A Different Drummer

These protesters in their approved "protest zone" at the Democratic convention in Denver remind me of the protests in Cairo, where protesters were usually outnumbered 5:1 by security forces:

I blame this on foreign girls with their gorgeous accents:

An analysis of new census figures has shown that Australia is suffering from an unprecedented "man drought". The statistics have revealed that there are almost 100,000 more females than males in Australia.

Thirty years ago Australia was with flush with men thanks to immigration policies that favoured males. That position has been reversed because thousands of Australian men in their 20s and early 30s have gone overseas either to travel or work....

"If you go into the United Arab Emirates census you'll find there is around 12,000 Australians living in Dubai, mostly male, mostly in the 25 to 34-year age group." (BBC)

The whole story shows two big demographic shifts are happening: men from the big cities are moving abroad, and women from the country towns are moving to the cities. So you have big cities flooded with single women and country towns flooded with single men.

There are plenty of good reasons why young Australians are choosing to live abroad in their twenties and thirties, but no I have no idea why it is disproportionately men who are doing so.

The numbers could also be a bit more complicated than the story suggests. Sure, there are more expat Aussie men than women in Dubai, but I'm sure the numbers are much closer to even in places like London, home to something like 200,000 Aussies.

A brilliant, righteous editorial in The National today by Ayman Safadi:

Winning in the Olympics requires planning, hard work, commitment and institutions that design strategies and invest in the requirements for success. All these are missing in an Arab world still intoxicated by a false sense of supremacy and unwilling to admit failure. The fiasco at the Olympics is not a rare disappointment. It is repeated in almost all aspects of life...

It is telling that there are no role models in the Arab world. Bed-time stories still summon personalities belonging to centuries gone by. Disgruntlement with the present and lack of trust in a better future force people to remain stuck in the perceived glories of the past. Dreams take people centuries backward rather than carrying them into the future. The personalities celebrated in popular culture are mainly historical war heroes, invoking memories of a “golden era” with little or no actual relevance to the present. They do not provide incentives for excellence in sport or the arts.

Only political leaders are allowed to compete with glorified historical figures. The majority of them, however, does not inspire excellence or innovation or the belief that hard work yields success. Nor do these leaders invest in the conditions necessary for nurturing the talent of their populations. State resources are mainly channelled toward erecting security structures that protect their regimes. In some Arab countries, the sum of money spent on arms, mainly used to suppress domestic discontent, is far greater than the money spent on education, health and, of course, sport."

Read it all.

The best part? Hosni Mubarak has ordered an enquiry into why Egypt did so poorly at the Games. Gee, I wonder.

Easily the most awe-inspiring photo of the Deathspire Burj Dubai that I have ever seen:

Click on it for the full-size terror - and check the whole gallery by the photographer David Hobcote at gizmodo.com.

Getting to talk to interesting people about how the world works and then write about it is pretty much my dream job, so getting to do it for the time being is pretty awesome. But it certainly does suck to hear all these smart people talking about how my industry is doomed. As a geek, technophile and Google lover, hearing Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, calmly and dispassionately explain how screwed we all are is especially rough. Check it out, three minutes of pure bring the pain...

As a journalist, you dream of writing two paragraphs like this:

As the newlyweds struggled on the ground, a police officer used a Taser on Somora, 29, police said. Pastuszwska, 28, was holding her new husband tight, and was shocked as well, Skowron and authorities said.

"Imagine the kids and grandma seeing the bride and groom getting Tasered on the floor," said Skowron. "In my opinion, the police totally overreacted."

The whole story must be read, as an epic reflection on the beauty of life. That wasn't the last time the couple would be tasered in the days following their wedding....

Are you a big, militarised nation pissed of at a small, overconfident neighbour that acts like it can stand up to you because of implicit US backing? Fear not! As Russia has shown, that US backing probably won't convert into much to be too worried about.

