The Yawning Heights  

There are lots of interesting articles in the local press this weekend - I really wish the Financial Review didn't paywall off their content (they have an excellent article on the new "Great Game" for example, by an ex ASIS and MI6 agent).

The Sydney Morning Herald, on the other hand, usually puts everything online - but the most interesting article in the weekend edition, "Power Play" got stuffed abruptly into the memory hole yesterday before I'd grabbed the link to it (though not before I'd noticed it in their top articles list for the day - the page had already been pulled at that point though). From the hardcopy:

At the south-east corner of jervis Bay, is is said, the sand is whiter, the water clearer and the view of the Bowen Island sanctuary for Little Penguins spectactular. This is Murrays Beach. This is also the site of what could have been Australia's first nuclear power plant.

In 1971 the federal government got as far as excavating and clearing the land before it pulled the pin on the idea.

...

The enthusaism for the atomic age shown by the federal minister for national development, David Fairburn, was typical of many when he claimed in 1967 that "it might not be very long before nuclear energy becomes fully competitive with thermal stations for the generation of power".

But behind the public statements was another agenda. When cabinet papers from the period were released a few years ago they showed John Gorton's government was intent on developing a nuclear weapons program.

I'm always interested as to why material gets stuffed down the hole - the obvious candidate in this case is the mention of an alternate explanation as for the renewed push for nuclear power here (as opposed to to government's new found acknowledgment of the perils of global warming and thus the "need" for nuclear power, and the realist's interpretation that they want to give some huge handouts to their mates in the mining industry) - as a means of acquiring nuclear weapons.

Max Walsh at The Bulletin is making the same case though, so either the blackout of discussion on the topic isn't very thorough or there was something else controversial in the original article that I missed. Personally I'm not in favour of uranium mining (though I believe expansion of the industry is inevitable), nor nuclear power (and I don't think it will happen here) - but I would view us obtaining nuclear weapons favourably - everyone else has them, so why shouldn't we - it might even enable Australian security policy to be developed independently of instructions from the centre of the empire for a change.

The elephant in the room that no one wants to mention in John Howard’s great nuclear debate is whether Australia should prepare itself to join the nuclear club.

The idea of Australia acquiring the bomb - and that’s what “joining the nuclear club” means - is no-go territory in political terms.

It’s a public debate that the leaders of the major parties don’t want to have. They know that it would cause division within their own ranks and across the community in general. It would create the mother of all scare campaigns, which could ultimately change the political landscape.

The reality is, however, that the global nuclear equation is changing in such a way that it would be negligent of Australia not to consider its implications.

...

The most important feature of the Iran situation for Australia in the short term is that we have something of the same credibility problem. Iran’s insistence that it is only concerned with peaceful applications of nuclear power is undermined by its depth of resources wealth - namely crude oil and natural gas.

The economics of energy for peaceful purposes favour the use of these hydrocarbons over uranium. Consequently, there is a justifiable suspicion that Iran has another agenda.

The same can be said about Australia, the world’s largest exporter of coal and one of its major exporters of natural gas. We have reserves of both that are sufficient for hundreds of years. If we are talking about electric power generation, as is ostensibly the case in the great debate, then uranium offers an inferior outcome in economic terms to coal or gas.

That is certainly the case if we do not take into account external diseconomies such as pollution and global warming. To bolster the government’s pro-nuclear case, Science Minister Julie Bishop has been pushing the case of uranium versus coal by comparing their carbon dioxide output.

That’s quite legitimate except that “clean coal” power generation is still an infant industry but one that is growing rapidly. Curiously, perhaps, in this era of spin over substance, one of the better primers on clean coal technologies was posted last month on the website of the Melbourne-based Uranium Information Centre.

Nuclear power generation per se will not make Australia eligible for prospective membership of the nuclear club.

For that to happen, we would have to be in the enrichment business, potentially an economically justifiable activity if we are to maximise returns from our uranium exports. However, it would also almost certainly involve the return of nuclear waste. That would normally be unacceptable in political terms unless it was seen as a price worth paying in terms of guaranteeing our nuclear potential.

