Posted 12:11 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Czech out this web exclusive list of conventional wisdom on Amerikan values and their reality czechs Even Texans hook up in marriage, have children, put them through school, offer car rides to their teen friends and join clubs (especially gun clubs) and other organizations

Eye on Politics & Law Lords: The Downward Spiral of MEdia Abuse and Political Evasion
The dream may be, wrote Mary Riddell in the same paper, of a media respectful to politicians, mindful of their democratic duties and shorn of tatty stuff about Beckham's tattoos and Jemima's marriage. The result would be newspapers of such turgid blandness that nobody would ever buy them... the greatest causes can hang on the tackiest cases... Britain has rarely needed its flawed, contrary, trivia-obsessed free press more than it does now. And Andrew Neil, wrote in the same vein: The media is the lifeblood of democracy... though the specifics of their stories (the BBC Gilligan broadcast on government lying about WMD; the Daily Mirror fake pictures of British soldiers beating Iraqis) were wrong, both drew public attention to vital matters of public concern.
If the media doesn't have power over people's perceptions, then what is it doing? Above all, what is it doing to us? We in journalism haven't asked that question much. It is time we did, for if not us, who?
• The most pockmarked ground in journalism is that of political reporting [ 2004 A Democratic Year?]
• · Micklethwait and Wooldridge: The Right Wing's Deep, Dark Secret
• · · See Also Spain, the government is putting the 'social' back in socialism
• · · · How did it come to this? I cannot remember a time when the gulf between Europeans and Americans was so wide: A letter to Europe from Philip Gordon and ; A letter to America from Timothy Garton Ash
• · · · · Web Exclusive Robert Kuttner: John Kerry could win by 2 million votes and still lose the e(l)ection... Three ways to fix the electoral system
• · · · · · · Web Exclusive Steven Hill and Rob Richie Fixing E(l)ections: Instant runoff voting [ How the Uncle Sam of Electoral Collages (sic) is stacking up]

Posted 12:09 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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MEdia Dragons are like steel: when they lose their temper they lose their worth: MEdia Dragon finds 300-year-old wine cellar

Repeating History Classes: I see more McCarthy than Murrow in Moore's work
NPR's Scott Simon says much of Michael Moore's films and books seems to regard facts as mere nuisances to the story he wants to tell. No matter how hot a blowtorch burns, it doesn't shed much light.
• Writ Large [link first seen at I wish I'd taught Moore to have a little more balance(Milw. JS) ]
• · See Also Director of schools threatens to beat the s--- out of editor
• · · Visual History Television and the politics of humiliation
• · · · Wei Jingsheng writes to Anne-Marie: Can America combine power with modesty? ; [ ]
• · · · · If I told you tonight, 'Let's leave the Fleet Center, we're in danger,' and when you get outside, you ask me, 'Reverend Al, What is the danger?' and I say, 'It don't matter. We just needed some fresh air,' Al Sharpton: I have misled you and we were misled
• · · · · · American Nudist Research Library has a fairly simple motto: Dedicated to preserving nudist history with a comprehensive archive of nudist material". Like all specialist libraries, it operates with a limited budget. Thus, the library covers only what it needs to

Posted 12:06 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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There's a lot of ghostwriting about and everyone understands that. People know it covers everything from celebrity autobiographies to what might be called more serious literary work, but it's a fascinating area for people because it's secretive, sometimes a little bit murky. It's a sort of creative life that dare not speak its name.
The publishing trade to some extent colludes in this as well -- there are a lot of in-house editors nowadays who are brushing up the efforts of quite well-known writers.

Literature & Art Across Frontiers:
My mother, Maria Imrichova too, worshipped God as intensely as the saint transfixed. And His companionship was to her as that of an old and very dear friend. Perhaps somewhere else one woman has walked through so many years charming so many people by her warmth and diffidence and humor and faith. If so, I wish I might have known her.
Her love for her children and her husband was absolute.
• Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography [The Untold Story: Who is Hot Now? Cold River and its Site Media Dragon (smile) ]
• · The Untold Story of The Importance of Being Famous: The Rise and Rise of Celebrity Journalism
• · · See Also Publisher peeved at political parody
• · · · Is literary culture reflected in how books are pulped? It's a sad chapter for Cold River [Media Dragons live in what is likely the beauty capital of the world and have the enviable fortune to work with some of the most beautiful women in it ]
• · · · · Most literary prizes -- however valuable -- merely give the chance for organisers and judges to drop a polished pebble into the ocean of indifference At least they also prove that money can't buy love - or even attention
• · · · · · Is literary culture reflected in how publishers and fraudsters interact? Khouri coverage [ Faking it has a rich history]

Posted 7:58 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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James Meek describes life in a Catch-22 world where a human life is valued at $500, the mercury rarely falls below 40 and the daily carnage in Iraq goes largely unreported

Eye on Politics & Law Lords: Appointments to public sector boards in Australia: cronyism or competence?
Drawing on a study several Australian government agencies and their board members Meredith Edwards considers appointments to public sector boards in Australia and identifies opportunities for reform drawing on experiences from abroad. • Mono Culture [ via APO]
• · Johnny Was Good Blogging from the Democratic Convention [What did one America say to the other? Shove it!; Double Damning the Gurlie Men Arnold Uses Comedy ]
• · · Maiden Act Australia’s first Bill of Rights
• · · · Democratic Audit of Australia, Australian National University Democracy in the digital age: enabling electronic voting and counting in the Australian Capital Territory
• · · · · See Also Opinion polls: issues and preferred party, and preferred PM, July 2004 ((Opinion polls: comparison of voting intention, July 2004; Electoral rankings: Census 2001 (2003 boundaries) ))
• · · · · · · See Also Florida officials: Some voting records wiped out

Posted 7:54 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Feeding the Soul: She's not at the Bus Stop
There's only one bus a week where I live. It's actually the daily schoolbus--one of those old-fashioned yellow ones with metal seats--but it does one special "shopping trip" every Thursday for those of us poor suckers who don't have a car. It goes around all the beaches and then into the main town half an hour away, then in the afternoon it comes back. We sometimes take it to town, but usually just get it down to my parents place about five minutes away up on the main road, as it's too far to walk.
• A strange thing happened the other week [Link Poached from Gianna]
• · See Also Does philosophizing change what we think about death?
• · · Ownmost possibility The discomfort of strangeness
• · · · See Also Proofs of the Nonexistence of Censor by his Author
• · · · · See Also It's time - and we can't get enough of it

Posted 7:42 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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There are times when one must dispense contempt with economy, because of the large numbers of those in need of it.
- Chataeubriand, Posthumous Memoires.

Invisible Hands & Markets: How the Left Lost Its Heart
That our politics have been shifting rightward for more than 30 years is a generally acknowledged fact of American life. That this movement has largely been brought about by working-class voters whose lives have been materially worsened by the conservative policies they have supported is less commented upon
• A Troubling Influence [Can We Be Good Without God? How history can help China solve its wealth and poverty dilemma ]
• · See Also Corrupting the truth, corrupting government, and corrupting science have much in common
• · · Ted Turner How the government protects Big Media
• · · · See Also Insanity of relocating the Olympics every four years
• · · · · Why Why Why is society paying students to go to graduate school in economics? A Terrible Waste of Taxes
• · · · · · Richard Goldstein writes after going through Michael Petrelis' list of journalists who donated to candidates: Where's the muck in list of journalists' who give to politicos?

Posted 7:40 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Bloomberg Time to pay for deceit: James Hardie Industries NV

Tracking Policies & Investigative Stories: Police States
Chris Masters presents new evidence of corruption at a high level of the Victorian police force and asks whether Victoria, in shirking any attempt at serious and uncompromising reform, will be left behind while elsewhere the cycle of change moves on.
• Corrupt [link first seen at abc.net.au/4corners ]
• · Report Hiding Somewhere on this website THE JAMES HARDIE REPORT Maybe I've got another year or two, I'd be happy with that: Fraud, lies and the asbestos disgrace [ Company has never stopped lying, inquiry told; What the report says Reports omitted: Executives may have misled to keep Government in dark; Final submissions: Law firm also faces criticism; Risk business: Actuary may face action over liability estimate that grew]
• · · See Also >Report spreads blame for Oasis fiasco that cost ratepayers $22m ((Knowles denies being involved in Westfield rival's rezoning))
• · · · Waterfalling Tracks Commissioner exasperated as Waterfall inquiry reaches end ((Read all about it - the little book that spelled bad news for some; Carr that pulls faces: PM, Carr attacked as judge pulls plug))
• · · · · See Also Who pays the piper?
• · · · · · Breaches and brouhahas: Two security breaches, a continent apart. One could be a false alarm, but the other... ((Red Cell Inside story of how a band of reformers tried--and failed--to change America's spy agencies))

Posted 6:57 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Have you read Trumpet of the Last Judgment against Hegel, Atheists and Antichrists? If you don't already know, I can tell you that, under the secret seal, the authors are Bauer and Marx. I have truly laughed heartily reading it.
- G. Jung, letter to Arnold Ruge (December 1841)

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: Cutting through literary lies
Another literary hoax to join the grand Australian tradition of the Ern Malley affair, the Demidenko moment, the Thoughtli(n)es...
Humiliated publishers still want to believe the best of the author Norma Khouri, accused of literary deception with her bestseller, Forbidden Love, despite overwhelming evidence that the book does not truly represent her life and experiences. Its Australian publisher is awaiting rebuttals from Ms Khouri but concedes the book's withdrawal from sale is due to the Herald's allegations which, Random House said, "cast doubt on Ms Khouri's true identity and her story as told in" the purportedly factual book.
The Herald's allegations, established by old-fashioned but reliable gumshoe techniques of investigation, do more than cast doubt on Ms Khouri's version of her upbringing, and her claim that her nearest friend, the book character Dalia, was stabbed to death in Jordan by Dalia's father because she defied his will and pursued a chaste relationship with a Christian man she met while the two women ran an Amman hairdressing salon. The book highlighted the archaic and brutal practice of honour killings, where the state turns a blind eye to the murder of its own so that family honour can retain paramountcy. It is a moving tale of the excesses of cultural and religious inflexibility. It mustered a wave of Western revulsion against a supposedly widespread Muslim practice at the very time the West was clamouring for justification of anti-Muslim sentiment. But fact it is not.
• Forbidden Bribery Island (sic) ((Author goes to ground)) [The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing Riverview]
• · See Also On being able to switch accents
• · · See Also Books That Will Tell You Why Everything is Crazy [ Dragons ]
• · · · See Also Revenge may be frowned upon, but the urge is primed in the genes [link first seen at Disgust is an adaptation for survival, but what is the point of it now? ]
• · · · · I am often accused by people who don’t know me very well of never changing my mind and always wanting to be right Changing our mind These charges are usually hurled at me in the midst of some heated debate, often when the other side is close to be running out of defensible arguments.
• · · · · · See Also Is that quadriplegic or tetraplegic? The English language feeds from different streams, with the result that one term may acquire two forms

Posted 8:13 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Bomb note forces jet back to Sydney...A bomb threat forced a United Airlines jumbo jet with 264 people on board to abort its flight to Los Angeles and return to Sydney Airport after 90 minutes in the air Everyone just kept looking around and looking at each other, the expression on the faces of everyone was just unreal

Eye on Politics & Law Lords: Taking Power
It's e(l)ection night, and early returns suggest trouble for the incumbent. Then, mysteriously, the vote count stops and observers from the challenger's campaign see employees of a voting-machine company, one wearing a badge that identifies him as a county official, typing instructions at computers with access to the vote-tabulating software. When the count resumes, the incumbent pulls ahead. The challenger demands an investigation. But there are no ballots to recount, and election officials allied with the incumbent refuse to release data that could shed light on whether there was tampering with the electronic records.
• Only the Paranoid Survive [ via Protecting the Democratic franchise ]
• · All politics is local. But this year, it is getting downright neighborly So where do the Democratic and Republican nominees fit along the left-right spectrum? [Henry Fairlie explains Why the quality of oratory has fallen so low: THE FAULT IS IN THE SPEAKERS, AND IN THE HEARERS, TOO]
• · · Text of Bill Clinton's speech: Strength and Wisdom are not opposing values
• · · · What's the Republican lineup look like? Who are their elder statesmen? Link to Hillary's speech Comeback Party
• · · · · See Also Welcome to This Is Rumor Control, a new blog dedicated to original reporting, commentary, and discussion of security and foreign policy issues [link first seenat Rumour Control]
• · · · · · · Political Dragons Best Blogs - Politics and Elections (Winston Churchill said that In war, the truth must be accompanied by a bodyguard of lies: Spin, truth and lies )

Posted 7:24 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Meet the MEdia Dragons, Blogging Beasts and Evil Blaghhs

The Blog, The Press, The Media: Bloggers Are the Sizzle, Not the Steak
The Democrats and the Republicans are inviting a limited number of bloggers — those witty, candid, irreverent, passionate, shrewd and outrageous Internet chroniclers — to their 2004 conventions.
• Tracking Our Stories [ courtesy of David Adesnik: KEEPING UP WITH JONES: Joe Gandelman has posted a very thoughtful response to Alex Jones' anti-blog temper tantrum in the LA Times. Daniel Drezner: Good — this is exactly the kind of story that merits further inquiry by "real" journalists — you know, as opposed to...
Pejman Yousefzadeh: THE POWER OF THE BLOGOSPHERE — While Alex Jones moves Heaven and Earth to try to deride blogs as "the sizzle, not the...Rickheller @Centerfield: (Note to Alex S. Jones - I haven't been paid to promote this documentary. All I got was iced tea and a slice of apple pie.) Jay Rosen: Alex S. Jones, of Harvard's Kennedy School, a former reporter for the New York Times, and a biographer of newspaper...James Joyner: Alex Jones' LA Times op-ed "Bloggers Are the Sizzle, Not the Steak" set off a firestorm last evening, with several blogs commenting on it.
Also: Robert Cox, David Allan Pell, Jeralyn Merritt, Clayton Cramer,
Jeff Goldstein, Patrick Belton, Jeff Jarvis, Jon Henke, Jonah Goldberg, Captain Ed, Joe Gandelman, Matt Welch, Glenn Reynolds, Timothy Wheeler]
• · Beantown Becomes Blogtown: What is news is that for the virgin time several dozen political bloggers will receive media credentials to report on the event
Robert Cox: But...if you have a note from a doctor, you are allowed to TIVO THIS tonight... TIVO THIS Judy Woodruff's Inside...Will Collier: Fund On Blogs — Great John Fund OpinionJournal column today on political bloggers, who seem to be getting under the...Glenn Reynolds: CONVENTION BLOG-COVERAGE ROUNDUP: Here's my MSNBC post on convention blogging. Here's a link-rich item by John Fund...
"Beantown Becomes Blogtown" — John Fund today: "It isn't news that more than 15,000 journalists are descending on this city to cover the Democratic convention. The Big Trunk

