Which of these is really true?

1. A WTO Representative gave a lecture recently at the Wharton Business School in the US, arguing that ’stewardship’, or corporate ownership of people, was the only way to bring Africa back from the brink:

The initiative will require Western companies doing business in some parts of Africa to own their workers outright. Schmidt recounted how private stewardship has been successfully applied to transport, power, water, traditional knowledge, and even the human genome. The WTO’s “full private stewardry” program will extend these successes to (re)privatize humans themselves.

“Full, untrammelled stewardry is the best available solution to African poverty, and the inevitable result of free-market theory,” Schmidt told more than 150 attendees. Schmidt acknowledged that the stewardry program was similar in many ways to slavery, but explained that just as “compassionate conservatism” has polished the rough edges on labor relations in industrialized countries, full stewardry, or “compassionate slavery,” could be a similar boon to developing ones.

The audience included Prof. Charles Soludo (Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria), Dr. Laurie Ann Agama (Director for African Affairs at the Office of the US Trade Representative), and other notables. Agama prefaced her remarks by thanking Schmidt for his macroscopic perspective, saying that the USTR view adds details to the WTO’s general approach.

2. A UK thinktank has proposed that corporate and individual ownership of whales is the only way they will ever be saved:

Preserving endangered species is not rocket science. We should not rely on people’s benevolence to ensure their survival. If we allowed people, businesses, communities, and environmental groups to own whales, then Greenpeace could buy up all the whales to protect them, and businesses could sell whale-watching or sell hunting rights or whale meat.

New technologies would assist in protecting the whales – a small, harmless antenna could be implanted in whales to track their movements by satellite. The whales might even be valuable enough to merit a boat which travels with them to protect them. The IWC could assign property rights to whales and auctioning them to the highest bidders. If poachers violated those rights, they would be subject to the same legal procedures and punishments as for other forms of theft, and the owner would be awarded compensation.

Regardless of whether the whales were kept alive or eaten, ownership would ensure that whales never go extinct. This is because markets harness the self-interest of individuals. Whale markets would be no different - they would be driven by prices and would be subject to the same incentives that drive creativity and innovation through our economy.

Guess which one is real and which is false! (Without looking.) Answers under the fold.

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From the Gender Project:

Nominations are now open for Melbourne’s first annual Trans Revolutionary Achievement and Non-Achievement Awards (TRAANAA), otherwise known as the Trannys.

We call for nominations of

• local community organisations
• bureaucratic institutions
• community leaders
• films
• events
• performers
• health professionals
• random personal moments of revelation
• people we love, or love to hate

The Trannys are about celebrating the joys and difficulties of trans/queer existence with a dash of glamour, an ounce of piss-taking, and the serious need to out the crappy transphobic institutions that make our lives hell. We challenge the conservatism of the pink champagne
circuit, where the same ‘community leaders’ parade around, year after dull year. We challenge the skewed representations of the queer media, for whom the latest Anthony Callea single is more important than trans and queer people living with poverty, discrimination and violence. We challenge the fallacy that there is a GLBTQI community in which we are all equal.

By awarding prizes for transphobia, tokenism, unprofessional psychiatry and bureaucratic nightmares, we draw attention to the everyday discrimination many people in the ‘GLBTIQ’ community experience because of their gender presentation. We’re not afraid to laugh at ourselves, either. By awarding prizes for supportive healthcare, gender-neutral bathrooms, gender-messy events and improvements in the community’s treatment of transpeople, we honour the random kindnesses of strangers and the moving tide of knowledge about trans and gender-variant people, and the growing acceptance that for most of us humans, gender is never stable.

Nominations can be made for the following categories:

1. Most Outstandingly Unhelpful and Transphobic Gay and Lesbian Organisation
2. Most Supportive and Trans-Friendly Health Professional
3. Most Trans-Friendly Organisation
4. Most Unexpectedly Non-Traumatic Coming Out Moment
5. Best Genderfucking Event of 2006
6. Worst Case of Misinformation About Transpeople in a Newspaper or Magazine Article
7. Best Example of Simultaneous Racism, Sexism and Transphobia from A ‘GLBTIQ’ Perspective
8. The Harry Benjamin Award for the Most Inappropriate Comment by a Psychiatrist
9. The Milli Vanilli Award for the Most Lazy and Uninspired Drag Performance of 2006
10. The TransAmerica Award for the Most Conservative Trans Movie
11. The Golden Shower Award for the Best Gender Neutral Bathroom in Melbourne
12. The Ratbag Award for the Most Incorrigible Gender-Variant Upstart
13. The Red Tape Award for the Most Time Consuming Gender Related Administrative Nightmare
14. The Sharp Learning Curve Award for Most Improvement in Gender Awareness
15. The Token Award for the Best Performance of Trans-Friendliness Without the Action to Back it Up
16. International Achievement Award for the Best Example of Trans Advocacy Overseas
17. Best Tranny

HOW TO NOMINATE

1. Go to http://www.genderproject.net.au/trannys/ and follow the link.
2. Email info[AT]genderproject.net.au with the person/thing you’d like to nominate, the award category, the reason they should win, and your name.