So Iran's timing in starting a small, seemingly unimportant fight with the UAE is interesting. Especially when they start busting out rhetoric like this from the Iranian foreign ministry:

“The next crisis predicted to cover mainly the Persian Gulf is the crisis of legitimacy of the monarchies and traditional systems which, considering current circumstances, cannot go on living.”

Zing. It should be said, there are some pretty important differences between the Russia-Georgia situation and the Iran-Gulf one:

- Nobody wants to pick an actual fight with Russia, for both practical and strategic reasons. Plenty of countries would love to send a few thousand-pound bombs into Tehran, and are itching for the excuse to do it.

- Iran and the UAE are very closely connected - as one of the only places they can still do business, there is a ton of Iranian money invested in Dubai, and a shitload of Iranaian trade goes via the UAE.

- Iran is not stupid. Just as clearly would not start a nuclear war that would lead to its annihilation, it seems crazy to think that it would start a pointless war with a Gulf state that would lead to bad consequences (big economic problems, further isolation, no more pilgrims to Mecca etc).

- Although the committment of its largely expatriate armed forces is questionable, the UAE is the third-largest importer of American weapons, and would certainly do some damage to Iran.

But none of these points really undercuts the basic realisation that big, armed up countries are having post-Georgia: discount the real hard power of "Western" backing, remind your blustering smaller neighbours who the real daddy is.

Emad on the failed opportunity that was Pervez Musharraf:

"Sitting at the student lounge at LUMS, I saw the small crowd erupt in an applause the moment the words (I translate), ".. in light of this, I am resigning from my post", were spoken by the now former President Musharraf.

Almost 9 years ago, I had rejoiced in a similar manner seeing him oust Nawaz Sharif in a military-led coup. For years after that, I was a vehement supporter of the man and his policies, calling him a benevolent leader. I did buy into his charisma and the straightforward manner of his expression. I did appreciate the skill and confidence with which he carried the flag of the country internationally. I liked the easing relationship with India and I appreciated the moderate views he brought with him to office."

Read the whole thing. Most of the switched on middle-upper class Pakistanis I have met say similar things, that Musharraf was right to oust Sharif, that he pushed things in the right direction economically and socially, that he completely fucked it all up in the last year.

With The General gone, the country will be ruled by someone with a pretty questionable moral code ("Mr Ten Per Cent"), which sadly is seen as an improvement by many. Like India, Pakistan is crammed to the rafters with some of the world's most talented, passionate, honorable and hard-working people; you can only hope it moves forward in the same direction as its neighbour to the south, rather than its considerably less successful neighbour to the north.

(I should take this occasion to direct newer readers to the first and only poem I have ever written, "How My Uncomfortable Lunch With Pervez Musharraf, President of Pakistan and Chief of Army Staff of the Pakistan Armed Forces, Didn't Work Out So Well". Read it with low expectations and you'll only be mildly dissapointed.)

(UPDATED below)

Bolt's absolute dominance of the 100 metre sprint was impressive. But it is incumbent on me as an honest patriot to direct all readers to Australia's greatest Olympic moment. Our first ever gold medal at the Winter Olympics.

You see, winning in sports that your country cares deeply about is all well and good. But the truly great wins, the ones you savour for decades to come, happen when you are victorious at a sport you don't even try to compete in, like handball or soccer.

So when Stephen Bradbury triumphed in the speed skating at Salt Lake City, it really meant something, because we only have about three skating rinks in Australia, and they are filled with stumbling 13 year olds for most of the day. As you will see in the clip below, it was a truly glorious Aussie victory:



UPDATE: I'd be a fool not to include the greatest moment of the 2000 Olympics in Sydney - the stunning mens 100-metre freestyle heat featuring the one and only (literally the only) Eric "the Eel" Moussambani:

Some people will tell you that farming is the world's oldest profession, some say it's prostitution.

