The concept of government-backed web censorship is usually associated with nations where human rights and freedom of speech are routinely curtailed. But if Canberra's plans for a mandatory Internet filter go ahead, Australia may soon become the first Western democracy to join the ranks of Iran, China and a handful of other nations where access to the Internet is restricted by the state.
Why not just call it the 'Jesus Filter'?
....only a cluster of Christian groups and child safety advocates have come out as supporting the filter. In a June 5 poll conducted on the web site of the Sydney Morning Herald, 99% of the 88,645 people who responded to the survey said they were against the Internet filter. Nevertheless, (Stephen) Conroy told the Sun-Herald in May that the policy "will be going ahead.'' He also accused groups like GetUp! of deliberately misleading the public. 'We are still consulting on the final details of the scheme. But this policy has been approved by 85% of Australian internet service providers, who have said they would welcome the filter, including Telstra, Optus, iPrimus and iinet.'' Iinet have since denied that it ever approved the scheme.
Many say the biggest problem with the plan is that it simply won't work. "I don¹t see the point of blocking a site that no one would have come across, and making the criminals aware of the fact they are being watched. I am much more interested in seeing the Australian Federal Police work with international law enforcement agencies in tracking the site," Ludham of the Greens Party says.
The Liberals are making a bit of noise about the Jesus Filter, but they're not going to oppose it,, they just want to 'tweak it' a bit.
Please welcome to the bullfighting ring, Christian Hernandez, the world's smartest bullfighter :
Despite what you may read or hear, Hernandez was not arrested for "cowardice", he was arrested for breaking his contract, and paid a small fine before being released. He then announced his retirement.
Hernandez had previously been gored through the leg, but like all bullfighters, he has no doubt watched the following video and puked in fear and horror :
Sorry if you were eating breakfast.
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Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Peanut Butter Stings Less Than Vegemite
Helen Coonan : "I have two beautiful Golden Retrievers...."
UPDATE : Video is at the bottom of this post.
Definitely one of the most downright bizarre, and hilarious, panel debates ever seen on Australian TV. The subject? Consensual Sex With Your Pets.
HOST TONY JONES : We have a web question from Deirdre Baker in NSW. QUOTES: "Peter Singer, in your 2001 article 'Heavy Petting' you state that mutually satisfying sexual activity between humans and animals can develop. Please explain."
PROFESSOR PETER SINGER: It is a fact that there is sexual contact between some humans and animals. I was raising the question why we have such a taboo on this. Sometimes it involves cruelty and the infliction of power and dominance on an animal, and clearly I oppose that. There can be occasions, I don't know how much vivid description you want.
TONY JONES: Go ahead.
PROFESSOR PETER SINGER: I'm clearly not on American television tonight, because no American host would have said that. An example is a woman has oral sex performed by her dog.
PROFESSOR JAYATHRI KULKARNI: Brings new meaning to doggy style!
PROFESSOR PETER SINGER: Women have said this is something that pleases them, the dog is free to do it or walk away, there's no dominance over the dog, that seems harmless.
SENATOR HELEN COONAN: This is a trained dog, obviously?
PROFESSOR PETER SINGER: It's her dog who enjoys doing it and the dog gives pleasure to the companion. I don't see why we have a taboo.
PROFESSOR JAYATHRI KULKARNI: Sorry, Peter, this is just weird. It's just weird!
PROFESSOR PETER SINGER: It's not common, but is it wrong, is the question?
JOURNALIST DAVID MARR: Jay, this is your territory.
(LAUGHTER)
TONY JONES: Let's get a psychiatrist's perspective on this?
PROFESSOR JAYATHRI KULKARNI: I'm thinking, Freud did say that human beings are polymorphously perverse, which is another way of saying that there are lots of different views. Sometimes you have to draw the line and go, "That's weird."
PROFESSOR PETER SINGER: Since I wrote this piece, I've had people, sex therapists come to me, and say they have had patients who were tortured with guilt because they got some sexual satisfaction from contact with their animals, and their lives were miserable. And they gave them the article because it helped them to see other people were doing the same thing, and here was somebody who was saying, "This is not a sign of terrible moral evil."
TONY JONES: Helen Coonan, parliamentary sitting week up coming up, would you like to get on the record on this?
SENATOR HELEN COONAN: Thankfully, I don't answer questions, I ask them. I won't be asking this one, Tony. I agree, that's seriously off. I can't imagine... I have two beautiful golden retrievers, and... (LAUGHTER)
PROFESSOR PETER SINGER : I thought your party stood for individual freedom.
