Monday, May 30, 2005

Estimate

Just had the strangest sensation, reading Faiza's blog. A time disconnect, as if reading from several years in the future, the past. And then I realised what it was - the language of translation. It's something about translated texts I think, a sort of gauze that falls across thoughts, like time, like a web, several pairs of eyes reproducing distance.

Eventually, we'll phase war out (or perish). And who knows, perhaps sooner then later.

Sunday, May 29, 2005

Skewed constitutions and sham democracies

I remember realising how innocent my parents are. It must be their generation, mustn't it? To trust in their political beliefs as they did, indefinite as those beliefs were. Sort of loosely rolled around some higher aspiration to equality and freedom. It must have been their generation, I thought. And my generation - oh we were wise. We'd seen the grit under the carpet and the droppings behind the skirting boards.

Except that now I see innocent people everywhere. All over the show. And of my generation. Pounding out there exclamations and proclaiming their convictions. Justifying, their politic of choice. Because it does require a sort of innocence to subscribe to political belief. A sort of naivete, a trusting blind faith in humanity.

And I just don't trust humanity that much. It's not that I ever lost faith it's more that I was probably just never born with it. I was born, I think, with the blinkers off. It's not very pretty, seeing the scum. It's not very pretty and there's nothing eloquent about it. And most people just don't understand, when you notice that it's not an emerald on their finger but a chunk of cheap plastic. Most people just look hurt and disappointed when you point that out.

So you know, it boils down to choosing which things you really need to say, and which things you can let go. You can let the cheap chunk of plastic go but you can't let the screwed constitution or the sham democracy go.

Friday, May 27, 2005

Newsweek news-strong afterall

NEW evidence;

US knew about abuse of Koran, papers show
By Richard Schmitt in Washington May 27, 2005

Prisoners in Guantanamo Bay told FBI interviewers that guards repeatedly desecrated the Koran and that perceived abuses of the Muslim holy book triggered unrest at the prison as well as possible suicide attempts, US government documents have revealed.

The allegations include an incident in which guards "flushed a Koran in the toilet". In another incident a detainee refused to co-operate with investigators because of an interrogator allegedly "humiliating the Koran" while questioning another inmate. more

So bet all those bloggers trashing Newsweek last week are feeling bit silly now. Newsweek had it right. The papers show it. But will the bloggers admit it. I don't think so. I expect there'll be a notable silence in some quarters the next few hours. The kind of notable silence where one senses the bloggers mulling over which way to airbrush.

Howard under pressure - making up excuses

Howard says he doesn't want to look into wrongful detentions. His reason;
more than 88,000 people had been detained by the Department of Immigration between July 2000 and April 2005, so the 201 cases under investigation represented only 0.2 per cent of the total. more
88,000 people detained !!! My god, Australia's gulag.

Honestly, I had no idea we'd locked up that many since you know when. Shameful, shameful. And the world thought Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay were scandalous.

Wednesday, May 25, 2005

Vanstone on the run

Observe Amanda Vanstone in "fluff" mode (right this minute);
Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone today ordered her departmental officers to allow the asylum seeker parents of a baby boy born on Monday to take photos of him. more
Not good enough Vanstone, not good enough at all. Get on to those 201 "especially wrongful" cases of detention (all detentions being wrongful). Release the detainees !

More not-voters have impact - in Iran

Hah. I knew those guys in Iraq were onto something. Pro-active Iranian not-voters have done something that several decades of apathy could never achieve.
Iran's powerful religious watchdog, the Guardian Council, yesterday reversed its exclusion of two reformist candidates from presidential elections on June 17, defusing a row that had sparked calls for a boycott of the vote...

The move followed threats of a poll boycott by reformists furious at the decision by the council, an unelected body of conservative clerics and judges, to disqualify all but six of 1014 aspiring candidates, including 89 women. more

Moral of the story - if you are not going to vote, make sure everyone knows why.

