More 'Chocolate is Good For You' News

I've probably said this before, but I love it when my preconceived notions about something are confirmed... or at least affirmed even a little bit! Just as I always knew something as disgusting as margarine had to be bad for you, even when the accepted wisdom at the time stated otherwise, I believe in my heart that chocolate will one day be confirmed as a superfood that will make people live to 100. Well, I did once read about this really old french lady who died at 114 or something and ate either 1 or 2 pounds of chocolate a week (500g-1kg) right up until she died, and I'm sure it was the chocolate that did it... Not exactly scientific, I know. So when a scientific study that finds health benefits in eating chocolate, I'm all over it. I save it in a special folder along with other interesting nutrition-related news, ready to access at any time I may need to defend my chocolate habit. Of course, when it's reported they always have some fuddy-duddy wagging a finger and saying "this is not an excuse to eat lots of chocolate!".

Cocoa is rarely tolerable in large amounts in its raw state and therefore to consume the suggested therapeutic amount you would have to have 100g of dark chocolate per day.

Gee, a whole 100g. The only trouble I would have managing 100g a day is the cost!

Ban Smoking in Cars

I'm shocked. I never thought I'd see the day where I would agree with renowned bigot Fred Nile on something. His private member's bill aiming to ban smoking in cars, however, I wholly agree with. I also think smoking in the presence of children anywhere, whether in a closed space or not, should be a criminal offence. If a parent leaves methadone or heroin somewhere where a child accesses and ingests it, they can be charged, but if they wilfully expose their child to cigarette smoke, which causes a list of serious negative health effects a mile long, apparently that's within their rights as a parent.

Who Pays for Howard's Tax Cuts?

From July 1 this year people who apply for the carer's allowance - worth up to $94.70 a fortnight - will no longer be able to claim for a past year's worth of payments. Instead they will now only be able to backdate claims for 12 weeks.

[...]

The generous time for claims was in recognition that the existence of the allowance was not generally well known and that carers may not have had time to apply for the payment.

[...]

The changes will save the Federal Government $34.7 million next financial year and $100 million over three years.

[...]

Mr Raper [Michael Raper, president of the National Welfare Rights Network] said the changes were particularly mean-spirited "given there are 76 millionaire families and 352,000 families earning more than $500,000 a year getting $117 a fortnight in Family Tax Benefit B payments".

Last year there were 334,085 people receiving the carer's allowance. A spokesman for Mr Brough said he could not comment.

From the SMH.

10 years.

Anthony commemorates 10 years of John Howard as Prime Minister, remembering the 1996 election, and reminisces about the development of his political views since that time.

Being 12 years of age at the time, I was slightly older than Anthony when Howard was elected, but I don't remember thinking too much of it. I do vaguely remember a Liberal Party campaign ad though- a clip of Paul Keating saying (to a bunch of protesting uni students, I think) "Go and get a job". I don't remember anything else of the ad's content, other than the colour scheme. I also remember John Howard's refusal to release his policies until the last minute of the campaign, something which the Labor Party under Mark Latham were criticised for last federal election. Hypocrisy has always been a favourite of politicians.

John Howard has celebrated his 10 year in office by once again grinding his bootheel into the faces of refugees, saying that he won't apologise for lying that refugees threw their children overboard into the ocean, conveniently right before the 2001 election, because they did the 'next worst thing' by sinking the boat and forcing the navy to take them on board.

Funny, I thought the 'next worst thing' would have been something like choosing to stay in their home countries where their children would grow up under violence and oppression, assuming they got to grow up at all.

John Howard is an inhuman bastard. The saddest part about his decade in office is that we have no-one to blame for it but the majority of the Australian population, who voted him into power four times.

