a win for women globally...

ever heard of the Global Gag Rule (a.k.a. Mexico City Policy) - it prohibited family planning programs in other nations that receive US aid from using non-US monies for abortion counseling, advocacy, and referrals... can you believe the power america has...

well, Obama's lifted the ban... that's a good thing for women everywhere... but, Clinton already did it, then Bush came along and undid it... Obama's done it - but when is someone going to make it 'unchangeable' or is it going to be able to be undone again some time in the future??? let's hope not... women deserve better... they deserve to know where they stand rather than being pawns in some high-powered male chess game!!!!

of course 'the church' (in all it's forms and denominations) isn't exactly ecstatic by the decision... but all that can be said to them is...

closer to home...

it's January 26th - mean anything in particular to you???? invasion day maybe? survival day or australia day (sounds like an invasion to me!!)...

I'm of the 'invasion day' persuasion... so here's some music to go along with my beliefs...

oooohhhhh... sorry, i just get lost in YouTube.... all those songs from my youth - i just have to listen to them... I was lucky that my early life was part of a really political time - the 60s and 70s were full of change, change and more change - consequently it takes me a loooooooooong time to get a playlist together...

but i hope you enjoy... goanna, yothu yindi, the oils, the masters apprentices (now there's a micro-story... Jim Keayes and Glenn Wheatley (when he was spunky - before he was a 'businessman' who didn't pay his taxes - and as you've no doubt have been able to gather, i don't break the law!!!! ha!!!!!) had to wake Irene and me up out of a 'mandy' induced 'coma' (mandrax, the best gutter drug you could ever have experienced - forerunner to sarapax - but oh, sooooo much better! - you could drop it, smoke it, snort it (and who knows what else!!!!) - we were in a laundromat, they wanted the washing machine - pub bands didn't make much money in those days - we all lived in the same street, we all had to do the same shit no matter what state we were in - ahhh, life in suburbia!!!! life was just sex, drugs an' rock'n'roll then.... i think the emphasis was on drugs at that time)... ruby hunter, archie roach... etc. etc. etc.

did you know.....

... that Motown turned 50 recently??? far out, it's 4 years younger than me!!!! the 60s, 70s and to a lesser extent the 80s (it was declining by this decade) just wouldn't be the same without the soul, rhtyhm, blues and funk from the likes of Martha and the Vandellas, Marvin Gaye, Supremes, Temptations, Gladys Knight and the Pips, the Four Tops, The Jackson 5ive (when Michael was a cute, chubby-faced, full-nosed non-dermabrasioned young lad!!!), Stevie Wonder, The Commodores - let's face it - everyone was dancin' to 'Motown music'!!!!

aaahhhhh, but.... did you also know that Stylus, fronted by Peter Cupples, was the only Australian band ever to be signed to the Motown label???

I couldn't find an original 70s version of the song I remember best from Stylus - Summer Breeze - so you get a 90s version from the original band (well, the original singer anyway - couldn't tell you who else was in the band - hey, it was the 70s!!!! drugs, drugs and more drugs!!!!) but you have to skip over about 1 min 55 of daryl somers crap... and I don't think this version is as good as their original one!!!!!

hey, I still enjoyed it though...

after 22 days of death and destruction...

... Israel finally announces a ceasefire... they say they have "achieved their goal"... so their 'goal' must have been the MURDER of over 1200 Palestinians - and of course the destruction of infrastructure and resources for the surviving civilian population ...

according to the New York Times ...

"The announcement came on a day in which Israel was again criticized by the United Nations over civilian deaths in Gaza — this time after a tank fired at a United Nations school, killing two young brothers taking shelter there.

United Nations aid officials raised questions about whether the attack, and others like it, should be investigated as war crimes. The Israeli Army said that it was investigating the reports at the highest level but that initial inquiries indicated that troops were returning fire from near or within the school."

It's about time the international community stopped being apologists for israel; where america and the united nations (United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine or United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181) stopped backing them to the hilt and started treating them as what they are - war criminals intent on genocide (perpetrating their own holocaust against the Palestinians!!!) where's the International Court and Security Council in all of this??? oops, forgot... part of the united nations which means dominated by america!!!! who really don't give a damn... or will they now that 'new blood' is in the white house???? I'm skeptical...

Just had to do another quick post in support of the Palestinian people... now I'm going to think about getting ready for work this afternoon... working with Katherine so I know it's going to be a good shift!!!!

Tomorrow I'm off to the hospital (at 7.30 am!!!) with me mum to find out results of tests she had last week and to (hopefully) get some insight into where her kidney disease is at and what we can expect over what period of time...

and then maybe another post tomorrow arvo on something far less gloomy!!!!

back to the 60s...

