One Law for Rich Liberal Party Donors...

Wronged: Robert Gerard

It sounds so very Republican-Party: the appointment to the board of the Reserve Bank of a rich businessman who has made over a million dollars in donations to the Liberal Party. Of course it was Robert Gerard's eminent suitability for the position that they took into account during the appointment- so overwhelming were his qualifications for the position that it in fact blinded them to the knowledge that Mr Gerard had donated wads of cash to the Liberal Party. Mr Gerard is just so competent and invaluable in his role on the board that he doesn't even need to turn up to meetings!

He's such a great guy that when the tax office noticed that his company's payments of millions of dollars to an insurance company (coincidently based in a Caribbean tax-haven) were claimed as tax-deductions and then routed back to his own company in Australia, they let him pay it back with no admission of wrongdoing or liability- in fact, if you believe Mr Gerard, he did nothing wrong at all. He paid the tax-office $150 million out of the goodness of his heart, despite the injustice of its hurtful allegations. As any good businessman would do.

So persuasive are Prime Minister Howard and Peter Costello's statements in defence of Mr Gerard that I will have to abandon my initial assumptions of how it looks to have a major Liberal Party donor who paid millions through a $12000 company based in the Dutch Antilles and owned by himself that he, sorry, his company subsequently claimed as tax deductions and then quietly paid back to the ATO with no consequences whatsoever sitting on the Reserve Bank Board. We obviously need more Robert Gerards in this country.

Mother's Diet Influences Baby's Tastes

Found this also in the Independent. I've read about studies on this phenomenon before, and it is something worth bearing in mind for pregnant and breastfeeding mothers, but it can't be the whole story, because Gam's mother tells me she ate plenty of vegetables and fruit while she was pregnant with Gam, but he has always refused to eat his vegies, and today the only vegetable he can stand the taste of is the one starting with 'C'- Centrum (after I convinced him that potato chips don't count as a vegetable, that is).

I do wonder about the effect of foods like, say, blue cheese or salami (I realise there is debate on whether fermented meat such as salami is safe for consumption by pregnant women) or asparagus, even, on breast milk (or amniotic fluid). Could it be that foods such as this make the milk taste so bad that the actual foods themselves are met with sheer relief by the kid? Given they studied the facial expressions of the babies consuming carrot-flavoured cereal to gauge their 'acceptance' of the taste, perhaps they should study the faces of the breastfeeding babies whose mothers have been fed blue cheese or some other strong-tasting food and compare them with a control group to test the babies' acceptance at that point as well.

Life, the Universe and Everything

God bless Wikipedia... I went to make a baked chocolate pudding this evening and found I'd run out of baking powder. Knowing that baking powder essentially consists of bicarb soda and cream of tartar, I looked it up in wikipedia- and right at the end of the entry on baking powder was a little heading titled 'substituting in recipes', which gave the valuable piece of information that baking powder can be made from one part bicarb soda to two parts cream of tartar.

Wikipedia may not yet be the answer to everything, but they're working on it. Bloody marvellous.

Israel's Second-Class Citizens

I found this article in the UK Independent's World News section. It's reasonably long, but worth a read.

Christian Study Finds in Favour of Christian Morality

Not living in sin leads to better marriages!

While I certainly wouldn't fall over in shock at the news that a survey of 1500 Australians carried out by a bunch of Anglicans found that having a de facto relationship at any point leads to future relationships filled with crises of insecurity and intimacy, while 'bible-believing' Christian marriages (just like Nick and Jessica, boys and girls!) are more loving and secure, I was a bit surprised at the way the Sun Herald article treated the item.

I know the Sun Herald is the SMH tabloid rag, but somehow I was expecting them to delve a little deeper into the results of the study than they did. Instead, for some truly unbiased commentary, they turned to Dr Andrew Cameron, 'ethics lecturer' at Moore Theological College, of all places. Dr Cameron also happens to be one of the study's authors, but don't let that raise any question of bias in your mind- he does have God on his side, after all.

What really got me was this piece of information:

42.5 per cent of married people said their partners treated them very well, compared with 31 per cent of de factos who felt that.

Those are some pretty scary figures. All it says to me, however, is that there are a lot of people in relationships that aren't good for them, married or unmarried.

The Sun Herald reported that "[Dr Cameron] said the researchers realised such claims for Christian spirituality could seem smug and arrogant."

No mate, just incredibly biased to the point of being unscientific, that's all.

Another paper by the same group that was also presented at the Centre for Apologetic Scholarship and Education conference in Sydney, titled ‘Home/Work Conflict and Relational Wellbeing’

Tracy Gordon, co-author of the papers and researcher for Sydney Diocese’s Social Issues Executive, said the research team had been most disturbed to find that committed Christians are indistinguishable from the rest of the population in the extent they experience conflict between work and home life.

“This came as a surprise because previous American research was pointing in the other direction,” she said. “In the USA, Bible-believing Protestants have retained traditional gender roles that protect them from home/work conflict.”

