My latest post over at Care2 is up.  It’s all about this lovely little mess of a music video:

Here’s a taste:

[The video] is but the latest example of what I like to call activist narcissism, the impossibly naive belief that getting a bunch of beautiful people together to preen and act outraged is an adequate substitute for real change.  If these musicians (and impossibly hot actresses) really want to effect change, perhaps they can stop flying around the world on private jets and living in 10,000 sq. ft mansions.

I blame Will.I.Am, the patron saint of the inspiring-multiple-trendy-musicians-and-impossibly-hot-actresses-who-think-they can-sing-mash-up.  And as inspiring as “Yes We Can” may have been, can we agree to an immediate United Nations-brokered moratorium on such nonsense?

You can read the whole thing here.

What I don’t write about is the fact that they’ve trashed an awesomely cool song:

The best review of the new version is the one by Sam Roggeveen over at The Interpreter:

Not since the ‘Yes we can’ song recorded by Barack Obama’s celebrity chorus has there been such a sickening display of superiority and completely unmerited self-regard. They’ve even done away with the driving rock cred of Midnight Oil’s original and replaced it with a pop melange that’s as bland as milky tea, so there’s nothing to disguise the fatuous lyrics. Absolutely wretched.

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I hope to have some thoughts on Obama’s speech to the UN a little later today, but right now I want to focus on what may be the most underreported story of the day:  what’s happening in Australia.

Take a look at this.  It’s not Mars.

Sydney woke up this morning to a massive dust storm that turned the sky red and sent hundreds to hospitals with breathing problems.  The Associated Press, via the NYT:

Australia’s worst dust storm in 70 years blanketed the heavily populated east coast Wednesday in a cloud of red Outback grit, nearly closed the country’s largest airport and left millions of people coughing and sputtering in the streets.

No one was hurt as a result of the pall that swept in overnight, bringing an eerie orange dawn to Sydney, but ambulance services reported a spike in emergency calls from people with breathing difficulties, and police warned drivers to take it easy on the roads.

Dust clouds blowing east from Australia’s dry interior — parched even further by the worst drought on record — covered dozens of towns and cities in two states as strong winds snatched up tons of topsoil, threw it high into the sky and carried it hundreds of miles (kilometers).

The Australian provides an idea of how bad the air quality was:

Paramedics were called to help 469 patients suffering from breathing problems from 6am yesterday — 218 of them in Sydney, where particulate matter brought by the dust storm peaked at more than 15,500 micrograms per cubic metre of air.

A reading of more than 100mcg/m3 is normally taken to indicate poor-quality air, and more than 200 is ranked as hazardous to human health under the air quality index used by the [New South Wales] government.  Yet officials said readings yesterday were “off the chart” and throughout the day remained several times higher than the worst levels that would normally be seen in a bushfire, of 300 to 500mcg/m3.

Last night, even as the dust began to disperse, the readings were still more than 3000 in most parts of Sydney, reaching 4750 in the lower Hunter region and 4231 in the central tablelands.

To give you an idea of how bad this is, people were worried in the leadup to the 2008 Olympics that Beijing would have particluate matter levels of between 200 and 300 mcg/m3.  Here are the readings taken by the BBC in the days leading up to the Opening Ceremonies:

During the storm today Sydney was 550 times worse than the worst pre-Olympic reading.

As Jared Diamond noted in his book Collapse, Australia is one of the most fragile modern societies in existence.  Although this video (from Phillip Adams of the Australian Broadcast Corporation) is two years old, it provides a pretty good idea of the challenges the country faces:

As Adams notes, Australia is “looking down the barrel of a disaster.”  He talks about the potential of a Katrina in Australia, but as today’s events show, there are multiple potential crises.  Right now, the biggest challenge the country faces is not water, but the lack thereof.  Its entire infrastructure is predicated on a water table that, given weather patterns, is unsustainable.  The country is quite literally drying up.

Before the day was over, the Australia’s red dawn had passed.  Below are two shots of downtown Sydney.  The lower one was during the storm; the upper one was taken from the same spot later that afternoon:

The dust storm may be over, but Australia’s more fundamental climate challenges aren’t going anywhere.

The Big Picture has an amazing roundup of photos taken during the storm — well worth your time.

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Via Reuters:

An Australian couple thought they were being attacked by an intruder when a kangaroo crashed through their bedroom window and started jumping on them.

“My initial thought, when I was half awake, was it’s a lunatic ninja coming through the window. It seems about as likely as a kangaroo breaking in,” Beat Ettlin told local media on Monday.

The three meter (9 feet) kangaroo smashed through the window in Ettlin’s Canberra home on Sunday night.

While Ettlin and his wife and young daughter took refuge under the blankets, the injured kangaroo jumped on top of them, gouging holes in the furniture and smearing blood all over the walls, said the Australian Associated Press.

The next thing Ettlin heard was his 10-year-old son Leighton screaming from his bed: “There’s a ‘roo in my room!’” Ettlin, a 42-year-old chef, wrestled the bleeding kangaroo, got it into a headlock and dragged it out the front door. The kangaroo disappeared into bushes.

Kinda gives new meaning to Iron Chef, doesn’t it?  Maybe WWE and Iron Chef should get together for a show where chefs have to wrestle the food before they prepare it.

