David/Davina

We're all so used to stereotyping in advertisements these days that we're more or less inured to it. Nonetheless, occasionally you see an ad that includes stereotyping that is just so blatant that it makes you want to fume. The one that's got my goat right now is a coffee ad that I saw on TV the other night.

Apparently some coffee company has decided that those little portion control packs of instant coffee that you find in motel wardrobes are going to be the next big thing for the trendy, inner-city, 25 to 35 demographic, or possibly the over-the-hill 35+ and mortgaged up to the hilt demographic that looks back fondly on the days when they were under 35, trendy and inner city. The ad has a couple of attractive young women sharing coffee and discussing the hostess' new flat-mate, who we are told is very good-looking. Then the flat-mate comes home, and by god, he is very good looking. While coffee is being made for him, he goes to his room to change for his night out: we next see him standing on a trendy, inner city landing but only from the waist down. He is wearing high-heels and a skirt.

I don't know what kind of misogynistic, homophobic toad comes up with this sort of rubbish, but this sort of obvious stereotyping really pisses me off. Not every good-looking man in the world is gay: some of us are straight, thank you very much. Whatever some little toad of an advertising copy writer who can't pull a good-looking chick might think. Whoever this turkey is, he'd be better off lowering his expectations, rather than polluting our airwaves with these obvious attempts to queer the pitch for those of us who are better endowed in the facial aesthetics department. God put ugly men into the world for a reason - to take care of the ugly women. Deal with it. Either that, or get yourself a big jar of vaseline and console yourself with thoughts of the trophy bride you'll be able to afford once they make you a partner in the agency.

DIY Tomahawk Update

There's a new page up on the airframe design problems you can expect to encounter if you decide to build your own cruise missile. No schematics unfortunately - I was looking forward to getting in a good supply of balsa wood, glue, pins and bulldog clips and putting in a productive weekend. Guess I'll just have to wait for the kit.

Dream Diary

I can't help being bored by the ongoing Crean/Beazley stoush. Even so, mug punter that I am, my money's still on Crean to win, by a nose at most.

This flies in the face of the realities of Labor's factional politics, which I first learnt about when I was a member of a Labor Unity (Victorian Right) dominated ALP branch back in the 80s. At one branch meeting the branch president gave the following report on a recent State Conference of the party:

"This conference didn't go well for us, the Left rolled us on a lot of issues."

Everyone nodded, and the deputy president called for questions. There was a moment's silence, then from the back of the room where the alienated leftie members sat, someone asked:

"Excuse me Jack, but just which issues did the Left roll 'us' on?"

"I couldn't tell you that Gummo, I was in the Labor Unity caucus room most of the time," [tr: the back bar of the John Curtin Hotel] "But I do know we got rolled."

Of course this was back in the days before ALP branches started signing up members at weddings, baptisms, funerals and race meetings, and being a rank and file member of the ALP really meant something.

Of the newspaper articles I've read, Barry Donovan's in yesterday's Age sums it up best for me. Zeppo Bakunin, who is closer to being an ALP insider than I ever expect to be - he's actually on speaking terms with his local member - summed it up this way: the New South Wales Right would rather lose an election than yield control of the ALP. Don't expect them to give up if Beazley loses the vote on Monday.

The whole conduct of Beazley's bid stinks, starting with the leaking of the private poll results showing that up to 10 New South Wales members could lose their seats if Labor went to the polls with Crean as leader. The way this was handled shows how little genuine political talent the Sydney mob have. They could have used the information to develop policy and a long-term campaign strategy to win back support: instead, they decided the best way to use the information was to scare the shit out of their own sitting members to push them over to the Beazley side. Basically the threat is, support Beasley or expect to spend the rest of your career in the ALP stacking branches in Bennelong.

This doesn't show a lot of respect for the members concerned, nor for the voters. It's a case of bugger the policy issues, give them big Kim. He knows how to win them over. If Beazley does get up on Monday, I can think of only three reasons for a reasonably sane person to vote for Labor:

1. They may be conniving bastards, but at least they're your conniving bastards and nowhere near as bad as their conniving bastards.

