.

So, what does that statement mean?

1944 daggett
Dec 27th, 2009 at 12:24 am

Bob 'rebuts' posts 1895 and 1889:

First, there is no "massive discrepancy". As Nick pointed out to you, photographic evidence from NIST NCSTAR 1-9 shows that fires were still burning on Floor 12 around 5pm. ...

No, Bob. There is a massive discrepency and you are a shameless, barefaced liar to have claimed otherwise.

On the one hand, NIST's 'explanation' of the 'collapse' requires raging fires for 3 to 4 hours as illustrated in figure 9-11 on page 384 of NIST NCSTAR 1-9 Vol 2. On the other hand, the photographic evidence from 8 photos from 4.20PM until 5.13PM shows no evidence of fire. I could add to that list 4-145 on page 231 of NIST NCSTAR 1-9 Vol 1 at 4.10PM and 5-144 on page 229 at 3.55PM. The latter two flatly contradict the simulated 4.00PM image in figure 9-11.

Only in one image ('crudely estimated as being around 5.00PM') do we see any fire at all on Floor 12 and that is one very small isolated fire. (Where you meaning to construe this single fire as two so that you could use the word 'fires' instead of 'fire', Bob?)

So, that makes at least 10 photographic images of Floor 12 from 3.55PM until 5.13PM containing no evidence of fire and only one with a single small isolated fire -- all this during a periond when a fire hot enough to cause the total structural failure of steel on that floor was supposedly raging throughout Floor 12.

As I pointed out before, even NIST had acknowledged that the fires on Floor 12 had burnt out by 4.45PM.

The reason for this massive discrepency, is that NIST could not possibly have hoped to come up with an even remotely plausible explanation for the first ever global collapse of a steel-framed building caused by fire alone without grossly exaggerating the severity of those fires, and that is what it did. And in doing so, NIST is guilty of scientific fraud and both Bob and Nick by peddling their lies on this forum are accomplices in that fraud.

This is all abundantly demonstrated in chapters 9 and 10 of "The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7 -- Why the Final Official Report about 9/11 is unscientific and false" (2009) by David Ray Griffin. (BTW, the page number of the above reference is 227).

Appendix 2: Correspondence between myself and Larvatus Prodeo administrators

I am placing this corrrespondence on the public record in order to allow readers to form their own judgement.

Few of the arguments and facts I put to Anna Winter or Mark Bahnisch were acknowledged.

Please allow me to respond to anti-Semite slur
 Date: 27/12/09 10:51 pm
 From: James Sinnamon 
 To: Mark Bahnisch, Anna Winter 
 Reply to: James Sinnamon
 
Dear Mark and Anna,

I have now been accused of advocating the World View of The Protocols of the 
Elders of Zion, etc. etc. and cannot reply.

So, could you please either post the attached file that briefly answers that 
or unblock the post containtin the same?

I have not been able to at 
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/09/12/saturday-salon-208/ ?

I hope I have not been banned.

In a way it would be a relief if you were to confirm that I had been, but I 
think principles of open and free discussion are more important than my 
personal convenience, particularly when we are all facing the threat of 
Mandatory Internet Filtering.

If I have been banned, I think it would only be fair to stop others from 
attacking me personally.

Sincerely,

James Sinnamon

Re: Please allow me to respond to anti-Semite slur
 Date: 27/12/09 11:19 pm
 From: Anna Winter
 To: James Sinnamon 
 CC: Mark Bahnisch
 
James, don't repost comments again, it just makes the spam filter more
likely to take your comments.

Your comments are out now.

2009/12/27 James Sinnamon 

> Dear Mark and Anna,
>
> I have now been accused of advocating the World View of The Protocols of
...

Another post of mine filtered?
 Date: 28/12/09 10:18 am
 From: James Sinnamon 
 To: Anna Winter 
 CC: Mark Bahnisch 
 Reply to: James Sinnamon 

(Subject was: Re: Please allow me to respond to anti-Semite slur)

Dear Anna Winter,

On Sun, 27 Dec 2009, Anna Winter wrote:
> James, don't repost comments again, it just makes the spam filter more
> likely to take your comments.

I have followed that advice this time.
>
> Your comments are out now.

Thank you.

However, the discussion has since been closed (and as owners of 
larvartusprodeo.net it is obviously your right to do so, as much as I may 
disagree with that decision).

In closing that discussion, mercurius made a number of further personal 
attacks against me, which I consider unfair and I believe that I am entitled 
to respond to those.

I also believe that I am entitled also to respond to a further unfounded 
smear, made by another that I promote the anti-Semetic views of "The 
Protocols of the Elders of Zion".

So, I posted a response to 
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/12/26/saturday-salon-christmas-edition-2/

However, it disapppeared into your spam filter, that is, if it was not 
deleiberately deleted.

Could you please either take my post out of the spam filter, if you can, or, 
else, publish the attached html snippet on my behalf?

Thank you.

Yours sincerely,

James Sinnamon
Ph 0412 319669

Re: Another post of mine filtered?
 Date: 28/12/09 12:23 pm
 From: Anna Winter
 To: James Sinnamon
 CC: Mark Bahnisch

I think that thread is long enough for people to make their own judgements
about everyone on it. I'm not even a little bit interested in having that
debate spill over to any other threads. You have already responded, and your
comment at 1971 will remain there in that thread.

You've had plenty of opportunity to make all of your points now, and others
had the right to respond to you. And to be very clear, I won't be changing
my mind on this point, so don't think that sending more and more emails will
get me to do that.

Cheers
A

2009/12/28 James Sinnamon

> (Subject was: Re: Please allow me to respond to anti-Semite slur)

Re: Another post of mine filtered?
 Date: 28/12/09 02:42 pm
 From: James Sinnamon
 To: Anna Winter 
 CC: Mark Bahnisch 
 Reply to: James Sinnamon 
 
Hi Anna,

On Mon, 28 Dec 2009, you wrote:
> I think that thread is long enough for people to make their own judgements
> about everyone on it. ...

You are failing to acknowledge that a discussion can be disrupted if a number 
of people are resolved to do so.  That clearly has happened and has happened 
over a long period of time.

If you check the forum, you will see that a least the following "Unacceptable" 
practices from 
http://larvatusprodeo.net/about-larvatus-prodeo/comments-policy/ have been 
repeatedly employed by my detractors:

# Excessively long comments, which break up the give and take of discourse. 
Please post such screeds on your own blog and post a summary in comments with 
a link to your own post

# imputing ideas or motives to others ...

# Consistently repeated and aggressively stated opinions which fail to engage 
with others is regarded as a form of trolling.

So, for these and many other reasons I won't go into, I don't accept your 
contention that, in these circumstances "[I had] plenty of opportunity to 
make all of your points." 

In spite of all that, I believe that I had finally reached a point in the 
discussion where it was no longer possible for my detractors to employ those 
techniques against me as successfully as they had before.

I believe that the fact, that the moderators stood back whilst, for months on 
end, I was subject to relentless open cyber-bullying by a large number of 
other contributors all proclaiming their glee at their claimed humiliation of 
me, but chose to close down the discussion, just at the point where I was 
clearly winning, will seem suspicious to others.

> ... I'm not even a little bit interested in having that debate spill
> over to any other threads. ... 

OK, then why not put it on the thread that it concerns?

> ... You have already responded, and 
> your comment at 1971 will remain there in that thread.
>
> You've had plenty of opportunity to make all of your points now, and others
> had the right to respond to you. ...

The point remains that the forum has ended with yet a further unwarranted 
personal attack against me.

If the forum had simply been closed down without my having been smeared in the 
way I was, then I would have been prepared to let things stand.

However, I have been pronounced as effectively a nutcase by a moderator, as 
well as an anti-Semite.

I believe that I should be entitled to an apology for that, but I have not 
even given a chance to defend myself.

> ... And to be very clear, I won't be changing 
> my mind on this point, so don't think that sending more and more emails
> will get me to do that.

Well, I think you should change your mind.  But, if you choose not to, I 
believe that others will recognise that I have been treated unfairly.

>
> Cheers
> A

Yours sincerely,

James Sinnamon

Re: Another post of mine filtered?
 Date: 28/12/09 02:53 pm
 From: Anna Winter
 To: James Sinnamon
 CC: Mark Bahnisch
 
I have removed all references to you in the final comment on that post, so
that you've had a chance to respond to the last comment that insulted you.

Cheers
A

2009/12/28 James Sinnamon

> Hi Anna,
>
> On Mon, 28 Dec 2009, you wrote:
> > I think that thread is long enough for people to make their own
> > judgements

Re: Another post of mine filtered?
 Date: 28/12/09 03:56 pm
 From: James Sinnamon
 To: Anna Winter
 CC: Mark Bahnisch
 Reply to: James Sinnamon

Hi Anna,

On Mon, 28 Dec 2009, Anna Winter wrote:
> I have removed all references to you in the final comment on that post, ... 

Thanks for doing that at least.

> ...so that you've had a chance to respond to the last comment that 
> insulted you.

I am still not happy that such an inflamatory statement as:

"I'm sure you'll find a way to pin it on the Jooooooooz, Dag.

"And that's why you deserve every ounce of spite you're gonna get,
here and elsewhere."

... as well as all the other unfounded accusations of me of being an 
anti-Semite have not been answered as adequately as I would have wished, in 
the short time that was available to me, or, else, repudiated by the 
moderators or else removed.

Anyway, in the longer term, I suspect those comments, if left there, will 
reflect more on those who posted them, as well as on LP, than on me.

> Cheers
> A

So, can you tell me, am I welcome to comment, henceforth, on the other forums 
on Larvatus Prodeo or not?

Yours sincerely,

James Sinnamon

Re: Another post of mine filtered?
 Date: 28/12/09 04:04 pm
 From: Anna Winter
 To: James Sinnamon
 CC: Mark Bahnisch

You are more than welcome to comment, however for the time being at least,
not about 9/11 issues. You've argued your case on that, and we don't want it
derailing any other threads.

Please consider that our blog isn't for your soapbox. If you contribute to
discussion and community on the topics of the posts then you are always
welcome. Saturday Salons are generally for fun, lighthearted subjects,
especially at Christmas time. Feel free to join in,

Anna

2009/12/28 James Sinnamon

> Hi Anna,
>
> On Mon, 28 Dec 2009, Anna Winter wrote:
> > I have removed all references to you in the final comment on that post,
> ...

Re: Another post of mine filtered?
 Date: 28/12/09 04:59 pm
 From: James Sinnamon 
 To: Anna Winter
 Reply to: James Sinnamon
 
Hi Anna,

On Mon, 28 Dec 2009, you wrote:
> You are more than welcome to comment, ...

Thank you.

> ... however for the time being at least,  not about 9/11 issues. 
> You've argued your case on that, and we don't want 
> it derailing any other threads.

For my I don't intend to go out of my way to raise 9/11, not that I believe I 
did anything terribly wrong on that thread, as I have already explained.

> Please consider that our blog isn't for your soapbox. ...

I understand and accept that as a general principle.  In any case, I much 
prefer to use my own blog as my soapbox.

> ... If you contribute to 
> discussion and community on the topics of the posts then you are always
> welcome. ...

> ... Saturday Salons are generally for fun, lighthearted subjects, 
> especially at Christmas time. Feel free to join in.

Sure, thanks.

But, unfortunately there's a great deal more going on in the world that isn't 
fun and lightheated and if we don't come to grips with that somewhere our 
future will be very bleak.

>
> Anna

Yours sincerely,

James

A post of mine has vanished
 Date: 02/01/10 09:46 pm
 From: James Sinnamon 
 To: Anna Winter 
 CC: Mark Bahnisch 
 Reply to: James Sinnamon 

Hi Anna,

I tried to post the follwing just now:

I have updated the story featuring that interview/debate between myself and 
Andrew Fraser I mentioned a few weeks ago.  I have included the full 
transpcript (warts and all) or all threeYouTube Videos.  I have also added a 
Table of Contents and other supporting documents as well as links to other 
articles.  The story is Anti-privatisation candidate 
confronts Queensland Treasurer".

