Dear Mr Tony Burke, MP,

I don't expect that this letter in and of itself will make a jot of difference to the decision you have made to support the Gunns pulp mill project.
The fact that you lifted and used, word for word, company propaganda which has been long since debunked as blatant confabulation in your sales pitch to foreign investors, suggests that whatever relationship you have with Mr Gay is well and truly established.
You appear to represent the forces that are behind the steady and conscious erosion of quality in our natural world.
You are short term fiscal gain at the expense of my kid's future.
You are the merchant mentality gone mad.
You are economic fundamentalism.
You are the sale of life and breath for profit.
This much is obvious and in that you are not alone. You are surrounded by peers of your own ilk. Why, you probably believe most people think like you because you might not meet those who think otherwise very often, and when you do, they are shouting their message at you from an AFP maintained distance.
Am I right?
Just know, Mr Burke, that you are not a representative of the majority. You might not care what happens to a world that you won't have to live in for more than a few more decades, but being a politician you might care how you will be remembered in history.
Make no mistake Mr. Burke, moves are afoot to ensure that men like you are forever connected, personally, with the decisions that they make whilst in the offices that we, the people, award them.
For too long your class of person have massaged the machinery of mnemonic impunity.
No longer.
You might have gone to school with or joined the same clubs as the men who run the corporations that are eating our future... However, for once, why don't you try something different.
Do what's right for all of our futures instead of hiding behind the pathetic and discredited pseudo-excuses of "jobs" and "economy" to justify your decisions to act in support of your peers investment portfolios.
The age of mnemonic impunity is past. You will be remembered Mr. Burke.
Will it be as the man who sold our inheritance for short term gain and favours to mates? Or will it be as a man in that rarefied strata of leaders who acted to protect something for those who are not yet amongst us.
Don't forget, they will remember you too.

Yours, very sincerely,,

Letter to 4 Corners.

 A letter to the ABC "4 Corners" comments page in response to the Australian reaction to revelations about the serious mistreatment of Australian livestock being exported live to Indonesia.


We make many inferences about the nature of foreign cultures based on their approach to ethical challenges. We point our judgmental fingers at cultures who eat endangered wildlife. We cry foul at administrations who execute political dissidents. We have no time for traditions in which the abuse of women is endemic.
 Recently, incontrovertible evidence came to light of  pointless, gut-wrenching and routine torture of Australian cattle at the hands of our business partners in Indonesia.
 The researchers who brought these facts to the attention of the Australian public randomly picked a handful of abattoirs from amongst hundreds of similar Australian built operations. What they found was the systemic torture of the animals being processed in facilities paid for by Australian tax dollars at the hands of Australian trained personnel.
 To their credit, Australians everywhere were shocked into action and as a result, the live export industry was taken to task and the trade to Indonesia was put on hold.
 In the age old battle between ethics and profit, it looked, for a day or two, like we took the moral high ground. Very rare in today's Australia.
 How quickly the tide turns. Since the suspension of this despicable practice, the airwaves have been saturated with the plaintive wails of "poor bugger me" from representatives of the cattle industry. What are we to think of these people who present the argument that their livelihoods should take precedence over the welfare of the very creatures upon which their wealth is built?
 Is profit a sufficient argument for the turning of a blind eye to what we know is occurring at the cattle's final destination?
 The industry would have us believe that these randomly chosen facilities are anomalies that don't represent the otherwise excellent animal husbandry employed by the Indonesian side of their partnership.
 Exactly how stupid do these spokespeople think we are?
 It is not going to stop and it is not limited to the outfits into which the cameras were taken. It is in the workplace culture that this horrifying cruelty resides. It's built into the machinery that these animals are driven through; machinery that we helped to build and which we continue to feed.
 If we, as a society, continue to permit these crimes of abject cruelty and worse yet, to supply the victims to these monstrous facilities, then we as a society belong in the ranks of the cultures who's civility we ourselves question.
 For the first time since the dark years of Howard the Black Heart, I am feeling shame as an Australian.
 I've also stopped eating beef. Not because I fear for the treatment of livestock in Australian abattoirs, but rather because I refuse to give a cent to an industry who would knowingly feed their animals into this ongoing atrocity and then seek to justify their choice of business partners without reference to the much greater moral question.  If more of us make the same choice, how will that sit with your precious  profits.

Letter to ABC forum on live cattle export to Indonesia.

This letter was sent as a response to a forum discussion on ABC about live export in which someone commented on the new head of the RSPCA. The contributor felt that this person was inserted into the NGO executive to weaken the organisations ability to pursue their charter.


Well said. What we're seeing here is just another example of the "Howardian" subversion of ethical and scientific organisations for whom immediate profit is a secondary concern. These groups exist to take amoral, profiteering industries to task and force us as a society to consider our ethical position in the face of the temptation to abuse the creatures and environment from which we derive our wealth.
 The CSIRO, the EPA, the WWF and many other public and private offices for ethical and scientific thought were openly and deliberately infected by Howard's apparatchiks who vetted the output of those offices so as to minimize the inconvenience to the rapacious agenda of that time. Many members of those organisations quit in disgust and despair as a result of the bullying and sidelining they experienced at the hands of those carefully recruited sociopaths managing their workplaces. It was and is a spectacularly effective technique for the taming of NGOs who's charter is to counter the greed-driven feeding frenzy that is our modern corporatocracy.
 Why would those same forces not infect the RSPCA at this time of critical reassessment of our moral obligations to the animals we are driving, conscious, through the grinders to our north.