2. You live in a safe Labor seat and, as usual, the sitting candidate is a lot more competent than the Coalition wannabe who's only running to audition for one of the marginals.

3. You don't give a rat's arse any more and the Labor candidate's name was at the top of the ballot paper.

Bored as I am by it, the whole thing bothers me enough to sneak into my dreams. Last night, I had a shocker. I was living somewhere in Sydney and, god knows why, listening to Silver Tonsils on 2UE. He was doing a talk-back session with Simon Crean as guest. There was a call that went something like this:

Tonsils: Our next caller is Jim. What do you want to talk to Simon Crean about Jim?

Jim: I was wondering if Simon remembered appearing on your show back in August 1995, when you asked him about the shoplifting guide in that student newspaper?

Simon: Er ...

Jim: And after Mr Laws got stuck into you, you got onto Jan Wade and told her how she could prosecute the editors of the paper?

Simon: Er ...

Tonsils: Well, I remember Jim, but it's a bit old hat. Do you have anything else to ask Simon Crean?

Jim: Yeah. Mr Crean, if you get to be Prime Minister, are you going to let that turd across the sound-desk push you around again?

Postscript: You can read the original Rabelais article here. Really - just scroll down the page a lot.

Splog

An excerpt from Technorati's Interesting Newcomers Page (yes, I was looking to see if my own blog was listed):

1. G. 29 new blogs 39 blogs 40 links (Cosmos)
2. Brain Flashes 14 new blogs 58 blogs 61 links (Cosmos)
3. .blogdaddy 10 new blogs 37 blogs 50 links (Cosmos)
4. The Internet Topic Exchange 15 new blogs 74 blogs 152 links (Cosmos)
5. Shotput into the Abyss 11 new blogs 36 blogs 41 links (Cosmos)
6. Tiger: Raggin' & Rantin' 9 new blogs 41 blogs 63 links (Cosmos)
7. the dissident frogman 10 new blogs 47 blogs 62 links (Cosmos)
8. Heath Row's Media Diet 11 new blogs 66 blogs 76 links (Cosmos)
9. Brain Flashes 10 new blogs 58 blogs 61 links (Cosmos)
10. Desktopchina Live Page004 8 new blogs 42 blogs 42 links (Cosmos)
11. Desktopchina Live Page024 8 new blogs 42 blogs 42 links (Cosmos)
12. Desktopchina Live Page008 8 new blogs 42 blogs 42 links (Cosmos)
13. Desktopchina Live Page025 8 new blogs 42 blogs 42 links (Cosmos)
14. Desktopchina Live Page023 8 new blogs 42 blogs 42 links (Cosmos)
15. Desktopchina Live Page031 8 new blogs 42 blogs 42 links (Cosmos)
16. Desktopchina Live Page002 8 new blogs 42 blogs 42 links (Cosmos)
17. Desktopchina Live Page009 8 new blogs 42 blogs 42 links (Cosmos)
18. Desktopchina Live Page016 8 new blogs 42 blogs 42 links (Cosmos)
19. Desktopchina Live Page032 8 new blogs 42 blogs 42 links (Cosmos)
20. Desktopchina Live Page036 8 new blogs 42 blogs 42 links (Cosmos)
21. Desktopchina Live Page003 8 new blogs 42 blogs 42 links (Cosmos)
22. Desktopchina Live Page010 8 new blogs 42 blogs 42 links (Cosmos)
23. Desktopchina Live Page017 8 new blogs 42 blogs 42 links (Cosmos)
24. Desktopchina Live Page037 8 new blogs 42 blogs 42 links (Cosmos)
25. Desktopchina Live Page005 8 new blogs 42 blogs 42 links (Cosmos)
26. Desktopchina Live Page011 8 new blogs 42 blogs 42 links (Cosmos)
27. Desktopchina Live Page019 8 new blogs 42 blogs 42 links (Cosmos)
28. Desktopchina Live Page026 8 new blogs 42 blogs 42 links (Cosmos)
29. Desktopchina Live Page012 8 new blogs 42 blogs 42 links (Cosmos)
30. Desktopchina Live Page020 8 new blogs 42 blogs 42 links (Cosmos)
31. Desktopchina Live Page027 8 new blogs 42 blogs 42 links (Cosmos)
32. Desktopchina Live Page013 8 new blogs 42 blogs 42 links (Cosmos)
33. Desktopchina Live Page021 8 new blogs 42 blogs 42 links (Cosmos)
34. Desktopchina Live Page030 8 new blogs 42 blogs 42 links (Cosmos)
35. Desktopchina Live Page001 8 new blogs 42 blogs 42 links (Cosmos)
36. Desktopchina Live Page006 8 new blogs 42 blogs 42 links (Cosmos)
37. Desktopchina Live Page014 8 new blogs 42 blogs 42 links (Cosmos)
38. Desktopchina Live Page022 8 new blogs 42 blogs 42 links (Cosmos)
39. Desktopchina Live Page028 8 new blogs 42 blogs 42 links (Cosmos)
40. Desktopchina Live Page007 8 new blogs 42 blogs 42 links (Cosmos)
41. Desktopchina Live Page015 8 new blogs 42 blogs 42 links (Cosmos)
42. Desktopchina Live Page018 8 new blogs 42 blogs 42 links (Cosmos)
43. Desktopchina Live Page029 8 new blogs 42 blogs 42 links (Cosmos)

