KRudd, Christmas, and the global economy

'Tis the season to be ... shopping. Christmas shopping. And every man and his dog seems to out there doing it. I was shopping for DVDs and CDs, and you stood in a zigzag line to get to the checkout counter -- it was like checking in with baggage at the airport. The reason would have to be the monster sales that're going on right now. You can get 75% of just about anything, if you know where to look, which is great for Christmas shopping, but one can't help wondering what it's doing to the retailers themselves -- and the manufacturers. It's almost as if the holidays have offered a "stay of execution," and the retail industry will prop itself up for a couple more months before The Big Crunch comes.

Speaking of the impending Crunch ... Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was lampooned in the media (again) just last week. Apparently this country is still swearing up and down that we ain't, not no way, not no how, having any kind of a recession. Not even a marsupial one (which is the same as a regular recession, only it comes with a pouch). Australia is lingering in clinical denial at this point, and the farthest anyone will go is to predict that something like 80,000 jobs will vanish into the sweet by and by in the next 18 months --

Yeah, right. 550,000 American workers joined the unemployment line in the month of November alone, and Australia will get away with 80,000 retrenchments over a year and a half?!

At the precise same moment, Mister KRudd is reportedly toying with the idea [barfing sounds from every part of downunder, including some from new Zealand] of borrowing tens of billions of dollars overseas to pump into the local building industry --


Hooooold the phone. We only just got out from under our national debt. "Jackboot" John Howard put this country through the wringer for around a decade to get it paid off. By the time he left office, 12 months ago, Australia actually had a surplus of some billions of dollars. In a year, Kevin Rudd had spent the surplus and is looking seriously at getting us started on another national debt.

Hence the barfing sounds. The man needs to get a dictionary and look up the word "recession." It's something that happens, like flu. Since globalization happened, recession is a global problem. You can't fix it by borrowing megabucks from countries like China, to prop up industry...

Which is something the Bush administration never grasped either. In the end, they're borrowing from China et al to cover a massive budget deficit -- Chinese dollars are running essential services qt home in the States, while the country hoses money into Iraq at the rate of billions of dollars a week. Right. Makes sense.

A little while ago, I got to thinking: If the trillions of dollars are being pumped into the US, where are they? They don't just vanish. They go into the economy and should be circulating. So where the hell have 7.5 trillion dollars disappeared to?

Now, some would be sucked up by the mega-rich, who seem to be getting richer while the impoverished part of the community displays exponential growth patterns. But not all the money can be landing in the bank accounts of the rich -- they'd end up with more money than the national treasury! So, just where is the money?!

My guess would be ... right back in China. Think about this: money comes in; money lands in paypackets; money goes into circulation and eventually gets spent buying goods like toys, electronics, computer parts, DVD blanks, cars, textiles, which are made -- where? You guessed.

So, anyway, here we are Christmas shopping, and yep, a lot of the stuff we're buying is made in China, or India, Indonesia and ... so on and so forth. So you can see the same model in place as in the States ... you borrow a ton of money from overseas, and use it to buy imported goods. That's really intelligent.

In fact, it's about as intelligent as you'd expect from someone who is in the process of crippling the internet with filtering to protect children who, according to Save The Children, do need protecting, but not like this! This moron shall remain nameless, but his initials and K.R.

The Mel-o-Sphere is a complete vacuum at the moment. The proof of FORTUNES OF WAR just arrived from CreateSpace, so we were able to give the book a nudge in the direction of Amazon.com, but the process takes so long, you won't see it there before New Year. AQUAMARINE is in transit, with the proof halfway over the Pacific at this time (weeks late, due to the stuff-up at CreateSpace -- which has subsequently been fixed, I'm glad to report). THE LORDS OF HARBENDANE will be available as an eBook in a few days, but there have been too many hiccups in the system for us to be able to get the paperback out with any hope of a Christmas launch. So we're settling for January, with apologies to all concerned.

And if you'll excuse me now, I have to go giftwrap a lot of Christmas gifts. 'Tis the season, and all that.


Ciao for now,
MK

Keegan's Master Plan for 2009

If you've been following the Google situation ... in which Keegan's page ranking has been zeroed out due to an incredible f**k-up in the algorithms ... you'll be looking for an update. The story so far, in a thimble, is that this blog has been caught in the snare set to trap "pay per post" bloggers. 100,000 ppp bloggers have had their PR set to zero ... and about half a million more innocent blogs (of which this is one!) will probably also have abeen relegated to page 9,547 of the search engine results, since the snare catches the guilty and the innocent alike, so long as they met the right criteria ... and this blog does.

