Public Trust Journalism

Public Trust Journalism is critical to any form of democracy that can conceive of running a country devoid of the apathy that is repugnant to those, whom ‘of the people for the people’ has any real meaning. Without an operating process for the monitoring of bureaucratic activity, the result can only be worse than that which we have just witnessed, a runaway train wreck of George Bush proportions.

'By public trust journalism, I refer to journalism that applies scrutiny, analysis and accountability to governments, parliaments, politicians, public servants, judges, police, councils, the military, NGOs, diplomats, business and community leaders and the recipients of public funding.' * Eric Beecher

In Australia, most of this journalism has been funded by advertisers in the same newspapers, radio and TV programs that also undertook the “public trust” journalism. Those media outlets and their owners reveled it, while it lasted and they got to make extortionate profits from the ads at the same time as they were basking in the power and glory of running “public trust” journalism. Now, as advertising migrates from these profiteers to the Internet, the funding source is disappearing. http://www.crikey.com.au/2009/04/08/democracy-and-the-near-death-of-public-trust-journalism/

The ABC is the only alternative to the privately owned guardians but because of there close association with the very institutions being scrutinized, space should be put aside for the public to engage in online activities that would serve as the watchdog, that has been sadly lacking, and now runs the risk of totally disappearing. This is the right and responsibility of those who fund the ABC through there tax contributions and no one at the broadcasting commission nor the incumbent government, has the right to refuse.

Imagine, total accountability, transparent process and the ability to actually influence policy. These things can be achieved by demanding the obvious and necessary function of Public Trust Journalism be returned to the conscientious citizens who are prepared to participate in a broad spread of patriotic activity and a pinpoint of accountability, via an ABC supplied content management system designed for the specific task.

What perceivable application of democracy could you come up with that would come with in a bulls roar, of having a country wide forum for analysing all aspects of Governmental operations, in your home, at your disposal, twenty four hours a day?

A tall/short story

Super Professor/Administrator, I M Upitty signed off from the daily grind of endless discussion groups, countless working lunches and headed off in his Audi roadster to the airport for a rush trip into the field research part of His huge departments responsibilities. He was being pressured by the incumbent government’s budget restraints committee to actually come up with some positive actions in response to their massive financial contribution to His work. After a brief stop off at the Aero Ritz Bar and Grill to fortify himself for the hard yards which lay ahead, he boarded the private jet service flight to the remote location where he would have to walk all the way to the waiting helicopter. Just the thought it all was giving him a massive migraine, so he popped maybe one to many Vallium and managed to pass out for most of the gruelling three hour journey.

On arrival, the prearranged team of co-ordinators met Him with a small fleet of 4WD’s laden with all the provisions needed for an overnight stay in the potentially hostile territory referred to in His research as Problem area No:27b. This area had come under the spot light of all sorts of government research, it was unique in the sense that all the previous Aboriginal residents had move out because of the strict application of an alcohol cordon and now only poor white kids resided there, mainly because of a lack of transport. Small outposts of lean-to’s scattered over a large area was going to make the documenting of their current pathetic state difficult to say the least but, because of previous incursions into the area, Professor Upitty had it covered. He would make his base camp high on a ridge overlooking the creek where the little ferals tend to gather because of their need for water and the occasional yabby.

All had gone well up until the time they began to switch on the satellite surveillance grid and wouldn’t you know, it was down and a manual override had to be put in place before night fall. The professor tended to stay inside the air conditioned environment of the Hummer but as all the facilities of a fully operational field lab kicked into place and they settled down to observe the night time activities of the target groups, He positioned himself into the command chair ready to document anything that moved for the next twelve hours and had left word with his secretary not to be disturbed.

As the heat of the heat of the day subsided and night began to fall, all the occupants of the lean-to’s began to move about. Crime was about to erupt and the Prof. was feeling as hard as a Cobra. Soon the little perpetrators were brazenly about to start doing things in full view of the high tech surveillance devices and their conversations could be plainly heard via directional recording equipment aimed in their direction. Little fires began to erupt all along the banks of the creek even though there was a total fire ban covering the whole area. Before the night would be over, sex was bound to happen.

