Short shots. The terrorist attack in Jakarta, Indonesia. Australian security is irrevocably entwined with Indonesia, reality demands Australia and Indonesia form a security and economic partnership. Kicking the future of abundance off with a weak ratification/sortition model of government. Email as a file system.

Shorts

• The sign on the door to the pool at the local recreation centre demanding that everyone take a shower before entering the pool has been taken down. I suspect it was up for the kids that were coming through on camps. Labor Day in the US marks the back to school. So I suspect the kids were tramping mud into the pool.
• GANTT charts are highly impractical. Large and complex ones go across several over-sized pages on a plotter. The next person that decides to design organizational charts needs to make it so that it is readable when printed out on an 11x17 piece of paper.
• If the world could vote in the US elections in November, it would be Kerry by a landslide . Especially in Norway where Bush only got 7% of the hypothetical vote and Kerry got 74%.

Terrorist Attack in Indonesia

An Australian embassy in jakarta was hit by a car bomb , like the attacks in Iraq, the most killed and injured were locals , with Indonesians bearing the brunt of the attack. Indonesian police first suspect for this suspected suicide attack is Jemaah Islamiah who perpetrated the attack on Bali in 2002. Current suspicions lie with Malaysian, Azahari Husin.

This will push Australia and Indonesia closer together, if Jemaah Islamiah is seeking to isolate Australia from Indonesia with these attacks it wont work. These attacks will not cause Australia to become isolated and distrustful of Indonesia. These attacks will also not cause Indonesia to balkanize into the chaos that terrorism desires to flourish. The manner in which the Indonesians promptly caught the Bali Bombers and then brought them to justice through the rule of law shows that this will not happen.

Indonesia even refused to arbitrarily back-date a terrorist law, despite the cries and howls for blood from Australia and the Australian media. The prosecution of the Bali bombers showed the Indonesia commitment to the rule of law and non-arbitrary justice. Australia would do well to heed that example, as would the US. Hicks and Habib still face discriminatory detention and military court subject to the arbitrary will of the Executive.

Hopefully the current bombers will be swiftly caught and brought to justice. Indonesia, Pakistan and Spain have been successful in the battle against terrorism through the use of their police forces. Rather than using the blunt, clumsy and indiscriminate tool of the military to combat it, as the US did in Iraq, the Indonesians showed the maturity to view terrorism as a civil offence, and bring them to justice through the civil courts.

Australian Security Resides With Indonesia

The Australia battle against terror definitely lies with Indonesia. This is the adage, "security within Asia, rather than from it". Terrorism by Jamaah Islamiah has only hastened this recently unfashionable, but realist view of Australian security. Indonesia is a nation on the rise, with an increasing economy, a new found passion for democracy that must be a welcome relief to Indonesians sick of the oppression under Suharto and Sukarno.

Simply because fundamentalist Islam is the current religion of choice for many of the recent terrorist groups and Indonesia is a large Muslim nation, terror attacks from these fundamentalists will most likely be based in Indonesia. Security in the 21st century cannot be defined by an archaic Cold War document like ANZUS, it needs to be defined in both military terms, and in trans-national police co-operation and information sharing. Anything less is a dismissal of the civil nature of terrorism.

Australia should be laying down the beginnings of a new era of South Pacific prosperity in the ashes of these attacks on Indonesia soil. From this horror will come a new understanding of friendship between Australia and Indonesia as well the realization, that the dictatorships that divided our two nations, were wrong to divide us; horribly wrong and misguided.

Australia should be seeking a genuine Free Trade Agreement with Indonesia. Not a managed one, like the Au-US FTA, but a genuine FTA based on the fact that economically Australia and Indonesia are equals, with complementary economies. With this FTA the basis for wider South Pacific and ASEAN trade can be rooted. This FTA will also have the effect of speeding up the process of Indonesia prosperity. The region will be more stable and secure with a prosperous Indonesia, and an Australian economy entwined with the Indonesian economy.

Australia should also be seeking a new security treaty with Indonesia as well. One the includes military defences of both nations trading vulnerabilities, one that includes steps for the cessation of the trafficking in humans through the Timor Sea, one that includes a process to stop piracy, and finally, a security treaty that includes trans-national police co-operation as a means to combat terror.