The upshot of this is, The World According to Mel is like that island in Pirates of the Caribbean: it can only be found by people who already know where it is! For the full story, see this: http://mel-keegan.blogspot.com/2008/12/when-google-is-wrong-boy-is-she-wrong.html

The blog is obviously on the skids, because no one can invest this much writing in something which Google is determined to strangle out of existence! Is it unfair? Yes, it is. Am I madder than hell? Yes, I am. Am I going to chuck in the towel? No, I'm not!

I've been having ideas for new blogs and sites since I discovered what's going on between Keegan and The Goog. And if you tuned in a few days ago, you'd have seen this post:
http://mel-keegan.blogspot.com/2008/11/saturday-morning-subjectivity.html

Somehow (and I can't even remember how) I stumbled into the fascinating world of the digital novel. And I'm intrigued. I can't resist doing this.

I have a stack of novels about three feet thick (no exaggeration. If you printed them out in paperback form, they would occupy 36 inches of bookshelf), and no way of publishing them between covers anytime soon. But ... what if they were uploaded, chapter by chapter, to a blog? What if you parked advertising on the blog? What if you had about a thousand people reading each FREE daily installment of the unfolding epic adventure?! What if even a few people gave you a click on a $1 donation button? The Internet being what it is (vast beyond the wildest dreams of anyone barring a galactic astronomer or your actual cosmologist), there should be an unspeakably massive number of readers looking for a good-quality freebie, and even a small percentage of those readers, at $1 per click, will pay my bills.

There are 1,000 page novels with titles like BLOOD AND FIRE (vampyre), and THE EYES OF NIGHT (historical fantasy), and LEGENDS (tales of elder Atlantis) and DRAGON OF BRITONS (Arthurian fantasy), and POWER AND MAGICKS (after the holocaust SF), and CRYSTAL GENESIS (future fantasy), and THE KINDGOM OF SUMMER (more fantasy).

Where the hell do all these novels come from? I've been writing for over 30 years, folks. GMP and Millivres managed to publish the grand total of 8 books over 12 of those years. DreamCraft have done another 14 over the last 8 years, as well as reprinting many (though not all) of the original novels.

Uh ... what do you think I've been doing for thirty years?! New writers are inclined to write a book and then work like hell to sell it, and they don't write anything else till they sell the first one. This is a big mistake -- and a bad one. Firstly, it might take you several novels' worth of writing to develop a style, and an integrity in your editing, which makes you publishable in the first place! Then, practise makes perfect. If you write one novel and then stop ... your chances of becoming a working, self-supporting writer, just went down like a brick.

I always wrote about five times more than could ever be published. Some of my earlier stuff was read in "limited release" editions, and various versions of things were read by small(ish) groups a long, long time ago (like, 25 years ago).

So there's an ocean of gay fiction a la Keegan to be tapped into, and I'm very, very fascinated to give it a shot.

Also, thanks to the sheer audacity of Aricia Gavriel, I now know that you can rip Blogger templates apart and play tunes on their innards. Mind you, I, myself, don't know how, but have a look at this:

http://ariciasgaybookblog.blogspot.com/

And I know for a fact where AG had it done. Why did I never think to go whining to DreamCraft and have Jade drag out some magic wand and wave it over this blog? Good gods, I'm getting slow.

So -- when the big fiction blogs start running in the new year, you'll be seeing some page designs that are literally out of this world.

Incidentally, AG is only just floating this new blog. I think it has something like two proper posts up at the time of this writing, but I'll be watching it closely ... not (only) to see what she says about my stuff, but because I quite agree with the premise of the blog: there were some fantastic books 20 - 40 years ago, and they're being forgotten, or at least overlooked, in the avalanche of gay fiction which is issuing from the ebook and online publishers. Companies like alibris, Amazon and eBay are treasure troves of secondhand gay books (including mine), and the reader's biggest challenge is just to know what they are, where they are, what they're about, what to buy. AG: you've chosen a great niche ... now, let's see what you can make of it, kiddo.

Me? I'm heading off into uncharted waters in 2009. The unthinkably vast fiction blogs ... stories in which you can lose yourself for months at a time, as they appear post by post.

You've got to be fascinated.

Ciao for now,
MK

Getting onto Google's hit-list

The saying is, "It's a Google World." And that's absolutely true. And if Google were always right, her omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence, would (probably) be a good thing.

But Mother Google is sometimes wrong ... and when she's wrong, she stuffs it up royally, causing businesses to fold, people to fall out of work; and someone, somewhere, whose back was already up against the wall, is eventually going to shoot him/herself, and the suicide note will name Google as the reason.

