Foreign Affairs, Research and Data Activities

I am fortunate in life to count one Professor Clinton Fernandes as a friend and comrade for something close to twenty years now. Last Friday he gave a very pertinent lecture with discussion (now available on Youtube)on the status of Australian foreign affairs, as a minor imperialist-capitalist power, and the increasingly strained relationship between China and the United States. The perspective that Clinton takes, backed by actual events, is that Australian governments do the bidding of our major capitalist corporations who are the substantive power in the country and present it in the guise of being in the "national interest". This includes activities such as spying on Timor-Leste, in order to generate a good oil deal (the scandal receiving an excellent and accurate summary by Juice Media) and effectively ensuring a change of opinion in the Solomon Islands over their undersea Internet cables. Clinton also makes the point that protests are effective and the scale of Australian protests against the invasion of Iraq did limit the number of personnel deployed and makes the prediction that if the US and China end up in a shooting conflict, it will be carried out quickly, as to prevent public opinion debating the matter. All of this was a matter of some discussion that I had with Anthony L., and Robin M., over dinner last night, given their involvement in the Australia-China Friendship Society.

I've decided to cast my linguistic eye towards the south and east Asia a little bit and have recommenced, yet again, my Duolingo studies in Mandarin and Bahasa Indonesian. In addition, because for some unfathomable reason that it is missing, I am doing just a little bit of Thai through a Memrise course that follows the Duolingo style. Being an incorrigible swat I have also taken up a Fundamentals of Pharmacology, which is seriously non-onerous and something I have had a vague interest in from the perspective of public health issues. More formally, I have also just handed in the draft of my second assignment (a grant proposal and philosophical grounding) for HEDU503 Research in Higher Education as part of my MHEd at the University of Otago. The final submission is in two week's time. Finally, following both the process of decluttering and data recovery that I mentioned in my last post, I have recovered everything I need from the various systems scattered around the house and now can go through the process of the great hardware cull. Unless anyone wants five-plus year old desktop systems?