Christopher Hitchens actually had himself waterboarded by the US Military to see whether it felt like torture to him. It did.
via Pharyngula, who has links to video.
Author Archive for tigtog
The Age: Equality in education is a dying concept (Kenneth Davidson)
The imputation is clear. The Rudd Government education “revolution” involves continuing with the unfair funding arrangements of the Howard government. Why? This can be explained by a simple political calculus, which suggests that the Government has more votes to lose than to gain by a level funding playing field as operates in most OECD countries. This is where private schools receive public funding only on the condition that their total spending per student is no higher than for government school students.
It is not to denigrate government schools to point out that they educate most of the “at risk” students. It is irrefutable that each dollar spent on these schools will generate a much bigger pay-off in economic and social terms than a dollar spent on non-government schools, which are already better resourced than government schools.
Combine this failure to ensure a more level playing field with the fiasco enveloping the plan to give all school kids a computer and the current government’s education policies are looking more shambolic every day. I knew that this centrist government was never going to sort out everything on my progressive wishlist, but I thought they’d do better than this.
It appears that some folks here really like a good old rant. I understand that, being a great respecter of the cathartic power of a good old rant myself. It just appears that some of our ranters need a bit of corralling if they’re not to deafen others trying to have a quieter discussion.
So, to keep people busy over a winter weekend, this is an invitation to readers to offer up a rant. However, this is not Rant Club where anything goes. This is Rantledon, and there are rules and a code of etiquette, and everyone watching has an opinion on your serve. Queensbury Rules of Stoush, if you like.
The Rules are as follows:
Continue reading ‘Rantledon: hit some zingers, but don’t curdle the cream’
5 minutes worth of classic cricket catches in this YouTube montage:
Share your favourite sporting memories in comments.
Update July 3rd: the Medical Board has now approved the registration of the recruited doctor. Now they just have to get him sorted with a Medicare provider number and he can start providing care to Dorrigo.
* * * * *
From today the two doctors who service the population of Dorrigo are on strike, and at least one of them has resigned from the local hospital as part of their protest: they will continue to attend life or death emergencies and to provide palliative care for the dying, but anyone else in need of medical attention who can make it down the mountain alive to the hospital in Coffs Harbour will be sent there.
Their reason? After finally successfully recruiting a third doctor to alleviate their horrendous workload and provide better services for the Dorrigo community, their overseas-trained recruit (now an Australian citizen) has not been able to gain approval for his registration as a General Practitioner, without which he cannot come and practise in Dorrigo. This final piece of paper was originally supposed to be issued in April when he passed his Board assessment with flying colours, but there has been bureaucratic delay after delay, based on a (ETA) compulsory and arguably inappropriately rigorous assessment of his English competency when he has been working in hospitals here effectively for the last 6 years.
Dr Herb and his colleague just heard that the approval of the registration application has been further delayed until at least the 2nd of July. Unsure of whether this will merely be delayed again, they have declined to renew the lease on the accommodation they had secured for their recruit and his family, as they have been paying hundreds of dollars a week on an empty house since March while waiting for the paperwork to be sorted out, and are unwilling to keep on doing so with no promise of a timely resolution. Suitable accommodation is difficult to find in Dorrigo, and they now don’t know whether, when their recruit is finally approved for registration to practise, they will be able to secure him appropriate accomodation at that time.
In utter frustration, they have decided to go on strike.
Below is the press release from Dr Horst Herb, which was forwarded to me privately by a third party. (I have contacted Dr Herb to ensure that this is definitely from him and that I have his permission to publish it.)
Continue reading ‘Dorrigo doctors on strike over bureaucratic delay in registration of an overseas-trained recruit to overloaded rural medical centre’
Well, hasn’t it been a busy week or so for NSW Minister John Della Bosca and his wife, Federal backbencher MP Belinda Neal?
Of course, for the last few days we’ve only been hearing about her, despite Della Bosca’s documented history of multiple traffic offences leading to a revoked driving license and allegations that he was part of the alleged drunken and abusive behaviour in a Central Coast nightclub last weekend.
Last month Della Bosca’s licence was revoked for six months following a series of speeding offences, after which he reportedly swore at a newspaper photographer for taking pictures of him riding a bicycle.
