Pilfered from someone’s flist

I obviously belong then –

You Belong in Australia

Ace! Sunny, upbeat, and cute You make the perfect surf bum Now stop hogging the vegemite!

What English Speaking Country Do You Belong In?

Always thought I was more suited to darker and colder climes.

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Pilfered from someone’s flist

I obviously belong then –

You Belong in Australia

Ace! Sunny, upbeat, and cute You make the perfect surf bum Now stop hogging the vegemite!

What English Speaking Country Do You Belong In?

Always thought I was more suited to darker and colder climes.

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Protected: Foreign Correspondent

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Foreign Correspondent

I was watching the repeat of Foreign Correspondent on Saturday afternoon. Both stories featured in the show were very good. They’ve got the transcript of the shorter, second story about the expansion of gay rights in Argentina or rather Buenos Aires which is really quite surprising considering the heavy Catholic presence in all South American countries. The reporter Eric Campbell visits Buenos Aires and meets Esteban Hubner and Leonardo Gorosito, who are getting married.

To read the full transcript go here –
Argentina – Two to Tango

The main story covered Israel’s hard line government trying to force Israeli Bedouin into settlements by fair means and very foul means so they can move settlers from Gaza to the Negev as well as accomodate new settlers coming to Israel. It seems the Israeli government still has a 19th Century Colonialist mind set. If a bit of land is used traditionally by native peoples but they don’t have a Western Legal Document claiming ownership of the land, their claims for use of the land can be ignored it seems and their land can be resumed by the Government. That at least seems to be the argument. One of the politicians, the Deputy PM shrugged his shoulders and said that they were not using the land in the best way. This is the same sort of pernicious doctrine of terra nullius that allowed English settlers in Australia to wipe out all aboriginal land claims and steal the land from them. Time can not be turned back and both Israel and Australia will continue to exist, as they cannot be eliminated as nations, but in the 21st Century surely we can do better than that? This time the Israeli Government is attempting to take land not from Palestinians but Arab Israeli citizens. Isn’t this discrimination? They are pulling out of Gaza because of the trouble caused by the establishment of the illegal settlements there, so you would think that they would have learnt their lesson.

The story also contained some excerpts on some of the more aggressive behaviour of the settlers in the occupied West Bank. The reporter spoke to the Israeli Deputy PM and an opposition spokeswoman who is attempting to champion the bedouins’ cause and bring to public attention in Israel the type of aggressive and destructive behaviour of the settlers.

The transcript isn’t available yet but there is a brief synopsis of the show, outlining the main points –

Israel – Bedouin, Last of the Nomads
Reporter: Mark Willacy
Synopsis

In the wilderness of the Negev desert, the nomadic Bedouin have survived for many centuries, growing cereal crops and herding livestock. But this traditional way of life is about to end.

These Israeli citizens are being moved on to clear the way for some newcomers.

“Israel sees the Negev as a new frontier” says Jerusalem-based reporter Mark Willacy.

“The government wants to move the Bedouin out to make way for tens of thousands of new Jewish immigrants”.

Willacy reveals a campaign by Israeli officials to bulldoze Bedouin camps and aerial spray crops with poison. He interviews Israeli deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who denies the poisoning is government policy – but the evidence is on tape, of crop dusters destroying a field of wheat.

“The Bedouin are Israeli citizens, they serve in the army and pay taxes” says Willacy.

“But a country that claims to be the only democracy in the Middle East is forcing its Bedouin citizens into specially built towns lacking services”.

Willacy also crosses the so-called green line into the Israeli occupied West Bank, to investigate the way Palestinian farmers are treated.

Near the city of Hebron, farmers are literally digging themselves in – in many villages Israeli soldiers are bulldozing any external buildings.

We meet a group of farmers forced to live in caves, as they do battle with Israeli authorities.

“The desert has never looked more like a promised land to so many people” says Willacy.

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Protected: Good and Bad Day

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Good and Bad Day

I listened this afternoon to this fabulous lecture given by David Hare last year but replayed on the ABC.

