TeamValuesAustralia welcomes you to a ¹Gallimaufry, (a word we discovered on Steven Poole’s Unspeak website), a veritable salmagundi, bouillon, burgoo, goulash, medley, miscellany, mulligan, mélange, pasticcio, potpourri, ragout, assortment, derangement, hotchpotch, mishmash, mixture, pastiche and patchwork.

Focus, please…
TeamValuesAustralia is conducting focus group research for TeamHoward to determine which of these two concepts will be more effective:

Do you prefer this one:

^{Team Howard speaks with one voice}
or this one:

^{Team Howard is bursting with energy and ideas for the future}

Journalism in America
Why didn’t they ask the right questions when it mattered?
Professor Charles Lewis, on truth being the first casualty of war and the ’9/11 moment’ in American journalism.

“The amount of calcium in spine is directly proportionate in journalists to the polls of the President. When he gets down to 20%, 28%, 32%, they’re much more aggressive than when he is at 70%.”

See more at theRealNews. In fact, see lots more real news without any agenda except the mission to bring the world real news – Global warming with David Suzuki and George Monbiot, Aijaz Ahmad on Bush planning an attack on Iran, World’s fastest-growing refugee crisis in Iraq, etc. etc.

Disney on Vanessa Hudgens nude

^{Warning – Hoax alert…}

We bring this one up because Unconfirmed Sources tell us that the existence of nude pictures of Vanessa Hudgens – whom we’d never heard of before but who is in Australia at the moment(?) – is a very big deal in America. Everyone is talking about it (apparently) including HBO‘s RealTime with Bill Maher.

And we bring it up because of how Disney explains why it is moving from its seeming-century-old policy of insisting that women don’t have breasts, and babies are brought by storks, and the world is always lovely and full of cuddly furry animals, to one where girls are sexual beings. But what is their rationale? It almost seems that it’s because “that’s where the money is”. In the world of wall to wall autopsy television and Californication, sweet stories with happy endings seem a tad anachronistic. Disney has just discovered that not only are young people sexual but that they like sex, want sex and have sex – the sex that Disney has denied existed for so many decades. What is even more startling, though, is that Disney has simply shrugged off its now aging constituency, the religious centre-right to extreme right, the prudes and the righteous and the scared and just gone straight for the money. We like their justification, though – “healthy sexuality with an anti-war message”

Rather than panic over the recent release of apparently authentic nude pictures of 18-year-old High School Musical star Vanessa Hudgens, Walt Disney Studios today announced that it would be going ahead with plans for a cable only release of its remake of the controversial antiwar musical, “Hair“. “Hair” will star Hudgens and the entire cast of High School Musical and reportedly will include the controversial nude scene that was featured on Broadway during its run in the late 60s and early 70s.

“This just seemed to be an opportune moment for Disney studios to broaden its markets a little, and kind of distance ourselves a bit from some “family values” political affiliations which have become a little creatively stifling,” stated Disney CEO Robert Eiger.

“Healthy sexuality, with an antiwar message seems to be more of what the young American public is interested in. We at Disney applaud Ms. Hudgens for her progressive views and her recent decision, as was said during the period, to ‘let it all hang out’.”

“The Disney brand will be the same,” assured Eiger, “we will just be attempting to address a more mainstream set of family values with the High School Musical cast’s interpretation of “Hair”.

Is this a watershed – the intentional and outspoken kicking of the political, religious right in the teeth? Is the religious right shrinking so significantly? Is the neo-con experiment really over? Be still my heart….
^{End hoax alert…}

Guantánamo and the illegal underpants
Wonder if you have caught up with this. It would be a scream if it weren’t for the screaming.

Even though David Hicks is home, Guantánamo is still there and there are still people illegally and wrongfully detained there. Still being denied proper representation. Still having their rights denied. Still being tortured and going mad. Still with TeamHoward‘s tacit approval.

Notice in this story that it is clear that the US seems to have had to buy its detainees. Can’t it get enough real terrorists? Does it really have to make them up by paying Afghani and Pakistani gangsters to kidnap people and make up stories about them so that it looks as if the US is succeeding in the GWOT?