Yesterday, he refused to speak to irate teachers who invaded his office to vent their fury at the Government’s decision to change the rules under which school principals hire staff. [source]
Perhaps the newspapers are a bit bored with Della Bosca’s temper, plus although people like to lampoon him he’s simply not that easy a target for anything more (such as collecting a political scalp for the editor’s wall), due to the degree of power he wields in the NSW Labor party. But his wife doesn’t have the same powerbase behind her, and besides - a woman with a filthy temper, there’s a news story with legs - cue hordes of gleefully chortling editors. Neal’s excesses have made the international newspapers now, which gives us a very pithy summary of the key points that are being latched onto for the news cycle: Continue reading ‘Power couple politics NSW style and the alleged disciplinary double standard’
Author Note: The original title of this post was “Do the right thing, Mainstream Media: disguise the faces of the minors in your reproductions of the Henson images NOW”, deliberately imperative because I wanted it to grab attention in people’s feed readers and hopefully provoke an immediate reaction. That has happened, the faces are now being pixellated in the mass media (not that I’m claiming that this is a direct result of this post), so I’m changing the title to something that sounds a bit more like “me” speaking.
* * *
The Age has an article quoting the mother of the girl whose image is the most widely disseminated with respect to the investigation of complaints against artist Bill Henson’s nude studies of adolescents. The mother defends Henson against claims that he did anything unethical, and mentions in a statement given to The Age via an intermediary that he has been a friend of the family for over 10 years, that her daughter has “a keen interest in the arts” and that the whole family were well acquainted with Henson’s work before the photo-shoot.
The Age claims to have discovered that the pictures were taken last year, and that the girl is still 13 years of age. That contradicts earlier reports that the images were several years old, which would have made the girl perhaps now 16 or 18, i.e. possibly made her no longer a minor. If The Age is correct, then she is still very much under-age, and I’m pretty sure that that creates a problem for the media who have disseminated Henson’s images of her online and in the press, or at least it certainly should.
I only yesterday realised that the censored images of Henson’s work readily available online mostly lack one key ingredient that we usually see when images of minors are at the heart of a news cycle about alleged sexual exploitation/abuse - there has been no black bar or pixellation over the face to disguise the minor’s identity.
*NO PLOT SPOILERS FOR SEASON 4*
(cryptic allusions amongst the cognoscenti are encouraged, but take care!)
Image Source: BBC
Who else is becoming impatient for Auntie ABC to show us more of the scrumptious David Tennant and his charmingly ruthless ways? They haven’t even shown us the last Christmas special yet!
Continue reading ‘Open Whoverse Thread’
THE ABC’s flagship radio current affairs programs — often the source of tension and controversy in the Howard years — have won overwhelming endorsement from a landmark report by an external expert.
An audit of AM, PM and The World Today found they were almost 96% accurate.
[…]
The review, by an expert who reported to the ABC’s director of editorial policies, Paul Chadwick, found 95.3% of items sampled from the three programs were either wholly or substantially accurate for plain facts and were 97.3% accurate on the context of the facts.
Denis Muller, an independent media research specialist and a former associate editor of The Age, devised a method to review a sample of 150 current affairs items from last October.
I’m sure that some will cavil that this audit only covered three radio programs, and thus doesn’t account for the dastardly mind-control powers of Red Kezza on the 7:30 report, but it’s a fine result considering the relentless complaints of bias from the Howard government, and especially the complaints from former Communications Minister Richard Alston against these radio programs in particular.
It would be interesting to see a comparative audit of programs from before the time of Director Scott’s “impartiality” rules (adopted in late 2006) to see whether they have made any fundamental difference to the flagship news programs, or whether the new mandates requiring a “balance” of opposing opinions on any “matter of public contention” have just meant that various opinion programs have subsequently been hijacked by “balance”, no matter how ridiculous and poorly argued some of those “balancing” views might be.
My own suspicion is that the news programs before the new regime would prove to have been just as accurate as in this last audit, while the accuracy of content presented in the opinion shows would prove to have declined drastically since the mandatory “balance” rules were imposed.
Last year Paul Norton wrote with some sadness and much asperity “Is David Burchell brain-dead?”
Referring to the particular column which prompted the post, Paul contrasted ex-communist Burchell’s stance with the positions taken by anti-communist Robert Manne thusly:
David Burchell’s column, by contrast, repeatedly trivialises left-liberal positions on those issues and complacently denigrates those who hold such views.
Well, Burchell appears to be at it again, holding up as if it is an entirely new concept that the panoply of social ills afflicting many indigenous communities are more a product of poverty than of racism per se, because many of the same problems afflict the non-indigenous urban poor.
