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About this website

SydWalker.Info is a personal website. I live in tropical Australia near Cairns. I oppose war, plutocracy, injustice, sectarian supremacism and apartheid. I support urgent action to achieve genuine sustainability and a fair and prosperous society for all. I rely upon - and support - free speech as defined in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (see below).

with the dawg

"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers"

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Unless otherwise indicated, material on this website is written by Syd Walker.

Anyone is welcome to re-publish material sourced from this site, as long as the source is acknowledged with a hyperlink.

Material from other sources reproduced here is presented on a 'Fair Use' basis. I try to cite references accurately. Please contact me if you have queries, comments, broken link reports, complaints - or just to say hello.

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New South Wales: two sides of a sex-obsessed Parliament
Sep 2nd, 2010 by Syd Walker

New South Wales has the oldest Parliament in Australia.

The State has a lower, government-forming chamber called the Legislative Assembly. It is dominated by the major political parties and runs rather like a smaller version of Australia’s Federal House of Representatives or the British House of Commons.

The Reverend Fred Nile

Reverend Fred Nile, Father of the NSW Legislative Council. Likes well-researched moral crusades

The State of NSW also has a Legislative Council – an upper house akin to the Federal Senate – to which members are elected by a form of proportional representation. Other parties, such as the Greens, are currently represented in the Legislative Council. In fact, there’s a smorgasbord of political flavours in the NSW Upper House, because the quota for success is relatively low. One of the long-standing beneficiaries has been the Reverend Fred Nile and his Christian Democratic Party.

The Reverend Nile has been an MLC since 1981. He’s ‘Father of the House’. In fact, he the longest-serving NSW Parliamentarian.

Views tend to polarize on the subject of Fred Nile. His supporters believe he’s a valiant defender of traditional Christian values. Opponents tend to view him as a moralizing reactionary hypocrite.

Yesterday yet another NSW Government Minister was forced to resign from Premier Keneally’s beleaguered Labor Government.

An audit of Parliament House computer use turned up the fact that Ports Minister Paul McLeay MLA had been accessing gambling and porn sites on his parliamentary computer. Embarrassed, the Minister stood down immediately, even offering to resign from the Labor Party.

Glenn Beck Unplugged
Aug 31st, 2010 by Syd Walker

Glenn Beck does Washington

Glenn Beck does Washington: August 28th 2010

Glenn Beck is a smug, smooth-talking, conformist lackey of the super-rich, posing as a ‘man of the people’, original thinker and populist philospher.

Championed in recent times by Rupert Murdoch’s odious Fox News US TV network, Glenn’s ego has now become a global phenomenon.

Last week-end, he strutted improbably at a August 28th Lincoln Memorial rally as a leader walking in the shoes of Martin Luther King – a false messiah preaching to the seriously deluded.

The bizarre story was reported as far away as wintry Australia.

Unfortunately, like most shock-jocks, Glenn has a past. People keep tapes.

This one is a beauty…

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Malcolm Fraser’s warning about the power of News Corp
Aug 31st, 2010 by Syd Walker

Appearing on the ABC‘s popular TV political chat show Q&A on August 30th 2010, former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser dropped a minor bombshell.

Malcolm Fraser on Q & A

Malcolm Fraser on Q & A

80-year old Fraser was head of the Liberal-National Coalition Government between 1975 and 1983. Deeply unpopular on the Australian left back in the 1970s – especially following the controversial sacking of the Whitlam Labor Government in 1975 by Australia’s Governor General – Fraser has none the less emerged in later life as an elder statesman of quality.

Like Ted Heath in Britain before him, Fraser watched the centre-right party he once led moving much further to the right in the quarter century following his departure.  Like Heath, Fraser has been outspoken in his criticism. This independent stance has made the right-wing of Australian politics nervous, but his genuine liberalism strikes a deep popular chord.

Last night, 49 minutes into the show, Fraser was posed a hostile, partisan question by a young Liberal supporter in the audience.

