Talented and intelligent filmmaker Christopher Nolan answers the question as philosophical meditation on morality, with an ethical code and moral boundaries as defining the nature of heroism and identity all amidst the vast backdrop of an old fashioned crime “epic” – oh, and with tons of massive explosions and excellent special effects, too. It’s precisely the cast and filmmakers’ intense dedication in sculpting the movie into something “more” than just “pulp” that makes The Dark Knight successful on so many different levels. In lesser hands [Joel Schumacher, for example], the production would resemble a garish, cartoonish parade blowing millions on a formulaic “good hero vs. colorful villain” narrative, which would be easily digested and just as easily forgotten by the time the audience walked to their cars.

Wisely, the filmmakers acknowledge and celebrate the comic medium as a landscape of the fantastic that can embody and personify very real human idealizations of heroism, bravery, tyranny and sacrifice. Indeed, some suggest that comic books have become the pop culture equivalent of modern day “mythology.” [More] . . read more

George Monbiot yesterday gave the crucial figures that need repeating. Capturing (+ burying) carbon from existing coal plants (if it works) will cost A$151-259 per tonne of CO2 whereas the Australian Govt is talking about A$20 per tonne initial price for CO2 emissions. The coal burning power stations will always choose to pay $20 or $50 or $100 per tonne rather than install carbon capture systems that will cost $150-250 per tonne.

Dr Ben McNeil, ARC QEII Research Fellow at the Climate Change Research Centre UNSW, gave the crucial evidence. He was chosen by Penny to give the big picture of the science. At one point he asked "why, if the car industry spends 4-5% on research, why does the mining resources industry spend only 0.3%". Because they know carbon capture is not going to work, Ben. Because even if a technological miracle makes it possible it will cost at least an extra A$150-250 per tonne, doubling or tripling the current retail price and that will be more expensive than existing solar, wind, hydro technology.

This is the elephant that Penny Wong and most Australian and British government members are furiously avoiding, planning and announcing new coal burning stations - the British in Kingsnorth and the Australians in Latrobe - even though their scientists are telling them it will always be too expensive to make them clean. It's like they've entered into an international pact with Coal. This is madness and Penny with her calm, reasonable argument is in the middle of it. . . read more

The election of Barack Obama to the US presidency is a great moment in history. But will it fulfill its promise? The promise of a paradigm shift in America's foreign policy which has been such a disaster since the Second World War and in its individualistic domestic economy which exacerbates the distance between the ‘haves' and the ‘have nots.', creating poverty amid plenty.

A shift from greed to need; from Dick Cheney to Martin Luther King; from men to women.

The question hangs on the ability of the new White House administration to avoid becoming a captive of the system. Of the military and security power-base; the corporate persuaders; the politics of the senate and the anti-intellectualism of the creationists, neocons and rednecks.

To avoid captivity, Barack Obama and his friends must change the system. They must act generatively not just to do things better - but to do better things.

In the end, the Clinton end-game strategy of using the race card, and of trying to recast herself, absurdly, as a working-class hero, may end up being all to the good for Obama. Clearly it forced him to move away from his empty “change” and “hope” slogans and to address the issues of ordinary working-class Americans - something he had largely avoided doing earlier in the campaign. It also put the issue of race - which the Republicans can be expected to use even more blatantly in the general election - out front and center, where it could be exposed to the light of day.

What seems to be happening is that racist Democrats, those who cannot vote for a black candidate, are rejecting Obama, and will probably either skip voting in November, or swing over to McCain, just as they swung over to Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon before, on different but related issues. The difference is that Obama seems to be able to reach independent white voters and even liberal and libertarian Republican voters who are turned off by the Republicans’ overt racism, as well as by many of the Republicans’ so-called “social policy” positions, such as abortion bans, opposition to gay rights, denial of global warming, etc. [More] . . read more

Camus was right, of course. As a baby boomer, it doesn't make me happy to say this; however, how else does one explain the "absolute conformity" (not to mention hypocrisy) of my once-rebellious generation?

We have to look inward. We're the ones who created this mess. We're the ones who abrogated our political idealism and slowly but surely conformed to establishment power and corporate materialism. And we're the ones who allowed George W. Bush, a baby boomer of the worst sort, to slime his way into the American presidency and bankrupt the country both economically and morally. No wonder young people and Europeans hate our guts...

