buggery.org

In these troubled times, it’s great to discover that the really important issues can still unite Catholics and Muslims to fight a common enemy: homosexuals who want to be treated as human beings.

Yes, the culture wars have taken a back seat as the Papacy and the Caliphate (in this case, the Vatican City and dozens of Muslim countries) focus on the really important issue: whether “sexual orientation” should be included in the UN Declaration on Human Rights.

A draft resolution, sponsored by Brazil, was due to be debated by the UN Human Rights Committee, but Brazil has withdrawn the resolution following pressure from the Vatican (which has “observer” status at the UN) and such champions of human rights as the governments of Saudi Arabia, Iran and Libya.

Another victory for moral rectitude and a frabjous day for Christian-Muslim relations! Huzzah!

Michael Cashman, a homosexual activist who represents the Labor Party in the European Parliament, said the Vatican and OIC had engaged in “aggressive lobbying” to defeat the bid.

“It’s depressing when religions can succeed in denying ordinary men and women their universal human rights,” he said, adding that the Vatican and OIC should “hang their heads in shame for having reduced their beliefs to the gutter of bigotry and discrimination.”

[CBS News]

“Between the wish and the thing, life lies waiting.”

Andrew Denton’s interview with Deborra-Lee Furness (actor, director and wife of Aussie heartthrob Hugh Jackman) on Monday night impressed me. She came across as humble, genuine and at least just a little bit wise.

Which is unusual for acting types.

The quote, which comes from Furness’s short film Standing Room Only, could be a metaphor for my crazy life just now.

I’ve been going through a quiet period on the blogging front for a while now. I’m not sure why — I don’t feel especially uninspired and I’m reading and doing lots of fun things, many of which I would normally choose to share with the world on here.

Maybe that’s the problem — having too much fun?

No, that doesn’t feel like it either.

Well, please accept this as my mea culpa for the lack of content over the last few weeks. I’ll try to post at least once a day for the coming week, and I’ll work through a backlog of ideas and thoughts as I go.

The US Ambassador to Australia, Tom Schieffer, is being none too subtle in warning Australia that pulling out our troops from Iraq could “harm” the alliance between Australia and the US.

This sucks. Having put all our defence eggs in one basket, we are now essentially subjugate to US foreign policy. And if I can see that, the terrorists can see that. It’s only a matter of time before terrorists strike here. People will die, and for what? So John Howard can stick his glossa in George Bush’s cloaca.

Whatever Howard wants to argue, Australia was not a terrorist target before he became PM. We are now, and it will be decades before that changes. Call it Howard’s legacy.

Latham’s announcement that, if he becomes PM, the 850 Australian troops still in Iraq will “be home for Christmas” is a smart political move. It also makes sense. We need to extract ourselves from Iraq immediately.

US Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz has been pissing off the Spanish with some ill-considered and heavily stereotyped remarks on TV:

“The Spaniards are courageous people. I mean, we know it from their whole culture of bullfighting,” Wolfowitz said. “I don’t think they run in the face of an enemy. They haven’t run in the face of the Basque terrorists. I hope they don’t run in the face of these people.”

Obviously, Wolfowitz gets his detailed insight into the Spanish people by reading Hemingway, but for some reason the Spanish aren’t too happy having their “whole culture” reduced to the ritual execution of bovine ruminants for sport. Can’t wait for the Latham government to announce the withdrawal of our diggers from Iraq later in the year:

“The Australians are courageous people. I mean, we know it from their whole culture of crocodile wrestling,” Wolfowitz said. “I don’t think they run in the face of an enemy. They haven’t run in the face of the All-Blacks. I hope they don’t run in the face of these people.”

(The screenshot at top — from the Zempt spellcheck — popped up when I hit “post”. Spooky.)

Buggery.org is one year and one day old today.

The site launched on 19 March 2003 — the same day the war started (coincidentally … not). In the year since, 72,421 visitors have dropped by, and my server has pumped out almost 11 billion bytes of data, or 87,117,340,672 binary ones and zeros.

Happy birthday to … it.

I spent an enjoyable few hours today writing a “now playing” script in PHP. On the left side of the page, under all those nutty buttons, there’s now a list of the last six songs I listened to. Apologies in advance for my complete lack of musical sophistication.

The way it works is fairly neat, and similar to the way the blogroll over there is updated. When I play a song in WinAmp, a plugin sends the song details to Audioscrobbler.com, an open-source service which promises to introduce me to new music I might like one day, by allowing me to view the playlists of other musical insophisticates with similar tastes to my own. When you load this page, my web server then grabs an XML file from Audioscrobbler and formats the output as you see here. It’s all sweetly automatical, transparent and zero-maintenance … which is nice.

Just in case you thought he might have changed his mind, John Howard has “reaffirmed” his opposition to gay marriage.

It’s not about intolerance, Howard told ABC Radio in Adelaide, apropos of absolutely nothing except the opinion polls and the forthcoming federal election, it’s about “stand[ing] up for certain benchmark institutions”.

