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Here’s a video clip from JTV yesterday, featuring my very gorgeous niece, Mali:

• Let’s talk about sex – The Guardian on Gaydar
  You can very quickly think, oh, I’ll just log on and check my messages and four hours later you find yourself weeing on someone’s pillow in Willesden Green wondering: what the hell am I doing here?
  (tags: gaydar internet dating)

Two of our baby chickens were taken by a fox last night. Darn fox.

Oh well, they had a good life.

Previously:

• Adventures in Animal Husbandry
• Coppola, eat your heart out

A couple of stories from the local papers (click the images to enlarge).

1. From the front page of the Macedon Ranges Telegraph, two weeks ago.

“A LOCAL road reserve has been targeted for a clean-up of undergrowth amid concerns it is a homosexual hotspot and a fire hazard,” the story begins. It’s pretty much the standard sex-panic riff, with a country beat “suddenly” discovered to be a homosexual meeting spot (or “hotspot” in the Telegraph’s shorthand), but there’s an added element: it’s not just the sexual nature of the goings-on that we’re warned about, but apparently there’s a fire hazard as well.

“There are used condoms and tissues and other things left lying around where they have been, and it’s a worry to think that families on a long drive might stop here to let children stretch their legs and run around a bit.”

He said many of the incidents happened in broad daylight, and better maintenance of the long grass and plants might deter such activity.

“Not only is it a bit of a fire hazard, it’s also a health and safety risk. You just wouldn’t believe what can go on there. It’s shocking.”

2. The second article, from today’s Macedon Ranges Leader, also made the font page:

I don’t know anything more about this story than what’s in the paper, but it sounds like a tragic series of events:

A MACEDON Ranges teenager involved in a horrific head-on collision with a water tanker in Benalla was facing nine criminal charges, including two for rape, before his death.

The 15-year-old was due to face a Children’s Court today on charges relating to an alleged incident involving a 13-year-old boy at a 2006 New Year’s Eve party. But, the charges will never be contested in court after the boy died instantly when the Holden Commodore sedan he was driving slammed into a water tanker on the Midland Highway on January 29.

As I say, I don’t know any more than what I’ve read: maybe this is just a tragic coincidence, or maybe this young man deliberately ended his life when faced with a truth about himself that he didn’t feel he could go on with.

Either way, it’s terribly sad.

Good on Amanda Vanstone for focusing on the really big issues. Here was I thinking we were paying her a Cabinet minister’s salary to develop and implement immigration policy, keep the darkies and rag-heads off our shores, and ensure that women and kids with foreign-sounding surnames or funny accents get locked up – but no! Instead, Mandy has been developing her hidden songwriting talents.

In these dark and terrible times, Australia needs more patriotic songs, and what a ripper Under Southern Stars is! The choice of tune is genius alone – everyone loves Land of Hope and Glory; it doesn’t have the faintest whiff of imperious colonialism about it. Recognising this, Mandy saw that all the tune needed were some stirring new words that all Australians could take into their hearts. Just as well she was on a government minister’s salary the whole time, cos it took her six years to get the words right.

“The drafting began something like six years ago at either a Boxing Day or Australia Day lunch with a whole lot of mates,” Senator Vanstone said.

Gosh, wouldn’t it be fun to spend Boxing Day lunch round Amanda’s place? A case of Coonawarra, a whole lot of mates and a good old-fashioned sing-a-long around the pianola.

Back in the office after the long weekend, Amanda set to work to pen her opus magnus. There are only 83 words in Under Southern Stars, so that means she took a generous 26 days per word penned, at a cost to the taxpayer of $13,691.32 per word for her salary alone. What a bargain!

Here’s a sample stanza to whet your appetite:

Nature’s earthly heaven,
Glory for our eyes,
Ours alone those treasures,
Under Southern Skies.

Yes, I know, it doesn’t make sense – it’s not even grammatically correct – but that’s not the point. The real issue here is that Australia now has a patriotic song that can compete with Let the Eagle Soar, Es zittern die morschen Knochen, Die Stem van Suid-Afrika and other classics of the genre.

The full lyrics are on the Sunday Telegraph website (where else?) - they also have a recording of some bint singing them (not Mandy, alas, although I understand the Senator has a very fine baritone voice). No word yet on when the CD will be available or who will direct the video.

But let’s not let the politicians have all the fun. Australia’s patriotic ditty void won’t be filled by just one song: we need more. Just choose a suitable tune, string together some platitudes for lyrics, and off you go! People have often remarked that it’s hard to write patriotic songs for this country, because nothing rhymes with ‘Australia’ except possibly ‘failure’, but Under Southern Stars shows how easy it is.

Here’s my contribution, a little number I call Onward, Glorious Diggers, to the Brave Future of Lower Interest Rates. It’s sung to the tune of Joe Dolce’s Shaddup You Face.

Uno, Duo, Tre, Quatro!

When I was a boy, just about the eight-a grade
Mama used to say, ‘Invest in real estate.’
With negative-a gearing, write it off on-a you tax,
You get rich easy, an’ then you relax.

Boy it make-a me sick, all these queue-jumping refugees,
They bring’a they kids and they wives, travel across the sea.
Taking our jobs and our houses, pushing house prices down,
I just wish they would drown.

And a-Mama used to say all the time:
What’s a-matter you, hey, we decide who comes
And the circum-a-stances, there’ll be no asy-a-lums
It’s a-not so bad, put ‘em behind-a razor wire fence
Ah, shaddup you face.