With these means in place, Australia and Indonesia can serve as the basis for stability, security and prosperity in the South Pacific and South East Asian regions.

The Death of the Anglosphere

The Anglosphere is dead, Iraq proved that. The anglosphere is bereft of new ideas and their current solution only involves coercion through the blunt boots of the military. The only legacy of the anglosphere is the Westminster and Washingtonian liberal democracy. Even these have been under attack from within. The promise of the enlightenment has exhausted itself in the anglosphere. Terrorism is the new anti-enlightenment, and the anglosphere is playing to terrorism's strength. If chaos and discord is what terrorism seeks, then the anglosphere gave Al Queda that environment on a plate in Iraq.

There needs to be a new enlightenment, like the Renaissance countered the authoritarian and ignorant Dark Ages, a new surge in individual, societal and technological growth is required. A growth that understands the rapidly appearing abundance models for information, and soon manufacturing. One that understands an individuals freedom is inviolable, and the only thing between maximum liberty and an individual is oppression. A new enlightenment that recognizes that a representative republic has failed, and the only way to dampen the singular point of failure and corruption of the representatives is through statistics; by implementing a ratification and sortition model into parliamentary government.

Abundant Government

With information, media and manufacturing moving to abundance models (assuming nanotechnology moves the cost of manufacture to near zero, which I believe it will), government also needs to move to an abundance model. The most suitable forms in this model are the Ratification and Sortitionist models.

Mass media as we know it now is already being marginalized, as the cost of mass broadcasting continues to drop, mass media will have even more trouble maintaining a niche in an abundant information world that has the means to broadcast with the same power as the currently subsidized and regulated public channels/stations. A facet of modern government has been the lack of discourse between government and polity.

The only reason the government can get away with this contempt for the voter is through manipulating the mass media. Most mass media exists through the public subsidy of spectrum and with the increased concentration of media and the proliferation of outlets with mass media forms such as cable and satellite, it is easier for the government to pitch to these behemoths and not be concerned about the polity.

A ratification/sortitionist model will solve this issue. Especially if the sortitionists are the ones throwing out questions at question time in parliament. Mass media will be consumed and marginalised into the larger internet and global communications medium, as they fight with other information aggregators such as the internet is already providing.

Representative Failure

Madison described in Federalist Paper No.10 that faction and liberty go together like air and fire; that the cause of faction cannot be eradicated without a government falling to totalitarianism. Madison wrote that the effects of faction should be what is controlled, and he saw the Republican model as with representatives as solving this problem. A representative to Madison is better able to judge the demands and voices of special interests against the common good and at the same time, do so without legislating against the natural rights of a minority group.

Unfortunately with the management of mass media having become an art by political groups, with the ever increasing party discipline, the politicisation of all aspects of civil society and the mass media in death throes, representative government has failed. In the United States the Bill of Rights has been forgotten and individuals are detained indefinitely and consequently are subject to the arbitrary will of the Executive arm of government. In Australia the military and civil service have all been politicised to an extent where they no longer give impartial advice.

Government has increasingly become the government of corporate and hence propertied interests. Willfully legislating against the common good to create new classes of property such as intellectual property, increasing existing limits on intellectual property and adding DMCA like legislation to ensure the control of that property remains with the owner. The Sono Bono Act in the United States was laughingly referred to as the Mickey Mouse Act as copyright limits increase each time Mickey Mouse comes close to falling out of copyright. Australia adopted those same limits without question in the recent FTA.

Specialists, Statistics and Tenure

The benefits of representatives is generally their specialism in legislation. But history has shown that extended stays in government lead to corruption. Eight years in the Australian federal and state government appears to be the period by which time the government in power falls into corruption, nepotism and over-sized electoral buy-offs. For this reason the head of the Executive Cabinet (Prime Minister or Premier) should be term limited to two limits of three years each inside a system of fixed election dates.

While specialists are to be valued, the danger is in a legislator making a professional career in legislation. The Executive Cabinet in the Westminster system has the greatest access to power, as they are able to not only make laws, but also to fund them and enforce them. Even so, back benchers can become entrenched, for this reason all legislators should be term limited to twenty-five years. This is the period of a generation and a good mechanism to increase and maintain a churn rate to protect against entrenched incumbency.