... but it's nowhere to be found.

Can you tell me what happened?

Thanks.

regards,

James

Resend: A post of mine has vanished
 Date: 03/01/10 02:29 pm
 From: James Sinnamon 
 To: Anna Winter 
 CC: Mark Bahnisch 
 Reply to: James Sinnamon 
 
(See above)

Appendix 3: Further Correspondences with the Larvatus Prodeo administrators from 2 Mar 10

Update (3 Mar 10): Larvatus Prodeo moderator tells me she is "comfortable with how [she's] represented in [my] post," but I am still waiting to be advised if I have been intentionally banned and why.

Cyber-bullying, censorship, Larvatus Prodeo and 9/11 Truth
 Date: 03/03/10 02:48:33 am
 From: James Sinnamon
 To: Anna Winter 
 CC: Mark Bahnisch 
 Reply to: James Sinnamon 

Hi Anna and Mark,

I have decided to put on the public record our correspondences over my being 
banned from publishing on Larvatus Prodeo, seemingly as a consequence of my 
being scapegoated for the abuses of others during the long running forum at 
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/09/12/saturday-salon-208/#comment-846594 .

I published the correspondence in the article "Cyber-bullying, censorship, 
Larvatus Prodeo and 9/11 Truth" at http://candobetter.org/node/1741#appendix2

I was moved to do so, when, the day before yesterday, I found that I was still 
banned from your site.

Please let me know if you don't think the article is unfair to you.

You are welcome to post comments there, even if I am not welcome to post 
comments onto Larvatus Prodeo.

Yours sincerely,

James Sinnamon

Re: Cyber-bullying, censorship, Larvatus Prodeo and 9/11 Truth
 Date: Today 09:57:29 am
 From: Anna Winter
 To: James Sinnamon
 CC: Mark Bahnisch

I'm comfortable with how I'm represented in your post.

...

Re: Cyber-bullying, censorship, Larvatus Prodeo and 9/11 Truth
 Date: Today 10:31:43 am
 From: James Sinnamon
 To: Anna Winter
 CC: Mark Bahnisch 
 
Hi Anna,

On Wed, 3 Mar 2010, Anna Winter wrote:
> I'm comfortable with how I'm represented in your post.

Thank you for your reply.

Can I take this as meaning that you intend to maintain the ban on my
contributing to Larvatus Prodeo?

If so, could you tell me what caused you to change your mind after you assured 
me that I was still welcome to contribute?

Sincerely,

James Sinnamon

See also: "Pornography and the Celebrity Bestiality Report - Economic trends today" of 21 Aug 09, "Would you like porn with that?" by Catherine Manning of 7 May 09, Federal Government threatens Internet censorship of 16 Nov 08, "Australia facing loss of its language, culture and environmental sustainability to mass immigration" of 26 Jun 09 by Frosty Woodridge.

Sheila Newman's article "Pornography and the Celebrity Bestiality Report - Economic trends today" of 21 Aug 09 and, before that Catherine Manning's article, "Would you like porn with that?" of 7 May 09 have caused me to evaluate my attitudes to pornography and prostitution.

As with prostitution, of which pornography seems to be merely another form, it has become increasingly exploitative in our dysfunctional 21st century world.

How Australian women are being forced to turn to prostitution

One story I heard, maybe roughly 18 months ago now, on Radio National was how a woman, ironically, employed in a 'Human Resources' department, needed to go to University in order to get the degree necessary to get her past the glass ceiling that blocked career advancement for uncredentialled employees.

Unsurprisingly, once she left full-time employment, she didn't have the funds necessary to pay her living expenses. So, like many others in equivalent circumstances, she turned to prostitution.

This kind of story has become so commonplace that many of us don't give it a second thought, but if we do, it is clearly a damning indictment of just what kind of society we have become in the past thirty years, courtesy of the 'free market' 'revolution', as well as high immigration, imposed upon this country by the likes of Fraser, Hawke, Keating, Howard and, now, Rudd, Gillard and Immigration Minister Evans.

Before this 'revolution', nearly all capable and talented people could expect to find relatively easy paths to rise in their chosen career₁. People who did not have degrees could still eventually expect to be promoted, and on a few celebrated occasions, all the way to the very top without even having completed High School.

Now that has become practically impossible for nearly everyone who has not had the good fortune to have had parents able to pay their way through University, and have chosen all the correct career moves at the correct moments, without their careers suddenly being set back by retrenchments or other personal misfortune.

Instead, they must not only obtain degrees, but, often, also, a succession of post-graduate qualifications that are deemed current and applicable to their narrow area of expertise, in their own time and at their own expense, and so they are often faced with no choice but to pay for it all by selling their bodies.

About a year before I heard the story of the HR employee who turned to prostitution, I heard another documentary₂ on the ABC Radio National featuring a woman in Kalgoorlie. She would have been entitled to a disability pension before John Howard's 'reform' of our Social Security system. After that 'reform' she chose prostitution rather than jumping through all the stupid and demeaning hoops that unemployment benefit recipients are expected to jump through.

On 28 Jun 09,one site visitor, TrueFire commented in response to the article "Australia facing loss of its language, culture and environmental sustainability to mass immigration" by Frosty Wooldridge:

"It's all over the world news about Aussie women now working as prostitutes in record numbers to get by. How gutless can Aussies get? Does anything matter to you? Stand up to your politicians and their backdoor lobbyists."

Will censorship and prohibition make pornography and prostitution any less exploitative?

Prostitution and pornography are only two of many ways that vulnerable women are exploited. The fact that many women choose those livelihoods over working in sweatshop occupations is surely confirmation of that.

Far from reducing exploitation, outlawing or curtailing porn and prostitution is only likely to either force women back into occupations even less acceptable or to make earning a living through prostitution more difficult and hazardous.

A far more effective way to reduce the sexual exploitation of women is to give them back the economic choices that more than a generation of 'free market' ideology and population growth have taken away.₃

Is Porn inherently good or bad?

This brings us to that vexed question as to whether we should regard pornography and prostitution as inherently good or bad under more ideal economic and social conditions.

Clearly it meets a need, particularly for people who may be lonely, isolated or socially inept.

As long as no-one is physically or psychologically harmed and no-one is coerced to take part, and as long as children are protected from exposure to it, we should not cast judgement on those adults who choose to either make use of those services or provide those services.

However, about two years ago I found myself nodding in agreement with Clive Hamilton when he argued, as Catherine Manning also rightly does now, that our society has become over-sexualised and that our children, in particular, are exposed to far too much sexual imagery to allow their normal development into adulthood. In a debate on ABC Radio National over the controversy surrounding Bill Henson's exhibition of photos of naked, pre-pubescent children, he posed the question: "Does anyone here seriously believe that we are fighting the same old battles against censorship?" He went on to ridicule any suggestion that we might be faced with a re-run of the old fights to end the ban on "Lady Chatterley's Lover" and implied that those objecting to the ban on the exhibition of Bill Henson's photos of children had exaggerated views of the importance of the issue and of themselves.₄

At the time, I, too, found the suggestion ridiculous.

How reasonable objections to the over-sexualisation of our society can be used to increase control over us

However, a few months later in November 2008,I was incensed to learn that Clive Hamilton had, in fact, given his total and uncritical support to Federal Communications Minister Stephen Conroy's plan to impose Communist Chinese style mandatory filtering upon the whole of the Internet in Australia₅, ostensibly to prevent access to child pornography. In order to prevent anyone accessing child pornography, every single request for any page anywhere on the Internet, that occured every time someone clicked on a link on a web page, would first have to be compared with a secret database of banned sites. The fact that there were ways that people with more money and/or knowledge could easily evade the filter and the enormous peformance costs that all of us would need to pay did not appear to concern either Hamilton or Conroy.

It turned out that the blacklist could well have included sites containing pornographic material that is currently legal, sites advocating euthanisa, as well as sites deemed 'terrorist' or anything else that the Government considered undesirable.

So, the answer to Hamilton's rhetorical question turned out to be, indeed, 'Yes', after all. We are, indeed, in a sense re-fighting those old battles. This time what is at stake is our freedom to access not just sexually explicit material on the Internet, but potentially any content which a Government might, at some futere date prefer that we do not see.

How could Clive Hamilton, the same person who co-edited the 2007 book Silencing Dissent₆, which exposed the Howard Government's systematic suppression of dissenting views, then turn around and push for the adoption of laws to give secretive Government bureaucrats unlimited powers to tell us what we can and cannot view on the Internet? The Internet is the only mass media not currently dominated by corporations.

Clive Hamilton's embrace of the Federal Government's plans for a Communist Chinese₇ style Internet firewall demonstrates how reasonable community concerns about the sexual exploitation of women and children can be twisted around in order to allow our Government to extend its control over all of our lives.

This example illustrates how, if we are not very careful, reasonable stances, such as Catherine Manning's objections to children being exposed to pornographic material at corner stores and newsagents, can be seized upon to justify censorship and control way beyond what is actually necessary to fix the problem.

I therefore think it vital that, whenever concerned citizens fight to protect children and to mitigate the exploitation of women, it be made clear that this does not entail support for measures to take away from adults their current rights to access sexually explicit material (as Catherine Manning has in her article).

See also: "Pornography and the Celebrity Bestiality Report - Economic trends today" of 21 Aug 09, "Would you like porn with that?" by Catherine Manning of 7 May 09, Federal Government threatens Internet censorship of 16 Nov 08, "Australia facing loss of its language, culture and environmental sustainability to mass immigration" of 26 Jun 09 by Frosty Woodridge.

Footnotes

1. ↑ In fact, this is a simplification. Before the neo-liberal economic 'revolution', which roughly coincided with the removal of many forms of legal discrimination against women, many women's career choices were limited. Nevertheless, even given the supposed additional freedoms that feminism has brought, many women, now working hard at their paid occupations in order to help their husbands meet massively increased living expenses, particularly housing, as well as attending to household chores, see themselves as worse off, rather than better off, than were their mothers and grandmothers.

2. ↑ Street Stories "Here for the Money" episode of 24 June 2007 currently, as of 22 Aug 09, available as a 14M MP3 file downloadable from here.

3. ↑ See 1.

4. ↑ The words I write are to the best of my recollection. They may not be precisely a video version of the debate I thought I heard is "Art Censorship And Pornography" dated 26 Jun 08 on the ABC Fora web site.

5. ↑ See "Federal Government threatens Internet censorship" of 16 Nov 08.

6. ↑ Silencing Dissent (2007) edited by Clive Hamilton and Sarah Maddison, Allen & Unwin.

7. ↑ I should acknowledge here that my disparaging use of the adjectives 'Communist Chinese', in the teaser to refer to the Government's planned Internet filtering, was opportunistic. The Government's mandatory Internet filtering plans modeled on the Chinese government's existing Internet filtering system would be more accurately described as 'Stalinist'. In fact a true 'communist' society, whether of the variety that existed prior to the emergence of agriculture, or the form that may have been theoretically possible if the Russian Revolution had not been so thoroughly corrupted by Stalin, would have little need to control its citizens in the way that mandatory Internet filtering appears intended to do.

Five weeks after I made my complaint, the ABC has responded. The reponse defends the ABC Brisbane local Radio journalists' failure to hold to account the Queensland Government over these issues: privatisation, encouragement of runaway population growth, housing unaffordabilty, plans to triple our coal exports as the polar ice caps melt, and the devastation of agricultural and wilderness areas by open cut coal mining, etc. The ABC deems these issues not to be newsworthy.