Howard under pressure to be more democratic

Howard's backbenchers are putting more pressure on him to be nicer. Good. Otherwise we'll be adding him to the list of people we'd like to see in small cells stripped to their underwear sleeping and washing lingerie. Urgh. It's an ugly thought, but the man should know karma has a way of rolling round, eventually. Especially with such regime changing tools as photoshop (if we can be bothered, later).
John Howard, has reacted furiously to a backbench move to overturn the Government's detention policy and push a vote on the release of all long-term detainees more
(if link not working, open FREE smh account to view).

Yay the backbenchers (for once). Free the detainees !

Tuesday, May 24, 2005

More news from Australia's concentration camps

Veeery interesting. Cornelia Rau has outed herself with the media after her "accidental" detention and near deportation. Up until now, all media reports have painted Rau as a nutter - although some have provided for the possibility that detention may have had something to do with that.

Recently discharged from the South Australian psychiatric hospital to which she was admitted following her traumatic experience at the hands of Australian immigration centre staff, Cornelia Rau faces The Syd Morning Herald "looking healthy and suntanned".

Rau's story; she's an outspoken German Australian, her diary, money and passport were stolen, she wound up with the police, who treated her like shit, slapped her in an immigration detention centre and left her to the vices of detention centre staff, who treated her like shit some more. (For no reason it seems, other then she had no passport on her. I guess the staff were just "doing their job". Like the wehrmacht did).
"I am from Hamburg, Germany, and I have never been treated so unfairly all my life," said Ms Rau.

"I am a German citizen and a permanent Australian resident."

Ms Rau, 39, who came to Australia from Hamburg as an 18-month-old baby and lived in Sydney before she was wrongly detained, said she would seek compensation from the Federal Government for the gruelling 11 months during which she had feared for her life.
Feared for her life.
I was kept in a small cell," she said. "It was a very tormenting experience."

"I don't think [Immigration Minister] Amanda Vanstone would have liked to be in my situation," she said.
Well no, but it's not a bad idea. Perhaps we should put Amanda Vanstone in a small prison cell stripped to her underwear and broadcast live footage of her sleeping, eating, and washing her pantyhose. Voila, new reality telly show.

Catching up on things that bugged me this week...

Oh great, more live executions.
The special criminal court in the south-eastern city of Kut yesterday handed down death sentences to three members of extremist organisation Ansar al-Sunna.

I am so over dead people. Enough already with the death penalty. Just abolish the damn thing.

Members of the public attending the trial applauded the sentence and shouted "Long live justice." The court said the three men would be executed within 10 days.
Some things never change.

The death sentence, by hanging, was widely practised in Iraq under Saddam Hussein... Iraqi interim administration prime minister Iyad Allawi announced its reintroduction in June 2004.
Rest of the article here, kidnappers release hostages unharmed but Allawi sanctions killing rampage anyway. Is something wrong with this picture? No, war always looks this way. Hideous.

May

Perhaps the lyrics will mean something to you, or perhaps they will mean nothing at all. In any case, there is nothing wrong with the tune.

End Of May

Close your eyes and roll a dice
Under the board there's a compromise
If after all we only live twice
Which life is the runroad to paradise

Don't say a word
Here comes the break of the day
In white clouds of sand raised by the wind of the end of May

Close your eyes and make a bet
Faced to the glare of the sunset
This is about as far as we get
You haven't seen me disguised yet

Don't say a word
Here comes the break of the day
In white clouds of sand raised by the wind of the end of May

Close your eyes and make a wish
Under the stone there's a stone-fish
Hold your breath, then roll the dice
It might be the runroad to paradise

Don't say a word
Here comes the break of the day
In while clouds of sand raised by the wind of the end

Don't say a word
Here comes the break of the day
In white clouds of sand raised by the wind of the end of May

***

Sunday, May 22, 2005

What have we let them do

Last month twelve US states introduced laws banning local governments and communities from making decisions about what kind of plants they want to grow. Basically, these states cannot now lawfully decide to not grow Genetically Modified crops. It means that large corporate agricultural enterprises can wash into areas and grow GMO crops, and local farmers and communities will not be able to protest lawfully.