To protect against the single point of failure that representatives are, a volume of ratifiers, of at least 10% of the population, who are chosen periodically through lottery, are needed to stop repugnant legislation. Ratifiers would be located in the legislative process between parliament and the Governor General. Ratifiers would not be able to vote yes on a bill, but would be able to vote it down with a majority.

This process would initially enable the legislative specialists who have been popularly elected in to write the legislation, but have ratifiers act as a check against special interest legislation. Ultimately as knowledge and practice of civics increases, and the power of mass media diminishes, the ratifiers would slowly consume the responsibilities and tasks of parliament.

What role for the Governor-General?

One of the problems of a representative system that is polluted with party politics and only has to show face on mass media outlets is that there is no-one representing my individual rights. Australia is particularly bad for this, as somehow, the government has brain-washed Australians into thinking that they don't need a Bill of Rights. So who can represent my rights in government?

The Governor-General is the answer. The Governor-General should be able to veto any legislation that contravenes an Australian Bill of Rights. More so, he should be culpable if the Governor-General doesn't and liable to impeachment or criminal court. For this, a Bill of Rights needs to be enshrined into the Australian Constitution. Currently New Zealand has the most modern and complete Bill of Rights , Australia should ask if we could borrow it, and rename it something more inclusive such as the " South Pacific Bill of Rights ".

The Governor-General's authority to veto bills will come from this component of the constitution only. These are the only bills that a Governor-General can veto, ones which contravene the rights laid down in the Australian Constitution. To take the Constitution further, the Bill of Rights needs to be broken off into a separate section of the Constitution, a meta-tution, that deals solely with natural rights, and the rights implied from polity consent to be governed without coercion and arbitrariness. This meta-tution would be static, and only additive, not subtractive.

The second part of the constitution should be the process of government. This constitution should be sunsetted to twenty-five years. So each generation a polity has a referendum on the constitution to keep it in place as is, or to modify it through the route of constitutional conventions. The Australian Constitution has been dominated by its static nature which is sad considering by how far the "Bearded Men" missed in 1901 when they had the US, Swiss and UK systems to cherry pick from.

Email as a filesystem and Meta-data

I use Exchange/Outlook through a VPN 75% of the time. The VPN software is Cisco and is pretty flaky, if it loses the connection it usually takes out the ethernet driver as well. I suspect it puts some hooks in it. Our IT department also puts strict limits on the amount of space we can use. Google, Yahoo and even Microsoft are more generous. Since the VPN is so flaky I tend to look at my mail through the webmail interface unless I need to search for something.

Today a fellow I work with sent me some over-sized photographs of him in Italy, cheek to cheek with some stunning Italian beauties. This email put me over my limit and Exchange refused to allow me to send any more mail until I deleted some. Outlook auto-archived this morning, so I deleted the stuff in the bottom of my inbox and then went to delete it from the "Deleted" folder. Unfortunately outlook tries to load all the mails locally before deleting them, and the VPN was too slow or crapped out. So I cant delete the mails, and cant send until I do. Yay for modern technology.

This raises the issue though, of how I use email. I know my email is available in a single repository (I don't sort my mail into folders), I know my email is going to be tape backed up, whereas my workstation isnt tape backed up each night; I also know that many of the emails provide meta data that can be searched upon. Meta-data such as who it was sent from, who it was sent to, what date, the subject line, the content. All much easier than searching on the file system for a file or folder. Consequently I use my email storage as a secondary file system.

When it comes to email, I don't delete things, I just let them build up and only delete if I absolutely have to. Our home email is done through mozilla mail, and other than the emails that get trashed by the spam filter, it is rare we delete anything. I am the same at work, I only delete emails when the IT department forces me to. Since having a google mail account, I haven't deleted anything from it either. I think google has my number there.

Rather than making the filesystem a database, it would make more sense to make it a an email server. The /home/username file system anyway. To put something on the file system make it so we have to mail it to the file system. So it has a date, when it was sent, who sent it and any follow ups ("replies"). It would make things a million times easier to find. To get things we could access it the same way we find an old email in an IMAP server. it would also allow the files to be sorted in a manner the user sees fit.

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