The Journal
2009
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Google Thinks Tetris Is More Important Than D-Day
Google often changes its logo to match the day – public holidays, festivals, even sports get their own logo de jour. On June 6th 2008 Google remembered the birthday of Spanish painter Diego Velasquez. I like Velasquez. Las…
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NASA: Sun Influences Climate
No s%#t, Sherlock. A study from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland looking at climate data over the past century has concluded that solar variation has made a significant impact on the Earth’s climate. …
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Is Your Wink Pink?
One of my friends is a dizzy blonde beauty therapist. She spends a considerable amount of time ripping hair off people’s private parts. Last night she showed me a brochure for a new product – lightening…
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At Least 29 Children Dead In Mexican Fire
The fire broke out in a tyre depot next to the daycare centre in Hermosillo in northern Mexico. Of about 180 children at the centre at the time, 29 are reported dead from asphyxiation. May God grant them…
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Seals Not Endangered By Climate Change
Global temperature has (possibly, no one is really sure) risen by about half of one degree over the last hundred years. Given that seals have survived the last several million years of climate changes, varying from…
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Bing Bung
Yesterday Qohel was at the number one position on Bing for ‘leading conservative blog.’ Today it has dropped out of their listings completely. Bing’s webmaster tools report they had trouble finding my sitemap last time they crawled the site.…
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Women Are Cool, And Betterer Than Men
From Quadrant Online: From the editorial of Island magazine, Autumn 2009 edition: Ruth Sunderland discusses the gender issues she feels are being ignored in the endless analysis of our current economic crisis. She writes: ‘This mess…
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Defence Minister Resigns
Sad, really, because the Defence Department is notoriously difficult, and department staff and military personnel both seem to have respected Joel Fitzgibbon’s abilities. The trigger for his resignation was a lack of clarity about contact between Mr Fitzgibbon…
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Samson and Delilah (Again)
I wrote about the taxpayer funded Australian film Samson and Delilah a couple of weeks ago. Gary Johns has written a review of the film. The review appears in today’s Australian. Here’s a bit to get you started: The…
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Time To Dump Chaser
The ABC’s Chaser’s War On Everything guys have come up with some funny stuff, although they have always picked soft targets. But the occasional funny bits have been offset by the far more frequent not in the slightest funny bits which are…
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Taliban Blows Up (Another) Girls’ School
From the Pakistan Daily Times, this story about the methods the Taliban use to produce their desired educational outcomes: The Taliban blew up another girls’ school in Mohmand Agency on Monday. According to sources, Taliban had wired the…
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The Longer They Are In School, The Further Behind They Get
Reviewing the results of the 2006 Program for International Student Assessment, Walter Williams notes: ..the longer American children are in school, the worse they perform compared to their international peers. In recent cross-country comparisons of fourth…
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For Love Or Money
The Tragedy of The Diocese Of The Murray. You have never cared about me. Nobody likes me. But I am still your bishop, so do what I say. Or give me $1 million and I will leave. That was the…
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Bashing Pharmacy Companies Costs Lives
It is a popular pastime to portray large pharamceutical companies as monstrous villains because they refuse to give away their products for free. Research to develop new drugs is expensive and uncertain. It takes on average…
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Search Engines
New internet search engines come and go so often that I don’t usually even bother to look at them. Usually they fail because they do not return relevant usable results. Returning sites clearly related to the…