Thanks to James Russell for this perfect stocking-stuffer for next Christmas. Can hardly wait to see the looks on their faces ...

Palliative Care for Cats

CSL [pron: Seezl], the last of my ex-cats is on her last legs. Between the skin cancer that did for both her ears, the thyroid problem that did for most of her body weight, and the dementia that did for her few traces of good nature, she's been on her last legs for a couple of years anyway. But, now that the crusty discharges have started, the Cheynes-Stokes breathing can't be more than a couple of months away.

Old cats can be difficult to love. The cute little kitten, whose name we got off the old vet supplies box we took her home in, has long since turned into a skanky, smelly and utterly repulsive old moggy of questionable personal hygiene. You discover that the earth-tones in the hall runner (a traditional design from the fabled workshops of distant Dandenong) provide perfect camouflage for last night's attack of cat diarrhoea.

She hasn't been getting too many compliments from passing strangers lately and the friendly enquiries about her breed ("long-haired Australian lop-ear") have stopped. Most people pick up speed when they see her pad down the path, or hear her ingratiating mewl. She's a great deterrent to loiterers with intent.

Soon friends will start their well-meaning and pointed inquiries like surely it would be kinder to have her put down? They'll probably get the same answer they got when they asked about the last moribund cat: she may be smelly, incontinent & unpleasant to get close to, but as long as she isn't suffering and still enjoys rolling around in the sun, there's no good reason to euthanase her. Inconvenience is'nt a reason - it's an excuse. Can you smell cat-poo? I swear, I can smell cat-poo somewhere.

So the last visit to the vet will be put off until she's no longer able to stroll imperiously down the hall and call out for the front door to be opened so that she can get outside to poo on the neighbour's front lawn as all self-respecting cats do. And then call out for the door to be opened again, so that she can get back inside to the food bowl. With luck, she won't have to go to the vet at all, and her last hours will be spent curled up on an old towel in somebody's lap. As long as it's not mine, I don't really mind.

I Wuz Right (Sort Of)

The sometimes impenetrable J-Stro has been having a good gloat in various comments threads over the fact that I squibbed out on my moralising, interminable and inconclusive series of blogs on the recent war, while he, with his superior understanding of geopol, the Bush Administrations's fopo and dopo agendas, and an intellect unclouded by discredited lopo or pomo ideology, produced the only ethico-political theory of the war which yielded a testable hypothesis.

