Well, it’s all on out west with the Bulldogs league club heavily into their scandal du jour. This time it’s an alleged gang rape. Apparently there was a sex scandal cover up last year as well. Last night on TV, CEO Steve Mortimer was asked if there was a culture of abuse within the Bulldogs. He was somewhat evasive in his answer.
The Sydney Morning Herald, however, reports crisis management Bulldogs style:
Just minutes before Mr Mortimer spoke at Belmore Oval yesterday, one of the club's players at a training session was heard abusing photographers from the players' tunnel. The player allegedly encouraged his teammates to "pull our dicks out and come all over them".
Another player was seen urinating on the field.
Question answered, it seems.
And spare a thought for us young (ish) boomers. It looks like we’ll never get to retire.
According to Treasurer Peter Costello:
Older workers are skilled, disciplined and reliable, and their levels of sick leave declined as they aged. The days of throwing them on the scrap heap at 40 or 50 were over, and employers had to be re-educated to this end, he said.
There's going to be no such thing as full-time retirement.
So now settling into a little seaside number and going fishing every day is “being thrown on the scrap-heap.” Anybody sense they’re being manipulated here?
The generational change thing is such a huge issue it’s hard to get your head around, but I was talking to someone the other day who pointed out that it is now looming very large. Here 2008 is a key year. It’s the year when the peak of the boomer generation turns 55 and when the workforce, theoretically at least, slowly goes into net decline. Usually you find winners and losers in this kind of thing but the only winners here, as far as I can see, are people who have already bolted for the scrap-heap.
The implications for business are equally great. This is a major disruptive force that will make and break many a business strategy – and, as always, create some huge opportunities.
I mentioned Lost in Translation a week or two back. The film continues to be caned as racist in some quarters, which is just total nonsense.
This is Japan seen through the eyes of two reluctant tourists. Neither main character particularly wants to be there and they find it odd and dislocating. I spent a week there and found it odd and dislocating too (and charming and gorgeous and interesting as well). Yes the Japanese people in the film are a bit like caricatures, but they are pretty damn accurate caricatures too. Remember the film isn’t really about them, it’s about the two central characters and the Japanese are the background.
I was told a few years ago the Maori extras on The Piano referred to themselves as the “blackground”. It’s pretty much the same thing. Background characters rarely appear “in the round”.
Now, it’s time to report on the death of a meme. This is a favourite of the likes of NZPundits and Mark Steyn: Saddam fed people into a plastic shredder, sometimes feet first. Conservative organ The Spectator questions this one, showing the shredder has now gone the way of all those WMDs.
The story came originally from a group called Indict. Brendan O’Neill reports it was uncorroborated
This is all that Indict had to go on — uncorroborated and quite amazing claims made by a single person from northern Iraq. When I suggest that this does not constitute proof of the existence of a human shredder, [Labour MP Ann] Clwyd responds: ‘We heard a victim say it; who are you to say that chap is a liar?’ Yet to call for witness statements to be corroborated before being turned into the subject of national newspaper articles is not to accuse the witnesses involved of being liars; it is to follow good practice in the collection of evidence, particularly evidence with which Indict hopes to ‘seek indictments by national prosecutors’ against former Baathists.
So is the shredder propaganda, pure and simple, just like the bayoneted babies of Belgium in 1914? Only time will tell. But the naïve right (read Gordo and Craig), who parsed everything Andrew Gilligan ever wrote so closely, lapped it up and passed it on.
Another supposed source was an anti-war activist, Kenneth Joseph, maybe or maybe not a trainee pastor with the Assyrian Church of the East, who the Pundit boys reference favourably.
"I know who I'm listening to. Just don't bother waiting for the usual suspects to get off message" wrote Craig Ranapia in March 2003.
Oh dear. Joseph’s testimony has since been discredited and his supposed 14 hours of taped interviews with Iraqis has gone west. Searching under his name in Google turns up some interesting exchanges too. Try it. Anyway, this from The Spectator:
Even Johann Hari, a pro-war columnist on the Independent who wrote a sycophantic account of Joseph’s conversion, has since declared that Joseph ‘was probably a bullshitter’.
Clwyd insists that corroboration of the shredder story came three months after her first Times article, when she was shown a dossier by a reporter from Fox TV. On 18 June, Clwyd wrote a second article for the Times, describing a ‘chillingly meticulous record book’ from Saddam’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison, which described one of the methods of execution as ‘mincing’. Can she say who compiled this book? ‘No, I can’t.’ Where is it now? ‘I don’t know.’ What was the name of the Fox reporter who showed it to her? ‘I have no idea.’ Did Clwyd read the entire thing? ‘No! It was in Arabic! I only saw it briefly.’ Curiously, there is no mention of the book or of ‘mincing’ as a method of execution on the Fox News website. Robert Zimmerman, a spokesman for Fox News in New York, tells me: ‘That story does not ring a bell with our foreign editor here, and it is something you expect would ring a bell. It sounds like something we would have gone to town with, in terms of promotion and PR.’
And finally it looks like George Bush has gone soft on Cuba, the big pussy.