Stay and get executed. Go, and be crucified.

From The Australian:

FEARS that ex-Tamil fighters may be passing themselves off as refugees will lead to the latest boatload of unauthorised arrivals - believed to be Tamils - being subjected to a particularly rigorous security screening process

WTF? What threat do they pose here, exactly? Given that ex-LTTE fighters are typically executed on the spot if identified by the Sri Lankan army, how can they not be considered refugees? When some top LTTE officials tried to surrender, a move negotiated by a top UN official, shortly after the end of the official fighting (but surely not the brutality), the Sri Lankan Army shot them in the head.

Until the Sri Lankan government is held to account for its behaviour and is forced to clean up its act, any Sri Lankan who makes claim to being a refugee upon arriving here should have their claim accepted.

Adopting a cat? Consider UQ.

From the most recent staff newsletter:

==================
Finding a loving home would be the cat's whiskers
UQ's School of Veterinary Science has a number of cats desperately looking for loving new homes. Rescued from the pound, they have been cared for by University researchers while they have taken part in a study and now it is time for them to be adopted. There are both male and female cats of all ages. They are all desexed, vaccinated, wormed and micro-chipped. Details: Renee or Nicole on 3365 3064.
==================

UQ's small animal clinic also has a profile and lists animals up for adoption on Pet Rescue, the website on which we found our lovely Xiaoxiao. There's a link in the sidebar on the right-hand side of the page :)

Media, still dumb/crooked

As usual the media only appear to be doing their jobs when a ready made, pre-packaged scandal falls into their laps. There are indications that it was known Malcopops had the dodgy email before he made reference to it and even after he did:

1) No one bothered to ask him where he got it from
2) The media, mostly the Murdoch rags, were integral in promoting the fake email as true, accepting something from the Libs and printing it as unsourced truth. No doubt as part of the seemingly endless campaign to tar Rudd with something media pea-brains can understand and don't need to do too much work to uncover.
3) There's been no analysis of how the email got from the Libs to the front page of Murdoch's cage liners anonymously. Maybe Godwin Gretch will tell the AFP and we'll find out.
4) The media are still stuck in the lazy loop of repeating other people's statements and trying to insert themselves into the story, as usual.

I read some ridiculous piece by some guy and George Megalogenis on how no one really knew Gretch, but they had the inside line on how he was a bit weird but a stand up guy. Their evidence for this? Gretch's involvement as the treasury official in charge of a Howard government pork barrel hand out to his 'favourite' footy club. He had daily meetings with Howard to report on the progress of the deal and we're to believe that it wasn't shady because he 'never accepted a free footy ticket.' Get fucked guys.

Maybe the real story here is the nature and the extent of the relationship between News Corp., the Liberal opposition and Gretch. Gretch seems to be the source of every government 'scandal' from Fuel Watch onwards, scandals that News Corp. always seemed to have an inside line on. I wonder if having a mole on the inside might explain the smugly confident 'we'll get him eventually' tone of News Corp. reporting on Rudd. The fact that they were willing to throw down with Malcopops and attack Rudd on a single email of dubious origin, when the 'evidence' (evidence that Swan talked to Mr Free-ute, who wound up getting no help from the government) pointed to Swan seems to suggest a lot of investment in one side of politics.

The whole issue is a massive I-told-you-so from this blog which declared when Rudd took office that he should begin immediately by purging the public service of Howard era inbreds, nepotism appointments and water-treaders. Perhaps the image of Godwin Gretch (whose cronies have already started the 'health concerns' stuff) going on a retreat to involuntary accommodation behind bars and showers with soap on a rope might encourage some of his contemporaries to think twice before ringing Malcopops or make them change jobs.

We need a definition

For the feeling that you get when you think: The only thing that makes Malcopops' own goal sweeter is that it happened a week after Peter Costello gave up waiting for the leadership to fall into his lap. Peter Costello: whenever opportunity knocked, he had his door dead-bolted.

Michael Jackson

So, he's dead. It was hard to think of someone as obviously fragile as Michael Jackson ever making it to a ripe old age. Indeed, with his contribution to the world of music being so far in the past and with him being about to be trotted out on stage with a cattle prod at his rear for a series of concerts engineered to pay off his creditors, it was hard not to think of him as effectively being dead already. I felt sorry for him. He didn't seem to have the level of understanding necessary to function as an adult in the world, and while I would impute to most people a degree of responsibility for the way they behave and live their lives, Jackson didn't seem capable of that kind of undertaking.

