The more the universe appears comprehensible, the more it also appears pointless.
-Steven Weinberg

Peace in the Air: International Year of Fresh Water

The New Year inevitably brings thoughts about change. Medieval writers wrote about the Wheel of Fortune, a turn of the wheel and those in High Places may suddenly be brought low (think Trent Lott, think Rodney Adler, think HIH, think other Carrtels). The world offers no guarantees.
They put the word up in lights on the Sydney Harbour Bridge. We all felt it in our hearts.

Resolve That 2003 Will Be a Year of Peace

Everyone -- and I mean everyone -- is for peace. Even Hitler wanted peace -- not a just peace but a peace that excluded non-Aryans. The German monk Thomas à Kempis expressed the sentiment: All men desire peace but few indeed desire those things which make for peace. Or to put it another way: Being a pacifist between wars is as easy as being a vegetarian between meals, in the words of the Christian anarchist Ammon Hennacy. That's why it's not enough to call for peace. The important question is always: peace under what terms?

Asylumn Seekers Villawood Stood for Hollywood for many Eastern European Migrants

1 January 2003 - Fifth refugee centre burns. Australia's detention centres are facing unrest, but no crisis, Prime Minister John Howard has said. Mr Howard said the Government would respond appropriately to a series of deliberately-lit fires at immigration detention centres, but would not change its policy on detaining asylum seekers.
Read about an ironic verb - Christmas. Island of coziness and loveliness and sweetness.
· Detecting Unrest [The Australian]
· New Year Fireworks: Detention centre at Christmas Island and Australian Hollywood [Sydney Morning Herald]
· Let's make it the year of facing up to the roots of poverty and asylumn seekers [Sydney Morning Herald]

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in times of comfort, but where he stands in time of challenge and controversy.
-King (Martin Luther)

Internet & Media Playing a blogging version of the Six Degrees of Conmen & Conbloggers game: Auld Lane (sic) Syne

As for Blair, sometimes he gets bored writing about Margo Kingston but the Americans, especially, beg for more. ‘If I don't post on Margo I get letters of complaint.’
Diversity without diversity. The well known spinners, actors & conmen, Hitler and Stalin, said something to the effect that people will sooner believe one big lie than many small ones. 2002 proved them wrong. Conbloggers tend to quote out of context and lie habitually, lie shamelessly, lie unnecessarily, lie about small things and big things, lie about the past, lie about the future, lie about lies, lie with every ‘and,’ ‘but,’ and ‘if,’ and some of their lies are bound to be believed. Of course, it helps if you can read all this in the Australian. Many conbloggers tend to express themselves in the tongue of reason as they seem to know more about right wing politics, but care less and less about meaning of life ...

Ironically, Margo Kingston who does care about the powerless in this world is made to be the scapegoat by conbloggers. Even at its worst, Webdiary is engaging. Those who read the lies spread about Vaclav Havel under communism by spineles & idealess com-journalists struggled to comprehend the ways of reporting the truth. But we took comfort knowing the spineless spinners only wrote stories dictated to them by their masters or what they thought their masters would want to read in the press. Will no one throw mud on comrade Havel? Who would have imagined that the same spinners who preached about the evil of Western Democracies would be singing praises to dog-eat-dog type capitalism? Any guess whose bread the extremely communist authors are buttering now when it comes to the balanced reporting about scapegoats in ultra conservative environment? Exchanging one kind of barbarism for another is not the way to gain moral authority.
· Ein Steyns of the blogging world many times looking rather foolish & blurred [The Australian]

It is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the
executioners.
- Albert Camus