Apart from the International Achievement Award, please keep nominations limited to Australia. Be imaginative.

Nominations close 6pm, Friday 8th December.

HOW TO VOTE

Once the nominations have closed on the 8th December, vote at http://www.genderproject.net.au/trannys

THE AWARDS CEREMONY

The Tranny Awards will be held on Sunday December 17 at an as yet undisclosed location. Look out for more publicity coming soon or join the announcements list at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/trannys_2006_announce/.

The last three ways that people got here via Google:

problems encountered when employees engage in multi tasking (page 18)
gay self fisting blogs (page 13)
spivak poststructuralism, marginality (page 1)

Sorry, no gay self-fisting here. But good luck, and please wear gloves.

A. has been sending me Youtube clips of the Sunnyboys and Saints and Do Re Mi and Big Pig all night, culminating in a nostalgic surf through our respective musical childhoods. As much as I love late 70’s/early 80’s Australian punk-pop, I wasn’t old enough to discover it at the moment it emerged. Which means that when A. finds a clip for me, she’ll say, “Don’t you remember the blah blahs?” and my answer is often, “No? Should I?”

Intergenerational music education: a more relaxed pedagogy than the musical education I receievd as a teenager, which consisted of the household stereo being tuned ubiquitously to classical music stations, Karl Haas at 9am every weekday (while I was doing home schooling my parents let me start work at 10am so I wouldn’t miss “Adventures in Good Music”), Glenn Gould, the Tallis Scholars, Yitzhak Perlman, Du Pre and Barenboim, violin practice, piano practice. It’s not that this wasn’t enjoyable, I just didn’t get a grasp of popular music until I was about 15, and even then, it was pretty tenuous.

Ratcat’s “Don’t Go Now” marks the intersection of classical and pop fandom in my musical history. Specifically, 1991: I was in Year Ten and on music camp in the big city, billeted with a goth-punk viola player called Mikal. Mikal was 17 and sang in a band. Mikal looked like Simon Day. The band, I don’t remember their name now, let me hang around while they practiced covers of “Don’t Go Now” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. (It’s totally possible that this was the first time I heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, ‘live’ in some kid’s garage.) Smitten, I decided that if you could play viola in an orchestra and sport leather jackets, black hair and eyeliner, I wanted in. Black and white stripey shirts never looked so good.

The other day I had coffee with a friend, and a friend of his who recently finished Honours in Cinema Studies at our [growing] esteemed institution. Cinema Studies has been rocked by controversy lately, and it’s all the fault of Jean Seberg. Apparently, some of this year’s first year Cinema Studies students were shocked at finding a picture of two men in a romantic embrace on the cover of the Cinema Studies 101 photocopied reader. They continued to be offended until it was pointed out that the ‘two men’ were actually Jean-Laul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, from A Bout de Souffle, and that what they’d been reading as homosexuality was, in fact, heterosexual love between a man and a 60’s androgynous gamine.

To be sure, Jean does look pretty boyish. Boyish enough, I think, for some queer Godard fan of yore to deliberately read her in key moments as male, turning Breathless into a story about a boy failing spectacularly to find a Daddy. You would have to explain the pregnancy somehow, but it could be done.

Anyhow, what-philistines-isn’t-that-that-hilarious! Not so much, it turns out. Some of the students were so offended that they complained to the Vice-Chancellor. So the VC had words with the Cinema Studies department, and as a result, Jean and Jean Paul were removed from the reader cover, along with the week on pornography in cinema. It looks like A Bout de Souffle itself only just managed to escape being pulled off the syllabus completely. (more…)

I’ve been trawling through my Thailand fieldnotes over the last week, and along the way finding unrelated notes that I meant to blog about at the time, but didn’t. My friend Dion told me I should visit Siriraj Medical Museum while I was in Bangkok. Siriraj Hospital is a large public hospital on the left bank of the Chao Praya river, just opposite the Grand Palace and tourist precint. The hospital has a medical and forensic museum, in which the embalmed bodies of at least one serial killer is displayed, along with various articles of evidence, such as blood-stained knives, the clothing someone was wearing when she was stabbed, recontructions of murder scenes, and most famously, a room full of physiological exhibits: dead deformed babies, cancerous lungs, weak hearts. I’d left my camera behind, so took notes. Here are some of them.

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Check out Bordersphere. Among other things, there’s an essay by Yugi Agematsu about being arrested on Roosevelt Island; audio of one of my favourite writers, Lynne Tillman, reading from her work and William Haver talking about “Public Enemies”.

One of the Tillman stories is especially great. At a party dressed in her dead father’s suit, she meets Clint Eastwood and they talk about masculinity, the western and other stuff. She has such a beautiful reading voice.