While I've done enough mocking of the propaganda industry and the Zarqawi myth lately, I did notice one slightly sinister aspect (if you're a Democrat) to the recent quacking of the ducks about the mortally wounded Zarqawi stumbling out of his bombed building (watch the footage of the explosions from the air and ponder his remarkable survival ability once again) to die in the arms of the Iraqi police, who amazingly beat US troops to the scene.

The sinister aspect isn't so much the silliness of the official story (our propagandists obviously share Hitler's thoughts on the application of this stuff - don't sweat the details, as the proles don't pay much attention anyway), but the note that, amongst Zarqawi's leopard print skimpy women's clothing and terrorist propaganda (all surviving the explosions along with the evil man of steel) were pictures of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

On a semi related note I've noticed that the extreme right smear machine working the Al Gore / Nazi comparison angle pretty hard lately (its a shame they don't investigate historical Nazi links to the Bush family, for example, instead of pounding this shameful nonsense) as a way of trying to blunt the impact of "An Inconvenient Truth".

ABU MUSAB al-ZARQAWI was accompanied by women who wore skimpy night clothing, and read magazines on current affairs and militant propaganda.

An inspection of the remains of the "safe house" in which the terrorist mastermind was killed also suggested that he and his companions — which an Iraqi army officer said included two women and an eight-year-old girl — lived with few luxuries.

The US military took reporters to the site in the village of Hibhib, near the town of Baquba north of Baghdad, three days after the death of the al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, who is blamed for beheading hostages and killings hundreds of people in suicide bombings.

At the site surrounded by palm groves, two thin foam mattresses were scattered among the debris of smashed concrete and twisted metal. There were few clues on Zarqawi's extreme ideology or the militant groups he was linked to in the rubble of the building that was pulverised by two 227-kilo bombs in a US air strike on Wednesday.

One leaflet identified a radio station in Latifiya south of the capital as an apparent target. A few metres away was a magazine picture of former US President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

I've always taken the "Aussie battler" myth about the Rodent (growing up in Canterbury and working in his Dad's service station) at face value, so the Sydney Morning Herald's article - "The secret Howard plantations" - on the history of the Howard family was rather interesting.

His mother's church and his father's service station have come to stand as markers of respectability, honesty and the Howard family's deep roots in the suburban heart of the nation. To be the son of a service station proprietor allows John Howard to claim as a qualification for high office that he was and remains an ordinary Australian.

But Howard's father had another life. While this old soldier worked his humble Sydney service station, he was also - on paper - a New Guinea planter with a string of estates where 200 native labourers grew copra in his name. Lyall Howard had cashed in his status as a returned digger to "dummy" for the trading house W. R. Carpenter and Company Ltd. His own father, Walter, was doing it, too. The Howard case provoked secret, official investigations at the highest levels in Canberra, but they and their powerful backer got away with the scam.

The Treaty of Versailles spelt the end for the German planters of New Guinea. Australia took over the colony, stripped them of their land and sent them packing in the early 1920s. The prime minister, Billy Hughes, promised "New Guinea for the returned serviceman" and ex-diggers were offered very generous terms when 40,000 hectares of plantations went on the market in 1926 and 1927.

A hefty catalogue spruiked them as "The Envy of Planters, The Magnet of Copra Buyers" and quoted Shakespeare to inspire investors down south: "There is a tide in the affairs of men which taken at the flood leads on to fortune."

TreeHugger has a book review of Big Coal - The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future.