Whether J-Stro's testable hypothesis should be accorded any more respect than Athena Star-Woman's, equally testable prediction, based on the current position of Jupiter, that Leos can expect to meet a tall, dark handsone stranger this week, is questionable. But, for whatever merit there is in these things, here's a prediction I made on March 24:

Ken Parish has an interesting post up Through a glass slightly less darkly, which is attracting a fair bit of comment, some on the subject of Saddam Hussein's weapons of you know what, and when they are likely to be used. As we know that we're talking principally about chemical weapons (such as VX gas) and biological weapons (such as bacillus anthracis) - the nukes seem to have been dropped off the agenda. I'm prepared to say, with a little confidence and a lot of hope that they won't be used. [emphasis added]

Unlike J-Stro's hypothesis, where all the supporting evidence has to be drawn by inference from the statements of White House officials, as interpreted by the media, this one should be easy to refute: just produce one recorded instance where Saddam's chemical or biological weapons were used in Gulf War II. Unfortunately, this doesn't validate the "theory" I used to produce this prediction: derrida derider shot a couple of large holes in its historical basis. Nor is it particularly relevant to the new debate over whether we wuz lied to about the threat of Saddam's weapons in the first place and whether it is acceptable for a democratic government to lie to the electorate. (Or, if you prefer the soft option, whether it is desirable for us, as citizens, to go on electing governments who are so bloody credulous on issues of national security). It's just another piece of the self-indulgent opinionated crap that blogging is really all about.

What's In a Name?

A little googling turns up evidence that, elsewhere in the world at least, the name Phil Ruddock is still one which can be spoken with pride and respect. At Ulster's Ballymena RFC:

Phil Ruddock continues to defy age (and fashion rules) at training, while back row combinations from Whyte, King, Lorimer, Shirley and Crabbe continue to thrive off the possession provided by the front five.

And also in Barnsley, home of Wakefield Juniors, a doughty band of budding coarse fishermen, where Phil is the captain who led his team to victory in the National Junior Angling Association NATIONAL KNOCKOUT:

At the end of the match the weigh in showed Wakefields team captain Phil Ruddock had lead by example and had won his section with 9lb 3oz, Shaun Kearsley also took another section win with 8lbs 11oz, other team members Michael Reeder took second in section, Gareth Ridge a third and Daniel Ibbotson a fourth in section.

and the National Federation of Anglers North East Regional match for junior anglers:

The junior match was a forty-eight pegger, which fished very hard due to the wind, and the canal towing like more like a river, however it was known that the target species was the abundant Gudgeon, if they would feed.
...
As the team results were given it was confirmed Wakefield had secured the win with their four section wins, a section second and section third, a fantastic achievement.
To add further celebrations the individual winners were announced which showed Wakefield were superior on the day.
...
Phil Ruddock was individual fourth with 1kg 460g.

Haloscan ist kaput. Again.

Or Not.

Own Your Own Tomahawk

The ultimate do-it-yourself project:

Some time ago I wrote an article in which I suggested that it would not be difficult for terrorists to build their own relatively sophisticated cruise missiles using off-the-shelf components and materials.

...

... in order to prove my case, I decided to put my money where my mouth is and build a cruise missile in my own garage, on a budget of just US$5,000.

I like to think of this project as the military version of "Junkyard Wars".

...

A detailed level of documentation will be provided to those who qualify and are willing to pay a small subscription for full access to the project diary.

Low Gudgeon in High Dudgeon

One of the great things about being of the right is the franchise it grants on misrepresentation. If you want an example, consider Stanley Gudgeon's recent piece on Pamela Bone. In Monday's Age, under the unfortunate headline "When support for a cause smacks of a new imperialism", Bone wrote:

An email going around contains a petition to the Government of Nigeria, asking it to rescind the death sentence imposed on a young woman, Amina Lawal, for adultery. The email says Lawal (whose baby is proof of her crime under the Sharia law of her state) is to be buried up to her neck and stoned to death this week, the execution having been postponed until her baby was weaned.

There are reasons not to sign it. Another email from Nigerian human rights group Baobab respectfully asks international "friends" to stop the letter campaign. It advises that the information contained in the petition is not only inaccurate but may be damaging this case and others like it.