Fresh Lady of Company and Other Tales

Fresh Lady of Company Miyuki Kasuda

Whether you're into porn or not, there's a great deal of hilarity in just reading the titles and the names of the actors in some of the tens of thousands of porn movies produced worldwide each year. The names of the actors 'Brandon Iron', 'Pat Myne' and 'Erik Everhard' and the movie 'Weapons of Ass Destruction' are funny in a dirty-minded schoolyard kind of way (Gam found me another classic title: 'Grand Theft Anal'), but the most imaginative titles belong to the Japanese porn movies with Engrish titles. There must be thousands of them, but a list I saw today included the titles:

Fresh Lady of Company

Confinement Chair Trance

Endless Semen

Metamorphosis Hospital

Kinbaku Sperma

Violent Shoot 27

Semen by Female Teacher 002

Obedient Semen Pet

I only wish I knew Japanese so I could understand the dialogue in the films... if the titles are anything to go by it must be hilarious.

Quick question- does anyone know if the US is the only country in the world where you can legally star in a porn film (age 18) before you're legally allowed to buy alcohol (age 21)?

The guy who killed six teenagers last week when he drove his car into them had apparently appeared in court at least eight times since 1992 for driving while disqualified. Why haven't state governments around the country introduced laws to confiscate (preferably permanently) the cars of people convicted of serious driving offences? How many second-chances does someone deserve? As many as it takes for their actions to finally deprive 5 families of their children's lives, it seems.

In a book I'm reading at the moment (Hands-on Health Promotion, Eds. Rob Moodie & Alana Hulme) there is a brief history of tobacco-control measures throughout Australia, and one chapter details a conversation one of the authors had with a senior health administrator after asking what had caused the NSW government to finally get its act together and ban smoking after almost 20 years of campaigning by anti-smoking and healthcare advocates.

He replied that the health minister had recounted to him a 'straw that broke the camel's back' incident where the minister had been in a restaurant with his children, one of whom was asthmatic. The child disliked tobacco smoke and asked a nearby diner to stop smoking, but was ignored. The minister saw this incident as a challenge for his public role, and doubtless it may enter the oral history of how the law changed in its retelling.

It looks like we may have to wait for a government minister's child to be hit by a drunk driver before those idiots finally feel 'challenged' enough to get off their arses and ensure real deterrents are made to serious driving offenders.

Nazi Liberal-Liberal Nazi

Gam picks up on the story of the death of former Nazi propagandist and Liberal Party figure Lyenko Urbancic. Apparently he was a friend of our good friend, NSW Liberal Party Right Wing powerbroker David Clarke.

Unfit to Stand Trial

One thing that puzzles me about our justice system is how someone who is mentally ill and commits a murder and is subsequently found not fit to stand trial can be released into the community. Just because the justice system cannot sentence a mentally ill person for murder doesn't mean that the person does not pose a danger to the community. Like this guy who murdered his de facto in 1995 but was found by the Mental Health Tribunal to be 'of unsound mind' at the time of the murder. Now free, he has made death threats against another woman. It's no stretch of the imagination to say that she must be bloody terrified.

Sensibly, magistrate Liz Hall has refused bail for the guy, saying "The allegations are serious and should be treated with a great deal of caution, given the defendant's background." but what if he's found to be of 'unsound mind' again? Personally, I can't believe his lawyer, Angelique Clarey, even asked for bail. I know there's a stereotype for lawyers being sharks with no conscience, but hasn't this woman considered the burden on her conscience should her client act out his threats? She claims his schizophrenia is 'under control'. Except for the small matter of a few death threats I'm sure it's perfectly under control. I don't know what the guy's doing free in the community in the first place. He's a demonstrable threat to the community. How many people does someone of 'unsound mind' have to kill to be kept out of the community? I'm sure it's small comfort to the family of the final victim in cases like this that their loved one was the 'last straw' before the killer is locked up.

Failure to Enforce Queensland Smoking Laws

Tongue Cancer, one of smoking's many delights.

In the last year, only 771 people have been fined for violating Queensland's new anti-smoking laws that were supposedly designed to tackle smoking in public spaces. The number of smokers I've personally witnessed violating those laws (and littering laws) must be about triple that.