See also: "Brisbane ABC suppresses alternative candidates in state elections despite listener dismay with major parties" of 30 Apr 09, "Brisbane's local ABC radio fails to hold Anna Bligh to account over privatisation" of 28 May 09.

Five weeks after I made my complaint, the ABC has responded. The reponse defends the ABC Brisbane local Radio journalists' failure to hold to account the Queensland Government over these issues: privatisation, encouragement of runaway population growth, housing unaffordabilty, plans to triple our coal exports as the polar ice caps melt, and the devastation of agricultural and wilderness areas by open cut coal mining, etc. The ABC deems these issues not to be newsworthy. The full text is included below.

See also: "Brisbane ABC suppresses alternative candidates in state elections despite listener dismay with major parties" of 30 Apr 09, "Brisbane's local ABC radio fails to hold Anna Bligh to account over privatisation" of 28 May 09.

Dear Mr Sinnamon

Thank you for your email of 1 May concerning 612 ABC Brisbane's coverage of independent candidates during the 2009 Queensland State election, and your email of 27 May concerning talkback on the 612 ABC Brisbane Morning program with Madonna King of the same day. In keeping with the ABC's complaints policy, your emails have been referred to me for investigation and response. Please accept my apologies for the delay in response.

With respect to your concerns about the ABC's coverage of independent candidates, including yourself, during the 2009 Queensland State election, we note you raise a number of matters in your blog post of 30 April on the website http://candobetter.org, and have responded to your substantive concerns in turn below. However, by way of context, please note that the editorial principles fundamental to the ABC are articulated in the ABC's Code of Practice and Editorial Policies. Complaints made in respect to ABC content are assessed against these editorial principles. The ABC's provisions in respect to political and election broadcasts are outlined in section 12 of the Editorial Policies. Copies of both the Code and the Policies are available at: http://www.abc.net.au/corp/pubs/charter.htm.

The ABC's approach to election coverage focuses on the Government and official Opposition on the basis that one of the two major parties will ultimately form government and thus represent the principal points of view. Whilst not discounting the views or policies of the other parties and independent candidates, coverage in respect to such parties and candidates is determined on the basis of newsworthiness. The Policies also note that the ABC reserves the right to withhold free broadcast time to political parties, including those not currently represented in the Parliament concerned, on the basis of the measure of demonstrated public support for the party.

Whilst we note you refer to a number of specific broadcasts of concern, which are addressed in further detail below, we believe that the 612 ABC Brisbane coverage of the Queensland State election was consistent with the ABC's approach to election coverage, as outlined in the Editorial Policies. By way of illustration, external monitoring of 612 ABC Brisbane's coverage of the first week of the election campaign by Media Monitors showed the 'share of voice' coverage to be 43.3% ALP, 38.3% LNP, 13% Greens and 5.4% Independents. We note your view that listener dissatisfaction with the major parties should encourage a greater level of coverage of non-ALP and non-LNP candidates; however, we cannot agree that this changes the ABC's editorial obligations as stipulated in the Policies, or that the ABC's level of coverage of independent candidates was discriminatory.

We note you raise concerns that the ABC failed to cover the issues of privatisation and population growth during the campaign. Whilst we do not dispute that such issues may be of some interest, and we note they were platforms on which you conducted your campaign as an independent candidate in the electorate of Mount Coot-tha, we believe that the two issues were not raised as significant election issues and hence were not afforded detailed coverage on the basis of newsworthiness.

ABC Radio notes that the Morning program took hundreds of talkback calls during the campaign on a variety of issues and the matter of privatisation was only raised by you. We further note that your question on the topic was put to State Treasurer Andrew Fraser by Ms King on 13 March and answered on-air. Ms King was clear in putting the question to Mr Fraser that it was submitted by you, noting you were an independent candidate for the seat of Mout Coot-tha, and that you had previously written directly to Mr Fraser on the matter. This was as part of a weekly segment on the Morning program during the campaign in which Mr Fraser and his LNP Opposition counterpart Tim Nichols discussed the big political issues of the week. The segment covered a range of topics that day including preference deals, uranium in north Queensland, the mood of the electorate in key Brisbane seats and the Leaders debate.

We note you raise concerns that Mr Fraser's on-air response to your question concerning privatisation appeared contrary to the written correspondence you received from Mr Fraser on the matter, and that you were 'entitled to air-time... to rectify that misinformation'. Having reviewed the broadcast, we note that Mr Fraser's on-air response to the question 'yes or no: are there any assets you plan to privatise' was 'no, and I've written back to James and we don't have an ideological commitment to pursuing privatisation'. We cannot agree that further correction or clarification was required by you; the statement made by Mr Fraser on-air was not presented as factual content by the ABC but clearly were the views of Mr Fraser and the ALP. Accordingly, we believe that if you have any concerns as to the level of assurance Mr Fraser provided in his written correspondence with you on this matter is most appropriately raised by you directly with Mr Fraser.

With respect to the interview with Mr Fraser by Ms King on 13 March, we note you raise specific concerns of 'lightweight' treatment, when compared with Ms King's treatment of Ms Bligh in an interview on 18 March, most notably in respect to the issue of privatisation. The Editorial Policies state that, with respect to interviews, it is a matter of editorial judgement as to how, if and when the completed interview will be broadcast or published. Accordingly, we assess each interview for compliance with the ABC's editorial principles. In respect to the two interviews to which you refer, we can find no evidence to suggest they were not in keeping with the ABC's editorial standards.

We note you raise concerns regarding the interview with Ms Bligh's husband, Greg Wither, on 17 March on the Morning program. ABC Radio advise that the interview intentionally focussed on Mr Wither's experiences as the spouse of the leader of a political party, not policy information. ABC Radio also note that the Morning program sought an interview with LNP leader Lawrence Springborg's spouse, but this was not granted. Having reviewed the interview, we consider it to be appropriate and relevant in providing a different human interest angle to the current major news event of the time - the election - and of interest to the listening audience.

As indicated above, coverage in respect to the non-major parties and independent candidates during election campaigns is determined on the basis of newsworthiness. Whilst we note you provided information in respect to issues you considered to be worthy of coverage - including population growth, privatisation, and a survey being conducted on your website - the ABC determined, consistent with the principles outlined in the Editorial Policies that note staff are responsible for exercising editorial judgement, that these issues were not of news value at the time, and hence detailed coverage was not warranted. We further note that it is not the ABC's role to 'use its influence to prevail upon the major parties to respond' to the survey you were conducting on your website.

In addition to your question concerning privatisation being put to Mr Fraser on 13 March, you spoke on-air on the Breakfast program with Spencer Howson on 10 March. ABC Radio advise that Mr Howson had asked if community members were willing to pay $130 for a ticket to attend the Leaders debate. We note that your talkback call on the matter was put to air, you were identified by your full name and as an independent candidate for the Mount Coot-tha electorate. In addition to expressing your views on the Leaders debate ticket pricing, and concerns that the media and the debate would not address a number of important issues, you advised that you were participating in a free public debate in the Mount Coot-tha electorate and advised the date, time and location.

We regret you feel that the ABC demonstrated disdain for independent candidates in the Queensland State election, based on your experiences and those of fellow independent candidate Dave Zwolenski. However, we again point out that ABC coverage of independent candidates is determined on the basis of newsworthiness, consistent with our statutory obligations.

We note you make specific reference to a comment by either Ms King or Kellie Higgins-Devine on 20 March that noted an independent candidate was very late in releasing their policy statement, some two days before the election. On the basis of the information you have provided, we have been unable to identify the comment in the broadcasts of that day.

In both your blog and your email of 1 May, you allege 'shabby treatment' by 612 ABC Brisbane Program Director Kellie Riordan. ABC Radio advise that Ms Riordan telephoned you in March to assist you in understanding the process by which stories should be pitched to program teams, and also provided to you contact emails for those program teams. Ms Riordan explained that stories are judged on newsworthiness and relevance to the listening audience. We understand Ms Riordan noted you had already appeared as a talkback caller on the Breakfast program once, and had your question concerning privatisation put to Mr Fraser, and considered you had been provided sufficient coverage. We note that following this telephone conversation, you emailed Ms Riordan on 20 March regretting having argued so heatedly with her for so long, and reiterating your concerns that 612 ABC Brisbane was serving Brisbane voters very poorly.

Having reviewed your exchanges with Ms Riordan, on both the information provided by you and ABC Radio, we cannot agree that you were treated disrespectfully or inappropriately. Instead, we note that Ms Riordan articulated the ABC's editorial principles with respect to election coverage, and provided you with appropriate means by which to pitch stories to program teams to enable opportunities for coverage.

In your email of 27 May, you raise concerns that Ms King deleted two blog posts you submitted to the Morning program website. Please note that the ABC publishes blog posts based on numerous criteria including their relevance to the on-air program, their coherence and focus. The ABC is under no obligation to publish all blog posts submitted, and the moderation principles for user-generated content are outlined in section 9 of the Editorial Policies.

Unfortunately, the two blog posts you submitted are no longer available. However, ABC Radio advises that the Program Director, Ms Riordan, recalls that they articulated a general view as to why the Government should be opposed to privatisation and, on the basis of lack of relevance to the matters being covered on the program, were not published. Further, Ms Riordan advises that she cannot recall any posts that were critical of Ms King being submitted by you, but notes that posts that are critical of the program are routinely published on the blog.

I wish to assure you that the ABC is committed to editorial independence, and to coverage of election campaigns in accordance with its editorial principles outlined in the Code of Practice and Editorial Policies. The ABC establishes, for each election, an Election Coverage Review Committee which monitors and reviews the ABC's performance, balance and fairness in accordance with the editorial principles. Having reviewed the ABC's coverage of the Queensland State election, the Committee found it to be in keeping with the editorial principles. By way of illustration, 612 ABC Brisbane's cumulative coverage during the election, which closely matches polling, was 5:01:31 for the ALP; 4:53:59 for the LNP; 0:30:09 for the Greens; 0:46:59 for independents; and 0:20:45 for other coverage.

In summary, and having reviewed all the matters which you raise in your email of 1 May and blog post of 30 April, we believe that the 612 ABC Brisbane coverage of the Queensland State election, and the treatment of you as an independent candidate, was fair and appropriate, and in keeping with the editorial principles for election coverage and news and current affairs content as outlined in the ABC's Code of Practice and Editorial Policies.

With respect to your email of 27 May, we note you raise a separate concern as to whether you were deliberately cut off when you phoned in to the 612 ABC Brisbane Morning program that day to participate in talkback during a segment featuring Ms Bligh that covered, amongst other issues, privatisation. You also seek advice as to whether you are welcome to express your views on 612 ABC Brisbane, in particular the Morning program.

ABC Radio advise that you did not identify yourself by name when calling the program for talkback that day, and hence your call could not have been deliberately screened with the intention of not putting you to air. As is often the case with talkback, the volume of calls and time constraints were the likely cause of your call not being put to air. In this case, the Morning program producer, Simon Scoble, notes that callers telephoning after approximately 10:23am that morning were thanked for calling and advised there was no further time available for calls.

I understand Mr Scoble telephoned you on 28 May to explain the talkback process and your concerns in respect to this matter. As Mr Scoble advised, talkback calls are put to air at the producer's discretion and are judged on a number of factors including, but not limited to, relevance to the topic being discussed, whether the point to be made by the caller has already been sufficiently covered, and whether the point to be made will be of interest to the audience and can be made clearly and succinctly. Where possible, programs endeavour to give as many people as possible an opportunity to contribute to talkback, within the context of putting to air a diversity of voices and views, and other programming constraints and considerations.

I am assured by ABC Radio that you are welcome to contribute to 612 ABC Brisbane talkback, as is the case for all members of the community, noting that all calls will be assessed in respect to the editorial talkback considerations described above. In the case of your call on 27 May, we do not believe you were deliberately cut off or not put to air, and instead note that the management of the talkback session with Ms Bligh was in keeping with the ABC's editorial principles.

