The lunatic world of commodities prices.

On the SBS news last night there was a story about another impending round of petrol price rises. The story was that a journalist in Israel had printed something about not liking Iran, so petrol speculators had a bit of a fit. Something to do with the US not being happy with the results in Iraq and eyeing off Iran… “Saw the lights on, thought we’d drop in while we’re over this way…”

In the papers the impending rises were being blamed on Asia and the US recession. Heh, fancy anyone outside of Anglo culture wanting their share of the world’s resources. Next thing we know the Africans will be wanting food. What’s the world coming to? Soon we might have to stop taking produce on boats on laps around the planet to get to other countries that produce the same food, in order to meet “free trade agreements”.

Well, last week the petrol price was supposedly down. Again because of Asia. However that was apparently not good news because any reduction in numbers could look like a “negative impact on the global economy” and that isn’t good because nobody who’s part of the huge consensual hallucination of kleptocrats who sustain the planet pillaging wants to be thinking about their own little collection of stock numbers reducing, even if it’s to reflect anything remotely like reality.

While the petrol prices “eased” in trading, there was no corresponding drop in petrol prices at the pumps. What a surprise. I can see you all holding your heads. What, no reality in petrol pricing? What is the world coming to! This week though some of you astute readers will have noticed that some of the face-hugging conglomerate thieves that pass for supermarkets in Australia are offering a deal 20 cents per litre off when you buy half a dozen bottles of grog. Hmmm. 10 cents per litre off if you spend more than $50 in the shop. Wow. You’ll need the grog to understand the system.

What this means is that although every dollar increase in crude prices is alleged to translate (or has been fabricated to reflect) a cent per litre increase in the price at the pump, the price is already 10 to 20 cents over priced and the big boys holding the cards are reaping windfall profits both ways. One because their stocks are worth more and they’re able to control more politics and social values while their commodities (bits of the planet they’ve dug up and are poisoning everyone with) that they’re holding the planet to ransom with are, well, effective and powerful. Two because they’re able to make more money and pay less tax. I dunno what they’re going to spend all this money on when there’s no air left to breathe. Tanked air, perhaps?

This is the same planet on which farmers in rich countries being paid massive subsidies and produce less food in order to keep prices high is spoken of as an economic necessity and part of the level playing field in this lunacy that is globalism.

But it’s not all bad news. There’s less cars on the road which means a reduction in car exhaust related illnesses and accidents. The flow on is that petrol isn’t so important to those drivers at least, and cars aren’t either. This is a good thing so far as reality is concerned. Real reality I mean, not the BS that advertisers and speculators would pretend to be involved in. Not the supposed reality that is a mere hangover of Victorian class-society and the industrial revolution inherited in a thought-free board room. This is reality for awake people.

And car parts manufacturers are beginning to rethink. Last week an auto parts retailer bought a bicycle manufacturer and this week another one is selling out.

Eventually at some point this whole elaborate soap opera that is Western civilisation (cough) will wake up face down in a swamp of its own effluent and wonder what the fsck happened. Eventually. If the people who concocted advertising as a tax deduction put their minds to something useful we’d be carrying portable solar chargers for every bloody thing by now. Houses would have rain water, grey water and 150% solar capacity. Coal and petrol would be a thing of the past. Which they will soon, but without taking half the planets bio capacity with it.

In the meantime, it was earth day last week and I patted myself on the back for leaving the car in the garage most of the week and pedalling around.

So while I might be feeling a little like a mental case presently, at the very least I feel much, much more sane than anyone involved in the global economy.

The joys of misogyny in Australia.

Not only have we set world standards in woman hating with our statistics for domestic violence and rape, not to mention the walking public debacle that is Sam Newman… We’re now setting the pace for paedophilia. And in the oh so tastefully titled Victorian man arrested in childporn dragnet, for a moment there I got the impression we were supposed to be sympathetic for the bloke who was caught drooling over images of abused children, not the children who have been raped and photographed for the viewing pleasure of men all over the planet.