Summary:
Do stories matter any more? Has the Western world ground to a narrative halt? This week on Big Ideas, renowned dramatist Sir David Hare puts forward a spirited defence of the power of telling tales, and telling them as best we can. Hare argues that we must strive for fresh perspectives, imaginatively realised, as an antidote to the dulling effects of modern mass media. His lecture ‘Why Fabulate’ is the 8th Philip Parsons Memorial Lecture on the Performing Arts, delivered late last year in Sydney.

For the transcript click here –

Why Fabulate transcript

Or if you want to listen to it click here –

Why Fabulate audio

It was better than the day I spent at the day course on the Spartans. Presentation was OK but not very interesting really. They tried to make out that Spartan society was hard done by in history. True the winning side, Athens effectively squashed knowledge of Spartan society so that for many years people generally had only a sketchy and hardly pleasant impression of Spartan society but it was in my opinion a rather appalling society for women, as most societies were in that time. The other Greek cultures were not much better in this respect I suppose but maybe it was one of the speakers almost wistful harking back to a society and rhapsodizing about the idolization of battle and the military hero as the ultimate paragon of virtue and why it was such a radically good thing for society that began to turn me off. All it meant was that the unique societal system developed in Sparta was a new means of creating unity in society by encouraging the rather pathetic egos of men to dominate their contemporaries to co-operate rather than compete against each other for the good of the city state, a feat that most women have always managed to do rather easily without much effort or planning.

At the end of the day this same speaker tried to make out Spartan society gave greater freedom to women than other Greek societies but in reality the only difference was that the Spartan women were useful for doing things while the men were away killing and being killed. As far as I could see the only role women had was baby making for the good of the Spartan state and to give them up to the Spartan system for proper training of their children by the city state after the ages of 7 or 8 years of age.

Actually Spartan society sounded chillingly like pre-1970’s Australian society. The cult of the fallen soldier which all members of society had to mindlessly pledge their allegiance, the encouragement of men to spend more time with their mates down with the pub and only consort with women for the purpose of baby making and the Australian reputation for being laconic.

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Protected: The Spin on Iraq

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The Spin on Iraq

The continuing saga of our PM and the US Administration’s continuing mendacity and absolute insistence on controlling the “spin” on the war in Iraq. Our PM claims to be a “conviction politician”, he possesses so much conviction that he waited until Parliament had closed for a fortnight before calling a press conference in his high-security courtyard five days later. He then went out to pick and choose his hosts in selling his decision on selected radio and TV programs. If you believe the timing of the announcement, with Parliament not sitting, was coincidental, you’ll believe anything.

Lip service to conviction
By Mike Carlton
February 26, 2005

Only last week I wrote here that, with good reason, no one these days believes a word the Government says about the Iraq war. On Tuesday the Prime Minister showed why. Yet again.

His latest piece of sophistry is that the war is at a “tilting point”. How he loves that White House jargon, those Pentagon mots du jour. Having sailed through the election campaign tossing out bland assurances that Australia would not be deploying more troops to Iraq, and having told The Bulletin magazine only three weeks ago that this still held good, John Howard has suddenly tilted another 450 diggers into the quagmire.

And all because our good friends the British, and our oldest ally, the Japanese, have asked politely. No arm-twisting from Washington, of course.

If you believe that you’ll believe there are fairies at the bottom of the garden, or even that the Government doesn’t appoint its handmaidens to the ABC board. But Howard, all wounded amour-propre, is now adopting that familiar lippy pout he does whenever he is caught out, protesting loudly that he has taken the right and principled decision.

Naturally, the sycophants of the right-wing media rat-pack have wheeled into line to trumpet their approval. Howard is a conviction politician, whatever that is. The Iraq war is going wonderfully well. Anyone who disagrees is aiding and comforting the enemy.

Singularly offensive is the slick line from the likes of Hugh White, the defence policy guru, who suggests that while getting into the war was a strategic error we must now muddle through and make the best of it. Unlike the tilted troops, White does not risk being blown up by a terrorist car bomb.

The trouble with the Prime Minister’s many convictions is that they keep changing. Let me give just one example. In his victory speech to Parliament on May 14, 2003 (yes, he used the word “victory”) he announced that “we are starting to uncover the evidence. We have found what appear to be mobile biological weapons production facilities, just like those described by Secretary of State Powell to the Security Council in February.”

