It’s frightening to consider what the US has been capable of in the name of “national security.” What’s even more scary is what an Australian government once considered acquiescing to in the name of the Australia-US alliance:

Defence files have revealed the United States military was planning to test deadly nerve gas on Australian troops in a far north Queensland rainforest in the 1960s.

Australian Defence Department files obtained by Channel Nine show the US was planning to test Sarin and VX nerve gas on up to 200 Australian combat troops by aerial bombing areas around Lockhart River.

The plan never went ahead, but American survey teams inspected the proposed testing site.

The prime minister at the time, Harold Holt, vetoed the plan.

His former staffer, Peter Bailey, says the Australian government was concerned that its Cold War alliance with the US would be damaged if it did not acquiesce. (ABC News Online)

Sadistic fuckers.

Less than a decade earlier, Australian and British troops and Indigenous Australians had been the victims of nuclear testing at Maralinga, South Australia. British troops were ordered to crawl through radioactive fallout in order to get as much contamination on their clothing as possible. In order to facilitate the tests, the Tjatjara people of the area were removed from their traditional lands to a reserve at Yalata; nonetheless, thousands of Aborigines died of radiation exposure. In 1956, the arsehole that required licking at the expense of public safety belonged to the British government, with which the Australian government collaborated to ensure that the nefarious effects of the Maralinga tests (and those at the Monte Bello Islands off the coast of Western Australia in 1952) remained under a black mist of secrecy. Australia’s chief apologist for the testing, physicist Sir Ernest Titterton, remarked that “if Aboriginal people objected to the tests they could vote the government out,” their lack of citizenship status and ineligibility to vote notwithstanding.

The week in fundie . . .

1. The mind-virus that is creationism has infected British schools, 40 of which are teaching in science classes that evolution is a “myth” and creationism a “fact,” according to a survey of Islamic, Jewish and Christian Evangelical schools. 1000 of the students being lied to about the scientific status of creationism attend schools wholly funded by the British taxpayer. (Ekklesia)
2. Demonstrating its firm commitment to religious freedom, the Indonesian government has told Ahmadi Muslims in that country to convert to mainstream Islam or face 5 years in jail. (Online News)
3. In Cheshire, UK, two schoolboys were given detention after refusing to pray to Allah during an RE lesson. (Telegraph)
4. In Herefordshire, a student will have to take four separate buses to travel to school after the local council banned non-Catholic students from using the subsidised bus service it provides to St Mary’s school. (Telegraph)
5. A 23-year-old woman in Mexico strangled to death a 16-year-old mother, and also killed her 3-month-old baby, because she thought the mother was practicing witchcraft against her. (PR-Inside)
6. A professor of Christian theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary blames the phenomenon of spousal abuse on women who refuse to submit to their husbands’ “God-given authority.” Those mouthy bitches, Bruce Ware maintains, “desire to have their own way instead of submitting to their husbands because of sin.” (via Fundies Say the Darndest Things)
7. Haredi Jews in Jerusalem vandalised and razed shops selling MP4 devices, which have been banned by the Orthodox Righteous Court of Law because they are apparently “the devil’s way to try and gain entrance to our protected homes and yeshivas, disguised as something you can listen to Torah lessons through.” (via Fundies Say the Darndest Things)
8. In Romania, where abortion is outlawed, an 11-year old girl who was raped by her uncle will be allowed to abort her foetus, despite threats by 20 Orthodox Christian groups to press charges if the abortion goes ahead. (via Fundies Say the Darndest Things)
   

There seem to be a thousand and one uses for The Prodigy’s “Smack My Bitch Up,” which is hardly surprising, given that it was one of the best dance tunes of the 1990s, from one of the best dance albums of the 1990s.

Prodigy Vs. Enya

Prodigy Vs. Kylie Minogue

More “Smack My Bitch Up” mash-ups over the fold . . .

