For some reason Ustream only recorded the first 70 minutes of that program, so the remaining 2+ hours is lost forever. Apart from this inaugural Christmas Message, which must be preserved for future generations! If the video player does not appear immediately below, try watching it directly at Viddler.

Warning: There is “strong language”. Well, not by my standards, but maybe by yours.

The full text is over the jump, should you wish to read along. However my main aim in putting it there was to attract Teh Googles.

Also, the Message is riddled with continuity and other errors. Perhaps, if you’re bored, you can amuse yourself by listing them in the comments. I won’t mind.

My especial thanks to ’Pong for the massive amount of work on this silly project.

His Benevolence Stilgherrian’s Christmas Message 2008

Good evening, sheep. Sorry, “subjects”. We trust that you’ve had time today to partake in the traditions of Christmas.

The gluttony. The binge drinking. Bongs and backyard cricket. False affection for the relatives you hardly know. False enthusiasm for presents that you’d never have bought with your own money. A fight with your parents about something that’s so deeply repressed in your childhood memories that you can’t remember what it was about — neither of you can — but you know that you hate them you hate them you hate them!

Another drink. Another bong — though perhaps later. Furtive sex with a person you later discover is your actually a close niece or nephew. Another three drinks. Then the depressing realisation that you’ve paid for this. Your credit card is exhausted. And so are you.

By now your guests have departed. You’ve stumbled back inside, ignoring the cyclonic disaster hell that is your back yard and the rest of your house — the rest of your life. You slump on the couch, pour an even larger drink to wash down another year of complete misery. You turn on the TV. You realise that, like every other year before, all 40 channels are full of shit.

As I say, you pay for this.

And so here we are. Cheers!

As your Tsar, I’ve had a challenging year in 2008. And I suppose you have too, but in a simpler, proletarian kind of way.

The global economy has collapsed. Apparently you shouldn’t lend money to people who can’t afford to pay it back! Apparently credit default swaps are really just a kind of expensive game of musical chairs. But the music’s stopped.

The signs of global warming have become obvious, and all of those predictions — the Arctic ice packs melting, the most rapid variation of climate, of floods, hurricanes, of fire, drought — they’ve all happened just as was predicted three decades ago.

The pointless wars over oil continue. We respond not by decreasing oil production [sic], but by sinking billions of dollars into last century’s transport system.

But let’s not forget the true meaning of Christmas.

Let’s remember a young man — maybe around 30 years old — a man of Middle Eastern appearance, we’d call him today. He dedicated his life to helping people, to healing the sick. Though a humble man, he was mercilessly attacked. He was accused of the most heinous of crimes — accused of horrific crimes — a pawn in the vicious game played out by a militaristic empire.

I refer of course to Dr Mohamed Haneef.

Dr Haneef was the chosen scapegoat of a government led by that miserable toad John Winston Howard — the Man of Steel — supported by his evil Minister for Immigration Kevin Andrews.

A year ago we celebrated the end of Howard’s depressing anti-human regime. We hoped that Chairman Kevin Rudd’s Iced Vo-Vo Revolution would change everything. But only last week the enquiry into the whole Haneef debacle said that there’d been mistakes at the highest levels of government, at the Australian Federal Police. Nevertheless, the Rudd government said it still has full confidence in its police commissioner, Mick Keelty — a man who two years ago actually suggested forcibly “re-programming” people’s political beliefs. Need I point out that that is the most fundamental breach of people’s human rights?

Meanwhile Chairman Rudd has failed to address the fact that Australia is the largest per capita consumer of carbon fuels — more than any other nation on the entire planet — and his Minister for Being a Complete Prick, Stephen Conroy, is trying to implement the most comprehensive censorship of the Internet of any Western democracy.

Fuck this! Fuck this!

Fuck this!

Some famous historian once said that it always takes a few years for the world to notice how things will change.. Or was it that tanned young apprentice plumber that I had the other year. What was his name? Anyway, whoever it was, with hindsight we can see that the United States became the world’s global leader at the end of World War One, but it wasn’t until the end of the Second World War that everyone became aware of that.

