links for 2007-04-24
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Always wanted to stick something into John Howard’s mouth? Now’s your chance!
Le week-end
At last I have a couple of days’ peace and quiet after what has been a maddening couple of weeks. With all the media brouhaha about HIV I’ve been working my pert little butt off, – wrangling reporters, issuing media releases, drafting talking points and generally fighting the good fight. I think we got our message out.
With all this action it’s no wonder I succumbed to a nasty cold a few days ago. Spent a day in bed during the week but have been trying to shake it off with only limited success since. Now I think the cold is gone but I have a secondary chest infection which means a nasty rasping cough which is unpleasant for me and distressing to those around me. People are keeping their distance lest they pick up the bug. Fair enough.
Last night I took my cold germs, my husband and my friends Kirsty and Sean to see Keating! at the Comedy Theatre. I don’t normally do entertainment reviews on here (Richard Watts has that territory covered) but I can say that I laughed my head off. Eddie Perfect’s perfect as John Hewson (in a duet with Keating of “I Wanna Do You Slowly”), and utterly brilliant as Alexander Downer (”Too Freaky”).
The show is brilliantly conceived and the writer obviously loves his subject as much as the audience (no-one under the age of 35 was in attendance) do. An affectionate preach-to-the-choir extravaganza with great songs, strong performances and occasional moments of sheer brilliance.
Today I’m off to the farmers’ market, baking sourdough bread, practicing my Turkish lessons and taking care of a lovely house guest.
Australia has run out of water
The Prime Miniature is on the radio as I type, announcing that the Murray-Darling basin is suffering from an “unprecedented shortage of water” and that, unless there is significant rain in the next six weeks, there will be no water for irrigators.
The Murray-Darling is Australia’s biggest river system and it is the source of irrigation water for the vast majority of Australia’s agricultural industry. Apparently it’s expected that there will be enough water for “basic human consumption,” but none for farmers.
Maybe now would be a good time for the PM to acknowledge that by denying the possibility of climate change for so long he has led Australia to a very precarious predicament.
links for 2007-04-13
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Try to correctly attribute the quotes: was that Ann Coulter or Adolf Hitler? I got 11/14.
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It must be a great relief to have “a place to publish all the things I really feel the need to say without the wanton censorship of the paper.” (Total posts to date: 1. Last post: November 2004).
The dog whistler
I suppose it was only a matter of time before John Howard weighed into the HIV debate. In a radio interview this morning, the PM has said that he doesn’t believe people with HIV should be allowed to migrate to Australia:
“My initial reaction is no (they should not be allowed in),” he said on Southern Cross radio.
“There may be some humanitarian considerations that could temper that in certain cases but prima facie - no.”
Mr Howard said Australia already stopped people with tuberculosis coming in and this was why he supported stopping HIV-positive people as well.
Howard knows as well as I do that Australia already bars HIV-positive people from entry as immigrants in most cases. Applications for resident status by people with HIV are routinely denied on the basis that the individual’s condition would lead to undue cost for the Australian community. Getting past this barrier requires that the applicant prove there are genuine humanitarian or compassionate reasons – via a lengthy and expensive legal process.
But now Howard is apparently considering legislative change to tighten the law further. He knows that the vast majority of people know nothing about the current arrangements and won’t bother to find out. If they did, they’d immediately see this is a non-issue – only a handful of HIV-positive people getting through the process each year (a few years back, my husband was one of the lucky ones) and those that do have genuine humanitarian or compassionate grounds for doing so.
Howard’s already said that “humanitarian considerations” will continue to have effect, contradicting his claim that there is a need for tighter restrictions. This is just an opportunity for grandstanding at the expense of a stigmatised group (last election year it was gay marriage, remember?)
This is blatant dog-whistling, and it’s something Howard has proven himself adept at.
A few years ago Howard infamously offered the opinion that Australia was taking in too many Asian migrants. These days he’s not allowed to make such obviously racist remarks, but substitute “HIV-positive” for “Asian” and nobody blinks.
The yellow peril has become the HIV peril, it’s an election year and Howard’s got the dog whistle out.
ALERT: The News Limited website is running a poll: Should HIV-positive people be allowed in?
ALERT 2: The SMH website is running a poll too: Where do you stand? Ban them or not?
Launch
Paul (FTrain) ford has been building a website:
If you work for a startup you can fool yourself into believing that the reward will be eternal wealth, but I work for a nonprofit, and the reward is: I did a thing, and I doubt I’ll ever do anything like it again. One, two, three: I will never get enough praise; of course I failed; and what I did was not particularly important. The best thing to hope for is that in time and with much more effort the work will become transparent to its users, that it will be taken for granted. That’s life with websites.
Me too. More blogging soon.
P.S. The website Mr Ford has spent the last 18 months working on appears to be offline/broken/borked/spindled/mutilated. I know how that feels too.