While many writers may be capable of gathering mountains of facts on the role the coal industry plays in contemporary American life, and stringing them together into a coherent narrative, fewer likely have the ability to turn those facts into an engaging book that a reader literally can not put down. Jeff Goodell, a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone and the New York Times Magazine, has done just that in his new book Big Coal: The Dirty Secrets Behind America's Energy Future. Goodell proves that he's a meticulous researcher in this book, but the incredible stories he tells as he examines the role of coal in American growth over the past century and Chinese growth in the coming one make Big Coal a genuine page-turner -- no small feat in a non-fiction examination of an industry that many Americans probably consider a part of a bygone era. Goodell shares the experiences of miners, utility executives and global warming activists, and aptly demonstrates that coal still affects American lives in the most mundane, and the most dramatic, fashions.

I honed in on the phrase "the empire of denial" in Goodell's epilogue, and that's essentially how "Big Coal" is characterized through the book: in denial of not only the human and environmental costs of their product, but also about the inevitable waning of this energy source even as it's seeing a renewal of interest in the US. A few executives tied in with coal production, primarily in the big utility companies, recognize that regulation of CO2 is coming, and think it's in their best interest to get ahead of the curve by, at the very least, investing in new power plants that incorporate coal gasification and carbon sequestration technologies. By and large, though, the big utilities are building old-school dirty coal-burning plants (such as one going up just south of Nashville, Illinois) as quickly as possible to make a quick buck before regulation becomes a fact of life and requires the coal industry to internalize the costs of the big polluting plants. Yes, they're incorporating the latest scrubbers and such into these new power stations, but as Goodell notes, even these new "clean" plants will still emit tons of CO2, mercury, and combustion wastes such as fly ash, continuing Big Coal's legacy as one of the biggest contributors to global warming and public health problems...

WorldChanging has an interesting post on China, Coal and Green Leapfrogging.

More on Chinese Pollution. The Times reports that coal-burning in China is killing 400,000 Chinese a year, and contributing mightily to environmental problems around the world:

One of China's lesser-known exports is a dangerous brew of soot, toxic chemicals and climate-changing gases from the smokestacks of coal-burning power plants.

In early April, a dense cloud of pollutants over Northern China sailed to nearby Seoul, sweeping along dust and desert sand before wafting across the Pacific. An American satellite spotted the cloud as it crossed the West Coast. Filters near Lake Tahoe in the mountains of eastern California "are the darkest that we've seen" outside smoggy urban areas, said Steven S. Cliff, an atmospheric scientist at the University of California at Davis.

The coal China is burning now is of immediate concern to most of East Asia and the North American West Coast, but the coal Chinas burns over the next two decades will weigh heavily in deciding not only what kind of future we will have: it may well play a critical part in deciding what kind of lives our great-grandchildren live.

This is what makes winning the great wager in China so important. China is hell-bent on raising itself out of poverty and bringing at least its urban, industrialized communities into the ranks of the globally affluent. As the Times puts it,

One-fifth of the world's population already lives in affluent countries with lots of air-conditioning, refrigerators and other appliances. This group consumes a tremendous amount of oil, natural gas, nuclear power, coal and alternative energy sources.

Now China is trying to bring its fifth of the world's population, people like Mr. Wu and Ms. Cao, up to the same standard. One goal is to build urban communities for 300 million people over the next two decades.

This is part of what makes rapid progress on sustainable innovation so important. We need better models and systems -- better buildings, better vehicles, better urban planning; massive investment in clean energy research, energy efficiency and green chemistry; new models like product service systems, distributed power and smart metering... the list could go on and on -- we need them now, and (here's the kicker) we need to spread them across the entire planet more quickly than any other set of technological advances has ever spread.

Dave at The Oil Drum raises some interesting questions about the world's biggest Natural Gas Field.

Without much fanfare, Qatar announced a moratorium on new development of the natural gas North Field basin, a decision that had actually been taken in 2005. At the same time, in a recent presentation by Matt Simmons entitled Tight Oil Supplies, we run into this intriguing slide.

This report will go into considerable detail about the future role of the North Field/South Pars natural gas field, it's size and importance, the reasons for the moratorium and finally important questions about both the geology and proven reserves of the field. As Simmons notes in his slide, there is a "large degree of uncertainty regarding [the] true potential [of this field]". The topic is important regarding the uncommon phrase "peak natural gas" on a global scale. As we know, natural gas production has already peaked in North America.