In bunyip-speak, this translates to:

... Pamela Bone's most recent piece in the Age, in which she pleads for people to stop writing letters in support of Amina Lawal, the Nigerian woman sentenced to death by stoning for the "crime" of adultery.

Too many annoying letters, Bone explains, and the likely result will be that the savages get even more upset, their resolve will stiffen and, if the pleas really get their goat, authorities may even bring forward the date of the execution in order to grind a thumb in the eye of civilised sensibilities. We must be cultural attuned, the columnist preaches, allow Sharia law to have its way and hope for the best. No women have yet been stoned, so Bone reckons Lawal has an excellent chance of winning her appeal and escaping unscathed. The problem isn't Lawal's persecutors, its those yapping Westerners raising such a fuss. To support her point - at least that is what the Professor thinks she's trying to do, because the column is even more illogical than it is disjointed - she cites the $15 billion the United States is making available to combat AIDS in Africa. Apparently this could be a bad thing - quite possibly "cultural imperialism", which may be even worse in Bone's eyes than burying women up to their necks and whacking them with big rocks.

As paraphrases go, this is one of Stanley's more accurate: he at least manages to cover most of the major points in Bone's article, even though he is viewing it through crap coloured glasses. To show how well the Professor has captured Bone's argument, here's the section of Bone's article dealing with Ms Lawal's current situation:

"Although the stress on Ms Lawal is obviously considerable and awful, she is not in immediate danger of being stoned," Baobab says. Her legal process is still several steps away from the final option of appeal to Nigeria's Supreme Court. So far, not one such appeal taken up by Baobab, with the support of women's groups in Nigeria, has been lost.

If there is an immediate danger to the women under sentence of stoning or flogging, says Baobab, it is that local politicians or vigilante groups will carry out the sentences to defy international opinion. In one case in which a woman was flogged, despite an appeal pending and despite an international letter-writing campaign, the local governor boasted of his resistance to "these letters from infidels".

Besides, the human rights groups do not want pardons for the women; they want the convictions and sentences imposed by local religious courts to be overturned by higher courts, to show they are wrong in law.

Bone's position, the Professor assures us, represents a complete back flip from the position she took in this article, published in The Age on November 16, 2002. Here Bone says:

Islamic fundamentalist groups are angry about having the Miss World pageant in Nigeria, branding it a "parade of nudity". Well, let them be, because however ideologically unsound beauty contests might be to some (they don't bother this feminist), this represents a great victory by women over religious fundamentalism.

Yet on Monday, according to the Professor's precis, she's taking a typical lefty post-colonialist, post-modernist, post-macchiato position on the same issue. Perhaps he overlooked this paragraph:

Culture is not sacred. And as Doris Lessing observed recently, customs are never as strongly valued as when they are about the subjection of women. There are many progressive men and women in Africa who know that cultural practices have largely been dreamed up by men to suit men, and must be changed, not only to stop the AIDS pandemic but because justice demands it.

And Bone's muddled position on the US funding to combat AIDS? Here it is, more or less:

Yet the difference between support and cultural imperialism can be difficult to judge. The US Senate recently passed a $US15 billion($A23 billion) bill to stop the spread of AIDS in Africa, which included funding to teach "feminism" to African men. The money will be used, in part, to fund programs to reduce sexual violence and coercion, child marriage and polygamy.

...

The Bush Administration's commitment to the empowerment of women would have more credibility, however, had it not been cutting funding to any programs that might give information about abortion as part of their service. The fact that a large part of the new money is to be used to promote sexual abstinence also gives rise to suspicions that its main interest is in pursuing its own conservative social agenda globally.

Many African men do need to be taught feminism. But perhaps it is African women, rather than men in Washington, who are best suited to teach them.