Posted 12:39 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Politicians with totalitarian tendency of their fathers are using the latest technology to abuse their power: The new Czech Prime Minister Stanislav Gross (34) is handling the European Commissioner switch pretty invisibly: I've informed him by SMS about what measures we're heading toward. So that he wouldn't know of it only from the press.
Economists are looking into a tankard of pitch-black Guinness's Ale instead of a crystal ball: A study of economics usually reveals that the best time to buy anything is last year

Invisible Hands & Markets: Big government is good for economic freedom
Over at Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok recently presented a graph showing a positive correlation between UN measures of gender development and the Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom Index. Of course, Alex presented the usual caveats about causation and correlation, but he concluded "at a minimum the graph indicates that capitalism and gender development are compatible contrary to many radicals"
This prompted me to check out how the Economic Freedom index was calculated. The relevant data is all in a spreadsheet, and shows that the index is computed from about 20 components, all rated as scores out of 10, the first of which is general government consumption spending as a percentage of total consumption. Since the Fraser Institute assumes that government consumption is bad for economic freedom, the score out of 10 is negatively correlated with the raw data.
• Diversity of scale in economic enterprises [johnquiggin.com/]
• · See Also Where 140 ex Howard staffers are now
• · · Westfield and Bob Carr's preaching: The NSW Government had intervened. It had passed an Act of Parliament to end the proceedings and preclude any appeal. Even louder protests followed, with public debate about the right of the NSW Government to overrule legal process. However, the anger eventually subsided and the Westfield Eastgardens Shoppingtown went up on its section of the site In light of this, why on earth can't the Carr Government follow the lead of the Wran Government and legislate to protect the $40 million Gazal project with its 62 retail tenants and 450 employees
• · · · The PR scandal that is James Hardie Greg Combet told Lateline last night that Hawker Britten pulled out of the James Hardie deal when they realised it was immoral... two companies were Gavin Anderson and Hawker Briton
• · · · · New paper by Drezner and Farrell called The Power and Politics of Blogs (PDF) A corrective to the worst excesses of the mainstream's haughtiness about its privileged position as our society's information priests: we tell you what you need to know and when
• · · · · · The Princess or the Dragon The children are our nano future Swinburne University of Technology's Centre for Micro-Photonics constructed a model of the Sydney Opera House. Its dimensions are 64 x 38 x 41 micrometers, (yes, I know; not nano, but cool, anyway)

Posted 12:36 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Telling men not to become aroused by signs of beauty, youth and health is, as David Buss has noted, like telling them not to experience sugar as sweet

Tracking Trends Great & Small: Quiet is the new loud
When trying to summarize my impressions of this week, I come to think of the title of an album from the Norwegian lo-fi rock group Kings of Convenience. It is called "Quiet is the new loud". Is that not what we have been preaching through out this week? That, in times when everyone screams, the solution is not to scream louder but to whisper. It has become incredibly hard to reach consumers via mass communication. Super Bowl ads and sponsorships of the Olympics, millions of dollars are spent on branding activities with questionable results. But with new technology like blogs we have the opportunity to start small conversations - whispers - with tiny groups of people who actually will listen, which if our predicitions are right, in time will spread and our messages will have the chance to reach larger audiences. Quiet is the new loud
• Kings of Convenience [link first seen at Kingsofconvenience.com/ ]
• · Hippie communes Live on
• · · Flirting is in our blood, literally All animals are hardwired to attract mates
• · · · The State of PR - A Tale of Two Profession It was the best of times
• · · · · See Also Pollies make poor bloggers - UK report
• · · · · · See Also More alarming this week was the ABC's failure to give a decent explanation for refusing to sell news clips of politicians to a documentary maker

Posted 11:35 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Age of Marriage

Tracking Policies & Investigative Stories: Case Study: Blogging to Spot Trends & Forecast Markets
Small Business Tends LLC is a company that uses blogs to spot trends and forecast the likely behavior of the small business marketplace.
With more than 300 pages up at Small Business Trends and the launch of a second TrendTracker website, we have learned that blogs are great for identifying trends and for disseminating insight into developing trends.
We daily roam the Web, print publications, TV and radio looking for information that tells us something about small business.
• Spotting Trends
• · UPI: A special series on The War of Ideas [part 2, part 3, and part 4)]
• · · David Brooks on why the war on terrorism is really an ideological war
• · · · Terry Eagleton: What any decent politics must be built
• · · · · Interview: Alexander Downer
• · · · · · See Also Globalprblogweek.com

Posted 1:13 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Liberals whose major interests were cultural and social often ended up in alliances with anti-capitalists. Some found themselves making excuses for communism while others joined the more economically minded followers of Keynes or the devotees of the Swedish model (the 'third way' of its time). Neither alliance met with much success Russian tanks turned...up in Eastern European cities whenever political liberty threatened to break out, there was that awkward secret speech, and threats to bury the capitalist West followed the slow economic collapse...

Eye on Politics & Law Lords: Red-Blue Divide
Of all the forces governing this campaign, the greatest may not be the candidates themselves or the jolt of external events but something far more basic: The split personality of the US electorate. The election is being played out on a political landscape more sharply - and evenly - divided than any other in generations.
The red-blue divide, as it has come to be known, entered public consciousness in the 2000 election, when the nation split down the middle between George W. Bush and Al Gore. The color-coded electoral map told a blunt geographic tale: Mr. Bush's red swept across the South, the Great Plains, and most of the Rocky Mountain West, while Mr. Gore's blue covered almost all of New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and the West Coast. The dramatic results recast the United States as a bipolar, 50-50 nation, in which where one lived translated into differences in culture, values - and partisan allegiance.
• The Christian Science Monitor, a series inside red-and-blue America [part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5]
• · See Also How to strengthen the 2-party system Have you ever been to a party where it's ok to talk politics?
• · · See Also What is at stake in Australia’s History Wars (in 10 parts)
• · · · See Also Carr attacked over planning debacle [Talk about the story becoming the story History ]
• · · · · See Also Advising Singers To Sing (Not Talk Politics)
• · · · · · · Hypocrisy is an extraordinary spectator sport No Child Left Behind Act [ http://dox.media2.org/barista/ ]

Posted 1:04 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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The 2004 Vice Regal Blog Comments Award

The Blog, The Press, The Media: At the speed of blog
After a Republican congressman resigned unexpectedly, a lefty blogger called for readers to send money to his opponent -- and the cash poured in.
What happened next was beyond anything that Yellin had expected.
• Stephen Yellin, a 16-year-old politics junkie and frequent contributor to the lefty blog Daily Kos [ E-mail is so 1995 In no time, you'll be spending more time reading what you want and less time sifting through junk ]
• · The unedited voice of one person Online personals sites that cater to a specific political point of view [Malcolm Farr political leaders and rumours ]
• · · pass the word We don't need no stinkin login http://www.bugmenot.com/ [link first seen at Gianna ]
• · · See Also ADV: PClessons.info. Free articles and lessons about Windows, MS Word, MS Excel and Internet.
• · · · > Medical Meta-Search Engine Debut: Metasearch engine: operates different way as search engines like Google or Yahoo
• · · · · See Also CNN announced that Technorati will be providing real-time analysis of the political blogosphere at next week's Democratic National Convention [ Coming Soon: Politics.technorati.com ]
• · · · · · Circa 1960 Google of Yore

Posted 12:57 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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The good parts of a book may be something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life—and one is as good as the other.
Ernest Hemingway, letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sept. 4, 1929

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: Truth scores at the movies
With Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 about to crest the $100-million (U.S.) mark at the box office, and movies such as The Corporation, Super-Size Me, Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster and The Control Room currently doing well in multiplexes, we're in the midst of a documentary explosion.
Apparently, it's no longer the vegetable on our entertainment plate. Apparently, we can handle the truth.
Why Now?
Part of it could be escape fatigue. As mainstream movies have become more effects-driven and divorced from reality, we are craving something that has some connection with life as it's lived outside the multiplex.
Documentaries also feature real people, a scarce movie commodity. And technology has made docs easier to make.
Finally, I suggest a political impulse. Docs by their nature question assumptions about reality, truth and history, and the appetite for alternative viewpoints is only made keener during times of official information management. That is why Michael Moore is a star.
• One more thing: When [documentaries] work, they can knock you flat on your ass [Actual crime statistics aside, some cities just stand out as the world's most crime ridden:=: Crime Magazine’s Review of True-Crime Books]
• · See Also The Art Of Giving Credit
• · · A brief history of the alphabets .Believe it or not, many ancient philosophers and thinkers were not entirely supportive of the art of writing
• · · · See Also Author Norma Khouri may lose the right to live in Australia following allegations she made up parts of her past, published in a best-selling non-fiction book last year
• · · · · See Also Libraries ordered to destroy US pamphlets [The Boston Globe] [Dummies And Idiots And Boneheads, Oh My::Who knew you could make millions by insulting your customers? ]
• · · · · · See Also Books, Books, Books! Everywhere! (Too Many?) [ Kartoffel Surprise Kafka Cooks Dinner ...It was a dish so clearly German, rather than Czech, and certainly not French at all] [The Jean-Paul Sartre Cookbook Formula for a Denver omelet ]

Posted 7:54 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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It appears that last Thanksgiving in Iraq, Bush posed not with a fake turkey, but with a display turkey, never intended for carving but to adorn the buffet line. John Quiggin glad that's been cleared up
Since we know President Bush does not like to read should we expect him to read the entire [9/11 Commission] report? I was thinking about this earlier this morning. Not only Bush, but countless members of Congress have the reputation of asking their aides to do their reading for them. This has driven me nuts for years -- Bush is hardly the first president I've covered who sometimes avoids nuts-and-bolts hard work to absorb complicated material. Some politicians even defend the practice as 'good leadership' -- delegate the details. This drives me nuts too... Emperor of Pen fame, Kaiser, hates it when politicos don't read reports

Eye on Politics & Law Lords: Intelligence failures exposed
Australia invaded Iraq on the basis of thin, ambiguous and incomplete intelligence but without Federal Government pressure, an inquiry by former diplomat and spy boss, Philip Flood has found
• Spies underestimated JI threat: Flood [ via Vital reports on Iraq totalled only 51?2 pages ]
• · Congratulations: SMH actually provides a link to Flood Report from its Website; If this trend of providing links to primary material continues in the mainstream media then the MEdia Dragon can consider itsbloggingself (sic) totally redundant: Report of the Inquiry into Australian Intelligence Agencies
• · · Snapshot: Key findings
• · · · Speed of lies equals the ease of acceptance Propaganda, maybe, but Fahrenheit 9/11 encourages vigilance about truth
• · · · · Blair's off the hook (again). Bush brushes off the United States Senate finding about "the greatest intelligence failing in the history of the nation". And now Howard looks to have avoided incrimination: Artful dodgers, these vain masters of war
• · · · · · · See Also Companies that helped arrange financing for Gov. Bill Richardson’s $1.6 billion transportation program are the top contributors to a newly formed political committee affiliated with the governor
• · · · · · See Also Judges who enjoy extensive travel entitlements as part of their salary package are taking a second dip at the public purse by claiming additional trips as work-related expenses

Posted 7:51 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Best Blogging Barista in the Brave New Netherworld
Correct us if we're wrong. Every once in a while you have to step back and look in the mirror. Unfortunately, all of our mirror manufacturing has been outsourced. So...we turn to our friends across the pond for a fresh look.
In essence you don't run for President directly, you ask the media to run you for President. Reaching the voters relies almost entirely on how the media choose to perceive you and your campaign.
The March of Time: Old Battle for the White House (punt intended)

The Blog, The Press, The Media: Margo On the road again
Making the media accountable for their errors in the lead up to the Iraq war, and the false claims of some mainstream media that they’re working for you, the reader, rather than for their owner’s corporate agendas. Harry Heidelberg recommends Petition for initiation of complaint against Fox News Network for deceptive practices, where moveon has petitioned the Federal Trade Commission to take legal action against Murdoch’s Fox Network for deceptive advertising by promoting itself as the “fair and balanced” network. And see details of the moveon-inspired Outfoxed movie, which “provides an in-depth look at Fox News and the dangers of ever-enlarging corporations taking control of the public's right to know”. The Not Happy John Website is pulling together a mailing list of readers who we hope will help the site morph into an Australian version of moveon to help defend our democracy.
• Wondering who's to bless and who's to blame in the MEdia [Why network publicists cut off journo Bobbin at six questions People are naturally superstitious in an industry in which no one really understands what separates hits from flops and hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake, they will cut off a Q&A session after Bobbin's sixth question ]
• · See Also Media Matters: making headway in campaign against misinformation
• · · Journo wonders why media bigs aren't reporting WMD scoop: Why isn't Dan Rather reporting this? Why isn't Peter Jennings reporting this? It has been generally ignored, just as any story that's deemed favorable to the president is ignored by the formerly mainstream press
• · · · See Also Thomas Norton, a retired college professor, stared at Morning Call reporter Tracy Jordan and called her a 'stupid bitch
• · · · · See Also SF Chron letters editor on leave over political contributions
• · · · · · MEdia Dragon, who smacked book critic Dale Peck Crouch says he's being congratulated for hitting critic Peck

Posted 7:39 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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A parliamentary inquiry will investigate the State Government's refusal to rezone a controversial shopping centre at Liverpool and whether the minister who made the decision was pressured: Was there a secret handshake? Carr facing the music...

