An expat Australian’s perspective on Kevin Rudd’s meeting with Barack Obama.

The [cultural] cringe expresses itself in many ways – parochialism, bravado, humor – but at the root of it is an often unspoken embarrassment about our place in the world order. We act indifferent to other nations’ views of us and claim that we’re “the best country on earth” (yep, it’s not just Americans who say that). Yet deep down, we’re desperate for the affirmation of powerful friends.

Go read the whole thing.

Andrew Bolt thought that US President Barack Obama’s gift of 25 DVDs to UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown was a diplomatic faux pas because Brown is blind in one eye, but it was actually a balls-up because the DVDs are encoded with the wrong region code.

It occurred to us recently that the British PM might not even be able to enjoy the thoughtful and luxurious gift of 25 American DVDs given to him by President Obama… Now, just in case they weren’t upset enough already, the British press confirms our worst fears…

Newspaper of choice for the average British fascist, the Daily Mail, has been having conniptions in the wake of Gordon Brown’s visit to the US. Apparently the PM gave Barack Obama some snazzy gifts, among them a penholder carved from the timber of some old-timey anti-slave ship and a multi-volume biography of that old soak Winston Churchill. And what did Obama give Gordon in return? A set of 25 classic Hollywood moofies on DVD, including The Wizard of Oz and Singin’ in the Rain.

Pretty frickin’ cheap coming from the chief executive of the world’s largest economy. Not that Dubya was much better: when Brown visited him in 2007, Bush’s gift was a bomber jacket. And Brown seems about as likely to don a bomber jacket as he is to slip on a full-body condom.

What would you give the British PM if you were picking the White House’s diplomatic sweeteners? The pretzel that almost choked George W. Bush? The DNA scrapings from Monica’s frock? One of Abraham Lincoln’s old Fleshlights?

So, this morning I’m rushing from the train station through the city to work, already 10 minutes late, when a young well-dressed guy in his 20s looks at me while I look at him and stops me to ask me something. I thought I heard wrong, so I stopped and said, “Pardon?”

He repeats himself, “Would you like to work in the District Court?” and starts pulling a piece of paper out of his pocket. It was folded piece of paper that looked like a single A4 sheet.

Before I could utter, “What the fuck?” I hear the green pedestrian lights start beeping and I say “No, sorry, not interested.”

Not interested? NOT INTERESTED?!

OF COURSE I WAS INTERESTED! I wanted to know what the hell he was on about. I wanted to know why he was stopping random chicks on the streets asking if they want to work in the District Court. I wanted to know what the work consisted of. I wanted to know why the job wasn’t advertised on Seek.com.au. I wanted to know what was on that piece of paper. I wanted to know how much money he was offering and if it was good money, I wanted to know if I’d be tempted.

But stupid me ran across the street because I didn’t want to wait another 5 minutes for the green light, and cursed at myself all the way through Hyde Park, wishing I had stayed and probed him for more information.

So, I’m leaving it up to you, GrodsReaders. You’re all (supposedly) smart people.  Any ideas what this guy meant when he asked, “Would you like to work in the District Court?” And what was on the piece of paper?

Ant’s interesting post on American rightard Andrew Schlafly led me to investigate his hOmEsKooLing empire - an educational behemoth where conservative kidz can get, like, good learning without evil liberal bias. There’s stuff on this fiasco all over the web and it’s interesting reading, and the best bits are condensed into this article at RationalWiki. Amongst Schlafly’s brilliance we can include:

• ‘teaching’ hundreds of kids, despite not having any credentials as an educator
• inferring that his courses are accredited, when they are not – and that they would allow students to claim college credit, when they would not
• proclaiming larger classes to be better (liberal teachers want smaller classes to make their sinister mind-control agenda easier to achieve) and claiming to teach the largest US History class in the ENTIRE WORLD, which is teh bollocks
• setting stoopid questions like “What do you find inspiring about Christopher Columbus?” and “Describe what you like most about the Monroe administration” and “Abraham Lincoln was homeschooled. Do you see any characteristics in him that might have reflected [this]…?”
• giving full marks for stoopid answers to his stoopid questions, e.g. to the Monroe question above, “The prosperity” (!?!) and to the Lincoln question, “That he was open to ideas such as growing a beard.” (!?!?1!!)
• putting each kid’s questions, answers, grades and teacher’s comments on the Intertubes for all the Conservapedia world to see
• telling students that sentences are not compulsory in essays
• telling students other clear and meaningful stuff like “You will spend a certain amount of time preparing for the midterm exam. Call that amount of time “x”. How you allocate that time to different areas of 1500-1877 will make a difference on how well you do on the exam. If you spend 90% of x on the period between 1500 and 1700, then you will do poorly on 90% of the questions, because they will be from the period 1700 to 1877. You would have done far better to spend the 90% of x on the time period that will have 90% of the questions”.
• proclaiming that girls are academically weaker than boys (”Think girls can excel in math as well as boys can? Liberals teach they can, which is teaching a falsehood“) and setting different curriculum to accommodate this gender difference
• and, of course, teaching a curriculum jam-packed with a blind, unquestioning allegiance to the conservative mind (if such a thing exists)