This is NOT, repeat NOT, a pay-per-post blog. I have not, nor have I ever, been a "postie." The only time, prior to this, that I have mentioned the term "postie" was in reference to an Australian postman, who is locally, colloquially, known as (you guessed) a "postie."

A pay-per-post blog is a blog where the blogger blogs about blogable subjects for which a sponsor pays him/her maybe $5 a pop for a couple of hundred words on a specific topic, with a link buried somewhere in it, and the link points to (duh) the sponsor's website.

One such sponsor is Tom Burton, who has used, or is using, pay-per-post advertising to get significant numbers of inbound links pointing at his Sweeney Todd website. It works. Let's say Burton paid $5 per link to 5,000 posties ... for $25,000 he would have so many links pointing to him, his Page Rank is #1 ...

Google is probably madder than all hell about this, because they're losing money hand over fist. THEY need to be the ones earning up to $100 per click (!!), via their pay-per-click advertising (Google Adsense) ... and THEY need to be the ones who sell the sponsored ads at the top of the search engine results pages, which put advertisers the #1 spot for about $1,000 a day. And THEY need to be in charge of page rankings -- THEY award the PRs ...

They also take them away. Page Ranking is a Google game. You play by their rules, or they hurt you. The hurt you bad.

Not surprisingly, a short while ago Google decided that pay-per-post was one of the world's greatest evils, and it had to be rooted out with Dominionist fervor. Their algorithms were changed ... they hunted down blogs that met the criteria:

• Many different subjects, not just one;
• One or several posts per day;
• Lots of outbound links headed everywhere;
• The word "postie" appears somewhere;
• Blogger uses a deliberate "pinging service."

And apparently up to 100,000 folks on the pay-per-post network, who had been earning enough to stay off unemployment, were instantly screwed: their page ranking was "zeroed out."

No visitors = no click-throughs = no sponsors = no money = the unemployment line.

Worse yet, Mother Google is not always right. To put it another way, she's frequently dead wrong. Lots and lots of other, innocent, blogs, fit the bill nicely ... like this one. I write on every topic under the sun, with links going everywhere; I post daily, and can do a second post if something good happens. I talked, once, about the Aussie postie, on his postiebike. And, on the advice of an Internet guru, I used a third party service called "Pingomatic" to deliberately ping the blog registers, four consecutive days.

Before the crackdown on pay-per-post bloggers, The World According to Mel was getting between 30 and 90 visitors per day, and my mission was being achieved -- I don't blog because I love to type. I don't yack on here to massage my ego, or because I like the sound of my own voice! I blog to increase awareness of my work ... my novels. For every 50 people who land on the blog, one or two click through to the website, and one of them bookmarks it and starts looking at my free samples. This is the way -- theoretically -- you build up a readership base. Right? Right.

And along the way, some readers actually like to read the blog, because there's a lot of good stuff on these pages, and I'm over 200 posts now. Theoretically, I should be drawing about 150 hits per day by New Year.

And then --

Wham. You guessed. I've been caught in the snares set to catch the pay-per-post bloggers. My page rank has been zeroed out. The only people reading this blog are regular readers who have it bookmarked. Meaning ... yourself, and a group like you.

It is physically impossible for me to win a Google search, because no matter how relevant my keywords are (and they are bloody relevant -- deliberately designed that way), with a Zero Page Rank, no page will ever appear on any search results page, anywhere.

Since June 20th, when The World According to Mel went online, around 30 regular readers have gathered. Most visit once a week. It's enough to amount to about 4 hits per day, all of them from bookmarks. The only other visitors come from urls that have been emailed to friends by the 30 regulars, and a couple who click through from the website. There are no other visitors ... no one comes from Google or any other search engine. In other words, what should have been up to 650 visitors per week by New Year will be 28.

Well ... darn. I could put it in stronger language. There's absolutely nothing that can be done about this. Contact Google and tell them they've made a booboo, and you just know they'll put you on the blacklist forever.

So, what's the plan?

Obviously, you know I can't keep on putting up long, serious posts! It's taken 90 - 120 minutes per day, every day, since June 20th, to build this blog to the point it's at now. Am I angry with Google? Yes, I am. Am I thinking about what to do next?

Of course I am. The plan is this: I'll keep posting till New Year, and see if the system is self-correcting. If there is the slightest shred of justice, there will be a system of "check and fix" in place. I have no idea if there is, but IF this is true, then eventually a 'bot will be along, and will actually look at the blog, see the mistake, and fix my zeroed-out rankings.