Hold that thought -and look at it in relation to this...

Bombing Al Jazeera

Given that the US has had its 'precision-guided' bombs encounter mysterious malfunctions and 'accidently' bomb Al Jazeera headquarters in Baghdad (Iraq), killing Tareq Ayyoub, and Kabul (Afghanistan), it's understand how the world might find it hard to believe that US President George Bush wanted to deliberately bomb Al Jazeera headquarters in Qatar, a US ally. Indeed, I'm sure if the Qatar headquarters of Al jazeera did happen to mysteriously blow up, the bombings would have been carried out by Syria or Iran or some evil country like that.

In order to ensure the truth comes to light, Britain has charged the staffer who leaked the documents of the discussion between Blair and Bush (don't they mean forged documents?) in which Blair attempts to dissuade Bush from the plan to bomb Al Jazeera (remembering of course that Bush planned no such thing!) under the Official Secrets Act, and are warning media outlets that anyone who reports details of the (alleged) conversation will face jail time.

Junk Food Review

I might be studying food science and nutrition, but I appreciate certain forms of tasty junk food as much as the next person. This post is handing out a big tick of approval to the Natural Confectionary Co's 'Natural Jelly Beans'. I don't particularly care whether they're 'natural' or not, and I would appreciate knowing without having to do a google search that the company is owned by Cadbury Schweppes (at least it's not Nestle, but so much for buying Australian), but regardless, they are very tasty. They have a little bit of a sour taste to them that isn't present in most jellybeans, which I like; my only criticism is of the orange ones- they use a paprika derivative for colouring, and have kind of a paprika-ry aftertaste. It's possible that some of the other flavoured beans use this for their colouring as well, but the orange ones are the only ones I've noticed the aftertaste in. I'll be sure to eat some more just to be certain.

Big props also to McVities Jaffa Cakes. We have lots of McVities biscuits here in Australia, but no Jaffa Cakes. Why? They're just so good! I'm a worthy market all by myself!

Gam, as a special present for me, yesterday forked out $8.95 for a 12 pack (150g) of Jaffa Cakes from this little shop in the city (in the Myer Centre- it seems to be owned by a really sour lady, but she knows that suckers like us have nowhere else to go if they want sweets that aren't usually available here) that charges extortionist prices for everything. We polished them off in next to no time, and I went looking online to see if it's possible to buy them and have them shipped over. One site wanted £54 shipping costs for 4.5kg of Jaffa Cakes, which brought the price per packet up to about $9 anyway. Eventually I found an Australian site called TasteIreland which sells them, and with postage ($14 to Brisbane) costs about $7.50 per packet. Of course, they were out of stock with the promise of getting more soon. I bookmarked the page. Unfortunately there's no pre-ordering facility, so it'll be a mad scramble with other Jaffa Cake-deprived Australians and expat Brits and Irish to get an order in fast.

Cheeky Chavez Provokes Washington

He really did it! When Venezualan President Hugo Chavez suggested that he could sell cheap oil for the US poor, I figured he was just stirring and that if he tried such a thing, the American Government would thwart it. Turns out he wasn't and they didn't:

Venezuela's President, Hugo Chavez, has pulled off his greatest public relations coup yet in his campaign to irritate the Bush Administration with a deal to supply cheap fuel to thousands of poor residents of Boston and New York.

To the anger of many in Washington, Citgo Petroleum Corporation, a company controlled by the Venezuelan Government, will supply more than 45 million litres of oil at 40 per cent below market prices.

Petrol in the US is already cheaper than in most of the Western world, but it's still fun to see Chavez getting some back at the Bush Administration, given they supported several coup attempts against him. It's hard to gauge how long Washington will tolerate independent-thinking in Latin American governments for, though. The US probably sees Chavez as a sort of cancer, given the spread of left-leaning governments in that region, and might just decide to treat him with chemo.

Christianity Means Following the Teachings of Jesus?

The Bible versus homosexuality

November 25, 2005

THE case of Christian conservatives relies on half a dozen passages from the Bible that explicitly ban homosexual practices.

In the Old Testament, Leviticus, chapter 18, verse 22, instructs, "Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with women", and goes on to suggest the death penalty for those who engage in homosexual behaviour.

Jesus was silent on the subject, devoting more time to MATERIALISM and the concerns of the POOR.

In the New Testament, St Paul cites male and female homosexual behaviour as an example of human rebellion for which God's punishment is death.

Christian gay activist groups such as Uniting Network insist there are dangers in isolating these biblical passages as evidence that homosexuality is a sin. The scriptures have been used to justify slavery, apartheid and the oppression of women. Divorce and remarriage is not sanctioned yet is accepted, albeit reluctantly, among the churches.

And few heed the instruction of 1 Corinthians 5, 11, which forbids Christians from associating or eating with anyone guilty of immorality, greed, idolatry, drunkenness or theft.

Meanwhile, Jesus' message of inclusiveness, love thy neighbour, is ignored for straitjacket literalism, they say.