So, just to reiterate, here is the news from the Federal Government of Australia:

• Abortion is bad. Teenage promiscuity is bad. (Abbott, yesterday)
• Thousands of Muslim terrorists are amassing off our northern coast. Terrorists are bad. Muslim terrorists are especially bad. (Downer, yesterday)
• Gay marriage is bad. Children should have two parents, of different sexes, and they should be married. Gay adoption is bad. (Howard, today and last week)

Caddie, pass me that wedge!

Mark Latham, meanwhile, is bushwalking in the Styx Valley with Bob Brown, hundreds of miles from the nearest radio or TV set. Lucky bastard.

For no reason in particular, here’s a photograph of my office:

My office

Or, as I like to call it, a photograph of a desk, a computer, two chairs, a sofa, two labrador retrievers, a window, a tree, some rain, a whiteboard, a thesaurus (open at the letter “D”), a dictionary, a medical dictionary, a Merck Manual, a “John Hunt is a Coward” coffee mug, a mobile telephone, a framed photograph of the man I love, a box of files, a pile of old train tickets, several items of stationery, a yellow legal pad with all my secrets written on it, an item of East German communist propaganda, a front cover of the May 1977 Nation Review showing John Howard with the words “This Man Rapes Housewives”, an Adbusters postcard, an “AZT=DEATH” button, a first communion photo, a rack of uniform shirts, and an empty yoghurt container.

It ain’t much, but it’s home. And work.

SES training last night … week three and I’m happy to report that the training is moving, gradually, from the general to the specific. Last night was pretty engaging and interesting.

We learned about the principles of emergency management, the difference between an “incident” and an “emergency” (essentially, an emergency is bigger, but you could’ve guessed that) and we were introduced to the State Disaster Plan (known, military style, as “DISPLAN”) and its many sub-plans (”Animal Health Emergency”, “Hawkesbury-Nepean Flood Emergency”, “Bad Hair Day Emergency” and so on).

It’s comforting to know, in these difficult times, that the emergency services are ready to respond should things go pear-shaped.

Certainly it’s more comforting than the picture painted by our elected leaders, who (Foreign Minister Lex Loser, on the front page of today’s paper) want us to believe there’s a “Terror army on the rise” in Indonesia, hell-bent on destruction, mayhem and other distinctly un-Australian activities.

Downer reckons that Jemaah Islamiah, the Indonesian Muslim group widely blamed for the Bali bombing, could have as many as 5000 members. Scary stuff, although it’s worth pointing out that the population of Indonesia is about 201 million, making JI’s recruitment efforts (0.002% of the population) look a little pale in the scheme of things.

But let’s not get too caught up in the numbers. Yes, there are terrorists in the world, and we should deplore their tactics, do what we reasonably can to prevent them and — here’s a radical suggestion — maybe think about understanding their motivation and ameliorating their distaste for us, rather than using them for cynical short-term political goals.

“Three to five thousand people can do a lot of damage if they get their hands on TNT. Let us not be complacent about it.”

Yeah, right, and “Let us not be complacent” about politicans who will think nothing of stirring up hatred and division to protect their own sorry arses.

This is going to be a tough year. A desperate Prime Minister and his cronies, behind in the polls and with unquestioned form on playing the race card, using the wedge and caring nothing for the consequences, in an election year.

The Guardian’s first-person account of conditions in Camp X-Ray is nauseating, but sobering, stuff:

Yet all witnessed or experienced brutality, especially from Guantanamo’s own riot squad, the Extreme Reaction Force. Its acronym has led to a new verb peculiar to Guantanamo detainees: ‘ERF-ing.’ To be ERFed, says Rasul, means to be slammed on the floor by a soldier wielding a riot shield, pinned to the ground and assaulted.

(David Rose, “How We Survived Jail Hell“, The Guardian, 2003-03-14)

Now that thousands of gay and lesbian couples have gotten hitched in the United States in the last few weeks, it’s just a matter of time before we see what damage these unholy unions will do to existing, traditional marriages. President George W. Bush says concrete evidence of gay marriages undermining regular marriages is probably already out there; it’s just a question of finding it.

“We must act quickly and decisively, because if we don’t, by the time the evidence is found, it’ll be too late to do anything about it.” President Bush is working hard to build a coalition of U.S. states to ratify a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages, rather than waiting for the evidence to materialize.

(Linwood Barclay, “Marriage inspectors need time“, Toronto Star, 2004-03-13)

Yeah, I know, more than a week without posting anything. Here’s an update:

Mardi Gras (the parade) was a washout which we sensibly skipped. All due respect to those who suffered through it. I was in the really wet parade (’91, was it?) and didn’t want to get pneumonia again so we stayed safe and warm inside.

Mardi Gras (the party) was surprisingly good — music variable but not all bad, good company, nice friendly vibe. After party was especially enjoyable — well done to all who participated in that exercise.

Highlight of that weekend was seeing several old mates visiting from the UK. Lunch with Michael C. was lovely but reignited my sadness that he lives on the opposite side of the planet to me. The delightful Tom L. brought his also-delightful boyf for us all to marvel at. Tom combines sweetness and sexiness in the exact right proportions; it’s always a delight to be in his company.