Essentially, what we have, is a seed dictatorship rising up in US agricultural states that is likely to spread and impact upon any country either under US "jurisdiction" or entering into trade agreements with the US government.

It basically means that seed diversity is unprotected from the advances of agricultural firms who are interested in cashflow, not long term sustainability. If we end up with only one or two strains of crop (quite conceivable under GMO circumstances) for each food species - say, one type of brown rice, one type of white, one type of short grain and one type of long - it means that those food crops become extremely vulnerable. When you have several hundred strains developed by individual farmers, you have diversity. If one type of short grain rice is wiped out by a disease it's a bummer for the individual farmer, but there are still several other hundred strains unaffected and as a consequence there is still food available. If you only have one type of the strain to begin with and it is devastated by a new unforeseen pest, you lose the whole thing. One massive epidemic and the whole crop is wiped out - small pockets may survive, but the devastation is on a much larger scale. It's like the stockmarket. Say you put all your investments into one stock and then that stock collapses - you and everyone else who invested in that stock are left with zilch. Where is if you'd "diversified", that is had a few investments tucked away in other stocks, you'd at least have come out of the crash with backup.

Genetic Modifification is one of the worst double speak phrases in the agricultural lexicon. GMO crops once they have been developed allow for very little "Modification" at all, becoming inflexible and stagnant. The last thing these strains are about is growth, they actually inhibit growth in that the companies who manufacture them are seeking laws that prohibit competition from other naturally bred and more diverse strains.

These new seed and plant bills being passed are basically limiting the number of "backup" stocks. And if GMO crops crash (it is likely as not) then we'll end up with one hungry globe.

More here and here and here.

UN condemns torture

At least the UN are condemning abuse.
A report of US military abuse of detainees in Afghanistan is deeply disturbing and those involved should be punished, the United Nations said on Sunday. more
Good. One of the UN's few redeeming features, at least they are sticking up for human rights.

One sick world

We live in one sick world. And blogs are partly to blame. "Torture acceptable" publishes Peter Faris, former National Crime Authority chief, on his weblog (which I am not going to link, read about it at the Sydney Morning Herald instead).

Torture, is never acceptable. And if Mr Peter Faris thinks it is, then he deserves to be photographed stripped to his underwear in a prison cell.

Iraq might have lost a dictator, but the rest of the world is gaining them in bucketloads.

Thursday, May 19, 2005

Why are people arseholes.

Nobody really deserves the web, or the real world either. If the way they treat it in here is any indication, I really don't hold out much hope.

Monday, May 16, 2005

Forget blogs

Forget blogs today, go to urbs and listen to "Operation W" (track 7, toujours le meme film).

Style; degenerate.

Degenerism, predicting more this century.

Howard not interfering...

Johnno just wrote a letter to the Indonesian prosecutors in Corby's case (girl being charged for drug trafficking in Indonesia, big stink, major news deal in Aus everyone thinks she's innocent and now Howard's trying to get a bit of the action - just like he did by not pretending to be a green last week);

Howard gallantly caging his bets as usual, rushes to Corby's defense;
"I cannot interfere in the justice system of another country. It's fundamental to our system of democracy that the executive arm of government doesn't interfere with the judiciary... more
Oh goody. We'll remember that next time he tries to pretend to change other peoples regimes with W'ya and W'md.

How the man can participate in the devastatation of an entire country on an entirely different continent in the name of democratic intervention, but claims he can't assist one of his own citizens in his own region because of international borders is beyond me.

Clucks and shakes head.

Vanstone be-smudges Liberal party

Beazley wants Vanstone to resign. Good. That means I can dig out that note I wrote last week and still post it.