If the problem is not fixed by New Year, then the best idea is -- transmigration. The World According to Mel closes; Keegan's World, or The Daily Keegan, or something, will open in January. The content of this blog can be salvaged in several ways. I can just repost everything to the new blog -- as soon as I know the old one has been thoroughly deleted not just from Blogger, but from the Google index (because, of course, if you post "duplicate" material, Google will hurt you, big time ... and until the old index is updated, a repost from an extinct blog will just look like a duplicate).

I can also zip each month here, and make it available as a webpage archive, which is readable by every browser except Netscape. I can also take the best posts and make a really terrific ebook, for $1 (guys, I got bills to pay; a little help here?? Thank you kindly).

So there are multiple possibilities, but also the purple flags are up: if Google does NOT fix the problem, and a new blog becomes necessary to get away from the utter garbage rating that has been assigned to this one without a shred of justice ...

What's to stop the shiny new blog meeting the exact same criteria, and instantly being wrongly categorized by the 'bot?! Now, this is a question I'm still thinking about. I don't have an answer yet. What might happen is that I wind up with several different blogs: writing ... politics ... entertainment ... publishing ... gay issues ... religion ... whatever.

I'm still thinking about it -- and I'll let you know what I come up with.

For the moment, I want to thank my regular readers VASTLY for your support. Do keep reading, because (!) right now you're the only ones who are visiting. Also, if you were in a mood to help ... email the urls for really good posts to friends who might be interested in the topics. And if you have a blog of your own, let's trade links.

Otherwise -- let's see what sense the Googlebot can make of the incredible mess it's made. I'm angry, because I have six months' work invested in this blog. I'm also angry that in order to make even more billions, Google has taken away the livelihood of a great many "little people" who blog for just enough to pay the rent and buy groceries. To me, that is evil. Its just plain wicked ... and poetically predictable in a world where money is replacing the air we breathe.

Ciao for now,
MK

Gay books: where are the good ones hiding?

Yesterday I was talking about the fact that diminishing numbers of people are reading at all ... not because they wouldn't read if they could, but because they just plain can't read. With illiteracy rates up over 50% in some parts of the US, is it any wonder that American politics is a game of deception and drama? Half the electorate can't go and check the facts on paper or on the Internet! Half the electorate is compelled to accept any twaddle handed out to them by a shonky politician, because they can't read well enough to verify and/or invalidate what's been said!
http://mel-keegan.blogspot.com/2008/12/i-write-therefore-i-am-but-whos-reading.html

So, with reading becoming a rare skill, it's little wonder than even people who can read are not reading a much as they used to: the entertainment marketplace is becoming increasingly geared to the HUGE section of the public that has the vote, the job, the paycheck and reading skills which are so inadequate, you find them in the theatre or in front of the TV, not in the bookstore. The rest of us are, therefore, so inundated with the constant torrent from the visual and audio media that our choices are massively wide ... and sure, we sometimes read. But there's always something to do instead. Like, the new DVD or MP3. The new movie that just opened. The new season of something halfway decent on TV.

Reading is gradually being shuffled off into the background, and alas, creative writing is going with it -- because if no one is reading, who the hell is going to be bothered writing?!

Worse yet, for writers, (and particularly for fiction writers), with the inexorable collapse of the mainstream publishing industry, book reviewers are overlooking "marginalized" writers more and more. I just read a post by Brent Ledger at Xtra* in which he's lamenting the fact that the mainstream media appears to be blind, or at least myopic, when it comes to reviewing new gay books -- in other words, they only review the best-selling gay mega-stars; and meanwhile, a significant number of gay readers have "stopped reading gay, because they don't know what to read."
[*http://www.xtra.ca/public/Toronto/Fleeting_gays-5959.aspx]

Well ... from my perspective (and I've been in this business for over 20 years now), the mainstream media never did review gay books from people whose names were not Edmund White, Gordon Merrick, Mary Renault, or Patricia Nell Warren, and so forth. I don't recall a single instance when one of my earlier works was reviewed by a mainstream paper or magazine, though I was quite often reviewed by the gay press of the day. I still use those pull quotes in my current books.

Perhaps the mainstream media avoided my books because they were "too gay?" Brent Ledger suggests that virtually all of the gay books reviewed in the mainstream lately have been written by straights ... in other words, these writers have possibly "packaged" gay stories and characters for the mainstream media, putting them in wrappers and ribbons that make the books acceptable, while a Keegan novel, from the Gay Men's press, would have been a gay story for a gay (or at least gay-friendly) readership, from a gay publisher. Which is altogether too gay to be comfortable to the mainstream.