While he was twice accused of child molestation, it was pretty clear that in each case the child's parent was an avaricious scumbag out to milk their child's supposed misfortune- and Jackson- for every penny they could get. That Jackson behaved inappropriately whatever the case was true, but the parents' actions only served to disguise whether or not he was guilty of the crimes he had been accused of. And the world was, by and large, happy to make assumptions regardless of the outcome.

All that served to detract from the greatness of a man who was a musical genius. Maybe even the Mozart of the 20th century. Michael Jackson was not only talented to a degree rarely seen, he was an original artist, something the largely talentless pop singers and 'musicians', the derivative hacks of today who claim him as their idol could never credibly claim. Like so many other child prodigies, it is difficult to tell whether the early talent Jackson displayed was merely the product of the hours of forced practice and abuse from his father, but that he went on to produce so many great works as a young man is strong evidence for inherent genius. He was musically amazing.

Unlike maybe most of my generation, I didn't grow up listening to Michael Jackson. For almost my entire childhood my parents did not have a TV in the house. Nor were we ever allowed to tune into commercial radio or even Triple J- a rule instigated by my Dad that I ignored once I hit my teenage years. Incidentally, I find commercial radio extraordinarily irritating because of its 'personalities', but without spending a lot of money on cassette tapes or CDs it was the only place to go for an education in pop music at the time. So Michael Jackson certainly wasn't a part of my life in the way he was for many people my age and older. I don't remember when I heard my first Michael Jackson song. When I 'discovered' Michael Jackson it was largely via illegal downloading in my first year or two of uni, and by that time I remember feeling like it was a taboo to admire him as an artist. But the first music video I ever remember seeing was 'Black or White' in 1991. I was 7 or 8 years old and at my primary school best friend's house (her family was 'normal', meaning they ate junk food and had a TV). I've seen the video since, and it's nothing special on its own, but the song, like so many of Jackson's works, still is. I remember my friend's mum saying how funny it was that Michael Jackson should sing a song like that given that he used to be black and had become white. My friend and I were shocked to learn that he used to be black!

Speaking of shocked, I was taken aback to hear Michael Jackson compared on one of the free-to-air TV stations' new programmes the other night to Madonna. Maybe whoever dreamt that up was confused by the difference between popularity and musical talent. All Michael Jackson and Madonna had in common, apart from being incredibly popular, was the fact that they were both plastic freaks who haven't resembled a normal human being in a long, long time. Michael Jackson's plastic nose had more talent than Madonna. When Gam and I have kids, Michael Jackson will undoubtedly be part of their musical education but Madonna will merely be part of history. Or maybe she will still be dragging her bony, botox-filled bottom around the world like the Rolling Stones and everyone will be wishing she was history. She might have a place in pop, but she doesn't have a place in music.

As for kids, let's wish MJ's kids all the best and hope they don't grow up too fucked up. No-one should expect, or exploit, them to fill his shoes. Everyone should concentrate on giving them the love and support they need to grow up into good-hearted and functional human beings. By all accounts Michael Jackson was a good parent to his three kids, so let's hope whoever is tasked with raising them from now on can manage the same.

Rudd-Rage

Outta my way Godwin, I'm hunting the Pwime Minister!

ICD-10 E2007.10

Rudd-rage or Ideologue Defeat Syndrome is a heritable and communicable psychological disorder with onset in early puberty, recent acquisition of wealth or alignment with the right wing of Australian politics. It is characterised by an all consuming, monomaniacal obsession with what sufferers perceive as the irrefutable evil nature of Kevin Rudd, prime minister of Australia. Sufferers are identifiable by socially inappropriate and vulgar utterances (Tuckeylalia) on the subject of Kevin Rudd. Sufferers show pathological obsession with the idea that Kevin Rudd is

a) Personally cheating them
b) Responsible for their bankruptcy, the global economy, whaling, broken vending machines, dead hooker in the trunk
c) Manipulating the media to hide the crimes he has committed.
d) The antichrist

Sufferers of Rudd-Rage will typically go to great lengths to prove their belief and, having no insight into their illness, will continue to do so long after they have embarassed themselves in public attempting to do so. The urge to pursue this obsession is so strong that sufferers will commit serious crimes and ignore evidence pointing to other, real wrongs in order to satisfy their irrational compulsion.