Invisible Hands & Markets: When the Priests of Capitalism Sin
I was wondering how Grandma Millie has been doing. You remember her, the hapless California electricity customer, the one the potty-mouthed energy traders on those Enron tapes bragged about bleeping over on her energy bill? I can't even use dots or asterisks to substitute for what Trader Kevin and Trader Bob were saying, or that's all there would be — dots — between snarky references to stealing from poor old ladies and jamming Grandma Millie for 250 bucks a megawatt-hour.
This was three and four summers ago, when the hotshot megawatt traders were holding us prisoner in the heat and the dark and making jokes about our miseries. Think Abu Ghraib with a beach. When a wildfire took down a power transmission line, they chanted Burn, baby, burn! When blackouts surged through the West like tsunamis, and people got trapped in elevators, and assembly lines slammed to a halt, and milk curdled in coolers, Trader Kevin wished for an earthquake that would let that thing float out to the Pacific.
• Enron road kill — that was Grandma Millie. Just like the rest of us [Alive & Well: Govt spending is back in fashion]
• · See Also New Tax Cut Scam Excludes Poor Kids...
• · · See Also Other People's Children...
• · · · An educated work force is not essential for economic growth. Neither is a high saving rate: What the McKinsey research makes clear is that it's not what you put into the economy that matters, but what you get out of it. Consumption is the goal of production
• · · · · · See Also NEW PROPHETS OF CAPITALISM [Australian tourism industry: How the goss is dimming the gloss... Love the country, not sure about those policies
• · · · · Cybermarket: Little did I know that I was about to be plunged into a netherworld of obsession and longing, an online universe where untold thousands of women around the world congregate...
• · · · · · Sydney CityRail fighting tooth, heart and nail: Panic stations over CityRail driver exodus

Posted 7:17 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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in Bushworld, you don't consult your father, the expert in being president during a war with Iraq, but you do talk to your Higher Father, who can't talk back to warn you to get an exit strategy or chide you for using Him for political purposes.
Ms. Dowd's Bushworld
Their civility...

The Blog, The Press, The Media: Liberalism as Deep Civility
Political correctness is another name for civility
The point of being polite or civil to another human being is not to demonstrate superiority, it is to demonstrate respect. The real test of a person's civility is the way they treat those who have less power and status than they do. True civility is not about whether you chew with your mouth open or use four letter words, it is about acknowledging that other people's beliefs, ambitions, and feelings are as important as your own.
Good manners are sometimes about being respectful and sometimes about maintaining a status hierarchy. Knowing which fork to use at dinner can be a mark of status. Knowing the right name to call something or someone can serve the same purpose. For example, referring to a judge as 'your highness' will earn you a smirk and a snicker from those who pride themselves on knowing better. Elaborate rituals can be used to exclude and humiliate people.
Civility is not just good manners. It is not civil to publish tracts denying that the holocaust took place or promote research which set out to prove that blacks are genetically inferior to whites. It doesn't matter how well mannered your prose is or what deference you show to academic norms. To have members of your family slaughtered like animals and then be accused of making it up is to be treated with contempt.
• What's the Point of Being Polite? I; Where's the civility? II [ courtesy of Ken Parish]
• · See Also John Quiggin
• · · Daniel Drezner had a nice roundup on civility in the blogosphere: An Incentive to Behave badly
• · · · Kalblog: That said, it does make a lot of civility complaints look rather silly, especially since the blogosphere is in many ways an outgrowth of academia
• · · · · See Also Rewarding-random-acts-of-civility
• · · · · · See Also Never underestimate the role of envy in any walk of life

Posted 7:55 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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One sunny day in 2005 an old man approached the White House from across
Pennsylvania Ave, where he'd been sitting on a park bench. He spoke to
the US Marine standing guard and said:
- I would like to go in and meet with President Bush.
The Marine looked at the man and said:
- Sir, Mr. Bush is no longer president and no longer resides here...
Kommunist about Joe Stalin Jokes Revised by Bohemian Amerikan Editors...

Eye on Politics & Law Lords: Gore Vidal, 'Contrarian-in-Chief' Where is terror's Homeland?
At 79, his writing is more outrageous than ever, especially about the ruling 'junta' in the White House. Ever since the events of Sept. 11. The patrician man of letters has become a rock star among dissidents -- and a contemptible fool in the eyes of his critics.
I am told the Cheney-Bush team dislikes their junta being compared to the Nazis. If they ceased behaving like Nazis, no comparison would come to mind.
• Orgy of destruction: That was so Clintonesque...
[Littwin: On the road to the 2004 e(l)ection: Why you don't need a map to find America's political divide ]
• · See Also What a surprise! Terrorists at Iranian military bases! Who ever would have imagined such a thing?
• · · See Also Some legislators are angry with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the serial w***en fondler, after he referred to them as Gurlie Men
• · · · THE CHOSEN FEW: exclusive clubs carry on traditions of fellowship, culture -- and discrimination The Bohemian Grove: Continuing the Long Legacy of Racist Elitism
• · · · · See Also 10 Stories the world needs to know more about
• · · · · · · What exists beyond those iron gates has yet to be written: What is Left?: Nihilism vs. Socialism [Spoon Benders Loading the language: This paper has explored the techniques used by i.e. (SusSex Street) to maintain high levels of conformity, activism and intolerance on the part of their members]

Posted 7:48 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Above all, blogging is fun. And that’s one thing I don’t get from Jennifer Howard’s eat-your-spinach account of life in the blogosphere: a sense of how much fun we’re all having out here. ‘We’ meaning TMFTML and Maud and Cup of Chicha and Old Hag and Bookslut and the thousands of nice people who visit us every day. It’s not a private party. There’s no secret handshake. All you have to do is click on a link. Or not. But we hope you do.
Not exactly Heathers

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: Why 'Heritage' is no longer a dirty word
Although the sun doesn't often make an appearance, summer is upon us. And across our bloody meadows, open commons, and ancient forests Britain's heritage army is steeling itself for combat. As July merges into August, the great battles of the English Civil War, the Wars of the Roses, even the Roman invasion will once again be re-enacted to the delight of millions. For summer is the season of heritage.
Since it was first widely identified some 20 years ago, Britain's love affair with the living past has mushroomed both in popularity and as a realm of critical inquiry.
• Think of heritage as the building block for understanding the world: Think of literature as training wheels for the imagination [Shared inheritance As July merges into August: In the future, all books will be digital...well, ]
• · But who knew half the nation was still reading? Literature's killer could hardly be more obvious: It's the Internet [I want to be a loose cannon, I still want to do my part to shake things up: Lily Wong Fillmore is in love with village language
• · · There's a profound air of inquiry hanging over 9 La Trobe Street, Melbourne: The Existentialist Society gives me purpose, yes. Although it might all be bullshit [The multiculturalist preaches that, in an age of mass migration, society can be a kind of salad bowl, a receptacle for wonderful exotic ingredients from around the world, the more the better, each bringing its special flavor to the cultural mix. For the salad to be delicious, no ingredient should predominate and impose its flavor on the others: As culture merges into mores]
• · · · See Also So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance
• · · · · John Marsden Australia's most influential author: John, when you sign one of your books, you sign, Take risks. Why that?
PS::Because I guess in modern society the emphasis is so much on taking care that I think we're going to end up with a generation of frightened people, but also people who are emotionally and spiritually stunted by being so careful that they never get out there and try anything adventurous.
• · · · · · Rachel Griffiths: Rejected by NIDA, dismissed by others who simply continues to delight in the unorthodox
• · · · · · · Writing Tool #14: Interesting Names Roy Peter Clark The best reporters recognize and take advantage of coincidence between name and circumstance

Posted 2:07 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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You'd have to think hard to come up with practically any journalist, east of Iraq, who has a juicier beat nowadays. ...Toobin's beat is suspenseful enough to make a Reality TV poobah drool Toobin is a journalist in the right place at the right time

The Blog, The Press, The Media: American journalists thought they were safe in Russia
Former Time magazine Moscow correspondent Andrew Meier says there's little doubt that Forbes editor Paul Klebnikov was the victim of a contract killing. Although during Putin's presidency 14 reporters have been killed, with one exception they were all Russians, so Americans thought they were safe. Business, imagined Western reporters covering the rise of Russian capitalism, had matured. The bosses of the underworld and the lords of the oligarchy had learned. Disputes were settled in courts, not bloody sidewalks. How wrong we were.
• Svoboda Slova; Freedom of Speech [ courtesy of Why Jones is wrong about blogs NYU's Rosen has three reasons]
• · See Also Shooting the Messenger: The Challenge Facing Real Journalists... [ courtesy of Call this the season of the documentary... Fahrenheit 9/11, Control Room, Hunting of the President and now, Outfoxed]
• · · How does today’s Republican Party fit Wall Street bankers under the same tent as blue-collar America? How does a party unify those who seek to bathe corporations in taxpayer cash with those who want to curtail government spending? When Left is Right
• · · · DRAGON: Underground MEdia Diet FOX: The 'Official' Government News Network... a steady diet of official information [ courtesy of The E(l)ection: Bring It On!... ]
• · · · · See Also Why the Press Failed... [ courtesy of A Giant Leap for Academia? Google Ventures into DSpace
• · · · · · Darren Baker on My Czech Republic: A native of California, Darren has been living in Moravia since 1992. Not far, in fact, from the house where Freud was born (which, incidentally, is a massage parlor today)

Posted 11:47 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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All told, there have been no more than seventy empires in history. If the Times Atlas of World History is to be believed, the American is, by my count, the sixty-eighth...
Unilever NV, the Dutch conglomerate that just dropped Whoopi: Goldberg Brings Hypocrites from Under Their Rocks...

Eye on Politics & Law Lords: Worst of the Worst?
Sally Neighbour pieces together the Mamdouh Habib story from his migration to Australia 20 years ago, his growing devotion to Islam and his radicalisation by the US murder trial of an Islamic extremist.
Habib campaigned for the men convicted of the first World Trade centre bombing and came to ASIO's notice. He began attending lectures by a firebrand Islamic preacher in Sydney. But he was under growing personal pressure. A government contract fell through. His business collapsed. He felt cheated because he was muslim and Egyptian, according to an old friend.
• Habib [ via abc.net.au/4corners ] **Tony Blair was warned before the Iraq war by the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, that a UN court could rule Britain's invasion unlawful**
• · · · Westfield: Link to Ngo grounds for zoning ban. The battle over Nabil Gazal's Liverpool retail centre has turned personal [Assassination:
A Norfolk Island politician instrumental in the hunt for Sydneysider Janelle Patton's killer was shot dead in his parliamentary office yesterday
• · · · · Big funds boost for spy office
• · · · · · MP Peter Breen says he is victim of a payback
• · See Also This article from TIME states that the 9/11 Commission's upcoming final report will provide information linking Iran with Al Qaeda [via National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (also known as the 9-11 Commission) ]
• · · Brendan Gleeson, Toni Darbas, Laurel Johnson and Suzanne Lawson: (Warning PDF Format) What is metropolitan planning? [Brendan Gleeson outlines the major strategic challenges facing Queensland Transport (PDF) The chrysalis breaks open: the emergence of a post neo-liberal mode of urban change ]
• · · · Who Cares? Australian Council of Social Service: New tax statistics show capital gains tax cuts unfair
• · · · · Peter Mares: WHAT a surprise: ‘queue jumpers’ and ‘illegals’ who once made ‘an assault on our borders’ now make ‘a significant contribution to the Australian community’ and may be allowed to stay permanently
• · · · · · · Rudyard Griffiths...My Five Minutes on Fox:
Defending Canada Against the Broadsides of the U.S. Right is a Learning Experience

Posted 11:36 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Too bad for Bill Clinton that he wasn't on trial in the Czech Republic. The Senate would probably have voted him a pay raise before dismissing the case. People here would just as soon laugh and buy the man an absinthe. As many see it, there's something distinctly untrustworthy about a man who doesn’t lie about an affair and cover it up...
Hillary Clinton with Czech President Vaclav Havel at Cafe Slavia, famous for serving Hill's Absinth

Giving People Better Stories: Daring, If Human, Leader & Heterosexual Icon: William Jefferson Clinton
I loved being president. I loved it. Even in the hardest period, I thought, Gosh. It was an exciting job. There was always something new, and always some opportunity, every day, to make somebody's life better, to make... As I said in my book, the way I judged my own life and politics was whether I was giving people better stories - were they going to have a better story? And I think every day there was some chance to do that. So there was some loneliness there, but basically, it was a joy for me. I liked it.
You were raised to be an optimistic man by your mother. Do you have as much faith in humanity now as when you took office?
More. Oh, more. How could I not? You know, the whole...you know, power structure of the Republican Party, the Congress, the Special Counsel, came down on me, the press was hounding me and baying like dogs at the moon and saying I was dead as could be, and the American people stayed with me. And then, after that passed, we had two of the best years of my presidency, in '99 and 2000, from the point of view of the American people. And the way I've been treated by people since I left office...how can I not? I believe I'm more optimistic today, and more idealistic today, than I was the day I took the oath of office as president in 1993.
Mandela told me he forgave his oppressors because if he didn't they would have destroyed him, He said: 'You know, they already took everything. They took the best years of my life; I didn't get to see my children grow up. They destroyed my marriage. They abused me physically and mentally. They could take everything except my mind and heart. Those things I would have to give away and I decided not to give them away.' And then he said 'Neither should you'.
Mandela said when he was finally set free he felt all that anger welling up again and he said: 'They've already had me for 27 years ... I had to let it go'.
Speaking of his own attempts to forgive the former independent counsel Kenneth Starr and the rest of his legal tormentors, Mr Clinton adds: You do this not for other people but for yourself. If you don't let go it continues to eat at you.
• Nelson Mandella praising Clinton for being the person we'd all like to be on our best day... Bill Being Far From The Male Eunuch [ANDREW DENTON: Enough Rope]
• · Tony Jones: Mark Latham, do you see any similarities between Bill Clinton's rise to the US presidency and your own tilt at power here in Australia? Liverpool Mayor: Latham