Nevertheless, please be assured that all of your concerns with respect to both election coverage and talkback on 612 ABC Brisbane have been conveyed to ABC Radio management.

Thank you for taking the time to share your concerns with us, and for providing us an opportunity to respond. Please note, for future reference, that complaints about ABC editorial standards are best submitted via our online complaints form at: http://www.abc.net.au/contact/complain.htm.

Yours sincerely

Kirsten McLeod

Audience & Consumer Affairs

See also: "Brisbane ABC suppresses alternative candidates in state elections despite listener dismay with major parties" of 30 Apr 09, "Brisbane's local ABC radio fails to hold Anna Bligh to account over privatisation" of 28 May 09.

Brisbane's local ABC radio morning presenter Madonna King failed to use knowledge that she had in her hands that would have demolished Queensland Premier Bligh's excuse for not raising the issue of privatisation during the recent state elections. When I tried to phone the ABC to put this knowledge directly to the Premier, I was cut off.

See also: ABC's response in "ABC dismisses complaint claiming privatisation not 'newsworthy' in 2009 Queensland elections" of 10 Jun 09, "Brisbane ABC suppresses alternative candidates in state elections despite listener dismay with major parties" of 30 Apr 09, "Queensland Government has no mandate to privatise" of 27 May 09.

On the morning of Wednesday 28 May I heard Madonna King interviewing Queensland Premier Anna Bligh over her suddenly announced plans to privatise Queensland's publicly owned electricity generators, ports, railways and other assets.

When Madonna King asked Anna Bligh why she had not discussed her plans to privatise during the recent elections, the Premier claimed that the issue had not occurred to her.

For the Premier to have claimed that such a critical issue as privatisation would not have entered her head during the course of the election campaign would have truly been stretching he credulity of the ABC's listeners.

Almost certainly the real reason for her omission was that she knew that privatisation was overwhelmingly opposed by the Queensland public as even the editorial of Tuesday 26 May in the virulently pro-privatisation Courier Mail acknowledged:

"Predictably, (Premier Bligh and Treasurer Fraser) made no mention of this during the recent election campaign. This means they have either just come up with this idea in the face of worse-than-expected revenue figures, or, as is equally possible, they decided to wait until they were re-elected before unveiling a strategy that, if carried out, will almost certainly result in job losses."

In fact. Madonna King knew perfectly well that I, as a candidate, had attempted many times during the course of the election campaign to get both Anna Bligh and Andrew Fraser to come clean with the Queensland electorate regarding privatisation during the course of the campaign. Indeed, only the previous day I had sent her a copy of a letter I had sent to the Courier Mail. In that letter, I wrote:

"I stood as an independent candidate against my local member and State Treasurer precisely because I believed that the electors of Queensland were entitled to express their opposition to privatisation at the ballot box.

"In fact, even before the elections were announced, I sent an e-mail on 17 February to both the Premier and Treasurer asking that any planned privatisations be put to the public at forthcoming elections. My letter was ignored.

"My repeated challenges to Anna Bligh, Andrew Fraser as well as Opposition Leader Lawrence Springborg to defend privatisation in a public debate during the subsequent campaign were also ignored."

So, there could have been no possible excuse whatsoever for Premier Bligh not to have not mentioned the issue of privatisation during the elections, but in spite of having been repeatedly supplied this knowledge by me, Madonna King failed to put it to the Premier.

I attempted to phone the talkback line on 1300 22 612 in order to put this to the Premier.

When I phoned, I told them that I wanted to ask the Premier why my letter of 17 February was ignored and put to her that she therefore had no mandate to privatise.

I was thanked for my call, but after a few seconds, I was cut off.

I tried to dial again but found the lines engaged.

As I had already been treated poorly by the ABC during the course of the recent election campaign, it seemed likely to me that I had been deliberately cut off. So, during the day, I attempted to ring the ABC in order to establish whether or not this was the case. I left a message asking that I be called back, but was not contacted. I then posted the following letter to the ABC's feedback page:

"Hi,

"I'm trying to ascertain whether or not I was deliberately cut off, when I phoned in this morning to put a question to Premier Anna Bligh on the issue of privatisation.

"I wanted to ask her why she ignored my e-mail which asked her, prior to her calling the election, if she would inform Queenslanders of any plans to privatise any more of their assets during the election campaign.

"As Ms Bligh was trying to claim that the issue of privatisation had never occurred to her during the course of the campaign, I thought that this would be of utmost interest to your listeners.

"However, shortly after I was thanked for my call, I was cut off.

"I need to know whether or not this was deliberately done.

"So could someone please call me on ... so that I can know, from now on, whether or not I am welcome to express my views on Brisbane ABC local radio, in particular, Madonna Kings's Morning Show?

"I have already left a message to be called back and have tried unsuccessfully to dial 130022612 in order to be able to discuss this.

"Thank you.

"Yours sincerely,

"James Sinnamon

"Independent pro-democracy candidate
Mount Coot-tha electorate
Queensland State elections, March 2009
http://candobetter.org/QldElections"

See also: ABC's response in "ABC dismisses complaint claiming privatisation not 'newsworthy' in 2009 Queensland elections" of 10 Jun 09, "Brisbane ABC suppresses alternative candidates in state elections despite listener dismay with major parties" of 30 Apr 09, "Queensland Government has no mandate to privatise" of 27 May 09.

President John F Kennedy once famously cited the words of the ancient Greek Law maker Solon, who decreed it a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy. Yet many supposedly independent web-sites do precisely that. These include Larvartus Prodeo and Webdiary. in regard to the burning controversy over the 9/11 attacks.

In February this, year a post I made to a discussion on Larvatus Prodeo concerning 9/11:

"I think it's time people questioned the very pretext of the so-called 'war on terror'. Starting in September 2008, 7 years later than I should have, I began to seriously research the controversy over the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I have carefully considered the claims of the '9/11 Truthers' and the '9/11 debunkers' and have arrived at the firm conclusion that 9/11 was a 'false flag' terrorist attack planned and orchestrated by the cabal centred on Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Bush to advance their geo-political goals.

"I urge others to seriously consider the evidence. It shouldn't take long form anyone with an open objective mind to see that a massive cover-up has occurred. And where there's a cover-up a crime has usually occurred.

"Many credible and very well credentialed people, for example, those listed at patriotsquestion911.com are demanding that new proper investigations, unlike the cover-ups conducted by NIST and the 9/11 Commissions, be held.

However, it was deleted by the site owner Mark Bahnisch. On 19 February, Mark Acknowledged that he had deleted the post, stating:

"I'm not prepared to host 9/11 truther discussions."

In response, on the same day, I asked:

"Do you consider the issue unimportant?

"... or do you believe you know for a fact that the account of the 9/11 attacks given by the Bush administration is true?"

Mark Bahnisch's response, also on the same day, was:

"James - it's not our practice to enter into discussion of moderation decisions, as the comments policy indicates."

I left it for a while to respond further. On 6 March, whilst I was also campaigning as an independent candidate in the Queensland State elections, I wrote:

"Please consider again, what I wrote.  I did not study the question properly until 7 years after it happened.

"Until the middle of 2007 it never seriously entered my head that the Bush administration would have been so monstrous as to deliberately commit the crime of 11 September 2001.

"I point this out only to show that I was not the kind of person who has  lightly come to the view that I have."

I will quote the last post (not made by myself) on on Online Opinion discussion about this question:

'If there was a possibility of complicity by sectors other than the alleged Saudi / UAE "hijackers", which if you read BOTH sides of the argument there seems to be, then this is a most important subject, to be discussed and investigated.

'Any one who says one side has "been completely debunked" needs a self-inflicted slap in the face.'

"If you persist in your decision to censor discussion of this critical issue, I don't believe that your site visitors will thank you in the longer term.

"Yours sincerely,

"James Sinnamon

"Pro-democracy independent
candidate for Mount Coot-tha
candobetter.org/james"

I got no further reply.

On 12 May, I mentioned the issue in passing in the discussion "Murdoch: the current days of the Internet will soon be over":

"... why are so many truly independent websites - globalresearch.ca, www.culturechange.org - constantly crying out for money, whilst those ostensibly alternative independent websites, who accept corporate funding, have become obviously compromised (for example, by refusing to discuss the 9/11 controversy)?"

This drew a few interested responses, including from one who said he didn't realise that 9/11 was a taboo topic. A subsequent post I made was placed in the moderation queue, but did not appear, whilst my post following that one did appear. The post which did not appear was:

"Well, I certainly hope the LP moderators will reconsider what I was told was their policy of imposing a blanket ban on discussion of the topic to which you referred. Not long ago I put to John Quiggin that his disapproval of discussion of that topic on his website was misguided. Some discussion ensued. I would say that I won that relatively short argument, but even if I had not, his expressed fears that it would derail discussion were never realised.

"In fact, in my own experience, questioning the principle justification for the so-called 'war on terror', the removal of our rights to free speech, habeus corpus and other civil rights, previously taken for granted, does more than anything else to put such discussions back on the rails.

"If you still truly believe 'Al Qaeda' 'did it', then I urge you to spend ten minutes to view the first part of a two part YouTube broadcast, which I believe was made by US High School Physics teacher David Chandler. If you agree with me that his case is sound and solidly backed by the evidence, then perhaps you will want to then view the second part.

I don't think you will regret having spent your time doing so.

The following post, which was published, but the content of which appears to have been ignored in regard to the previous post, was:

"I believed for many years that Lindy Chamberlain killed baby Azaria.

"I also believed for many years that what I considered to be ruthless dangerous Islamic extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan had largely got what they deserved after 2001. I now know better (even though I still have concerns about political Islam and high immigration) because I have taken the trouble to study the evidence.

"You should do the same

.

"It would greatly help if the LP moderators were to heed the words of JFK when he cited the views of Solon in support of the open, democratic and accountable society he was trying to bring about:

'… the Athenian lawmaker Solon decreed it a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy.'

… and accordingly approve this, as well as my previous post.

The responses, so far, from a few regular LP contributors, dispute the case of the 9/11 Truth movement, but at least they demonstrate that unlike the LP moderators, they are interested in discussing 9/11.

However, as one post has not been approved and the previous post from February was deleted, there is no guarantee that a fair and balanced discussion can proceed.

See also: "The end of the Taliban?" of 29 May 09, a discussion on johnquiggin.com in which two of my posts were deleted and I was banned for 24 hours, "John Quiggin censors JFK's speeech against secret societies" of 31 May 09, a discussion forum on 911oz.com, "Pakistani refugees" of 1 Jun 09, a very helpful article about the current conflict in Pakistan.

Brisbane's local ABC radio station 612 disregarded its own listeners' expressed dissatisfaction with both the major parties when, during the 2009 Queensland state elections, it refused any air time to local independent candidates. Instead, virtually all the available time was given over to candidates from the governing Labor Party or the Opposition Liberal National Party, who even according to the ABC's own listeners, provided little useful information.

See also: ABC's response in "ABC dismisses complaint claiming privatisation not 'newsworthy' in 2009 Queensland elections" of 10 Jun 09, "Courier Mail, ABC back Department of Main Roads land grab" of 29 Mar 09, "Why the Brisbane Mayoral elections should not have been 'boring'" of 23 Mar 08, "Courier Mail provides 'boring', yet unbalanced, coverage of Brisbane City Council elections" of 17 Mar 09.

See also: ABC's response in "ABC dismisses complaint claiming privatisation not 'newsworthy' in 2009 Queensland elections" of 10 Jun 09, "Courier Mail, ABC back Department of Main Roads land grab" of 29 Mar 09, "Why the Brisbane Mayoral elections should not have been 'boring'" of 23 Mar 08, "Courier Mail provides 'boring', yet unbalanced, coverage of Brisbane City Council elections" of 17 Mar 09.