A Melbourne Anglican, Dr Muriel Porter, says scriptural injunctions against homosexuality come down to a handful of texts written at a time when homosexual behaviour was regarded as an expression of lust or sexual indulgence.

It was not until the 20th century that homosexuality was regarded as a fundamental human sexual orientation and given a name, Porter says. There was no understanding of deep, monogamous and meaningful homosexual relationships.

"The Bible is a very complex set of documents dating back thousands of years and I don't think there is any such thing as a plain reading of scripture, just like there isn't of Shakespeare, or John Donne's poems."

Linda Morris

From the SMH

Gee, What Were the Odds?

Pass the tissues...

Now, brace yourself, people: Jessica Simpson and Nick whatsisname (let's just call him 'the first ex-husband') have split after being married for only 3 years. Betcha never saw that coming. Has a single one of these much vaunted American "I'm saving myself for marriage" marriages ever had a happy ending (or at least a 'happy'- they all seem to have an ending)? Three years might be a long time in Hollywood, but it's a long way off from "'til death do us part". I wonder how many people are counting their money after betting on a breakup?

Regional Food Magazine

As much as I love food and recipe books, I usually avoid food magazines because I can't stand food and wine 'wankerism': recipes filled with ingredients so expensive and obscure that even if you're prepared to fork out the money to buy them, you probably wouldn't be able to find them anywhere except a single exclusive delicatessen somewhere in Sydney; ridiculously flowery descriptions of food and wine (I once saw a wine review that claimed there were 'background notes of nicotine') and arsehole food critics who know soooo much about what constitutes 'good food' (usually involving a faddish obsession with a single ingredient or combination of ingredients that happens to be particularly fashionable at the time- pork belly, puy lentils, whatever) that if you disagree with them you're marked as some kind of heathen; the trick is to nod worshipfully and pretend to understand what they're on about. All in all it's like the art world: a chronic case of emperor's New Clothes Syndrome.

That's why I usually avoid food magazines.

However, I bought the very first issue of Regional Food magazine back in July simply because the delicious looking hunk of King Island cheese on the cover caught my eye. I'm a sucker for good cheese, and so the promise of finding out a little more about King Island and how the cheese is made there was too much to resist. The magazine was a nice little read- it also detailed other produce industries and people involved in the food industry on King Island and also had information for potential tourists. Finding out a little more on what was previously, to me, a rather small and obscure part of Australia was an enjoyable way to waste a couple of hours. I'm also very supportive of efforts to bring attention to small farmers who fall outside the radar of the majority of consumers because they don't sell to the big supermarket duopoly of Coles and Woolworths (who are responsible for depressing the prices paid to farmers while they make a fat profit margin on fresh produce at the supermarket). Fresh produce that hasn't been transported from one end of the country to the other in a refrigerated truck tastes a whole lot better than produce that has: anyone who has been unlucky enough to eat one of those disgusting grey supermarket bananas (which happens because the storage temperature dropped below 14 degrees Celcius, I found out recently), or lucky enough to have had a crate full of fresh picked apples after usually consuming horrid, tasteless supermarket apples ought to know what I'm talking about.

I kept an eye out for the second issue, to no avail. I thought maybe it had gone bust on the first issue- a lot of magazines fail to make it- but last weekend I finally saw the second issue in our local newsagent. The cover isn't nearly as attractive this time around, and the price has gone up to $8.95 from around $5.00, but it was still a great read. The focus of the second issue is on 'Capital Country Villages' around Canberra; small food and wine producers as well as more tourist-y information on local hotels and the like. There was a small note in the back of the magazine under the headline "where have we been?", explaining that as the magazine doesn't yet have a big publisher behind it they needed to sell a certain number of ads for the next issue to be able to afford to pay the printer, hence the second issue was a few months late.

Anyway, I posted this because I thought the second issue might be worth a heads-up to any Canberrans who occasionally read this blog, and to anyone in general with an interest in the small-time food industry in Australia.

Child rape? 5 Years in jail. Done for drugs? You're as good as dead.

Gary Glitter has been busted, again, on child sex offences, this time in Vietnam. The guy is scum, that's well known.

What got my attention, however, is the fact that he faces anything from one to five years in jail for his offences ('alleged' offences would be a mere matter of semantics here- the guy is a paedophile). Vietnam is one of those South-East Asian countries that has the death penalty for drug smuggling. Rape a Vietnamese child, though, and by comparison you get off scot-free. It got me wondering what the penalty for child sex offences is in Singapore, well known for its prudish, restrictive government (until last year even oral sex carried a jail term, and it's still illegal between same-sex couples, thanks to the Singapore government's bigotry). Turns out it's up to 20 years. But it's nowhere near as harsh as the death penalty, which says to me that they think preventing children being raped and molested isn't quite as important as keeping drug smugglers out of the country.