The week after MG was taken up with recovering (it takes longer and longer as you get older, who knew?) and getting my magazine to press (finally on-street this week; it’s a cracking good read too). In the old days, the week after MG was always tinged with a bit of sadness as the tourists fled to warmer climes and the long dark winter loomed ahead. I feel a bit that way now, which I guess explains my lack of output.

Still no word from immigration: Brent and I are resigned to the wait but tired, so tired, of waiting.

www.kingstroker.com (commercial site, not safe for werk)

From Newsday:

Jason West, 26-year-old Green Party mayor, was ordered to appear in court Wednesday to answer charges that he broke state law by solomizing about two dozen weddings without a marriage license, according to New Paltz police and West’s lawyer.

“Solomizing” isn’t in my dictionary. “Solemnizing” and “sodomizing” both are …

(”Mayor faces charges for marrying gays“, Newsday, 2004-03-02)

Newsweek columnist Gersh Kuntzman, on msnbc.com:

A picture in The New York Times on Sunday did more than just capture the gay marriage debate: In the photo, two newly married lesbian women are kissing while all around them, homophobes, bigots, haters and distorters of Christ’s message of love taunt them with flame-covered signs reading, “Prepare to meet thy God!”

It’s a striking image of love and hate in bloom. And so it’s time to ask a question that has come up from time to time in our nation’s history: Looking at that picture, it’s time to ask yourself, “Which side are you on?”

Kuntzman then quotes extensively from the hate mail he received after a week ago writing a column in support of gay marriage, and includes the writer’s names. It’s sobering stuff.

No single column of mine has ever generated as much hate mail as [last week's column] in support of allowing people who love each other to marry. True, some of the letter writers hoped to engage me in a civil debate. But the majority saw my support for gay civil rights as a good opportunity to unleash wave after wave of hate. Oh, and some hoped that I would die a horrible death.

So, I ask again: Which side are you on?

(The photograph that Kuntzman refers to in the lead par is online at Queer Visions, from whence came this link)

Don Watson, former speechwriter to Prime Minister Keating (how we miss him!) and writer of some note, in today’s Herald:

We may soon expect to hear it at weddings and funerals - George had a good life on an outcomes basis. Every day in government departments throughout the nation countless sentences are built around “outcome”. The same happens in the big corporations. Government departments learnt “outcomes” from business, and small companies and little local government agencies, and quite possibly bridge clubs and church auxiliaries are committing themselves to “outcomes” - “going forwards”. Poor fools. I’m told among the really cutting edge these days “outcomes” have been superseded by “outputs”.
…
The words - “value”, “strategic”, “quality”, “commitment” and “outcome” - are almost to modern management what “proletarian”, “glorious”, “revolution” and “marching forward” were to copywriting in the old communist states.

So, Australia is to have a judicial inquiry into the intelligence that led to our involvement in the baseless and illegal war in Iraq. But what kind of an inquiry will it be?

I was pleased to see Mark Latham asking the PM in parliament today whether we would have a Royal Commission (he used the term “Royal Commission powers”; I’m not sure what an inquiry with “Royal Commission powers” is unless it’s a Royal Commission, but I digress). FWIW, a Royal Commission is what I’ve been arguing for all along. Unlike other forms of judicial inquiry, a Royal Commission has the power to compel witnesses to attend under subpoena, to order witnesses to answer questions, and to apply contempt penalties – including imprisonment – to those who fail to comply.

On a more philosophical level, a Royal Commission is, technically, set up by the executive arm of government – the Crown – and not by politics – the legislature. Importantly. a Royal Commission is the only form of judicial inquiry which could compel the man who took us to war – Howard – to give sworn evidence. On my analysis, that means that anything less than a Royal Commission will be a whitewash.

Howard, predictably, stonewalled.

Well, my trip to Sydney was a bit of a bust — after 2½ hours on the train, I arrived at Uni to find a picket line between me and my classroom. The university staff are on strike and all classes cancelled. I’m no scab so I didn’t cross the picket, just wished them well and went on my way.

Bumbed around Sydney for a few hours, went to the library, browsed a bookshop, got back on the train and came home. Basically a wasted day. These things happen.

Our landlords have decided they want their house back when our lease expires in July. This is less than pleasing news, as we really like this house, but hey, it’s their house. At least we have five months to get used to the idea of moving, which is more than most people get.

It’s early, but the sun is up and so am I.

Back to Sydney and to University this morning for the glam-sounding “Professional Practice and Culture”. When I return home this afternoon I expect to be professional, practiced and just a little bit cultured. And probably dog tired, what with the three-hour commute on the front and back ends of that class.

I’m thinking I need to get a laptop so at least I can write on the train, should the muse grab me by the testicles, which she has been known to do at the least convenient of moments.

The weekend has passed without incident. Our new sofa was delivered on Saturday, so we’ve been lounging a lot. The sofa is big enough to seat about nine people in comfort so there have been many lounging configurations experimented with in this house over the last twio days.

Still no word from the MRT. Could be this week. That’s what I said last week.

Our other project partially completed over the wekend was the invitations for our wedding … it’s been a challenge to find the appropriate balance between appropriate gravity (I am getting married) and cheeky subversion (I am getting married).