Protected: The Road Map to Peace, Toxic Memories and Freedom of Speech, Our Democratic Right?

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The Road Map to Peace, Toxic Memories and Freedom of Speech, Our Democratic Right?

This cartoon may be rather cynical about the prospects of peace between Palestine and Israel, but looking at the form of the two leaders and their less than heart-felt desire for peace that is reflected in their words and actions, it maybe fairly factual after all –

Speaking of facts they’ve got the ABC in trouble with the Government which is trying to muzzle its reporting of US activity in Iraq and elsewhere so that it is in line with our Government’s policy of playing deputy cheer leader to George W. The ABC, though financed by the Government is supposed to be independent of Govt policy. Mr Alston, the Communications Minister is determined to stop any independent reporting by labelling it as anti-American and threatening funding to the ABC if it does not desist in running reports that reflect badly on its current support for everything George W does and says –

Though I am a bit dubious about the following so called research at Queensland University. I don’t know if this guy is serious or he is trying to stir some controversy in the red neck, homophobic Deep North of Australia –

Jesus was gay, says academic
May 29 2003
Jesus Christ was gay because of the position of the planets at the time of his birth, a Brisbane academic says.
Rollan McCleary, who was awarded his doctorate today from the University of Queensland, also believes one and possibly three of Jesus’s disciples were also gay.
Dr McCleary, who will launch a book on his findings next month, said today he based his opinions on St John’s gospel and on Christ’s astrological chart based around the date, place and time he was born.
The former Paris radio broadcaster, Hong Kong teacher and graduate of London University, now based in Melbourne, said “one or two queer theologians” had attempted to argue Jesus was gay in the past.
“People haven’t taken them very seriously because they don’t have any evidence and they say things so sensationally that people are not really going to listen or just be very angry,” Dr McCleary told ABC radio.
“What I’m doing is showing a much more theological and also astrological dimension on all this which will make a lot more sense to people.”
He refused to name which disciples he believed were gay, saying people would have to read the book.
“Let’s work that one out when the book comes out,” Dr McCleary said.

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Protected: An Amusing and Rather Interesting Theory and Admirable and Not So Admirable Pollies

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An Amusing and Rather Interesting Theory and Admirable and Not So Admirable Pollies

I read in the paper this morning the very interesting theory developed in Wales about where the SARS virus came from –

SARS – the bug you might get if you lived on Mars
By Julie Robotham, Medical Writer
May 24 2003
It came from outer space: something insidious and deadly that wormed its way into human society to devastating effect.
Not a colony of androids – the SARS virus. At least that’s the theory of a group of British scientists.
Chandra Wickramasinghe believes SARS could have migrated from the stratosphere and been dumped in the Himalayas and surrounding areas, where it might have been dormant for many years before finding a person to latch on to.
If that sounds far-fetched, then let it be known that Professor Wickramasinghe, of the Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology, is no crank. Indeed, his theory was aired yesterday in The Lancet, where he writes that it is already established that bacteria exist high above the Earth.
He recounts an experiment two years ago in which samples were taken from a balloon 41 kilometres above India. The sterile bags came back chock-full of micro-organisms – but most could not be cultured in the laboratory. Only two were successfully grown on Earth, but that was sufficient proof of the concept.
“Our findings lend support to the view that microbial material falling from space is, in a Darwinian sense, highly evolved, with an evolutionary history closely related to life that exists on Earth,” he wrote.
Meanwhile, history was awash with plagues and pestilences that arose suddenly, disappeared just as mysteriously, and could not be explained by standard biology.
The 1918 flu pandemic, which flared in waves throughout the world, hit Alaskan villages that had been isolated for months by snow and ice. That, Professor Wickramasinghe said, might indicate that, rather than human transmission, a patchy global space dump was occurring.
“With respect to the SARS outbreak, a prima facie case for a possible space incidence can already be made,” he wrote.
While most scientists suspect a mutated animal bug, the SARS virus – which has killed more than 680 and infected about 8000 – is unlike animal and human pathogens, and emerged without warning.
If SARS really is an alien, its global progress would “depend on stratospheric transport and mixing, leading to a fall-out continuing seasonally over a few years”.
And in the grand science fiction tradition, the future remains an open question: “New cases might continue to appear until the stratospheric supply of the causative agent becomes exhausted.”