I should also add here that as despicable and undemocratic as the Singapore government is, some of the nicest, friendliest people I have ever met have been Singaporeans, and I have met a lot of them -Chinese, Malay, Indian and Tamil Singaporeans- all lovely, friendly, funny people- and probably not just because they're happy at being allowed to chew gum and have sex in Australia. I don't believe their crime rate is low because of their harsh, restrictive laws- I would be quite happy to believe that it's as low as it is because they are generally such lovely people- with the exception of their government. It's sad that Singapore's poor record on the death penalty has only come to light because of the Van Nguyen case. Even after Van Nguyen is killed, I think Australia should try and pressure South East Asian countries to abolish the death penalty, at least for drug smuggline (although our Government sounded very supportive of the death penalty in the case of those accused of the first Bali bombing). We shouldn't take notice of injustices only when they affect Australians. Singpore's laws have been in effect for many years, so it's a bit rough to start jumping up and down about them a few days before they execute one of our citizens.

Republican-Buddy Ambassador's Foot in Mouth Disease

It's... it's stuck! My foot is stuck!

When your only qualification as an diplomat is the experience of putting fat wads of cash in the pockets of the Republican Party and owning a chain of seafood restaurants, it's reasonable to expect to take a while to find your feet, even in New Zealand- the country America regards as the huggies pull-ups of diplomatic training grounds.

Bill McCormick is the new US ambassador to New Zealand, and not only has he made himself a laughing stock by pronouncing the name of the ANZUS treaty as 'An-Zoo', he has gotten himself in the Kiwis' bad books for asking why a freedom-lovin' country such as themselves didn't want to help the US invade Iraq.

I'm trying to decide which is more insulting... having a seafood restaurant chain owner or an ex baseball-buddy from the time Bush's daddy bought him a baseball team to run as ambassador (Tom Schaeffer, former US ambassorder to Australia). I think New Zealand wins by a hair's breadth.

Phantom Torturers

And this is different from life under Saddam?

Funny, innit? There's this story in the news about how US soldiers, following reports from a family that their teenaged son had gone missing, stumbled across a secret jail-slash-torture-chamber, with 173 starving, beaten and tortured prisoners inside. Nearly all of them were Sunnis, aside from some who were followers of Moqtada al Sadr. The Iraqi Government has promised a 'full investigation' to get to the bottom of the matter. Given that we can't even get a 'full investigation' under the Howard Government without already knowing the outcome, it goes without saying that the outcome of the Iraqi Government's 'investigation' will be somewhat predictable.

I guess the first question to answer is- who would want to put a bunch of Sunni males and al-Sadr followers into jail and torture them? The Iraqi provisional Government's official line seems to be an adaptation of the US 'few bad apples' excuse- that a few rogue Shiites have been wilfully and randomly abducting and torturing Sunnis, and also that reports of torture have been 'exaggerated'. Somehow, I don't think so.

No Justice for Iman al-Hams

Q: How do you get clean away with the murder of a 12 year old schoolgirl?

A: By being a member of the Israeli 'Defence' Force.

Israeli officer acquitted over girl's death

By Ed O'Loughlin Herald correspondent in Jerusalem
November 17, 2005

An Israeli military court has acquitted an army captain who admitted deliberately firing shots into a prostrate Palestinian schoolgirl last year and who then ordered his soldiers to kill anyone who entered a free-fire zone "even if it's a three-year-old".

The killing of Iman al-Hams, 13, in the Gaza border town of Rafah received widespread publicity last October, after some of the commander's troops accused him of cold-bloodedly emptying his assault rifle into her at close range. Palestinian doctors said she was struck by at least 17 bullets.

Initially, the Israeli Army claimed a girl, 16, had been shot after planting explosives at an army outpost and running away, a statement it later revised after it emerged no explosives or weapons had been found.

An internal military investigation also cleared the soldiers, but then an Israeli TV station broadcast communication tapes showing soldiers were aware the target was a wounded girl "of about 10" who was "scared to death" and trying to run away.

After the captain led a sortie from the fortified outpost the tapes recorded him as radioing his unit: "We fired and killed her … confirmed the kill."

The captain - whose name has been given only as Captain R to protect his identity - is then heard to broadcast: "Anything that's mobile, that moves in the zone, even if it's a three-year-old, needs to be killed."

In his trial Captain R argued "confirmation of kill" - an Israeli army euphemism for shooting a fallen person at close range to ensure they are dead - was standard procedure.

In earlier claims, the captain denied firing his magazine into the child, claiming that while inspecting her body he had come under fire from Palestinian gunmen and fired into the ground beside her body in response.

Initial charges of manslaughter were dropped after at least one of Captain R's soldiers retracted statements that he had witnessed the officer shooting the child's body. The captain, a member of the Givati Brigade, was yesterday acquitted on minor charges of misusing his weapon and attempting to persuade his troops to give false evidence.

How the hell did she get 17 bullets in her, then? Murderous scum.

Disappointing

I'm not the sort of person who is patriotic at all costs- I hate unsporting behaviour by players and fans on any side. So I was disappointed to see this in Spike this morning:

Balls and whistles

We were only joking. On Tuesday we listed the places near the Uruguay team hotel that sold loud musical instruments.