Population-growth-driven chaos observed by ABC, but ignored as election issue

On Friday 20 March 2009, the last day of the hectically brief Queensland state election campaign, a listener phoned Brisbane ABC radio 612 to say:

"It would be a lot better if the Queensland Government would stop inviting people to come to Queensland."

The following morning, on the day of the actual elections, Tony Eastley, ABC radio's national AM program presenter, reported:

"... Transport is increasingly a problem because of the huge population that's coming to south-east Queensland. Thousands and thousands of people arrive each week in south-east Queensland to take up employment, searching for something new in their lives, and the infrastructure in those places has really struggled to keep pace.

"When we were down there the other day there's always road work going on, there's always something happening, and I think people just genuinely get frustrated. Anyone listening to this program who lives in a city knows that there's an ongoing battle between what you want and what you get in cities as far as infrastructure goes."₁

The fact that the Queensland Government had deliberately encouraged the population growth that had needlessly resulted in the "ongoing battle between what you want and what you get," as Tony Eastley had put it, and fully intended to continue doing so₂, should have been a hot issue in the election campaign.

However, the Queensland Opposition is every bit as committed to the reckless encouragement of population growth as the Government,₃ although this has not prevented it from taking cheap political shots at the Government for the problem of traffic congestion mentioned by Eastley and other problems that simply would not exist but for past population growth.

The Queensland Greens, on paper, stood opposed to population growth, but said nothing about it during the election campaign.₄

So that only left myself, and possibly a few other independents, who were prepared to speak out against population growth. None were approached by the ABC as far as I could tell. Even though I had sent a lot of material on population growth, the ABC ignored the issue or ignored me.

This meant that the majority of Queenslanders opposed to population growth, were kept ignorant by the ABC of how to express those views at the ballot box.

Voters' wishes for information on alternatives to the two major parties ignored

During the elections there was abundant evidence of voter dissatisfaction with both the ruling Labor Party and the Opposition Liberal National Party. Population would have been one of many factors.

On 6 March, the Courier Mail newspaper's Galaxy Poll showed that 56% of voters did not believe that the Labor Government deserved to be re-elected. 57% of voters did not believe the Opposition Liberal National Party (LNP) deserved to win. Immediately prior to the date of the elections, two weeks later, on Friday 20 March, the same poll showed that attitudes had barely changed. 57% of voters believed that the LNP did not deserve to win and 57% believed that Labor did not deserve to win.

These poll results were confirmed throughout the election campaign by many listeners' calls to the ABC's local Brisbane Radio station 612.

One listener objected to the LNP because they supported Uranium mining, but he said he didn't like the Labor party either. Another said she would be voting for the LNP, but not because she liked the LNP, only because she saw it is preferable to Labor. Still another stated, "None of them are any good."

One listener stated that he wanted to vote for a good independent and explicitly asked that more information be provided.

The fact that most of their listeners had expressed dissatisfaction with the major parties did not deter the ABC from devoting nearly all the available election coverage to those same major parties -- usually state government ministers and shadow ministers -- and to almost no-one else.

Of what was said on air by the major party spokespersons, one listener complained, "they come on and waffle on and on." That they had indeed waffled on, and that the ABC had wasted its listeners' time was further confirmed immediately after the elections.

On the Monday 23 March, at least two listeners phoned in to say that the ABC had provided them with insufficient policy detail about the major party candidates. One of them stated that she consequently voted for Anna Bligh only on the basis of her having been depicted well in a personal light in interview with her husband (referred to also below).

Open ABC disdain for independent candidates

It was incumbent on the taxpayer-funded ABC to encourage any independent candidate who overcame Anna Bligh's engineered time constraints and had information ready for the voting public despite often limited campaign budgets. Instead, one ABC presenter effectively ridiculed an independent candidate before her audiences on one occasion, when, on Friday 20 March, the day before the elections, a morning presenter₅ told listeners of an independent candidate who had only managed to release his policy statement the previous day. Then she remarked:

"They're leaving their pitch until a little late, aren't they?"

No useful information was given to the audience about that candidate.

Requests for air time ignored

In fact, one candidate, namely me, had provided the ABC with plenty of information, and in plenty of time, but the ABC presenter neglected to tell her audience this.

I was not given air-time and the information I made available was not used, in spite of its clear relevance to concerns expressed by ABC listeners during the election campaign.

Although I presented it to the ABC through e-mails, media releases, text messages, telephone calls and even a printed brochure, delivered to the studio on Saturday, one week before the elections, no information was passed on to the public. Nor did the ABC give me any opportunity to put that information to voters myself. If any other candidate also campaigned actively for those policies, they certainly got no exposure either.

The total return on all my efforts was only two tiny instances of exposure (see, also, below):

• When I phoned in around 8.00am on Monday 9 March, I was able to introduce myself as an independent candidate for Mount Coot-tha and then announce a 'meet the candidates' night for my electorate scheduled for Monday 16 March;
• After the 10:00am news Friday 13 March, Madonna King put to Andrew Fraser a question on my behalf: Would he commit himself to not privatising any more Government owned assets? His response to that question, which I considered unsatisfactory, was accepted without further pursuit.

Spurious justifications for refusal of air time

On the two occasions I spoke to ABC staff to request more time, they protested that I had had more than a fair amount of coverage. They argued that they could not allocate air-time to every independent candidate.

However it was Anna Bligh's decision₆, and not mine to hold an early election of less than four weeks duration.

So, far from compensating the electorate for Anna Bligh's own decision, the ABC lavished her and other Labor candidates with air-time. At the same time the ABC seemed to go out of its way to ensure no Greens or independents like me, might challenge her policies with substantially new or different ones.

The ABC even found time to broadcast an interview with Anna Bligh's husband Greg Withers, who, unsurprisingly, depicted Anna Bligh sympathetically, but gave no useful policy information.₇

Thus the ABC, the nation's public, tax-paid broadcaster, utterly failed to disseminate vital information to taxpayers on the core business of government - a state election. It did not just fail; it seemed to present an obstacle to a real election choice.

Much of the little time scheduled for election coverage was often taken up with other stories of little practical relevance to ordinary voters. For instance, one session discussed an article by Murdoch journalist, Glen Milne, in the Australian,₈ which advocated that Brisbane Lord Mayor Campbell Newman join the campaign on Lawrence Springborg's side. Whilst the article may have held interest for LNP strategists, it is clear that these sorts of programming decisions prevented many of the ABC's listeners from being able to arrive at informed decisions when they voted.

Why didn't the ABC schedule enough time to interview all the candidates? In fact, that is the policy of the ABC's local Adelaide Radio Station. On 22 Mar 09 the following was posted to a forum discussion:

"Here in South Australia, we enjoy the award winning ABC 891 Adelaide who make a feature of giving all the independents adequate time to present their policies and issues.

"Listeners obviously appreciate being fully informed, a fact which seems to have gone over the heads of ABC 612."₉

If it could be done in Adelaide, then why not also in Brisbane?

Madonna King refuses to hold Labor Government to account for public asset fire sale ...

As part of my efforts to obtain air time on the ABC, I sent a number of ABC presenters, including Madonna King, copies of an e-mail concerning privatisation, which I had sent to Anna Bligh and Andrew Fraser (see Appendix 3).

The e-mail pointed out that a large number of publicly owned assets had been privatised since the Labor Party won government in 1998, but that those privatisations had not been put to the Queensland public at election times, nor had the public been consulted in any other way. I concluded the letter as follows:

"If the public had been consulted, none of these privatisations would have occurred and the Queensland public would have been spared the harm caused to them.

"I therefore ask that you give, to the Queensland public, a categorical assurance that you will not privatise any more assets during the coming Parliamentary term.

"If you are not prepared to give such an assurance, then privatisation is an issue at stake in these elections and should be openly discussed.

"Accordingly, I would ask that, as a candidate opposed to privatisation, you justify your stance before the Queensland public in a debate₁₀ with me.

On the following day, Friday 13 March, when I heard that Andrew Fraser was to be interviewed by Madonna King, I created the text message which follows as fast as I could and sent it off as the interview was proceeding:

"James Sinnamon, Independent for Mount Coot-tha asks: Why weren't Qld public consulted about privatisation of Brisbane, Mackay Cairns airports, Energex, etc?"

It turned out that Madonna King had already decided to put a question to Andrew Fraser on my behalf as James Sinnamon, an Independent candidate for Mount Coot-tha. She asked him:₁₁ would he commit himself to not privatising further Government-owned assets?

Andrew Fraser responded by telling listeners that he had already sent me a letter in response to my question.

In fact, no posted letter ever arrived and I only received an e-mail later that day, which means that it could not have been sent at the time Andrew Fraser claimed. The e-mail actually arrived three and a half weeks after I had first e-mailed my question to Andrew Fraser.₁₂

Any impression audiences may have received that Andrew Fraser was in this case responsive to the concerns of his detractors, would have been misleading, in fact.

Mr Fraser then claimed that the Government had no plans to privatise more assets and that he was ideologically opposed to privatisation.

Nothing further was asked by Madonna King concerning privatisation.

None of the many other facts contained in my e-mail, my text message, or my web site, were put to Andrew Fraser. The fact that he neither made the firm commitment I was seeking, nor agreed to defend his stance in a public debate, was not pointed out to the audience. The interviewer did not confront him with the general failure in the previous election to consult the public about the privatisations which had followed, including Mr Fraser's own enactment of airport privatisations. Nor did she put to him that the public overwhelmingly opposes privatisation.

To my knowledge, that was the only time during the whole election campaign, that I am aware of, that the ABC ever raised the issue of privatisation with the Labor Government, although the ABC's listeners did raise it themselves on a few occasions.

After I received the promised letter from Andrew Fraser, I found its contents differed significantly from his account on the ABC. At one point the letter stated:

"We will only ever agree to such sales where there are demonstrable benefits to the Queensland community."

This was clearly different to Fraser's stated claim that he had "no plans to privatise" and it obviously fell even further short of the assurance I had been seeking.

At the end, his letter stated:

"We ... will not pursue an ideologically driven agenda of privatisation."₁₃

Again different to Mr Fraser's claim that he was "ideologically opposed to privatisation".

I believe that I was entitled to air time on the ABC, to rectify that misinformation.

However, my subsequent e-mailed requests for more time were also ignored.(see Appendices 8 and 9)

My e-mail to Andrew Fraser and Anna Bligh (see Appendix 6 ), CC'd to Kellie Riordan and Madonna King, pointing out Mr Fraser's self-contradiction and re-affirming my challenge to debate him on privatisation, was also ignored by all recipients.

... but proves capable of asking hard questions when she chooses to

In contrast to her lightweight handling of Andrew Fraser on privatisation, the following week, on Wednesday 18 March, Madonna King showed that she could, when she applied herself, nail politicians down with their own words.

A listener called in to ask if Anna Bligh was prepared to apologise to electricity consumers for promising them that electricity charges would not go up as a result of privatisation of Energex - the retail arm of the state's electricity service, when, in fact, they had faced massive hikes, with the caller's own annual electricity having risen by $450.

Anna Bligh did not apologise. Instead, she claimed that she merely promised that no-one would have been any worse off than they otherwise would have been (which, if it had been made at the time, would have been regarded as the meaningless guarantee that it was). She attributed much of the increases to the need to build more electricity infrastructure (which would have been unnecessary if she had not encouraged population growth, although she neglected to mention this).

Madonna King confronted Bligh with the question:

"Are you absolutely sure that you didn't say that it would be cheaper?"

Anna Bligh responded:

"I didn't say that."