And I had to agree with this article. The necessary reforms in the state legislature were long overdue, regardless of the conservative huffing and puffing in the right-wing Murdoch Press and the old right-wing fogies of the Federal Coalition Government. Our Premier, Bob Carr was courageous in introducing the bill to equalise the age of consent for boys for homosexual relations to the same age as that for heterosexual relations and to introduce legislation to legalise marijuanha for the treatment of cancer, AIDs etc.

Not so admirable our PM, John Howard turning up everywhere the returning servicemen from Iraq are, to wring as much political mileage as possible. It was bad enough when he used to tag behind the Australian Cricket Team. He is the ultimate Australian Cricket Tragic supporter. Pathetic really.

Last but not least the Democrat Senator, Robert Byrd one of the few American politicians I admire for his stand on Iraq and his ability to highlight the hypocrisies of the current regime.

Welcome time for class acts
By Mike Carlton
May 24 2003
There has been surprisingly little outcry about the Premier’s decision to plunge NSW into a drug-soaked orgy of state-sponsored sodomy although, predictably, The Daily Telegraph had a fit of hysterics.
Providing cannabis for cancer patients in chronic agony and lowering the age of gay consent to 16 is “a social revolution”, the paper screeched, in dizzy ignorance of fact or even plain common sense.
Gay sex at 16 is legal in most of the civilised world, from New Zealand to Russia, most Australian states and even parts of the US. Trials of cannabis-based drugs in palliative care are planned or under way in the US, Canada, the UK and the Netherlands. If anything, Bob Carr is moving belatedly to catch up.
The NSW Liberal senator Bill Heffernan, a man seemingly obsessed with gay sex, was also shoving his oar in. A state Liberal MP and, surprisingly, a Labor cabinet minister, both told me on Tuesday that Heffernan had been on the phone to harangue them about the evils of homosexuality. He has apparently learnt nothing from the failure of his disgusting pursuit of Justice Michael Kirby of the High Court. Perhaps he had a frightful time at St Ignatius, Riverview.
The high point of the age-of-consent debate was provided by the National Party member for Orange, Russell Turner, who defied his party whip to speak in passionate support of his gay son. If he never utters another word in Parliament, he deserves to be remembered for this act of political and moral courage. ANY member of the Defence Force who has not yet been met, greeted, welcomed, feted, lauded and applauded, hailed, saluted, praised, hugged, acclaimed, eulogised, thanked or otherwise embraced by the Prime Minister should contact Canberra immediately. No matter where you are in Australia, we can get John Howard and a media contingent to you in good time for this evening’s TV news.
Like everyone else, I am pleased that our troops are returning home safely from Iraq, their duty well done, honour intact. Public disquiet with the war should in no way reflect on them, and I am sure the Prime Minister is anxious, quite properly, to demonstrate to the Australian people that Iraq veterans must not be shunned as Vietnam vets were.
But Howard, political animal to the marrow, is also cynically attuned to the huge electoral plus of wrapping himself in desert cammo and the flag. Even more delicious, he knows that Simon Crean has no choice but to traipse along behind him to military bases from Perth to Townsville, where he is about as popular as the ex-boyfriend at a shotgun wedding.
In Britain, Tony Blair declined to welcome HMS Ark Royal home to Portsmouth because he did not wish to appear triumphal. Much more classy, by a country mile.
ROBERT Byrd, of West Virginia, entered the US Senate in 1958, when Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, and at the age of 86 he is still there, the Dean of Congress. Snowy-haired and courtly, Byrd is an old-school Democrat in direct descent from Roosevelt’s New Dealers, though no Ivy League patrician. He was raised by an aunt and uncle on the West Virginia coalfields in the Depression. He welded Liberty ships during World War II and, after that, put himself through law school in his first term in the Senate.
This admirable background stands in splendid contrast to the slippery neo-conservative spivs and silver-spooners who infest the Republican Administration of George W. Bush. Byrd skewers their deceits in fine speeches on the Senate floor.
“It is an affront to the Americans killed or injured in Iraq for the President to exploit the trappings of war for the momentary spectacle of a speech,” he said on May 6, deriding Bush’s Top Gun histrionics on board the USS Abraham Lincoln. “I do question the motives of a desk-bound President who assumes the garb of a warrior for the purposes of a speech. I am loath to think of an aircraft carrier being used as an advertising backdrop for a presidential political slogan, and yet that is what I saw.”
Last Wednesday, Byrd turned up the blowtorch on Iraq. “The American people may have been lured into accepting the unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation, in violation of long-standing international law, under false premises,” he began.
“There is ample evidence that the horrific events of September 11 have been carefully manipulated to switch public focus from Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, who masterminded the September 11th attacks, to Saddam Hussein who did not … It was the exploitation of fear. It was a placebo for the anger.”
The senator was scathing about the fruitless search for weapons of mass destruction. “Presently our loyal military personnel continue their mission of diligently searching for WMD. They have so far turned up only fertiliser, vacuum cleaners, conventional weapons, and the occasional buried swimming pool,” he said. You had to hear the tape to get the magisterial sarcasm dripping from that last paragraph.
“The Bush team’s extensive hype of WMD in Iraq as justification for a pre-emptive invasion has become more than embarrassing. It has raised serious questions about prevarication and the reckless use of power,” he concluded.
Would that we had such a mind in Canberra. For more, try http://byrd.senate.gov

