Sex panic in Geelong
“UNDERCOVER investigations have revealed that men are coming to Geelong from across the state for organised sex romps,” reads the breathless lead in the Geelong Advertiser. Apparently there’s a beat in Geelong. Who knew?
The ‘lock up your sons, homosexual predators are stalking our parks and reserves’ school of journalism isn’t new - it’s an old staple of small-town newspapers. Of course, no sex panic is complete these days without a mention of the internet:
“There is a website up for the Barwon River. It’s a gay website that advertises the area as a meeting place, in particular the back of the baseball field,” undercover policeman Acting Detective Sergeant Paul Michell said.
Leading Senior Constable Laurie Taylor, another one of the four undercover operatives in Geelong tasking unit’s Operation Teras, said the issue was bigger than people thought.
“People are very naive about what happens down there. They think that spot along the Barwon River is a beautiful spot and it is, but there’s a dark side to it,” Leading Sen-Constable Taylor said. “It’s a pretty disgusting area to be walking around in. There’s toilet paper everywhere where they’ve obviously wiped themselves after, there’s condoms, condom wrappers, underwear, garbage and the place smells of faeces.”
If the place stinks of shit, you’d think the council would go down there and clean it up.
The paper has a follow-up story today which is a bit more measured in its tone and quotes an unnamed gay man who pints out that the beat, “exposed in the Geelong Advertiser as one of five sex hotspots across the city,” is the only place to go to get a root down that way, but he doubts whether “the establishment of a gay nightclub would be enough to change negative perceptions of homosexuals in the city.”
Richard Carleton is dead
Journalist Richard Carleton has died of a heart attack during a press conference at the Beaconsfield mine in Tasmania. In recognition of his passing, here’s an audio clip of what was, I think, one of his finer moments:
Carleton was a fearless and feared journo in his day. This interview, conducted on the day that Bob Hawke became Labor leader in February 1983, was typical of his unrelenting and vigorous style and came at perhaps the high point of his career.
The triumph of Catholic intellect
Cardinal Pell is in the news today over a speech he gave to the “Legatus Summit” in Florida, a gathering of rich Catholic businessmen.
Pell told the crowd he’s been reading the Koran, in order to better understand Islam and its followers:
On the pessimistic side of the equation, concern begins with the Koran itself. In my own reading of the Koran, I began to note down invocations to violence. There are so many of them, however, that I abandoned this exercise after 50 or 60 or 70 pages.
Conveniently, the Christian Bible is completely free of violence, as is the entire history of Christianity, so Pell is the ideal person to make these observations. No-one could compile a list of invocations to violence in the Bible, because there aren’t any.
Having rubbished the Koran, going so far as to publicly question ts status as a divine text, Pell then brought his considerable learning and wisdom to bear on the vexing question of climate change. Apparently, there’s notthing to worry about because God will take care of us:
It is not just a question of having more children, but of rediscovering reasons to trust in the future. Some of the hysteric and extreme claims about global warming are also a symptom of pagan emptiness, of Western fear when confronted by the immense and basically uncontrollable forces of nature. Belief in a benign God who is master of the universe has a steadying psychological effect, although it is no guarantee of Utopia, no guarantee that the continuing climate and geographic changes will be benign. In the past pagans sacrificed animals and even humans in vain attempts to placate capricious and cruel gods. Today they demand a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions.
You see, it’s clear: we shouldn’t do anything about climate change because that would be like sacrificing goats to Baal; instead we should place our trust in the master of the universe, the benign CEO of our metaphysical multinational megacorp, and everything will be alright.
That’s it for me, I’m off to burn some coal.
Boring?
According to the caption on ABC News, this “boring machine only has to drill through 12 metres of rock to get the two trapped miners out.”
It may be a boring machine to you, ABC News, but you’d feel differently if your life depended on it. 