Note to Dr (sic) John ‘TingTong’ Ray, get out those diplomas, polish up that CV - there may be another academic gig for you after all.

UPDATE

Current topics up for discussion amongst Eagle Rock University’s study groups include:

1. Judicial Attacks on our Culture

(Bad. See Roe v. Wade)

2. U.S. Sovereignty vs. Globalism

(’Right’ vs. ‘Wrong’) 

3. Immigration and Border Security

(Shoot to kill and drive away the wetbacks)

4. How Candidates are Elected: Elections, Political Parties & Lobbying

(God)

5. Family and Life Issues: Abortion, Cloning, Feminism & ERA

(Sin) 

6. Guns, Gambling & Government

(Problem?)

Anyone who believes Wikipedia has a liberal bias is an idiot. In 2006, one such idiot — lawyer, home-schooling enthusiast and conservative Christian Andrew Schlafly — decided the world needed an alternative to the pernicious, Leftist Wikipedia … a place where other idiots could gather to read about a variety of topics without the terrible inconvenience of truth getting in the way of their backward-arsed ideology.

And so Conservapedia was born.

Nothing — and I mean nothing — demonstrates the rank imbecility of this website more than its entry on Barack Hussein (!!1!) Obama. The whole article is worth reading, just to marvel at how desperate and deranged its authors are — but for your convenience, here are a few highlights:

Obama used his Muslim middle name when sworn in as President,^[7][8] and chose not to use the Bible for his real, private oath. Elected by claiming he’s a Christian, Obama has since avoided attending church on Christmas and Sundays.^[9]

Obama refers to America in the third person, as a foreigner would.

To announce his trip to Berlin in July 2008, Obama used posters which show a marked similarity to posters of Lenin.^[14]

Obama uses the Muslim Pakistani pronunciation for “Pakistan” rather than the common American one.^[36]

Obama has consistently shown himself to be an elitist who looks down on “ordinary” Americans.

Obama’s smears usually fall into two categories: race-baiting and distortions.

Seriously, go and have a look — there’s plenty more gold where the above nuggets came from. And if you have time while you’re there, do yourself a favour and check out the references for the entry’s most outlandish claims (the Lenin poster one is particularly laughable). They make Leon Bertrand QC’s spectacularly inept fumbling for evidence to support his claims seem like the work of a perfectly persuasive genius.

But the last word goes to Wikipedia itself, whose Conservapedia entry lays bare the kind of attitudes that led to its creation:

Conservapedia is an English-language wiki-based web encyclopedia project written from a young Earth creationist, Americentric, right-wing^[2] and Conservative Christian point of view.

[...]

Several articles on the site have had reputations for bias and inaccuracy.^[9][10][11] Conservapedia has also been seen as part of a trend of conservative and Christian-themed Web sites imitating the format of mainstream sites to provide a right-wing antidote or Christian alternative.^[3][12]

Fair dinkum — even if I’d been stupid enough to hitch my wagon to the ideology of the Right all those years ago, I would still be mortally embarrassed by the abortion (pun intended) that is Conservapedia. I wonder how many “conservatives” are.

Up to two million people gathered in Washington DC to watch President Obama’s inauguration, and with that many people around it’s only natural that freaks and nutters of all denominations flocked to the crowd to harass and preach. A friend of a friend on Facebook posted this photo that she took on inauguration day.

A typically even-handed and fair-minded message from compassionate and tolerant Christians

Porno freaks, homos and Mormons I understand — of course they’re going to hell. But sports nuts?