The next day, Anna Bligh's words from Hansard of 28 Sep 2005 and which had been looked up by a researcher from the LNP were quoted by Madonna King:

"Most importantly, it does not matter where you live, nobody--not one Queenslander--will be worse off under the government's proposal."

So, whilst no evidence that Anna Bligh had explicitly told the Queensland public that electricity prices would be cheaper was found, her guarantee that nobody would be worse off had been unconditional and it would have appeared that Queensland consumers were, after all, entitled to the apology that had been asked of Anna Bligh.

Over the following days, the ABC rightly reminded its listeners of this.

If Madonna King could have held Anna Bligh to account on that one issue, then why not on others, and why not also with Andrew Fraser on the issue of privatisation, when she had all the information provided by me at her finger tips?

The fact, that the link to the question put to Andrew Fraser about privatisation the previous week, which should have been blindingly obvious, was not pointed out to the ABC's audience, contributes to the impression that these rare examples where politicians are asked truly hard questions are part of a token, rather than systematic approach.

The ABC shifts the goal posts

On the morning of Monday 16 March, I received a mobile phone voice message from Kellie Riordan, the ABC Radio's news director. The message advised me once again that they could not give me any more time than I had already been given. However, if I sent them anything that could be considered newsworthy, I might stand a chance.

I sent an e-mail back (see Appendix 9) restating that I believed that I was entitled to time, anyway, in the circumstances, but that I would do my best to provide material that was newsworthy.

The following day, I sent a media release "Andrew Fraser's three different responses to a question on privatisation" (see Appendix 10) to Kellie Riordan and other ABC staff, but they still did not report it and they still failed to give me air time.

During the rest of that last week before the election I sent to the ABC's Brisbane radio station:

• On Wednesday, an e-mail to Madonna King asking for air time in response to listeners' expressed dissatisfaction with major party candidates (see Appendix 11);
• On Thursday, an e-mail asking that they publicise a survey sent to all candidates I could reach and the responses to which had been published on my web site (see Appendix 12).
• On Thursday, a text message sent at the time Lawrence Springborg was being interviewed: "Could u ask Mr Springborg if he would agree to respond to my survey at candobetter.org/qldelections/survey ? James Sinnamon ind 4 mt coot-tha"
• On Thursday, an e-mail to Lawrence Springborg challenging him to defend the pro-privatisation view that he had espoused in an interview in a public debate (see Appendix 13), which was CC'd to the ABC;
• On Friday, a media release about my challenge to debate Lawrence Springborg (see Appendix 14);

All of these communications were ignored. None were used in any news broadcasts as far as I am aware and no air time was given to me as a result.

Survey ignored

The survey mentioned above was to inform voters of candidates' attitudes towards the issue of privatisation and population growth, mentioned previously, as well as:

• Premier Bligh's plans to triple Queensland's already record levels of coal exports by 2030 entailing the destruction of agricultural land and nature refuges;
• the construction of a second massive Chinese-owned aluminium smelter in addition to the existing smelter at Gladstone;
• making access to affordable housing and water a human right; and
• a government sponsored full-employment program.

The list was not comprehensive, but, nevertheless covered a good many more important issues that I believe the Queensland public had a right to be informed about before they voted.

Evidently, the ABC did not agree.

I had set it it up to make it as easy as possible for any voter to quickly work out where each candidate standing in his electorate stood on each of these issues. I included a table with an entry for each candidate in each electorate. Where a candidate would not have been able to simply provide a 'yes', 'no' or 'undecided' to any of the questions, a further column included a link to another page containing comments.

By the morning of 19 March I had received responses to the survey from some of the Greens and Independents and had published them. Although not one major party candidate had answered and although the ground covered by the survey was far from complete it was a start and provided an opportunity for voters to gain more vital knowledge of the candidates' policies. Had other politicians been encouraged to respond to the questionnaire and had its existence been made known, it would have filled a major deficit in electoral policy information.

As I have said above, I sent an e-mail (see Appendix 12) to Madonna King and other presenters on Thursday 19 April, advising her of the survey. I also asked that the ABC use its influence to prevail upon the major parties to respond and, on the following day, a text message was sent whilst Lawrence Springborg was being interviewed.

Even the fact that on Thursday morning the ABC's own listeners had, yet again, expressed their dissatisfaction with the major parties and had asked for information on alternative candidates, as I pointed out in the e-mail, failed to galvanise our public broadcaster.

Dave Zwolenski's campaign material also not good enough for the ABC

Dave Zwolenksi stood as an independent candidate in the same electorate in which I stood. He campaigned on the more limited, but, nevertheless, important platform of total truthfulness and openness in our politicians. During the campaign he produce some polished and original material included a media release, posters and a YouTube video.

In the YouTube video, he appeared in a succession of scenes in the Mount Coot-tha electorate, each progressively closer to the Queensland Parliament, itself not far outside the electorate. In each successive scene, he takes off more and more clothes. In the final scene, he removes his pants and stands stark naked, although with an electronic equivalent of a figleaf in from of him, in front of the Queensland Parliament as a metaphor for the openness for which he was campaigning.

This campaign was also totally ignored by the ABC as well as by nearly all of the rest of newsmedia.₁₄

The only conclusion I can draw from this is that the ABC never seriously intended giving substantial air time to me or any other independent candidate. Had they had the courtesy to say so at the outset, then I could have used the time I had spent trying to get air time on the public broadcaster more productively elsewhere.

ABC's election coverage denies voters the right to hold elected representatives to account

Democracy was famously defined by US President Abraham Lincoln during his address following the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863 as "government of the people by the people for the people."

In Australia, in the early 21st century, democracy has been effectively redefined by the mass media to mean something far more limited. It has come to mean no more than the right of the electorate to decide, every three or four years, which of the two major parties, promoted by Australia's corporate elite, may make the sweeping decisions they claim via the mainstream media to be in the electorate's best interests.

In the intervening period between elections, voters have practically no right to influence what the elected government can and cannot do.

Even during the elections only a small subset of policy areas is ever discussed. In the 2004 federal elections, as examples, Prime Minister John Howard made no mention of his plans to savagely attack the wages and conditions of ordinary workers with his so-called "Work Choices" legislation, and discussion of his plans to fully privatise Telstra was almost completely avoided. In the 2009 Queensland state elections, the issues covered were mostly limited to fiscal management, health, road transport (but not public transport), water, and power supply and only within very restricted parameters.

In effect, this means that the public are usually left with very little to choose from between the major parties when they reach the polling booth and are largely ignorant of candidates, like me, who question the status quo.

This practically guarantees that politicians who have poorly served their constituents will continue to be re-elected or, at worst, only be replaced occasionally by one from the other major party who is unlikely to be any better. New candidates stand hardly any chance of being heard, let alone winning.

This is how the ABC has itself largely brought about the circumstances of which its own listeners complain, that is, about how they are ruled by governments that 57% don't believe deserve to rule.

In the past, the ABC in Queensland was rightly viewed as a fierce and independent critic of the state government, particularly during the Bjelke-Petersen years. However this is no longer the case. The ABC is no longer part of the solution. It has become part of the problem.

Appendix 1: E-mail of Fri 6 Mar 09 to Kellie Riordan requesting air time

Subject: Air time on ABC 612 for independent candidate for Mount Coot-tha?

Dear Kellie Riordan/Anna Reynolds,

Could you tell me what my prospects are to have air time on the ABC in these coming two weeks?

I am essentially available at any time.

Whilst I am slow off the mark, you will find some information about my campaign at http://candobetter.org/QldElections/MountCoot-tha http://candobetter.org/QldElections.

There's more about me on my home page, included below.

Throughout the years I have been interviewed on radio, mostly on the issue of privatisation of Telstra(1). I also stood as candidate for Lord Mayor and was interviewed once last year in the studio at Lissner Street.

If you know of anyone else you think may be interested, please let me know. Also, please feel welcome to pass on my contact details to such people.

Best regards,

James Sinnamon
Pro-democracy independent
candidate for Mount Coot-tha
james -dot- sinnamon |AT| gmail -dot- com
0412 319669
http://candobetter.org/james

1. Some information (although now largely dated) can be found at http://citizensagainstsellingtelstra.com.

Appendix 2: E-mail of Tue 10 Mar 09 to Madonna King requesting air time

Subject: Please give more air time to discuss election issues of substance

CC'd to Kellie Riordan, Richard Fidler and Spencer Howson.

Dear Madonna King,

I believe that yesterday's discussion on whether or not Lord Mayor Campbell Newman should enter the Queensland election campaign could have been better spent discussing issues of substance at stake in the elections.

In my view far too much air time and newspaper column inches has been given in recent years to topics which, whilst of interest to members of the LNP and Labor Parties, hold far less interest to members of the broader public.

I am an independent candidate contesting the seat of Mount Coot-tha. I am standing, in part to raise, before the broader public, issues of critical importance which I believe are at stake in this election, but which are not being adequately covered by the newsmedia.

These include:

* Privatisation, of which my electoral opponent Treasurer Andrew Fraser has been principle architect.

* The run away housing unaffordability crisis, which is literally impoverishing many Brisbane people, including even well-paid professionals (such as a surveyor who lives near me who had to cancel his annual flight back to Europe because of recent rent increases).

* The destruction of businesses in Inner city Brisbane also due to excessive rental increases. Only the weekend before last week the Baboa Art Gallery, which had operated on Latrobe Terrace Paddington for only two and a half years had to close its doors because its rent had doubled in that time. On Monday last week I walked by to see the interior of the Gallery, carefully constructed by its operator Joan Winter only two an a half years earlier already destroyed by workmen in preparation for the next tenant.

Since early 2008, virtually a whole retail community further down Latrobe Street closer to Given Terrace has been similarly wiped out by rent increases, actively encouraged by local real estate agents.

I could not recognise a single business that had been there when I wrote and talked of it during the Brisbane City Council elections as Lord Mayoral candidate (See "Rent gouging threatens Brisbane inner city retail community" at http://candobetter.org/node/360).

* Population Growth, which is the principle driver of all our social, environmental and economic problems (including housing unaffordability).

* The despoliation of Queensland's natural habitat (see "Coal mine threatens Queensland Nature Refuge" at http://candobetter.org/node/1129) and the rest of the world by Queensland's mining industry. (see "Why I am contesting the Queensland state elections as an independent").

* etc., etc, etc.

I think if you or other ABC presenters can find the time to interview me about these issues and others I have raised in my article "Why I am contesting the Queensland state elections as an independent" at:

http://candobetter.org/node/1121
http://candobetter.org/QldElections
http://candobetter.org/QldElections
http://candobetter.org/QldElections/MountCoot-tha

... your listeners will be very grateful.

yours sincerely,

James Sinnamon

Pro-democracy independent
candidate for Mount Coot-tha
http://candobetter.org/james

Appendix 3: E-mail of Thu 12 Mar 09 to Premier Anna Bligh and Andrew Fraser

Subject: Independent candidate seeks assurance from Government against any further privatisations

CC'd to: Madonna King, Kellie Riordan, Spencer Howson, Annie Guest, Lawrence Springborg and others.

Dear Premier Anna Bligh and Treasurer Andrew Fraser,

In the letter I sent to both of you on 17 February, before the elections were called I asked for "your firm assurance that if you do intend to privatise any (publicly owned) assets that you state your intention to do so to the public before the forthcoming elections, or, alternatively, that you will put any planned privatisations to the public at referenda."

I have still not received that simple assurance.

I ask this because I believe that, in a democracy, the public should be consulted by their elected representatives about all questions that will affect their lives, particularly decisions the (claimed) need for which can be easily foreseen.

However, as you are both surely well aware, the Queensland public has never been consulted about any of the numerous privatisations that have occurred since your Government came to power, starting with the full privatisation of the already partially privatised State Government Insurance Office (SGIO - now called SunCorp) in 1998 against a specific election promise made by former Premier Peter Beattie.

