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Smartphones. How about dumbphones?

SMARTPHONE. Nice word – is the phone meant to be the smart one or does it make the user smarter? Or is it the case that the phone increases the chances of error to the extent that people do tend to make more errors?

There is a sense of arrogance evident when people use smartphones, forgetting that if they are stupid then they will end up doing stupid things.

Any computer can only be programmed by human beings. Humans are prone to make errors. And those errors will reflect themselves in the way computer programs behave.
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Crikey: Hypocrisy with a capital ‘h’

THE Australian newsletter Crikey is a publication that thinks it is top of the pile. It is always lecturing all and sundry about standards, journalistic and otherwise.

But when its own shortcomings (and they are legion) are pointed out, one doesn’t even get an acknowledgement. I sent the following missive to the editor about the edition of June 1. No response at all.
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Why Australian retailers suck

AUSTRALIAN retailers are always quick to whinge about the trading conditions they have to put up with, due to the high value of the Australian dollar.

They are very quick to offer excuse after excuse for their poor performance.

But there are other, more fundamental, reasons why Australian retailing is going downhill. The following anecdotes, drawn from my own experience, may provide some insight.
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Blurring the message

GONE are the days when politicians would speak directly to the people in order to communicate their message. These days, politicians use the media as a shield to try and get the message across.

That’s why they fail to win popular support.

It’s difficult to understand why, if politicians are seeking public support, they cannot go out and interact with the source of their power. Unless, of course, they are bad communicators, are afraid of being embarrassed in public, or are simply ill at ease with crowds.
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Anzac Day glorifies war

IN AUSTRALIA, Anzac Day is a means to promote militarism and nationalism. It marks the day when Australian forces invaded Turkey in 1915, entering World War I.

Sixty thousand Australians were killed in that war and nearly 16 million people died worldwide. It was no event over which to rejoice.

Anzac Day was initially used during the war to recruit people to fight on the other side of the world. In 1916 and 1917, Anzac Day became a means of supporting conscription.
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Afghanistan: lies and damn lies. No statistics

THIRTY-TWO Australians have died needlessly in Afghanistan. All of them were young, in their 20s and 30s, and have left young families behind. If there was some point to their dying, if they had sacrificed their lives for a worthy cause, then at least their loved ones would have some means of consoling themselves.

But that isn’t the case. They have died for nothing. They have died because one man’s vanity led to him thinking that he could do better than the old Soviet Union, the British Empire and even the much reviled Genghis Khan.

That one man is George Dubya Bush.
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The China wave

PROFESSOR Zhang Weiwei is not particularly well-known around the world. An author and former translator for the Chinese supreme leader Deng Xiaoping, Zhang is, however, a very important figure in China.

He has written a ground-breaking book, The China Wave – which has not, as far as I can make out, been translated into English – about China’s way of approaching development and one that is attracting great interest in his home country.

In an interview with the one news service that seems to have a knack for ferreting out the interesting and the newsworthy – Al Jazeera – Zhang made some very interesting observations.
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Burma: the gold rush has begun

THE push for democracy in Burma by the West has been going on for just one reason: resources.

Burma has gold, copper, tungsten, timber and oil in abundant quantities. All these years, the political situation and tight economic sanctions have not permitted exploration by Western companies. But now oil companies in the US are straining at the leash and waiting anxiously for the change to fly into Rangoon.

The Americans have already lifted some sanctions on Rangoon even though the only move towards a less rigid form of government has been an election in which the National League for Democracy was allowed to contest 45 of 664 seats.
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Three years on, Sri Lanka still bleeds

A MONTH and two weeks from now, it will be three years since Sri Lanka won its war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, effectively ending the campaign for a separate state for Tamils in Sri Lanka.

But there has been no movement on achieving a political solution to put the minority Tamils at ease. Instead, the triumphalism that has pervaded the country has seen the government act in a manner that can only serve to remind the Tamils that during the days when the Tigers were in the ascendant they were at least not marginalised in the way they are right now.

The Tigers had ensured that the north of the country was more or less completely occupied by Tamils. Now, the army is everywhere in the north and Sinhalese people are being resettled in large numbers to change the population mix. And, to rub it in, there are signs in many places that are only in Sinhala, a language that Tamils, cut off from the rest of the country for decades, cannot even speak.
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Journalism of the very best kind

CHANNEL 4 has done journalism proud, with a follow-up to its documentary on the war in Sri Lanka.

Last year, in June, the television network screened a documentary titled Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields which provided powerful evidence of war crimes by both the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers during the civil war which ended in May 2009.

The follow-up, titled Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields: War Crimes Unpunished, screened on the night of March 14 in London; it is available on YouTube and is a powerful reminder that in a day and age when journalism is often referred to as a dying profession, good investigative reports are worth more than their weight in gold.
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