Posted 1:27 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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America is a 50-50-50 electorate: 50 per cent Democrat, 50 per cent Republican and 50 per cent who don't vote
Where politics shouldn’t go
One of the most untouchable issues in American politics is the damaging proposition, deliberately fostered by government leaders that religious devotion and patriotism are inseparable

Eye on Politics & Law Lords: A look at the history of Mein Kampf
One person who did read it, and take it seriously, was the British ambassador in Berlin in 1933, Sir Horace Rumbold. He sent his explicit report on it to the Foreign Office in London, and the report, pointing out the dangers of Hitler on the basis of reading the book, was read by all members of the Cabinet, including the prime minister. Why, despite this, the threat was not acted upon is, of course, another story.
Germans, even Nazis, did not quote from it very often, whereas Soviet Communists were quoting from Lenin and Stalin at every opportunity.
• It was hardly ever treated as a sacred text or used as an authority for action [Levy’s goal is simple: to wake us up to human suffering and injustice ]
• · Philip Flood: Revealed: where our spies got it wrong [ via Philip Flood, former ambassador to Jakarta, former high commissioner in London, and former head of ONA] [ via ]
• · · The summers of 1944 and 2004: Pre-invasion intelligence — despite ULTRA and a variety of brilliant analysts who had done so well to facilitate our amphibious landings — had no idea of what war in the hedgerows would be like
• · · · See Also We are closer to primitive man than we thought
• · · · · Tina Brown: Looking for an angel to outfox Murdoch's flawless malice
• · · · · · · See Also Conspiracy Theorists, Unite: A secret conference thought to rule the world [Every presidential ticket is a snapshot of a party, a particular political moment, a particular political need: Money, politics, and four Imrich men ]

Posted 1:23 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Subsidising speculative investments
The top 5 per cent of income earners have received half the benefit of the Government's capital gains tax cuts,
which also helped push house prices beyond the reach of first-time buyers
How the right to destroy property has implications for a broad range of legal issues: Rational people discard old clothes, furniture, albums and unsent letters every day

Invisible Hands & Markets: Harry Potter, Market Wiz: Is Pulling Rank A Social Injustice?
When a power-hungry boss, an overzealous coach, or a powerful politician uses his perceived authority to slap down an underling, most people would label the guy a jerk, a bully, or worse.
But Robert Fuller is taking it one step further, accusing such types of rankism, a serious social injustice which points up the need for society to begin tearing down traditional structures of rank, or at least to demand better treatment from those in authority. Fuller, a prominent physicist and past president of Oberlin College, is proposing some controversial societal changes to combat rankism, including the abolition of university tenure.
• The Order of Rankism: you shouldn't trust any rankism [With Hermonione, Ron and the usual suspects, the young wizard fights passionately against the politicians' ambition to control his school: Too bad that young students, in the real world, aren't fighting the same battle ]
• · Why the Invisible Business Cycle Happens Groping for an explanation for the cycle [Only a country that could produce the Invisible BlackSmith Hand and Yes Minister Could Produce a Report on the Worst Intelligence stuff up in history and say Nobody is to blame...]
• · · Terror in the Skies, Again? What does it have to do with finances? Nothing, and everything ((TERROR IN THE SKIES (CONTINUED)
At least the basic story is true
• · · · 40 Richest Australians, Ach, Rupert Murdoch: Australia's 40 most influential people of 2004
• · · · · Prince of tax avoidance is making trouble again. Michael Badnarik, a dark horse on the third ballot
• · · · · · Thomas Frank: on the FMA and how success comes by losing ((All magic aside, a striking aspect of the Harry Potter books is just how completely normal and bourgeois are all the settings and experiences of the characters ))
Drawn into a magical universe of flying cars, spells that make its victims spew slugs, trees that give blows, books that bite, elf servants, portraits that argue and dragons with pointed tails...

Posted 1:12 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Once a year, every politician should be required to catch a train. He should buy a ticket with his own money, line up with the citizenry, fight his way through the crowds, listen to public announcements; and pay close attention to what his fellow travellers are saying and doing. In short, he should be forced to remind himself on a regular basis of how ordinary people experience life, and marvel at the fact that they keep voting major parties back in spite of everything...
Mark Latham in 2003 From the Suburbs paraphrasing Cold River:
Wherever power is concentrated in society - whether in the boardrooms of big business, the pretensions of big media, the political manipulation of big churches or the arrogance of big bureaucracies - we need to be anti-establishment. The outsiders want us to take on the system on their behalf. They want us to disperse influence and opportunity as widely as possible.

The Blog, The Press, The Media: If not now, when? Czech out: Smartmobs
About grassroot journalism unsettling Big Media's monopoly
86% of US MEdia Dragon readers declare that blogs are a useful source of news or links they can't find elsewhere, and most believe that blogs feature a better perspective, faster news and more honesty than traditional media.

About Last Night got written up yesterday in Publishers Lunch:
Finally, the big blog occasion this week is the one-year anniversary of cultural critic Terry Teachout's abundant blog About Last Night. He writes, Blogs are the 21st-century counterpart of the periodical essays of the eighteenth century, the Spectators and Ramblers and Idlers that supplied familiar essayists with what was then the ideal vehicle for their intensely personal reflections. Blogging stands in the sharpest possible contrast to the corporate journalism that exerted so powerful an effect on writing in the twentieth century.
• I still can't figure out why everyone isn't getting their authors to blog [Blogging puts professionals and amateurs on an even footing: That’s why so many professional writers dislike and distrust it]
• · Yes, children, we did used to have blogs. We called them diaries: The Key to Discreet Gossiping ((Creator of the web turns knight: SIR TIM BERNERS-LEE ))
• · · The most delightful Tilly, the king of Moving Headlines: Coming soon: thunderstorm in the blogosphere
PS: I wouldn't move into knickerknotting mode here. But a sledgehammer was used to crack a nut, which managed to sprout legs and likketysplit out of the way on its little Dunlop Volleys.
• · · · See Also After The Lawyers, Can We Kill All PR People? [I would really like to believe that not all PR people are this bad, but I'm beginning to lose faith: PR-approved versions are clearly spun, and we're not fans of spinning]
• · · · · Well, come on. Both Yahoo and Google announced small purchases in the last week, do you think Microsoft could resist? Google-juice: Search Space Acquisitions Are Hot Hot Hot
• · · · · · Isn't it about time we addressed the question of why all that bandwidth is focused downward? Let Us Swim Upstream (( The internet is a communications medium, not a broadcast medium ))
• · · · · · · History is Back Australia Talks Back: Blogs and Blogging

Posted 5:38 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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John Howard doesn't need an authorised dirt unit when he has young Liberals running amok using aliases and masquerading as members of the Maroubra ALP.
A young blueblood last week duped Sauce by claiming he was a Laborite who was cranky with Bob Carr as he stirred up trouble over a photo that the Premier had in one of his recent Maroubra newsletters.
He also misrepresented himself as a reporter from this organ to Carr's media adviser, Michael Salmon, who picked him for a dirt trickster.
It turns out that Salmon's suspicions were right.
The chap was Steve Josephs, who ran unsuccessfully for president of the UNSW Students Guild last year on a [dry] Liberal ticket called Y.O.U. (Your Own University).
Young Bipartisan rascal

Eye on Politics & Law Lords: Play with science, and face unthinkable consequences
One of the leading themes of current philosophy is that the notion of objectivity is utterly illusory.
According to Wittgenstein, the purpose of philosophy is to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle. For those reluctant to regard themselves as flies, still less ones trapped in bottles, Wittgenstein's aphorism gives all the excuse needed for lobbing philosophy into a mental box marked Not Needed on Voyage.
Having long regarded Wittgenstein an intellectual fraud, it has taken me a long time to recognise the potency of his definition. It began with a growing suspicion that those keen to boss us about are indeed like flies buzzing around in bottles, in the shape of academic departments or the Westminster Village. Only very recently has it occurred to me that philosophers might have something useful to say on the matter dealing with political risk.
• When Philosophy Met Science [Since 9/11, the mainstream media can't get enough of the question: 'Why do the terrorists hate us?' Well, We, e.i. Labour Party, Gave Them The Idea ]
• · See Also Wal Murray dies in his sleep [ via Boisterous of voice - mixing a big man's gentleness with a bucolic earthiness ] [via Wal Murray called a spade a spade] [ via New South Wales has lost one of its greatest champions of country causes] [ via ONE of the true gentlemen of NSW politics]
• · · Left, Right & Center - The PBS Political Slant: Is PBS slanting right because it gave conservative Tucker Carlson his own show?
• · · · See Also It was clear long before anyone had seen a frame of either "Passion" or "Fahrenheit" that what audiences would witness was the uncompromised, unfiltered vision of a strong-willed, stubborn and bloody-minded director ((Censured on the House floor ))
• · · · · Surreal farce of corrupt police: Irish police planted bogus IRA arms, bullets and bombs: a litany of lies
• · · · · · · Law is a very gentle profession compared to politics (Senator Helen Coonan) This the most realistic thing I have read all week ((Without Priscilla, we wouldn’t be talking: The Perfect Mistress Priscilla Morgan))

Posted 5:37 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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The kids need more than rock in their art diet:
One of my beginnings was about a young university guy who, when you meet him. is drinking coffee at a Toronto diner. He's reading Kafka in the hopes that it'll offer a clue as to why he's able to turn into a housefly, but really he just wants to get up enough nerve to talk to the waitress.

Feeding the Soul: If you can make Underground Love to Zamizdatzine, you can make a Book
The first thing I learned about self-publishing is that the literary world considers it roughly equivalent to defecating in the middle of a formal dinner party...
The rise of indie music offers a potential model. Ten years ago, if someone put out their own album people would say, Oh, I guess they couldn't get a record deal. Nowadays -- after years of undeniably great independent releases, consciousness of media ownership, and a self-sustaining community -- public perception of indie rock has shifted. Now, people would be just as likely to say, Oh, cool. Major labels suck.
The same shift could happen in publishing. Similar conditions are there: increasing media consolidation on one end, and a pool of artists who are used to doing it themselves on the other. This time, it's zinesters and their photocopiers instead of guitarists with their four-tracks.
• The Thing by Which You Will Be Judged: Indie music in the '90s, indie publishing in the '00s [Link Poached from Don’t Let a Little Thing Like Failure Stop You! ]
• · the very stuff of your being is unworthy, your soul too thin and your brain too thick: Fighting the Voices In Your Head
• · · The absence of new stories makes for a monotonous and confining culture: Writing a book is a political act, and because it's entertainment, it's a subversive one

Posted 5:25 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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For I am like a passenger waiting for his ship at a war-time port. I do not know on which day it will sail, but I am ready to embark at a moment’s notice. I leave the sights of the city unvisited. I do not want to see the fine new speedway along which I shall never drive, nor the grand new theatre, with all its modern appliances, in which I shall never sit. I read the papers and flip the pages of a magazine, but when someone offers to lend me a book I refuse because I may not have time to finish it, and in any case with this journey before me I am not of a mind to interest myself in it. I strike up acquaintances at the bar or the card-table, but I do not try to make friends with people from whom I shall so soon be parted. I am on the wing.
W. Somerset Maugham, A Writer’s Notebook

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: Small print, big picture

Getting a book on the big screen is a hard enough task, so what chance of starting from scratch with the latter in mind?
In September 1994, Derek Hansen was an author in search of a movie deal. Setting out to write his third novel, Sole Survivor, he decided to do everything he could to make the book attractive to filmmakers.
His motivation was simple. A movie deal is an imprimatur. If you get a film made, it says it's a good book because there's a blind faith in movies. So I kept the cast small, set it in one location and made the props fairly minimal.
• Hansen was something of a river-dolphin. He enjoyed swimming in silty water and outwitting the crocodiles around him [The challenge was to ourselves not the Morava River iRiver drowned in the sea of ideas ]
• · Just as Hitchcock, Dreyer and Eisenstein in their bravest, most driven projects reached for cinema's unique selling point so, in Ten, did Kiarostami The whole point about cinema, surely, is the close-up of the human face
• · · See Also But though the book has been optioned for a movie and he is on top of the world, Jones lives a minimalist lifestyle
• · · · Any book publicist will tell you that it's easier to get press or broadcast coverage for non-fiction books because they come with pictures and flesh-and-blood characters: Making Room For Fiction ((Making Better BBC: The corporation’s programmes were not good enough and launched a major inquiry into how to improve them))
• · · · · Never a dull day, never a good night's sleep: Blaenavon, the small coal and iron town in South Wales, launched an audacious experiment - to build a new prosperity based on second-hand books in a post-industrial graveyard of dead jobs.... Town Of Books, Town Of Dreams
• · · · · · A Cold Serial With Your Hot Cereal: Minority Opinion: NYT To Serialize Fiction

Posted 2:52 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Back in June 2004 AD I made a punt along the lines that Federal E(l)ection would take place sometime after 20 October (The Day of the Dragonian 20th wedding anniversary). My gut feeling is that the Liberals will scrape in despite byelections making Blair look like a loser. Winner takes all mentality was practiced by the communists and now major parties are also tempted to take the easy way out. In my humble opinion Iron Wall to Iron Wall Labour version of the political machine might be even more dangerous than John Howard. While NSW is in the hands of the Sussex Street the Kanberreans of Liberal devotion have nothing to fear until 2007.
The year of the webdiary/blog: It's one thing to hear people in the internet industry swapping jargon like Blogosphere. It's quite another to hear it emerge from the lips of a government minister