It’s simple, really. When a nation lowers itself to the moral level of teh terrorists in an effort to defeat teh terrorists, teh terrorists win.

The official in charge of the military commission process at Guantanamo Bay has become the first senior Bush Administration figure to publicly admit that a detainee was tortured.

And when barely-credible leaders of a barely-credible administration tell such brazen porkies, teh terrorists win a little bit more.

“The United States does not torture. It’s against our laws, and it’s against our values,” [President George] Bush asserted on September 6, 2006…

In an interview last week with the Weekly Standard, [Vice President Dick] Cheney said: “I think on the left wing of the Democratic Party, there are some people who believe that we really tortured.”

What is it with teh Left and their freedom-hating ways?

Suburban Marxist and others, in comments, rightly ask this question:

When will Grodscorp post a statement condemning the Israeli atrocities currently underway in Gaza?

And while I can’t speak for Scott, John, Ant and others, the reason I haven’t posted or commented about it is this: I’ve just run out of things to say.

For a journalist attuned to world politics to say such a thing sounds lazy and evasive; and for a blogger to toy with irrelevant bottom-feeders like MK and Dr TingTong while staying silent on Israel and Palestine seems superficial to the point of silliness. But after years of writing, ranting and fuming about the limitless hatred and senseless murder that Israelis and Palestinians visit upon each other, it feels that every time I speak up or spill ink on the matter, I’m going over ground that I and a thousand people smarter than me have covered countless times before. So now I prefer to watch, wait and hope, rather than to write, rant and revile.

Don’t mistake my silence for indifference though. I’m a lifelong follower of this crisis, born shortly before the Yom Kippur War and raised in a house where every war and wave of aggression was discussed around the dinner table or the TV. I chose to study it at university (my tutor was one of those Israel-criticising Jews that right-wing bloggers love to portray as race-traitors). I visited Israel in 1998, where I found the people wonderful but the atmosphere so tense and uncomfortable that I cut a six-week visit down to four and left despairing that a solution was a generation away.

And that, by and large, has been my position since: one of despair. I despair for that part of the world and particularly its children, whose innocence is all too brief before they are infected by the pathological contempt Israelis and Palestinians feel for each other and for peace itself. I despair for the Israeli civilians who live each day in fear of Hamas rockets dropping on their homes and schools; and I despair for those killed and maimed by ever-disproportionate IDF retaliation. I despair for the leaders – Sadat, Rabin, Peres, Clinton and others - who worked so hard to forge a brittle peace; and I despair for those who frittered it away with their stubbornness and stupidity. And I despair for the world, condemned as it is by the shockwaves that radiate from this region: the malevolent shadow of al Qaeda, the abhorrent anti-Semitism rising in the Middle East and the threat of nuclear war on Iran.

Every new wave of conflict brings little that is new, it is just the same play in the same theatre with a different cast. Writers and bloggers finger-point and fulminate but new insights and attitudes are virtually absent. For some it’s just a further opportunity to vent the frothing bile of racism they ordinarily release in just a trickle. Some scour the media and the blogosphere, cherry-picking to support their ideological position or statements they can flag as support for terrorism or war crimes. The conspiracy theories and mental gymnastics that some will use to explain or justify dispossession, violence or murder is bewildering … they will condemn Hamas for firing rockets and mortars at civilians – and in the same breath explain away the bombing of a school as a legitimate military tactic.  There is no better example of this than the treatment of Rachel Corrie after she was crushed to death by an IDF bulldozer in 2003; nothing on the Internet has upset or disgusted me more than the campaign of vilification since visited upon her.

So, while others at Grods will see it differently, that is my position. I choose to say little, feeling a little guilty for doing so – but I am watching closely nonetheless.

Breaking news… according to the entirely credible and not at all tit-fixated UK Sun, ’Wacko Jacko’ is now one of them evil Jihadists:

Jackson, who was raised a Jehovah’s Witness, has become a Muslim and changed his name to Mikaeel, according to UK reports. The singer wore traditional Islamic dress as he pledged his allegiance to the Koran at a friend’s home in Los Angeles, The Sun reports. Jackson… reportedly decided to convert after discussing religion with a music producer and songwriter on his new album – both of whom were converts to Islam.

