The Journal
Politics
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I’ve Just Been Stimulated
By Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. My wife was stimulated at the same time. Then we got a letter from the Tax Office telling us we had been stimulated, just in case we hadn’t noticed. Most Australians…
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What The Fitzgibbon Is Going On?
Over a month ago I wrote about Defence Minister Fitzgibbons’s relationship with Chinese/Australian business woman Helen Liu: Fitzgibbon may genuinely have forgotten how well he knows Ms Liu, his visits to China with her, the functions he…
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Pakistan, The Taliban And The Tamil Tigers
Sri Lanka’s now virtually complete victory over the Tamil Tigers has been all but ignored in the western media. But it may very well have been a motivating factor in the March 3 shooting attack on the…
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Homeland Security – How To Spot A Right Wing Extremist
Watch out for anyone carrying a pay cheque. He he.
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Disabled Protestors Arrested Outside White House
This is hardly a news flash – it happened a week ago. But I had seen nothing about this in the mainstream media, and only heard of it this morning from Uppity Woman. A fuller version…
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Obama And Notre Dame
I am trying hard to imagine what the real Notre Dame, the Blessed Virgin Mary, would make of a Catholic university named in her honour, and I presume, relying on her patronage and intercession, inviting someone who publicy opposes…
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Climate Change Hits Indigenous Australians Hardest
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner Tom Calma, recently returned from the UN’s Conference for Racism and Anti-Semitism, says that Australia’s indigenous people will be hardest hit by climate change. If temperatures in North…
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Those Gentle Caring Greenies
A $1.2 million arson attack on forestry equipment. Selfish, irresponsible, idiotic, criminal. But pretty much no risk of anyone being harmed. But attaching wires to trees where loggers cannot see them to make those trees fall in…
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Anthropogenic Global Warming Could Have Been Right
In laboratory conditions, increases in the proportion of CO2 in air result in a small, but proportional increase in heat retention. It was reasonable to ask whether a similar effect might apply in the real world. If…
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D-Day (Dimwit Day) In South Australia
The Rann government’s ban on lightweight plastic shopping bags starts today. I predict chaos and frustration at supermarkets around the state. Tim Blair notes that the people who grow marijuana are subject to a fine of $300,…
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Condi – ‘Do What’s Right’
Former US Secretary of State Condolezza Rice talks with students at Stanford University. As always, she is intelligent, dignified, respectful of others. She respects the students who question her enough to listen to them, and to…
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Obama – Tastes Great, Less Filling
And 99 more awesome thoughts about the 100 days of awesomeness, from Doubleplusundead. Here’s a sample: 12 When his wife twisted off the Queen of England’s head like a beer cap, he reattached it with nothing…
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100 Million Mentally Ill People In China
“This is a modest number,” said Huang Yueqin, the director of the National Centre for Mental Health. Mental illness has now overtaken heart disease and cancer as the biggest burden on the Chinese health system, according…
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Not Ready To Make Nice
I like the Dixie Chicks, even though their politics are entirely unrelated to reality. This song, though, could be a message from the free world to terrorists everywhere. Not Ready To Make Nice. I love this clip.
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Who’s A Snollygoster?
World Wide Words defines a snollygoster as ‘a shrewd, unprincipled person, especially a politician.’ Snollygoster has not been heard much for the last sixty years. President Truman used it in 1952, and defined it, either in ignorance or…