The Washington Post has an excellent article on the 2030 challenge and how sustainable architecture can help reduce carbon dioxide emissions (the trend towards green building practices is one of the more encouraging things happening, given its importance in reducing power consumption).

Carbon dioxide is in the air like never before, but not just as measurable parts per million in the earth's atmosphere. Increasingly the subject of everyday conversation and cultural discourse, rising CO2 emissions are seen by many as no less a threat than terrorism, uncontrolled immigration, avian flu or escalating gasoline prices.

A new exhibit on green architecture at the National Building Museum contributes to the discourse. Atmospheric carbon dioxide and its planetary consequences are what former vice president Al Gore talks about in the documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth."

Carbon dioxide was also the focus of a presentation at last month's conference, "The Architecture of Sustainability," sponsored by the American Institute of Architects national committees on design and on the environment.

Addressing the conferees packed into the Corcoran Gallery of Art auditorium, New Mexico architect Edward Mazria delivered a sobering, persuasive opening presentation about carbon dioxide and global warming. He also delivered a daunting challenge to architects: Design all new buildings, whatever the type, to use half the fossil fuel energy used now by buildings of that type.

By the year 2030, the goal is for new buildings to be "carbon-neutral" and use no energy from fossil fuels that produce greenhouse gases. This means that less than 25 years from now, ideally no oil, coal or natural gas would be burned to build, heat, cool and light new buildings.

Rob at Transition Culture has a post on a visit to the Eden project in the UK which greatly impressed him (I never made it down there, though from all reports its taken a while to mature).

Last week I took my family to the Eden Project in Cornwall. I went fully expecting to be underwhelmed, and I have to say it completely blew me away. What a stunning thing. From the first sight of the place, everything was done so well and so thoughtfully, and was of such a scale, that it couldn’t fail to take away even the most cynical skeptic’s breath.

eden3As a blogger who focuses on peak oil, energy descent and the need to relocalise, you might expect me to launch into a big moan about the fact that people have to drive to the Eden Project, that they don’t grow all the food for the visitors onsite, that there is no wind tubine, blah blah. It would be very easy to walk around being critical, nitpicking about what isn’t quite right about the place. While there is of course plenty of room for improvement in a number of areas, in all honesty, I could not have pulled off something on that scale, so I don’t really feel qualified to criticise.

Reminds me of the only time I met Bill Mollison, the co-founder of permaculture, when he gave a talk in Stroud in 1992. He gave an amazing talk (still one of the most inspiring I ever attended) about permaculture and the need to live simply, and then in the break I went outside and there he was smoking a cigarette. “I wonder”, I thought, “if I should point out the contradiction here, smoking a developing world cash crop that he has just been criticising…”. Seemed to me though, as I thought about it, that here is a man who has done more in terms of promoting sustainability and permaculture than I can ever hope to do, and who on earth am I to criticise…

TreeHugger also has a post on one of those slightly questionable biofuels production process - Rice and Bamboo Power for Assam, India - which looks at using the byproducts of rice and paper mills to produce energy. While these schemes are far superior to turning food (such as corn or soy beans) into biofuel, I still tend to wonder what the long term effects of burning all the excess organic matter from crops will have on land productivity.

In some circles it’s known as ‘industrial ecology’, where the ‘waste’ process of one industrial action is successfully employed by another. In Assam, India they are planning to build a 16 megawatt power plant that will be fuelled by rice husks from food production, and bamboo dust waste from paper fibre mills. India is said to the world’s second largest producer of bamboo, after China, and these power plants are expected to be amongst of the first to utilise bamboo for fuel. The bamboo power stations are expected to be operational by year end.

The gasification of rice hulls to produce power is noted as being in use in several countries, such as the US, China, Italy, Thailand, and elsewhere within India. Aside from generating electricity, the rice husks can also power irrigation water pumping. But using such technologies the state of Assam hopes to be self sufficient for energy within 10 years. Currently much of their electricity is imported from surrounding states with hydro schemes but such reservoirs are now prone drying up.