Record US Lottery Win

While I'm not a fan of gambling, it's nice to see that the record US lottery jackpot drawn a few days ago was won by a diverse bunch of 8 workers at a Nebraska ham processing plant. No doubt this is the sort of story that keeps poor people buying lottery tickets (that prizemoney doesn't come from nowhere), but nonetheless the $US22.1 million that each of the workers receive will no doubt go a lot further than if a single person had won the entire US$365 million. I hope it doesn't screw their lives up in the way that seems to happen to so many lottery winners and others who suddenly come into large amounts of money, but they seem sensible.

One of them was Dung Tran, 34, who immigrated to the United States 16 years ago from Vietnam, while another Vietnamese immigrant, Quang Dao, 56 and a married father of five, said the lottery would change his family's life.

"Yes, they are very happy," he said.

Another winner, Alain Maboussou, 26, said his family fled civil war in the Congo and has been living in the United States since 1999.

Voice of America reported that he worked 70 to 75 hours a week at the meat processing plant and hopes his lottery winnings will allow him to finish his university degree and start his own business.

"I'm going to finish up in business administration, major in accounting, and I'm going to open something," he said.

Qant-ass Sucks Arse.

Ever since Qantass gave me the worst imagineable start to my first ever trip out of the country in July 2003 I have made it my mission to bad-mouth them to everyone I know. There's no shortage of fodder for denigrating those bastards, although some of the blame for my horrible experience can no doubt be placed on Sydney Airport (owned by Macquarie Bank).

Now that Qantass has successfully kept the government in its pocket, maintaining its monopoly over the Sydney-LA route, Singapore Airlines has hit back, claiming that Qantass charges 38% higher fares per kilometre on the Sydney-LA route (for which it has no competition) compared with the Sydney to London route. Given that both are still cheaper than flying to Johannesburg as I did that first time, I hate to think of the premium they charge for that route, even though it is significantly closer, by several thousand kilometres.

Here's the thousandth retelling of my Qantass horror story (Singapore Airlines, by the way, comes highly recommended by everyone I know who has ever flown it, without exception):

This happened in early July 2003.

Gam and I booked well ahead for our flight from Sydney to Johannesburg. As I recall, the Qantass return flight cost about $2500. We had them book us a connecting flight from Brisbane to Sydney at either 5:30am or 6am. Whichever it was, we arrived in Sydney just before 7:30am. Upon arrival at Sydney airport we hunted in vain for our queue.

After asking around, we were told by several other frustrated queueing passengers that they were also booked on the Sydney-Jo'burg flight. Why were they frustrated? The queue stretched pretty much the entire length of the International Terminal, then doubled back on itself. The brightsparks at Qantass had forced a Sydney-Hong Kong flight, a Sydney-Tokyo flight and our Sydney-Jo'burg flight to share the same queue. The queue was literally 1000+ people long. The time was 7:45am. Gam and I, along with god knows how many other people booked on our 10am flight were desperately checking our watches as one hour ticked by, then another.

By this time the actual queue ropes and counters were in sight. The line stretched behind us- there were hundreds more people who had queued after we had. Then we heard the boarding call for our flight. Realising that we weren't going to make the counter in time, Gam asked an airport employee for advice. We received a curt reply: Stay in the queue. While we were waiting, inching along the queue ropes, we saw a guy with a megaphone directing the people down the far end of the queue to move somewhere- to give you some idea of how far away the end of the queue was, we could not hear a sound from the megaphone. By this time we were one or two places from the check-in counter, so we figured it wasn't worth our while running down to see what the guy with a megaphone was on about. It was 9:50am.

"I'm sorry, boarding for this flight has closed." The girl at the check-in counter pressed her lips together firmly without any pretence of sympathy. "They've been making the boarding calls for ages. Someone came around and called you for a special express check-in for the flight already."

So that was the guy with the megaphone. But... but... that was down the other end of the airport!

"It's your fault for not listening."

We strained our ears to hear every last message pertaining to that flight.

"It's your fault for not listening to the messages. You'll have to catch the next flight. That's... next Monday. You'll have to stay in a hotel or something". Monday was a week away. We were students. I'd saved for 6 months to buy that ticket, and had only managed with the help of my parents. How were we going to afford a week in a Sydney hotel? At this point I started to crumple. Nothing more than a whisper would come from my mouth, and my eyes started to water. It was my first time travelling overseas and it was a disaster before I'd even left! Gam, thankfully a seasoned traveller, argued with the girl, who argued back for a full ten minutes before she left in a huff to get a supervisor, who directed us to another counter where our passports were hurriedly stamped and we were told to run to catch our flight.