In support of his case against Bone, Stanley links to snopes.com where he found this description of the rioting which forced the Miss World pageant to be moved out of Nigeria:

...an outbreak of violence between Muslims and Christians (triggered in part by opposition to the Miss World content, which has been characterized by fundamentalist Islamic groups as a "parade of nudity" likely to undermine the fight against AIDS) spread to the Nigerian capital of Abuja -- planned site of the beauty pageant -- and left over 100 people dead and several hundred more injured, the Miss World pageant organizers moved the event to London instead, thereby eliminating one of the Nigerian federal government's prime motivations for preventing the execution of Amina's death sentence. Without a reversal of the ruling by the Sharia court ... preventing her execution will require intervention by force, an act that has the potential to plunge Nigeria into civil war.

Don't be bothered by the little dots: Stanley isn't playing silly buggers with elisions this time. On the other hand, it appears that Stanley stopped reading at the end of that paragraph. Here's the next paragraph:

Would sending letters to the Sharia appeals court in Katsina (the one which has already heard her appeal and rejected it) help? This is even more unlikely: Muslim fundamentalists deeply resent Western interference of any sort at any time, so telling them the world will be angry with them unless they reverse themselves isn't going to be the carrot that will inspire this particular donkey. They believe the teachings of the Koran and their interpretations and applications of them are entirely above matters of world opinion -- to them, they are answering to God, and nothing may be placed ahead of that.

And an update from the bottom of the page:

Update: A revised petition circulated in mid-2003 claimed Amina was due to be executed by stoning on 3 June 2003. This information is wrong: 3 June is the date Amina is next scheduled to appear before the state Sharia court of appeal. For now, her death sentence remains suspended until January 2004 to give her time to raise her child until it is old enough to be weaned.

Perhaps in his haste to get to the meaty bits, he also overlooked this while scrolling down the page:

Will signing a petition help the cause? In all likelihood it won't. The person to whom the missive is being addressed, Olusegun Obasanjo, the President of Nigeria, is both opposed to the sentence and almost powerless to do anything about it. He has said that under Nigeria's federal system of government the mainly Muslim northern states have every right to reintroduce the Sharia code into their penal law, and that while he will weep for Amina and for Nigeria itself if her execution is carried out, he will not overturn the finding of that court.

And also the link to this page on why Internet petitions in general are a waste of time.

Finally, let's look at some information from Baobob, the Nigerian human rights group Bone refers to and which the Professor cites, after his enthusiastic discovery that Baobob clearly speaks Bone's language. Here's the Professor's quotation from their web-site:

Dominant colonialist discourses and the mainstream international media have presented Islam (and Africa) as the barbaric and savage Other. Please do not buy into this. Accepting stereotypes that present Islam as incompatible with human rights not only perpetuates racism but also confirms the claims of right-wing politico-religious extremists in all of our contexts.

And here's something he skipped - an example of how an international letter writing campaign led to the flogging of another Nigerian woman under Sharia law:

Dangers of Letter Writing Campaigns?

However, if there is an immediate physical danger to Ms. Lawal and others, it is from vigilante and political further (over)reaction to international attempts at pressure. This has happened already in the case of Bariya Magazu, the unmarried teenager convicted of zina (extra-marital sex) and sentenced to flogging in Zamfara in 1999. Ms. Magazu’s sentence was quite illegally brought forward with no notice, despite the earlier assurances of the trial judge that the sentence would not be carried out for at least a year. She was told the night before that it would be carried out very early the next morning (and thus had no way of contacting anyone for help even if this unschooled and poor rural teenager had access to a telephone or organizing knowledge and experience), whilst the state bureaucracy had been instructed to obstruct and was physically refusing to take the appeal papers from BAOBAB’s lawyers. The extra-legal carrying out of the sentence was not despite national and international pressure; it was deliberately to defy it. The Governor of Zamfara State boasted of his resistance to "these letters from infidels" – even to sniggering over how many letters he had received. Thus, we would like you to recognise that an international protest letter campaign is not necessarily the most productive way to act in every situation. On the contrary, women’s rights defenders should assess potential backlash effects before devising strategies.

I think further comment from me would be superfluous.