The Blog, The Press, The Media: The Next Power to the People will be Blogged
Margo is without any doubt, just like John Hatton and Brian Harradine and Ted Mack, the national living treasure. As ordinary Havels and Mandelas of this fragile world, Margo might not have a silver bullet to solve the entrenched problems of democracy but she honestly cares about people. Margo is also one of the few journalists who keeps every dishonest leader, be it a power hungry politician, media personality, or businessman, awake at night.
Margo Kingston would like to make one thing clear: she is not Australia's answer to Michael Moore. Yes, her new book Not Happy, John! is a broadside against our Prime Minister, just as Moore's books and films have been slaps in the face for George Bush.
Yes, like Moore, she argues with a colloquial passion that her publishers hope might - just might - tap into a similar seam of popular discontent. But that's where it ends. Although we both dress badly, and we have continual bad hair days, there's one crucial difference. Which is that I do not have a sense of humour.
• There's enormous energy just bubbling along under the surface in this country [ courtesy of The Antipodian Political Bible]
• · See Also Anti-Howard website linked to controversial consultant Tim Grau, the Bunyip of the Labour Party; like the weblog it sends up, it lacks any real depth or insight
• · · Google et al Search firms hunt the next dotcom boom
• · · · MEdia Dragon, Inforworld meets print:
Dialogues started online shape the content of this magazine InfoWorld Test Center Lead Analyst Jon Udell has worn his fair share of hats during a 25-year career
• · · · · Believe or not this sewerage case scared a bit this MEdia Dragon based in Sunshine Coast in Y2K: Fear factor: Largely the stuff of Hollywood films, cyber terrorism - politically motivated attacks intended to shock and terrify


• · · · · · Czech Out The Community Amplify: Blogs on steroids

Posted 2:00 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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The taxpayer-funded Government Members’ Secretariat is doing party political work, according to former government adviser Greg Barns: Inside the propaganda machine

Eye on Politics & Law Lords: Paul McGeough: World Exclusive The dark background of Iraq's new Prime Minister
His enemies say he was an assassin for Saddam Hussein. Now Iyad Allawi is accused of personally executing prisoners.
Hold the doctor up to the light and there are flaws in the glass. We are not quite sure how Iyad Allawi became Iraq's interim Prime Minister and no one knows just how and why he fell out with Saddam Hussein. It is unclear whether his preoccupation with security outweighs a professed love for democracy or what that might mean for Iraq's 25 million people.
• Allawi shot prisoners in cold blood: witnesses: Hard man for a tough country [ via Allawi's Rocky road to the top ]
• · See Also The Federal Government denied allegations yesterday that the Israeli spy agency Mossad had obtained at least 25 false Australian passports
• · · See Also Terror war a fight to the death: PM [link to Advancing the National Interest is the Government's - and Australia's - second foreign and trade policy White Paper www.dfat.gov.au/ani/foreword.html Foreign Minister Alexander Downer yesterday released the white paper outlining the nature of the terrorist threat facing Australia and the root causes ] [Dollars and sense: trends in intelligence resourcing Punishment and praise won’t bring the best intelligence advice]
• · · · Beyond the wire Canberra's softened attitude on asylum seekers can be put down in part to how a family's suffering touched a Government MP
• · · · · See Also Democratic breakdown: Winner take all system would be a step backward for Czech democracy
• · · · · · · By-elections: British reaction [ via Every hotel room in Leicester was fully booked last night - unscientific but telling proof of the importance the byelection held for Tony Blair, Michael Howard and Charles Kennedy]

Posted 1:58 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Invisible Hands & Markets: Nation of landlords lines up for $15bn tax deduction
Negative gearing tax deductions on rental properties have soared to almost $15 billion, after 220,000 new landlords lodged claims for the first time.
• You cannot form a government by buying people [link first seen at ]
• · NSW politics is rarely dramatic or exciting. Most political dramas have a habit of dying down after a few days and then fizzling out altogether ...It's not the first time Westfield has clashed with rival retail developer Nabil Gazal, but this time the Premier's name has added fuel to the fire
• · · See Also Even the hint of corruption can lead to the fall of a government, but in the case of the Czech Republic, such allegations seem to be inseparable from nearly any political undertaking
• · · · See Also Don Boudreaux writes about the incremental improvements of the market that build up and make life better
• · · · · See Also Sydney migrants sell up and go west
• · · · · · See Also Is your family worse off than it was in the 1970's? Are many of the families that you know worse off?

Posted 1:54 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Books for Babies, and earlier. Biblia, the Warrior Librarian writes "New Zealand has just started a new scheme to promote literacy - Books for New Zealand Babies. Interestingly, as part of the campaign they... will produce Baby Bookpacks in consultation with Kidz First, comprising a free book and reading tips, to be distributed to parents of premature and critically ill babies in the neonatal unit, with the goal of encouraging them to read to their newborns..
Sharing books with children from birth not only promotes bonding, but is proven to have a powerful impact on literacy - both for these children and their families

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: Books have not been killed off by the visual culture
It is depressing that we have one of the most literate societies in history but a decreasing number of readers...
Divine marketing opportunity. Collect donations for people not to buy your book, but to put your book in a public library. The indie press No Media Kings crowd would like you to do just that in their NO MEDIA KINGS, YES LIBRARY BLING drive. Don't miss their how to make a book section.
I'm interested in strengthening the ties between indie culture and public libraries, because it's a political alliance: we both fight corporate power. Just by being there we provide an alternative to our increasingly commodified culture and preserve the diversity of the public sphere. I think there's a lot of really interesting things that can be done between these two communities, once we become aware of each other's intersecting mutual interests.
• Literature of MisReading [Literature of Dating]
• · See Also With Toughness and Caring, a Novel Therapy Helps Tortured Souls
• · · See Also Six signs you may be taking yourself too seriously at work
• · · · See Also Top 10 Contemporary Classics
• · · · · See Also Chattering Classics
• · · · · · · See Also This the most tiring thing I have read all week: So Tired - Where Web surfers go when they haven't slept a wink

Posted 8:55 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Peter Singer, philosopher, questions John Howard's ethics

Eye on Politics & Law Lords: Letter According to Paul and his Lasting Speech
On June 28, Paul Bremer gave a farewell speech as he stepped down as U.S. administrator in Iraq. Some Iraqis, at least, found the talk moving. Ali Fadhil, 34, a resident in pediatrics at a Baghdad hospital, watched it on television with a group in the cafeteria. He said Bremer's words choked up even a onetime supporter of April's Shiite uprising. We have this information about the Bremer speech because Fadhil and his brothers are bloggers who file their own reports on the Internet ( iraqthemodel.blogspot.com).
Word that Bremer actually gave the speech is something of a collector's item among American reporters.
• The Washington Post said Bremer left without giving a talk [> Freedom takes strong stomachs Freedom takes strong stomachs, but many of us have indigestion ] [Strong Stomach Berlin Wall]
• · See Also Professor Tom McPhail calls bloggers pretend journalists and complains that (bloggers) are not committed to being objective
• · · Lord Chauvinist Pig And some people want to get rid of the House of Lords in the UK. Then we'd miss out on gems like this debate on the subject of Amazon club memberships
• · · · See Also Yellow-cake scandal: CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS has more on the collapse of the Joe Wilson Bush lied story
• · · · · General Accounting Office Report ((http://lautenberg.senate.gov/crs-homeland.pdf)) Questions Value of Color-Coded Warnings ((To you, it's sushi. To me, it's bait ... to some it's just raw fish cake: Absolute predictors of political leanings Red or Blue: Which Are You? (PURE PURPLE!)))
• · · · · · See Also Donald Luskin: Mrs. Kerry Is Filthy Rich. Why Is Her Taxable Income So Small

Posted 7:39 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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In the immortal words of Monty Python, Amongst [the Spanish Inquisition's] weaponry are such diverse elements as: fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope, and nice red uniforms. Truthfully, not a bad formula for startup success...Fanaticism is the secret weapon... that, and the comfy chair

The Blog, The Press, The Media: New York Times, Sydney Morning Herald et al...
We've discussed many times how newspapers simply don't get the internet, and Adam Penenberg is suggesting that there may be no greater example than the NY Times. The Times, of course, was one of the first online newspapers to require online registration and set up a paid archive for articles after a short period of free time online. However, because of that, the New York Times results barely appear at all in Google. If they're striving to be "the paper of record" then they need to be where people are looking -- and these days, people are looking in Google. Penenberg notes that despite the fact that the Times makes very little money off of those archives, they won't open them, because it might endanger their $20 million per year deal with Lexis-Nexis. Talk about getting hung up by legacy systems. Either way, it's a good point that the folks at the NY Times (and other newspapers) need to realize. Being online means being accessible. If you're not, then today's surfers aren't going to care. You may believe you can hang onto a small group and sell their demographic data to advertisers, but the data is dirty and the times are changing. People don't want to jump through hoops when there's a lot of other content out there, and if the command line of the internet is a search engine, these sites that block themselves off are simply making themselves obsolete.
• Being online means being accessible [ courtesy of Bad for business popups generating more negative feelings for the brand than positive responses]
• · See Also Silicon Valley and Hollywood Are Not That Different
• · · Webdiary: If Tony Fitzgerald QC was correct about the importance of truth to democracy, it's not just politicians who owe us the truth. Journalists do too
Only for MEdia Dragons who fail to appreciate the fact that curiousity about intelligence can kill even in the so called civilised world...Czech this Out:
• · · · Full Report of Contradiction in ChairName and Content: Lord Butler delivers Iraq verdict [The spectre of Good Intentions & Weapons of Mass Destruction ... will hang over Media, MI6 and MPs]
• · · · · US Senate report on the intelligence that helped bring about the war in Iraq: Warning Amerikan PDF spy within [Tasman courtesy of ASIO, Mossad, KIWI agents]
• · · · · · Last, But Not Least: Barista singlehandedly pumps MEdia Dragon;=) [ Ken Parish: Pump, Baby, Pump New Blog: From a LAN Downunder Moore New Blogs Down Under:It's 4.45am and I'm crying like a baby...]

Posted 9:40 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Looking for the truth in a sea of deceit...

As Montaigne wrote, sanitatis patrocinium est, insanientium turba [a mob of lunatics now claim to form the authority for truth]

Invisible Hands & Markets: Circle of self-interest hides the truth: Blow to Westfield rival shocks MP
Labor's federal MP for Fowler, Julia Irwin, was told six weeks ago the NSW Government would sign the planning consent to allow developer Nabil Gazal's Liverpool shopping centre to continue operating.
• There's a lot of questions to be answered and I want to know where that pressure has come from [Sydney's urban secrets unlocked ] [[ via James Hardie offers glimmer of hope for asbestos victims]]
• · See Also Things I have to do before they become illegal
• · · See Also Ironically, We Found Tens Of Thousands Of Workers Who Have Not Paid Their Personal Income Taxes To Their Own Employer-The Federal Government
• · · · · Ethan Zuckerman A map of a country: economic and developmental analysis

Posted 8:42 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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MM blog now has more hits than my decade old car has meters Here are Michael Moore's extensive factczeching notes on Fahrenheit 911

Eye on Politics & Law Lords: Nudist colony gives you a newfound appreciation for intelligence
The intelligence failure over Iraq will take a prominent place in the history of notable intelligence breakdowns.
These range, if you want to go back far enough, from the wooden horse in Troy to, in modern times, Stalin's refusal to believe that Germany would invade the Soviet Union in 1941, and the British belief that they would have warning of an Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982.
Intelligence also failed to warn against - let alone stop - the two sudden and daring strikes against the US, at Pearl Harbor in 1941 and on 11 September 2001.
Intelligence failures can be put into a number of categories:
Overestimation
Underestimation
Over-confidence
Complacency
Ignorance
Failure to join the dots
This is the failure to make connections between bits of intelligence to make a coherent whole.
The key intelligence failure was that the Trojans ignored a warning.
The trouble is that lessons are not always learned, which is why the list of intelligence failures grows longer.
• A short look at the long history of intelligence failures: Turning the tables on intelligent conpersons [Trotskyism and Centrism: Don't let a series on the politics of opportunism on the left rattle you(part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, and part 7)]
• · Dirty party talk: Tis the season of the free buffet, and the diplomats, self-important journalists (ahem) and cuddly cultural icons are out in full force
• · · See Also Who's Got the Wrong Values Now? Order of the British Empire
• · · · Operation Buy Candidate a Drink: Politicians have a legal right to lie to voters just about as much as they want: How come this fact does not surprise me to even the slightest degree?
• · · · · See Also Federal Park Police Chief fired after talking to reporter
• · · · · · · See Also Transparent grab for power or genuine threat?

Posted 8:33 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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I am looking forward to an open, transparent and meritocracy-based communication, attributes that bloggers are famous for!
Here are some tidbits from head of the Federal Communications Commission, Michael Powell's blog at http://www.alwayson-network.com/

The Blog, The Press, The Media: The Blogger, the Pamphleteer, and Mixed Blessings
The blogosphere is Berlin in the late eighteenth century. It is London in the late seventeenth century. It is Paris...well, pretty consistently since the French Revolution on. The blogosphere is all of these, wrapped up into one overwhelming whole.
What does it mean to say this? Simply put, the blogosphere now seems to fit the space that pamphleteers and small journals in ages past once held. Where once groups of individuals would come together to create, say, the Berlinischer Monatsschrift, today any individual with a computer, Internet access, and time can do the same. Indeed, where in previous ages, the writers needed to be near to one another, now an online weblog can include people from Texas, DC, Indiana, California, and England in realtime. The flurry of ideas that one could see at those points in history has now come to the masses.
• The Great Periphery makes up the rest of the blogosphere [After Howard Dean: The next step in grassroots campaigns is here. And this time, it's Republicans who are leading the way] [A blogger named Jason is making a case for why people should go to church naked: Life is but a blog for growing number of Web writers ]
• · 419 e-mails: Next time you get a spam letter from Nigeria, keep this link handy... The Order of the Red Breast
• · · See Also The Duke Professor Is Vulnerable: Liberal Blog Praises and Attacks John T Plecnik ((Malaysia: The media monitors' blog provided the much-needed space for online, critical examination of the mainstream media in the run-up to the general election
• · · · See Also Venture capitalists muse on new blog [ Visit Nwventurevoice.com was initiated by Martin Tobias] [ courtesy of The Value of a Business Mentor]
• · · · · See Also Legal blogs ((Blog, baby, blog: to get your five minutes of fame))
• · · · · · See Also A good blog is a punch in the stomach: It's officially a living: Bloggers find ad boom can pay their rent
• · · · · · · See Also Reporters share dark side of news in blogs

Posted 2:56 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Bastille Day: Exactly 215 years ago today the French were revolting. Here's the best of the web on how they celebrated that event...