I don't remember which gate our flight was due to depart from, but we had to sprint the entire length of that fucking airport. A few days prior Gam and I had been suffering from a bad bout of the flu. I had a middle ear infection, and an ENT specialist had put a grommet in my left ear 2 days before we left. I wasn't feeling too good, but Gam and I ran like hell. After collapsing into our seats on the plane (welcome to economy class, suckers!), we discovered that we weren't the last passengers to make it on the flight. At least 30 other people booked on our flight had suffered the same fate and it would be another 15-20 minutes before they were all processed and on board. I'm not sure if they were told to run.

The flight left over an hour late. Though we were thankful to be on board, we found most of the flight attendants to be at best stand-offish, and at worst bordering on rude. Compared with our treatment at the check-in it can't have been too bad, however, because I can't remember any specific incidents. 14 hours later we escaped thankfully to Jo'burg airport where we were speedily processed before boarding our connecting flight on Air Botswana to Gaborone.

I do remember being on the receiving end of some filthy looks from flight attendants who I'd dared ask for a glass of water (so I didn't have to climb over the poor guy in the seat next to me to fill my medicine-glass sized cup). On the way home I brought a 1L bottle of water onto the plane and periodically filled it at the tap so I didn't have to bother the staff. They were still surly though.

The next time we travelled, we went on Malaysian Airlines, from Brisbane with a stop-over in Kuala Lumpur. The cost of a return ticket was around $1900 including taxes and all fees. We had no problems with checking in. The staff were friendly and polite. Of course the flight sucked anyway, because it was economy class, but at least it wasn't a traumatic experience.

We hear Singapore Airlines is even better.

And I've made it my mission to ensure I never give Qantass a single cent of my money ever again, even in the unlikely event that they do offer a cheaper price than their rivals for a particular flight. Bastards.

Yeah... I'm a little bitter...

Argumentum ad Infinitum

Australian Idol.

I knew there must be a name for it. The technique used so successfully over the last decade by the Howard government (and probably other Australian governments before that, but that's about the extent of my political awareness, sadly), and also by the Americans...

Apparently the concept of the 'Big Lie' originated with Hitler and Goebbels, who attributed the technique to the English.

The phrase was also used (on page 51) in a report prepared during the war by the Unites States Office of Strategic Services in describing Hitler's psychological profile [1]

His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it. - OSS report page 51

'Revenue Raising'

Finally we get to see just how much damage a single speeding driver can do. Six teenagers dead, at least one more critically injured in hospital- if they survive it will probably be with brain damage or spinal injuries. The crime in this case wasn't really the 'hit and run'- the guy fled on foot after being accosted by horrified witnesses to the scene, leaving his two young children in his own car at the scene. The crime was speeding- something that most people do at some time in their life, something that politicians are loath to crack down hard on (not only because most of them do it themselves, but also because of the number of voters who do it); something that, when the police attempt a crackdown on it, the media portrays it as 'revenue raising' for the government, and the guilty public laps it up.

Aside from no doubt getting a 'huge' kick from pulling people over for speeding, I think the police may also not enjoy having to deal with the broken bodies of young people who have died an untimely death, either in accidents in which they were speeding, or in accidents such as this latest one, where they were simply innocent victims of a speeding driver. I have an inkling that the police may also not particularly like having to deal with the heartbroken families of such young people. It would tend to get you down after a while, I imagine.

So, no doubt A Current Affair and Today Tonight have put their latest 'State Governments are revenue raising by fining drivers who break the law by speeding' stories on hold while they adopt an air of solemnity and ask the hard questions of this latest tragedy: "How could this happen? What can Australians do to cut the tragic road toll?".

I wonder.