It's an interesting question, and I left this comment on the post at Xtra:

Waiting for gay literature to be treated fairly in the mainstream media is like waiting for rain in the desert.

Frankly, I gave up on the media a long time ago. Much of the best gay writing, publishing and (often) reading happens online these days. When GMP closed, many of their writers, myself included, embraced cyberspace. (I was with GMP for 12 years.) Until the recent market crash, we were doing fine, and when the recession turns around and readers start shopping again, we expect to be doing fine again.

Here's the rub: looking for good gay reading, you have to stop waiting for the mainstream media (I agree 100% with all Mr. Ledger says ... and he's said it all here, no need for Keegan to reiterate).

In fact, you have to hunt down good gay books yourself. They're out there, but they seldom get into bookstores these days, since the "worms in the Big Apple" situation with mainstream publishing.

Looking for a good gay book starts, not with a bus or train downtown, but with a Google search. As a gay writer with a backlist of over 20 novels in print, I guess I view the situation from the reverse perspective. On one side you have readers desperately wanting to find a good gay book. On the other side you have gay writers desperately wanting to be read. There HAS to be a meeting of minds somewhere in the middle, and the internet seems to be the place where it's most likely to happen!
http://www.xtra.ca/public/Toronto/Fleeting_gays-5959.aspx

The situation leaves one a bit at a loss: people en masse go to the Internet for anything and everything these days. News, sport, weather, a new camera, DVD rentals, plane tickets, hotel bookings, roadmaps --

But, looking for a good gay book they would rather read nonexistent reviews in the paper or a magazine, and complain that there's nothing to read?!

People, please. Wake up. Google rules the world -- you haven't noticed?!

The bookselling marketplace is, at the moment, a depressed and depressing place to work. It's easy to become disillusioned with it, and one has to remember, the housing market, the new car market, the travel industry ... everything is flat as the proverbial bickie. Why should books be any different?

To readers, I would say: "Get on the Internet and use Google, that's what it's there for!" To writers I would say, "Have patience and have faith -- all recessions turn around, and the trick is to be there when they do." To publishers I would say, "Rethink your industry, because it's been strangling writers for decades, so who can be surprised when we gravitate to cyberspace?!"

Cheers,
MK

I write, therefore I am ... but who's reading?!

As a writer -- and blogger -- I often find myself wondering just who my readers really are, and where they are, where they come from, what they want, and so forth. There was a time (not so long ago) when people wrote letters, gave feedback, came out and said what they thought of a story or novel. Those days appear to be gone. You can barely wring a comment out of readers even by offering them entry into a competition with a nice prize, in exchange for a paragraph of feedback; and there's something inestimably sad about this.

Which leaves the writer (blogger, journalist, diarist, editors a large, cover artists ... all of us!) wondering just who's reading, what they like (and don't), how much of the subtlety of our writing is "getting through" even to people who purportedly speak English as a first language, how readers are responding to the more experimental factors of the work, and so on.

(Speaking of subtleties in the writing ... I have nothing but admiration for people who can tackle a novel in a different language. After decades of trying to get a grasp on a couple of languages other than English, I'm nowhere near fluent enough to, say, read the Alatriste novels in the original Spanish, much though I'd like to. So if anyone out there is reading this (or my fiction) in English as a second or third language -- my hat's off to you. It's the native English speakers who worry me a little, when they become readers. If they write the way they post to the online forums, how much sense are they making of the written word?! I'm sure you know exactly what I mean. We've all cringed to read the unpunctuated, phonetically spelled, grammar-free comments which are attached to articles in the popular online press! Where did these people learn to read?!)

Most writers are, these days, blundering along in the dark, making best-guesses and hoping to please readers who are becoming increasingly anonymous. The Internet is a marvellous place for chatting. As a novelist, I would have expected acres of feedback on my novels, and I confess, I've been surprised.

Recently, I've become quite interested in adult literacy ... or, more specifically, illiteracy. I'd never realized the extent to which illiteracy is a problem, and I struggle to understand it. How hard can it be to learn to read?

It turns out, 25 million Americans are totally illiterate! And the "most illiterate" places in the States will take you by surprise. Like, Miami, FL, where the rate is at 63% ... and Detroit, MI, with 47% illiteracy...! And for a statistic to knock you senseless, try this: "The NALS found a total of 21-23 percent - or 40-44 million - of the 191 million American adults (defined as age 16 or older) at Level 1, the lowest literacy level."
http://www.ahalenia.com/id/id11/illiterati.html

To folks like you and me, who take reading so much for granted that it's just part of the landscape, it's incomprehensible.