Tuckeylalia (the spontaneous utterance of socially objectionable or taboo words or phrases) is the most publicized symptom of Rudd-Rage, but it is not required for a diagnosis of Tourette's and only about 30% of Rudd-Rage patients exhibit Tuckeylalia. These utterances are typically characterised by the use of the word "Krudd" which the sufferer will typically find extremely humourous and will often use as a convincing argument that Kevin Rudd is:

a) Personally cheating them
b) Responsible for their bankruptcy, the global economy, whaling, broken vending machines, dead hooker in the trunk
c) Manipulating the media to hide the crimes he has committed.
d) The antichrist

Echolalia (repeating the words of others) and palilalia (repeating one's own words) occur in a minority of Rudd-Rage cases, largely confined to Federal Parliament, while the most common initial motor and vocal tics are, respectively, eye blinking and the use of fake emails to demand the resignation of the Prime Minister.

Rudd-Rage is co-morbid with moderate-severe intellectual impairment, Narcissistic personality disorder (a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and a lack of empathy.") and poor literacy.

There currently does not appear to be a cure for Rudd-Rage as any cure would require insight to the illness and an acceptance of personal fallibility on the part of the sufferer.

Noted Sufferers of Rudd-Rage include:

John Howard
Alexander Downer - Mr Downer is noted as a particularly severe case, he is reported to break out in hives on observing pictures of comic book character 'TinTin'.
Malcolm Turnbull
Godwin Gretch - Mr Gretch has evidently recently destroyed his career and possibly broken several laws as a result of his illness. It is unknown whether Rudd-Rage will be entered in his sentencing submission.

Anti-gay bigots cop a serve in mainstream paper

Fairfax's Lisa Pryor, one of the only opinion writers worth reading, pwns the anti-gay-marriage bigots in her latest column. Pwns. It's so rare to see bigots served a big helping of dripping sarcasm like this in a mainstream paper. Go Lisa!

Isn't it heartening to see both sides of politics united in their determination to protect a vulnerable minority from the whims of the majority? Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull both oppose gay marriage against the wishes of the majority of Australians.

This week a poll was published showing 60 per cent of Australians supported the idea of equal marriage laws. Another 4 per cent were undecided, leaving just 36 per cent opposed to gay marriage. Among young voters, support rose to 74 per cent. The poll was commissioned by a lobby group, Australian Marriage Equality, and conducted by the pollster Galaxy.

The stance Rudd and Turnbull are taking may be unpopular, but not everything in politics is about popularity. Obviously they have decided in this case it is more important to protect the persecuted minority of Australians who identify as bigots, a minority whose lifestyle is under attack.

Read on...

Victorian energy minister paints greenies black

Say what?

'Eco-terrorists' the Earth Liberation Front are thought to be active in Victoria, after a threat was made on the house that belongs to Hazelwood power station boss Graeme York.

Victorian Energy Minister Peter Batchelor, drawing what any sane person might think to be a rather long bow, claims that this means that environmentalists want to abolish electricity:

"For some time now environmentalists have been stepping up their campaign, trying to turn the lights out in Victoria," Mr Batchelor said.

Yes. All people who are concerned about the negative impact of coal-fired power stations on the environment hate electric lighting and the ability to refrigerate their food and want to prevent everyone else from having these things. Damned crazies.

There you have it: environmentalist = terrorist, according to the Batchelor Dictionary.

Nation of Ostriches

"No, no it smells fine in here. Why do you ask?"

At what point does the pile of evidence mount so high that Australians can no longer deny that we are a racist country?

Lately the media finally started to focus on the spate of attacks on Indian students, carefully enunciating in each television and radio report that the students were upset about 'perceived racial violence'.

Then the new study that proves that having an 'ethnic' name (even an Italian name, for chrissakes) will dent a person's chances of getting a call-back for a job interview.

Let's face it, we're a nation of "I'm not a racist but...". The sooner Australia, beginning with its pandering, populist leaders, can face up to that, the sooner we can tackle it.