The morning light put an end to the operations, Professor Upitty thanked his team for a job well done and headed off back to the waiting helicopter to rush his findings to the sitting committee that was meeting for lunch at the Hyatt. As he walked from the rooftop helipad into lift he commented to His aids how tiring field work was but His findings would prove beyond a shadow of doubt, it was all worthwhile. As he took the floor to point to the evidence proudly displayed on the overhead projector, the professor’s demeanour changed to that of a highly concerned moral campaigner and everybody agreed that more money was needed to fight this grave injustice to human rights, law and order. His recommendations for more research and a higher police presence were well received and everybody felt sorry for these underprivileged kids when it was finally reported; “There just wasn’t enough money to relocate them and the facility to detain them was designed but not yet built, it would require further massive injections of funds".

A bigger bite!

Everyday, I see an army of minimum wage flunkies servicing the interests of property magnates. They are the cleaners, shop assistants and waiters etc, for the tourists industry that is the Gold Coast, Queensland.

Up untill now you could have done OK here in Paradise as a underpaid slave for the negatively geared investors club, by rolling over your home loan till the debt level reached $300,000.oo but now you are up the creek without a paddle. How do you service a community when, as school leavers are now realizing, you have to pay $300.oo per week rent or take out a home loan that your meager $17.50c hourly rate is never going to pay for?

Even if you bite the bullet, roll up your sleeves and get the home loan from hell, you still have to factor in your out of control transport costs, dental plans, rapidly rising power costs, food and rates that would make a blind man blink. When ever I have pointed out this abysmal state of affairs to the one's that created it by voting for John Howard, they allude to the misconception that education can fix the problem and if the ones who are doing it the toughest, would only work harder at getting themselves into a big HEX debt, then they too could join the ranks of the privileged. This unfortunately does not fix the problem, it just passes it of to another sucker because the units still have to be cleaned, the shops manned, the beer poured and it doesn't matter if you are a qualified rocket scientist, you are still a only going to get less than $20.oo an hour to do it.

This problem is REAL, this dilemma is NOW and I would not consider voting for anybody/party that doesn't have a plan for addressing the inequality between the classes because what is going to happen when hard working, young family starters are being jailed for not being able to meet their debts.

It is in every bodies best interests that the working poor be given a bigger bite of the hamburger and that the over fed stop being so dam greedy.

BITE ME!

It's about time someone highlighted the disparity between the poorly paid underclass of people who are the bottom tier of the pyramid that is Australian society and the ones who attain higher status, by standing on their shoulders.

When I was a school leaver, forty years ago, petrol was less than 50c a gallon (that's about 4-5 lts for the uneducated), you could buy a new car for less than $3000 or a home for $20,000 and as an unqualified teenager, I could easily earn $10 ph labouring and $350 pw was not an unrealistic take home pay.

Today a young person in similar circumstance has to pay at least $6 per gallon for fuel, $15,000 for a new car and $250,000 for a home. So it is with great sobriety that I state " the average child in this country will have to earn ten times more than my generation to have a chance at achieving the lifestyle their grand/parents rose to." Now while this might be possible for the offspring of the ruling class it is virtually impossible for the bulk of average kids so don't continue to delude yourself any longer, if our children are not revolting, they should be.

Nothing new under the sun?

Nothing new under the sun?

Doing time, is an inevitability, because in the end all we have is time and time is what we don't have enough of.

Achievement requires doing time; a tradesman does time as an apprentice, a sports-person time in the gym and a scholar, time in the library. You could say it is one of the laws of creation, whether you are a Darwinist or a literal six day-ist, you can't be a big fish until you've done time as a guppy. Maybe this is why plagiarism is considered the unforgivable sin by those that haunt the corridors of the academic fortress, because no one knows better than them; if an engineer cheats his/her way into a position of authority the bridges of humanity begin to fall down.

Evil cheats the laws of creation, yet as a Lucifer, it presents as a manifestation of light. Just imagine if a patents clerk stole the idea for nuclear fussion and created a bomb, instead of free enery for the benefit of mankind, or a militaristic dictator stole the plans for a democracy and used them to defeat any opposition to his/her totalitarian reign.

