I hate when people whinge. I know I’m whingeing about people whingeing, but hear me out.
    I hate when people whinge without trying to fix the problem. I call these people the Do Diddly Squat Brigade.
    My friend Ivan is a colonel in the Do Diddly Squat Brigade. He loathes his bank and he lets people know constantly. That’s all he does: lets people know, while doing diddly squat.
    Ivan’s gripe is about the fees his bank charges him: account keeping fees, card renewal fees, overdrawn fees, fees for owning a dog named Fifi, fees for being able to touch your nose with your tongue. The usual ludicrous fees.
    “It’s extortion,” Ivan whines, “something must be done! The Government should take action!”
    “Why don’t you change banks? To one that doesn’t charge ridiculous fees?”
    “No. It’s too hard. I work full-time.”
    “Okey-dokey,” I say, as I call the waambulance. “Hello operator, I have a sooky la la here who won’t do anything to fix his boo-boos.”
    People who complain about bank fees: you’re the one who signed up for the bank account. It was your choice.
    It’s not like you were in a dungeon with Alf Stewart who told you the only way to escape was by opening a bank account (if it was you need to contact Today Tonight).
    Every few days there’s a news story about banks “gouging” customers. Invariably somewhere in the article a Mr or Mrs Crybaby calls for Government action — “Julia Gillard should do something about these evil banks, how dare they charge me the fees that I agreed to by signing a contract! Mummy! Mummy Government can you burp me and change my diaper, I’ve done poopy.”
    Our flag should just be a picture of a grown man being breastfed.
    I’m no bank lover either. Banks are run for the profit of shareholders so they’re compelled to try to beat as many gold coins out of you as they can. But the solution to these grubby hustlers is not more Government regulation and power.
    The answer is to find a better place to dump your money.
    About a year ago I left my bank because of its exorbitant fees. For legal reasons I can’t say which one but I can say it rhymed with Shmommonwealth Yank.
    I took my lifetime savings of $0.63, did some research and joined a credit union.
    Credit unions have been around for centuries.
    Instead of being run for profit like a bank, a credit union is a not-for-profit owned by its customers and run for their benefit.
    Banking with credit unions is cheaper and fairer because your account isn’t just meat for drooling shareholders.
    They’re a fantastic example of how ordinary people can work together to achieve social good without running to the Government.
    So if you’re unhappy with your bank then quit.
    Switch to a credit union. If your bank is screwing you get out of the sex swing.

As originally published in mX.

Episode 3 of Dog’s Breakfast is here! This one’s about bank fees.

Here’s the second episode of Dog’s Breakfast. This one is about euthanasia in Australia.

I’ve started a weekly vlog series called “Dog’s Breakfast.” In it I’ll explore political and cultural issues in a hopefully funny way. Here is my first episode “America Is The Greatest Country In The World At Shooting Rampages.”

I’m terrified of failing.

I don’t want to be the guy who didn’t make it. The guy who’s been doing open mics for 15 years and when he’s on stage all the comics in the room look at each other with raised eyebrows. As if to say, “Jesus Christ can you believe he’s clung on for so long? Isn’t it time he sold second-hand cars or bought some rope?”

I’m scared of being 39 and impoverished, going for interviews in share houses, having to pretend I’m cool. “That’s right, I’m a stand-up comedian. How come I’m not famous? It was a conscious decision on my part, had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that I’m shit. What about my appearance? I willingly cultivate an aura of shabby disappointment. I understand. Well, the ad never explicitly said that you didn’t want a middle-aged man with a creepy aura of having been beaten by life. No these are not tears, they are beads of cool guy liquid. Could I please leap out this plate glass window to my death?”

My girlfriend wants a baby in the next 10 years and I don’t know if I’m fatherhood material. I’m destitute with no real prospects. There’ll come a point where she’ll look at me, after I’ve yet again asked her to borrow $20 “until I get paid from the next gig” and she’ll go, “Maybe this guy isn’t the one to support a sproglet.”

Which sucks because I don’t give a hoot about how financially successful she is. She could be some godawful poet writing shitty poems with maudlin lines like “and the yabbies made love in the dam below,” I wouldn’t care. All that would matter would be us.

But if you’re a guy it’s different. On some primal level women want a man who can provide for them. Never mind feminism and all that rhetoric about equality. Men and Women Are Equal But Men Need To Earn A Decent Income To Be Able To Provide For Women Because Of Deep-Seated Subconscious Evolutionary Impulses In The Female Of Our Species LOL.

I don’t hold it against my girlfriend that she wants a baby. Millions of years of evolution are telling her to churn a crittter out. I can’t go an hour without checking Facebook, or go 2 days without pulling my pud.

I could stay in this relationship and see how things pan out money-wise for me. Maybe I succeed gloriously. But maybe I don’t. Maybe Samantha and I end up in our mid-thirties, me a bitter comic living on a shoestring, her an increasingly clucky, increasingly dissatisfied woman whose looks have begun to fail. I don’t want that for Samantha. I’d rather drive her to a speed dating evening tonight to help her find a man who could support a child.

Financially, doing comedy isn’t ideal if you want to raise a child. Comedy isn’t known for its big paychecks. When you do get paid it’s often weeks or months late, which is great if you’re a parent and you want your baby to starve to death.