Prodigy Vs. Dirty Old Anne

Prodigy Vs. Lady Sovereign

What the NSW Government is doing to liberal democracy in the name of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Mutaween is a generic term for religious police in Islamic countries. They’re the guys (and of course they tend to be guys) who go around arresting, beating, flogging and even killing ordinary citizens who flout religious laws. In countries like Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, women tend to find themselves the victims of the sadistic dogma-enforcers (see this Amnesty report from 2000), who on one occasion prevented schoolgirls from leaving a blazing building “because they were not wearing correct Islamic dress.” (15 of the schoolgirls subsequently died, having been beaten back into the blaze by the police.) We in the modern, enlightened West like to pride ourselves on our difference from sickeningly backward societies like the theocracies of the Islamic world. We value religious freedom, and are not so cognitively immature that we require the repressive apparatus of the state to artificially prop up religious faith and deliver us from reality. Certainly nothing could be more alien to the liberal democratic values we cherish than the idea of religious police, right?

Wrong. As you are doubtless already aware, the NSW Government has deemed it necessary to outsource the Sydney constabulary (as well as emergency services) as rent-a-cops for the Spanish Inquisition, and they have already proceeded to heavy potential critics:

Lapsed Catholic Luke Roberts is a homosexual activist and performer who goes by the stage name Pope Alice, a character best described as a celestial being of indeterminate gender.　Along with Pope Benedict, Pope Alice will also be in Sydney during World Youth Day, hosting a “kiss-in” along Oxford Street in Darlinghurst.

“I want to see Pope Alice express herself as a focal point for anybody - gays, lesbians, transgender, queers, bisexuals, heterosexuals, anyone who has an open mind and wants to say, ‘We’ve had enough of the medieval religions that keep the world backwards,’” Mr Roberts said.

The performer has made no secret of the proposed kiss-in.

“You’re having your thing and we are having ours,” he said. “This is one of the gay capitals of the world.”

Yesterday, it appeared the NSW Police got wind of the plans. Mr Roberts received a call in Brisbane from a detective who identified himself as being from the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice World Youth Day Investigation Squad. He was then asked a series of questions. (ABC News Online)

Despite firm denials by the Minister for World Youth Day, the Sydney Morning Herald has revealed that police have informed protesters that “they need to have placards, banners and T-shirts pre-approved or risk losing their protest “rights” - even those groups representing victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests.”

And there may be, as Bruce and jim the lesser (a commenter at Matt’s Notepad) suggest, another angle to this. The State Government regulations also prohibit the distribution of “religious items” without the approval of the World Youth Day Co-ordination Authority: “for example, rosary beads, candles, candle holders, prayer tokens and prayer cards.” Jim suggests that

The regulations have little to do with protesters; rather they are designed to protect the “official merchandises” but more importantly, to prevent church groups, who are not conservative enough for the Sydney Cardinal and the Opus Dei senior echelons of the World Youth Day Committee, from distributing any material which is not orthodox enough for them.

So it may turn out that we have a situation where the state is not merely privileging a particular religion, nor a particular denomination within that religion, but a specific faction within that denomination. Which is a very good reason to favour secularism and the separation of church and state, is it not?

There are those who will bristle at the comparison being made between the religious police in Islamic theocracies such as Saudi Arabia, and the (albeit temporary) religious police that will pound the streets during the World Youth Day festivities. Said bristlers are, in my view, simply invoking the “NABA defense“. Of course, protesters in Sydney don’t have to fear anything like the kind of savage brutality to which the citizens of the aforementioned theocracies are subject at the hands of state-sponsored sharia-enforcers; the worst a gay rights or Broken Rites protester can potentially expect is a $5,500 fine. That is not the point. The point is that in a mature liberal democracy that cherishes freedom of religion, freedom and speech and the marketplace of ideas, the state has no business using police powers to shield members of a particular faith from protest and criticism.

Ninglun blogs on the same topic here. Catholic priest Frank Brennan has condemned the laws, and the Council for Civil Liberties is preparing a court challenge.

On this website you can watch a woman in a bikini plummeting endlessly over, past and through silver spheres. If she comes to a halt, don’t worry: you can just use your mouse to pick her up and set her on her way again.

Enjoy.

