Thursday, January 27, 2005
CHENEY NOW PRE-PHOTOSHOPPED
Check it out, Democratic Undergrounders! Dick Cheney’s links to evil have never been more obvious!
Speaking of our excitable DU friends, one of them has broken ranks:
Recently, and for the first time, I’m truly spooked by Islamic terrorism.
I’ve always seen it as a problem, but one that would eventually go away. Bush might not do it, but eventually it would burn out like a fire running out of fuel. But last night I saw an episode of Frontline on PBS, about Al Queda in Europe. I realized that these people are serious, and they want to restore the Caliphate, the old Islamic empire.
Among the replies: “Were those real Muslims or ACTORS?�
UPDATE. Yahoo image won’t work as a re-direct. Cut and paste: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/050127/photos_wl_afp/050127085944_shopt1hk_photo2
DEVIL DEFAMED
The Tasmanian devil goes by the nickname “nature’s janitor�, according to the UK Daily Telegraph’s Nick Squires. What an odd claim; we don’t use the word “janitor� in Australia (not widely, at least; we prefer “cleaner�.)
Squires seems to have confused our sweet Devil with the common North American opossum. Perhaps a fight could be arranged, devil vs. opossum, to decide who earns the prestigious janitor title.
RACIAL QUIZ THRILLS
Do you prefer white people to black people? Or black people to white people? Or are you without any preference at all? Take the Harvard Implicit Association Test and find out!
More details here. But take the test (there are several others at the same site) first, just for fun.
UPDATE. Hit the Australian flag when you enter the site, and take the Oz-US quiz. My result: “Your data suggest a slight automatic preference for Australia relative to United States.”
GOVERNMENT IN ACTION
Good things ahead:
The Howard Government has secret plans to use its Senate majority to dramatically simplify onerous tax laws, including stripping back the 7000-page tax act.
It gets better:
This is the year in which the media will be set free. Unnaturally boxed in by rigid but artificial ownership and control legislation since 1987, the brakes on media development and growth are finally about to be removed.
By the way, it’s been a while since we heard the once-common claim that Howard’s government was the most divisive since Jesus was born in Melbourne 2000 years ago. That line doesn’t hold up very well these days.
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
VOTERS DECIDE: BAD OR WORSE
Via Jeff Jarvis, an inspiring Iraqi election ad:
An old man rounding a corner into an alleyway looks up and sees young, masked militants facing him down. A couple joins the old man. Slowly, more and more people join the old man.
Voiceover: On January 30, we meet our destiny and our duty. We are not alone, and we are not afraid. Our strength is in our unity; together we will work and together prevail.
Those joining the man now outnumber the militants. He nods and they move forward. The militants run away.
Written on screen: Don’t worry about Iraq. We are its people. We will allow no one to deprive us of our rights. For the building of Iraq: Peace, freedom and democracy. The heroes of Iraq.
Sounds good, yes? But not to Paul McGeough:
They are unlikely to vote in the right numbers to legitimise this process. This election will do nothing - things will stay bad or get worse.
True to form, the Americans and the puppet regime they have installed are cooking the books ...
... the likely effect in a tribal and religious society is the outcome the Americans didn’t want - many voters will resort to religious and tribal edicts, decrees and urgings on how they should vote, thereby locking in Iraq’s sectarian divide and perhaps setting the scene for the full-blown civil war that some observers now fear is inevitable.
Like the inevitable disasters many anticipated during Afghanistan’s elections (McGeough: “Today’s voting goes ahead amid promised Taliban and al-Qaeda attacks on polling stations ... â€?), after which McGeough wrote:
Encouraged by the turnout and the surprising lack of violence ...
As John Podhoretz notes, some folks just don’t want the elections to succeed:
Anti-Bush partisans — both Democrats and Leftist ideologues — understand that if the elections are seen as a triumph, they will be seen as Bush’s triumph, and they cannot stomach it ... Maybe what they’re really pessimistic about isn’t Iraq’s future but their own.
Speaking of McGeough, who is of Irish birth, he once vowed to never take out Australian citizenship until we became a republic. Yesterday more than 12,000 other immigrants demonstrated that they don’t share McGeough’s concerns. Paul won’t be joining them any time soon:
Republicans will keep pushing for an independent head of state even though a poll shows support for a republic is at a five-year low.