Let’s all get in touch with Karl Marx in the spirit world and ask him to predict the tempered and well-reasoned responses that’ll eminate from the AWH ‘famous five’ (Touchstone, KG, Eugene, TingTong and MK the dog):

“Well he’s already a paedo, the two go together hand in hand… what about Mohammed and…”

“Radical Islam now has three allies in the West: The Left, political correctness and Blame it on the Boogie…”

“I onced wrote several academic journal articles about the pathology of black men who opt for plastic surgery. Why, here’s a link. And I’ve also got a nudie pic of Michael Jackson’s mother that I, erm, ‘found’…”

“This is not surprising. Jackson’s brother is named Tito, after the socialist dictator of Yugoslavia – conclusive proof that he is a leftist and insane…”

Miranda called it right – the minute bong-zombie Barack Obama was elected the war on drugs went up in smoke:

New South Wales farmers are being encouraged to start growing industrial hemp.

The Government recently passed legislation allowing the plant to be grown for use in products ranging from bio-fuel to dog food…

Mr Macdonald says hemp growth could become a lucrative industry for NSW.

“Already we’ve had over 200 farmers express interest in growing hemp across the state,” he said.

“It could become quite a significant crop in a very short period of time, particularly as various companies utilise the products of it for that broad range of products that can be created using industrial hemp as a base.”

The use of hemp in dog food might put smiles on the faces of pensioners, but at what cost? Imagine, with Miranda, what rural New South Wales will soon look like.

In honour of the many back-country, Francophone and/or anthropomorphic conservatives out there in blogland, here’s a cajun-fried takedown of Hussein Obama X. You’ll remember that he made history this week as the man who “racist black voters” (sic) propelled into le Bureau Ovale. Sometimes, even sizzling, right-of-centre zydeco can’t hold back the change that has to come. But if you can’t beat them, you might as well dance, non? Take it away, mes amis.

As for me, I’ll be spending the weekend toasting democracy with some more (possibly French) bubbly. Formidable!

A friend of mine (and of Jason’s, as it happens) is, like, rooly, rooly smart. From humble beginnings in Bris Vegas she went on to study at Harvard University before becoming a journalist for Newsweek magazine. For the past twelve months she’s been travelling the length and breadth of the USA, initially tracking the Republican primaries, and subsequently assigned to follow the McCain campaign. After a long, hard year of hotels, planes, rallies and fleeting glimpses of her fiance, her work (as one member of an eight-reporter team) is finally available to read.

This is… a seven-part in-depth look behind the scenes of the campaign, consisting of exclusive behind-the-scenes reporting from the McCain and Obama camps assembled by a special team of reporters who were granted year-long access on the condition that none of their findings appear until after Election Day.

I highly recommend that you pour a glass of single malt, put your feet up, and enjoy an article so long that Newsweek calls it “The Book”.

In a major boost to Barack Obama’s quest for the White House, a global survey has revealed that Australians will overwhelmingly vote Democrat at the November 4 presidential election. 76% of Aussie respondents indicated support for Senator Obama, with only 10% in the camp of Republican candidate, John McCain. (It is a mystery for whom the other 14% will vote. David Koch perhaps?) The problem is, of course, that Australians won’t be voting for the United States Prez in a couple of weeks because we’re, you know, Australian. So why is it that the same survey reckons 85% of Australians are paying attention to another country’s election campaign five months out (at the time of the survey), when 85% of Australians barely think about their own country’s elections until polling day?

Read the rest of this entry »

Troubling news.

The quality of New Zealand men’s sperm has halved in two decades – the most dramatic drop of any western country.

New research presented to a gathering of international fertility researchers in Brisbane today was told that the sperm volume carried by the average New Zealand man decreased from about 110 million to 50 million per millilitre between 1987 and 2007.

Baby batter experts are at a loss to explain the reduced fertility of Kiwi fellas.

Dr Peek said there were two broad theories on sperm quality decline, one being that semen was affected by environmental toxins, diet and modern changes in lifestyle.

“The other is that it is a consequence of what happened when the guy was a baby in the womb, and what his mother was exposed to, but it’s still unclear,” he said.

Although, Doc Peek couldn’t help having a little dig at New Zealand.

“New Zealand is unlikely to have a different situation unless,” he joked, “you consider all the fertile New Zealand men may be heading over here”.

And who can blame him? Our boys can swim.

This contrasts with Australia and the United States, where no decline has been seen.

Have you got any other theories about the cause of this terrible tragedy?