While we’re Stumbling around the intertubes, you may care to have a look at:

1. An Index of /banned books, containing the collected works of David Icke, the Unabomber Manifesto, literature on the Illuminati, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, stuff on the Priory of Sion, Hollow Earth Theory, “Living Crystals of Atlantis,” Freemasonry, the CIA’s secret weapons . . . . you get the picture.
2. iBypass, allowing students across the world to access porn in the comfort of their own school computer labs.
3. The Atheist Test, based on the ideas of one Ray Comfort, including the infamous banana=atheist’s worst nightmare argument. A good opportunity to laugh at the abject stupidity of religious fundamentalists.
4. Winterbells: use your mouse to manoeuvre the cute little bunny, and hit the mouse key to jump.
5. Amazing geological oddities, including moving rocks in Death Valley, and the largest crystals on Earth.
6. Ip Tools: find that troll.
7. OK, this is the last one. Ever written “Wash Me” with your fingertip in the dust on someone else’s car windscreen? (Or at least have been tempted to?) Artist Scott Wade has completely redefined the practice.

Here’s my “Stump the Yoo” question. Would the President endorse US military interrogators adopting Chinese Communist interrogation methods used to extract confessions, mainly false, from American prisoners during the Korean War?

Apparently, yes.

In fact, military trainers in Guantanamo Bay based an entire class on the Sadean techniques outlined in a 1957 Air Force document based on the accounts of US prisoners returning from North Korea, “some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities.” The US military at the time (i.e. the 50s) wasn’t buying the so-called confessions, which it deemed the result of “brainwashing,” and used the Air Force document to develop a training program, SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape), aimed at stiffening the resolve of military personnel, should they be captured, by exposing them to the harsh methods of the enemy. There is even a SERE course built into America’s Army: Special Forces, the first person shooter distributed for free by the US military as a recruitment tool.

In 2002, a chart copied verbatim from the 1957 Air Force report became a source of interrogation methods adopted by the military and the CIA, with the only change being the removal of the original title: “Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance.” Communist techniques used in Guantanamo (which, as the New York Times article notes, were long recognised by the US as torture) have included forcing prisoners to stand for excessively long periods of time, exposure to extreme cold, stress positions, and waterboarding. President Bush has given these torture methods (after all, that’s what Americans were happy to call them when the Communists were using them) the thumbs up, claiming that “they helped provide critical intelligence and prevented new terrorist attacks.” Because torturing people using techniques that have not proven to yield reliable confessions is what Jesus would do.

Via the commenter “minimalist” at Pharyngula.

John Yoo is a Berkeley law professor and one of the architects of the PATRIOT Act and the Bush Administration’s torture policies. Much is being made of an exchange with John Conyers of the House Judiciary Committee, in which Yoo refuses to delimit the possibilities of what a president could do to a suspect, or give a straight answer to a simple question: “Could the president order a suspect to be buried alive?” This has prompted a rather amusing game of “Stump the Yoo” at Pharyngula.

The inventor of that game, Gary Farber of Amygdala, alerts us to a previous interchange with Yoo in which he affirmed that the president had the right to order the testicles of a suspect’s child to be crushed:

Transcript:

Cassel: If the President deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?
Yoo: No treaty.
Cassel: Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.
Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.

In January 2002 Yoo, working for the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel, co-authored a memo declaring that the Geneva Conventions and other international laws did not apply to members of al-Qaeda. This prompted a quarter of the graduating class at Yoo’s law school to wear red armbands at their 2003 graduation ceremony in protest of the memo. Earlier this year, a much more comprehensive 2003 document co-penned by Yoo was brought to light in the form of a legal brief authorising the use of extreme interrogation methods, and arguing that wartime powers exempted interrogators from laws banning harsh treatment, and that many American and international laws would be inapplicable to interrogations conducted overseas.

The Australian and international blogosphere is abuzz with news of New South Wales’ antidemocratic laws protecting Catholicism from criticism during the World Youth Day festivities:

EXTRAORDINARY new powers will allow police to arrest and fine people for “causing annoyance” to World Youth Day participants and permit partial strip searches at hundreds of Sydney sites, beginning today.