I found this 1966 newspaper cutting amongst me mum's photos last time I went through them... it's from The Sun newspaper of June 1, 1966 - The Sun used to come out in the mornings, and The Herald came out in the afternoons... that was way before they merged in 1990... I couldn't resist posting it (sorry about the quality... paper's really, really fragile!!!)

this was how Judy (me mum) found out that me brother Darrell was wagging school (and had been for months!!!)... the article makes it sound like he was on a school excursion... being in the newspaper was a dead giveaway of not being at school!!!! but it was also a catalyst to finally getting out of the christian brothers college that he hated so much.... some of the 'brothers' and the 'sisters' could be violent people - and of course corporal punishment was allowed in the 60s!!!!

the column 50-50 (does that still exist in the Herald-Sun?? - I don't know, I don't read it!!) gives a 'window' into what concerned some people in 1966 - apparently whether bread should be baked and sold on Sundays was one of the issues... hard to imagine these days not being able to get bread on a Sunday, hey??!!!

and here's some of the music we were listening to in 1966... enjoy...

Israel - still trying for genocide

Sonia Karkar from Women for Palestine wrote this article in 2007...

"This year will see in 40 years of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands when Israel took control of the last 22 per cent of historic Palestine within the internationally-recognised Armistice “Green” line, known as the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. That was in 1967. It was a bold and deliberate plan to take all of Palestine, an idea that was put into effect with the UN Partition of 1947 giving European immigrant Jews 55 per cent of Palestinian land and the remainder going to the majority Palestinian population.

The plan was for an exclusively Jewish state on land historically known as Palestine. The Palestinians were never consulted, nor did they agree. It, therefore, required the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and throughout the months of 1947-1948, subversive European Zionist groups engineered the calamitous dispossession of the majority Palestinian population. Some 750,000 Palestinians fled their homes and homeland in terror as word of massacres and razing of villages and towns reached them. These events culminated in the al-Nakba or “Catastrophe” on 15 May 1948. The same day, the Arab states declared war on the newly-created Israel, but the weak and disorganised Arab armies were no match for the highly efficient and well-armed Israeli military force that had been formed from the Zionist terrorist groups already operating inside Palestine.

Like the Palestinians, the Arab states had only just emerged from colonial occupations and they were unable to withstand Israel’s blistering attacks. They lost the war and the subsequent armistice agreements between Israel and the Arab states increased Israel’s land acquisition to 78 per cent of Palestine. Again, the Palestinians were not consulted. It was a monumental betrayal of Palestinian rights by the Western powers and their own Arab neighbours. The Palestinians – both inside and outside of Palestine – were put in limbo and Israel continued to devise the most extraordinary schemes to ensure that Palestinians could no longer claim under Israel’s law, any of the land appropriated by the Jewish state.

Then came the six-day war of 1967 and Israel’s illegal military occupation which has continued for 40 years – a crime against humanity that has so humiliatingly oppressed and subjugated two, even three generations of Palestinians and is illegally and relentlessly stripping them of even more land. Today, there is barely 7 per cent of the land left for the Palestinians.

It is 40 years too many—an occupation that has no legitimacy in law and no morality in human behaviour. But, the crime is not Israel’s alone. The world powers—America, England, France, Russia and others —are all complicit. The ineffectual United Nations is complicit; the self-serving Arab regimes are complicit; the Zionist-controlled Jewish Diaspora is complicit; the Bible-struck Christian churches are complicit; and so is every person who has remained deafeningly silent in the face of Israel’s criminal acts. Only the remarkable resilience of the Palestinian people has stopped their deliberately planned demise. It is no wonder then that Israel’s crimes are becoming ever more blatant, in order to create immutable facts on the ground that will make it impossible for the Palestinians to realize self-determination in their own homeland.

And that is the inequity of it. Dispossession, displacement, ethnic cleansing and occupation have all been excused and accepted as a consequence of the shameful Jewish Holocaust. But, for the Palestinians, there will be no such universal acknowledgement, shame and reparations if Israel is allowed to continue its plunder of Palestinian lands with impunity. The world can no longer allow the vengeance of the victims to wreak havoc on a blameless people. After the original sin of dispossession and the wretched years of inhumanity that followed, we all have a responsibility to stop Israel’s crimes rooted in an illegal occupation and its colonialist expansionism. We must demand a free Palestine and seek a way forward that will redress the wrongs and finally bring justice to the Palestinians. Only then will there be a chance for peace and reconciliation between the two peoples – Jews and Palestinians."

nothing changes - one of today's headlines: "Israeli army moves into Gaza capital as war toll passes 510"

What more can I say - I am outraged, and my heart bleeds for the Palestinians...

here's "Warnings moving clockwise" by Do-Re-Mi...