The better question is, what can be done about it?!

Surely, it all starts with a desire to learn to read -- or, read properly. The availability of programs to teach is one thing. The wanting to learn, is something else. When people have no desire to learn, knowledge won't "stick" ... and since these 44 million Americans are adults, who's going to compel them to even open a picture book?

I find it sad. Thoughts, anyone?

Ciao for now,
MK

CreateSpace: cheers, and thanks!

A quick post this morning, because it's (!) Keegan's Day Off, and I plan to make the most of it. It's glorious weather, and there's a national park calling.

Speaking of which, I'm delighted to say that a lot of my photos will soon be appearing on another website/blog, which is being floated at this time by Jade and Dave. It's a "travels in South Australia" blog, and has the potential to be really something. I'll be linking to it when it has all its oars in the water.

The other thing I should also note is that AriciaG -- one of my "proofies" -- is finally getting a blog up and running. The subject is gay books, and if AG can just find the time and application to keep the bloody thing updated, it's got the makings of a very good one. Once again, I'll be linking to that one ... when there's something to link to. Right now I'm rather envious: AG had the presence of mind (audacity?) to want a blog that looked vastly different from the boring, boring usual thing at Blogger, and petitioned the gurus at DreamCraft to get in there and do ... something ... to turn a normal, ordinary, yawn-inspiring Blogger blog into something that looks amazing. (The next question is, how the hell is it done, and why can't Keegan have the same amazing stuff? I do believe I'm about to stamp my foot and hold my breath.)

But the big news today is --

CREATE SPACE HAS FIXED THE PROBLEM!!!

If you don't know what in the world MK is on about now, go here:
http://mel-keegan.blogspot.com/2008/11/hiccups-in-create-space-process.html
http://mel-keegan.blogspot.com/2008/11/road-to-amazoncom-pavement-is-up-be.html

...it's taken from the November 19 to December 3, but it's fixed, and we're functional again. The plan is to get at least another 5 books up to Amazon.com before the much-lamented Australian Internet filtering starts ... because, frankly, we're uncertain of being able to publish anything else, or even blog, after it starts --

I've blogged about this at length, and rather than reiterate, I'll link you through top the existing posts. For the full story on this...
http://mel-keegan.blogspot.com/2008/12/aussie-internet-censorship-repression.html
http://mel-keegan.blogspot.com/2008/10/australian-internet-censorship.html
http://mel-keegan.blogspot.com/2008/10/internet-content-filtering-impossible.html
http://mel-keegan.blogspot.com/2008/10/australian-internet-big-brothers.html

So --

Cheers to CreateSpace for getting the problem fixed. Very soon there will be 10 Keegans at Amazon.com;

Jeers to the Australian Labor Party for crippling the Internet in this country;

Cheers to Dave and Jade, and Aricia, for launching new blogs -- and why can't I have some fantastic Blogger design instead of ... this? (And yes, I'd like a little cheese with this whine. I shall pack both in this picnic basket.)

And now, Keegan's Day Off is about to commence.

Ciao for now,
MK

World AIDS Day: where lies the future?

December 1st is World AIDS Day -- and I know it's the 2nd of the month on this side of the dateline, but I delayed posting about it until today, because about 95% of readers are on t'other side of that dateline!

There's a slogan: "Fight AIDS, not people with AIDS." This is particularly poignant when one remembers that AIDS is not merely an African problem (though it's anguishingly true that most cases of the disease are found there). AIDS is a problem in every part of the world; and in some countries it's lately been swept under the rug. One need hardly point out the tremendous AIDS problem in the United States --

In the US, little or nothing was done to help infected people, much less the spread of the disease. Why? It's the question which haunts anyone with the brains to think about it, and after the first glance or two into a little research you run headlong into a brick wall:

"In America today, AIDS is virtually a black disease, by any measure," says Phill Wilson, executive director of The Black AIDS Institute in Los Angeles. Wilson also points out that while many black American leaders and celebrities have embraced the cause of the epidemic's toll in Africa, few have devoted similar energy to the crisis here at home.
http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=2346857&page=1

And here's the irony: in the public mentality, AIDS remains closely associated with the gay community. Even now, in the minds of many people -- particularly older citizens, and those of ethnic background -- the mention of AIDS pops up images of promiscuous young men; or at least young men who indulged in at least one unwise, probably anonymous sexual act.

This is the burden of stigma that AIDS is still carrying -- at one point, about 20 years ago, I recall it being called the Christians' "dream disease," since it came down on the gay community in particular and sexually active, not to say promiscuous, youth in general.