Fraser gave a rather thoughtful response:

“There is certainly a great yearning amongst both parties for a different approach, a broader approach, one which has some vision for the future of Australia and one which really tackles difficult issues and and is prepared to explain those issues, and not respond to focus groups or today’s polls or to pressure from News Corporation.”

The elderly ex-politician paused. There was a momentary and rather embarrassed silence, followed by a few titters.

Outsourcing Occupation
Aug 30th, 2010 by Syd Walker

Is there anything worse than a 63 year military occupation?

Perhaps there is?

More from Palestine Think Tank TV here.

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The 1-2-3 of tolerated religious bigotry
Aug 30th, 2010 by Syd Walker

1

First, imagine a scholarly and widely respected Christian leader gave a sermon last week-end, referring to Moslems as “our enemies and haters” and intoning “May they vanish from the world, may God smite them with the plague!

The story might well have made today’s New York Times. The western media would be chattering happily about this latest nasty turn in Christian-Islamic relations. Another ‘sign of the times’, TV talking heads would be saying to each other, shaking their wise heads. Sad – but understandable given the ongoing ‘War on Terror’…

2

Next, imagine a leading and widely respected Islamic scholar had given a sermon last week-end, referring to Jews as “our enemies and haters” and exclaiming  “May they vanish from the world, may Allah smite them with the plague!

If the Imam in question lived in the ‘free world’, it’s not hard to imagine he might already be in jail. He could certainly expect ‘hate crimes’ charges and a massive media campaign against him, with all and sundry deploring his outrageous remarks. If he lived in a Moslem nation such as Iran, it would be grist to the western mass media mill… yet another ‘proof’ that Moslem societies are barely civilized.

3

Finally… imagine a leading and widely respected Jewish scholar giving a lecture last week-end.

Rabbi Yosef

Rabbi Yosef: hopes God hates Palestinians too

Unlike the two hypothetical cases above, this actually happened.

Led like simpletons into war and ruin
Aug 30th, 2010 by Syd Walker

Islam Charicatured

Islam Charicatured: cartoon by Latuff

Even in the ill-informed western world, we don’t have to get all our news through the distorting prism of Zionist bias.

But it does take a little effort to get a more complete and accurate view of the world.

Reviewing the western mass media’s reportage of the globally-publicized spike of ‘Islamophobia’ currently surging through the USA, one encounters various flavours of opinion.

They range from well-intentioned bleating about the need to protect the rights of innocent Moslems – to the most extraordinary, extremist vilification of Islam and its adherents. A wide range of views are given expression… in true democratic style.

Well, almost all views. Absent is the analysis of authentic anti-Zionist commentators.

You won’t, for instance, hear Mark Glenn interviewed by the mainstream western media anytime soon. His message jars.

Zionist puppetry

Zionist puppetry

Heretically, he suggests Islamophobia is a deliberately manufactured phenomenon.

Mark believes it’s the product of some very illiberal and sectarian forces, but not Christian or ‘western’ interests in any meaningful sense.

On the contrary, he sees Islmophobia as the handiwork of Zionists, working to advance the interests of an expansionist State of Israel.

It would be nice if the western media allowed such opinions free expression. On the other hand, one can understand why they don’t. A marketeer doesn’t promote alternative brands.

Fortunately, the Iranian media doesn’t suffer such strict censorship.

Even though Mr Glenn’s views irritate the western plutocracy, Iran’s English-language news service Press TV featured him quite recently.

Nothing to say
Aug 29th, 2010 by Syd Walker

It takes a lot to silence the Israel Lobby, but a well-chosen question can do the trick.

Al Jazeera should be complemented on assigning independently-minded journalist Clayton Swisher to cover the recent AIPAC Policy Conference. Nice work all round.

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Saga from down-under: brain surgery and the global mind
Aug 29th, 2010 by Syd Walker

It’s an oddity of the human character that brain surgery, a very serious matter, is often the subject of jokes.