No doubt the idiot who killed those six kids is right now wishing like hell he hadn't been speeding, but wishing after the fact isn't going to bring them back, let alone save him time in jail. People need to realise that death is a very possible, very real and very permanent consequence of speeding. The punishment for speeding should be in accordance with this fact.

Culpability of Modern Farming in Bird Flu 'Epidemic'

From the BBC's 'Green Room': one of the few articles on bird flu I've seen that isn't filled with hysteria. Link here.

The likelihood is that the swans now dying in Western Europe had recently arrived from the Black Sea, driven south and west by freezing conditions that prevented them feeding.

They may have caught the disease from other wild birds; but this is unlikely given the tens of thousands of waterfowl that have tested negative for H5N1 over the last decade.

Much more likely is that before starting out, they picked up the virus from farms, either from infected poultry or their faeces. Mute swans often graze agricultural fields, and are likely to have come into contact with poultry manure spread as a fertiliser.

If wild birds had been spreading the disease across continents there would have been trails of outbreaks following migration routes; but this hasn't happened.

The "wild bird" theory for the spread of H5N1 also provides no explanation as to why certain countries on flight paths of birds from Asia remain flu-free, whilst their neighbours suffer repeated infections.

What is striking is that countries like Japan and South Korea, which imposed strict controls on the import and movement of domestic poultry after initial outbreaks, have suffered no further infections. Myanmar has never had an outbreak.

In fact, countries which have not yet developed a large-scale intensive poultry industry have also been largely spared. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports that in Laos, 42 out of 45 outbreaks affected intensive poultry units.

Lethal evolution

Highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses are very rare in wild birds.

But in intensively farmed poultry, the high density of birds and constant exposure to faeces, saliva and other secretions provide ideal conditions for the replication, mutation, recombination and selection through which highly lethal forms can evolve.

[…] Some of the agencies attempting to monitor and control avian flu, such as the FAO, seem to have been reluctant to draw attention to the role of intensive agriculture, because of the impact on national economies and on access to cheap sources of protein.

For this and other reasons, the role of migratory wild birds in the transmission of the disease has been exaggerated, and further sensationalised in the press.

[…] In fact, H5N1 outbreaks in wild birds have so far mostly burned themselves out without culls or other human interventions.

Cheney Trivia: Shoots Tame Birds

Here's one for the 'Did You Know?' section:

In 2003, Dick Cheney, in a party of 10, participated in a 'hunt' in which 500 pen-raised pheasants were released directly in front of Cheney and his party. They shot 417 of them in a matter of minutes.

This time around, Cheney was shooting pen-raised quail. Quail. You know, the cute, rotund little birds, some of whom have a funny little feather poking up off their heads?

Apparently it's common practice for ranches to breed gamebirds such as quail and pheasant in pens and then release them for the slaughtering pleasure of paying guests. Sick fucks. What is it with people who like to kill for fun? Just look at this guy who, having shot a duiker (a tiny antelope the size of a small dog) with a huge gun, has posed with the dead animal and is holding his hand behind its head so you can see that the harmless little herbivore has a complete set of 'deadly' horns... that are in fact so small that without his hand propped behind them they would otherwise be completely invisible to the viewer.

Sick, sick, sick. The world would be better off without Dick Cheney and his ilk.

Summer Holiday!

View from our balcony at Marcoola.

Where have I been? After promising to be more regular with my blog updates I disappeared to the Sunshine Coast along with Gam, my brother Richard and his girlfriend Priscilla... and no computer. It was only yesterday, the last day of our trip, that I realised that aside from two nights in July, it had been the first time we had left Brisbane for an entire year- since we arrived back from visiting Gam's family in Botswana and Ghana from December-February a year ago. It was nice to hear the sound of the sea at night instead of some idiot hoon with a motorbike racing down our street forty times a day, or the hired garden maintenance people using hedge trimmers and leaf blowers for 3 hours at a time. It was also nice to catch up with my once-little brother and his girlfriend who we haven't seen for a year, and who kindly invited us to stay with them when they went to stay at a resort at Marcoola on the Sunshine Coast, just north of Brisbane.





