The buzz over "An Inconvenient Truth" will no doubt start to fade soon, but here's one last review - this one from Roger Ebert (which I see TreeHugger also liked).

want to write this review so every reader will begin it and finish it. I am a liberal, but I do not intend this as a review reflecting any kind of politics. It reflects the truth as I understand it, and it represents, I believe, agreement among the world's experts.

Global warming is real.

It is caused by human activity.

Mankind and its governments must begin immediate action to halt and reverse it.

If we do nothing, in about 10 years the planet may reach a "tipping point" and begin a slide toward destruction of our civilization and most of the other species on this planet.

After that point is reached, it would be too late for any action.

These facts are stated by Al Gore in the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." Forget he ever ran for office. Consider him a concerned man speaking out on the approaching crisis. "There is no controversy about these facts," he says in the film. "Out of 925 recent articles in peer-review scientific journals about global warming, there was no disagreement. Zero."

...

When I said I was going to a press screening of "An Inconvenient Truth," a friend said, "Al Gore talking about the environment! Bor...ing!" This is not a boring film. The director, Davis Guggenheim, uses words, images and Gore's concise litany of facts to build a film that is fascinating and relentless. In 39 years, I have never written these words in a movie review, but here they are: You owe it to yourself to see this film. If you do not, and you have grandchildren, you should explain to them why you decided not to.

Am I acting as an advocate in this review? Yes, I am. I believe that to be "impartial" and "balanced" on global warming means one must take a position like Gore's. There is no other view that can be defended. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), chairman of the Senate Environment Committee, has said, "Global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people." I hope he takes his job seriously enough to see this film. I think he has a responsibility to do that.

What can we do? Switch to and encourage the development of alternative energy sources: Solar, wind, tidal, and, yes, nuclear. Move quickly toward hybrid and electric cars. Pour money into public transit, and subsidize the fares. Save energy in our houses. I did a funny thing when I came home after seeing "An Inconvenient Truth." I went around the house turning off the lights.

"Dispatches From Blogistan" has a number of mini interviews with some of my favourite writers - Bruce Sterling, Jamais Cascio and Cory Doctorow.

From Bruce:

on blogs as mini-internets
Blogs aren’t really literary endeavors. They are what lives on the long tails, tails stretching out to some distant vanishing point. They’re about an architecture of participation, about commons-based peer production. Blogs are, by their semantic nature, mini-Internets. Aggregators. We throw things against the wall and see what sticks. We’re basically watching as a new intellectual landscape takes shape.

on corporate and goverment blogging
In general, I’d expect governments and corporations to embrace and expand access rather than try to limit online communications. Hire some professional writer to publish an official government blog, something that would make the others look amateurish and stupid and poorly informed. Because, in fact, most blogs are amateurish and stupid and poorly informed. I can definitely see governments and corporations setting up blogging units and hiring talented propagandists. Then people will be saying, “What ever happened to the glory days of the early pamphleteers?”

But that won’t happen for awhile. They all have feel of clay.

Of course, there are both official government propaganda blogs and the unofficial kind run by the modern day brownshirt brigade that generate so much noise in extreme right blogistan. Billmon took a look at some of their antics in the successful blackballing of the appointment of prominent middle east expert and blogger Juan Cole to the faculty at Yale.

Although I’m back in the United States – and have been for more than a week – I’ve been hoping to finish my Egyptian epic before turning back to the daily atrocities of life in Dick Cheney’s America. But the atrocities, it seems, won’t wait in line. They’re right back in my face, gibbering and leering and showing me their hideous sores, like the inmates of an insane asylum for cancer patients.

I’d go on ignoring them, and write more about the ethereal beauty of ancient tomb paintings, but the news that a committee of scholarly bootlickers has blackballed Juan Cole’s candidacy for a tenured professorship at Yale absolutely refuses to leave me in peace.

