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A draft resolution, sponsored by Brazil, was due to be debated by the UN Human Rights Committee, but Brazil has withdrawn the resolution following pressure from the Vatican (which has “observer” status at the UN) and such champions of human rights as the governments of Saudi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