The irony is that the last US presidential election clearly showed that Afro-American community has a strong bias against the gay community. I have a hunch that the "stigma" of AIDS will be biting hard in the Afro-America because of its gay connotations (be they accurate or not; and they're not), and the punch line to this bad joke is this: AIDS has become a "black disease" in a culture which is fundamentally homophobic.

Homosexuality remains a taboo punishable by gruesome executions in much of Africa, and yet AIDS is a runaway train there. In other words, the connection between the gay community and the spread of AIDS is nebulous these days ...

Yet in the public consciousness the connection lives on; and in hidebound countries where fundamental Christianity is running out of control -- countries such as Nigeria and the United States -- the stigma of AIDS is killing people. A lot of people. Too many people.

Get your head around these statistics:
Black Americans make up 13 percent of the U.S. population but account for over 50 percent of all new cases of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. That infection rate is eight times the rate of whites. Among women, the numbers are even more shocking--- almost 70 percent of all newly diagnosed HIV-positive women in the United States are black women. Black women are 23 times more likely to be diagnosed with AIDS than white women, with heterosexual contact being the overwhelming method of infection in black America.
http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=2346857&page=1

...now, try to figure out why George W. would cut AIDS research and support funding both at home and abroad. It could be argued that America is a rich nation that should be able to look after its sick without needing vast amounts of government funding -- and this is perfectly true. If commerce and industry were to make small donations, the whole financial aspect of the situation would be covered --

Well and good. But the next bombshell knocks you senseless:
Since bird flu starting grabbing international headlines in 2003, fear of a pandemic has swept across the globe and refocused health policies in some countries, including the United States.

In all, 91 people died of avian flu between 2003 and Feb. 13, 2006, according to the World Health Organization. There are no known cases of bird flu being transmitted from human to human, and no known cases of humans becoming infected from eating chicken or other poultry; only those in direct contact with the infected birds appear so far at risk.

During the same period, 9.1 million people were infected with HIV and AIDS, according to UN AIDS and the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services.

Now, President Bush has proposed cutting $15 million in AIDS research at the National Institutes of Health, while increasing funds for studying avian flu and bio-terrorism.
http://www.aegis.com/news/wb/2006/WB060209.html

And what about poor countries which rely on the trickle-down of charitable handouts from countries whose cups runneth over? Consider this:
Mr. Bush's 2004 budget for the Global Fund, $200 million, actually cuts in half what Congress is likely to do in 2003. Mr. Bush has also found part of the money for his AIDS programs by cutting nearly $500 million from child health, including vaccine programs. Child survival is the biggest loser in the foreign aid budget — a scandalous way to finance AIDS initiatives. With the budget dominated by defense spending and huge tax cuts for the wealthy, the White House should not be forcing the babies of Africa to pay for their parents' AIDS drugs." 2.17.03
http://www.bushwatch.com/condoms.htm

The world itself has become sick during the last decade, and its symptoms are greed, stupidity, prejudice, ignorance, and hate. These are the qualities which are holding this world back; we can't step into any kind of a positive future until we let them go.

We must find a way to embrace all people, all cultures, all faiths, all strains of romantic affiliation, as being not merely tolerable and acceptable, but natural. We are as nature designed us: many colors, rich and poor, gay and straight, fat and thin, genius and dim, talented and not. Mother Nature doesn't play favorites -- we're all born, and we take our chances! It's what people do that segregates us. It's the class systems, the fundamental "true faith" religions, the politics of greed, and the ignorance, stupidity and prejudice of senior politicians, which keeps alive the old inequities, injustices, and fuels the hate which jeopardizes the future for us all.

Cheers,

MK

Aussie Internet Censorship: repression worse than Iran starts before Christmas

Australian web users are on a countdown to a nation-wide go-slow in online services that will cripple the Internet in this country: broadband will slow down to the speed of a dial-up, and dial-ups (which are the norm in rural areas) will be dead in the water --

You guessed: the Australian Labor Government's Internet filtering plan is going ahead, and will begin by Christmas 2008.

I wrote about it here: http://mel-keegan.blogspot.com/2008/10/australian-internet-big-brothers.html and here: http://mel-keegan.blogspot.com/2008/10/internet-content-filtering-impossible.html and here: http://mel-keegan.blogspot.com/2008/10/internet-filtering-banned-books-and-apa.html ...

...and from my personal perspective, it's a situation that is not just serious, it's critical.