History is full of such examples and can be studied as the rise and fall of any civilization. Our challenge, if we are to break the mold of a crumbling society, is to clearly locate and isolate the points were we are cheating and there is no doubt in my mind that when elements of destruction are elevated to the positions of acceptable solutions, the rot starts to set in. When the taxes collected from gambling, alcohol, tobacco and speeding cars are factored into the health budget, problems are not far ahead. When the army that destroys a city or country is left in charge of it's reconstruction, years of chaos will ensue. While the jailers of men like Nelson Mandela are running the radio stations and the rest of the media, apartheid in it's myriad of forms will preside.

Until the thorn birds are not left to rot on the vines for the pleasurable sounds they bring to the ears of the evil running the orchard and the interpretors of agony into ecstasy are removed from their privileged positions, we are at risk, our existence is challenged and the future happiness of our mutual children is in jeopardy. Let us at least try to define something new under the sun, peace and justice for all.

Dumb Insolence !

The act of remaining silent in a presumptuous and insulting manner.

During the course of the Second World War if you were charged and found guilty of dumb insolence, you could be legally stood up against a wall and shot; so serious was the nature of the crime. It's an effective way of protesting in the face of authority when the words are not allowed to be spoken because they may incriminate you and while the fifth amendment of the United States ConstitutionNo person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger goes some what towards protecting perpetrators of the act, even there it can be overridden by the military, during times of war.

Now while authorities have found this type of behavior unacceptable in people who are accountable to them, they don't hesitate to use it themselves, when it suits them; to say "no comment". Reguardless of whether you are supported by an authority or not, it is particularly annoying when you come up against it, especially when the perportrator is just using the "crime" because they want their way and don't have a valid argument to support their case. In everyday life, dumb insolence can be used as a tool for bullying people, for example; a group of cool kids decide to ignore a nerd by pretending he/she does not exist or a mean spirited individual monopolizes something that somebody else needs and refuses to dialog on resolving the issue.

In the commercial world, the right to say "no comment" or punish someone for dumb insolence is metered out by Buck the Almighty.
In the world of public service the privilege is decided by, he/she whom recieves the most money from the public purse. In a fair and equitable democracy, no one would be allowed to sink so low that they would use dumb insolence as a tool for pushing people around, without a valid exemption for the instance.

I like to pride myself as being a decent judge of character by sticking to a few basic rules;
* don't relate the size of someones wallet to their worth
* don't morally grade someone on what church they attend or their position in it
* don't worry about what dangles between someones legs or lack thereof
and if someone is able to rationally talk about conflicts of opinion, they are less likely to resort to violence and unjust acts.

The scatological dissemination society

The scatological dissemination society

The science derives from the Greeks (σκώρ "feces" & λογικός "the study of reasoning").

In considering this important strain of scientific understanding lets take for instance the story of Troy or the exploits of Alexander the Great, as examples of how scatological droppings can spread all around the world. In reality they were a rampaging bunch of barbaric invaders who raped and pillaged, but if you read their literature, they are reconstructed as legendary heroes. Similarly, the Romans carried on the tradition, along with every other Empirical regime since and if the Nazis won the second world war, we would be up to our ears in their brand of pooh. Currently the new crop of beefcake paddies are being spread by the Americans in conjunction with their coalition of comrades in arms and the trails all seem to lead back to the Pentagon, or associated agencies. The heaviest deposits seem to accumulate around technology centers and if you are seeking some specimens they won't be far from a computer or the media based service providers.

Now while this brand of anthropological data has been used efficiently to keep the average Joe Blow up to date with what is expected of them to know, it is getting a little long in the tooth and it might be time for those in the industry to reconsider the way they go about their "science". What with the invention of all the mod-cons we the people have at our disposal, like flushing toilets etc, we can learn to analize the stools for ourselves and a new era of freedom from the muck spreaders can be achieved.

So, it is with great respect that I propose the end of the scatological dissemination society and the beginnings of a new way of understanding how the Great Apes go about their buisness.