HAIL COMMENTS! GIVE MONEY!
In comments, Jorgen writes:
Reading this site without the comments would be unthinkable!
Amen to that. And the site would also be unviewable without the extraordinary work of admin Andrea, who has lately beaten spam attacks and coding flaws into a bloody paste. It would be nice if you dropped by Andrea’s site and left some cash, don’t you think? (Hit the link and scroll down a little for the PayPal button.)
COMING SOON: THE 38th EDITION OF “PHIL’S CORRECTIONS”
Phillip Adams continues getting it wrong:
Bush might be quietly encouraging the Israelis to take out the Iranian nuclear facilities, as they did some years ago, allowing Bush plausible deniability. Well, you can forget the deniability. Vice-President Dick Cheney is already talking up exactly this scenario.
The Israelis bombed nuclear facilities in Iraq, not Iran. And Cheney isn’t talking up an Israeli attack ... unless you believe a certain quote-hacking NYT columnist.
TSUNAMI UPDATE
The tsunami death toll now stands at 280,000:
Hundreds of bodies are still being pulled daily from the rubble in Indonesia, while many more lie unidentified in mass graves in Thailand as tsunami-hit countries struggle to even count their dead, let alone identify and bury them.
With 11 Indian Ocean countries suffering deaths and more than 50 other nations reporting citizens killed, the disaster a month ago touched an unprecedented number of communities.
In Indonesia’s worst-hit Aceh province more than 1,000 bodies a day are still being recovered.
Every day.
FISTY JIM
Judging by the following rush transcript at CNN, fist-obsessed Vanity Fair pudding James Wolcott has picked up some freelance typing work:
Just this weekend, Tim Blair, an Australian blogger, a very good blogger, took a “Washington Post” piece that was completely silly—and the term is fist—destroyed it, deconstructed it, proved that it was all spin ...
Of Wolcott’s unusual interpretation of the popular term “fiskâ€?, Tiger Hawk writes: “It reads like something Maureen Dowd would write if she weren’t working for a family paper.â€?
UPDATE. To clarify: the compliment is from Hugh Hewitt, speaking on CNN. The fist line is from Wolcott. Check them links!
EARLY MODEL VOLKSWAGEN DISCONTINUED
CNN explains Australia Day:
January 26 marks the day in 1788 when a fleet of settlers and convicts from Britain arrived in what was to become Sydney to begin the new colony of New South Wales.
But among Aboriginal people, the original inhabitants of the land, the day is known as “Invasion Day.”
And the day the original inhabitants arrived is known as Burn Everything Day:
Settlers who came to Australia 50,000 years ago and set fires that burned off natural flora and fauna may have triggered a cataclysmic weather change that turned the continent’s interior into the dry desert it is today, United States and Australian researchers say.
Their study, reported in the latest issue of the journal, Geology, supports arguments that early settlers literally changed the landscape of the continent with fire.
People are also blamed for killing off 85 per cent of Australia’s huge animals, including an ostrich-sized bird, 19 species of marsupials, a 7.5m lizard and a Volkswagen-sized tortoise.
These practices have become known as “living in harmony with the environment” and “maintaining a balance with nature”.
IRAQ SPEAKS
Michael Totten is editing a crucial website in the week prior to, and the week after, Iraq’s election:
We have more than a dozen local Iraqi correspondents, at least one in each province, filing daily reports. These reports include news, interviews, quotes, photos, whatever they can get in a day. They aren’t professional journalists. They are more or less ordinary Iraqis. Some of them you already know – Omar and Mohammed from Iraq the Model, for example. Others you don’t know because they don’t speak or write in English. Their reports are translated from Arabic before they are uploaded to the reports site.
I’m also going to be excerpting and linking to essays and posts in the Iraqi blogosphere and – on rarer occasions – stories in the mainstream and Middle Eastern media. The idea is to let Iraqis themselves tell their own story of their own first free election.
The site is called Friends of Democracy: Ground level election news from the people of Iraq. To the best of my knowledge there is nothing else like it anywhere out there, at least not in English. (We also have an Arabic site.)
Bookmark, bookmark, bookmark.