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Protected: Mmmm! Scrumptious New Tarzan!

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Mmmm! Scrumptious New Tarzan!

For those fans of the beauteous Travis Fimmel –

Read this article about his acting debut in a TV series based on the Tarzan story but updated somewhat. I assume there will be lots of lovely scenes with Travis in loin cloth only. Mmm lust-worthy TV. Wiping the drool off of my monitor .

Travis Fimmel is set to make the leap from underwear model to screen Tarzan.

A barefoot farm boy from Echuca, turned international supermodel, is about to become the next screen Tarzan. Alan Veitch reports.

Tarzan, the jungle superman created by Edgar Rice Burroughs, has been portrayed on the screen by 47 monosyllabic musclemen of various nationalities since the early silent movies. It’s now 85 years since the loincloth-clad, crocodile-strangler first swung from the synthetic vines of a Hollywood studio set, but he shows no signs of fading away into the undergrowth.

The latest to be cast in the role is Travis Fimmel, 22, a former Melbourne-based male model originally from Echuca, who has been signed by Warner Bros to star in a new television series. The series is due to premiere in the United States in October and will be seen in Australia next year.

Fimmel first attracted worldwide attention last year when his tautly tuned torso appeared on a Central London billboard advertising Calvin Klein underwear. His obvious assets led to him being anointed the first 21st century ideal of male virility.

But the giant billboard in busy Oxford Circus was removed following a complaint from a motoring organisation that it was a safety hazard. The billboard was apparently proving a little distracting in peak hour traffic.

Fimmel has since acknowledged that the underwear portion of the photo was digitally “enhanced” and admitted that the billboard caused him personal embarrassment. “It made me feel like a prick,” was his actual response.

Fimmel was one of hundreds of young actors and models tested for Tarzan’s role, but despite very little acting experience, Warner Bros president Peter Roth personally selected him.

“Travis is a wonderful young man,” said Roth, “He has not simply a great look, but that feeling you get that this person is going to be a big star.”