Without the speed of a broadband connection, most of the Internet will be inaccessible from downunder. Blogging will be next to impossible. Blogging with images WILL be impossible. Publishing with Lulu and CreateSpace will be utterly impossible, due to the upload times for large files, and the monstrous "routines" that make the pages sloooow to load even over the best broadband you can get down here. YouTube? Forget it. Gmail or Hotmail? Maybe. CNN and Huffington Post? Nope: too many pics and vids. Zazzle? Out of the question.

I'll continue to blog as long as I can, but the digital novels I've been considering will have to go on the back burner at this time, for one simple reason. It's three weeks till Christmas, and if I'm 75pp into a vast novel which is being issued via blog posts, with maybe 500 readers desperate for the next part, and I suddenly lose the ability to post -- few people overseas will know enough to rip into the Australian Government about it: Keegan will get the blame.

As far as I can see, it would be much better to wait a while and see how things go. We have a suspicion that the "digital economy" will virtually collapse ... which probably means that the government will have to be more reasonable, since it's in the process of ruining people -- crashing businesses and making jobs go away.

The digital economy will crash like this:

Aussies won't be able to shop online, perhaps won't even be able to pay bills online -- secure servers are too slow to be used over connections with the speed of a dial-up. With broadband running at just 13% of its usual speed, folks with casual broadband accounts will cancel those accounts. Business that depend on selling MP3 downloads and/or videos (or advertising on the side of same) will be history. Companies like Quickflicks (the local version of Netflicks) will suffer, since we'll time out before we can load a single page. The major online services which make Optus Broadband so attractive will be useless. (This is before you even get to the fact that tens of millions of legitimate web pages will vanish, intercepted by the filters.) What about live-feeds of news, sports, weather? Gone. How about ebook stores, which are literally the last places where writers can sell their books these days, what with the collapse of the traditional book industry? Gone. With the demise of all of the above services, online advertising ceases to be either effective or lucrative. The fallout will hit ad servers, affiliate schemes ...not to mention online publishers, writers, artists, photographers, musicians, who sell their wares off their own webpages. When enough subscribers cancel their ISP accounts, the next casualties will be the ISPs -- declaring bankrupt en masse. Then, the class actions as users sue them for breach of contract. Teleconferencing via the Internet? Forget it. Webcam? It's a joke. Google Earth? Not a chance.

Meanwhile, the child p*rn*graphy which is at the root of all this, will continue to thrive. Where? As hard copies, on 20c CD-Roms which are retailed or shared via email newsletters among enthusiasts. There is no way to stop a vice in which hundreds of thousands of adults participate. You've only got to look at drug abuse, and the trillions that have been spent to stop it in the last 40 years or so. Or look at alcohol abuse; or the junk food industry which has contributed big time to making the US and Australia fatter, per capita, than one would every have imagined possible. It has been proved time and again that vice is not something that can be stopped via censorship and legislation. It's been tried. It doesn't work.

However, the Australian Government is absolutely bloody determined to "do the Christian thing" and get the Internet filtering in place by Christmas 2008, and bugger the on line community. Who cares whose business is ruined, who's suddenly unemployed?

At least, that's what they think now. Let's take another look in January or February and see where the fallout lands. Our guess is that it'll dump itself, ten meters thick, on Parliament House, Canberra, ACT, Australia.

When Prime Minister Kevin Rudd sees the extent of the mess, the degree of carnage he has caused, he'll have to get his head out of the church, put away his Bible, and stop praying for long enough to take an interest in the business community. He'll have to look past the children who are supposed to be stumbling into pornography online (and apparently there's damned little evidence of it); he'll have to ask (belatedly, but better late than never) why the moronic, pea-brained parents of these children are not running Net Nanny. He'll have to make it ILLEGAL to even have a computer in the same house as a child, if the machine is not equipped with Net Nanny or similar. He'll have to make it a prisonable offence for school computers to be made available without Net Nanny -- and the same for churches

And then ... when parents, preachers and teachers are made responsible at law for the children they profess to love so much, and yet whom they abuse so casually and with such impunity ... then the Internet can get back to normal and business can resume.

Why don't they do this instead of putting on the crippling filtering? No one knows. We don't know, because the government won't respond to critics of their criminally stupid system.

Want the whole story? Here it is, on The Age:

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2008/11/28/1227491813497.html?page=fullpage

and if you really want to shake your head over this:

http://www.cnet.com.au/software/security/0,239029558,339281500,00.htm (how a 16 year old broke the filter in 30 minutes)

So ... I'll blog and publish as long as possible, but if I disappear around Christmas time, well, you'll know why. We'll see what happens next.

Cheers,
MK