By yesterday morning the police had been called three times by hotel staff to complain about noise, had thrice investigated continual sounding of air horns and allegations of firecrackers, and thrice shushed groups of fans intent on disrupting the Uruguayan team's sleep....

That's just rotten. When the socceroos were treated rudely by fans in Uruguay 4 years ago our media called it an outrage, and basically blamed their loss on that (unfairly). Now we think it's funny to do the same to them?

During the game last night there was a bit of dodgy behaviour by the Uruguayans- they even got away with hitting one of our players in the face when the ball was not in play. It was horribly unsporting. Now, though, I think maybe they didn't feel Australia deserved sporting behaviour on their part. The Socceroos, minus a few isolated incidents, did exhibit fine sporting behaviour and controlled themselves much better on field, so they didn't deserve it, but this certainly puts the Uruguayans' behaviour in a different light.

WORLD CUUUUUUUUPPPPP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We DID IT!!!!!!!!! The Socceroos beat Uraguay in a penalty shootout and they're going to Germany in 2006!!!!!! Mark Schwartzer is a bloody hero!!!! :D

National Day of Protest- Brisbane

Gam and I went to the Brisbane protests this morning at Southbank- it was good to see loads of people there. The ABC reported an estimated crowd of 10000. We arrived a bit late, so it was impossible to get near the podium, let alone the big screen, so Gam helped me up a tree to take some photos.

It pisses me off that the business groups against the protest have been claiming that Australians don't care about the IR reforms and so they stayed away from the protests, but meanwhile they have been threatening employees who planned attend them with sacking, and the Government had various departments revoke pre-planned leave for people who were wanting to attend the protests (and had the decency to arrange it beforehand in a way that would have minimised the disruption to their employer!). They warned public servants that they would be 'breaking the law' if they went out and protested. Where the fuck do they think we're living? Uzbekistan? I thought that in Australia it was our right to protest. Screw that- it is our right.

A Little Sedition

I would be totally ok with this replacing the bust of the queen on the back of Aussie coins...

Dedicated to John Howard.

We have a Queen of good old Oz
But see, this Queen's not one of us.
We need a plan, ourselves to rid
Us of this Queen, and of her kids.

Should we not act without delay,
To thwart the trait'rous Howard's play
Our way of life goes to its grave
While IR laws us all enslave

And the train on Howard's gown
-those anti 'terror' laws coming down
Those laws of such disgraced renown
Mean jail for those who diss the crown

One solution, both cheap and clean
Is 'shoot to kill' - you know who I mean.
And today I start my own campaign

"Ian Thorpe for Queen
Long may he reign!"

Yeah yeah, I know sedition provisions currently exist, but really, if they're included in the new anti-terror legislation, who is to know if John Howard is, as he says, going to be nice enough to let people get away with saying nasty things about him? Don't the anti-terror laws also enable the government, sorrry, police, *cough* to arrest you without trial and gag you and anyone you talk to from saying what you were arrested for, on pain of jail time? So if the sedition provisions are abused, are we ever going to find out?

Go on Australia, Swallow Another Mouthful of Lies

Pulling Australia's troops out of Iraq will do nothing to lessen the terrorist threat, Prime Minister John Howard says.

Mr Howard today said the threat from terrorism would not theoretically be diminished by removing Australia's troops from Iraq.

"We were a terrorist target long before Iraq," he told the Nine Network's Sixty Minutes program.

"The first time (al-Qaeda leader Osama) bin Laden identified Australia in a hostile way was because of our intervention in East Timor.

"In my view ... it would not theoretically make any difference. We will stay the course in Iraq."

To me, that sounds like someone with an unpaid speeding fine telling people 'the cops were after me anyway, so I figured I may as well go ahead and murder someone'.

Howard knows full well that what he has done in Iraq has increased the terrorist threat here, but damned if he's going to admit it. The first rule of politics: If you're caught with your pants down, pull 'em up and lie about it.

Suddenly Domestic Violence Outranks 'WorkChoices'

Has anyone noticed that the Government's 'To Violence Against Women Australia Says No' ad campaign is suddenly being screened twice in every single bloody ad break? I was trying to figure out why it has made such a sudden resurgence when I realised that I haven't seen those annoying WorkChoices ads in a while. Could it be that the government has bought a certain number of advertising hours from all the stations but once it became clear that a) the campaign wasn't effective and b) the obscene amount of money being spent on it was pissing people off even further, they decided to try and avoid more controversy and get the channels to screen the domestic violence campaign instead?

Gam's take on the matter here.

Doggedly Courting Ridicule

I'm sure it has a great personality...

When it comes to something like this, I simply don't know which of the two parties is stupider. Is it the morons who pay up to $1500 for a 'puggle' puppy, or the breeders who get upset that people are paying such a ridiculous price for a puppy that they would call a 'mongrel', when they charge ridiculous prices for their own purebred puppies?