The series has Tarzan returning from the jungle to his childhood home in New York, where his uncle is the head of Greystoke Enterprises. His love interest, Jane, will be a New York detective played by Sarah Wayne Callies.

Fimmel is said to be spending all his spare time on acting lessons hoping that his Tarzan role will lead to a future in feature films. But just four years ago he was flat broke when he was discovered working out in a gymnasium by a talent scout for Chadwick’s, the Melbourne modelling agency. He had tired of milking cows on the family farm in Echuca, where he never bothered to wear shoes, and headed for Melbourne with a vague idea of of breaking into acting.

Instead, his impressive physique and country-boy facial freshness were noticed by Chadwick’s, which launched him on a modelling career. Two years later, after saving enough money, he headed for Hollywood.

Fimmel attended acting classes, but without acting offers he fell back on modelling. He walked into the offices of LA Models, who found him a job as the love interest in music video clips for recordings by Janet Jackson and Jennifer Lopez.

The Tarzan series, being shot now in Vancouver, will be yet another take on the countless movies made, not just in Hollywood, but throughout the world.

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Protected: Gulf War II Didn’t Happen or Rather it Did, But Not How We Saw It on TV

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Gulf War II Didn’t Happen or Rather it Did, But Not How We Saw It on TV

Jean Baudrillard’s book about the first Gulf War “The Gulf War Didn’t Happen” seems just as applicable to the most recent adventure in Iraq. In that book he wrote of how modern man views a skewed reality through the simulacra presented by Television. The Jessica Lynch episode was a perfect example. So called war reportage modelled on the efforts of Jerry Bruckheimer’s Black Hawk Down. It was bad enough when the US President was a former B-grade movie actor who had trouble in later years discerning reality from fictional roles he played in the movies, but now we have an administration that thinks its perfectly acceptable to replace proper reportage with their sick version of “reality” TV.

See attached a report from the Guardian which relates the truth about this manufactured news story that was inserted at a critical time during the invasion when things were not going so well for the Coalition of the Witless’ campaign for hearts and minds in the US –

