total control

Tomorrow the Federal and State governments will discuss anti-terrorism laws.

As well as detention of suspects without trial, Mr Howard has asked the states and territories to support a regime of control orders that could see suspects who have never been charged being electronically tagged for periods of 12 months; wider search and seizure powers for ASIO and police; and a new crime of incitement for advocating or supporting terrorist ideology.
SMH, Sept 24 2005, Marian Wilkinson and David Marr

This looks like the state is seeking to totally control citizens' behaviour, if you don't conform you will be removed from the public sphere. If your actions and words, even your support, is conceived of by the state as being a danger to the state you run the risk of first being detained with no reason given for up to 14 days ie exiled internally, then you might be tagged and, by implication tracked, for up to 12 months.

These proposed laws strike me as being totally at odds with healthy public life. How can a person voice thoughts, discuss, question, act, and learn in public if their openness might lead to incarceration? As Matt says, the only way to combat this is for many, many people to voice thoughts, and to act.

see:
I'll back PM's terrorism laws, says Iemma www.smh.com.au, Sept 24 2005, Marian Wilkinson and David Marr
Beazley spells out anti-terror priorities www.abc.net.au, Sept 26 2005

undercover police

At Sydney Uni this morning there was a message chalked onto the path which runs between the library and the quad, it went something like this:

are you aware that undercover police are targeting activists on campus, 3 students have been arrested in the last 2 weeks

It's rather sinister, the use of the adjective undercover rather than plain clothes suggests police infiltrating student groups. And what kind of police, federal or state? And what were the students arrested for? Normal style crime - drug selling, theft, rape, murder. Or the more difficult to pin down terrorist threat type stuff.

The message left me mildly paranoid. Who would write something so indefinate, and why?

scriptwriting made easy!

Here's a movie plot I just whipped up:

boom boom
an original screenplay concept
by carmichael
Political thriller: An antisocial loner teams up with the chief of police to discover America. In the process they accidentally kill a super intelligent chimpanzee. By the end of the movie they burn 12 double agents and end up winning the admiration of their co-workers, living happily ever after.
Think Clerks meets kaos.

You too can put together an "original screenplay concept" in about 3 minutes, or less, using Plot-o-matic™.

poems

a mobile phone
works well to
tell a story short

my friend sent
this a poem
about a tank

cuckoo cuckoo

Walking through Sydney University this morning we heard a channel billed cuckoo, and a koel for the first time this spring.

how to . . .

. . . Help a Friend Who Gets Arrested in the Middle of the Night in the US. The basic premise of these instructions is that your Friend Who Gets Arrested is able to contact you. Once they've made contact, you ask them where they're being held, tell them not to talk to anyone until you get them a lawyer, then you tell the police not to talk to them (!), and then you get off the phone and try to find a lawyer. One of the top tips is:

Always keep about $500-$1000 available without having to go to the bank. Most minor crimes and traffic violations can be bailed out from the stationhouse through the use of a desk appearance ticket or a desk sergent's bail.

I think I'd only be keeping that kind of cash available if I was getting regular phone calls from friends who'd got themselves arrested. And if that was happening I'd be having a long hard talk with my friends about their life choices. But I've got to remember that I'm a white and female - I'm sitting happily in the least likely to get arrested demographic grouping. Maybe if I was black and male I'd be keeping the cash around the house after all.

outrage! terror! snub!

This is funny - FASHIONABLE SYDNEY SET OUTRAGED AT AL QAEDA TERROR THREAT SNUB.

And the outrage is not limited to "fashionable Sydney". I personally felt mildly slighted. All I can say is thank goodness Al Qaeda didn't name Wellington, NZ as a target.

(thankyou to Sandie for the link!)

http://65.39.85.13/google/

This is amazing http://65.39.85.13/google/. It's an application which gives you a brief demographic report of an area when you click on a point on a map. Two companies SRC and analyGIS have combined Google Maps with data from the US 2000 Census.

The application gives data for 1 mile, 3 mile and 5 mile radii from the point which you click. It's very, very interesting.

able was I ere I saw elba

We saw Palindromes the other night. Todd Solondz has something to offend everyone in this film, but at the same time it's wonderfully engaging. As Tim pointed out, somehow his films make you have a huge emotional response at the same time as making you think. Watching Palindromes I was constantly thinking "why am I reacting like this? what don't I like about this? what is the structure doing? do I agree or disagree with this position/philosophy/world view?" One of the groovy things about the film was that half way through it went into a Robert Mitcham "Night of the Hunter" thing - very strange. (And one of the Avivas reminded me of a book I read last year that I can't remember the name or the author of. Yes I know very helpful. I'll have to go to the library and pull the book out, surname beginning with L maybe. Ah yes J.T. Leroy's The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things.)

In the end I was just really happy that I don't have any children.

On another note - both Adam and Lily have said that they preferred the Gene Wilder version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Whereas Matthew really enjoyed it. I'm re-reading the book and may see the film. If I do, I'll report back.

Bob Roberts and New Orleans

Last night we watched Bob Roberts on dvd. It's a depressing film to watch now. The US has the second Bush as President and is still engaged in Iraq. Self-interest is still, somehow, good. Caring about other people as well as yourself is, somehow, a form of weakness. We are shown the dishonesty (Bob's foot tapping at the end of the film) and yet we live with it, as Gore Vidal explains - we're frogs being brought slowly to the boil. How do we get out of this position?

This morning I read this: Notes from Inside New Orleans. The writer describes the disorganisation within a refugee camp, the lack of information about where transport out was heading, the lack of any system to record who was in the camp, and where they had been sent on to. It's nightmarish. I imagine people just getting lost. Never getting back to New Orleans, not having the means, or the identification necessary.

MM's MMM

Over at flickr.com I came across a photoset mysteriously entitled MMM. The photos are of art work RE Huxley has done in an old cook book - the Modern Meal Maker - now called Modern Mixed Media. The art work is super cool, but, of course, because the work is done in a cook book I got very curious and thought what sort of recipes were in this book. So I did a search on the author Martha Meade and came across this: 101 cookbooks - Bacon Popovers in which a person called Heidi cooks Bacon Popovers out of MM's MMM. It's pretty damn good. And her photograph of the popovers looks like it's been styled and planned and previewed on digital before shooting on film for at least 3 weeks, but apparently was shot in 30 seconds. Anyway, it's interesting, it's a good indication of what's in the Modern Meal Maker which was put out by "General Mills to promote the use of their Sperry brand of Drifted Snow 'Home Perfected' Flour, . . ." very, very cool.