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Australia is experiencing the worst wildfires in its history — over 160 dead.  The fires are mostly in Victoria — mainly to the north and west of Melbourne — and appear to be the result of arson.  A massive heat wave that has seen temperatures go as high as 130 degrees isn’t helping matters, nor is record drought.

As is usually the case, The Big Picture blog has the best coverage:

A fire truck moves away from out of control flames from a bushfire in the Bunyip Sate Forest near the township of Tonimbuk, 125 kilometers (78 miles) west of Melbourne, Saturday, Feb. 7, 2009. Walls of flame roared across southeastern Australia, razing scores of homes, forests and farmland in the sunburned country’s worst wildfire disaster in a quarter century.

You can view the entire portfolio at the Big Picture.  Warning:  some of the photos are quite shocking.

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I’ll have a longer post later this morning on the Olympics, but I wanted to share the following story, related by BBC correspondent Nick Bryant, about the Sydney Olympics:

One of my favourite yarns from the Sydney Olympics concerns the thin blue line painted onto the roads as a guide for runners in the marathon. In the middle of the night, as most of Sydney slept, someone armed with a brush and a can of blue paint decided the route was in need of a detour - and redirected it into a nearby pub.

Now contrast that with this story in The New York Times:

Chinese officials have thrown an almost smothering blanket of security across this capital of 17 million in preparation for the start of the Olympic Games on Friday. Above all else, Chinese leaders say, these Olympics will be “safe.”

…[I]n Beijing, the city is edging toward war footing. More than 34,000 military personnel and 74 airplanes, 47 helicopters and 33 navy ships have been deployed, said Col. Tian Yixiang, director of the military affairs department in the Olympic security command center. The Chinese government has also been installing tens of thousands of surveillance cameras on lamp poles and in Internet cafes and bars.

“Safe,” maybe, but fun?  Not gonna happen.  If Chinese security sees people having fun, they are under instructions to deport them immediately.  If Sydney was the most fun you could have at the Games, Beijing is going to be the exact opposite — the no fun Games.  You will only have fun if we say you are to have fun, and then you will have fun now.

To put it another way, if you were in a bar with a guy who spends his life surfing and a guy who works airport security, which one would you rather hang out with?

Welcome to the Controlympics.

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That wacky, wacky Hu Juntao — he’s such a kidder!  Via the BBC:

With one week to go to the Beijing Olympics, Chinese President Hu Jintao has urged people not to politicise the Games….  Mr. Hu said politicising the event undermined the Olympic movement, and called for dialogue to resolve contentious issues.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.  As my 20-month-old daughter would say, “So funny.”

Contrary to the myth propagated by the IOC (and NBC), the Olympics aren’t about bringing the world together; they’re about nations competing, often viciously, to demonstrate their superiority.  And this year, no one is doing that more loudly or frequently than the ChiComs.

Much as Berlin 1936 was about demonstrating Germany’s reemergence as a major player on the world scene, Beijing 2008 is about showing China’s dynamism and power.  That is why the ChiComs basically tore down the entire freaking city and rebuilt it from scratch.  Albert Speer, white courtesy phone please.

In fairness to the Chinese, no recent Olympics host has avoided the temptation to use the Games to show off.  The United States was just as bad in Atlanta and Los Angeles, the Soviets were almost as over the top in Moscow, the South Koreans had their moments in Seoul, and the Brits will represent more of the same in four years.  Even the Greeks managed to be loud, proud, and jingoistic in 2004.  After all, that’s the whole point:  countries fight so hard to host one of these quadrennial monstrosities posing as spectacular sporting events so they can act like the diplomatic equivalent of alpha males.

The only exception I can think of are the Aussies in 2000.  They were having far too much fun to be overtly nationalistic.  Occasionally obnoxious, sure, but that was just the alcohol talking.

That said, when Molly and I visited Melbourne during the 2006 Commonwealth games, we were treated to a roomful of our well-lubricated friends cheerfully shouting “Aussie Aussie Oi Oi!” over and over and over again as their countrymen and -women swept the swimming medals.  So perhaps even the residents of Oz are not immune to nationalism’s siren call.

Photo credits:

• Beijing National Stadium:  via darajan, using a Creative Commons license.
• Berlin Olympic Stadium:  via Olympiastadium Berlin, public domain.

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Apparently The Condi has something other than golf she is looking forward to pursuing:

When Condoleezza Rice’s term in office ends, she is looking forward to “getting back to shopping”, she says.  The US secretary of state told girls at a school in Perth, Australia, that she used to “hit the stores” with her mother on Sunday mornings after church.  “It’s a great pastime, shopping. I love it, even if I don’t buy anything. I just love going to the stores to look.”

Kinda brings a new meaning to the term “golf spikes.”

The sooner you can get to the mall and the links, the happier we’ll all be, Madam Secretary.  But do you think you could spend at least a small part of your remaining time in office doing something other than just dreaming about retirement?

Image courtesy of the Jimmy Choo Autumn/Winter ‘08 collection.

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Remember in Rain Man, when Ray (Dustin Hoffman) refused to fly on any airline except Qantas because only Qantas “never crashed”?

Read the rest of this entry »

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