Torres Strait Week: Half way through their seven-day ordeal, 12-year-old Stephen Nona stood on a waterless, barren outcrop of rocks in Torres Strait and told his two sisters: We have to swim - or we'll die...

Tracking Policies & Investigative Stories:
Imagine...all the world's information at your service with just a few clicks of the mouse. It's a dream that Brewster Kahle has held onto for the past 20 years and is now seeing through to reality in his role at the Internet Archive, where he serves as chairman of the board. The Internet Archive was founded in 1996 to build an Internet library that will offer permanent access for researchers and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. Kahle is the force behind that effort.
BK: A 100-page black-and-white Cold River with current toner and paper costs in the United States is $1, not figuring labor costs, rights costs, or depreciation of capital. That's an interesting number, because at a buck a book, it turns out that for a library, it could be less expensive to give books away than to loan them. In his book, Practical Digital Libraries, Michael Lesk reported that it cost Harvard incrementally $2 to loan a book out and bring it back and put it on the shelf. This is not figuring in the warehousing costs and all the building costs. This is just the incremental cost of loaning a book out.
Even if you put some fee in for the author, it looks cost effective to print and bind many books locally.
• The Librarian to be blogged on MEdia Dragon [link first seen at ]
• · See Also Why lessons of the past can help fight terror of the future [Hottest link on Amazon]
• · · See Also Money does seem to seem to buy greater happiness, but it does not buy more sex
• · · · Paul Krugman's crystal ball Paul Krugman has become the West's most quotable public intellectual...
• · · · · See Also Proposal To Postpone U.S. Elections:Joe has all the links you need
• · · · · · See Also French Jews are leaving, but why?

Posted 2:33 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Murry N. Rothbard on state versus free-market capitalism.The difference between free-market capitalism and state capitalism is precisely the difference between, on the one hand, peaceful, voluntary exchange, and on the other, violent expropriation. I don’t see even the most Left-Wing scholar in this country scornfully burning his salary czech.

Invisible Hands & Markets: Victory for the Nation
The State Government has been forced to pay a further $60 million for a pocket of harbour foreshore it bought two years ago, to a property developer who never owned the land.
The final bill to taxpayers for the old Caltex industrial site at Ballast Point, Birchgrove, will now pass $75 million, three times its original estimated cost.
For the property tycoon Lang Walker, an $825,000 deposit (since repaid) has secured $60 million compensation for a hypothetical housing project on contaminated land.
The magnitude of the payout verges on the obscene...
• Harbourside land deal to cost state $60m more [ Developer cries foul over illegal retail centre: A western Sydney property developer, Nabil Gazal, versus Frank Lowy of Westfield fame]
• · See Also Minister quits and forests are sold off - all in secret
• · · On(e)liner John Quiggin: Election 2004: Labor’s economic policy options in the coming election
• · · · See Also Philip Morris pays $1.25bn to settle its money-laundering and smuggling case
• · · · · Greens research website: MPs Income The public not only has a right to know: The NSW Greens have done for the first time what generations of politicians have resisted: publish the salary details of all NSW MPs ((Devotion to Catholic faith led me to residence - Peter Breen ))
• · · · · · White House Staff Salary Analysis: Leaked list of what folks working in the Bush Administrayshun make: No Surprises here Sins of Wages: The minimum wage is nothing but a huge off-the-books tax paid by a small group of people Blogosphere: ((Wages: Brayden King, Stephen Landsburg, Brad Delong, Robert Waldmann, Tyler Cowen, and John Quiggin)) Business Week: (((Series of articles comparing pensions around the world)))

Posted 2:28 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Lev Grossman suggesting a list If You Read Only 10 Cool Books This Summer! You don't need a reviewer to know which way the river a flowin
Shed, any inhibitions about raw escapism. You get back in touch with the tiny Philistine who lives in your lazy, pleasure-loving little heart. Why fight it? We took a look at this summer's guilty pleasures and picked out the most delicious we could find. Go ahead. You've been good. Have a summer fling with an unsuitable book.
The survey, by the National Endowment for the Arts, indicates that people who read for pleasure are many times more likely than those who don't to visit museums and attend musical performances, almost three times as likely to perform volunteer and charity work, and almost twice as likely to attend sporting events. Readers, in other words, are active, while nonreaders, more than half the population, have settled into apathy.
[Why hadn't this active act happened before? Jozef Imrich Punches Critic: The Literary Wars Turn Violent ]

Literature & Art Across Frontiers:
Fantasy is a literature particularly useful for embodying and examining the real difference between good and evil. In an America where our reality may seem degraded to posturing patriotism and self-righteous brutality, imaginative literature continues to question what heroism is, to examine the roots of power, and to offer moral alternatives. Imagination is the instrument of ethics. There are many metaphors beside battle, many choices besides war, and most ways of doing good do not, in fact, involve killing anybody. Fantasy is good at thinking about those other ways. Could we assume that it does so?
• Ursula K. Le Guin: Immature people crave and demand moral certainty [Visit Ursula Le Guin's Web Site ]
• · The world is suffering from a dark and silent phenomenon known as Digital Decay: New on the endangered species list: the Bookworm [An Austrian-born cartoonist ruins his life pining for Disney's approval and just a little credit More people in the world know my name than that of Jesus Christ
• · · See Also Jean Bethke Elshtain reviews books on Gandhi
• · · · See Also Insiders agree the financial squeeze on university presses is likely to persist ((2nd hand books make shaky future on the Web: Is Amazon.com becoming the Napster of the book business?))
• · · · · See Also 'Micky Mouse' courses, such as a BA in Popular Music, can be rigorous, relevant and lucrative
• · · · · · See Also [The Da Vinci Code]: Librarian Aids Best-selling Novelist

Posted 12:49 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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I possess three free market brain cells. One is concerned with food and beer, particularly the black stuff from Prague. The second brain cell is concerned with personal visions of a possible future in a couple of thousand years. The third brain cell, God bless it, is concerned with music, philosophy, chess, politics, writing, art... I have just read Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism. That poor old overloaded third brain cell has just been fried...
In order to control the bodies and the minds of their various subjective populations; and both forms of socialism are always keen on strengthening all the other usual monopolistic apparatuses of state necessary to maintain a parasitical elite in power, though this is for our own good obviously, such as the police, the army, the legislature, and the judiciary.

Eye on Politics & Law Lords: Democratic Tradition Lives on
The origins of Democracy are steeped in the mead beer and wine of ancient Greece, and its modern appearance in England is equally associated with beer, ale and stout drinking and pub-centric political organizing. From the French toasting their breifly glorious and gloriously breif revolution to our Founding Fathers plotting sedition in Boston Bars, to modern Russian elections greased with Vodka poll chasers, alchohol has been used throughout the ages to get out the vote, get through election day, celebrate victory and weep with defeat.
• Free beer if you register to vote [There's a battle brewing ... Attack of the Political Cartoonists: Insights and Assaults from Today's Editorial Pages ]
• · See Also Broward Sheriff’s Office downgraded crime reports in order to present a better picture of crime
• · · See Also Police minister pushes for more sting power: flexibility to pose as drug dealers and even contract killers
• · · · ICAC of a political nature? If the party's over for Peter Breen, it will just be starting for John Marsden [ via Boilermaker Bill: It's not easy being Breen or Globalised Gibbson shadowed by Faulks ]
• · · · · See Also This the most puzzling thing I have read all week: Technically in time of war, desertion is punishable by death, but nobody's talking about that right now ((It was deepest darkest winter in Canberra: Suddenly old rumours about Latham's bucks night flared into life))
· · · · · · See Also This the most thoughtful thing I have read all week: Adopting proportional representation in e(l)ections

Posted 12:37 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Former editor of the Antipodean Terror Col Allan, now of The New York Post kitchen sink fame, got Kerrey's running mate wrong. You can buy a copy of Page 1 on eBay for five bucks... Ach, priceless sink is going for $$$$
Critic says people are laughing at NY Post, not with it...
Media critic and longtime Post reader Jon Friedman says it pains him to say the Murdoch tabloid is becoming a bad joke. Fixated with the task of printing what it considers to be scoops and exclusives at all costs -- even when it had the flimsiest evidence to make its case -- the Post has been captured by its own game and, worse, it has become a caricature of itself.

The Blog, The Press, The Media: Is Another Caricature of itself Sliding slowly into the S(a)dney Sunset?
Lord knows, we get a little puffed up sometimes. Having someone who can puncture our over-stuffed dreams of fair and balanced journalism might be a really good thing.(Hard core irony intended)
Well Margo Kingston's web diary has an extraordinarily high hit rate and her web discussions are informative lively and civilised and give a real debate that is missing from the rest of the paper. She has cultivated new writers and many readers after taking part in web forums have gone off to start their own blogs.
The Herald editors just wish Margo would go away. When her book Not Happy John was published it was recommended by middle ranking editors that it was good enough to warrant an excerpt. But this was vetoed by editor Robert Whitehead. A profile commissioned for spectrum was ditched, once again by Whitehead. So we have the funny experience of Kingston being ignored by her own paper. Then the Sun-Herald dropped her column without even telling her. The oddest thing was when Ross Fitzgerald launched her book, his speech on the death of civil society was a page one story in The Age and it spilt to a full text of his speech on the oped page. In the Herald, not a word.
• What makes it strange is that her book is now in its second reprint and has sold about 25,000 copies
• Out-of-the-closet liberal columnist Walter Cronkite: Outfoxed Amazing Documentary: Former Fox journalists, internal memos to blow the whistle on Fox partisan bias [Newspaper ethics Jon Carroll laments the passing of the old days of casual corruption and illicit favors]
• · See Also Election 2004 Backyard Blog project: Seattle Times wants its readers to blog the elections
• · · See Also Jay Rosen will be on of 35 credentialed bloggers reporting from the Democratic Convention [ courtesy of First Draft]
• · · · See Also Andrew Cline laments the dearth of understanding journalists have of rhetoric, a lack that results in he-said, she-said political coverage [ courtesy of Campaign Desk ]
• · · · · See Also Tim Rutten labels 2004 as the year of living dangerously for the U.S. news media, warning of an acceleration of "journalism's slide back into partisanship
• · · · · · See Also W's to the basics of journalism. No. 8: Why did I waste my time?

Posted 12:33 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Boom time for Stollywood: Cold (War) River stories take bizarre new turn: The Movies' Billion-Dollar Month For the first time, American movie theatres sold more than a billion dollars worth of tickets.

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: This Genteel Racket: Meeting an Untimely End
One of the hardest things in art, outside of creating it, is to be that very first person who looks at an unknown and his or her work and says: I like it. Any idiot can second the motion. But to look at an unknown and say, 'You, yes you, you are worthy'—that is different. That means taking a risk, to say yes where probably dozens have already said no. It is also what changes the course of an art form. And this is why I sometimes nurse the suspicion that the real gatekeeper of American literature is not the publisher, not the critic, and not Jack Warner's fabled 'schmucks with Underwoods'—i.e., writers. No, it is the schmuck with a Rolodex: the literary agent
• Successful Art - It's Who You Know
• · · See Also Burdened by Books: Jim Fusilli quit his job reviewing fiction for the Boston Globe
• · · · See Also Bookworm Gordon Brown: Modern politicians don't read [Brown's speech on the great success of the British Council internationally (part 1) ] [Brown's speech (part 2) ]
• · · · · Garton Ash witnessed the power of freedom in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland in the late 1980s Making a world of difference
• · · · · · David Holthouse received over 2,000 e-mails after writing about his plot to kill: I'm a journalist who wrote the toughest story of my life, a story that explains my life. And now I'm getting on with that life and moving to a new story

Posted 9:18 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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You heard it here first: Scotty of the Tulip fame will give Free Beer to any Australian Bloggers --md. Yes...Yes...Yessss
Wait a minute. You gave money to Kerry?-ed Yes. Doesn't that violate journalistic ethics?--ed. Not mine, as long as I disclose it, which I just did. The danger is that having invested in him, I'll now go soft on him. Don't worry! You think he'll be a failed, Carter-like President--ed.
I plan to vote for him because I think a) we need to take a time out from Bush's strident public global terror war in order to prevent it from becoming a damaging, lifelong West vs. Islam clash...

The Blog, The Press, The Media: I am not Paranoid, but Trees are Out to Get MEdia Dragon
Back in the mists of early Internet history, online publishing was going to wrest power from the inky fingers of old media groups and put it in the hands of ordinary people. Well, it never happened. Yet just when old media began to feel smug again about its old-fashioned paper-based products, weblogging (known as blogging) happened. The question for the big media world is whether to embrace the phenomenon that, in part, claims to undermine it.
Blogs have emerged as an instant critique of major media, says Andrew Sullivan, former editor of the New Republic, whose weblog book reviews can lift a title into the top ten on Amazon. At the same time, bloggers are parasites on big media, relying on them for stories and raw material.
• Should old media embrace blogging? [ courtesy of Web logs have done more to spark opinion-sharing than anything since the creation of the Internet]
• · Bloggers Suffer Burnout Whiskey Bar: The site's author ran the site as a virtual bar with himself as the bartender ((Don Arthur is back with burnout, wealth, for toil))
• · · See Also Technorati tracks 3 million blogs
• · · · See Also Pentagon Reportedly Aimed to Hold Detainees in Secret; Proposal to keep some prisoners 'off the books'
• · · · · See Also In Australian cyberspace, no one can see you vote ((The Web: Online voting an election away))
• · · · · · See Also What bloggers are reading...

Posted 9:14 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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We're living in such conservative times. Anyone who is prepared to commit a passionate act for something they believe in is considered crazy.

A cold story about the ghosts of Hitler and Stalin trapped in the tomb, may not sound like hottest book in town
Hitler and Stalin took over societies already riddled with fear of the future, with paranoia about conspiracies and with hatred of 'others' expressed in murderous language. Both dictatorships were able to replace the notion of moral and legal absolutes with 'historical absolutes': the idea that law must be subordinated to the 'iron laws' of development, whether Marxist-Leninist or racism...
Steel magnate Fritz Thyssen fled to Switzerland because he believed that Nazi planning was 'Bolshevising' Germany. Factory manager Victor Kravchenko defected in 1943 because he found that class privilege and the exploitation of labour in Stalinist society were no better than the worst excesses of capitalism. Violence was... regarded as redemptive, saving society from imaginary enemies. It is the memory of that deception which still, generations later, darkens our hopes of constructing a future through politics.