While I love all kinds of dogs (except for chihuahuas- they're usually nasty little buggers), I do find it kind of offensive that when a fad arises, people start paying huge sums for puppies that they ordinarily wouldn't have given a second glance had they been available at the local RSPCA or animal shelter. I don't believe that any kind of pet should be bought simply because it is 'in fashion'.

And I don't agree with breeders who are so up themselves they believe that a 'mongrel' is inherently inferior. The person who wrote the SMH article obviously didn't do basic studies of genetics in highschool, and got this line straight from a breeder:

While advocates say hybrid vigour can result in cross breeds - producing a healthier offspring than both parents - it can also accentuate genetic faults.

That's just dead wrong. Genetic faults are 'accentuated' by the inbreeding that creates the breed in the first place. By definition, hybridisation means that the offspring of the two parents of different breeds cannot be homozygous for any undesirable genetic trait only present in one of the breeds.

Remember This.

I've always liked the section in the Sydney Morning Herald's Good Weekend magazine called 'two of us'. Today though, I not only liked it but thought it worthy of reproducing some sections of it here, as it does such a good job of explaining why I feel sick to my stomach when I see someone like John Howard holding his hand over his heart on occasions such as Remembrance Day.

two of us

interviews by Paul Maley

Louise Merrington, 21, is a student at the University of Melbourne and a freelance writer. Ken Sillcock,95, is her grandfather. During World War II, he served as an army stretcher-bearer, then as a wireless operator flying bombing raids over Europe; his brother Ron went missing in action in the Caribbean. Ken is collating his wartime correspondence for a book.

Louise: [...] His younger brother was killed in the war. I can see that even after so many years he's still quite sad about it. The thing that really struck me was when he said 'I just don't understand why Ron could only live to 30 and why I've got over three times that'. It made me want to cry.

I know people have a tendency to idealise the past and I guess things like that force you to step back and say, 'Hang on, it's not all as rosy as you think it is'. He said to me the nickname they had for themselves in the army was 'six-bob-a-day-murderers'. He says murder is illegal except when the government's paying you to do it.

[...] We're both against the Iraq war. He's very strongly against it because he's been through it all, whereas I can see that, while we shouldn't have gone in the first place, if we were to pull out now it would probably end in anarchy. Well, more anarchy.

[...] I feel a terrible irony when all the politicians come out on Anzac Day or Remembrance Day and lay their wreaths and make their nice speeches and say, 'Lest we forget', and then they go and send our young men and women off to get killed again. I find that incredibly frustrating because it's like, well, if you just stopped for long enough and actually came and listened to the stories of these people, you might have a different view.

Ken: [...] Louise spent six months in China before starting her uni course. In one of her emails she commented that living as a minority in a foreign culture makes one very tolerant. That's the way young people should see the world. It's so much better to send them abroad to meet young people of other countries in a friendly way instead of going to fight them.

The whole business of war is wrong. Every generation has been conned by their elders that it's their duty to go. In World War I it was frightful. Women used to hnd out white feathers to anyone who hadn't enlisted and accuse them of cowardice, which was a rotten thing to do.

I was against war right at the beginning, but I felt, well, it will feel a bit crook if, at the end of [WWII], all those people have givn thteir lives and I haven't done a damn thing to help, so I enlisted. But at the time I thought, I'm in the business of saving lives as a stretcher-bearer -not killing people. I didn't want to be firing rifles at other people, but of course when I came to Bomber Command we killed so many thousands. We didn't see who we were killling, that was the only difference.

Lest we forget, indeed. We still have old guys like Ken Sillcock alive at the moment, who are trying their best to pass on to us the lessons they took away from their painful experience of war. But we're not even listening, and soon, there'll be nothing to remember.

No Positive Correlation Between Coffee Consumption and Hypertension

From the NYTimes:

One of those things I just knew all along: something I like so much cannot possibly be bad for me. Well, it's now on the record that I've been vindicated: women who drink 3 or more cups of coffee a day are actually slightly less likely to develop high blood pressure in the long term than women who consume little or no coffee. Be warned though, the same doesn't apply to Coke:

Women in the same study who drank colas appeared to have a greater risk of high blood pressure.

There was some evidence that women who drank four or more daily cups of regular or decaffeinated coffee had a slightly lower risk of developing high blood pressure than those who drank little or none.

A possible explanation, Dr. Winkelmayer said, is that coffee has lots of antioxidants, substances that are thought to help protect the heart and reduce risks of cancer.

Dr. Winkelmayer's group examined data on 155,594 mostly white female nurses, with an average age of 55, who took part in two long-running health studies. They were questioned periodically about their diets and health and followed over 12 years. High blood pressure was diagnosed in about 33,000 of them.

Heh. I love being right.

More Random Photos

Photos 1-3: views from the City Cat. Photo 4- we came across the Aussie Aerial car again, parked in the street near the City Cat terminal and photographed it properly this time!
Photo 5 is a possum our cat spotted just tonight. Earlier today I noticed that the leaves of the sweet potato vine had been clipped back from the top of the wall; I suspected Gam was responsible since he's always at me about cutting it back. Well, it turns out the possum was cutting it back for us and eating the leaves! I'm definitely keeping the vine now!