Image hosted by Photobucket.com

Original note much longer but trimmed provocative language for gentle readers. (Written with left hand).

For anyone not know what talking about (ie not know Australia, not read Sydney Morning Herald") ~ Amanda Vanstone is the minister of Australia's Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs otherwise known as DIMA. Amidst it's other duties, DIMA oversees the detention of refugees in Australian detention centres (formerly known as immigration centres, now known as camps surrounded by 9000 volt electric fences topped with razor wire). It has recently emerged that DIMA has also been using these facilities to hide stray mentally ill Australian citizens, should one accidentally wander and fall into the clutches of DIMA.

Most recent scandal (of which there are a number) ~ in July 2001 an Australian Philippino women with Australian citizenship who had been living in Australia for 18 years was deported after an alleged car accident. In a daze after the accident and perhaps suffering mild amnesia, she apparently gave her mother's maiden name rather then her own former married name to a stranger who supposedly found her (this may or may not have complicated matters). And unfortunately, the poor women wasn't traveling with her passport at the time, which it seems may have been a pivotal factor in her deportation (I remember when I received my passport, it came with a recommendation to "keep it in a safe place" not "keep it on you at all times". Mental note to self to catch train with passport tomorrow). At this point it's also worth noting the woman had two sons, the younger of whom she'd been on the way to pick up from a day care centre prior the accident. And she cared for these two sons herself, being a solo mum. Which might explain why she might have resumed using her mothers maiden name, but doesn't explain how DIMA apparently never thought to try and find out her home address (perhaps by asking?) and were unable to link her with local family members by first name (there can't be that many Vivian's in Lismore).

Ordinarily you might expect an injured car-accident survivor (she required neck and spinal surgery after the accident) might be taken to hospital and efforts made to find and contact her family. However not in this case. It seems DIMA are predisposed to ridding Australia of it's solo mums, because although the car accident survivor was taken to hospital, she was shortly afterwards deported to the Philippines. Meanwhile the deportees siblings in Australia allegedly patiently waited for news after having filed a missing person report on the disappearance of their sister. And they could still be waiting, if the previous case of Cornelia Rau hadn't shone a dim light on the dimmer recesses of DIMA and stirred up a list of more then 100 other mistakenly detained Australians, one of whom was recognised, on satellite tv, east of Manila, by a priest at the hospice where the accident survivor was being cared for by Catholic nuns.

And that's where it ended, with the Catholic nuns at the St Teresa Missionaries of Charity. Ironically. It's always the nuns who are picking up the shattered pieces of government policy. And I do mean irony. And I do mean shattered.

It's an improbable story I know, not least that four years absence seems to have opened up a beaurocratic memory gap, in which the deportee's account, the nuns and priests account in the Philippines, and the deportee's family, hospital records and DIMA account back in Australia are all still trying to jiggle themselves into one cohesive picture. People are reporting the poor woman was mentally unstable before the accident, and people are reporting that she is very very sane but understandably traumatised after the deportation. And all this filtered through the media. Either way, it's a major stuff-up and it should never have happened.

So how did it happen? Well, they can hold all the enquiries they like, but I'm betting my beaded slippers it's going to boil down to staff "just doing their job" with overzealous verve and a certain amount of paranoia. I know, I live here, I've seen it and I sadly do not think it's going to change so long as the Howard government is mailing everybody fridge magnets printed with 1800 numbers to report suspicious activities too.

Australia still has a long way to travel, just for a wee taste of what Australia is trying to move away from (if only it's government would let it) here's a link to an extract from a hideous little book published in 1956.

Saturday, May 14, 2005

Uzbek wants democracy too - but the whitehouse wimps out

Radio Liberty publishes utter trolsh. No pretty language from me on this one. Excerpting from an article titled "U.S. Urges Restraint In Uzbekistan";
"We urge both the government and the demonstrators to exercise restraint at this time," he said. "The people of Uzbekistan want to see a more representative and democratic government, but that should come through peaceful means, not through violence."
Please excuse for one moment (@#$%&@*!!!) "Restraint" ? Where was "restraint" in March 2003?