Sometimes I console myself with the reminder that humans are, afterall, only animals. But animals don’t do this. Is there such a thing as devolution? Oh yeah, it’s called the Patriarchy.

And so it goes.

Well, the subject of adoption and birth came up again for me recently. On several occasions I’ve tried to contact either of my birth parents, each time without luck. This time I’m requesting some info from the hospital where I was born. Hopefully along with my time of birth, which I need for a horoscope, they’ll be able to tell me more about my birth mother’s aboriginality. My maternal Grandmother was living at an aboriginal community at that time, and I have some mention of that on my mother’s birth certificate, but it would be nice to have more info.

That’s one of the big problems dealing with adoption, you feel like you’re kinda floating in nowhere. There’s no roots or sense of connection to the people around you.

Having my own children helped that a little, moreso since they’re both now living with me. However I had been sucked in to a Pentecostal cult when I was in my late teens and my marriage and childbirth experience were horribly damaged by the cult teachings that went on. I have a lot of sympathy for any married woman who hates the idea of sex with her husband because of my own hideous experiences. And they actively taught emotional abuse of women and children under the guise of so called “godly marriages”. Dogs.

I guess it’s all kind of come to a head after the anniversary of my first daughter’s birth recently. The doctor put me back on mood stabilisers as he reckoned my lows were becoming dangerously low and he feared for my safety. I didn’t disagree and have been taking the bloody things. At least they help me sleep with much less nightmares or intrusive memories. It’s nice to be able to get to sleep at night.

For a while now I’ve been feeling a lot of the cultural diminishment of women. Because I’m over the hill now as part of an older, middle aged demographic, I’ve been used up in terms of sex or child bearing despite the fact that I have probably ten years to go in that regard. When you’re not a sex toy teenager or a chained to the kitchen sink mother, you’re either a hooker or may as well be dead to society. I notice a lot of women my age now trying out different roles for themselves. There are many who opt for the desperate housewife look, glamming themselves up and having a go. There’s also lots who buy corpulent four wheel drives that look like the results of liposuction and pretend to be men in order to have some sense of purpose and humanity. Because everyone knows that in Australia’s cock culture you have to be a butch man in order to have any real worth to society. It’s not even about work in that issue as women who work are paid less and promoted less. It’s all about the dick. And men who are emotionally sensitive or artistic or thoughtful are often sidelined by those militaristic standards as well. No one wins except the board members of disgusting corporations and the ever present media and advertisers. Bastards.

So here am I with two children to raise feeling like society could well do without me now. I’m over the hill and was never a man in any case, so why do I bother hanging on? There’s a few of us who feel this way and encourage each other with the saying “Stay here just to spite the bastards.” With pills in hand and distractions aplenty, I will. But what a way to live.

Despite what Mars proponents and concocted and contradictory evolutionary psychology might say, humans are really only animals, not the be all and end all of evolution. Certainly not the ultimate peak of life on planet earth. Manifest destiny as a theory went out on the Nineteenth century and only has a toe hold now amongst Pentecostals and Brethren who still live in the dark ages. Humans created this society as it is and we are at liberty to re create it anyway we like. We don’t even have to believe that the earth needs to be destroyed before Christ will return and sweep us all away like angels into everlasting heaven… And who’d want to spend eternity with a god who expects you to treat other people horribly and entrench world starvation and poverty in order to show yourself approved? Approved of what, being an arsehole?

Me I’ll hang on here quietly in my little spot by the creek and wait to see if the next generation is going to wake up to the bullshit and make some necessary and constructive changes.

Blessed be.

The future at YSL

One of the most famous quotes from Kingdom of Heaven is “All death is certain.” Unfortunately (or not depending upon how green you are) it happens to everyone. Yves Saint Laurent passed away last night at the age of 71. What a shame. Here was a man who did some constructive, beautiful things with his life. Oddly, I’ve been wearing his perfume Opium all last week which I haven’t worn in years…

Yves Saint Laurent brought in those power dressing shoulders in women’s suits in the 80’s and of course his (in)famous cerulean gowns.