FOOTBALL GUY KICKS AUSTRALIA
Looks like AFL chief executive Andrew Demetriou wrote his Australia Day speech (theme: we are bad) before the Asian tsunami, and our subsequent massive donations. Some awkward changes seem to have been made:
We have just come through a terrible time - the tsunami of December 26. But that disaster has brought out the best of us as a nation. We have been, and continue to be, the most generous of nations, giving so much to support the massive task of rebuilding communities ripped apart by a freak of nature. As that renowned philosopher Ron Barassi said: “We have played well above our weight.”
This is the Australia I love: instantly reacting to the needs of others. We asked no questions, we reacted immediately, we provided everything we could.
But does this outpouring represent what we really are as a nation? I’m not sure if it does.
Despite our response to the tsunami, we remain the conservative country we have become in recent years. When we, as a country, reflect on where we come from, we look narrowly, inwardly, rather than considering all the influences that have made us the country we are. Notwithstanding the massive support we have given to the tsunami appeal, we are more inclined to self-interest than sharing; more interested in surpluses than what we do with them, more interested in the stockmarket than the state of education and equality of opportunity.
We seem to have lost our sense of adventure, our sense of backing ourselves, our sense of looking towards tomorrow, preferring to worry about today ...
All I can do is hope that the next generation of our leaders - whether Liberal or Labor - will think broadly and challenge their values and our values, rather than building barriers between us and a world in need.
Naturally, because Demetriou’s speech was negative, today The Age published it. Happy Australia Day.
Tuesday, January 25, 2005
We’re ba-a-ack
“Mother? What is it? I’m coming, Mother!” (shriek shriek shriek shriek...)
Yes, the site was totally down, due to a hailstorm on the mysql database caused by evil spammers. All together now: “Spammers must die! SPAMMERS MUST DIE!”
Anyway… for future reference please put this link in your bookmarks; it’s where I will post updates in case the site cacks out. Which I hope won’t happen again, or at least not for a very long time, now that things have been moved to a different server.
PS: I’ve been attempting to make the site more readable and easier to navigate through. The font is set at Verdana/Arial/sans-serif at 12 pts and you can make it larger or smaller with your browser “increase/decrease text” menu option. The line height is set at 150%, to cut down on that crowded look. The big “Tim Blair” in the header at the top of every page is now a link to the main site page. More visual ease to come. If anyone has any suggestions on what would make the site easier for them to read/see/stare at for hours on end please feel free to leave your suggestions in the comments where they MAY (note the emphasis) be implemented to the best of my ability. Please keep in mind that I’m no credentialed web maven, nor have I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express recently.
Monday, January 24, 2005
FREE ICE CREAM
Tennis is a nancy sport featuring insufficient opportunity for injury (my solution: tie-breakers should be played using a rock-hard field hockey ball). That being said, women’s tennis is sometimes diverting, and not for reasons you may imagine. Rallies last longer; players seem less robotic (Roger Federer) or irritating (Lleyton Hewitt, shown here interviewing his hand and during a Lamaze class).
Much more fun to watch Australia’s Alicia Molik duke it out with Venus Williams. Molik had never defeated Williams (they’d met three times previously) but took her out in straight sets last night. If anyone was at the game, please file a match report in comments.
I’ve only ever been to a couple of Australian Opens, once to interview Martina Hingis; we arranged for this to be conducted at a show-jumping course outside of Melbourne, so Hingis (who loves horses) could get in some riding on her way to winning the first Grand Slam event of her career.
That victory almost never happened. Stupid horse threw her on a jump. It was a big fall, but Hingis hit the ground in a practiced roll and avoided any harm. Then Hingis quickly dusted herself off and determinedly hauled herself back on that horse. “I think she’s going to win the Open,� I told her mother, which was kind of pointless, since Mrs. Hingis spoke no English.
In reply, she bought me an ice cream.
PROBLEMS SOLVED
Don’t know your Islamic Daawa from your People’s Union? Is embarrassed silence your only response when people ask: “Hey, what about that Iraqi National Unity Grouping?” Has your wife or husband left you because you didn’t know the difference between the Kurdistan Democratic Solution and the Kurdistani Alliance?
Well, your problems are now at an end, thanks to Arthur Chrenkoff’s multi-link guide to the Iraqi election.