I have to admit a bias here. I’m not a rugby player, or, for that matter, a follower.

I just don’t get it….never really have. When at boarding school I did actually play. You had to, it was compulsory…either that or hockey, and nobody really got away with playing hockey without being whispered about behind their backs. You could never make prefect if you played hockey, or for that matter, softball.

So, yes, ever the conformist and desperate to get in the prefects room (which I didn’t do, moving north to Auckland at the end of the 6^th form), I played rugby. I’d played earlier, age 10 or abouts in Upper Hutt, when Dad decided I should give it a go (he’d played for Canterbury under somethings some years earlier). But the game made no real sense to me, and it still doesn’t really, so I declined after a week or two to return, and my mother, bless her, breathed a large protective sigh.

But at high school I discovered I was actually quite good at it. I made the 2^nd XV, and was bussed all over the southern part of the North Island, where we played other boys schools and as often as not, won. The problem was I didn’t like it at all. I hated the encouraged brutality of it all, I hated the grabbing and thuggish brawls and the psychology that went with it that said that all that was very acceptable.

Oh, and I hated scrums…and the idea that I was obliged to grab and twist all sorts of things (and have mine twisted)….I’m no homophobe but rugby union is a very, very gay game, and if that’s what you want…more power to you.

I gave it all away after a game at Te Aute Maori Boys College where one large teen came down in a line out and deliberately used his elbow to break my nose. As I rolled in the mud and blood pissed out I was told I took it well and he was congratulated for giving them the (winning) edge. Yep…a fine game.

So I opted out..resigned from the second XV. But that didn’t work…I was allocated then to the 4^th XV, who made me deputy captain, sight unseen (coming from the 2^nd etc) so I bit the bullet, and simply failed to turn up enough times that they walked away from me.

Since then I’ve watched a game or two, but generally find Union to be, unlike Rugby League or Soccer which do seem to the observer, rather more skilful, a fairly immature sort of game. It’s thuggish, it’s brutal, and it’s a sport that arguably engenders a level of violence in the society I come from, not least against women and children…that’s my opinion and I know others would happily, and at times, violently oppose it, which I guess is partially my point made. I know the abuse I got both online and by email after my last mention of rugby here.

Why mention all this now? Well, because large numbers of people I know in NZ seem to be obsessing about the bloody Rugby World Cup. Actually that’s not true…almost the whole country is obsessing about it if you believe the mass media (I don’t). And that obsession is being foisted across the miles on me, as if, like the hockey players, there is something questionable about me if I don’t obsess too. And the assumption seems to be that the whole world is also obsessing about it.

Which is not true, or even close…the Rugby World Cup is slightly more a global event than the American Baseball ‘World Series’, but really not very much more, especially if you look at the actual teams participating: there are the few countries in which it is the dominant sport….namely New Zealand and, uhhhh, Tonga and Samoa. Then there is Australia, which, in which in NSW it finds a following but really nowhere else (League and Aussie rules rule absolutely..the last RWC final, in Australia, pulled an audience of only some 4 million there, a big number but not as big as the media frenzy would imply); South Africa where the white people like it and it’s their national sport but no so of the overwhelming mass of the population; and then the bunch (the various UK constituents, France and Argentina) in which it runs a very, very, very distant second to the popular game, but has some traction ……..the one the world calls football. Then you have the rest, the ones like Japan, USA, and Italy where no-one, beyond a tiny minority actually knows anything about the game, but those that obsess like to think it’s a growth sport with a fast amassing following.

Oh, and Namibia and Georgia!! Seriously!!

Which is fine…believe what you will (many of my best friends love it etc), but don’t foist it on me. I’m in a country where nobody, beyond a few expats in dark, rather sad, expat bars, even knows what a bloody rugby ball looks like. And don’t tell me, as someone did, that the NZ Rugby Union has somehow determined that 4 billion will be watching….world population today about 6.7 billion….remove China, India, Pakistan, most of Africa, Indonesia, most of South America, the USA, Russia, and at least 50% of Europe from the total and you may be looking at an audience aware of the cup of some 200 million or less, and I understand that once you take a step back from the unreal cumulative figures used to manipulate a figure of 4 billion, that’s somewhat closer to the real audience being tossed around behind the scenes.

Obsess away but leave me out of it and keep in it perspective for gods sake.

Of course large numbers of my friends love the game (and obsess over it), so I’m in serious shite now, but what the hell.

Damn, I’m grumpy today…..

If there was another reason needed not to sign a record deal with a major in 2007, this may be it:

The music video is shrinking. With the music industry in crisis from falling sales and file sharing, labels have less cash to subsidize elaborate videos that will mostly be seen in miniature on computers. The result has been a major shift in the art form, as artists increasingly embrace the YouTube aesthetic with cheap, stripped-down, low-production videos.

Even your uber-budget pop star fantasies, assuming you have such things, are unlikely to be fulfilled anymore…and that was, lets be real, the only thing a major could offer anymore….