All tip and no iceberg – the video
Previously: All tip and no iceberg
Thanks Sam! And Red!
links for 2007-04-08
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Turnbull should read Henry’s speech to the Australian National University in Canberra on September 21, 2001. Maybe he might learn more than sneering banalities about “people who work all day in the bush and know how things work”.
links for 2007-04-06
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Here’s the big news that some may not have heard. There’s actually an art to using PowerPoint — or old fashioned transparencies for that matter — effectively.
300
I was actually thinking of going along to see 300, the Zack Snyder-directed movie of the graphic novel adapted from the movie about the myth of the battle between the Spartans and Persians at Thermopylae on 480BC (that’s a lungful). But Richard Watts has put an end to that notion for me. It’s “a ludicrously bad movie that fails spectacularly on so many levels,” he writes:
Equally offensively, the film is overtly homophobic, as if somehow needing to offset the director’s vision of Spartans as muscular underwear catalogue models in red cloaks and leath codpieces designed to show off their oiled pecs and washboard stomachs. One example of this comes when the Spartans dismiss Athenians as “poets and boy lovers”. The most extreme example of homophobia in 300 is in the depiction of the film’s villain, the Persian god-king Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) who is presented as the classic Hollywood evil fag, with plucked eyebrows, long nails, a lascivious voice and exaggerated, effeminate posture.
Xerxes’ unnatural overtures are rebuffed - and rightly so, cry a thousand sweaty, insecure teenage jocks - by the Spartan king Leonidas (Gerard Butler), a manly man’s man who surrounds himself with half-naked men in an unwittingly precise illustration of the struggle between homosocial and homoerotic urges that dominates the Western masculine millieu.
[...]
In short, 300 is an abominable film that offends the intelligence of its viewers, that betrays the historical canon it purports to celebrate, that butchers any concept of drama, and whose politics and social messages are deeply suspect. It even fails to be so bad it’s good. It’s just bad, boring, and uterly undeserving of popular or critical acclaim.
I guess that’s that. Pity – it looked like a hoot, but Watts is no stick-in-the-mud ideologue, so if he reckons the film is that offensive, I’ll give it a miss. Read the fill review.
Image from IMDd.com
links for 2007-04-04
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According to a study published this week, if you live in a “major city” the air pollution you breathe in each day could be shortening your life expectancy even more than the radiation exposure suffered by survivors of the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.
Wednesday agit-prop
Yes, the country’s going to Hell in a Handbasket, but you don’t have to just lie there and take it:
From the ACTU:
Casual workers at Darrell chocolates shops have been left with a less than sweet taste in their mouths after their employers served them up an AWA that cut public holiday pay by more than $100 a shift. Weekend rates are also slashed, and there is no pay rise factored in over the life of the five year agreement.
John Howard likes to trumpet that AWAs are “flexible” and allow workers to “negotiate” with their employers. But surprise, surprise: at Darrell Lea, every AWA is the same… and if you don’t sign, you lose shifts.
Tell Darrell Lea boss John Tolmie to pay his workers fairly! Send him an email from our website today.
From GetUp:
The Federal Government has passed extraordinary legislation that will close the rolls for new voters at 8pm, on the very night the election is officially called. In the last election, 83,000 first-time voters enrolled in the first week after the election was called. Hundreds of thousands more registered at their new address. But this time they won’t get that chance - unless we act urgently.
That’s why whether you’re enroled to vote or not, there’s a crucial role for you to play right now. Visit the GetUp website to demand this law be revoked, and help friends and family enrol correctly in the next two weeks – before new changes and extra red tape come into effect on April 16 making it even harder!
Go get ‘em, Tiger!
CC-licensed photo by woowoowoo
The next president of the United States?
Crikey, if that’s the way she looks when she sees an old friend, I’d hate to be an enemy.
Seriously, I love Hillary and I hope she wins. (But I’m still rooting for Al Gore).
AIDS doily
I want one of these doilies, by artist Laura Splan – the design is based on the structure of HIV.
She’s also done doilies of the Hepadna, herpes, SARS and Influenza viruses – if I had the money I’d get a full set.
Besides the biomedical reference, I’m reaching the stage of life when doilies seem appropriate…
links for 2007-04-03
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A website that shows a large piece of cheese as it (very slowly) matures is getting thousands of hits a day. What is it about dull- as-ditchwater webcam footage that can be so strangely gripping?
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The truth about the polar bear cub in a German zoo who animal right campaigners supposedly said should be killed … “a complete fiction” according to Media Watch (video starts at 6:14).
Glastonbury
Tickets to this year’s Glastonbury festival have sold out in record time, 137,500 tickets sold in less than two hours, according to the BBC.
Organisers said the 137,500 tickets available to the public were snapped up just one hour and 45 minutes after going on sale on Sunday at 0900 BST.
They added that they were happy with how the sales went despite websites and phone lines struggling to cope.
“Struggling to cope” seems about right. Brent and I each had a half-dozen browsers open, trying to load the web page without success for about an hour of Cmd-R, Cmd-R, Cmd-R.
The good news is that the UK arm of our operation had much more success, and we are going to Glasto. W00t!