8 cents vs. human rights... and Queensland buys a lolly

In this item about how Anna Bligh's government is going to screw over public servants by slashing government super contributions, I found the following:

Motoring body the RACQ on Thursday presented the state's largest-ever petition, of 120,000 names, calling on the government not to scrap the fuel subsidy from July 1

Meanwhile, a young woman and her boyfriend are being prosecuted for obtaining the abortion drug mifepristol in order to terminate her pregnancy. Nary a peep from the public.

Let no-one say that Queenslanders have their priorities fucked up.

Belladonna's 'How to eat a popsicle like a porn star'

Isn't she awesome?

Oh, and I also found this link on her blog... be selfish and demand she appear in your home town if you want, but otherwise do me a favour and type Brisbane!

View all Brisbane events on Eventful

Mother knows best: Be a whore, honey!

These days it seems anyone can make a buck off a single, attention-grabbing, politically-incorrect mantra. This time it's "Marry for money!".

Some American git, 'Daniela Drake, MD' (she went to a posh school, is a doctor and has an MBA!... And George 'Dubya' Bush went to Harvard...) has apparently managed to scrape together enough material, or at least paper, to co-write an entire book based on this premise.

An entire book advising women to marry for money.

It's not like this is a novel concept. It's extremely common, and anyone would be kidding themselves if they thought otherwise. In some poverty-stricken places in the world it can be a matter of eating or starving. But not here, and not in America.

See, there's a huge difference between being financially secure and being CEO of Macquarie or Telstra. There might be a glass ceiling in business, but there's no glass ceiling to making a good living. Any woman with an education and the smallest amount of financial common sense can be financially secure- though good luck to anyone, male or female, trying to buy their first house in any capital city in Australia in this climate.

So Daniela Drake's claim that she would advise her daughter to be a one-man prostitute- and that is what marrying for money makes a woman- in order to attain financial security is based on utter bullshit. Sure, if she wants to live in a multi-million dollar mansion and buy everything she sees in the pages of Vogue then she'd be better off whoring herself out than getting a real job and attempting to earn that money for herself- if only because being the wife of a rich man leaves one more time to go shopping (and how much time would 'hubby' have to go shopping?), but financial security is another thing altogether.

Besides, taking up this socially-acceptable form of prostitution could be risky, even if Ms Drake's daughter were to marry a squillionaire. I recently had the pleasure of reading an item in Vanity Fair about the 'victims' of Bernie Madoff. Some of those rich fuckers were so greedy that they mortgaged their own mansions to invest the money with Madoff and make big bucks by pocketing the difference in interest between what the banks charged and what was earned from Madoff's ponzi scheme. These rich sons-of-bitches mortgaged their fancy houses for extra pocket money, then lost them when Madoff went down and the fraud-derived moolah was no longer rolling in. Serves them right, if you ask me.

If Daniela Drake's daughter is as greedy and avaricious as Ms Drake (who herself claims to have 'married for love' and be doing it tough financially) believes she should be, no doubt there's the potential for the same thing to happen to her. At the very least, what Ms Drake is advising is that women mortgage their future for pocket money. For her own sake I hope the daughter has the common sense not to follow her mother's advice. I'm sure Drake herself would be outraged at the implication that she's plugging for her daughter to become a prostitute, but anyone who treats a man as nothing more than a wallet is asking to be treated as nothing more than that. Nowhere does she appear to consider what the wallets men in question might want out of a partner- in Ms Drake's world they appear to be insentient beings that exist only to be milked of money by women looking for an easy path to financial security. What the men who marry such women think of them, how they treat them, how they feel they have the right to treat them, is a topic studiously avoided.

I'm sure we'd hear the usual tripe from Ms Drake and her co-author Elizabeth Ford about how their book aims to 'empower' women and help them survive in a sexist world, but frankly it's a book for greedy bitches. Hot ones, that is. I mean, it's obvious that if you're ugly you're screwed when it comes to the strategy they lay out. Straight from the horse's mouth:

Elizabeth Ford: Our culture accepts that men value women because they're beautiful, because they're young, because they're hot. So why can't it go both ways? No one ever says that a man is a beauty-digger because he wants a beautiful girl. Even though women are in the workforce at record numbers, we're not making the money that men are making. Men are making three times more money over their lifetime than women are. So why isn't it valuable for a beautiful woman to look out for her security at the end of her life? Of women who are alone at retirement age, one in five end up at the poverty level. So we realized, "Whoa, what's a girl to do?"