This may not seem like particularly noxious news, at least when compared to the stench of putrefying corpses hanging over Haditha, or the Nazi stab-in-the-back myths now being recycled in Right Blogistan, but it’s touched an extremely raw nerve with me – because of what it says about the age of fear and intellectual intimidation that we live in, because of the unadulterated vileness of the self-appointed commissars involved, and, not least, because I consider Juan Cole my friend, and a man who won’t take the time to speak up for a friend who's being blacklisted is, as the Godfather might put it, less than a man.

...

In addition to Rubin and Mowbray, we’ve also had John Fund (the poor man’s Humbert Humbert) sliming Cole on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, David Horowitz doing his impersonation of Andrei Vyshinsky over at Planet Conspiracy, plus the usual blog wannabes, like the Powerlie bundists and the little green fascists, bringing up the rear – the tail end (in more ways than one) of the lynch mob.

...

This is not, as some would have it, simply another petty academic quarrel. As Cole himself has noted in the past, the U.S. scholarly community is under relentless pressure from the pro-Israel lobby and its camp followers, who are determined to purge Middle Eastern Studies departments of anything and anyone who contradicts the party line. The goal, quite simply, is to choke off any possible source of independent information and analysis that might challenge the steady stream of distortions issuing from the right’s favorite think tanks and from propaganda artists like Mowbray and Rubin.

It almost brings to mind the old Brezhnev-era KGB, obsessed with tracking down every obscure dissident with a mimeograph machine and packing him or her off to the nut farm, while the Soviet versions of the Moonie Times and Fox News thundered at full volume about capitalist plots and vile slanders against the people’s vanguard party.

This is only a moderate exaggeration. The neocons may not be in command of a fully functioning police state – yet – but like enforcers of Brezhnev's Politburo, they seem to understand instinctively that their ideological monopoly is too fragile to tolerate much dissent. All three branches of the government, both political parties and virtually every major media organization are firmly in the hands of people who believe – often passionately – in America’s alliance with Israel. Politicians compete to see who can offer the most generous aid concessions, or utter the most strident denunciations of Israel’s enemies, or turn the blindest eye to the latest illegal settlement expansion. Polls show the public overwhelmingly supports these positions. And yet, somehow it’s still not enough. And so one academician/blogger who believes, and publicly states, that the Palestinians are human beings – and have rights that are being violated daily by the Israeli government and the settlers – becomes a mortal threat, to be fought with every weapon the gang can bring to bear, including Yale’s Jewish donors.

I’m sure Mowbray doesn’t have a clue about the perverse irony of what he’s done – which plays directly into every conceivable anti-Semitic stereotype about wealthy Jews pulling strings from behind the scenes. Neither Al Jazeera nor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could dream up a scenario more calculated to confirm every Middle Eastern prejudice about what (and who) drives U.S. foreign policy. How can we explain to them that it’s just the educational bureaucrats at Yale, who would probably do whatever it takes to please any well-heeled group of donors – even if it involved putting on bright red lipstick and getting down on their knees. Especially that.

Steve at Deconsumption has a post on "Trolling for Dollars" - which touches on another class of professional online advocate - the paid troll, which I guess - if you're into caste systems - could be taxonomised as the untouchables of the online world.

I received a few hits today from the following referral address: http://arrca.netvocates.com/default/index.cfm?

Had it been just one hit I would have marked it off as noise...but there were several in a short space of time, so being the curious guy I am I decided to visit said site--but don't bother doing the same, as it's password firewalled.

Now strangely the hits were targetted not to Deconsumption's web-address itself, nor directly to any specific posting I wrote, but to the following url: "http://www.netvocates.com/tools/cleanpage.pl?postid=86242&postche..." That's the truncated report on what address was used to come into my site. I don't know what that means, but I imagine it's informative.