Rejection of Intelligent Design Sets a Straight Path to Hell for Pennsylvania Voters

Oh boy. While I can never get tired of hearing about Pat Robertson's latest rant, I can't help but be more than a little alarmed that this man actually wields influence over a substantial number of people in the US.

On Tuesday, Dover voters ousted the local school board, which had tried to introduce the concept ['Intelligent Design'] as an alternative to the theory of evolution.

Pat Robertson told his TV show that the town had turned its back on God.

"I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: If there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city," Mr Robertson said on The 700 Club.

... "If they have future problems in Dover, I recommend they call on Charles Darwin. Maybe he can help them."

There's not much you can say about nutbaggery of this magnitude. His words speak for themselves, really.

From the BBC.

Wholemeal Crumpets

They used to be one of my favourite snack foods, toasted and dripping with golden syrup or honey. I tried the white ones once but they just aren't as good. So why aren't wholemeal crumpets available in Queensland? The white ones on the supermarket shelves here are the exact same brand. Another backward Queensland thing, just like how they used to shut all the shops on a Sunday when I first arrived here, I guess.

Harrangueman's Yes/No Top Ten

From HarrangueMan:

Are you pro-choice on Abortion? yes
Are you against the death penalty? yes
Do you vote for the right side of politics? no
Do you believe that homosexuality is a moral crime? no
Do you believe that some cultures are obviously superior to others? no
Do you believe some aspects of cultures are disquieting and are wrong? yes
Have you ever secretly thought a retarded or mentally deranged person was amusing to you? Not that I can remember, but that doesn't mean I haven't.
Do you have things that you do in secret that no one knows about that if they knew they would think less of you? Depends on who is doing the thinking!
Do you suffer from crippling pangs of regret on a frequent basis? Definitely
Have you ever masticated in public? Masticated... yes.

Fun Fact

Some things make me thankful not to be a guy. This is one of them.

Gotta love Wikipedia.

More Random Photos

Yeah, I know... this is kind of the blogging equivalent of a respirator... keeping the poor thing alive while I wade my way through exams. All photos but the pigeon were taken yesterday. The turkey was great- it was so preoccupied with sorting through that person's rubbish that it forgot to be its usual nervous and flighty self when I went over with the camera.

Beazley Decides to Tail Popular Opinion Instead of Flying by Seat of Howard's Pants

Better late than never, I guess. Kim Beazley has finally stated that he will repeal the Howard Government's so-called 'WorkChoices' laws if (if) Labor wins the next election. If Beazley really believed in the cause, rather than just seeing a popular movement to take advantage of, he would have made this commitment a long time ago. Never mind the motivation, though, it's a good move. The 'WorkChoices' legislation has created the threat of a poverty-ridden underclass in the model of the USA. It may sound like an extreme statement, but since the government is so fond of portraying terrorism as anything that 'threatens our Australian way of life', I put the government's WorkChoices Bill in the category of legislative terrorism. For a bunch of people who have consistently opposed increases in the minimum wage for working Australians, it's not enough for them to say 'trust us'. We don't.

More Random Photos

Photos #1 and #4 are of our crazy but not often drunk cat, Feifei. Photo #2 obviously should have been taken from the other side of the antenna, but neither Gam nor I thought of it at the time... nonetheless it's cute and you can see what the person was getting at! Photo #3 is for the benefit of Anthony and anyone else fortunate enough to live in Brisbane, particularly within walking distance of Bean Scene's cherry crumble and baked cheesecake... mmm.

CSIRO: Selling Science Short

Not surprisingly, this article in the SMH was written with a fairly sympathetic tone toward the 200 soon-to-be sacked CSIRO employees, probably because many Fairfax employees found themselves engaged in industrial action over a similar move at their own paper.

Now, the reason axing the jobs of 200 research support staff and labelling it as 'cost cutting' might seem a little hypocritical is that certain people at the top have been given rather large pay rises in the last 12 months:

The CSIRO's recently released 2004-05 annual report indicates the number of people being paid at least $330,000 had risen from five to nine over the year.

That seems a little hard to defend, given this urgent need for 'cost-cutting' cited by the very people who receive those huge salaries. To give some perspective, the salary of a senior scientist at the CSIRO is $67000 per year. The CSIRO's media manager gets five times that ($330000 per year).

In Praise of Coffee

Mmm- Brown Gold, beloved of students.

And of all other sources of sustenance so dear to students during hard times. Mi Goreng, various forms of concentrated simple sugars, pizza delivery... when you haven't studied as much as you should have throughout the semester and therefore have little time for shopping or cooking come swot-vac, these things are a godsend. Of course if I was truly serious about knuckling down I wouldn't be posting on my blog, but everyone needs some procrastination. Some need it more than others. Plus, I'm waiting for my latest coffee to kick in.