Perhaps it’s our way of dealing with the frightening and unthinkable.

The notion of an utter incompetent engaging in something as delicate as tampering with our brains makes us squeamish. What might he do to our minds? Ouch! So we joke about it.

Communications Minister Senator Stephen Conroy

Communications Minister Senator Stephen Conroy: mash-ups by Bob Whidon

In similar vein, many informed Australians have been making jokes about Senator Stephen Conroy for some years now.

The sniggers began almost as soon as he begame Australia’s Communications Minister, after the Rudd Labor Government was elected to power in 2007. They took off the next year, when it became apparent the Minister was quite insistent on imposing a mandatory internet ‘filter’ on all Australians.

The internet can be viewed as the neuronal structure of a globalizing humanity. It provides the basis for closely interwoven global society. Information streams through the network – information about people, activities, ideas, money and other data. It travels at the speed of light. This is the information flow that binds us together and makes our interconnected world work.

Our generation has grown used to the technology and participated in its growing sophistication. We are alive at a most remarkable time in human history. It’s a time when the mind of humanity is literally coming together, in ‘real time’. We’re still at the beginning of this extraordinary metamorphic process.

Perhaps they’ll listen now?
Aug 29th, 2010 by Syd Walker

This morning I woke up thinking of my old friend Huw Davies, who took his own life in early 1994.

Huw Davies

Huw Davies: via PhotoAccess, Canberra

Huw was a talented art photographer and ‘life artist’.

His friends adored him for his kindness, his compassion, his amazing energy and above all for a wonderful sense of humour.

About a year before his death, I had an intense debate with Huw about prospects for humanity. I took the optimist side, arguing we’re not only part of creation, but a special and significant part – for all our faults and weaknesses.

Huw – in blacker mood than I’d  seen him before – countered that humans are more like a lethal virus. I clearly remember him saying that if humans ever truly escape from the bounds of this planet, we’ll screw up the rest of the universe too.

I still can’t agree with Huw about that. Yet 15 years on, it’s hard to adduce much evidence he was wrong. I don’t think Huw believed all humans as intrinsically evil. His point was about the powerful (those most likely to head for the stars).

Perhaps our outward progress is stalled until we develop the wisdom to coexist and co-evolve?

I wish Huw was still around to continue the discussion.

In the last years of his life, Huw Davies developed a style for retouching photos by fingerpainting. The similarity with the painting style of Vincent Van Gogh was obvious. Somewhat later, he became intensely depressed and took his own life, like Vincent before him.

The anti-Carter coup of 1980
Aug 29th, 2010 by Syd Walker

With a persistance that does him credit, veteran investigative journalist and founder of Consortium News Robert Parry has been nibbling away at the 1980 ‘October Surprise’ story for a long time.

Each time he revisits the saga, Parry bites another chunk off the cookie.

Jimmy Carter - Worst President Billboard

Jimmy Carter - Worst President Billboard

His latest article – The CIA/Likud Sinking of Jimmy Carter – draws more confident and far-reaching  conclusions than before.

Parry makes a solid case that Jimmy Carter’s Administration was brought down by a conspiracy involving elements of the CIA and the far-right Israeli Government of the day. The former were ultimately answerable to George Bush senior, Vice Presidential candidate for the Republicans in the 1980 election. The latter were presumably under the control of Israel’s Prime Minister Menachim Begin, a former Irgun terrorist.

The Israeli connection helps explain how this story has taken so long to break. Parry relates (emphasis added):

As the Official Story of the 1980 October Surprise case crumbles – with new revelations that key evidence was hidden from investigators of a congressional task force and that internal doubts were suppressed – history must finally confront the troubling impression that remains: that disgruntled elements of the CIA and Israel’s Likud hardliners teamed up to remove a U.S. president from office.

Indeed, it is this disturbing conclusion – perhaps even more than the idea of a Republican dirty trick – that may explain the longstanding and determined cover-up of this political scandal.

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