Lucky for us, no one reads Camus anymore. After all, he was French and an intellectual and a left-wing radical; everything Americans despise and distrust. They would never have a beer (much less a glass of wine) with someone like Camus... Perhaps Barack Obama can change this paradigm. The young seem to like him, and so do the Europeans. And at least he's not a baby boomer. [More] . . read more

But this seismic shift in mass consciousness was nowhere to be seen in the Democratic primaries in recent months. On the contrary, as Hillary Clinton’s quest for the Democratic nomination succumbed to the momentum of Senator Barack Obama’s, the multi-millionaire Clinton ludicrously posed as a populist spokesperson for that minority of stereotypical rural, racist whites who steadfastly refuse to vote for any black candidate... Now, as Clinton faces the inevitability of failure in her quest for the presidency, she is floating the possibility of vice president on Obama’s ticket. He should give her a middle finger, after surveying the wreckage the Clinton campaign has left behind.

U.S. politics are at a potential turning point, in which a nation founded upon slavery, with racism ingrained in its very foundation, could finally begin to correct its hideous past. This process is long overdue. But realizing it requires a candidate willing to wage a frontal assault on the minority of white Americans from all social classes who still cling to racism — who the Clintons have consciously emboldened — while championing the civil rights of African-Americans, Muslims, Latinos and Asians victimized by the system. [More] . . read more

When I say your whiteness is showing this is what I mean: You claim that your opposition to Obama is an act of gender solidarity, in that women (and their male allies) need to stand up for women in the face of the sexist mistreatment of Clinton by the press. On this latter point - the one about the importance of standing up to the media for its often venal misogyny - you couldn't be more correct. As the father of two young girls who will have to contend with the poison of patriarchy all their lives, or at least until such time as that system of oppression is eradicated, I will be the first to join the boycott of, or demonstration on, whatever media outlet you choose to make that point.

But on the first part of the above equation - the part where you insist voting against Obama is about gender solidarity - you are, for lack of a better way to put it, completely full of crap. And what's worse is that at some level I suspect you know it. Voting against Senator Obama is not about gender solidarity. It is an act of white racial bonding, and it is grotesque. [More] . . read more

NSW Labor left machinations deserve media scrutiny, but not the past dominance of the Labor right? All critics of Public Transport just want to free up the roads for their benefit - there's no concerned users? Environmentalists are a distorting "vested interest", while developers having a foot in the door are just improving the economy for everyone's benefit? Costa was happy to abuse Government process to get his way, but when others do the same against him, well, that's just plain... unfair?

Certainly, portfolios are underfunded relative to expectations. We need to be realistic about costs. Goverments, State or Federal, claim credit for winds that blow in their favour - while someone else is to blame for everything wrong. Some problems act a fact of Government - that messy, ugly negotiation. But, States deliver services, abuse the national economy for their own benefit, finger point and blame shift. State Goverments are worth getting rid of. Personal dummy spits notwithstanding. . . read more

In the wake of his defeat the attacks on Howard's legacy will turn ferocious, but at their heart will be an unease, a ritual exorcism of something deeper that Australians would perhaps rather not admit. For a decade Howard's power had resided in his ability to speak directly and powerfully to the great negativity at the core of the Australian soul - its timidity, its conformity, its fear of other people and new ideas, its colonial desire to ape rather than lead, its shame that sometimes seems close to a terror of the uniqueness of its land and people.

At the end of his concession speech, Howard claimed to have left Australia prouder, stronger and more prosperous. But it didn't feel that way. It felt like it had been a lost decade. It felt like the country was frightened, unsure of what it now is, unready for the great changes it must make, and ill-fitted for the robust debates it must have. There was a strange sense that Australia, which had seemed so often to sleepwalk, mesmerised, through the past 11 years, had suddenly woken up. But where it might go and what it might do and be, no one any longer knew.

From The Guardian. Richard Flanagan is a novelist. . . read more

Do we have the second American civil war? Will some states want to secede from the Unitedness of it all? Will Bush hang in there for an extended second term 'in the national interest'? Will Mugabe ask for asylum?

Add to these nice concerns the impact of the recession-which-isnt-really-here-yet but will bite in the fall and the inevitable global tensions of a turbulent Beijing Olympics and you'd reckon on the message for 2009 being a right royal state of disunion. Get into gold or cash. Soonest. . . read more