The Independent has this:

The case of the Guantanamo lawyer, the detainees and the illegal pairs of pants

For more than five years lawyers representing terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay have been pressing the American government to disclose the evidence against their clients.

Well now they have. And it doesn’t make pleasant reading.

Commanders at the US naval base in Cuba have written to lawyers for two of the inmates accusing their clients of wearing contraband underpants and Speedo swimming trunks which they claim have been illegally smuggled into the high-security compound.

In a bizarre development that would be laughable if it did not have such serious implications, the US prison‘s staff judge advocate has now launched an official inquiry to discover who is behind the smuggling operation. The judge has named the prisoners’ lawyers as the two prime suspects.

These allegations are the latest in a series of increasingly desperate attempts by the Guantanamo authorities to undermine the relationship between human rights lawyers and their clients. Muslim prisoners have also been told that their legal representatives are practising Jews or confirmed homosexuals.

Interestingly, the later Howard pushes out the election to give himself time to claw back support and build the illusion of TeamHoward, the closer he gets to David Hicks being released from prison and being able to speak about his experiences. Daivd Hicks will soon be news again, just when Howard won’t want him to be.

Incidentally, the Kevin Andrews appeal against the quashing of his order to revoke Haneef‘s visa could well be heard during the election campaign too. Fun times.

And an update on calls for Andrews’ resignation: Today 718 people have sent emails demanding he resign. If you’d like to and haven’t already, you can do it through this site.

Kevin Andrews on the “Terrifying” Legislation

John Howard on the Aboriginal Invasion

And in the interests of balance, here is an exchange we like from a Clarke/Dawe interview:

Dawe: You like to travel, don’t you.
Rudd: I love travel, yes.
Dawe: Broadens the mind, of course, doesn’t it?
Rudd: It does, yeah, but I enjoy it anyway.

The Smart Set
We have discovered for your delectation yet another excellent website for quality minds. It’s The SmartSet.

It was a title for sophisticates from early last century which has recently been resurrected. Here’s what they say about themselves:

The Smart Set: “The Magazine of Cleverness…The Aristocrat Among Magazines…The Only Magazine with an European Air,” edited from 1914 to 1923 by George Jean Nathan and H.L. Mencken. It was a fine magazine, publishing the early work of such talents as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, and Theodore Dreiser. Even though crotchety old Mencken in later years would call the magazine “the most dreadful piece of printing in New York.”

Drama and Melodrama
Contributors include people of the calibre of Alain de Botton.

The writing is excellent and the range of topics fascinating. Such as the Emily’s World story by Emily Maloney “In which our heroine [in Brazil] watches riot police, has a head massage, and hooks up. Sort of.”

Morgan Meis, one of the editors of one of the finest blogs, 3QuarksDaily, discusses Damien Hirst‘s $100,000,000 diamond-encrusted skull, For the Love of God.

Meis links Hirst‘s place in contemporary art, his representations of death, with the changes virtually forced – or perhaps the possibilities opened up – by Warhol in his investigation of the banality and meaninglessness of life and death. Warhol’s own image Green Car Crash sold recently for US$70M.

Hirst’s skull is a kind of Memento Mori. Such things are an ancient tradition.

This image, Holbein‘s The Ambassadors, is full of the trappings of life, the status and prestige which belongings both bring and reflect. But at the bottom, distorted, hidden except if viewed from a specific angle, like walking up a staircase towards the painting,

is the skull which reminds the viewer of the transitory nature of life and possessions, of the inevitable dust which is to come, of the vanity of even the proud, strutting and self-satisfied Ambassadors.

Leave Maddi Alone!
Oh dear! TeamJohn is in it again. So is Kev0Sev. And rightly so. Maddi’s mum is mad!

“Without knowing us, how dare they make those comments,” Mrs Gabriel said. “I would suggest both of them contact my family before they make any more defamatory remarks about us. We as a family deserve an apology from both of them.
[....]
“I believe the Prime Minister is getting very doddery. He does not know exactly what 13- and 14-year-old girls are like. I used to vote for him.”