SENATOR HELEN COONAN: I think it's off the wall. Put it this way, I'll continue to find the nice patch under my doggy's ear that he likes, that's all I'll do.
TONY JONES: I'm sorry to say, we have run out of time.
DAVID MARR: I'm not sorry.
The video is here. It's definitely worth whipping through to about the 50 minute mark. Helen Coonan's line about her Golden Retrievers sent the audience, and host Tony Jones, into hysterical laughter, with a fair scattering in the crowd of absolutely shocked, disgusted and "oh, I'm about to wet my pants!' expressions.
I bet they won't be using any of that discussion in the promos for next week's show.
UPDATE : Okay, we have the video here now :
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Beer Not Bought
Why would anyone think the Murdoch media are actively, hysterically campaigning against prime minister Kevin Rudd?
From the front page of today's Daily Telegraph online :
Bombshell.
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Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Australia played a small role, as the landing zone, in one of the most remarkable episodes of space exploration - the capturing of small pieces of a comet by a Japanese space probe, now successfully returned to Earth for study.
In more local Space-related news, Australian astronomer Anthony Wesley snapped this incredible shot of an unidentified impact on the surface of Jupiter :
On June 3rd, 2010, something hit Jupiter. A comet or asteroid descended from the black of space, struck the planet's cloudtops, and disintegrated, producing a flash of light so bright it was visible in backyard telescopes on Earth. Soon, observers around the world were training their optics on the impact site, waiting to monitor the cindery cloud of debris which always seems to accompany a strike of this kind.
"It's as if Jupiter just swallowed the thing whole," says Anthony Wesley of Australia, one of two amateur astronomers who recorded the initial flash.
I know the culture at The Australian. I worked there for five years. Occasionally, as a reporter you get leant-on to chase things. You can be pushed into prodding a certain side in a certain way in line with the paper's campaign of the day. I know how uncomfortable this is, particularly when the paper is not a disinterested player.
The Australian, owned by a non-Australian, who voluntarily gave up his citizenship to make more money. You can't more un-Australian than that.
Saturday, June 12, 2010
The Australian government's latest attempt to scare away asylum seekers.
How effective will it be?
It depends on whether the dangers you're trying to escape are more or less scary than being lost in a stormy ocean,, doesn't it?
Plague Of Locusts? Blame Rudd
It may seem completely irrational to blame what is expected to be the worst locust plague in decades on Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, but I've been reading plenty of Australian tabloid newspaper columnists recently and I've learned utterly irrational blame-gaming matters not a hoot.
The worst locust plague in more than two decades is threatening to strike Australia, the world’s fourth-largest wheat exporter, after rainfall boosted egg-laying by the insects in major crop growing regions.
“There are hundreds of millions of dollars worth of crops and pastures that are potentially at risk,” Chris Adriaansen, director at the Canberra-based Australian Plague Locust Commission said in an interview by phone.
The forecast plague could cost Victoria’s agriculture sector A$2 billion ($1.7 billion) if left untreated, the state government said today.
“The advice of leading scientists indicates the scale of the coming spring’s outbreak could be as bad as we experienced in 1973 and 1974 when locusts swarmed through much of Victoria,” state premier John Brumby said today in a statement. “Prior to that, the last outbreak of this scale was in 1934, so we could be facing a once-in-a-lifetime locust plague with locusts swarming right across the state.”
Australian farmers have mostly completed planting of winter crops including wheat and canola, with final output depending on favorable weather through the remainder of the year. Aerial pesticide spraying and ground-level controls by agencies and growers is planned to curb the spread of the locusts and reduce damage to crops and pastures, according to the commission
A swarm may contain millions of locusts covering several square kilometers and overnight migrations of as much as several 100 kilometers are not uncommon, it said.
High density swarms, with more than 50 insects in a square meter, can eat 20 metric tons of vegetation a day, according to a South Australian primary industries website.
Even Murdoch columnist Andrew Bolt, who gets free trips to Israel and then 'forgets' to mention so in a Daily Telegraph column where he recited IDF propaganda about the Gaza Flotilla slaughter without question, apparently has had enough of Israel's cruel, internationally condemned trade blockade of 1.5 million Palestinians :
Michael Rivero, who often links 2 or 3 times a week to Andrew Bolt articles on his popular website What Really Happened (contributing greatly to Bolt's claimed "2 Million Hits A Month!"), appears to agree with Bolt in this letter to the New York Times (excerpts) :
An official Israel government documented reported by McClatchy news only yesterday confirms that the purpose of the blockade is not Israel’s defense, but to force the Gazans to surrender their elected government and accept Israeli rule via their proxy Fatah. That the list of items banned by Israel in Gaza included potato chips, shaving cream, candy and cookies demonstrates that defense is not the issue here. Israel’s attempt to coerce acceptance of alternate government in Gaza is a mirror of the attempt by the USSR in 1948 and 1949 to blockade West Berlin in order to starve that city into accepting Soviet rule via their proxy East Germany.