Moscow, according to the China View, is pulling a similar line.
"Russia is concerned with the unrest in Andijan, Uzbekistan, with which Russia maintains a strategic partnership, and Russia supports the Uzbek government in its efforts to stabilize the situation there," Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Yakovenko said in a statement posted at the ministry's website.
There are too many 20th century Saddam echoes here, both Russia and the US have an ally in the current Uzbek government and Uzbek president Islam Karimov frequently receives criticism for human rights abuse. However, unlike 21st century Saddam, Karimov pledged to help out in "the war on terror" and has apparently been taking on interrogative duties for the Bush Administration. Don Van Natta;
Now there is growing evidence that the United States has sent terror suspects to Uzbekistan for detention and interrogation, even as Uzbekistan's treatment of its own prisoners continues to earn it admonishments from around the world, including from the State Department.

The so-called rendition program, under which the Central Intelligence Agency transfers terrorism suspects to foreign countries to be held and interrogated, has linked the United States to other countries with poor human rights records. But the turnabout in relations with Uzbekistan is particularly sharp. Before Sept. 11, 2001, there was little high-level contact between Washington and Tashkent, the Uzbek capital, beyond the United States' criticism.

Uzbekistan's role as a surrogate jailer for the United States was confirmed by a half-dozen current and former intelligence officials working in Europe, the Middle East and the United States. The C.I.A. declined to comment on the prisoner transfer program, but an intelligence official estimated that the number of terrorism suspects sent by the United States to Tashkent was in the dozens.

So no orange revolution for Uzbek then.

Nick Allen in Moscow;

The sudden eruption of violence capped weeks of peaceful demonstrations in Andizhan over the trial of 23 local businessmen on what supporters say are trumped-up religious extremism charges...

Anticipating official attempts to paint the events as a manifestation of extremism, some in the crowd shouted: "We are not extremists. We want democracy and work." more

Howard tries to snare Green vote

Too funny. Johno threw a tiff at reporters the other day because Bob Brown is the darling of the environment and Johno wants a bit of the action;
"Everybody's an environmentalist, but it seems in this country the extreme Greens represented by people like Bob Brown assume some kind of undeserved monopoly of concern about the environment and if you don't match what they demand then you don't care about the environment," he told reporters.

"Well I am sick of that point of view and so are a lot of Australians who vote for my party and also a lot of Australians who vote for the Labor Party."

Well it might have worked with stealing One Nation's vote - but I'm not sure you'll ever get the green vote, John.

Still, isn't it great to see the green movement making an impact on Liberal rhetoric! Keep at it Bob.

Sunday, May 08, 2005

Virginia's Mum's weren't the earth mother type

I am childless and I am angry. Angry that I was so foolish to take the word of my feminist mothers as gospel. Angry that I was daft enough to believe female fulfilment came with a leather briefcase.

- Virginia Haussegger July 2002, now with book.

Virginia Haussegger was angry. And she is trying to identify the source. But is she barking up a tree of battered orange ruffy I wonder?

What is it that is really making Virginia unhappy? She has a career, she has clothes, she has her lattes (or her short black expresso's - really I can't pretend to know how Virginia drinks her coffee or if she even drinks it at all but I can bet "your bottom dollar", as my grandmother might've said, that whatever she's drinking is not instant nescafe or packaged in cheap no-fills tea-bags). What else does she have? She has her shoes, and her apartment (probably) and her bank account - she has money ! But is money making her happy? Has money bought her a family?

Perhaps it is not her mothers feminism that has made Virginia unhappy, perhaps it is that little green-backed monster lurking in the leather briefcase.