Had the Government retained ownership, or at least partial ownership, then at least one insurance company could have been directed by your government not to have resorted to the unconscionable business practices that have been described on the Madonna King radio show over the last two days.

Other privatisations, which have been imposed on the Queensland public since
then include:

* The remaining government stake in Brisbane airport in 2009

* Cairns Airport in 2009

* Mackay Airport in 2008

* The Qld Government's stake in the Emu Downs wind farm in Western Australia in 2008;

* The Enertex (not be confused with Energex) gas business in 2008;

* The Golden Casket state lottery agency in 2007;

* Ergon Gas in 2006;

* Energex, the retail arm of Queensland's electricity generation utility in 2006;

* the Dalrymple Bay coal loader in 2001

* TAB in 1999

I believe all have been detrimental to the public interest and some, including the privatisations of Energex, Ergon, the Dalrymple Bay coal loader and the SGIO, as discussed above, have been indisputably disastrous.

If the public had been consulted, none of these privatisations would have occurred and the Queensland public would have been spared the harm caused to them.

I therefore ask that you give, to the Queensland public, a categorical assurance that you will not privatise any more assets during the coming Parliamentary term.

If you are not prepared to give such an assurance, then privatisation is an issue at stake in these elections and should be openly discussed.

Accordingly, I would ask that, as a candidate opposed to privatisation, that you justify your stance before the Queensland public in a debate with me.

Yours sincerely,

James Sinnamon

Pro-democracy independent
candidate for Mount Coot-tha
http://candobetter.org/james
http://candobetter.org/QldElections/MountCoot-tha

Appendix 4: E-mail of Thu 12 Mar 09 requesting air time

Subject: The prospects of air time discuss privatisation, population growth, climate-changing coal exports, etc.

Dear Kellie,

I tried to phone today to find out whether or not I was likely to get air time on ABC 612 in the coming days.

I believe that the issues I want to raise are of immense interest to the Queensland public.

It seems to have been implied that because I was heard once on the radio at Breakfast show I should not be heard again before the elections.

If that is what has been decided, then I think that that would be a mistaken decision, that is, unless you are giving air time to other candidates, who are raising the same issues which I am trying to raise (see below) -- which I would welcome.

Whatever, I want to see all the candidates are properly scrutinised by ABC journalists on all the questions I have raised so that at least ABC audience will properly informed of the choices before them at these elections.

I trust that you will do what you can to bring this about.

So, could you phone me on [...] to discuss this?

Yours sincerely,

James Sinnamon

Pro-democracy independent
candidate for Mount Coot-tha
http://candobetter.org/james
http://candobetter.org/QldElections
http://candobetter.org/QldElections/MountCoot-tha

Appendix 5: E-mail of Fri 13 Mar 09 to Kellie Riordan

Subject:Re: The prospects of air time discuss privatisation, population growth, climate-changing coal exports, etc

Date: 13/03/09 02:02 pm
CC'd to: Madonna King

Dear Kellie,

Further to yesterday's e-mail, I would still like to know whether or not it will be possible to have air time on Brisbane local radio in the coming days.

I appreciate that Madonna King put my question to Andrew Fraser this morning, but it seems to me that she left him off the hook far too easily.

His response that he had no plans to privatise electricity and that he was ideologically against privatisation should have been easily anticipated by anyone familiar with this issue.

Points I had made in my correspondences which could have been used but were not put. Even a text message I sent to Madonna King could have been easily use to follow up but was not. That text message was:

"James Sinnamon, Independent for Mount Coot-tha asks: Why weren't Qld public consulted about Brisbane, Mackay Cairns airports, Energex, etc?"

Consequently, our politicians, who should be being held properly to account in this period are getting off far too lightly making the current elections a pale imitation of true democracy.

I suggest once again, you give time to candidates like myself to candidates who are raising the issues of real concern.

Another candidate you should get in contact with is Robert Huston, Greens candidate for Mount Ommaney who wrote a short article which I posted on my web site.

"Qld Greens: 'competitive' market a calamity for electricity consumers" at http://candobetter.org/node/1139

He can be reached at mount.ommaney[AT]qld.greens.org.au 0428 XXX XXX

I am sure he would be happy to speak to you.

Yours sincerely,

James Sinnamon

Appendix 6: E-mail of Fri 13 Mar 09 to Andrew Fraser

Subject: Categorical assurance against privatisation has not been given by Andrew Fraser

Date: 13/03/09 04:45 pm

CC'd to: Madonna King, Kellie Riordan and others

(Subject was: Response)

Dear Andrew Fraser,

The letter I have received from you is not the categorical assurance against privatisation that I was seeking from you.

Furthermore, it significantly contradicts what I recall that you told Brisbane listeners on Madonna King's Breakfast show this morning.

This morning, according to my recollection, you said that there were no plans to privatise any more of Queensland's assets and that you were ideologically opposed to privatisation.

In contrast, your letter states:

"The Queensland Government's record on the Sale of Government. We will only ever agree to such sales where there are demonstrable benefits to the Queensland community."

Further along, in marked contrast to my recollection of your statement that you were ideologically opposed to privatisation, the letter merely states, "We have not and will not pursue an ideologically driven agenda of privatisation."

So can you please make clear to me whether you are ideologically opposed to privatisation or just merely not ideologically in favour of privatisation?

Either way this doesn't provide the categorical assurance I was seeking.

I therefore repeat my challenge to you, and to other candidates, who appear to favour privatisation during the next term of Parliament, including, it would seem, the opposition leader Lawrence Springborg, that you publicly debate the issue of privatisation with a candidate opposed to privatisation, such as myself.

I will also be asking all candidates for categorical assurances that they will oppose privatisation during the course of the next Parliament. I trust that the ABC, the Courier Mail and other newsmedia will make the responses known to electors so that they can be fully informed when they cast their votes.

Yours sincerely,

James Sinnamon

Pro-democracy independent
candidate for Mount Coot-tha
http://candobetter.org/james
http://candobetter.org/QldElections
http://candobetter.org/QldElections/MountCoot-tha

Appendix 7: E-mail of Mon 16 Mar 09 to Kellie Riordan advising that anti-privatisation Greens candidate Robert Huston would like air time

Subject: Robert Huston, Greens Candidate for Mount Ommaney confirms that he would like air time

Date: 16/03/09 12:21 am

CC'd to Madonna King.

Hi James,

I would be happy to talk to local radio about the disaster of electricity supply management.

Regards

Robert Huston BVSc. BEnv.Sc. MPhil.
Greens candidate for Mt Ommaney
...

Appendix 8: E-mail of Mon 16 Mar 09 to Madonna King requesting air time to counter Andrew Fraser's misleading statements of Friday

Subject: URGENT: request air time to correct misleading statements by Andrew Fraser broadcast on Friday

Date: 16/03/09 08:51 am

CC'd to: Kellie Riordan and others

Dear Madonna King,

Further to my e-mail on Friday, I request that I be given air time on your program to correct the misleading and incomplete response, given by Andrew Fraser, the sitting member for Mount Coot-tha in response to my question.

That question which attempted to establish whether or not Queenslanders can expect even more of their assets to be privatised in the next term of Parliament. How Andrew Fraser's answer misled your audience was explained in an e-mail, sent to Andrew Fraser (included also below), which was cc'd to you:

"Furthermore, (the letter) significantly contradicts what I recall that you told Brisbane listeners on Madonna King's Breakfast show this morning.

"This morning, according to my recollection, you said that there were no plans to privatise any more of Queensland's assets and that you were ideologically opposed to privatisation.

In contrast, your letter states:

"'The Queensland Government's record on the Sale of Government. We will only ever agree to such sales where there are demonstrable benefits to the Queensland community.'

"Further along, in marked contrast to my recollection of your statement that you were ideologically opposed to privatisation, the letter merely states, 'We have not and will not pursue an ideologically driven agenda of privatisation.'"

I believe that your audience is entitled to have this misinformation corrected.

This is all the more urgent as I am a candidate who represents the overwhelming opposition of electors both in Mount Coot-tha and the rest of Queensland to privatisation. That popular rejection of privatisation has been repeatedly defied, in practice, by both the Labor Government, in particular, the Treasurer Andrew Fraser and the LNP opposition, which, in Government, has conducted its own privatisations and, in Opposition, has voted for all the Government's privatisation bills, should be treated as a serious election issue.

I am the only candidate in Mount Coot-tha, and one of very few across the state, who has attempted to give this critical issue the prominence it deserves.

I am happy to be interviewed on my own or together with Andrew Fraser.

In my view, to not agree to my request for air time in these circumstances would amount to withholding to Brisbane electors, information about a vital issue at stake in these elections.

Thank you.

Yours sincerely,
James Sinnamon

Pro-democracy independent
candidate for Mount Coot-tha
...
http://candobetter.org/james
http://candobetter.org/QldElections
http://candobetter.org/QldElections/MountCoot-tha

(Subject was: Response)

Dear Andrew Fraser,

The letter I have received from you is not the categorical assurance against privatisation that I was seeking from you.

(See Appendix 6 for the rest of this included e-mail.)

Appendix 9: E-mail of Mon 16 Mar 09 to Kellie Riordan in response to voice message

Subject: Robert Huston, Greens Candidate for Mount Ommaney confirms that he would like air time

CC'd to: Madonna King

Dear Kellie,

Sorry I missed your call just now. I will try to keep the phone closer to me from now on, but a return number would also be helpful.

I don't think your response addressed my concerns, so my request for air time still stands. I have shown that Andrew Fraser misled your program's listeners and did not fully answered my question, so on that grounds alone I believe I am entitled to air time.

If there is insufficient time to allow such misinformation to be corrected and to force candidates to adequately answer questions of electors and other candidates, let alone for views, which enjoy overwhelming public support such as opposition to privatisation to be put, then this election is a farce and the ABC should be telling that to its listeners.

However, as I wrote before, the ABC programmers could help by focusing more on substantive issues rather than pondering whether or not it would be a good idea for Campbell Newman to help Lawrence Springborg.

I would also suggest that whilst the story about Anna Bligh's husband Greg Withers was not altogether without interest, given the time constraints, of which you complain, that should have been left until after the election.

I will, as you suggest, send news items, but you must appreciate that it is more difficult with few resources and not enough time.

Thank you for your attention.

Yours sincerely,

James Sinnamon

Pro-democracy independent
candidate for Mount Coot-tha
...
http://candobetter.org/james
http://candobetter.org/QldElections
http://candobetter.org/QldElections/MountCoot-tha

Appendix 10: Media release on privatisation sent to Kellie Riordan and others

Andrew Fraser's three different responses to a question on privatisation
Media release of 17 Mar 09

Queensland voters, who overwhelmingly oppose privatisation, have a right to know which candidates can be relied upon to block any further sell-offs of public assets, said James Sinnamon, independent candidate for the Brisbane inner-north-west seat of Mount Coot-tha.

"The privatisation of the Cairns, Mackay and Brisbane airports, the Golden Casket, Energex and Ergon during the last term of Parliament, demonstrate that privatisation was an issue at stake in the 2006 state elections," said the independent candidate, "yet where were the electors told of this?"

(For the rest of the media release, see "Andrew Fraser's three different responses to a question on privatisation" of 17 Mar 09.)

Appendix 11: E-mail of Wed 18 Mar 09 to Madonna King asking for air time in response to listeners' dissatisfaction with major party candidates

Subject: If listeners are dissatsifed with major parties, why aren't others given air time on your program?

Date: 18/03/09 11:39 am

CC'd to: Kellie Riordan, Richard Fidler

Dear Madonna King,

As you have just heard from your own listeners, a lot of electors are extremely dissatisfied with what both major parties have to offer.

So, why are candidates, who stand for something different and, on many issues,such as privatisation and population growth, actually represent the majority view, getting so little air time on your program, and on the ABC in general?