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: Do-or-Die Revolution: A Hard Day's Escape
When the Beatles spontaneously launch into I Should Have Known Better from the caged-in luggage compartment of a train as a group of girls cluster outside, Taylor shoots the crisscrossing fence wires not as a cold, defensive barrier but as a protective one, one that fosters a kind of intimacy: It's all that separates the Beatles from the world, but it also frames them beautifully, a visual affirmation that these four raffishly striking young men were made to be seen as well as heard.
There was a time, shortly after John Lennon's death, when A Hard Day's Night was almost unbearable to watch. It was bad enough that we all knew how the band's story had ended, with lawyers and negotiations and daggers of mistrust shooting four ways and then, the worst thing imaginable, silence. But in the early '80s the story took a sadder and more jagged turn. If it was hard to think of the 1980 John as dead, leaving behind some great and some mediocre solo records and a grieving widow nobody ever liked much anyway, it was incomprehensible that the 1964 John -- the one we'd loved first -- was gone too.
• The great Beatles movie reminds us how much they gave -- and how much we took [The world premiere of The Beatles' film A Hard Day's Night was in London in July 1964 ]
• · See Also Pretty good for a leg crosser: Defender of the little people, Sharon Stone lists her requirements for taking a job
• · · See Also Literary Reading in Dramatic Decline: Fewer Than Half of American Adults Now Read Cold River
• · · · See Also Nobodies of the world unite!
• · · · · Oedipus complex is the antecedent Hamlet complex Ours is a culture obsessed by the skull beneath the skin
• · · · · · Where it will all end, knows God! You heard it here first: Congratulations Terry, ouch Terence Alan Teachout ((Readers of Cold River & Barbara Bush drown in the 33.333% of the Bohemian Index featured on About Last Night))

Posted 11:30 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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We talk as if democracy were the natural human condition, as if any deviation from it is a crime to be punished or a disease to be cured...
Citizens seem increasingly unwilling to surrender civil liberties... and keen to celebrate their Independents... Somehow the hard won success of the major political parties doesn't smell as sweet for ordinary voting punters... The Broken Promise of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness...

Eye on Politics & Law Lords: Dirt diggers: Digging dirt and slinging mud is risky
Writing in The Australian Financial Review yesterday, Hewson asserted, with obvious passion: If they are going to play the dirt game it should be spread fairly. Why not dig into John Howard as much as they dig into Latham? In his 30 years in Parliament nobody has ever done the job on him like it has been done on others.
How is it, they wonder, that Al Gore told small fibs and was branded a liar while George W. Bush told big ones and was elected President?
• Say whatever you like about me, but leave them out of it please [ via Moore's Ax Falls on a Derelict Media Too... ]
• · See Also A divided Europe is like a room in which only one half is heated ((It's Not Always About You... Cold War Ideology Doesn't Work: the rich rule and the poor obey ))
• · · See Also In the U.K. and Oz, liberalism means small government, free trade, and self-reliance. For Americans, it means Bill Clinton The mediator, former NSW Court of Appeal judge Tony Fitzgerald: ((Westfield settles Ken Hooper affair with $3.5m cheque to Kirela)) ((Ach, Carr's man in London paid twice the salary
• · · · See Also Historians are either truffle hunters, noses buried in detail, or parachutists, with a view from on high [Imagine you're a federal judge. Life used to be glamorous: the money, the women, the imposing work clothes... But the Incredible Judiciary Is Shrinking: The federal judge starts to be a rubber stamp more often than the gavel]
• · · · · See Also White House Moves to Protect RIGHT to SPY on Readers...
· · · · · · See Also Paul Volcker on getting to the bottom of the UN Oil for Food scandal ((They Behead; We Do It With Smart Bombs... ))

Posted 11:26 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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It is easy to make fun of the French and their pompous pretense to the grandeur they shed a half-century ago when their loss of honor under Vichy, and then their loss of empire, relegated them to the rank of second-class power. But the fun is over.

Tracking Trends Great & Small: You, yes you, you are worthy of Box Office Record
This is just a small rant, but it always annoys me. I've read in several places comments about Man From Cold River 2 breaking box office records. (This isn't a comment on the movie which I haven't seen yet although I intend to). This is a comment on economic ignorance or in some cases just laziness. We constantly hear of movies breaking box office records or record breaking gas prices or some other such, but the figures quoted are almost always unadjusted for inflation.
• Economic Ignorance [Dymock's 'Top Ten' bestsellers list: I did not have relations with John!]
• · Election seasons flood the airwaves with cold minded ads: Why are campaign commercials so bad? [Do pundits care that all candidates are millionaires? Americans have a choice in November — they can vote for millionaires John Kerry and John Edwards, or cast their ballot for millionaires George W. Bush and Dick Cheney ] ((Swing Party of Punters The swing vote isn't just a story, it's a fun house, a riddle, with no penalty for guessing wrong))
• · · See Also Ivory Project: Advertising Soap in America 1838-1998 ((The Limits of Media Dream Machines...))
• · · · See Also Deering Literary Agency: A genteel racket for Great Rejected Masses
• · · · · See Also Decline of Australian relative power ((Homes boom widens the wealth divide))
• · · · · · See Also Fascists hate homosexuality, but many fascists are gay. Scratch the homophobic surface and there’s a spandex swastika underneath

Posted 11:03 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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For some reason entrenched government and waste seem to go together...Govt office space left invisible ...Yes, Minister

Invisible Hands & Markets: In search of optimistic leaders
Many successful leaders have two faces.
The public one inspires and conveys optimism, hope and a galvanizing sense of direction.
And there's a private one that is often subdued, moody, plagued by doubts, and even a sense of foreboding.
Sometimes the public face slips, and the private one peers out, provoking a sense of disquiet in observers.
Paul Martin, for example, has frequently -- and with good reason -- looked worried on this campaign trail even though he is by far the most experienced leader.
• Honorable mentions to Vaclav Havel [I can't take politics anymore, and pretty much everything The last of the attempts at honesty have gone out of the thing, and we're down to side A trying to brainwash side B into believing that Side B has already been brainwashed by the evil leaders of side B, with--and this is the part that's wearing me out--absolutely no reference to reality]
• · See Also War and Tax Cuts... In the Age of Terrorism, the Rule Is: Celebrate Early, If At All... ((Australian Election 2004: taxing times for working families))
• · · See Also The strength of the small donor has helped level the financial playing field with the Bush campaign
• · · · See Also The customer is always right? Not anymore
• · · · · See Also A Microsoft employee puts up with the fact that Bill Gates gets $80 billion. But if the idiot in the next cubicle makes $5/hour more, there’s indignation. Are people crazy?
• · · · · · See Also Nothing to Hide: The Iraqi official heading the investigation into alleged corruption in the United Nations oil-for-food program was killed in a bomb attack

Posted 7:34 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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It is exactly 60 years since Rudolf Vrba's and Alfred Wetzler's successful escape from Auschwitz, an escape that brought to light accounts of Hitler's extermination camps.
The testimony given by Messrs. Vrba and Wetzler forced representatives of the democratic world to face facts that many did not want to believe, even after the end of the war. Thanks to them and countless numbers of other witnesses, the horrors and extent of the Nazi final solution are universally known.
Like the Nazi Holocaust, the crimes and brutal reality of Soviet communism were also outlined and understood, thanks to the writings of Arthur Koestler, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and others...
Fortunately, people who use direct eyewitness testimony in attempts to expose the greatest crimes against humanity can be found in each era and all over the world.

The Blog, The Press, The Media: Let the de-linking begin: John Kerry and the Lost Kos
A violent squall sprang up in Blogistan earlier this year over comments made by a wonkish blogger named Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of the Daily Kos. He typed something impolitic about four contractors in Fallujah, Iraq, whose charred, mutilated corpses made for a perverse photo-op on the front page of The New York Times, as well as leading the news on CNN. The dead men weren't there on orders, Moulitsas, a military vet, pointed out. They weren't there to rebuild Iraq. They are there to wage war for profit.
With the Internet being the Internet, his comments spread at the speed of data. The fact that a blog could be de-linked from a presidential candidate's official website (and actually had advertising to lose) is noteworthy -- it shows that blogs have indeed arrived as a force to be reckoned with...
• America's War With Blogistan [ courtesy of Daily Kos Kos]
• · See Also Rupert Murdoch's print media pulling Dewey Defeats Truman moment [via Europe pioneered the Internet as a mass medium, but the U.S. has made the best use of it ]
• · · See Also Is civility an endangered species in the blogosphere?
• · · · Trust me - I'm a journalist What The Media Are Doing To Our Politics
• · · · · Shot, and Drowned in the Political Dark Room: McGavin's sacking just doesn't add up. I don't think it is acceptable to be kept in the dark ...
• · · · · · Google Search Coolest River & Surf Operators
• · · · · · · See Also Political bloggers

Posted 6:54 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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During a recent graduate seminar on 20th Century American Autobiography and Memoir, I found myself obliged, in the interest of civility, to swallow a fit of temper.
Deeply ironic, Saar's work speaks from a sort of existential nakedness, and gets beyond...Exclusion is the rule in binary practice (either/or), whereas poetics aims for the space of difference -- not exclusion but, rather, where difference is realized in going beyond. Read it before it is banned!

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: ACTION AND REACTION: It's Imitation Time
In Seven Types of Ambiguity, William Empson argues that ambiguity serves an indispensable function in poetry. When the disparate meanings of an ambiguous grammatical construction or word reinforce and enrich each other, the poet can achieve radically novel conceptual and emotional effects; but unhappy ambiguities, including those condemned as mixed metaphor, may be simply incoherent when the meanings are mutually impertinent or at odds. In his recent contribution to the history of ideas, which tracks the medieval word reaction and its more ancient correlate action from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries, Jean Starobinski makes a similar argument about the metaphorical appropriation of terms.
• Jean Starobinski's History of Reaction: The Uses and Dangers of Metaphorical Language [The most dangerous threats are right under our noses: If books could kill]
• Gene Deitch: A whole new area of work opened up for me just as the Soviet forces were breathing smoke around the borders of Czechoslovakia, and I made a film called The Giants that the communists banned for 20 years. For me, it was a point of pride: The Giants Win and Lose (Part 1): (Don’t Let a Little Thing Like Failure Stop You!)
• · See Also Our MPs can scarcely be accused of being bookish. Why then a plush library?
• · · Péter Esterházy's Celestial Harmonies A Cheeky Work of Postmodernist Genius
• · · · The Boston Globe: offers an amusing round-up of reviews of presidential memoirs
• · · · · See Also The attraction of strangers: partnerships in humanities research [Happy ever after - on separate floors Couples are increasingly finding that living apart is the best way to stay together ]
• · · · · · See Also Literacy in the new millennium

Posted 8:51 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Showing once again that there is a tax angle to virtually everything, Laurence Tribe (Harvard) in an op-ed in Thursday's Wall Street Journal compares Iraqi torture to tax .
Justice Department memoranda cynically dissecting the laws banning torture with a sensibility better suited to the parsing of tax-code loopholes than to the treatment of human beings...

Eye on Politics & Law Lords: Kerry's Sexiest Salesman
Think about this for a minute: He left college, and he volunteered three different ways. First he volunteered for military service. Then he volunteered to serve in Vietnam. And then he volunteered for some of the most dangerous, hazardous duty you could possibly have in Vietnam...
That's John Edwards talking about John Kerry at a Florida Democratic Party fund-raiser three weeks ago. This is why Kerry had to pick Edwards: Kerry sounds so much more attractive when Edwards is doing the talking.
• The Big Decision - The wisdom of picking Edwards [Edwards’ weakest on issues that matter most... Why Edwards Hurts Kerry]
• · See Also Campaign Websites and the Politics of Open Source. [Why governments so often allowed themselves to pursue self-destructive policies Government is little better practised now than three or four thousand years ago ]
• · · See Also Survey Chooses Top 10 Digital Counties (( An investigation into why a private investigator was following city manager could end with a city councilwoman in hot water. The resulting report reads like the script for a detective show ))
• · · · See Also Stay Tuned This could be a major story: Iranian Intelligence Officers Captured in Iraq
• · · · · See Also Austrian President Thomas Klestil has died in a Vienna hospital aged 71 NSW Premier Bob Carr denies his Government's unpopularity could cost Labor the federal election ...((And testing how far his luck would stretch, Mark asked for one for NSW Premier Bob Carr, saying the bookworm and American history buff loved nothing better than a stubbie cooler ))
· · · · · · See Also How a man behaves publicly is a mere postscript to how he's been behaving privately (know your Freud: there are no accidents)

Posted 8:43 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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In 2004 AD Rupert Murdoch's media empire pulled a Dewey Defeats Truman moment...
In 1979, Observer published a list of 80 young people The Observer predicted would define the country's culture, politics and economics for a generation In 2004 new selection of 80 prodigiously talented young people is out

Tracking Policies & Investigative Stories:
Government advertising is a contentious issue in modern democracies. In Australia, both Commonwealth and state governments are entitled to taxpayer money to provide the public with information about their programs. This is allowed for under the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918. Richard Grant provides figures on expenditure since 1991 and examines proposals for reform.
· Top-spending advertising programs [2002–03 Redistribution of Commonwealth Electoral Boundaries]
· · See Also Focus On Ethics Can Dispel Cynicism: the growing divide between the values of business and those of society
· · · See Also I don't like secrets. This story's about Neil Goldschmidt, it's not about me. I was just a conduit, and I couldn't look the other way ((A doctor who revealed that the SARS epidemic in China was worse than the government was admitting is undergoing reeducation by the authorities))
· · · · RNC Research: Who Is John Edwards?
· · · · See Also Who Is Rene Rivkin? (( Gayle Rivkin ))
· · · · · Walter Williams: An Explanation for Third World Poverty
· · · · · · See Also When political bloggers bay in the blogosphere, do political reporters hear them?
· · · · · · · See Also Interesting debate in the blogosphere among non-tax professors over the the estate tax: They often die not even realizing that they were wealthy, but without the elaborate tax shelters of the very rich

Posted 10:05 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

Cockroaches 36 v Canetoads 14

This result is worth covering as it made my day as well as Gabriella's!