Similarly, the Industrial Age is over, and with it the great industrial age empire of the United States of America and the corrupt, secretive military-industrial complex of the Neocons. Dick Cheney has been indicted. They’ve even voted in a blackfella for President!

But look, before we get carried away with the audacity and hope of President Obama‘s new regime, consider the words of Crikey‘s Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane:

Politics is more or less based around people of high principles and good will discovering that the obtaining and exercising of power involves doing bad things, distasteful things, amoral things, [it] involves unpleasant trade-offs and not just the famous half-loaves of compromise but [the] stale, mouldy crusts. And it’s all the more that way because its symbiotic partner, its Siamese twin the media, dislikes complexity and nuance, in favour of the same simple narratives, repeated with an ever-changing cast of characters but the same plots and [the same] moral lessons over and over again.

Yet all this is changing. And the players are afraid.

The newly-hyperconnected world means that politics and the media is changing. Radically. Witness the reporting on the Mubmai terrorist attacks. Witness the reporting on Thailand’s People’s Alliance for a Not-Quite-Democracy. Witness the speed at which resistance to Senator Conroy’s Rabbit-Proof Firewall is organising itself. Haha!

The 21st Century has finally begun, and in the year 2009 we will see it unfold. Cheers!

Looking more locally, let us consider the achievements of the New South Wales state government.

[long pause]

Even more locally, I’m pleased to see that in my village of Enmore in Sydney, next to Newtown, it’s full of children. While it’s easy to complain about the pushers — what Americans would call “strollers” — which are bigger than Belgium, there is a joy in seeing the next generation coming into being. And not in that disturbed “we must protect the children” kind of way which imagines children are threatened by pretty much everything on the planet. But in that wondrous, joyous, happy way which I know every parent watching this tonight understands.

Children are our future. They’re growing up in a world where they’re always connected to the global grid, where they know themselves whether some person they’re talking to is one of their peers or some creep — and it’s only ignorant politicians with their own outdated agendas, with their own pervasive ignorance of information technology, who don’t understand.

Well fuck them! Fuck the lot of them!

Cheers!

Finally, let us remember the words of that great poet:

In touch with the ground
I’m on the hunt I’m after you
Scent and a sound, I’m lost and I’m found
And I’m hungry like the wolf
Strut on a line, it’s discord and rhyme
I howl and I whine I’m after you
Mouth is alive all running inside
And I’m hungry like the wolf.

Goodnight. Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year.

You may now kiss my ring.

Stilgherrian Live, my live Internet program, returns tomorrow night, and I need nominations for this week’s “Cnut of the Week”.

If you missed the last two episodes, well, the segment “Cnut of the Week” is dedicated to the memory of King Cnut the Great, also known as Canute, a Viking ruler of England and Denmark, and Norway, and of some of Sweden variously from 1016 to 1035 CE.

Cnut is best known for attempting to hold back the tide. As 12th-century chronicler Henry of Huntingdon tells it, Cnut set his throne on the shore and commanded the tide to halt — but of course it didn’t stop. Cnut leapt back and said:

Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws.

He then hung his gold crown on a crucifix, and never wore it again.

This story about Cnut may not be true, and it’s really praising the greatness of the Christian God whom I do not worship. But I prefer the other interpretation: that Cnut staged the scene to rebuke the flattery of his courtiers, and to demonstrate that the forces of nature are mightier than any mere human.

In Stilgherrian Live, I nominate as “Cnut of the Week” people who futilely resist the forces of change.

I’m particularly interested in examples of trying to hold back the changes brought by the Internet, with its greater connectivity, transparency and democracy. And you get to vote.

In episode 7, for example, I nominated Senator Stephen Conroy for trying to filter “bad stuff” from the Internet, a sea cucumber (don’t ask!), NSW Premier Morris Iemma for being a Pointless Cnut generally, and the entire government of China for their oppressive censorship — with China as the clear winner.