While it might not seem terribly feminist to appreciate haute couture, not least because of the poverty entrenched around the globe, in contrast with such a small proportion of the population being able to drape their hides in glam gear, there is so much creativity in these designs. And we desperately need creativity if we’re to solve our crises. Without people who can buck the system and do something genuinely innovative, we’ll stay stuck in our current miasma of global consumerism until we poison ourselves off the planet.

Vale Yves.

Lay off Amy Winehouse.

At a Sunday bike fix not long ago Val had some music playing on his bike’s loudspeakers. It’s a setup with an old car amp and speakers on panniers on the back of the bike running off an ipod. Kinda dinky.

A song came on with the most beautiful smokey blues voice and I asked him who was singing. Sure enough it was Amy Winehouse singing “Back to black” from her latest album. I was very impressed. I had no idea quite how good she is.

The discussion came up about her supposed drug use. Fancy that, a musician doing drugs. What will the world come to! ;-) Of course, when you think about it drug use has sometimes seemed almost mandatory for anyone in the arts and music scene. Before there was heroin and tablets there was always wine, hash and opium. For many thousands of years these things were available legally.

It is no coincidence that opiate drugs work so well because they fit the endorphin receptors in the human brain. How many thousands of years were these plants cultivated by humans for exactly that purpose?

A large part of the complaint about Ms Winehouse came from the US trash media. I’m beginning to wonder if it wasn’t because they’re jealous of her talent. The US media seem to think they’re the whole point of evolution and planetary development sometimes.

Not to mention inventing the war on drugs. Using “save the children” (TM) as a cover, in spite of the drugs industry in the US being second only to petrochemicals as a money spinner and many large drug companies being based in Texas… conservative politicians have created a you-beaut-wonderful straw man to use as a whipping boy to distract punters every time another one of them gets busted for snorting crack and screwing street kids. There isn’t really a war on drugs or the troops in Afghanistan would be helping set up schools and hospitals, not stuck in a penny ante tit for tat with guerillas armed by the Saudis. Same is true in Colombia. They could have had farms growing food, instead the US wanted coffee and coke, so they set about upending South American economies with standover tactics described as free trade agreements.

Aside from all of that, the real problems with illegal drugs are mainly the fact that they’re illegal. If they weren’t brewed up in backyard dunnies and cut with rat poison, we’d have plenty of pills kids could try out safely. Those who are going to get addicted can always get addicted to legal or illegal drugs and at least there’d be some safeguards and harm minimisation in place.

Humans are always going to want to alter their consciousnesses. Hell, we’ve only really had an egotistic “I” conscious self for a few thousand years anyways. Maybe drugs helped trigger this evolution? If Governments really gave a rats arse about the damage done by illegal drugs they would be setting programs in place and ignoring the hysteria in the media. Or at the very least not exploiting it in the name of re-election. How about exploring some of the reasons why kids want to do drugs? How about some limits on the emotional abuse and sexual content of advertising that pushes people over the edge? (And if you think that’s an overstatement consider that advertising is known to affect and alter the physical function of your brain).

In the meantime give Amy a break. The last thing the poor girl needs is to be a scape goat for a slow news week in Hollywood. Heh, the people that castigate her on television look like they’re made of plastic anyway.

Reeling them in.

The headlines in the morning papers read thus: “Libs left reeling by Labor surge.”

It’s not really news that the Liberal Party are having a hard time after their former dictator departed. And this isn’t the first time I’ve recommended a book by Marion Maddox God under Howard. The Liberal Party in Australia are hard-line conservatives and pretty much a festering hive of right-wing extremist religious politics. Some have described them as Fascist or Nationalist.