Lately we had the conviction that the Americans had not employed torture in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay and, most recently, the conviction that Australians had not taken part in the interrogation of prisoners. Each now thrown overboard, to coin a phrase.

Is there no end to the litany of deceit? I fear not. The conclusion is unavoidable. We have a prime minister who has sent young Australians to war by elevating slyness and mendacity to an art form.

Pity this is only a cartoon, more mealy mouthed “conviction” politicians being parachuted into a war zone with no perimeter of body guards protecting them might enlighten them on the risks that they knowingly put the troops they so blithely condemn to implement their military adventures.

Bush Administration’s ongoing hypocrisy –

Add counting bodies to the list of dangers
By Alan Ramsey
February 26, 2005

Naomi Klein, anti-corporate activist, author and syndicated Canadian columnist who writes for The Guardian in London, has a point of view about civilian casualties in Iraq.

She wrote at length about it just before Christmas after being challenged by the acting US ambassador to London, David T. Johnson. Miranda Devine’s babble in this newspaper this week incites me to offer Klein’s counterview, given the paucity in this country of press comment on Iraq that actually says something.

Klein wrote, in part: “Dear Mr Johnson. On November 26, your press counsellor sent a letter taking strong exception to a sentence in my column of the same day. The sentence read, ‘In Iraq, US forces and their Iraqi surrogates are no longer bothering to conceal attacks on civilian targets and are openly eliminating anyone – doctors, clerics, journalists – who dares to count the bodies.’

“Of particular concern was the word ‘eliminating’.

“The letter suggested my charge was ‘baseless’ and asked The Guardian either to withdraw it or provide ‘evidence of this extremely grave accusation’. While I agree the accusation is grave, I have no intention of withdrawing it … In April [2004] US forces laid seige to Falluja in retaliation for the gruesome killings of four employees. The operation was a failure. The reason for the [eventual US] withdrawal was that the seige had sparked uprisings across the country, triggered by reports that hundreds of civilians had been killed.

“This information came from three main sources.

“1) Doctors. USA Today reported that ‘statistics and names of the dead were gathered from four main clinics around the city and from Falluja general hospital’; 2) Arab TV journalists. While doctors reported the numbers, it was al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya that put a human face on the statistics. Both [TV] networks beamed footage of mutilated women and children throughout the Arab-speaking world; 3) Clerics. The reports of high civilian casualities from doctors and journalists were seized upon by prominent clerics in Iraq. Many delivered fiery sermons … igniting the uprising that forced US forces to withdraw.

“US authorities denied that ‘hundreds of civilians’ were killed in the siege and lashed out at the sources of those reports … [In November, after the US elections] US forces again laid siege to Falluja. This time the attack included eliminating the doctors, journalists and clerics who had focused public attention on civilian casualties.

“The first major operation was to storm Falluja general hospital, arresting doctors and placing the facility under military control. The New York Times reported that ‘the hospital was selected because the American military believed it was the source of rumours about heavy casualities’, noting that ‘this time around, the American military intends to fight its own information war’ … the Los Angeles Times quoted a doctor as saying ‘soldiers stole the [hospital’s] mobile phones’ to prevent outside communication.

“[TV] images from the siege this time came almost exclusively from reporters embedded with US troops. Al-Jazeera had been banned from reporting in Iraq indefinitely [and] al-Arabiya’s reporter with the troops was arrested on November 11 and held for the length of the siege … Clerics who had spoken out forcefully against the [April] killings were also targeted. [Klein related four instances of clerics arrested and mosques raided reportedly ‘as retaliation for opposing the offensive’.]

“‘We don’t do body counts,’ said [former US commander] General Tommy Franks, [in April 2003]. The question is: what happens to people who insist on counting bodies – the doctors who pronounce patients dead, the journalists who document the losses, the clerics who denounce them? Mr Ambassador, I believe your government and its Iraqi surrogates are waging two wars in Iraq. One war is against the Iraqi people and it has claimed an estimated 100,000 lives.

“The other is a war on witnesses.”

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Protected: A Scientific Explanation for Dubya

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A Scientific Explanation for Dubya

Saw this at The Australian website this afternoon. Well it’s a good an explanation as any I’ve heard –

A scientific explanation
Philip Adams
February 25, 2005
I’ve been asked by a number of readers to explain how the United States – and the world – gets lumbered with a president like George W. Bush.

