patrick.net

Ha Ha Says:
March 26th, 2006 at 1:53 pm
I wonder why activist film makers such a Michael Moore does not do a film on Credit Bubble/Housing Price Absurdity…..

hmm, good question. too ephemeral, and off the radar of the 'big social issues'. he might focus on rampant homelessness. his latest thing is HMOs... interestingly, i think that welfare states with cheap, universal health care but over-priced housing are potentially no better off than the US system of potluck healthcare and oftentimes cheap housing...

quote from my blog:

"The main barrier to progress appears to be that housing continues to lie off-centre from the main economic, social and political concerns of governments at all levels. In part, this involves an inertial lag effect. For most of the post-War period, the vast majority of Australians have been well housed by historical and international standards. Housing, labour and financial markets worked together to ensure that housing standards were adequate or better for perhaps 85 per cent of the population. A similar proportion of the population became home owners at some time during their lives. The fact that this dominant housing career and expectation has broken down over the past 20 years appears to have eluded many policy makers, who still look to the housing market operating within conventional parameters to meet housing needs for all but a tiny residualised group in the population.

It is this dominant view—along with the tendency to uncritically celebrate house price inflation as a sign of a healthy economy and domestic world—that needs to be taken head on by people concerned with both Australia's long term economic sustainability and the immediate social problems of declining housing affordability for an increasing number of Australians."

Show me the money: financing more affordable housing - Mike Berry

i dunno, this blogsite has problems with posting a lot of the time, not to mention being cumbersome. i'm trying to get patrick to re-develop as a proper threaded forum with CHAT rooms!

Your friendly Indian allies:

NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has had to deal with the querulous left allies, without whose support his government cannot survive, for quite sometime now. Given their anti-US postures left protests were expected during the visit of US President George W Bush to India. However, it is the massive anti-Bush rallies in which Muslims participated that caught New Delhi unawares. It is perhaps the first instance of pan-Islamic sentiments so strongly expressed by the Muslims in India who number close to 150 million in the country, the largest population after Indonesia.

Hindu-Muslim riots broke out in Lucknow, the capital of UP, in which four people, including a 15-year-old girl, were killed and several injured. Elsewhere, across the nation, Muslims took to the streets in thousands chanting “death to enemies of Islam” and “down with US.” A mock funeral of Bush was staged at Hyderabad, a city that he visited.

http://militaryweek.com/southasiacalling.shtml

A memorandum submitted to Manmohan by Muslim leaders stated: "in the post cold-war era the American imperialism has posed a serious threat to the world order based on mutual respect for the sovereignty of every country. Unprovoked aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq and a threatening posture against Iran has proved beyond doubt that the new security doctrine of pre-emptive strikes to destroy all foci of potential resistance to American dictates of world order has blurred and finally erased the distinction between peace and war."

Indeed, India’s stand against Iran has been a sticking factor with the Muslims in India. New Delhi has been unhappy with Tehran repeatedly dragging India into its problems with Washington. On Sunday Iran trashed the US for its "double standards" in signing the nuclear deal with India. Iran's foreign ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said Washington was systematically trying to show Teheran in a bad light. "The United States' approach is a form of double standards. It signed a contract with a country that was not a member of the non-proliferation treaty. That is objectionable. On the other hand, it approaches Iran in such a (bad) way." India has not signed the NPT, which it says is discriminatory. Iran has voluntarily signed the agreement.

New Delhi has been trying to broker on behalf of Iran and has been instrumental in buying more time for Tehran at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) meet in September despite the anti-Iran vote. The November meet of the IAEA postponed action due to active behind the scene lobbying by New Delhi officials. Matters were relatively quiet on this front, until in January this year when Tehran removed UN seals from three nuclear facilities, ending a two-year suspension of uranium enrichment-related activities.

i know a few indians who say the whole place is mired in corruption, and no-one can do meaningful business as a result. to call places 'democracies', and see them all as strategic allies when in fact they have their own self-interested agendas would be a grave geopolitical mistake. for instance, india needs oil to industrialise, and guess where the nearest source is?

i haveen't even got wordpress working... is that the secret? should just get good quality forum software : (

i wouldn't fight 'em... they feud to the death, even the ones who've emigrated to australia... and there's lots of them... iran is 4 times the population of iraq and 4 times the area - and indonesia has 250 million muslims....

if they have depleting oil, then i guess international interest in those regions will go down, and there will be less tension and conflict between east and west... borders mean that populations cannot shift far, so if they cannot support the populations after peak oil, i don't know what happens...

i don't know about pax americana, i think that's an overstatement - the view here is that the US has corruptly meddled in too many other countries in the last 50 or 60 years, and causes a lot of the world's strife and mischief by appropriating an unfair share of resources through economic imperialism, covert activity and gunboat diplomacy...

funnily enough, the romans were always looking for pretexts to invade. they used to trigger wars of conquest by saying that the people in a new territory had offended one of their 'friends' in a neighbouring territory and that they therefore had to intercede. sometimes they even fabricated allies in neighbouring territories to do it. but they had a big 'discourse' about how they were civilising the world, etc, as they expanded, but they were ultimately warlike and unpopular, causing the germanic tribes to turn back on them eventually.... the equivalent militarisation may well be the truman doctrine...

hmm, maybe there is a perfect storm of peace, economic co-operation and sustainable development, on the other hand...

just hum the words to Imagine...

I think it's a shame that this thread peaked at only 299 comments. If only someone would come by and make it an even 300. Oh, well... :-(