In episode 8, commentator Greg Barns won with his call for Facebook, MySpace and other social media websites to moderate all of their content, beating consultant Dan Kaminsky who dared tell us that the Internet isn’t secure (fighting the tide of ignorance-is-bliss) and the commissioner of the Australian Federal Police, Mick Keelty, for persisting in the persecution of Mohammed Haneef in the face of an overwhelming lack of evidence.

So, who do you nominate this week, and why?

The new poll on my website asks a simple question: Who should be sacked?

• Federal police commissioner Mick Keelty? News today is that he’s blaming everyone else — but his organisation was in charge of the investigation, wasn’t it?
• Damian Bugg QC, Director of Public Prosecutions. While he did step in eventually, you’d have thought that in such a politically-sensitive case he’d have been involved from the start.
• Kevin Andrews, Minister for Immigration. Dear dear dear, Kevin, first WorkChoices and now this. Last week’s poll suggested you’d be first voted off the island, and it’s looking even more likely now.
• Attorney-General Phillip Ruddock, for sticking his oar into the mess.
• and I’ve made some other suggestions too.

If you vote, also feel free to post some comments here explaining your choice.

Speaking on ABC TV’s Lateline on 8 March, Keelty says we should look at techniques which have been used “successfully” in such bastions of human rights as Indonesia, Singapore and Pakistan — even referring to it as “best practice”.

Keelty equates reprogramming people to convincing an informer to give evidence, and says this is the next step… to re-program somebody who has a belief or holds a belief. It has already been discussed with the government in the context of anti-terrorism control orders.

Commissioner Keelty, just in case you’ve forgotten Articles 18 and 19 of the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, here’s a refresher…

Belief: a Basic Human Right

The UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights was signed and ratified by Australia.

18.1 Everyone shall have the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion…

18.2 No one shall be subject to coercion which would impair his freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice…

19.1 Everyone shall have the right to hold opinions without interference.

19.2 Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice.

The UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights expands upon the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and it does have provisions for “limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary to protect public safety, order, health, or morals or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others”.

But the key word is necessary. Not convenient or useful, but necessary. You may only restrict human rights if there’s no other method at all for preserving our safety. There’s a burden of proof there, and Keelty hasn’t even begun to address it.

Who’s Belief?

The dangerous question, of course, is who chooses what political beliefs we “should” have.

Keelty was careful to call his proposal “de-programming” — making a distinction between the bad “brainwashing” or “programming” done by Them and the healthy “de-programming” done by Us.

But whether a change in belief is “forward” programming or “reverse” de-programming or sideways “re-programming” is simply a matter of your political beliefs and how you want to spin it.

Spin 1: Make it sound community-minded

Keelty admits there might be a PR problem here. He says we need to…

“…be very careful as to how we present those operations, not only back to the Australian community, but to those within the community who might otherwise take up the the cause because they see one part of their community being disenfranchised or mistreated by the authorities.”

Quite.

So he tries hard to make it sound humane, twice mentioning that you might “turn” someone using “somebody who’s influential within the community. A respected imam, for example” — once more reinforcing en passant the propaganda that terrorist = Muslim.

But in the end Keelty is quite pragmatic:

“The best scenario would be… the one that is likely to yield the best results.”

And what is best? Well, this technique…

“…also opens up the opportunity to get information that would otherwise not be available.”

Spin 2: Make it sound medical

Commissioner Keelty also tries to equate his “de-programming” to treating drug addition. After all, it’s “healthy” if we’re treating a “sickness”.

“People who believe something that the wider community doesn’t believe in and certainly doesn’t understand and when you get into the realms of suicide bombers, that is something that is so foreign to, I guess, our way of thinking that somebody who is in that position has to not be thinking rationally. So if I guess the extension of that is if they’re acting and thinking irrationally, then how do we convert that behaviour and bring it back to rational behaviour? In a sense, that is a sickness.”

Except for one tiny problem.

The health model is about getting the best result for the patient, based on the medical opinion of qualified doctors. That’s not the same as getting “the best result” for policeman who are after “the opportunity to get information”.

The full transcript of the interview makes interesting reading.