Why wait for the planes to come....
Discovery of the day is a thorough, if somewhat messily laid out, article on the nightmare of DNA databases and false positives that should be required reading. And finally a very good news story from San Francisco - according to Reuters, SF city legislators said Tuesday that Elephants must receive hundreds of times more space to live at San Francisco's zoo, or not be kept there, in new laws that could effectively bar imprisoning these wondrous animals (at least in SF) for good. At present the zoo allocates about 1/64 of an acre to animals that have ranges of hundreds of kilometers in the wild. One hopes this will set a precedent, for all sentient beings in cages, and not before time.
Peter Garrett reckons "Oh man, I'm not going to change the language, just because I got a suit and tie on" - in fact he wants to see "how we can make this joint [Parliament] really swing a little bit". We'll hold you to that Peter - (even if "it aches like tetanus, it reeks of politics") these words will be thrown back at you should the suit and tie stifle the swing. You can't perform a song like "Hercules" and then expect the public to comfortably watch the integrity invested in such songs be flushed down the Canberran sewers. It's a pity Sen. Vanstone doesn't know the meaning of "integrity" or "compassion" though - trying to fix institutionalised indigenous health problems with petrol pumps and big sticks is utterly offensive. Man of Shite seems to enjoy combining lies and self-aggrandisement as a hobby, while denying contol of the Senate amounts to "some macho demonstration that we have the numbers and boy are you going to cop our radical agenda", one can only look to his record to see that mostly, he means the opposite of what he says to the public. But as the The Hon. Mr. Garrett says: "It seems to me that what we're saying/ Nobody really wants to talk about it/ .../ Why wait for the planes to come/ When everybody's got us on the run"...
And a footnote to history that demonstrates exactly why and how the conservative extremists that run this country are hell-bent on shredding any rights or sense of social responsibility: a High Court ruling in September has "effectively ruled out strikes on the basis of political, social and environmental causes" - thus removing fundamental labour rights that were part of the foundation of modern Australia, though the media has sidelined this tyrannical action in a mountain of political verbiage that completely hides that fact. But it's not a "radical agenda" that we are now subjected to, is it John? Not to mention the wilfull destruction of indigenous culture and values, for instance today's paternal declaration on "the desirability of embracing concepts of private land ownership as an advance on the concept of everything being owned by the community". Effectively, this advocates the destruction over 60,000 years of black history with the extreme conservative notion that "private land ownership" is somehow an "advance" on community of interest.
But there were children in the water, honest!
Item posted by AutoEditor at 2:46 pm ::