When I look at our mothers, I see a generation of woman who worked goddamned hard. They broke their backs for us, and spent copious amounts of time (and the little money that they had) on other people, on, horrors dread, "community projects". Oh yes, we laughed at our mothers as we grew up didn't we - watching them do all that stuff for other people. Poor silly mum we thought, all that time she spends on education and health "in the community" when she could be investing in the sharemarket. Yes, that's what we thought. And we packed our briefcases and slipped on our square toed heels and squeezed into our slimline pinstripe skirts and tottered off to play business-lady.

And what did we learn, 30 years on?

Ah sigh, perhaps we should have listened to our mothers. We learnt that money is not the sole source of happiness and that power-dressing is not likely to come back when we could be wearing one of those flattering floral reproductions by Collette Dinnigan.

Poor us. But we were not the only ones duped by what we thought to be our independence. For there were our brothers. Our brothers who thought this whole career girl thing might be a bit of a cinch. Oh glory days ! The girl buys the bloke drinks ! And goes halves in the dinner bill ! Not only that - Wohoo - she wants to work after we shack up ! Cruisey dudes, now we only have to work half as hard and hey, this pushing little sisters pram in the supermarket ain't so bad ! Wo ! the chicks dig it when I flex my arms reaching for baby formula on the top shelf !

Oh yes, our poor brothers were duped too.

For all the time that we were dressing up for Wall Street and they were practicing their sensitive new age pickup lines, the real Scrooge Mc'zillions were rasping hoarsely and rubbing their hands together in glee. Oh a great thing the glass ceiling is they chortled - just wait till she starts bumping her head against that ! And they cackled and waited for the sexual revolutionaries to start sleeping their way to the top. Well, not quite the top.

And what's worse, we sealed our own fates. Oh yes we did. Those of us who strutted our way toward the elevator doors, pushing our peers aside like skittles and betraying our own sex to collude with the powers that be (for collude some have).

All the while our "freemarket" chortling as cash registers rang out across the land where once wedding bells might have peeled. "Dual income families !" "Single working women with expendable income !" "Dual income couples - no dependents !". The freemarket almost squawked as it packaged it's barely concealed delight in ever diversifying consumer items for us to buy, with our expendable incomes.

And before we knew it, it was too expensive to have kids as well. Oh no ! The Manolo Blahniks ! We lamented. We cannot do without watching those on Jessica Parker ! (For by this time our 100% pure virgin cold pressed olive oil and organic tomatoes and cured prosciutto were already in excess of our shoe budget and having dashed our heads against the glass ceiling all day we settled for vermouth and gin and Sicilian olives in front of the flat screen telly, rather then ankle bitters).

Our mothers didn't tell us to ignore motherhood - our economy did.

Virginia, award winning journalist - toss aside those tailored shirts for a moment, chuck on an old T and go teach a journalism workshop with some disaffected teenagers. Go on, your employer will love you for it. Soul journalism is your answer Virginia, our egalitarian feminist mothers had it right.

Sunday, May 01, 2005

Tangent

Can anyone beat Beth's voice, or lyrics?

Tangent ~ Beth Orton

Lost myself in a tangent of words,
Can't decide what I've seen or heard,
Can not sleep for counting sheep,
How long does this river run deep,
How long does this river run deep.

Building a map in order to find,
What's not lost but left behind,
My instinct got bruised,
But I still see,
I was a victim I'll be no casualty.

Just like coming home,
Just like coming home,
Just like coming home,
It was just like coming home,
Coming home.

He said that you weave deadly tricks,
Come right back to the worldly hicks,
Stare it cold in dull surprise,
Spread evil to hell in every tear you cried,
Every tear you cried.

Building a map in order to find,
What's not lost but left behind,
I was a victim I'll be no casualty.

Just like coming home,
Just like coming home,
Just like coming home,
Could be just like coming home,
Coming home.

Cut off my toes to spite my feet,
Drank your poison
Didn't taste too sweet,
Saw that heaven's in my mind,
It's there for me to find,
It's there for me to find.

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