So anyway, intrigued by the off-chance that I might have found a new admirer, I decided I'd go the extra mile and Google-up "arrca netvocates". I mean if someone is having a private conversation about me, fine, but I'd at least like to know who they are. And fortunately the blogosphere is full of egoistically curious individuals like myself, because blogger Robin Hamman at Cybersoc.com had already gotten the low-down on NetVocates for himself just a little over a week ago:

"Other bloggers who have found themselves visited by NetVocates include:

PSoTD
Make Chai, Not War
CracksInTheFacade
pandora's jar of mixed nuts

What do each of these have in common? Well, based on a very brief visit to each, I'd say they all discuss political issues at least some of the time.

...So who are they?...I spent a bit more time on the NetVocates site and found this:

"NetVocates then recruits activists and consumers who share the client’s views in order to reinforce those key messages on targeted blogs – and rebut misinformation when appropriate."

So they hire sockpuppets to go out and pretend to be "ordinary users" when they post stuff on blogs?"

I won't steal all of Robin's thunder, and you should definitely take a peek over at his weblog for a better take on what his research dug up. But the gist of it is that NetVocates appears to offer a service whereby they will target weblogs which might "impact an organization and its products and image in uncontrolled and often unexpected ways", and they then hire individuals to post comments on those weblogs which will, presumably, help to create more "controlled" and "expected" impacts.

In other words they pay people to troll.

I noticed these guys (NetVocates) a few weeks ago in my logs. At the time they were trawling for blogs that mentioned "climate change", "earth" and "al gore" - so my initial guess was that they were doing advocacy / monitoring work for the forces of reality and measuring the impact of "An Inconvenient Truth".

The CEI "carbon dioxide is good for you" ads came out shortly after which left me undecided about their purpose though.

There are lots of firms doing this sort of stuff and to be honest I couldn't care less about them trolling blogs, other than my long term curiosity about the mechanics of the PR / spin / propaganda industries.

My view is that all debate is good - if paid trolls (and there are plenty of them out there - I used to bait them for sport for a short time) want to leave comments and spark debate let them do their best - its good for honing your own understanding of the world and learning how to mitigate various dishonest talking points when you're simply being bombarded with some sort of ideologically driven propaganda (and on that particular note, I'd love to see the stats on how much money goes into pro-war blog trolling vs the traditional placing of stories into the mainstream media - I suspect the different groups who fund these activities don't come up with a consolidated view though).

I did track referrals into this blog from various blog monitoring and tuning companies for a while - the weirdest one I've seen in my logs is a cross between Douglas Adams and Harvey Keitel - the "brand cleansers" at the discreet Vroomfondel - I never did manage to work out whose brand they wished to cleanse though.

The Sydney Morning Herald has an obituary for a Soviet dissident who got exiled to Munich for satirising (amongst other things) the Soviet propaganda system. Russian dissidents are always hard for me to understand - this particular one ended up thinking old Uncle Joe Stalin was a good guy, which seems to be a fairly difficult belief to cling to (though I guess, to give the old monster some credit, he was the driving force behind the downfall of Adolf Hitler).

The satirist and philosopher Alexander Zinoviev, who has died aged 83, fitted uneasily into the communist system under which he was born, but was equally uncomfortable when forced to play the role of exiled dissident.

The former fighter pilot turned philosopher created a biting satire of the society he had helped defend, which led to his exile by Leonid Brezhnev in 1978. However, he did not settle happily into Western emigre circles, nor was he an uncritical believer in Western democracy.

Growing freedoms under Mikhail Gorbachev were not to his liking, and by the 1990s he was advocating the return of the Communist Party to power, championing Stalin as the pre-eminent political figure of the 20th century and defending the former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic.

...

Zinoviev's first novel, The Yawning Heights, is set in a fictional Soviet town in which shortages are common, mediocrity praised and inefficiency a byword. The town is ruled by The Boss (Stalin) until he is deposed by The Hog (Khrushchev), whose only motive is to seize and retain power. The title is a reference to the gap between reality and propaganda.

And to close, check out "information" (via Past Peak).