Yours sincerely,

James Sinnamon

Pro-democracy independent
candidate for Mount Coot-tha
...
http://candobetter.org/james
http://candobetter.org/QldElections
http://candobetter.org/QldElections/MountCoot-tha

Appendix 12: E-mail of Thu 19 Mar 09 to Brisbane ABC local radio staff asking that survey be publicised in response to listeners requests for more information

Subject: Please advise listeners of my online survey sent to all candidates

Dear Madonna King, Richard Fidler, Kellie Riordan, Annie Guest et al,

I have heard a number of listeners saying to Madonna King on her program that they are dissatisfied with the major parties and that they want more information about policies.

Could you please advise your listeners that they can find answers to much of the information they seek printed in results to a survey on my web site.

Late last night and this morning I sent out survey questions concerning privatisation, population growth, the environment and full employment to every candidate I was able to e-mail. That survey is included below.

As I write, I am receiving responses. I am publishing the results at:

http://candobetter.org/QldElections/survey

I am also publishing any more detailed comments I have received.

Could you please advise your listeners of this survey and do you think you could use your good influence to prevail upon candidates from the major parties to respond to my survey?

So far, none have responded.

Thank you.

Yours sincerely,

James Sinnamon

Pro-democracy independent
candidate for Mount Coot-tha
...
http://candobetter.org/james
http://candobetter.org/QldElections
http://candobetter.org/QldElections/MountCoot-tha

Appendix 13: E-mail of Thu 19 Mar 09 challenging Lawrence Springborg to debate privatisation

Subject: URGENT: Please justify your pro-privatisation stance in a public debate

Date: 19/03/09 02:37 pm

CC'd to: Madonna King, Kellie Riordan, Richard Fidler, Annie Guest and others.

Dear Lawrence Springborg,

If you intend to privatise any more of public assets I believe you have an obligation to satisfy Queensland voters that this is justified.

To date this has never happened and all privatisations have been overwhelmingly opposed by public opinion.

All privatisations, without exception, have been public policy disasters and any further privatisations undertaken by a further LNP Government or a future Labor Government are almost certain to be no different.

I therefore challenge you or any other LNP candidate to justify in a public debate before the election your refusal to rule out any more privatisations, or, else commit yourself to not doing so until you have obtained the specific consent of the Queensland public.

My past challenge to Anna Bligh and Andrew Fraser (or any other Labor candidate) to publicly debate their pro-privatisation stances also still stands.

yours sincerely

James Sinnamon

Pro-democracy independent
candidate for Mount Coot-tha
...http://candobetter.org/james
http://candobetter.org/QldElections
http://candobetter.org/QldElections/MountCoot-tha

Appendix 14: Media release of 19 Mar 09 challenging Lawrence Springborg to debate privatisation

Subject: Media Release: Lawrence Springborg out of step with the public on privatisation

Date: 19/03/09 06:44 pm

CC'd to Madonna King, Richard Fidler, Kellie Riordan, Annie Guest and others

Lawrence Springborg out of step with the public on privatisation

James Sinnamon, independent for Mount Coot-tha
Media Release, Thur 19 Mar 09

During an interview on Brisbane ABC local radio's Madonna King show, today, Lawrence Springborg told listeners that he has 'no objection' to the further sell-off of publicly-owned assets.

However, Mr Sinnamon pointed out that only the day before, Mr Springborg's Liberal National Party had rightly taken Premier Anna Bligh to task for misleading electricity consumers by promising that no electricity consumer would be worse off as a consequence of the privatisation of Energex.

(For the rest of the media release, see "Media release: Lawrence Springborg out of step with the public on privatisation" of 20 Mar 09)

Footnotes

1. ↑ "AM's Tony Eastley live from Brisbane on polling day" in ABC radio's AM archive of 21 Mar 09.

2. ↑ In "Have your say" in the Village Green section of the Courier Mail of 21 March, Lavinia Wood also commented on Premier Anna Bligh's deliberate encouragement of population growth when she commented on the draft South East Queensland Regional Plan 2009-2031:

"No one but the developers thinks that bringing an additional 1.3 million people into a region that is already under stress is a good idea. Yet the South East Queensland Regional Plan is driving this agenda, touting a target of 4.4 million by 2031."

See, also "Exposing Queensland Government population growth duplicity" of 1 Apr 09.

3. ↑ See, also, my letter to Lawrence Springborg within the article "Lawrence Springborg responds to Brisbane Save The Mary River Questionnaire" of 10 Mar 09.

4. ↑ During the 2007 Federal elections, Greens Queensland Senate candidate Larissa Waters, who also stood in 2009, as a Greens candidate in Mount Coot-tha, in which I stood, advised me that the Greens had judged that raising the issue of population growth could make the difference that could cost her the Senate seat. As it turned out, Larissa Waters did not win a Senate seat anyway. This raises two questions:

1. Why is opposition to population growth judged by the Greens to be an electoral liability? and
2. Even, if it is, then when is a good time for the Greens to begin educating the public in order that opposition to population growth eventually does not become an electoral liability?

In regard to the first point, all opinion polls show that population growth and immigration are unpopular, so why the Greens apparently believe that a stance against population growth would harm them is not obvious. In regard to the second point, the Queensland Greens are noted for doing very little outside election campaign periods, so, if they are reluctant to raise the issue at election time, then when do they ever intend to educate the Queensland public about their opposition to population growth.

5. ↑ I can't recall whether the presenter was Madonna King, the mid-morning presenter or Kellie Higgins-Devine who, for that week, replaced Spencer Howson as the early morning presenter. However, it was definitely one of the two.

6. ↑ Anna Bligh's stated reason, that early election speculation was destabilising our economy, seemed disingenuous. If that had truly been her concern, she needed only to reaffirm her March 2008 promise to serve her full term. Instead, she remained silent whilst early election speculation was fueled by the Courier Mail from at least November of the previous year. (See also "Courier Mail misreports water recycling to demand early election" of 5 Jan 09.) So, by by her own logic, Premier Anna Bligh had allowed needless harm to be caused to Queensland's economy for at least two and a half months.

When she did call the election on the morning of Monday 23 February, water from devastating floods was receding in the north of Queensland, which still faced threats of further cyclones. Both these factors made it harder for many candidates to campaign and harder for some to vote.

The very night on which she called elections, TV stations began broadcasting Labor Party election advertising in slots which had to have been booked well in advance.

7. ↑ The ABC also sought to interview Opposition Leader Lawrence Springborg's wife, but she declined.

8. ↑ "Springborg's hope lies with can-do Campbell" by Glen Milne in the Australian of 9 Mar 09.

In any case, Milne's prediction that Newman's intervention would help Lawrence Springborg badly misfired. Newman turned out to be considerably less popular than Milne believed him to be and his association with the LNP's campaign appears to have turned Brisbane voters against the LNP. As one ABC listener pointed out on the morning of Monday 23 March:

"When I saw (Campbell Newman's) photo in an advertisement with Lawrence Springborg, I knew it was 'all over Red Rover.'"

In the 2008 Brisbane City Council elections in which I stood against him for Lord Mayor of Brisbane, Campbell Newman earnestly promised not to increase rates beyond the rate of inflation. He broke that promise only weeks later and imposed savage rate hikes on high rise dwellers. For this and a number of other reasons he now appears to be widely disliked in Brisbane. On the night of the elections he headed towards the Brisbane tally room in order to share the limelight with the Lawrence Springborg, whom he assumed would win. However, before he reached the tally room, he learnt that voters had turned against the LNP and he ordered his driver to turn around.

9. ↑ Forum discussion "My election night" on johnquiggin.com on 22 Mar 09.

10. ↑ Whilst some may judge a relatively unknown independent candidate to have been audacious in challenging the state's leading politicians to publicly debate privatisation, no other candidate had done so and no journalist, as far as I am aware, had confronted the Government over this issue. So as far as I am aware, this was the only attempt to hold our Government leaders for having sold off publicly owned assets without the consent of the owners of those assets.

11. ↑ This has already been mentioned in my article "What was achieved by my election campaign?" of 22 Mar 09.

12. ↑ See Open letter to Anna Bligh and Andrew Fraser asking that any planned privatisations be put to the public at forthcoming elections of 17 Feb 09.

13. ↑ This has been covered in the article "Andrew Fraser's three different responses to a question on privatisation" of 17 Mar 09.

14. ↑ The only substantial coverage that either Dave Zwolenski or I received during the course of the campaign, was from the University of Queensland-based community radio station, 4ZZZ. Dave was interviewed twice by 4ZZZ, whilst I was interviewed once for 5 minutes.

Here's something the Australian Press would probably rather not report on, so we had better, because it is very important.

“Caterpillar management taken hostage by workers in Dijon. New signs of social radicalisation in France”, begins Tuesday’s France2 TV news.

Since Tuesday morning (31 March 09) four Caterpillar managers have been prevented by Caterpillar employees from leaving their director’s office in the Grenoble (France) factory, where 730 jobs are down for the chop.

The report opens with footage of Caterpillar’s human resources manager being allowed to drive out of the factory under medical orders for a cardiac problem after 8 hours of detention by Caterpillar workers.

Meanwhile the workers continued to detain four other managers on the first floor of the factory.

The negotiations began with only about ten workers early Tuesday morning, then, very quickly, a hundred took over the area and confronted their bosses with their demands for negotiations when they tried to leave. The bosses holed up in the offices.

The camera shows a lot of excited workers milling around in the large corridors of the first floor, outside the Director’s office where management has dug-in.

Suddenly the door of the director’s office gives way. The managers are there. They look haggard.

The workers surge in, boo-ing and whistling at them.

“We’re on strike. It’s not unemployment, thug!” a worker calls out twice towards the Director.

The Director General of Caterpillar France, with the almost unbelievable name of Nicolas Polutnik, mumbles incoherently something like, “ In the time to come … free… one could …. wait and see…in order to give a chance ...” It sounds a little as if he is avoiding making any legal commitment by talking nonsense. The press commentator remarks that the director could not come up with anything more.

Someone off-screen calls out, “You’re a thug! You’re a thug!

A worker berates the director from behind: “M le Directeur, you weren’t even capable of calling a meeting to discuss the situation …:”

Caterpillar, the US construction group, announced only two months ago a vast plan to get rid of jobs – 22,000 in the world, 733 out of 2,006 in Grenoble.

This was the only solution that the workers could find - “Taking hostages” - as they call it, in the hope of having their voices heard.

Benoit Nicolas, spokesman from the Workers Federation (Confederation Generale du Travail (CGT) spokesman, speaks through a loud-hailer:

“What we want above all is an equitable sharing of the wealth which has been obtained through the living force of this enterprise, that is to say, the workers!”

Bosses for another night on the office-carpet until they agree to negotiate

Alexis Mazza, representing the employees, said, “Today they [management] refuse to negotiate, therefore they will remain here, they will sleep here, in order to think things over, because you can’t flog workers like that! ”

No negotiation was able to be started on this day (Tuesday 31).

Source: France2 News, Tuesday 31 March 2009, 2000hs edition

No doubt many corporations like Caterpillar, backed up by the same governments which have thrown taxpayers’ money at banks and big business, will be finding ways to communicate with the Caterpillar management at Grenoble. They will be telling them to hold out at all costs, because, if they give in and negotiate, workers throughout the world will see how easy it is to have the upper-hand on the hachet-men of the power-elites.

After all, there is really no reason to keep the management and owners of these factories. The workers could take over now and simply produce for local needs, or trade modestly where there was a need. The same could be said for most large enterprises like this. Vast profits are only necessary where the cost of land and rent are artificially pushed up by land-speculation, more of a problem in the English speaking countries which have different land-tenure laws from Western continental Europe. (And that problem, of course, urgently needs confronting.)