Whoa, Elizabeth, what's an average-looking girl to do?

No-one ever calls a man a 'beauty-digger', sure, but that's because everyone knows such relationships are best described by "Sure she's dumb, but I'm fucking her because she's hot". No-one needs a term to describe it because just as wealth makes even the ugliest man with the most despicable personality attractive to a certain class of women, beauty possessed even by the most vapid of women with the most despicable of personalities makes them attractive to a certain class of man. Just because that's the way some people operate doesn't make it a desirable goal for the rest of us. Unless you're Elizabeth Ford or Daniela Drake.

Of the one in five women alone at retirement age who wind up in poverty I'm guessing they have something else in common, and it's not a tertiary education or financial nous. In fact, I'm willing to bet that most of them were career housewives. Indeed, the aforementioned issue of Vanity Fair recounts an example or two where a well-kept millionaire widow makes a bad investment after hubby's death and winds up penniless. Clearly marrying for money may make some women comfortable for a while, but the idea that it guarantees a poverty-free retirement? Drake and Ford are selling snake oil.

Interviewer: If the idea is that men are making three times more money, why shouldn't we try and change that?


Daniela Drake: "We're not saying, "Give up." We're not saying, "Don't get a job."

[...]

The book is about being financially savvy in all aspects of your life. Absolutely, your job is your most important asset, but your marriage is part of the financial picture. What we're saying is that women have important assets."

Important assets? The sort that can pull a rich husband? I notice she's a bit coy on what those are. Could it be that even among these shameless proponents of gold-digging there's a nagging feeling that they're merely touting a rather dishonest form of prostitution? Let's see what comes to mind:

- Looks

- Ability to squirt out a child

- Housework (although I suppose ideally hubby would be rich enough to afford a housekeeper, leaving one to the important chore of squeezing genetic heirs from one's vagina and having spa treatments in one's down-time).

The first two 'assets' are extraordinarily ephemeral and decline over time. The third function can be carried out entirely by paid help. These 'female assets' upon which Drake and Ford place so much emphasis are ones that depreciate as madly as a second-hand Commodore. Once the gold-digging wife hits menopause, what good is she? No longer playing 'good mother' and tucking the kids (now teenagers or college students) into bed every night, no longer 'hot' despite madly spending hubby's money on botox, chemical peels and facial fillers. Why wouldn't a man with a wife who valued him for his wallet trade up once her 'assets' no longer matched his financial value? After all, if it was a business decision for her, it's perfectly fair for it to be so for him.

Real prostitutes are more honest about what they do for a living than are women who chase rich men. Given that prostitutes are under no illusion that their 'assets' aren't going to be providing for them in their old age and thus manage their own financial affairs accordingly, I would say they are also far more 'empowered'.

Work rant

I'm at work and I need to vent.

I'm on dishwasher-duty this week. After the machine was put on yesterday afternoon, a bunch of people left their dirty dishes/glasses/cutlery by the sink like they're supposed to do. But some dumbarse decided to jam their two fucking glasses so hard inside each other that the receptacle glass broke when I tried to pull them apart to stack the dishwasher this morning.

And once I went to start work I find that the work experience girl (woman, really- about my age, from Holland) has not replaced in my filing cabinet a bunch of papers that I need for data entry. She took them from the filing cabinet beside my desk yesterday. It was a little weird, I felt, to have her come and rat around in my filing cabinet and take them without asking, but I figured we're both doing the same job- (only I'm getting paid for 14 hours a week on top of the mandatory 32 for my PhD scholarship)- so what the hell. Fair enough to forget to replace them, even. Her desk is just across the room, so I went to get the papers back. Only work experience girl has locked them in her filing cabinet and taken away the key. WTF?! So now I have to wait an hour and a half until she gets to work before I can start on the work I need to do. Hopefully by then I won't feel like punching her.

On the whole I don't bitch about work, and that's because I work in a really great environment with really nice people. But honestly, this morning I just wish I didn't have to be here.