May 18 2003
By John Kampfner

Jessica Lynch became an icon of the war in Iraq. The story of her capture by the Iraqis and her rescue by US Special Forces became one of the great patriotic moments of the conflict. It couldn’t have happened at a more crucial moment, when the talk was of coalition forces bogged down, of a victory too slow in coming.
Her rescue, however, will go down as one of the most stunning pieces of news management conceived. It provides a remarkable insight into the real influence of Hollywood producers on the Pentagon’s media managers, and has produced a template from which America hopes to present its future wars.
But the American media tactics, culminating in the Lynch episode, infuriated the British, who were supposed to be working alongside them in Doha, Qatar. Tonight in Britain, the BBC’s Correspondent program reveals the inside story of the rescue that may not have been as heroic as portrayed, and of divisions at the heart of the allies’ media operation.
“In reality we had two different styles of news media management,” says Group Captain Al Lockwood, the British army spokesman at central command. “I feel fortunate to have been part of the UK one.”
In the early hours of April 2, correspondents in Doha were summoned to Centcom, the military and media nerve centre for the war. Jim Wilkinson, from the White House, had stayed up all night. “We had a situation where there was a lot of hot news,” he recalls. “The President had been briefed, as had the Secretary of Defence.”
The journalists rushed in, thinking Saddam Hussein had been captured. The story they were told instead has entered American folklore. Private Lynch, a 19-year-old clerk from Palestine, West Virginia, was a member of the US Army’s 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company that took a wrong turning near Nassiriya and was ambushed.
Nine of her comrades were killed. Iraqi soldiers took Lynch to a hospital, which was swarming with fedayeen, where she was held for eight days. That much is uncontested.
Releasing its five-minute film to the networks, the Pentagon claimed that Lynch had stab and bullet wounds, and that she had been slapped about on her hospital bed and interrogated. It was only thanks to a courageous Iraqi lawyer, Mohammed Odeh al-Rehaief, that she was saved. According to the Pentagon, al-Rehaief risked his life to alert the Americans that Lynch was being held.
Just after midnight, Army Rangers and Navy Seals stormed the Nassiriya hospital. Their “daring” assault on enemy territory was captured by the military’s night-vision camera. They were said to have come under fire, but they made it to Lynch and whisked her away by helicopter. That was the message beamed back to viewers within hours of the rescue.
“It was like a Hollywood film … an action movie like Sylvester Stallone.”
Al-Rehaief was granted asylum barely two weeks after arriving in the US. He is now the toast of Washington, with a $500,000 book deal. Rescue in Nassiriya will be published in October. As for Lynch, her status as cult hero is stronger than ever. Internet auction sites have listed at least 10 Jessica Lynch items, ranging from an oil painting with an opening bid of $200 to a $5 “America Loves Jessica Lynch” fridge magnet. Trouble is that doctors now say she has no recollection of the episode and probably never will. Her memory loss means that “researchers” have been called in to fill in the gaps.
One story, two versions. The doctors in Nassiriya say they provided the best treatment they could for Lynch in the midst of war. She was assigned the only specialist bed in the hospital, and one of only two nurses on the floor. “I was like a mother to her and she was like a daughter,”says Khalida Shinah.
“We gave her three bottles of blood, two of them from the medical staff because there was no blood at this time,”said Dr Harith al-Houssona, who looked after her throughout her ordeal. “I examined her, I saw she had a broken arm, a broken thigh and a dislocated ankle. Then I did another examination. There was no [sign of] shooting, no bullet inside her body, no stab wound – only RTA, road traffic accident,” he recalled. “They want to distort the picture. I don’t know why they think there is some benefit in saying she has a bullet injury.”
The doctors said that the day before the special forces swooped on the hospital the Iraqi military had fled. Hassam Hamoud, a waiter at a local restaurant, said he saw the American advance party land in the town. He said the team’s Arabic interpreter asked him where the hospital was. “He asked: ‘Are there any fedayeen over there?’ and I said, ‘No.”‘ All the same, the next day “America’s finest warriors” descended on the building.
“We heard the noise of helicopters,” says Dr Anmar Uday. He says that they must have known there would be no resistance. “We were surprised. Why do this? There was no military, there were no soldiers in the hospital.
“It was like a Hollywood film. They cried, ‘Go, go, go’, with guns and blanks and the sound of explosions. They made a show – an action movie like Sylvester Stallone or Jackie Chan, with jumping and shouting, breaking down doors.” All the time with the camera rolling. The Americans took no chances, restraining doctors and a patient who was handcuffed to a bed frame.