To be honest, there's not a whole lot to say for the Sunshine Coast except that it beats the pants off the Gold Coast. Which isn't saying a whole lot. While we had a beautiful view (top picture, above) from the fairly new, well appointed and self-contained 2-bedroom unit we were staying in, from the outside the place was a concrete monstrosity, built alongside countless other garishly coloured concrete monstrosities. I meant to take a photograph to illustrate, but I wound up only photographing the nice things we saw. In short, though, it was a perfect example of what happens when the local council is in the pockets of developers, something that seems to be rampant in coastal towns everywhere. They'd sensibly left a buffer zone between the beach and the apartment towers, but no concern had been shown for creating any harmony between the buildings and the natural environment. It always puzzles me how people wind up destroying the very things they came to enjoy. As you can see, though, the beach is still really pretty, and it was nice to see some birds other than 'Squeakers' (native Noisy Miners) for a change, even though they were mostly sparrows. I do have a soft spot for sparrows!

In July our unit was being tiled, and we stayed for two nights with a friend who lives on the Sunshine Coast. On one of those days we went to meet someone for coffee at one of the cafes by the beach in Maroochydoore. The place was so full of nouveau-riche bogans wearing too much gold and too many blonde highlights that Gam and I started referring to the place as 'Boganville'. We got another taste of Boganville when we went to a Bi-Lo in Marcoola this week where, shortly after entering, Gam received a sympathetic nod and knowing smile from a melanesian woman, the only other 'dark' person in the store. We cottoned onto why shortly afterwards, as what seemed like every second person in the store rubbernecked as soon as they laid eyes on Gam. Heck, it's only an hour and a half away from Brisbane, yet the only non-whites we saw were an Aboriginal security guard from a hotel in Kempsey, two Chinese tourists and the melanesian woman in Bi-Lo. I told Gam that his efforts to find shallots in a place like that would be futile, but he persisted. In vain.

Our well-travelled female Siamese Fighting Fish.

View from the lookout at Mapleton Falls National Park

St Mary's Church Hall, Montville

Priscilla, Richard and Gam.

Much nicer was our trip to the Sunshine Coast Hinterland- Maleny and Montville in the Blackall Ranges. The incredible scenery was largely unspoiled, and while the little villages still had a big bent towards tourism, none of it was tacky in the way of the huge concrete high-rises of the Sunshine Coast. I convinced Gam to come along with me to ogle the board outside the little cottage that housed the local real estate business in Montville, and just over $300 000 for a 3 bedroom house on 1/3 acre sounded a whole lot better than $695 000 for a non-penthouse apartment in the resort we stayed at. Sure, they had large houses over a million dollars listed as well, but they generally came with a couple of hundred acres of land. Just about every house we drove past had an incredible view, either of the Glass House Mountains or the beautiful river valley (I'm not sure which river). Not that I can afford any of it right now, mind.

I'm quite sure I could cope with living down the road from the Maleny Cheese Factory, though... While visiting we stocked up on the washed-rind Le Blochon, the Goat-milk Camembert, the Vintage Cheddar and the Tuscan Herb Cheddar (which is so tasty I have already finished most of it). Alongside the pile of fudge and other confectionary we bought in Montville, I can almost feel a heart-attack coming on. It will be a happy death.

Me & my haul of cheeses at Maleny Cheese Factory.

Rich Kid's Gold Medal for Aussie Winter Olympics Charity Box

The Australian media, dizzy with relief after 'Australian' winter olympic gold-medallist Dale Begg-Smith salvaged some Aussie dignity after we were shown up as a bunch of struggling wannabes in every other event, mostly forgot to mention how he is a 21 year old ex-Canadian multi-millionaire who with his brother owns a company that creates hideously annoying and intrusive internet pop-up advertising. He drives a Lamborghini and owns houses in Australia and America. Oh, and he's an arsehole, according to the account of Ann Killion of The Mercury News, a San Diego (US) paper. He spends less than six months per year in Australia (which makes less than three years total time spent here, since he moved here aged 16). When he split with the Canadian national skiing body, it seems that Australia snapped him up, desperate for credibility and medals.