Getaway with Mark

Gareth Parker has posted a short excerpt from this cheery travel piece* by Mark Steyn. Here's a bit of local colour from Mark's visit to the town of Rutba:

But just what exactly was deteriorating? As my groaning table and the stores along Main Street testified, there was plenty of food in town. Was it the water? I made a point of drinking the stuff everywhere I went in a spirited effort to pick up the dysentery and cholera supposedly running rampant. But I remain a disease-free zone.

Obviously, Mark is a traveller, rather than a tourist. A tourist looking to catch cholera or dysentary in Iraq would have done a little preparation, perhaps checked out a couple of brochures at the local travel agent, rather than swanning off to a foreign country totally unprepared on the basis that this is the best way to learn about the country. Had he done so, he might have saved himself the pointless sojourn in Rutba, charming as it might have been, and gone straight to Basra where, if this MSNBC report is correct, he could have had a very satisfactory cholera and dysentary experience:

The Iraqi city of Basra made headlines recently when a deadly wave of cholera swept the area. But it was only the first problem in a summer health-care crisis that will get worse in the coming weeks. Even before the war, water filtration plants across the nation were in a state of disrepair. Patched up with second-hand parts, they chugged along with machinery purchased in better days. The war delivered the coup de grace. Many of those that survived the bombing and the fighting—and quite a few didn’t—were crippled by looters after it. In recent days, as the heat has crept up into the low 100s, so has the reliance of locals in towns across the country on the ancient, sewage-choked waterways of the Tigres and Euphrates rivers. The impact on Iraq’s children has been devastating.

The border city of Usaybah, on the banks of the Euphrates up by Syria, is typical. “There is no water except from the river and there is nobody to help me,” said Jossa Jamel as she sat with her infant son, who was stricken with diarrhea and started vomiting five days ago. “What should we do? There is no other way.” Each day in recent weeks, Hamdi al-Aloosh’s staff at Usaybah Hospital has treated as many as 30 cases of dysentery. And almost every day, he loses a child. “Everything is destroyed and the pumps are 25 years old,” al-Aloosh explained. Lately, his doctors have begun to notice another disturbing trend: cases of typhoid, another deadly water-borne killer, may soon rise to epidemic proportions.

* - registration required.

Update: I just found this page on Rutba. For what it's worth:

Rutba is a dirty little desert town which has grown up around a border post. Because although it lies some 60 km inside Iraq, the open desert roads mean all traffic in and out of Iraq to Jordan pass through Rutba.

Make of that what you will.

Santoro Watch

Last week I developed a bit of a fascination with Senator Santo Santoro's performance in Monday's sitting of the Senate Committee on Environment, Communications, Information Technology and the Arts. I did intend to go through every piece of evidence [of ABC bias] that Senator Santoro presented but, as usually happens, the BlogGeist has moved on to other things. In the interests of wrapping up the Where There's Muck series, I've gone through the rest of last week's Hansards for the committee, to prepare a summary of the good Senator's contributions to the committee proceedings for the rest of the week.

On Tuesday, when the committee dealt mostly with matters relating to Telstra, Senator Santoro put the following questions to witnesses:

On Wednesday when the committee heard from the Australian Sports Commission and the Australian Sports Drug Agency, Senator Santoro offered the following insightful comments:

On Thursday, it was the turn of the Department of the Environment and Heritage [to come] under Senator Santoro's microscope:

And finally, on Friday, Senator Santoro finished up a brilliant week with a few light-hearted interjections:

Ken's Back

Ken Parish is back on line, with a third incarnation of Troppo Armadillo. Go visit Ken's new blog so that he can get lots of traffic and feed some of it through to me.

Locally, comments are back too, but for how long is anybody's guess.

US Senate opens Iraq weapons probe.

No comment.