The laws, which operate until the end of July, have the potential to make a crime of wearing a T-shirt with a message on it, undertaking a Chaser-style stunt, handing out condoms at protests, riding a skateboard or even playing music, critics say.

Police and volunteers from the State Emergency Service and Rural Fire Service will be able to direct people to cease engaging in conduct that “causes annoyance or inconvenience to participants in a World Youth Day event”.

People who fail to comply will be subject to a $5500 fine.

The Church itself has denied requesting the regulations. You can read more at Pharyngula, The Thinker’s Podium and An Onymous Lefty.

An organisation by the name of the No To Pope Coalition is prepared to take the $5500 challenge. Which brings to mind recent police crackdowns on anti-Scientology protests in London and Glasgow, as well as the arrest last week of a Gold Coast teenager for wearing a T-shirt deemed “blasphemous.” Having our delicate religious sensibilities offended, it appears, is something we want the police and the government to protect us against.

But what do you think? Do the religious have a right not to be offended?

UPDATE: T-shirt vendors have already begun to capitalise on the niche trend carved out by these inane laws: Annoying Catholics.

(Images: Ninemsn)

Machine Gun Keyboard’s take on World Youth Day

The week in fundie . . .

1. Three years after Campus Crusade for Christ spammed the incoming mail of Australian school principals with the creationist propaganda DVD The Privileged Planet, Focus on the Family is doing the same in New Zealand. But whereas the then Australian Education Minister Brendan Nelson welcomed the prospect of creationism being taught in Australian schools “if that is the wish of parents,” the New Zealand Education ministry maintains “the theory of evolution underpins the science curriculum and schools have a responsibility to teach theories that are subject to accepted scientific scrutiny.” According to the NZ Christian newspaper Weekly Challenge, The Discovery Institute’s Jay Richards and Guillermo Gonzalez (authors of The Privileged Planet) will be conducting a speaking tour of that country in October and November to, as the paper puts it, “strengthen our belief in an intelligent and amazing Designer.” Not that Intelligent Design has anything to do with religion, you understand. (Via Pharyngula)
2. In Ghana, 34-year-old Yussif Abdullarahman killed one of his wives by hitting her on the head with a blunt object and pouring acid over her body because, as he claimed, “she was a witch.” (Happy 98.9 FM)
3. In the Indian state of Jharkand, three members of a family were beaten to death with bamboo sticks and iron rods after being accused of practising witchcraft. According to Thaiindian News, “over 700 people, mostly women, have been killed over the past few years in Jharkhand after being branded as witches.”
4. The Anti-Christ will be a German Jew, according to UK Pentecostalist sect RedSky Ministries. The Star of David, the sect holds, “was originally a symbol for Satan worship and [RedSky] predicts that under the coming German-Jewish Antichrist’s reign all humanity will be forced to accept Star of David tattoos - or die.” (Israel News)
5. A Moroccan imam has declared that while marriages between Moroccan women and European men are forbidden by the Koran, “a Muslim man may marry Christian and Jewish women.” Marriages with European men are permissible if the husband-to-be converts to Islam just prior to the wedding, which he may do before only two witnesses, but if he subsequently deconverts, “Mohammed’s words apply to him: those who renounce their own religion must be killed, as they are an apostate.” (via Fundies Say the Darndest Things)
6. A quarter of Ethiopia’s AIDS patients have stopped taking retroviral medication, on the advice of religious leaders who urge them to take “holy water” instead. (Swissinfo, via Fundies Say the Darndest Things)
7. The UN Human Rights Council has banned discussion of religious questions, after a spokesperson representing the International Humanist and Ethical Union and the Association for World Education, giving a speech in condemnation of the stoning to death of women accused of adultery, and the marriage of girls aged nine in countries where Sharia law applies, was interrupted by at least 16 points of order. (National Secular Society)
8. Religion as child abuse: a Texas court has ruled that assault and battery and deprivation of liberty, even if the victim is a minor, and even if the victim subsequently attempted suicide and required psychiatric care, is perfectly acceptable if said actions transpire in the context of an exorcism. Taking the side of the church attorneys who claimed that the victim was just “acting out to get attention,” the court wrote that finding the church liable for damages “would have an unconstitutional ‘chilling effect’ by compelling the church to abandon core principles of its religious beliefs.” Ah, the good ol’ USA, where the need to pander to Christian dogma trumps all other ethical considerations . . . where your rights end where their “religious freedom” begins. (Via Pharyngula)

