Dr Barghouthi is here to beat the drums of peace, See him at the Trades Hall in Peel St on Monday
Dr Mustafa Barghouthi is here to talk about Peace in the Middle East and what western governments can and should do to help acheive it.
A Member of the Palestinian Parliament, Physician and President of the Union of Palestiniaarghouthi (also spelt Barghouti) has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and awarded the Medal of Solidarity and Legion of Honour and is speaking at Peel St, South Brisbane next Monday.
Venue: Level 2, QCU Building, 16 Peel Street, South Brisbane
Taking a break from tearing apart the judiciary and parliamentary process, the Newman government this week was predicted to ab use its absolute power by ripping up that other pillar of civilised society, the arts.
The Westender reported yesterday through its facebook page, “Qld government to announce slashing to Arts sector this afternoon. Institutions such as the Queensland Centre for Photography have been notified by phone that their funding has been removed. They will receive no future funding from the Queensland Government.
Stand by for further updates.”
So far, those further updates have not materialised, though plenty of behind the scenes activity only confirms that something is afoot.
Having heard Newman wax lyrical about the government’s support for the classical artforms, especially when they uphold politically “incorrect” attitudes to power, sex and politics, it is clear that the arts sector is in a very difficult position.
If they call out the philistines in George Street then they are relegated to the outer circle with womens reproductive rights, environmentalists, paedophiles, judges and bikies. If they do not, they are complicit in assisting the government in manufacturing a make believe fairyland that masks the chamber of horrors under the pink, glittery frosting.
You can rely on Westender to keep peeling back the marzipan to reveal the maggots that have inhabited the meal.
Sporting clubs, corporations, superfunds and chambers of commerce are busy announcing their new executives following their annual general meetings.
Like most forms of democracy many of these annual general meetings are somewhat untidy. membership lists are not up to date, rules around eligibiity to vote are not clear, the purpose of the annual general meeting is not clear, the membership has not been properly notified.
This is not an extraordinary or isolated incidence of corruption, this is so commonplace that Westender is providing access to the standard rules for those of you have yet to hold your annual general meeting or those of you who have just been to one and found it wanting.
Football star Leigh Matthews was delayed from running for the president of the board of the Brisbane Lions on the basis that his membership was up to date. The West End Traders association is this month holding an extraordinary general meeting after the annual general meeting last month failed to elect a president. The full story was reported two issues ago.
Most organistions do not have their own constitutions and are governed by the model rules provided under the and available at the Associations Incorporation Act 1981 and Associations Incorporation Regulation 1999.
The area that seems to vex many associations are those around the holding of Annual General Meetings and the rights to vote in them.
The model rules clearly indicate that nominees for contested positions must nominate 14 days prior to the AGM. The entire membership must have been notified of the time and place of the AGM and must have access to the agenda of the meeting and the rules for voting.
In the case of the West End Traders Association, new members who sign up by emailing WETA secretary, David Mildren and paying the membership fee of $100 between now and the 17th of November, can be ratified at the general meeting to be held prior to the Extraordinary General Meeting and therefore vote in the extraordinary general meeting election.
The annual general meeting did not appoint a full complement of general members and can decide to accept nominations fro m the floor.
Nominations for other positions are now closed or were voted on last month.
The laconic pace of outback Australia seems an unlikely platform for a thriller but Aaron Pedersen as executive producer and star winds us so tight in this neat little film that there are times I could barely breathe.
The open spaces of the outback support the tensions built in Mystery Road
This is a tale of the good man overcoming adversity and given that our hero is a black detective returning home from detective school “down south”, the adversity mounts thick and fast. From the opening scenes which outlay the tragic murder of one of “his” people through to the final shoot out the relaxed and open space of the script allows the heat, dust and loaded history of the frontier to blow through the action with full force.
The use of arial photography provides a powerful sense of location as we watch suburban cars cruise around suburban Winton. The ramshackle disrepair provides a hauntingly dangerous backdrop to the actions and rifles with scopes brings the action close up and personal in a way that hollywood action shoot ’em ups rarely do.
There are the inevitable sacrifices made for the sake of bringing the action to an audience without too much set up and explanation: targets are always centred in the cross hairs, for example, where as a real sniper has to shoot off centre to cope with distance and wind. The protaganists “tail” each other at a couple of hundred metres in a landscape where most horizons are tens of kilometers away.
It’s relatively low budget and looks very homegrown to a local audience but the scenery is so exotic, the language so true to life and the depicted events are so stark, harsh and heart-rending that this is essentially a foreign film told in Australian English.
As such, it is probably limited to the art-house circuit in Australia, but will almost inevitably become a cult film somewhere in the world.
I would not be surprised if it spawns a genre of films in the way that a Fistful of dollars did in the seventies. This is a powerful piece of work.
Michael Shuman being interviewed as Robert Pelkin ponders a point in the background
Michael Shuman is an advocate of local business and a community economist.
He was in Brisbane this week to give a talk called Delicious Development that covered the reasons why local business is good for community and society as a whole.
He opposes some basic tenets of traditional economic development beginning his talk by saying the worst thing you can do for your local economy is spend money to attract and retain outside companies to invest locally. His talk sets out to prove that money is much better spent investing in local business.