So I will provide a detailed, scientific explanation. Bush is a statistical inevitability. His arrival at the White House was a consequence of simple division by simple people. Or, if you prefer, a process of elimination. First of all, you can eliminate half the population as the US is a long, long way from being ready to have a woman president – though some Democrats are talking up Hillary Clinton while Republicans counter with Condoleezza Rice.

Then you can eliminate all the African-Americans – even Colin Powell and Condoleezza – who haven’t got a snowball’s. Apart from bland bigotry you’ve got all the white supremacists and Aryan Nation kooks who’d want to add a black candidate to such trophies as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Word is that’s why Mrs Powell insisted that her husband renege from the race a few years back.

Despite Al Gore’s selection of a Jew as his running mate, US anti-Semitism precludes getting nominated as top banana. And unless Arnie Schwarzenegger can organise a change of the Constitution, you can also eliminate anyone and everyone who wasn’t born in the US. “From log cabin to White House” applies only to residents of American log cabins – not to those raised in similar structures in Finland, Norway, Siberia or Poland.

See how fast we’re whittling down the figures? Getting closer to George Bush, father or son?

Homosexuals need not apply. While there’s undoubtedly been the odd gay president – Abraham Lincoln has recently been “outed” – such sexual proclivities have had to be kept a deep, dark secret. You wouldn’t want the cross-dressing J. Edgar Hoover to find out. At this point in time, US straights have narrowed eyes when it comes to the queer guy.

Roman Catholics have been contenders since Jack Kennedy beat Quaker Nixon. But for the foreseeable future you can eliminate Muslims, Zoastrians, Hindus, Sikhs, Druids, followers of the Norse gods, or Buddhists. Although, with Buddhism becoming so very popular in Hollywood, passionately embraced by the likes of Richard Gere and Oliver Stone, it’s only a matter of time until one sneaks under the radar. This will probably occur at a Democrat convention given that Christian fundamentalism is still de rigueur with the Republicans.

Atheists? No hope. In a nation where almost as many people go to church as shop at Wal-Mart, anyone who doesn’t claim to be born again would be out of the race long before Super Tuesday, probably before New Hampshire. Even candidates admitting agnosticism would have to hit the road.

As you can see, the pool of presidential possibilities is now little more than a puddle. And there’s a lot more draining, downsizing, filtering and elimination ahead of us.

While one of the greatest presidents was a polio victim who governed from his wheelchair, it’s hard to see the Americans of the 21st century, so obsessed with physical perfection that they’re all saving up for plastic surgery, going for an FDR. (Perhaps the American public would cop a paraplegic, provided the condition was a result of a war injury.) Indeed, it’s hard to see them backing any candidate with a greater disability than dyslexia. Of course, the incumbent is dyslexic, so he has moved the goalposts just a little. Low intelligence? Hardly an impediment as, once again, the incumbent demonstrates. Indeed, intellectual credentials would almost certainly be politically fatal. It’s okay to be bright – Bill Clinton was acceptable – but if you had a touch of the Barry Jones or Gareth Evans, forget it. Being very intelligent – indeed being very anything – rules you out. The very young, very short, very fat are among the various “verys” that would preclude nomination, let alone election.

This brings us back to physical appearance in the land of Narcissus. You can pretty well eliminate anyone who isn’t regarded as physically attractive. Indeed, it helps to have had a prior career in Hollywood. For in the US, elections are won on television and a Bush will beat a Kerry as inevitably as a Kennedy will beat a Nixon.

And you can pretty well eliminate anyone who isn’t stinking rich. It’s not entirely inaccurate to suggest that, by and large, presidential elections have given voters a choice of millionaires.

So there you have it. Take the American population. Divide in half. Subtract large numbers of people in various categories and, lo and behold, you’ve got George Dubya. Think of it. Had he been female, gay, black, Jewish, an immigrant, an agnostic or overly endowed with intelligence, he’d still be what he was. A political mediocrity in Texas, being baled out of business failures by his father’s wealthy friends. Back in the Governor’s mansion, instead of being able to wage war all over the planet, George would be limited to setting records for the confirmation of death sentences – hundreds of them. If only he had been born in Australia, the world would be safe.

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