There was one more twist. Two days before the snatch squad arrived, Al-Houssona had arranged to deliver Jessica (pictured above) to the Americans in an ambulance. “I told her I will try and help you escape to the American army but I will do this very secretly because I could lose my life.” He put her in an ambulance and instructed the driver to go to the American checkpoint. When he was approaching it, the Americans opened fire. They fled just in time back to the hospital. The Americans had almost killed their prize catch.
A military cameraman had shot footage of the rescue. It was a race against time for the video to be edited. The video presentation was ready a few hours after the first brief announcement. When it was shown, General Vincent Brooks, the US spokesman in Doha, declared: “Some brave souls put their lives on the line to make this happen, loyal to a creed that they know that they’ll never leave a fallen comrade.”
None of the details that the doctors provided Correspondent with made it to the video or to any subsequent explanations or clarifications by US authorities. A Pentagon spokesman in Washington, Bryan Whitman, declined to release the full tape of the rescue, rather than its edited version. He would not talk about what kind of Iraqi resistance the American forces faced. Nor would he comment on the injuries Lynch actually sustained. “I understand there is some conflicting information out there and in due time the full story will be told, I’m sure,” he said.
That American approach – to skim over the details – focusing instead on the broad message, led to tension behind the scenes with the British. Downing Street’s man in Doha, Simon Wren, was furious that on the first few days of the war the Americans refused to give any information at Centcom. The British were put in the difficult position of having to fill in the gaps, off the record.
Towards the end of the conflict, Wren wrote to Tony Blair’s adviser Alastair Campbell complaining that the American briefers weren’t up to the job. He described the Lynch presentation as embarrassing.
Wren last week described the Lynch incident as “hugely overblown” and symptomatic of a bigger problem. “The Americans never got out there and explained what was going on in the war,” he said. “All they needed to be was open and honest. They were too vague, too scared of engaging with the media.” He said US journalists “did not put them under pressure”.
Wren, who had been seconded to the British Ministry of Defence, said he tried on several occasions to persuade Wilkinson and Brooks to change tack. In London, Campbell did the same with the White House, to no avail. “The American media didn’t put them under pressure so they were allowed to get away with it,” Wren said. “They didn’t feel they needed to change.”
He acknowledged that the events surrounding the Lynch “rescue” had become a matter of “conjecture”. But “either way, it was not the main news of the day. This was just one soldier, this was an add-on: human interest stuff”.-”
The American strategy was to concentrate on the visuals and to get a broad message out. The key was to ensure the right television footage. The embedded reporters could do some of that. On other missions, the military used their own cameras, editing the film themselves and presenting it to broadcasters as ready-to-go packages. The Pentagon had been influenced by Hollywood producers of reality TV and action movies, notably Black Hawk Down.
In 2001, the man behind Black Hawk Down, Jerry Bruckheimer, had visited the Pentagon to pitch an idea. Bruckheimer and fellow producer Bertram van Munster, who masterminded the reality show Cops, suggested Profiles from the Front Line, a primetime television series following US forces in Afghanistan. They were after human stories told through the eyes of the soldiers. Van Munster’s aim was to get close and personal.
It was perfect reality TV, made with the co-operation of Donald Rumsfeld and aired just before the Iraqi war. The Pentagon liked what it saw. “What Profiles does is give another, in-depth, look at what forces are doing from the ground,” says Whitman. That approach was developed in Iraq.
The Pentagon has none of the British misgivings about its media operation. It is convinced that what worked with Jessica Lynch and with other episodes of this war will work even better in the future.

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I Think I’m Developing Webbed Feet

It has been raining five days straight. In between downpours have managed to get to work through the flooded streets. The creeks have all risen –

And a lot of the streets look like this –

I guess this guy thought surfing to work would be quicker –

It looks like the weather is breaking. Hopefully might see the sun tomorrow. And the really awful thing is all the rain fell on the coast and none in the areas so badly affected by the drought. Even the catchment area for the dams for Sydney haven’t had much rain so there will be continuing water restrictions here even though we seem to have had oceans of water dropped on us this week. It all flowed out to the Pacific unfortunately.

Ventured out shopping today. Should have bought some new winter clothes but I hit a bookstore first and you know where the money went. I ended up with six books, a pair of shoes and no winter clothes. Oh well maybe I can get another year out of the current winter wardrobe. But they all look a little frayed.

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I Think I’m Developing Webbed Feet

It has been raining five days straight. In between downpours have managed to get to work through the flooded streets. The creeks have all risen –

And a lot of the streets look like this –

I guess this guy thought surfing to work would be quicker –

It looks like the weather is breaking. Hopefully might see the sun tomorrow. And the really awful thing is all the rain fell on the coast and none in the areas so badly affected by the drought. Even the catchment area for the dams for Sydney haven’t had much rain so there will be continuing water restrictions here even though we seem to have had oceans of water dropped on us this week. It all flowed out to the Pacific unfortunately.

Ventured out shopping today. Should have bought some new winter clothes but I hit a bookstore first and you know where the money went. I ended up with six books, a pair of shoes and no winter clothes. Oh well maybe I can get another year out of the current winter wardrobe. But they all look a little frayed.

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