Two of the stand out messages from the talk:
1/ The localization movement in the USA has shifted from a straightforward consumer movement to influence investment and other infrastructure issues.
2/ Despite the huge subsidies, tax breaks and other corporate welfare provided by governments to the big end of town, small business has maintained its share of revenue, employment and profit steadily over the last century and a half.
Most Westenders appreciate the value of a diverse ecosystem of small independent businesses. We know that every dollar spent in a locally owned business stays in the community two to four times longer than a dollar spent in a national or international company. We also know that locally owned businesses support the local community in a robust and direct way.
These facts are familiar to us from our personal experience and it is reassuring to see that hundreds of studies across North America reaffirm this. What has also emerged from those studies is that the resilience of communities with diverse small businesses is much stronger: they are better equipped to deal with major change, such as external shifts in the economy. They are also more coherent: people are less alienated, better connected and less likely to fall through the cracks.
These advantages lead to indirect benefits to the economy, primarily through lower welfare costs but also through lower crime rates.
Mr Shuman’s focus was largely on food. The globalization of food is one of the major challenges of our time, leading to reduced quality, poor nutrition, lower prices for growers and an increasing dependency on international infrastructure to maintain food supplies.
The indirect benefits of a healthy, resilient, local food supply extend to better health and nutrition and deepen the relationships in a community significantly.
On the flip-side, the collapse of food sovereignty is of major concern to growers, regional leaders and advocates of economic sustainability worried about the increasing cost of energy and transport and its impact on our lifestyle.
“Given the relatively high weight to price ratio of food, it is one of the most price sensitive goods as transport costs increase,” Shuman pointed out.
Of similar significance to his graph showing the resilience of small business in the face of government favouritism of corporations is his breakdown of food costs.
Over the last century the farmer’s share of the food dollar has fallen from around 40% to around 10%. The cost of packaging, transport, refrigeration and storage has risen from 30% to almost 70%. It is that cost that is being consumed by corporations and which is also most vulnerable to rising energy costs. It is that variable and vulnerable cost which leaves us all exposed to the collapse of our food supply networks.
While many small business owners are not overtly worried by the globalization of the economy, or particularly focused on food. The raft of statistics showing the benefit of local business in creating robust stable economies reinforces their instinctive preference for entrepreneurship. It should also make us all extremely wary of the attempts by government chambers of commerce and industry associations representing corporate interests to take over our small business lobby groups and local chambers of commerce.
Delicious Development was organised by local businesses, Food Connect and Energising Communities (the founders all live in West End) Michael Shuman is a fellow of the Post Carbon Institute and a founder of BALLE (Be a localist) http://bealocalist.org/
I don’t know why you’re laughing, one of you two has to go second
One of the most frightening aspects of the Luring RapeBait email that hit the news on October 9th is the entrenched positions it has exposed.
The instructions for getting sex by alcohol and aggressive dancing offended all sensitive, caring people and anyone with a college age daughter. It also caused an equal and opposite reaction from some men totally bewildered as to what all the fuss was about.
“Besides the fratty language this is just ordinary instructions for being a good host: find a lonely girl, get her a drink and show her a good time” wrote one, possibly disingenuous, defender of the dick.
Keep looking and you can find sites where the vast majority of the comments back the boys and their “dismay” at “feminazi dominance”.
Watching my local boy bush turkey hound his target female into sexual submission over days of high-speed chasing up and down trees, rubbish piles and tangled undergrowth I cannot help but observe that there is some truth to the frat brat claims that it is quite “natural” for young animals to push the boundaries of “decency” or “civilised behaviour” in the search for sexual satisfaction.
The point that they miss is that we came out of the trees well over ten million years ago and began building cities about ten thousand years ago. While we still have a ‘lizard brain’ and animal instincts, we have also evolved a range of civilized behaviours and emotional responses, such as romance, that are an important part of our social fabric.
That being said, there is nothing wrong with mutual exploration of the darker side of our sexuality, or engaging in a little ‘rough trade’ if that’s what we feel we need. Even dolphins and elephants with their complex neural cortex and social structures are not always the most romantic of lovers.
The point missed by the misguided lads defending their date-rape mentality is that while this behaviour is not ‘evil’ it is not ‘normal’. For the advancement of humanity, the freedom of women and the well-being of society, young people need to develop the social skills around romance, consensual sex and the ability to separate the thrill of seduction from the blood lust of conquest.
Even from a completely hedonistic, self-centred point of view, those occasions where sex is the most bestial and the least refined rarely make it into the best-bonks-I-ever-had list. More importantly, unless you deny the equality of women, sexual conquest is not a victimless crime.
Given the central role of the television show Game of Thrones in our culture’s view of power and sexuality it is worth requoting the character Daario, “The gods gave men two gifts to entertain ourselves before we die—the thrill of fucking a woman who wants to be fucked; the thrill of killing a man who wants to kill you.”
It still puts women in the passive role but at least it gets the mutual nature of the desire the right way round.
The accidental rapists in our midst have completely missed out on this fundamental piece of evolution and need re-education quickly.
I have a suggestion for harnessing the power of the Internet to facilitate this re-education and reverse its role in promoting rape-culture but that will have to wait for another day.