Gam and I have notched up our consumption to an entire 200g bag of beans per week over the last couple of weeks- usually we get the PNG Highland something-or-other beans from Oxfam stores (in the pretty blue bag) but because we've been too busy to go into the city we have been buying bags of the house blend from our favourite cafe. I know it seems a bit too posh for a couple of poor students bludging off the government to be drinking 'real' coffee as opposed to instant, but the smell of instant makes me gag. Besides that, I bet taxpayers are funding nice beans for the politicians in Parliament House, and they could actually afford to pay for it themselves! Our flatmate has a big tin of 'farmland' brand instant that she bought last year and is still using that has gone stale and now smells like some sort of bizarre savoury soup. Ugh. I keep giving her samples of decent brands of instant whenever I get them in the hope that once she tries them at least she'll give up on the farmland one, but no luck. I guess, to her credit, she only seems to drink it for the caffeine around exam time or when she has assignments due, not because she likes the stuff.

Because I don't cook when I'm studying I tend to just make do with whatever is around the house- my favourite snack this swot-vac has been chopped apple microwaved with a teaspoon of brown sugar and honey dissolved in some hot water and a sprinkling of cinnamon, then refrigerated... partly to let the apple soak up the syrup, and party because it's been a bit warm for hot food.

My favourite junk snack is chicos... addictive little buggers. Gam doesn't like them, so when I buy some, as I did yesterday, I wind up eating them all myself. Mmmm. Horrid things. I don't even like buying Allens sweets, because they're owned by Nestle, but I make an exception for chicos because, well, they're so tasty. After eating a whole packet I don't feel like buying them again for a while, which is good.

Now I'm curious to hear about other people's study-foods...

A Round of Applause

... For the guy who managed to pull this off (from Spike)

The voicemail in [Liberal MP Alby] Schultz's parliamentary and electorate offices was replaced with a male voice informing callers that "we are going to f--- you up the arse with our industrial relations changes".

A clearly annoyed Schultz told AAP it raises serious questions about politicians' cyber security. "Where does that leave … parliamentarians in terms of being confident that the personal files that we have on our computers are not able to be accessed? Where does that leave us … when our constituents ring … to be confronted with, and to be forced to listen to, obscene language?"

If only they could have managed to simultaneously create the same message for the voicemail of all Howard government ministers...

Rotten Apples Cost 30% More for Australians

From Opinion in the SMH this morning:

Owners of iPods seeking music from the "major" record companies are effectively forced to use Apple's new digital music service, iTunes, putting a great deal of power in the hands of Apple. Apple not only provides the hardware to consumers, it also effectively provides the only legal means of obtaining and transferring the content to your hardware. So by giving someone an iPod, you are also effectively locking them into iTunes.

At best iTunes can be described only as a partial digital music service since it does not include content from several independent record companies, as well as from Sony/BMG, one of the biggest recording labels. As far as local acts are concerned, the absentee list includes Alex Lloyd, Anthony Callea, Pete Murray, the Rogue Traders and Shannon Noll. And, iTunes has significant gaps in available back catalogue.

Consumers can't get access to the US iTunes site, which has a larger range of available product than the Australian site, because Apple and the big record companies have adopted a system of regional zoning. This means that iTunes can charge different prices for downloads in different markets.

We're a tolerant bunch, because Australian consumers will pay about 30 per cent more for digital downloads compared to US consumers. Yet an Australian iTunes digital download of Don't Cha by the Pussycat Dolls is identical to a download of the same song in the US. Apple is yet to explain how this price difference arises.

Given the lack of repertoire, consumers may be tempted to use the internet to obtain unauthorised MP3 downloads that they can then play on iPods. In an environment of rampant record company lawsuits this could be risky.

But faced with a partial digital music service and price gouging, who could blame consumers for taking the risk?

Consumers are idiots. Buying an iPod in Australia is tantamount to begging to take it up the arse from Apple, yet they're selling like hotcakes. I'm of the opinion that regional zoning is anti-competitive; it's an example of companies such as Apple, DVD and games console manufacturers and movie studios collaborating and utilising the benefits of globalisation for themselves while denying the same benefits to the consumer. All allowed under the law by the governments that we voted in. Money talks louder than democracy, obviously.

Police Open Fire on Children

What the hell is up with PNG? A bunch of police go to arrest a school principal who previously got drunk and obnoxious towards police; the police are confronted by stone-throwing students aged as young as nine years old, so they open fire on the crowd with semi-automatic weapons?!

WTF?!

Two students were killed, and three aged nine to twelve were in intensive care in hospital after being shot.

Something is seriously wrong in that country.

Bill Gates Shoulders World's Responsibility, Again

In the SMH this morning:

The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is providing a grant for malaria research worth over 3/4 of the total global spending on the problem. US$258 million.

A child dies every 30 seconds of malaria on the african continent.

Deaths from malaria have doubled in the last 20 years.

Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical companies our governments work so hard to protect are busying themselves with more worthy causes, like creating drugs to 'cure' obesity and stuff.

Article can also be read here.