Well, we've got our medal, but I'm not so sure about the credibility. This guy doesn't deserve a single cent of Australian taxpayers' money to fund his skiing hobby. The whole episode confirms my view of the Winter Olympics largely being the olympics for rich white kids. And of Australia simply buying talent for those Olympic fields in which we deem ourselves lacking.

Support This?

From an article in the SMH:

Vietnam Veterans Federation national president Tim McCombe said the new study showed the suicide rate among former soldiers was now 200 per cent higher than in the rest of the population.

Wikipedia Clues In to Spin

Wikipedia has volunteers poring over its pages on US, Canadian and British political figures after the revelation that several of its pages on US Senators had been spin-doctored by users on computers traced to Capitol Hill. Minnesota Republican Senator Norm Coleman was one of many Senators busted for several favourable 'amendments' to their entries:

Senator Coleman's office has confirmed that staff there had made a number of changes to his online record.

Where he was described as a "liberal" back in college, this was changed to "activist".

Among other changes, staff also deleted a reference to Mr Coleman voting with President Bush 98% of the time in 2003, despite running as a moderate the year before.

Senator Coleman's Chief of Staff pretty much told the media Wikipedia could blow it out its arse, saying if they must have wanted the edits, otherwise editing wouldn't be allowed. I get the feeling they're missing the point, or at least creating a deliberate diversion from it.

The people in charge of Wikipedia probably already know it, but the spin-doctoring goes a lot further than that. The page on Tasmanian Premier Paul Lennon was obviously originally written by either someone working for the Tasmanian State Labor Party or someone with the hots for Lennon, as Wikipedia's Non Point of View policy (NPOV) seemed to be completely ignored in its construction. One example was te reference to Lennon's "genuine working class background" (italics mine), as opposed to the fake working class background of... whom? Another was the description of Lennon as a 'strong defender' of Tasmania's forestry industry (taking the subjective view that the industry is under some kind of attack), referring in the same sentence to what is widely known as old-growth forest as "old growth" forests, and indirectly implying that that anyone who opposes Lennon's style of Labor politics in Tasmania is anti-development. Also included in the article on Lennon was a quote seemingly unrelated to anything but the Tasmanian forestry debate but that the original author of the article felt made Lennon look good, as it involved Lennon asserting that those who disagreed with him on the forestry issue didn't care about 'Tasmanian families':

...The Wilderness Society, Doctor Brown, Christine Milne, Olivia Newton-John and everybody else... might not care about Tasmanian families in this industry, and people working in this industry, but the Tasmanian government does."

The above-mentioned parts have since been edited out by myself and various others, but can be viewed from the article's history page (you can see which ones I did because it took me about 7 goes to get it right... oops).

Another classic example of government spin-doctoring was the page on Queensland. I found it quite amazing the number of times someone obviously working for the Queensland government managed to inject glowing references to the Queensland government into seemingly innocuous and straightforward sections. A classic example was the mention of the Queensland population reaching 4 million. Instead of saying something along the lines of "On Friday the 9th of December 2005, the population of Queensland officially reached 4 million", the entry on population read (italics mine):

On friday the 9th of December 2005, the Queensland government welcomed the four millionth baby into Queensland.

I haven't looked into any of the other state pages, or pages on the various Premiers and other Australian political figures, but frankly I'd be surprised to find a single page without any instance of spin-doctoring by staff of various parties.

'Deeply Offensive'

Prime Minister John Howard has claimed that the t-shirt bearing the slogan "Mr Abbot, get your rosaries off my ovaries" that received widespread publicity after being worn by Greens Senator Kerry Nettle is "deeply offensive to many Australian Catholics", and that the Greens are 'sneering' at 'Catholic devotional practice'. That's all very well, but you know, I don't mind 'deeply offending' someone who thinks they have the right to tell me what to do with any fertilised ova I happen to have inside of me, and that they have the right to tell me I'm going to hell if I don't agree with them. Fair enough to practise one's religious beliefs and live accordingly, but anyone who wants to inflict them on others, including Tony Abbott, can just fuck right off. I find it deeply offensive that in our secular democracy, a health minister with a religious agenda wants to keep from being available a drug that has the potential to make abortion safer for Australian women. Funnily enough, John Howard doesn't seem concerned about offence caused to me or the millions of other Australian women who share my views.