I don’t even know if I can be a professional comedian. One of the risks of chasing your dreams is that your dreams are too big for you and you’ll get halfway through chasing them only for them to turn around and beat gold coins out of you. You dedicate everything to becoming a professional cellist and then you wind up the token elderly employee at Woolworths, the cello shoved in the linen closet. Then one day you have an aneurysm in Aisle 8 and you die next to a 24-pack of toilet paper.

All I know for sure is that success is worshiped in our culture. Failure is to our culture what sin was to earlier religious cultures. Each of us, having been raised in this culture, is terrified of failing, just as a 12-year old boy in 18th Century Ireland would have been terrified to touch his dick.

A kind of success that is especially lauded is the success that at one time looked like failure but didn’t turn out that way. One thinks of J.K. Rowling, who was an unemployed single mother before Harry Potter took off. People in the process of failing abysmally see these success stories and continue to plod on in the deluded hope that their break is just around the corner, greyhounds chasing a rabbit they will never catch. For every J.K. Rowling there’s a thousand failed writers cupping a hand under a waterfall of sleeping pills. For every Louis CK there’s a thousand comedians living on the margin, sinking slowly, overwhelmed by a dream too big for them. Am I one of these fools?

Here is an old piece I wrote shortly after the first reports of Osama bin Laden’s death.

So Osama bin Laden is dead, apparently. America and its allies have scored a Great Victory, apparently. America, with the largest military budget in the world, has taken ten inept years to finally get its revenge for 9/11. And all it took was a war that caused the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent Afghanis at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars.

By far the most disturbing element of the last decade is the way in which the mainstream media has rarely questioned why 9/11 happened. Instead it has been fixated on the details of the War on Terror, for the most part never questioning whether the War on Terror actually does prevent terrorism. The question we should ask is: has martyring Osama bin Laden made any difference at all?

It is quite clear why 19 terrorists hijacked planes and flew them into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon; all that is required is to read what they themselves have told us of their motivations. Osama bin Laden gave us the clearest account of why 9/11 happened:

[I]t had never occurred to us to strike the towers. But after… we witnessed the oppression and tyranny of the American/Israeli coalition against our people in Palestine and Lebanon… Destruction is freedom and democracy, while resistance is terrorism and intolerance.This means the oppressing and embargoing to death of millions as Bush Sr did in Iraq in the greatest mass slaughter of children mankind has ever known. So with these images and their like as their background, the events of September 11th came as a reply to those great wrongs.

These were the expressed grievances that led to the tragedy of 9/11. Yet as the sycophantic high-fives for America and the Obama administration flow in, the greatest tragedy of all is that the reasons why 9/11 happened have not been addressed. In fact, Islamic terrorists are now more likely than ever to attack America. The Afghanistan and Iraq wars, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo – these have not made the world a safer place for America and its allies.

Make no mistake, there will be a second 9/11 – and a third, fourth and fifth. There will be as many 9/11s as there needs to be before the United States ceases to support Israel’s smashing and slaughter of Palestinians, puts an end to propping up conveniently-oil-producing dictatorships like Saudi Arabia, and stops interfering in the Middle East. I for one am terrified what a fear-palsied American public will allow their Government to get away with when it is made blindingly obvious that killing Osama bin Laden has achieved not a jot of good. The underlying reasons for 9/11 remain the same. America, however, has changed – for the worse. Since 9/11, the U.S. Government has suspended habeas corpus for suspected terrorists and enacted the Patriot Act which, among other things, legalizes wiretapping of its own citizens.

We need to get away from dismissing al-Qaeda and Islamic terrorist organizations as ‘religious extremists’. That is not the full story. To disregard them like this is to eliminate the possibility of rational dialogue, to reduce the enemy to mad evil machines that cannot be dissuaded and must be destroyed. They, like all terrorists, have turned to violence because they face an overwhelmingly powerful enemy (America) and have no peaceful, political recourse. Their violence is not primarily religious but political, though it is couched in Islamic eschatology. I agree for the most part with Osama bin Laden’s criticisms of American evils, just not with how he went about seeking to redress those. Saying that, before we condemn al-Qaeda for 9/11 we should bear in mind we have never been on the receiving end of America, save for its many unwatchable movies and pop “music”.

More alarming than the spastic death throes of the dying American empire is what the fallout of a continuing War on Terror will mean for Australia. Like Hitler’s girlfriend, we will stay with America to the cyanide end. It can therefore be reasonably expected that we willbecome an increasingly attractive target for terrorists. It doesn’t take an oracle to foresee public support for the rollback of our civil liberties exploding once we are attacked by terrorists. It is also obvious when this happens that we will ratchet up our efforts in the War on Terror, meaning more Australian boots on the ground in far-flung hellholes. The inevitable mistakes our soldiers will make, like the 5 Afghani children Australian soldiers killed in February 2009, can only serve to foment greater anti-Australian sentiment and increase the likelihood of more bloodshed on Australia soil. This is going to be a downward spiral of abridgments of freedom and Australian military action in foreign countries. Welcome to the vortex.

It doesn’t have to happen like this. The fact remains that we in Australia live in a free and open democracy and, ultimately, the Government must respond to the concerns we articulate. As a public, as a people, we ought to do everything short of violence to get our troops out of Afghanistan and this doomed Americanjihad. If America insists on continuing to wage its War on Terror, Australia should chuck a sickie. The War on Terror can only escalate from here. Killing Osama bin Laden changed nothing. Like sawing the top off a shotgun, killing the head of al-Qaeda only means things are going to get uglier.