Crime & Punishment Court Steps In Where Political Corruption Blocks Reform

People for whom greed is a guiding ethos ironically blame greedy trial lawyers for raising the cost of everything from medical care to car insurance through litigation. But this litigation is often the only means to protect society from medical malpractice or corporate malfeasance.
When the wave of corporate accounting and governance scandals first broke, these reforms were widely seen as a reasonable first step toward restoring investors' trust and protecting employees. Yet Congress did not address these issues in its corporate accountability bill, which was largely an empty public relations gesture. The SEC obstructed even the weak provisions in this act, with its Chairman Harvey Pitt eventually being forced to resign after appointing a person tied to an accounting scandal to head the newly created accounting oversight board.
· The Pitts [Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services via Common Dreams]
· The Corporate Club [Tom Paine]
· Imagine A World...Where Merit, Not Money, Determines Erections (sic) [Tom Paine]

War & Peace Weapons inspections in the United States

A Canada-based peace and disarmament group plans to launch weapons inspections in the United States to draw attention to its claim that the country is a dangerous rogue state. The group, Rooting Out Evil, plans to assemble volunteer weapons inspectors at U.S.-Canada border checkpoints some time next year and says it has already found volunteers for the campaign from Europe, North America and Asia. It is asking voluntary inspectors to sign up at its website - www.rootingoutevil.org.
· Rooting Out Evil [InterPressService via Common Dreams]

Axis of Evil Keep an Eye on Iraq BUT Focus on rogues like al-Qaeda , Belorus, Indonesia, Korea, Turkey ...

North Korea has nuclear weapons, long range missiles and has shown the kind of disregard for its own people that may see up to one third of the population starve to death. How can anybody argue that Iraq is anything like the threat to world peace posed by North Korea?
Michael P Coleman
Tully, Qld - The Australian
Logic that seems transparent in London or Washington can look entirely different in Pyongyang. The history of outbreaks of war is one of misread intelligence and mistaken signals. In World War II, both the German invasion of Russia and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour amazed their victims. More recently, it seemed extraordinary that Saddam Hussein declined to withdraw from Kuwait in 1990, once it became evident that America would fight. The West was astonished that Saddam did not fall after suffering defeat in 1991. Western logic underrated both the effectiveness of his domestic tyranny and the grudging prestige that accrued to him for having stood up to the Americans.
· Elements of Luck [London Story via SMH]

Lifestyle Snobbery: So Watch Your */\*

Echoing one of the book's chapters, titled Fags and Yids, Epstein explained that the WASP aristocracy is dead, and in its stead homosexuals and Jews now constitute the preponderance of this country's taste-makers: designers, decorators, curators, magazine editors, movie and television producers, art and literary critics. Because of their slight outsiderishness they are alive to the social nuances in the American atmosphere. As persecuted minorities, Jews and homosexuals had to be hyper-alert to the desires and whims of the ruling class, since their social well-being depended on it. This familiarity allowed them to imitate and create variations on the taste of the upper classes, until they themselves became the taste-makers.
· Backward Aristocracy [Forward]

Luddites

We tend to see winning and losing in this country in absolute terms. As if when someone fails to triumph in an election or a cultural movement they just disappear. But, of course, they don't disappear. Sometimes they're converted to the winning side, but often they live on unpersuaded, continuing to believe in and contribute their point of view.
· Success & Failure [Washington Post]
· We will pay the price for believing the world has infinite resources [Guardian UK]

Literature Absolutely Worst Publishing Blurbs & Decisions Of The Recent Past

The book industry is a cultural industry like any other — it has its share of bizarre and depressingly inane moments. These are the moments when publicists and editors, perhaps coming back from a long, indigestible lunch, enter a blank zone. In this blank zone, they sit at their desks and stare off into space and gradually bestir themselves to write jacket copy or arrive at publishing or editorial decisions that make sense at the time, many things make sense in the blank zone. Later, when the zone fades, nothing is done to change those decisions. Months go by, and then one day the results appear in print.
· Worst Blurrs [Toronto Star]
· Take a tour of the literary year: Who Kissed and Told [Guardian UK]
· The Hottest PaperBack: Cold River [Guardian of Wishful Thinking]