The world reacted quite differently back then, mounting the Berlin airlift, flying 13,000 tons of food and necessities into West Berlin daily on the principle that no government has a right to starve another people into changing their political system.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is often accused of being utterly boring and morosely humourless, at least as far as his public persona goes. He's trying to change that perception on Twitter :
Er, yeah. Okay.
Apparently there's some soccer games about to start in South Africa, and an Australian soccer team will be playing, too. Though you'd hardly know it from watching the TV, or reading newspapers. They've barely mentioned it all.
(Yeah, I know, that was even less funny than Kevin Rudd's Friday afternoon attempt at humour).
Crikey's First Dog On The Moon has worried about a lot of things this week. Here's two :
Indigenous singer-songwriter Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu has scored a US release for his platinum-selling debut album.
The self-titled record by the blind singer from Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory picked up a string of awards following its release in 2008, including an ARIA for best independent album.
It will be released in the US on the Dramatico label in June.
Yunupingu will also go on a promotional concert tour taking in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Toronto, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Now, getting your song played in a coffee shop may not sound like a big deal, but literally millions of Americans will hear that song as they line up for their coffees and hang out.
A similar promotion a few years back successfully introduced Bob Dylan to a new generation of fans and helped sell hundreds of thousands of copies of a rare Dylan album.
If a reporter can say it on ABC News, why can't Kerry O'Brien drop it on the 7.30 Report? "For fuck's sake, Kevin Rudd, just answer the question!"
It's not the most inappropriate word to use when discussing the behaviour of Australia's richest mining bosses.
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Attached to this story about Nimbin, by Mandy Sayer in The Australian, is this block of ads :
Who knew you could advertise better ways to grow an illegal crop in such a bastion of conservatism?
Blaze on, Boomers, blaze on.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
In case this isn't enough, I've posted a bunch of new stories at : Your New Reality
And there's a shitload of new story links and random, vacuous, inappropriate and occasionally insightful comments over at Twitter : Darryl Mason On Twitter
I hope the trickle of entertaining #FedElect2010 political ads, by professionals & amateurs (or professionals imitating amateurs), turns into a steady stream. Key word - entertaining :
John Birmingham poses a What If? on The Greens, who now command a chunky 16% of the national vote, according to recent polls (excerpts) :
What if Bob Brown's lentil eating slouch bikers and militant anti-military-stuff movement actually got a couple, just a couple, of seats up in the lower house, and forming a government after the next election actually required the eventual victor, be it Abbott or Gillard, to cut a deal with Brown?
What would that government actually do? And more importantly what could it not do, in terms of passing laws and spending money?
They might well be able to leverage their support into seemingly minor but actually significant policies such as, say, a moratorium on the release of genetically-modified organisms into the environment. Or a ban on old growth logging.
They'd almost certainly put a bullet into any xenophobic nonsense about demonizing asylum seekers as mad bombers and child killers waiting to jump our queues and blow up our shopping malls because they hate our precious, precious freedom so much they're willing to spend years in a detention centre just to have a crack at us.
...in actual security policy, even motherhood statements like the party's central principle that "no nuclear armed or powered forces should be deployed within Australia's maritime boundaries" would mean a radical transformation of decades of settled, bipartisan policy, abrogating as it would the entire alliance with US.
Most people my age have kids to make them feel old, but my wife and I are part of that somehow suspect group of people standing over at the side, looking at their shoes, whenever some politician starts tossing around the word ‘family’; selfish couples who don’t want children. Other forty-one-year-olds have the blooming sophistication of their own offspring to point out how they’ve become daggy and unfashionable. We have to rely on far subtler signposts.
Until about two years ago, I would read both the local street press publications from cover to cover, down to every last Fred Negro curlicue. Then I started to notice how, when I got to the dance music section in the middle, I’d slide my hand through to the back page and flip the entire silvery supplement over, and make for the live reviews at the back, in the hope that someone I recognised, like You Am I, had done a gig that week.