It’s true that some remote Aboriginal communities, caught in a morass of isolation, neglect and joblessness, have sunk to levels of dysfunction unknown to white Australians.
Yet dysfunction is remarkably colour-blind. If, as we did until relatively recently, you put white families, preselected for their turbulent family histories, into welfare ghettoes on the fringes of the main cities, they will struggle to hold their lives together, too. And then, exactly like indigenous families, they will weave narratives of defeat and despair to console them for their marginality.
Unlike Burchell, I’m not a literary academic writing in the area of public policy, and have only a few undergraduate course credits in social studies from the early 80s under my belt, yet I’d be amazed if he could point to one, single, solitary social studies course which did not identify poverty as the primary component of social disadvantage in blackfella communities here in Australia (as well as in communities of colour amongst our immigrant population and in other nations as well). That correlation with poverty, and particularly de facto ghettoised poverty, has never been in contention. The question he studiously avoids is - why is there such a strong correlation in so many countries between socioeconomic class and the melanin content of one’s skin?
Continue reading ‘More complacent denigration’
Except of course, they aren’t. Our world is chemicals, our life is chemistry.
This rant is brought to you by yet another TV talking head rabbiting on about
“natural remedies, not those chemical ones”
Sorry Kochie, all those natural remedies are full of chemicals too. Chemicals don’t only come from factories, where they are not created but refined from naturally occurring raw materials and recombined to form new compounds.
Chemicals are also combined, recombined, recycled and recombined again every time you, me and every other animal breathes and eats, just for starters. Chemicals also gad about when every plant respires and photosynthesises - every plant and every animal is made of chemical elements and every natural remedy consists of active ingredients that have consistent conventional chemical names e.g. vitamins.
This idea that chemicals are nasty and unnatural and dangerous is rampant. Why? Continue reading ‘Terrible, horrible, scary UNNATURAL chemicals’
The Age believes Attorney-General Robert McClelland will announce today that he will introduce amendments to Parliament as early as next month to alter around 100 federal laws.
The changes will not allow gay marriages or same-sex couples to adopt children, and the issue of access to the Family Court for same-sex couples is still being resolved.
Some of the changes would take effect immediately, but many financial laws — such as social security, tax and veterans’ affairs — would be phased in by mid-2009. But first the changes will have to be passed by the Senate, where the Coalition retains its majority until July 1.
Even after then, Labor will need the vote of conservative Christian and Family First senator Steve Fielding and independent senator Nick Xenophon if it cannot clinch Coalition support.
Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson has signalled he backed the principle of removing discrimination against gay couples but has yet to secure formal support from his colleagues.
This is the sort of situation that led to my rabbiting on so much about the importance of balancing the Senate in our last election. I’ll bet on Fielding voting against this bill, in which case unless the Liberals support it it won’t go through. Continue reading ‘Rudd govt anti-same-sex-discrimination bill depends on the Senate balance of power’
This post is likely to be of interest mostly to those who are hosting a blog on Wordpress.com.
Looking at Fire Fly’s blog, I noticed that she’s discovered that a new feature on her hosted-by-Wordpress.com blog. It turned up without direct notification, and is opt-out, not opt-in. … » Problem No.1 (She’s disabled it, and you should too if you blog on wordpress.com - see below for instructions)
This new feature generates a list of “Possibly Related Posts” at the foot of your own posts, and it searches through a database of all other Wordpress.com blogs to do so. Now, just consider the variety of attitudes people have to the words “feminism” and “racism” for instance, and can you guess where this is going? Oh yes it did - the list of “possibly related posts” on Fire Fly’s feminist blog included links to posts written by white supremacists and anti-feminists (often in the same link) - fanfuckingtastic, eh? So your readers might well think that these posts are being recommended by you, instead of automatically, and what does that do to a poster’s credibility? …. » Problem No.2
Did I mention that these “possibly related post” links are not visible or able to be edited when you are writing your post? … » Problem No.3
Not only that, by having this feature enabled on your blog, it also means that posts from your blog are being included in the list generated by this “feature” on other people’s blogs, which for Fire Fly included those self-same white supremacists and anti-feminists, thus sending their readers to her blog. This is why she titled her post thusly: Warning! The new WordPress feature is utter trollbait. … » Problem No.4
I was very grateful for her post, because it enabled me to immediately disable this “feature” Continue reading ‘Wordpress.com enables another new “feature” to far from universal acclaim - PSA’
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