Before the law sits a gatekeeper . . . (Image: Sony Pictures)

It has been a while since I’ve posted one of these. “Before The Law” comprises part of the penultimate chapter of The Trial, though an extant form was published during Kafka’s lifetime. It is said that Kafka used to laugh hysterically when reading The Trial to his friends, and this makes me wonder whether “Before The Law” inspired the great Seinfeld episode “The Chinese Restaurant.” In both cases, for example, the protagonists are being denied access to a place they are completely free not to attempt to enter; when they inquire as to whether it is possible to enter, Kafka’s gatekeeper replies “It is possible [. . .] but not now,” while Seinfeld’s maître d’ repeatedly assures them they will be waiting “5, 10 minutes,” regardless of how much time has actually passed; and both protagonists try unsuccessfully to bribe the gatekeeper/maître d’, though their gifts are accepted. Read the story, watch “The Chinese Restaurant” (if you have it on DVD/VHS) and see what you think.

The following translation is courtesy of Ian Johnston of Malaspina University-College, British Columbia:

Before the Law

Before the law sits a gatekeeper. To this gatekeeper comes a man from the country who asks to gain entry into the law. But the gatekeeper says that he cannot grant him entry at the moment. The man thinks about it and then asks if he will be allowed to come in later on. “It is possible,” says the gatekeeper, “but not now.” At the moment the gate to the law stands open, as always, and the gatekeeper walks to the side, so the man bends over in order to see through the gate into the inside. When the gatekeeper notices that, he laughs and says: “If it tempts you so much, try it in spite of my prohibition. But take note: I am powerful. And I am only the most lowly gatekeeper. But from room to room stand gatekeepers, each more powerful than the other. I can’t endure even one glimpse of the third.” The man from the country has not expected such difficulties: the law should always be accessible for everyone, he thinks, but as he now looks more closely at the gatekeeper in his fur coat, at his large pointed nose and his long, thin, black Tartar’s beard, he decides that it would be better to wait until he gets permission to go inside. The gatekeeper gives him a stool and allows him to sit down at the side in front of the gate. There he sits for days and years. He makes many attempts to be let in, and he wears the gatekeeper out with his requests. The gatekeeper often interrogates him briefly, questioning him about his homeland and many other things, but they are indifferent questions, the kind great men put, and at the end he always tells him once more that he cannot let him inside yet. The man, who has equipped himself with many things for his journey, spends everything, no matter how valuable, to win over the gatekeeper. The latter takes it all but, as he does so, says, “I am taking this only so that you do not think you have failed to do anything.” During the many years the man observes the gatekeeper almost continuously. He forgets the other gatekeepers, and this one seems to him the only obstacle for entry into the law. He curses the unlucky circumstance, in the first years thoughtlessly and out loud, later, as he grows old, he still mumbles to himself. He becomes childish and, since in the long years studying the gatekeeper he has come to know the fleas in his fur collar, he even asks the fleas to help him persuade the gatekeeper. Finally his eyesight grows weak, and he does not know whether things are really darker around him or whether his eyes are merely deceiving him. But he recognizes now in the darkness an illumination which breaks inextinguishably out of the gateway to the law. Now he no longer has much time to live. Before his death he gathers in his head all his experiences of the entire time up into one question which he has not yet put to the gatekeeper. He waves to him, since he can no longer lift up his stiffening body. The gatekeeper has to bend way down to him, for the great difference has changed things to the disadvantage of the man. “What do you still want to know, then?” asks the gatekeeper. “You are insatiable.” “Everyone strives after the law,” says the man, “so how is that in these many years no one except me has requested entry?” The gatekeeper sees that the man is already dying and, in order to reach his diminishing sense of hearing, he shouts at him, “Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I’m going now to close it.”