They just make it up. That always seems to be the most convenient way to deal with a quagmire that simply won’t go away. I refer of course to the Bush administration (although Bill “I did not have sex with that woman” Clinton had his moments too, but that, leaguewise, was something else, substantially more minor), and all who sail in her.

Like the road to war itself…they simply made it all up.

They lied.

Powell lied to the UN, Bush knowingly lied to the elected US Congress and to his constituency dozens of times. Even in the face of buckets of publicly available and minutely scrutinized evidence, Cheney was able to appear before the media, on TV and in public and blatantly lie. He was able to say something and, knowing it’s completely without foundation, repeat it.

And do it over and over again, without flinching.

And others do it….unless you are screamingly gullible and /or able to dismiss the obvious, John Howard is a proven liar over both the Tampa issue and the Australian Wheat Board thing. He didn’t tell the truth, and he did it in the full knowledge that he was lying to those who had elected him to serve.

But bigger than all the lies is the terrifying fact that Howard, like Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld and so many others, got away with it.

And got away with it time and time again. So it works. You say something, no matter how outrageously or demonstrably incorrect, and stand by it in the face of all and any evidence to the contrary. It’s a tactic long used by the hard right and the hard left. Hitler did it, so did Stalin, so did Nixon, so did Muldoon in NZ, and Bush and his posse (because John Howard is his sheriff after all), do it to.

Glenn Greenwald is magnificent in pulling up the media for rolling with, and wallowing in, the bullshit, but his is very much a lonely voice.

He pulled up the media the month before last when a couple of long time neo-con fellow travellers were able to present themselves as anti-war analysts who had seen the light via an editorial in a major US paper (which in itself does a very good job as portraying itself as liberal thinking when it was pro-war, so much so the right wing loonies rail against it with some vitriol). And he pulled up the claim that the so called surge was working when there was a claimed drop in casualties in July…a claim trumpeted by simply not telling the truth…by making things up and letting a very gullible middle America read them in their less than questioning regional papers (who s often as not simply print the disinformation and skewered media releases verbatim as Greenwald pointed out).

And here we go again. It’s clearly a policy decision with the surge report to the US Congress, by Gen. David H. Petraeus, the policy being, it really doesn’t matter what the truth is we will say whatever we want to say, and then repeat it ad nausuem as the truth. The media will, as they always do, roll with it and repeat whatever we want to them to say. Sure there will be a few prickly columns, and blogs, and maybe an editorial or three in the “left wing” press, but overwhelmingly people will buy it.

And they will…they bought the lies about the threat from Iraq, they’re buying the lies about Iran, they bought the lies about the Australian Wheat Board, they buy the lies about Saddam and 9/11 (am I right in thinking most American still believe this..18 months ago 80 % of US troops in Iraq still believed there was a link…I guess it’s easier than believing that your buddy died to make Cheney and his friends a little bit richer).

So, make it up, tell lies..the surge really is starting to work….the 300,000 US troops (it bemuses me how the US taxpayer paid private mercenaries are never included in the troop total) have stemmed the violence and things are slowly looking just a little bit rosier..so much so that we might…sometime in the future, be able to pull out..ahhh…3500 troops. It doesn’t matter how many times they’ve said troops out soon in the past this time they will, and a massive 3,500 too.

Except its crap…all the independent analysis says it’s crap. I’m not going to repeat exactly why its bullshit, all made up to sell to Bubba in Wisconsin, for that you can go here, here, here, here, and here.

Suffice to say, that in some bizarre the all powerful Bush camp and their accommodating General seem, amongst a raft over other over / under and convenient misstatements to have found a way to redefine what dead actually means when you are an Iraqi civilian. Now you are only dead as a result of the ongoing mayhem, and countable by the good General if you are shot in the back of the head. In the front does not count…you are really not as dead and worth counting as if the slug came from the back.

Oh and the 500 killed by bombs in northern Iraq don’t count….

Oh…ok…

I don’t know how it’s possible to twist the truth anymore than that..maybe the body counts in Vietnam are slightly more statistically warped…but this whole war has been a litany of bullshit, from grand Coalition counts of the numbers of classrooms repaired back in 2003..that much touted good news, to the Al Qaeda crap.

They make this stuff up, they twist and warp to produce any result that want…and the USA will buy it.

And all it takes is Fox and a complacent media to sell the wining now bullshit to the masses, which they will do, and the poll numbers will rise…after all, Bush is only unpopular because a rag tag bunch of, to use Vietnam analogies again, gooks, is substantially kicking the butt of the “greatest army the world has ever seen”…again…nothing to do with any moral objection to half a million dead Iraqis.

With that in mind, this is worth watching:

Update: This poll seems to, hopefully, indicate that mom and pop apple pie might no longer be as gullible as they were leading up to March 2003. You can but hope, but once again the mood seems to be against Iraq only because they’ve had their arses well and truly whooped.