Bummed Out

I don't know about anyone else, but I'm beginning to find this page a real downer:

Forbidden
You don't have permission to access /troppoarmadillo/ on this server.
Apache/1.3.27 Server at cyberfuddle.com Port 80

This one too:

Forbidden
You don't have permission to access /infinitebabble/ on this server.
Apache/1.3.27 Server at cyberfuddle.com Port 80

What's really depressing is that Ken came round commenting today and I suspect (perhaps a little immodestly) that, if Troppo was on-line, I'd be getting some much needed linkage. So today, at least, I have a purely self-centred reason to hope that the cyberfuddle domain is back on line soon.

There are one or two other blogs that have gone strangely quiet lately, but I'm not going to name them. It might be tempting fate.

Read this, then this and finally this (permalinks bloggered as usual - scroll down to: "One of the great things about being of the left is the franchise it grants on inconsistency ...").

No Comments

Haloscan appears to be down again. I've taken comments off-line for now, so that pages will load within a reasonable time.

Update (Tueday, 3 June): they've buggered off again. Bloody Haloscan!

More ABC Bias Revealed

A quick trawl of last Firday's AM archives turned up this example of anti-American bias that Senator Alston may have missed. At the end of a report on the latest Chinese government initiative to control the spread of SARS, John Taylor said:

JOHN TAYLOR: China knows a lot about executions. It leads the world in killing its own citizens. Many human rights groups say it annually kills more people than the rest of the world put together, and not only people convicted of capital offences are executed.

This is scurrilous. As we know, there are plenty of State Governors, District Attorneys and Judges in the US who are proud of their willingness to execute some of the citizenry to discourage the rest from killing each other. But, according to John Taylor, rather than the world's greatest democracy being the world leader in this area, it's one of the world's few remaining communist regimes. This is not merely anti-American: it's anti-democratic.

Of course I may be wrong about this. It may be that we currently have a round of trade negotiations going on with the Chinese. If so, I'm prepared to withdraw the charge of anti-American bias unreservedly: Taylor's endorsement of China's leadership in this area of human rights is consistent with the nation's best economic interests and probably just the sort of responsible reporting that the Federal Government wants to see more of from the ABC.

Double Backflip With a One and a Half Twist

I've reconsidered my position on the bill that the US Government has presented for the RAAF's use of its bombs during the recent war. I think, on the whole, it's quite reasonable that our government should pay for them.

The situation is analogous to one that some parents may have faced: you send your brat round to play with the neighbour's ankle biter and then get news that, in a moment of over-enthusiasm, the little bugger dismembered his host's GI Joe and melted an entire battalion of plastic soldiers into a scorched green blob. Under such circumstances I think any decent, responsible parent would feel constrained to make good the neighbour's losses and lay down some firm guidelines on how junior was to behave when playing with other kids' toys.

So it's time to stop complaining, and stump up the money. And time for Defence Minister Robert Hill to get onto the RAAF and let them know that, next time the US Air Force invites them over to play with the heavy ordinance, they're to make sure that it all gets returned in good working order. As a true friend, it's the least we can do.

I've also reconsidered my post on Hugh Mackay's call for our community's intelligent people to recognise their obligations to society, get off their arses and do something for the benefit of their fellow Australians. It was brought on by a story Zeppo Bakunin told at last Thursday's trivia quiz.

Way back in his misspent youth, Zeppo worked at the Tramways for a while. One day, while he was on a break, one of his colleagues - a gnarled senior trammie of many years experience - turned to Zeppo and said: "You went to Uni didn't you?"

"Yes" Zeppo confessed.

"Y'do Physics?"

"Only first year." answered Zeppo, a little apprehensive.

"D'you study any Relativity?"

"A bit." Zeppo answered, a little more apprehensive.

"Good. Perhaps you can help me out." His interrogator said, and produced a sheet of paper on which he scribbled out a string of incomprehensible equations of the

dt = {2L/c}*{1/[1-(v^2/c^2)]^0.5}

variety. Pointing to one he said: "The thing is, I don't understand this transformation here."

I think this bloke is a good example of the sort of person Hugh was complaining about. If he'd gotten off his arse and done something with his intellectual resources he might have made something of his life. Instead, he was content to waste his life as a trammie, occasionally pestering the better educated with pointless questions about the Theory of Relativity. What a waste.