All this brings something of a sense of deja-vous to those of us living down here in Victoria. After a preening fascist moron was voted out everyone breathed a premature sigh of relief. Ding dong the bastard’s dead… or at least voted out on the end of a boot, where he can hopefully do no further damage. And we’re still realising quite how much damage he did. After Kennett sold off all the utilities and public transport, the problems arising from such a fire sale are still coming home to roost.

We had a newer, friendlier Premier, one who made noises about having learned lessons and governing in the interests of the voters. What we found after some time was that though the noises coming from State Parliament were different, in practise nothing was.

The public transport system is one prize example. The opportunity arose last November for the State Government to take the reins again, which they forfeited and the system is as crappy as ever. Likewise selling off the utilities was supposed to make them lean, mean and efficient. What actually happened is that the utilities are now owned by mostly overseas interests, many, many jobs were lost and the famed improvement in service has boiled down to the introduction of two and three year contracts to keep people chained to a particular provider at the expense of any improvement in either service or competition.

It is really funny therefore to watch Morris Iemma, the scheming weasel of NSW Parliament who is doing for the NSW Labor party what Jeff Kennett and John Howard did for State and Federal Liberals. No one in their right mind thinks that there will be any benefit in selling out public utilities. There must be a very, very nice future job or golden handshake in the works for someone in all of this and it sure as hell ain’t the voting public!

The corporate media helped sell the idea and the utilities when the fire sale was on in Victoria and at Federal level with Qantas, Telstra, the Commonwealth Bank and energy utilities sold for a song, they now enjoy a very, very modest level of criticism of such sales. Rather than every Australian being part owner of the gas, telephone, electricity, public transport, a national airline, a bank and of course the water infrastructure, now very few individuals hold shares and most are traded by multi-national conglomerates.

The utilities are run with a profit agenda. This is a huge problem for global greenhouse solutions. No one’s promoting serious changes to the status quo because they are more interested in a profit and share prices than they are in say, eliminating the use of coal fired power stations. No one’s pushing hammer and tongs for every household in Victoria to have rain and grey water systems because, you guessed it, there’s a profit agenda. Despite the damage being done to the environment and the risk to the survival of humans and many other animals, money still talks the loudest among the groups of old white men who run the global kleptocracy.

Unfortunately we’ve over-learned our stereotypes too well, otherwise every woman worth her salt would be making noises about the utilities being returned to public ownership in order to make the necessary changes. The stereotype of leftist politics and the fabricated need to avoid such like the plague has been drummed home so far that some people think Labor is left wing. Nothing could be further from the truth.

While we wait in vain for anything practical and positive to be done about global warming, we watch the approval ratings of the new government climb and climb, while Brendan Nelson shoots himself in both feet with gay abandon. We watch another Sydney Anglican employ the tactics of ‘bread and circuses’, as did his predecessor, and create commissions and enquiries into all manner of things. He even had his national youth summit and a listening tour. In reality, it’s all show. What is happening is little different to anything prior. A lot of song and dance, and bloody nothing really changes.

And the media’s still raking in the money with it’s embarrassing collusion in the whole sordid sideshow.

Bah, humbug.

Male privilege circumvented by teh ‘nets and geek grrrls.

Hoyden has founded the Australian chapter of Hollaback. Hollaback Aus is a blog where you can post pics of men who have been harrassing you, should you record them on your mobile or digital camera.

* A note to harassers: All emails containing threats, bluster, abuse, insults, rudeness, and general douchehoundery may be published, here or elsewhere, and/or appropriate action taken. Harassers and their apologists have no expectation of privacy on this blog.

H/T to Twisty for this one.

Yay. That’s it. Fortunately I don’t have a use for it presently, unless I scope back through my past and take pics of various church ministers, adoptive father and other assorted retrograde semi-human evolutionary anomalies…. But what a freaking great idea! Out the bastards. And mucho kudos for any woman who makes use of it.

Happy May Day!