Knee-jerks from both TeamHoward and Howard-With-Hair. Here is what they said about this now-13-year-old girl being the face of the something fashion something whatever Queensland (where else) etc. etc.

Howard: “Catapulting girls as young as 12 into something like that is quite outrageous and I am totally opposed to it.”

Rudd: “I have real concerns about littlies that young going out there doing that sort of thing.”

Catapulting? What the fuck? And, John, “something like what” exactly? What are you imagining?

Kev, oh prissy, prudish, pompous Kev0, “that sort of what thing”? Where is your mind taking you?

Do either of you have any idea what you were commenting on? At all? Why don’t you go and see a Disney movie?

Children do commercials and model clothes from babyhood. So what? They put the catalogues in your letterbox every day. Do you complain to the child agencies? Take the children into foster care? Should we get the pedophile police out and ban it?

Oil? Well Oil be Damned! What a Surprise!
On Saturday the 8th at the APEC demo, ex-US Marine Matt Howard said,

“George Bush, you have violated international law and are a war criminal by all Nuremberg legal standards.”

He also said that we know there would be no boots on the ground in Iraq if there was no oil under the ground in Iraq.

Fucking commie! Fucking liberal stooge. Fucking Democrat! Fucking America-hater! Fucking traitor!

Oh, hang on. What’s that?

Iraq war was about oil: Greenspan

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, in his new book, says the US went to war in Iraq motivated largely by oil.

Greenspan said: “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”

How must Brendan Nelson be feeling now!

[17-09-07: We have previously mentioned Murdoch's swinging the News Corporation's global support behind the Iraq invasion (“the greatest thing to come of [invading Iraq]…would be $US20 a barrel for oil”).

We wish to note for the record that oil has hit $80 a barrel.

So we just wonder…how does he think it’s going so far?]

 

That’s Taken for Granted

Here is a book that throws light on the fact that the greatest enemies of our freedoms and rights are…ourselves and our complacency.
The book is Towards the Light – The Story of the Struggles For Liberty & Rights That Made the Modern West by AC Grayling, published by Bloomsbury (who also publish J.K. Rowling‘s Harry Potter books, as well as Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Will Davis, Germaine Greer, Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Atwood, Daniel Barenboim, Malcolm Knox and Will Self amongst hundreds of others).

The publishers say: “The rights we enjoy in the West today, from the basic right to vote in elections to freedom of conscience, were won in a series of hard-fought struggles over five hundred years. This is the human story A. C. Grayling sets out to tell in his inspirational history of ideas in action, Towards the Light.

The triumphs and sacrifices of these hard-won victories should make us value these precious rights even more highly, especially in an age when, as Grayling shows, democratic governments under pressure sometimes find it necessary to restrict rights in the name of freedom.”

Here is an excerpt from the Introduction:

Today’s leaders have grown up taking those freedoms and rights for granted, and are demonstrably not much interested in them any more; they find them an inconvenience because protecting them requires lengthier and costlier measures than they care to sanction. Alas, most of the general population either seem to share that indifference, or are merely ignorant of what is in process of being lost. The cliche — no less true for being one — has it that we only properly value things when they have gone: perhaps the day will come when both leaders and led wake to the carelessness with which they allowed a precious inheritance to slip from their grasp.
[....]
The point I urge in this book is that all the efforts towards securing the rights and freedoms we enjoy today (still enjoy, almost, although they are beginning to fray and diminish) cost blood, and took centuries. It dishonours those who fought for them to forget that fact now, and it does us no credit to be careless of what was thus won. My hope is that understanding what it cost—seeing our last five centuries as a continuously unfolding series of struggles to make ourselves free, to make us lords of ourselves—will summon resolve not to allow the erosion of our liberties in the spurious name of security, for as Benjamin Franklin said, ‘he who would put security before liberty deserves neither’.

We haven’t read the book (yet) but the recent APEC exercise, as well as the Haneef debacle, for example, show starkly how urgently relevant these sentiments are.

So let’s say it again:

He who would put security before liberty deserves neither
- and, by the way, ends up with neither.

 

 

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