Thursday, June 23, 2005
ENVIRONMENT SAVED
Robert Mugabe’s lunacy campaign now extends to destroying orphanages and vegetable gardens. But it’s all in the name of a good cause:
On Tuesday vegetable gardens the urban poor plant in vacant lots around Harare were added to the police’s targets. The government says the plots are threatening the environment.
FALSE AND MISLEADING PROPAGANDA
“Surely it must be patently clear to those with a modicum of intelligence that the (Australian) government is once again, (at the bequest of it’s master) feeding the public false and misleading propaganda regarding the established innocence of Iraq and that all attempts to further tarnish and keep the enemy in a status ‘hatred’ category whilst it pursues it’s atavistic motivation to plunder the country’s oil and allow for US firms to reap billions in reconstruction are futile,” writes Australian William Hardiker at Al-Jazeerah, a crank site not related to the similarly-named crank-ish TV network. Hardiker, whose maniac notions sometimes appear in The Age, then exposes the Great Douglas Wood Fraud:
How remarkable that within twenty four hours, Mr. Woods, appearing in newspaper headline photographs beaten, with deep black and bruised eyes, made such a miraculous recovery.
Within 24 hours? Wood appeared in those images on May 8. He wasn’t seen again in print until after he was freed on June 15. What kind of crazy theory will Hardiker run with next? Maybe he’ll claim that Iyad Allawi is a murderer.
BUT ARE THEY DOLPHIN-FRIENDLY?
Japan’s latest taste sensation:
“We have decided to add a whale burger to our menu due to strong demand from our customers, and feel very thankful to the whales for allowing us to make the burgers.”
READER QUIZ
Spot the missing word in this Melbourne Age report.
UPDATE. Readers attempt to solve the mystery of the missing word:
The missing word is dissident.— Mr. Z
Evangelicals.—R.H. Hardin
I’m guessing Quakers; all that repressed hostility, seething below the surface- it was only a matter of time before they exploded in a frenzy of violence, mayhem and hymns.—Habib
‘Insurgents’ surely.—Jay Santos
Christian ... definitely christian.—Razor
I’m thinking it’s ‘Zionists’.—ArtVandelay
Does it start with an ‘M’ and end with an ‘uslim’?—Harry Buttle
It’s ‘Woodsmen’, we’re in a late run for the flag. It must be stopped.—Slatts
Those bloody Masons and their exploding billy goats?—Phranger
Poofters?—you bet
Wednesday, June 22, 2005
INGLORIOUSNESS PERCEIVED
Tracee Hutchison slams freed hostage Douglas Wood:
The hostage revealed himself to have none of the grace or dignity dished out to his brothers and looked like a blustering buffoon at his airport news conference ...
It was enough that his words “God bless America” had been played over and over on his release, but the 20 years Douglas Wood has spent as an expat Australian in America were played out in all their cringe-worthy ingloriousness when he decided to meet our media singing a song about a sheep thief who would rather die than be caught for his crimes . . . oh dear!
Oh dear, indeed. Tracee’s graceless, undignified piece was still prominent at The Age’s site when further details of Wood’s treatment became known:
Douglas Wood’s Iraqi captors forced their hostages to watch the executions of fellow prisoners, a released hostage has revealed.
How are you feeling now, Tracee? A little buffoony? Garbage site Crikey.com.au can relate; shortly after Wood’s liberation, it sent an item to subscribers asking if Piers Akerman and Andrew Bolt, both of whom had criticised Sheikh al-Hillali, would apologise to the magical man-saving mufti. Now that the Sheikh’s non-role has been exposed, will Crikey apologise to Bolt and Akerman?
NICENESS WISHED FOR
Melbourne Age reader Dennis Whelan:
Wouldn’t it be nice if Douglas Wood donated the reputedly large sum of money he is being paid for telling his story to Sheikh Taj al-Din al-Hilali, a man given little credit but who tried to negotiate the release of other hostages in Iraq?
BEING AND EMPTINESS
Wall-eyed ideas guy Jean-Paul Sartre ain’t loved no more:
France celebrated the 100th anniversary of Sartre’s birth Tuesday with a number of activities, including a National Library exhibit featuring letters, photos, interviews and manuscripts that belonged to the famed father of existentialism, who died in 1980.
However, organizers say the exhibit, which runs until Aug. 21, has drawn a disappointing number of visitors.