Well, it’s that time of year again. While students in Korea and employees in Russia might be celebrating with a vodka or a riot, things will probably be quieter in the land down under. We may still be waiting for a revolution. You know, realising that people are human beings and not units of labour. Remembering that we’re part of the life of the planet and not merely consumers. Connecting with some sort of idea that humans created what we think of as the economy or culture and that if we made this one, we can just as easily make it into something else. Something more practical, more inclusive and less damaging.

In Australia women are particularly still waiting for a revolution. In recent days we’ve been vilified, stabbed, shot and raped… Not to mention the legislation of financial abuse that hasn’t been altered or even addressed by the current Government.

In spite of all this, Happy May Day. Because we can change it if we want to. It’s a waning moon at the moment, a good time for banishing and letting go. A good time for rituals that release all the stuff in the past that’s unhelpful and poisonous. Time to clear the decks in order to move forward.

Not that it would be beneficial to repress the past and forget it’s lessons. Simply that forever focussing on the evils in the world, all the horrible things that men do to each other and to women, can be so dreadfully depressing and seemingly hopeless. We continue on, often in spite of the carnage going on around us. We persevere hoping that in the midst of the abuse, we can create something for ourselves and experience life, love and laughter with friends.

And in spite of all the bullshit in the media and corporate construct, we can still spend some time in the bush reconnecting with the sacred natural.

Blessed be.

Back to my roots

Whew. After all the Feminist (or Womanist if you prefer) blogging in recent weeks, it’s back to a consideration of me time. Trying to exist without too much reference to the patriarchy and its abuses can leave you pretty worn out. It’s so very difficult to do. To insulate one’s self from messages of diminishment or denigration takes a full time effort and often leaves you alone in the lounge room, lonely and unplugged. The filtering of patriarchal infused advertising and media is likewise tiring.

Hence, time to renew meditation practise and do a few decent little rituals of renewal and grounding. Yum.

Today I’ve been cruising teh ‘nets and catching up on the witchy blogs. The blogroll is updated with some curious little oddities encountered during said venture.

You might get a laugh out of Godchecker. That’s their Celtic page…

Anglicans play catch up.

Which is marginally better than the Catholics in this instance, who aren’t even in the race.

Last week it was announced that Kay Goldsworthy will be consecrated bishop in May. Despite the ongoing dispute by neanderthal throwbacks in the Sydney diocese who seem to equate women with some odd variety of ornamental cattle, Ms Goldsworthy will become Australia’s first woman bishop. For what it’s worth, the Baptists (who are a diverse bunch) have been ordaining women for years and don’t have women bishops because they don’t have bishops at all.

Kay Goldsworthy was ordained back in 1992 by Peter Carnley, who made a few waves back then.

What caught my attention in this news was the tellie article on the ABC, which included a statement by Archbishop Herft:

“The church has brought about diminishment to women in the world and in the church,” he said.
“So there needs to be a time where we say in this act we are also saying sorry to those many women for whom the church has been a place of isolation and exclusiveness.”

ABOUT BLOODY TIME!

Not that this will scratch the surface of the damage done over the last 1700 years by crazed celibate monks and priests so deluded by their hatred of women that the entire gender was socially and culturally relegated to sex-caste throughout the world. The hatred and spite continues to this day. It has become entrenched in every layer of secular society where the leaders of business, law, medicine, religion and academia are mostly educated in religious schools that maintain the cultural subordination of women as a reality.

Even this most minute alteration to the overwhelming dominance on men and masculinity within the organisation has brought the expected disagreement from Sydney, who are notorious misogynists and retrograde puritanical control-freaks. How dare a mere woman attempt to exercise any leadership over men!

At the very least, the quote above is a public acknowledgement on behalf of a very small group of religious people in a corner of the land down under, that organised religion has been doing great damage to women.

That, at least, is appreciated. Now to get on with rearranging and correcting the rest of the construct, the other 99.9% of religion and male dominated phallocracy.