They'e all wrong. For thousands of years, Egyptians have been ripping off tourists at the pyramids. They spotted Herodotus for a sucker, fleeced the 14th-century King of Mali, extracted rivers of baksheesh from Mark Twain and probably conned more money from American tourists today than you'll earn this year.

It is an ability that has become almost genetic, as if those who live and work by the pyramids have evolved over thousands of years in a brutal Survival of the Dodgiest. Only the man who can sucker foreigners into paying $80 for a ten-cent piece of cloth is destined to reproduce and have his unique, sketchy blueprint remain in genetic circulation.

But all that may be coming to an end. Things are changing, for the better or worse depending on your outlook:

"Visiting Egypt's famed Giza Pyramids has long been a nightmare, with hawkers peddling camel rides and pharaonic trinkets hustling tourists relentlessly at every turn.

But now the hustlers are gone, as Egypt unveiled on Monday the first stage of an elaborate project to modernize the site and make it more tourist-friendly, complete with security cameras and a 12-mile fence with infrared sensors surrounding the site.

"It was a zoo," Zahi Hawass, Egypt's chief archaeologist, said of the usual free-for-all at the pyramids. "Now we are protecting both the tourists and the ancient monuments." (IHT)

I suppose this is "good" news, but I don't like it, for a few reasons:

- The pyramids are MEANT to be a strange, uncomfortable experience involving way too much haggling and frustration. Welcome to Cairo, assholes. If you want pleasant, comfortable serenity, go to the frigging British Museum or something.

- The pyramids are like flypaper for the bumbag-and-backpack gaggle of lurid tourists and the awful Cairo conmen who prey upon them. If the conmen can't do business there, they will probably just descend on other parts of the great city, becoming apartment brokers in Zamalek or something....

- It's not as if the pyramids really need the preservation. Of all the historic sites in the world that can handle as much punishment as human beings can physically throw at them, the pyramids have to be number one, two and three. They are indestructible. If you want to protect something, how about all those gorgeous thousand year old mosques in the Old City that are falling to pieces and under the sole jusridiction of some random 120 year-old dude who uses them as a storehouse for piles of broken pieces of other mosques, etc...

- "Hawass insisted none of the innovations will diminish the experience of the visit. "We are giving back the magic of the pyramids," Hawass said."

Wrong. The magic of the pyramids is that despite thousands of years of total neglect, non-existent management and industrial scale fleecing and harassment, they are still the world's greatest tourist site. Only Egyptians can pull of a trick like that, and this is just messing it up.

The geek within me was almost uncontrollably turned on by these wonderful photos of the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, which will soon start accelerating atoms to just below the speed of light, racing them around a 27 kilometer tunnel cooled to absolute zero, then smashing them down into their sub-sub-atomic components and looking at them.

As a pure, audacious feat of human potential, the LHC is probably the most significant achievement since reaching the moon. It comes at a perfect time - when people around the world are losing faith in institutions and our ability to navigate a tricky future, the world's smartest people are about to pull of a feat of literally unimaginable complexity. The reward will be clues to nothing less than how it is the universe came into existence, and what it is made out of on a fundamental level.

That is seriously cool - as cool as the space program, as cool as DNA, as cool as the internet. I need to go and hug a scientist.

In tribute, I offer one supercollider to another: Large Hadron Collider, let me introduce you to "supercollider", the lovely brand spanking new Radiohead song that I was lucky enough to see performed last month in Amsterdam.




Supercollider
Twisted and broken
Particles scatter
Brought in from the sun
Swimming up stream, before the heavens crack open
Thin pixelations, coming up from the dust

In a blue light
In a green light
In a half-life
In an odd light

I’m a brain stem flip-flopping
I’m a pulse wave hot-stepping
I put the shadows back into the boxes
I am open
I am welcome
For a fraction of a second
I have jettisoned my illusions
I have dislodged my depressions
I put the shadows back into the boxes.
I put the shadows back into the boxes.