Sartre might have enjoyed this line, however:
“I have no recollection,” 22-year-old Jean-Francois Vergnoux admitted to the Associated Press. “It’s terrible – it’s total emptiness when I think about him.”
TOWN RETAINS PRIDE
Michael Moore receives appropriate recognition:
For now at least, Michael Moore’s name will remain absent from road signs and schools in his hometown of Davison.
The place already has a Grand Blanc Road. How much more recognition does Large Whitey need?
TRAPPED FOREVER
Giggly Robert Fisk appeared on Australian TV this week to make some sort of point about progress:
History for us is easy to cut off from. End of the Second World War, end of Nazism; new world, European Union, Commonwealth - you say what you like. But in the Middle East, people continue to suffer from history. The Palestinians in the refugee camps of Saba and Shakila, which are scarcely 2.5 miles from where I’m speaking, they still look back and say that the Balfour declaration, which was Britain’s support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, is what drove them into exile. They lived the Balfour declaration, which was made in 1917, last night, one hour before. You cannot ask the Arabs to separate themselves from history, because they live it today.
Guess nothing can be done, then. Oh well.
FEAR OF STEAM
A letter in this week’s Bulletin:
Why are articles on global warming-pollution-the end of the world so often illustrated with a picture of cooling towers? While the spectacle of a giant tower belching out white smoke may alarm, the stuff coming out the top is nothing more than water or, more precisely, water vapour, and probably the only thing it may do is increase the possibility of rain.
Tony Reed, Dalmeny, NSW
It won’t happen again, Mr Reed. At least not in The Bulletin; I can’t speak for the BBC. J.F. Beck has more on the story at that link, and Terry McCrann notes standard behaviour from the usual suspects: “The executive director of Greenpeace International, Gerd Liepold, has been wandering around Australia receiving reverential treatment from adoring acolytes on the ABC.”
U.N.? D.N.!
The Washington Post reports:
The U.N. Security Council had detailed knowledge of how Saddam Hussein was violating U.N. sanctions, but was so divided that many violations went largely unchecked.
So why is it still called the United Nations?
THAT’S ONE WAY OF GETTING HER OUT OF THERE
French journalist Anne-Sophie Le Mauff is not impressed by orders that she leave Iraq and return to Paris: “I don’t understand this decision. I do my job, I’m careful, I don’t leave my hotel.”
SELF-PURGING INSURGERS
Insurgers are attacking outsurgers in an intrasurgent upsurge, reports the NYT:
U.S. marines watching the skyline from their second-story perch in an abandoned house here saw a curious thing: In the distance, mortar rounds and gunfire popped, but the volleys did not seem to be aimed at them.
In the dark, one marine spoke in hushed code words on a radio, and after a minute found the answer. “Red on red,” he said late Sunday night, using a military term for enemy-on-enemy fire.
Marines patrolling this desert region near the Syrian border have for months been seeing a strange trend in the complex Iraqi insurgency. Insurgents, they say, have been fighting one another in this constellation of towns along the Euphrates, from Husayba to Qaim. The observations offer a new clue in the hidden world of the insurgency and suggest that there may have been, as American commanders suggest, a split between Islamic militants and local rebels.
This might be as close as we get to Paul McGeough’s predicted civil war; Baathist dead-enders shooting it out with Saudi and Syrian goombahs. Excellent.
(Speaking of McGeough, don’t miss Andrew Bolt’s complete takedown.)
MUSLIMS, OPRAH OVER-REPRESENTED IN FRENCH JAILS
Via Mike Jericho:
Iranian-French researcher Farhad Khosrokhavar said in his recently published book Islam in Prisons that Muslims make up some 70 percent of a total of 60,775 prisoners in France ...
Sociologists and French Muslim leaders further hold racism and discrimination as the root cause of unemployment and crime rates among the Muslim minority.
They could on to something there. Ask Oprah about her recent shopping adventure in Paris:
Winfrey, 51, tried to enter the chi-chi handbag boutique but was blocked by staff who mistook her for a troublemaking North African.
Hermes has been “having a problem with North Africans lately,” according to The New York Post, and “Oprah didn’t have her hair done,” rendering her unrecognizable.
TILTOLOGY
Toby at BYF explains a curious modern phenomenon: “Their heads tilt because they have no spines.”