Stupid headline of the week

Noticed this beauty at The Australian:

Police get secret search powers and you won’t even know

Yeah, because if we knew they wouldn’t be secret you fucken mongs!

Honestly!

Are Bondi cigars attacking swimmers?

Down here in Melbourne we have long conceded that Sydney has way better beaches, however we used to hear about problems with raw sewage in the water which gave rise to the term “B0ndi cigar” which I’ll allow your imagination to work out the definition if you’ve never heard the term.

It’s bad enough that there’s crap in the water but now The Australian reports that it is coming back to bite.

According to The Oz there have been three “shart” attacks in as many weeks at Sydney beaches.

Not sure what a shart was so I consulted Urban Dictionary and found:

1.

shart

a small, unintended defecation that occurs when one relaxes the anal sphincter to fart (blend of “shit” and “fart”)

I sharted at the party last night andn went home pronto to change my clothes.

Or as another definition explained, “to gamble and to lose”.

Stay away from Sydney’s beaches!

Get well Bill Leak

It’s almost exactly a year since the sad death of The Australian’s political writer Matt Price, and now the newpaper has suffered another tragedy with brilliant cartoonist Bill Leak suffering serious head injuries in a fall from a balcony on the NSW central coast.

I hope Bill, who is also an author and has spoken out about his battle with depression, is able to totally pull through and continue to bless us with his beautiful illustrations that cut through political spin and bullshit better than his journalistic colleagues can usually manage.

Click here to see a gallery of Bill Leak’s work.

That old “Mandela was a terrorist” chestnut rears it’s ugly head again

A disappointingly simplistic opinion piece was published in The Australian today by author Alan Gold who is described as an “a delegate to the UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa” to give him some sort of credibility over a subject he seems to know sod all about.

Gold writes of his bemusement that the world would celebrate the 90th birthday of Nelson Mandela and how world leaders and the rich and famous all make a bee-line to be seen anywhere near him.

He writes, “what the congregation rocking in Hyde Park probably didn’t know was that long before most of them were born, Mandela was one of the leaders of the African National Congress, who created an armed wing called the Umkhonto we Sizwe or Spear of the Nation, which was dedicated to bombing civilian, industrial, military and government targets.

“South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has accused it of torture and executions without due process.”

Gold seems to have attended the Andrew Bolt school of opinion writing where you present so-called facts by hiding the whole truth. What he doesn’t say is that Mandela and his fellow ANC founders and lawyers such as Oliver Tambo worked as hard as they could to use the South African legal system to fight Apartheid, only for blacks to lose all their rights to due legal process.

It was only as a last resort, when all the hurdles meant that even to speak out meant jail, did the ANC embark on a campaign of civil disobedience, with option that would resort to terrorism against structural targets – and not specifically aimed at killing people.

Gold also fails to mention that the torture and executions associated with the ANC mostly happened many years after Mandela was incarcerated.

He also says this: “But before Mandela is accorded the same Mahatma status as Gandhi, who peacefully reclaimed India from the British and a man whom Mandela says was his guiding light and inspiration, it’s important to examine his record as a freedom fighter. What it shows is that like so many black Africans fighting the evil of apartheid or colonialism, he has a record of advocating and condoning violence.”

Again, Mandela only ever condoned violence as a last resort, and only after the white government denied the ANC of all possible political and legal avenues, people were jailed without trial and teenagers were being shot in the back for protesting.

Gold continues: “During his presidency of South Africa, he deliberately courted leaders of nations who abuse the human rights of their citizens.”

Shit, and no Australian or Westen government has ever done this? 

And more bullshit from Gold: “It’s by examining his often overlooked past that Mandela is revealed as anything but a saint. And it’s all too tempting to forgive him and his colleagues their excesses because they were fighting a brutal and oppressive white racist regime that treated blacks as subhuman.”

Yes, which is why when he did came to power the first thing Mandela did was create “the rainbow nation” and embraced the white South Africans, knowing that turning the tables of them would have resulted in South Africa becoming a bigger basket case than Zimbabwe is today.

Gold concludes, “It’s a pity that so few people looked beyond the iconic image when he emerged from incarceration and questioned Mandela’s actions and principles. If they had they done so, it’s likely that his 90th birthday flock would have been much smaller.”

What Gold fails to realise is the reason that Mandela is so revered is for his capacity for forgiveness, and his ability to look forward in the interests of peace rather than look back through vengeance. But then when you’re willing to look back and bend the truth this is probably a very difficult concept to understand.

Shit, Albrechtsen’s right you know

I don’t mind right-wing commentators when they aren’t foolishly condemning the good intentions of unknown people they categorise as “The Left” while carrying on like card-carrying Liberal Party apologists with missives that are designed to provide literary fellatio of the the Party’s far right faction in NSW.

One of the worst offenders, Janet Albretchsen, has finally wiped her chin and come out with a good piece  in The Australian (yes, I said good and will shower three times) about the knee-jerk reactions by governments to tragedies.

The catalyst of her piece was calls for tougher boating laws after the tragic Sydney Harbour boat crash that killed six young people – despite the fact several existing laws were already broken in the leadup to the disaster including the boat being taken without permission; over crowding and the obvious involvement of alcohol.

She says that although the government seems to want to look like it is doing something to respond to the grief about such events, “Our sympathy for those killed and injured should not prevent us from recognizing that stupidity appears to have played a part in Thursday’s accident. We cannot and should not regulate for the lowest common denominator.”

The same thing happened happened here in Melbourne after the horrific crash in the Burnley Tunnel in which several cars, and three drivers where crushed and incinerated after a truck plowed through them. The state government immediately introduced laws to ban overtaking in the tunnel and discussed lowering the speed limit to a ridiculous 60km/h, well before the coroner released any findings.

Since then a truck driver has been charged with three counts of culpable driving, which showed how misguided the new measures were.

In her column Albretschen actually praises former UK Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair who criticised the ever growing blame culture.

Interestingly a lot of the people who comment on her column started with stating their disbelief that they actually agreed with her. Keep it up Janet, you might start earning some respect.