This letter was posted on Skeptical Science, a website designed to address the points that climate science deniers throw up in their debate. The site is full of excellent and measured information which succinctly debunks the standard toolkit of the deniers. Unfortunately the site's owners are still operating under the delusion that the deniers are honest interlocutors who simply need to be shown the facts to be brought on board and everything will be alright. The Sceptical Science website comments policy strictly forbids; politics, ad-hominem commentary, accusations of fraud or dishonesty and pretty much anything that addresses the real problem, namely the politicization, the fraud and dishonesty and the individuals who, paid and otherwise, inject mud into the waters of the debate to prevent the very resolution of the problems we have on the horizon. This post was removed for failing to remain in the safe and noninflammatory territory of selling the hard scientific facts of climate science to the converted.

The interests behind the global warming denial camp are not under any illusions that they are winning their argument, or even that their argument can in fact be won.

They are not interested in “winning” anything as mundane to them as this abstract treehugging argument.

The forces behind climate science denial are interested only in perpetuating the debate in the public domain. This is in spite the fact that the debate is long since settled in the fields of science relevant to the understanding of the issue. They know this. They also know, only too well, that the public perception of controversy is all that’s required for the maintenance of the obscenely profitable status quo.

 In the cases of tobacco, DDT, CFCs, asbestos and slavery, science and ethics predicted great harm and immediately, the techniques of science denial have swung in and granted a stay of execution, often for decades, to industries who have continued to reap the rewards while society procrastinates. For every extra day that these businesses get to ply their deadly trade, billions of dollars of profit and dizzying bonuses accumulate in the hands of the rapacious executives at the helm. Their entire model of economic enrichment is predicated upon the ability to go ahead with business as usual and the only thing that puts that at risk in the near term is society becoming convinced of the need for change. For that to happen, society needs to trust that the harm these industries do is understood and beyond doubt. Only then will the community overcome the terrible inertia inhibiting their activism and only then will the gutless twerps we call our “leaders” respond by limiting the potential for these industries to damage our future.

It should be no surprise that the P.R. firms who developed  Big Tobacco’s highly successful, multi-decadal campaign of science denial are the very same firms who now support Big Carbon’s efforts to spread mud into the clear waters of the message science is sending us. We need to stop wasting precious time trying to convince industry of the scientific truth and start informing the public of the black-hearted techniques that the industry deploys in managing their opinions about these big issues.

The reader may experience a certain amount of cognitive dissonance at the thought they could be victims of “opinion management”.  This might cause a person to resist accepting the notion that their reaction to the climate debate has been engineered by unethical but well demonstrated and powerful P.R. techniques.

Do yourself a favour, take an interest in the history and techniques of the P.R. industry and read some of the many published accounts of that industry’s “success” stories, published by the industry in their own journals and widely on the web.

 I've heard more than a few people exclaim, “no-one in high office would deliberately drive the planet into climatic and ecological jeopardy for individual gain! These captains of industry and government are intelligent, educated people who would never put profit before the good of humanity!”Not to burst their bubble but these Utopian dreamers need to see the vast body of reliable, peer reviewed work that demonstrates the capacity of humans to ignore evidence that sits in opposition to their worldview however unsupportable that worldview or incontrovertible the evidence might be. Changing your worldview is like changing your OS. A pain in the ass. This is the essence of the term “cognitive dissonance”. As Upton Sinclair said, “It is very difficult to make someone understand something when their salary relies on them not understanding it.” The clever PR person can use the power of cognitive dissonance as a blunt instrument or a scalpel.
 If that gives you a chill, then go to the various studies that demonstrate the fourfold concentration of psychopathic personalities in the highest offices of our corporations and government.
 This is difficult for many to accept, partly because most of us have a very limited picture of the psychopath as "the bug-eyed, axe-wielding maniac" of our nightmares and movies. That kind of psychopath is the kind that gets taken out of circulation quickly and dramatically. The rest of them live amongst us at a density of around one in one hundred in the general population. They are intelligent, often above average as a result of their abnormal brain. Again as a result of their abnormal brains, an entire network of processing lies unstimulated. In brain imaging tests this region just doesn't light up when the rest of the brain does ethical testing exercises.  This is the part of the brain that seems to deal with moral and ethical issues. The fear processing areas are similarly feeble  With no fear of repercussions and no internal behavior watchdog the impulsive ones qet removed from circulation quickly. The smart ones learn to fake social graces and to willfully learn a fear of getting caught, academically as a substitute for real fear..If they are smart enough to manage that, they are smart enough to remain in the community as “free range psychopaths”. Out here they run riot over their competition on their way to the top of their various games, unbound by the ethical and moral limits the rest of us elect to be bound by. In the halls of high office their numbers are estimated at as high as one in twenty five. In prison it's one in ten, the only place with a higher concentration of psychopaths in its population than in high office!

It’s is these same people who wield the tools of opinion management and who call the loudest shots in our society. It is these same people who are driving us to the point of no return in our delicate dance with the well understood chemistry of our atmosphere.