As a side note, apparently the vote of 45 to 28 in the Senate last night to have the Therapeutic Goods Administration assess the safety and efficacy of RU486 resulted in female senators voting in a ratio of approximately 10-1 in favour.

UPDATE: Kim Beazley, not to be outdone, has said that he is personally offended by the t-shirt. Cos, you know, if he disagreed with John Howard he might offend someone. Spineless.

Potatoes

Shetland Black potatoes.

The 'very rare' Dunbar Rover.

I found this interesting link from a not overly-interesting article in the Guardian. Which I've since lost and couldn't be buggered looking for. Maybe I'm just a food-nerd and no-one else will find this interesting, but... how cool are all those different kinds of potatoes?!

What Would Jesus Do?

When Jesus wasn't preaching that his followers should lead exemplary lives of poverty and selflessness, he was preaching "Go forth and buy thee the finest of bowling alleys for thy private Pacific island!". You might now consult your bible and exclaim "Hey, that bit's not in there!". Well you'd be wrong. It just so happens that that bit was omitted from the bibles that you plebs have on your shelves at home so as not to make you feel bad about not owning a private island. Or a bowling alley. For the bibles of special people like Mel Gibson, God apparently left that bit in.

Asking for it.

It seems the media in Australia has been a tad slow to pick up on the story that the Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that originally published the cartoons of Mohammed that have sparked debate and debacle worldwide, refused to publish cartoons depicting the resurrection of Jesus submitted to them in 2003 by Danish illustrator Christoffer Zieler on the grounds that they could cause offence to some of the paper's readers.

So while they, and we, jump up and down about our right to free speech, the hypocrisy of the Jyllands-Posten goes relatively unscrutinised.

Meanwhile, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has decided to stir things up a bit by announcing a competition for Holocaust-themed cartoons, and challenging media organisations around the world to put their money where their mouths are and publish them.

I think I can hear crickets chirping all of a sudden...

This bit, although barely related, is too good to leave out:

Last week, the Iranian foreign ministry also invited British Prime Minister Tony Blair to Teheran to take part in a planned conference on the Holocaust, even though the idea has been branded by Mr Blair as "shocking, ridiculous, stupid".

Mr Blair also said Mr Ahmadinejad "should come and see the evidence of the Holocaust himself in the countries of Europe", to which Iran responded by saying it was willing to send a team of "independent investigators".

Fair Pay for Politicians

A rare species: the politician who rules in the interests of his constituents.

While Evo Morales and the Bolivian parliament have acted admirably in their decision to halve their salaries and put the savings towards health and education in Latin America's poorest country, I don't believe that people in other countries should have to wait hundreds of years for their own Evo Morales to come along and bring some semblance of honour to the business of politics. When politicians in Australia want their salaries raised, a referendum should be held at the time of the next Federal or State election, and voters can decide whether they think the politicians deserve it. This would be much better than the current system, in which the politicians wait until after an election has been held and then hold a vote at sometime around midnight to give themselves whatever pay increase out of our tax dollars they feel they can get away with.

Bad, Bad Lazy Sarah

As much as I hate to admit it, it just goes to show how much my blog is an exercise in procrastination. My lack of posts, I mean. Compare my posting frequency for January with that of November, the month of exams. Hmm. At least with uni going back soon things will no doubt be back to normal. I haven't exactly been out saving the world while neglecting my blog, either, just generally neglecting household chores, playing x-box and reading books that Gam and I have scavenged from the piles of junk put out on the footpath by people moving out or spring cleaning (including a 1970s Ninja how-to by an overly serious-looking white american dude who resembles Chuck Norris, complete with black & white photos, and a genuine 1978 Mills & Boon- pure gold!).

Hopefully I have got all the laziness out of my system (let's be realistic: hopefully some of it) and posting frequency will be back to normal within no time.