(Repeat until relaxed and comfortable)

An interesting story in New Scientist looks at research which could be a major step forward in cancer treatment. The media has a bad track record on reporting cures and breakthroughs, especially for cancers, which promptly disappear from view and are never heard of again, so it’s wise to read this one with a critical eye, but it does seem a striking discovery.

The researchers found that an existing, non-patented molecule called dichloroacetate (DCA) has the ability to switch on apoptosis – the normal process by which cells are programmed to self-destruct – in cancer cells. Cancers occur when normal cells mutate, lose their mitochondria and don’t undergo apoptosis, but the Canadians may have found a way to reverse the process.

Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and his colleagues tested DCA on human cells cultured outside the body and found that it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells, but not healthy cells. Tumours in rats deliberately infected with human cancer also shrank drastically when they were fed DCA-laced water for several weeks.

These are pretty exciting findings, but of course they will amount to nothing if they can’t be replicated in clinical studies. And that could prove difficult. DCA is not patented, so no pharmaceutical company is going to spend money doing the clinical research and taking the treatment, if it does work, through the expensive regulatory processes around the world: that research will need to be funded by ‘charities, universities and governments’, as the NS points out.

Because DCA has already been used extensively in humans (as a treatment for childhood metabolic disorders and cardiac ischaemia) it shouldn’t be necessary to run early Phase I safety studies, but the process will still be slow and expensive.

The University of Alberta is taking donations to help fund the research.

Bonnet et al; ‘A Mitochondria-K⁺ Channel Axis Is Suppressed in Cancer and Its Normalization Promotes Apoptosis and Inhibits Cancer Growth’, Cancer Cell 11, 37–51, January 2007 (PDF link)

This short film, by student filmmaker Brian Gonzalez, is moving but somewhat troubling. It’s a bit heavy-handed in portraying the effects of HIV infection – using the visual shorthand of KS lesions is striking, but hardly true-to-life these days – and there’s something darkly disturbing about the central character’s lack of agency and his submission to what almost appears to be coercive sex. But it’s beautifully made with a haunting soundtrack.

(Obviously from the foregoing, the video may not be suitable for everyone.)

What do you think?

(Thanks, P.J.)

Consider these two stories, both of which are fairly current:

1. In the UK, the British government has told Catholic adoption agencies they must comply with new laws which prohibit discrimination against same-sex couples seeking to adopt children, as must all adoption agencies. The agencies have two years to comply with the rules, and in the interim they have a statutory duty to refer would-be adoptive couples to other agencies. Predictably, the Catholics have responded with anger and warnings of ‘a new morality‘ being imposed by government via the workings of the UK Equality Act 2006. The Catholics don’t like the idea of a new morality because the old morality, in which they were legally entitled to discriminate against people on the basis of their religious superstitions, suited them just fine.

2. In Australia, where it’s an election year, the federal government has announced plans to ban same-sex couples from adopting children overseas. This is somewhat old news, as the legislation has been announced before, but it wasn’t an election year then. Last time it was an election year, the same federal government outlawed same-sex marriage (not that it was legal or anything). The Catholics and their fellow travellers applauded that action (which was supported by the lickspittle Labor opposition) and no doubt they are now drafting sermons in support of this move too.

The contrast between Australia and its former colonial power is clear. Britain is demonstrating that it is a confident, secular nation which cares deeply about the principles of non-discrimination. The British government’s actions on to bring adoption agencies into line with that principle have drawn considerable protest from the god-botherers, as did their decision to legislate for same-sex civil unions a few years ago, but Blair and his team have shrugged that off, as they should.

In Australia, anti-discrimination legislation at all levels of government universally provides an exemption for religious organisations. In most cases, this exemption permits the churches to discriminate against gay men and lesbians even in activities which are unrelated to their ‘core business’ of proselytism and ministry – so Catholic employment agencies, Catholic welfare agencies, Catholic hospitals, schools, homeless shelters and so on are all free to discriminate against individuals based on their gender, race or sexual orientation. Why is this allowed? Do we really believe discrimination is wrong, or not? I can (just) accept that some people carry these antediluvian superstitions in their head about Heaven, Hell and the rest, but I can’t see why this should qualify them for an exemption from the law.

The reasons why politicians allow this nonsense to persist are, of course, cynical in intent. Politicians pander to the churches to shore up their political support.

The churches continue to wield a great deal of influence in Australia, as they do in many countries including Britain. The British government doesn’t seem too deeply bothered by the prospect of an anti-government backlash from the pulpit, but in Australia the memories of the dark age of the DLP and Cardinal Mannix, when for two decades our political process was hijacked by the Catholic church, are still fresh – fresh enough that I don’t expect a lot of opposition from the ALP on this latest anti-gay move. They may even vote for it.

The argument behind all this posturing is familiar: children have a right to a mother and father, we’re told. But of course many kids don’t have a father and mother, for lots of reasons, and this has always been so. Even when the law changes to give children in same-sex relationships access to their third parent (as was the case earlier this year in Canada) there is an outcry from the religious lobby. The elephant in the room is that this has nothing to do with children’s rights and everything to do with perpetuating discrimination against normal, loving people who happen to be homosexual and who want to raise a family. The politicians and churches want to shoehorn human behaviour into a narrow, inflexible, and unnatural set of ‘norms’ – and we are the ones accused of ’social engineering’!

In the 21st century, Australia is a notionally secular country which remains in the thrall of the Christian churches, while Britain, with its constitutionally established church, is an avowedly secular humanist state. Why?