zhasper.com

Just ran across this answer from yahoo

Some other facts to keep in mind:

• Each year over 8 million people die because they are simply too poor to stay alive.
• More than 800 million people go hungry every day.
• The gross domestic product of the poorest 48 nations is less than the wealth of the world's three richest people.
• Thirty-thousand children die every day due to hunger and treatable illnesses.
• 6 million children die every year before their fifth birthday, as a result of malnutrition.

From a comment on Larvatus Prodeo.

My point is, it’s an institution that has constantly evolved and changed over all the years of our western civilisation. These days western girls have inheritance rights. Women don’t defer to their husband’s authority as they used to. Infertility does not invalidate the union. We believe love, and not property transfer or business partnership or political union, is the basis for marriage. In fact, we believe it’s the only basis for marriage. So marriage has shifted mightily. It’s an institution that can, and I’ll dare say will, accommodate the notion of gay marriage (or ‘civil union’), especially as property is now owned by individuals, rather than families (Packers and Murdochs excepted), and so the right of transfer is an individual choice.

Go read the rest of the thread. In amongs much nonsensical rambling from conservatives (seriously - just trying to parse some of their sentences gives me headaches. Every now and then I try to take it a step further and analyse their logic - fortunately, I have aspirin kept on hand for such folly), there are also other good comments that you should be reading as well.

[edit] I'm still reading more of this thread myself (thank you, LP, for your wonderful comments feed).

The contrast between the two sides of the argument really is startling. On the one hand, we have posters such as Naomi and Mark, links to samples of whose work I've already posted. On the other side, we have.. well, names (pseudonyms?) aren't neccessary.

Mark and Naomi in particular are fantastic: their points are logically consistent, well made, and on-topic. Those on the other side... well, one comment describes the idea of marriage being "between a man and a woman to the exclusion of others" as being:

the traditional institution as laid out in our Constitution

I'm astounded. I've not seen a better example of irony in almost a year.

[/edit]

PS. yes, I just put multiple sentences inside a set of parentheses, even but inserted taht set of parentheses into the middle of a sentence. Is that valid? I hope not - all grammar flames need at least one major error

PPS. I've long had a habit of posting pointers here to things worth reading elsewhere. Now that I've got ads on the site - and just possibly might make profit (Ha! I raff and raff and raff!) from traffic... well, I'm concerned that people might think I'm just trying to draw traffic. What do you think?

PPS. I posed that last question to myself and decided it's probably not a problem - I've been very clear that the material wasn't written by me, and I've encouraged you to go and read the source... also, I really do think it's worth reading.

I've mentioned machinegunkeyboard before, but I'm mentioning it again now because you should go and read this article.

In case anyone needs reminding, government in a first-world representative democracy exists for the service of the people, not the other way around. When government has the power to act with no justification to the public, without any means for redress of grievance, it has the power to act arbitrarily and capriciously for politically motivated ends. This is otherwise known as tyranny.

this lecture by Malcom Fraser.

In particular, the following:

We are the only democratic country, I am advised, to legislate for the detention of people whom the authorities do not suspect of any wrong doing or even of any wrong thought.

In Australia, any of us can be detained merely because authorities believe we might know something that we don't even know we know. The authorities do not have to believe we are guilty of any crime, or are planning any crime, or have consorted with any suspicious persons. How could such a law be drafted by the Government and supported by the Labor opposition? You can be detained for one week but then on a new warrant, another and another and another week. Unless it is approved in the original warrant, and why would ASIO do that? - you are not allowed to contact your wife, your husband, your child, your mother, your father and of course not a lawyer.

If you don't answer ASIO's questions satisfactorily, you can be charged and subject to 5 years in jail. But the law is reasonable, it goes on to say that if you don't know anything, then it's not an offence not to tell ASIO anything!!! But you have to prove you didn't know anything and so the "onus of proof" is reversed.

You can be asked to produce a paper and if you don't, you also go to jail on prosecution for 5 years but the law goes on to say, being fair-minded again, if you don't have such a paper, it's not an offence not to produce it but you have to prove that you didn't have it. How do you prove that you do not have something that you do not even know exists!!! Again, the "onus of proof" is reversed.

If a journalist heard that you had been detained and sought to report it, he would go to jail for 5 years. If a detained person were released and talked to anyone about his or her experiences, subject to prosecution, five years in jail.

There's a shuttle landing tonight..

If all goes well, the shuttle should be landing at Cape Canaveral sometime shortly after 6pm tonight, AEST.

Just as an even more random bit of trivia, Cape Canaveral is quite close to Melbourne, Florida, which is itself almost due east of Sydney, Florida.

If you pay attention to the URLs above, you'll note that I had to search for "Sydney, Florida" and "Melbourne, Florida" - searching for just "Sydney" or "Melbourne" unadorned finds the more famous cities of the same name in Australia. If this is too difficult for you, don't dispair - Microsoft have decided that none of the world except the United States of America matter, so just a search for Sydney or Melbourne will work fine on MSN Virtual Earth. You can find the landing strip for the shuttle there as well, but in glorious monochrome only.

More seriously, this Saturday marks one year since the federal government voted in legislation prohibiting marriage between any other than a man and a woman. I'm carefully avoiding using any adjectives at this point, as anything I can say is going to be inflammatory..

To celebrate this re-affirming of our status as second-class citizens, several groups including Australian Marriage Equality and Community Action Against Homophobia have organised a rally for Saturday. The rally starts around 13:00 at Taylor Square with a welcome from Portia Turbo (there was something I was meant to tell her, I'm sure...), followed by some short speeches from speakers such as Senator Kerry Nettle and Professor Kerryn Phelps. Around 1:30 the rally will march down Oxford St to Hyde Park, where there will be more speeches from Tanya Plibisek MHR and Clover Moore M.P, amongst others. The rally will conclude around 2:30pm.

(as an aside: if you're affiliated with any of these groups, and you're looking for web/mail/etc hosting, let me know. I'm in the middle of migrating to a new server which has stupid amounts of spare capacity, and I can't think of many better causes to donate some of it to...)