Out of years of failure can come success!!!

• Rugby League: State of Origin III
• Some pleasure in Queensland's pain: Blues take series with convincing win

Posted 8:28 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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The rich have the right to buy more homes than anyone else. They have the right to buy more cars than anyone else, more gizmos than anyone else, more clothes and vacations than anyone else. But they do not have the right to buy more democracy than anyone else.
Justice Learned Hand, a prophet of democracy

To live is an expression which has had much harm done it by rich celebrity writers who seem to think that life is limited to pretending you like Elvis, absinthe, cocaine, and keeping a mistress in Potts Point.
How many stories of loss and betrayal have been spawned by Czechoslovak communists since the coup of 1948 (Orwell's 1984)? Undoubtedly, there are at least as many stories as there are Czech and Slovak families. Suppose I told you that thousands of family lives have been crippled by ideology, some families have not spoken to each other for almost a quarter of the century. Suppose I told you that it is highly unlikely that there has been any more anonimosity among families than between the Imrich, Brejka and Dlubac families. Suppose I told you that despite all that the Cold River is more satisfying than the more grand My Life (File) by Clinton. Jozef Imrich's world, no matter how messy, has a ring of currency. Most readers seem to understand every word, (in broken English or not), and I swim in all the throwaway comments readers make which is like a pat on the back. And everyone cares for different parts of your story; so you realise that even though you have a bad liver and a broken heart you are considered by friends and enemies as the most stubborn survivor of the Iron Curtain. Shutter my dreams, reject me, run me over, shoot me, or dig dirt on me, but whatever the ruthless bullies try, I just bounce back ... (Hence the hard core irony nickname The Bouncing Czech coined by the parliamentary library clunish underground )

This is the Escape that will Never Be Duplicated: The Seventh of July of Our Tragic Escape: Declaring Independence From Fear...
It is important from time to time to remember that some things are worth getting mad about. The cold hard truth is that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, so we should not be surprised if or when Madmen Run the Asylum...
Once Upon A Bad Time, the lives of Eastern Europeans were dominated by leaders with aristocratic manners appropriate for the stone age. Thank your lucky stars you were not one of us. We have to remind ourselves that those born and bred in the Eastern parts of Europe were the Western European equal in their desire for life, their longing for liberty, their passion for happiness.
7/7 of 1980 enlarged the meaning of escape across the Iron Curtain as the crossing has no exact precedents or parallels. Even after 24 years, the scent of horror is still impossible to wash away.
In death, characters deep inside the Cold River find an extension of life: they live in death and we, the readers, actively participate in keeping them alive, even if only during our resuscitating reading. Nothing was as it seemed and the more mundane the surface, the more layers there appeared to be; we are thowing a life line to a true literary onion, multi-layered myths and realities that are quite able to bring literal salt to your eyes.
There is no history, only biography of divine discontent. It was Philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson who first coined the phrase divine discontent. Characterized by a yearning for greater meaning in life, this restlessness and dissatisfaction with the status quo is often an impetus to escape to the world that is more soul-satisfying... What could possibly impel three twenty-two-year-old Czechoslovaks, who just completed two year compulsory service in the communist army, to swim across the Morava River to Austria? How are we to understand their decision to forsake the land of their birth and build a new life in the far way world?
The ghost of the Central Europe tends to breathe confused life into every boy born into the communist system. In childhood we harboured fantasies that when we go to sleep at night our toys would magically come alive and carry us across the borders to the New World. Alas, it never happened, but that did not mean that one day we would not discover a mystical passage to the land of our dreams. One of the great things about life under communism was that it could always get worse, just when you thought it couldn't...
Those who know what it was like to be twenty-two-years young in communist Czechoslovakia might understand that some of us had absurd and impossible aspirations and we believed that we could achieve them. We used to dream of dancing at the Beatles' concert and marrying Olivia Newton-John ... Then we transferred our dreams to crossing the Iron Curtain.
There is a theory going around on the net that everything you need to know about divine discontent, and even life, you can learn from the drops of lessons in the Cold River. There is a lesson for teens, there is a lesson for adults, there is a lesson on having fun, there is a lesson on being serious, there is a lesson on soulful friendship, there is a lesson on dancing, there is even a lesson on how not to escape across the Iron Curtain. Moreover, there is a lesson how to make you feel like a lost Central European.
Unlike myth, history is not tidy, and the wall that became known as the Iron Curtain is complex as any genuine tragedy. Cold River is a chilling image of a totalitarian world without breathing space, where ideology has no outside and even an unborn child is already a subject.
When something is wrong, you know it. Deep inside, even if everyone around you tells you it is not, you still know the truth. Few would dare dream about crossing such a border, unless, of course, you have inside knowledge and contacts. Milan has both. They will have only one chance to disarm the army guards at the gate and drive through an army barracks without alarming others. Their set day is sunny. Not one of them, even for a moment, thinks it might rain. But it does and the swollen river makes it impossible for them to cross, yet it is impossible to go back...
You didn't care if you were brave or weak. You just became nothing!
The character in the Quiet American said, Sooner or later, one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.
In some ways, it was a selfish act. We had in a small way done our duty to our people and our country. We crossed the uncrossable Iron Curtain so we could sleep at night. True happiness calls for courage and a spirit of sacrifice, the rejection of any compromise with evil empire, and readiness to pay in person, including with death...
Zakes Mda's Ways of Dying features a central character Toloki who observes: Death lives with us everyday. Indeed our ways of dying are our ways of living or should I say our ways of living are our ways of dying?
· No power on Earth can stop an oppressed people determined to win their Freedom: Let's Say It with Blood [Any survivor has more to say than all the historians combined about what happened This was the Escape of Our Times: Survivor-on-Amazon breaking historical taboos]
· · See Also This is Another Fight of Our Lives [New Political Tidal Wave: Something to get mad about: Just memorise poetry if you are a teenager at heart- because the escape defies prose
· · · We weren't given a hope in Morava River... The Passion of Exile: Sentenced to the Strange Psychological Hell... From Old World Tragedy to New World Disaster
· · · · See Also In any society, it’s a risk to take freedoms for granted
· · · · · Random reality bites: We can't all be born rich, handsome and lucky... Better That 100 Democratic Witches Should Live
· · · · · · Better Off Dead: I'll admit I survived, but I wasn't proud of myself for surviving
· · · · · · Read more: In every book a wealth of experiences and universal wisdom awaits you, and they will enrich your cultural world ... Marilyn Monroe swimming in the Cold River

Posted 11:08 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Glenn Milne: At last count, three but which one is the real Mark Latham?

Eye on Politics & Law Lords: Hacks cop flak
Forget the dangers of policing the meaner streets of our state. Far more dangerous is a stint at the Police Media Unit.
As well as having three managers leave in less than a year, remaining staffers in what was a 25-strong unit have lodged numerous complaints against each other. One female employee complained about a threat to throw her from a 14-storey window.
And the dust is still settling after the axing last week of Norm Lipson, who was head of the unit, and his public affairs director boss, Ross Neilson. Stepping into the breach in the interim is Superintendent Mark Wright, whom the Herald revealed recently is being investigated after openly referring to Aborigines as "coons" during a senior management team meeting.
Police reporters got drawn into the squabble. Indeed, Channel Nine's Adam Walters complained to the Deputy Commissioner, Andrew Scipione, that Neilson had left a text message on his mobile phone which read weak c---. Neilson, on the other hand, complained to friends that he was sick of Walters, Lipson and others bad-mouthing him when all he was trying to do was to break down the historic mistrust between the media and the police.
· Spin Doctors ((Bipartisanship Ian Hanke: a Kevin Andrews' staffer )) [ Elsewhere Political and Media Animals]
· · Mark Latham: Will you take me as I am, Australia? I've been subjected to more rumours and smears than you can poke a stick at... (( Boilermaker Bill's Macquarie St musings ))
· · · See Also My hero, George Soros,Musing on Putin's Heavy Hand Halting Russia's Rise
· · · · See Also E(l)ction-vote-eligibility
· · · · · See Also This the most horrible thing I have read all week Almost as bad as the patterns set by the NSW Parliametary Clerks (nicknamed Marco Polos)
· · · · · · See Also This the most tattooed thing I have read all week: tracks the 372,644 tattoos on current and former state politicians

Posted 11:06 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Invisible Hands & Markets: The Chinese Century
China's miracle economy can come at you in a lot of ways. By now most of us know that China is the factory floor of choice for the world's low-road manufacturing: it assembles more toys, stitches more shoes and sews more garments than any other nation in the world. China is home to close to 1.5 billion people, probably, which would make the official census count of 1.3 billion too low by an amount equal to roughly the population of Germany, France and the United Kingdom combined. China has 100 cities of more than a million people. Since economic liberalization began in 1978, under Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese have started tens of millions of businesses.
China is not home to the cheapest work force in the world. Even at 25 cents an hour, Chinese workers cost more than laborers in the poorer countries of Southeast Asia or Africa. In the world's miserable corners, children carry rifles and walk mine fields for less than a dollar a day. China is the world's workshop because it sits in a relatively stable region and offers manufacturers a reliable, pliant and capable industrial work force, groomed by generations of government-enforced discipline.
· TED C. FISHMAN [Barista, the whistleblower: Statistically insignificant]
· · See Also
Lines of Despair: number of people seeking help at food pantries statewide has risen three straight years
· · · See Also Czech XL
· · · · See Also The best way to work out how much money the ABC needs may be to look at its competitors
· · · · · See Also An iron curtain is descending between the West and the Muslim world

Posted 10:57 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Good Things in Bad Times...Morava River Works The Amazon Spotlight To Amplify Its Voice... Whistle-blower: I fudged Cold River's Amazon figures for years

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: Snobs vs. slobs
From Spider-Man to Britney Spears to The Apprentice, America's identity is dominated by popular culture, both here and abroad. Yet the fine arts - painting, the symphony, literature - have always been part of the cultural mix, even if they have lost some of their cachet in recent decades.
There is nothing more American than the Three Stooges throwing a pie in the face of a soprano warbling Voices of Spring at a soiree.
· Even the intellectuals are anti-intellectual [Many progressive artists have lost their political will and regressed into self-indulgence: We now place little faith in hope and we decry the hopeful among us as simple-minded, manipulated, or worse]
· · See Also Sony E-Book a Revolution for Eyes
· · · See Also THE RETIREMENT OF THE PARLIAMENTARY LIBRARIAN, MR ROB BRIAN
· · · · See Also Jane Perrone meets the shy paramedic whose blog has readers hooked on tales of life and death in London
· · · · · See Also Blogging Ghosts
· · · · · · See Also A new, new, Bestsellers list that records the most borrowed books

Posted 7:05 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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The Quiggin case for inflation. In keeping with the blog tradition of bringing you tomorrow's talking points today, I thought I'd look a bit further than the current election campaign and consider the implications of a Bush victory

Invisible Hands & Markets: Science and technology don't exist in a vacuum
I was intrigued to learn last week that one of the United Nation's leading candidates for Iraqi leadership is Dr. Hussain al-Shahristani, a nuclear chemist and former science adviser to Saddam Hussein. Al-Shahristani spent more than a decade in Abu Ghraib prison for refusing to participate in Hussein's weapons program and finally escaped during the Gulf War.
You need to get political, even if science is a bunch of politicized factions
· There's No Future without Politics [Elsewhere Democracy, Taxes, and Wealth]
· · See Also Specially rigged Coke cans, part of a summer promotion, contain cell phones and global positioning chips
· · · See Also A coalition of human rights, religious, humanitarian, peace, and development groups committed to ending the trade in 'conflict diamonds (( Hunt for tyrant's millions leads to former model's home))
· · · · See Also China's Nuclear Industry
· · · · · See Also Iraq Index: Tracking Reconstruction and Security in Post-Saddam Iraq
· · · · · · See Also Making Table Wine at Home
· · · · · · · State Policy Inventory This the most useful thing I have digged all week

Posted 6:58 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Mainstream journalism reads more like a modern version of court gossip.

The Blog, The Press, The Media: Goodness and Tyranny
The first was goodness, the deep, abiding desire by these reporters and editors to do good journalistic work. They believed to a person that the purpose of journalism is to provide, at the least, information and, at its best, knowledge to their fellow citizens with the purpose of bettering society.
The second was tyranny, the oppressive troika of tradition, convention and production that combine to prevent most newspaper journalists from realizing these good intentions on a frequent basis.
· Hungry for understanding, what kind of people fill our newsrooms and how we make daily decisions [ courtesy of Blurbing
First Draft Blog ]
· · See Also Dreaming Our Digital Future [ Political blogs--online journals featuring commentary, often highly opinionated--have rapidly become a presence in the campaign landscape ]
· · · See Also Should The BBC Be Privatized? The Guardian (UK) 06/29/04
· · · · See Also Hacking into the youth vote
· · · · · See Also Essays analyze and critique situated cases and examples drawn from weblogs and weblog communities
· · · · · · See Also Blogs, Surveillance, and the State Monitoring Daily Life ((Online dragon data collectorsWho's afraid of big brother? Aren’t arguments against government surveillance really efforts to protect our own crimes from detection?))

Posted 4:58 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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If you aren't reading Margo's book now, you're missing out. I'm happy to report that this book launch was not sexed up

Eye on Politics & Law Lords: Green Valley: Once a Beauty, now a Beast?
Mark's selection signalled that Labour insiders thought this election will be decided on personality. I know a female political journalist or two who regard Mark as charismatic.
Most women see him as younger and more telegenic than John Howard. His round, baby face has something of the abstraction of a tribal mask. However, does Mark have enough Elvis in him to beat John; enough excitement factor, enough charisma, enough likeability?
I first practiced my broken English on impatient Mark at my maiden parliamentary Christmas party back in 1982. At the time Mark used the NSW Parliamentary Library on regular basis as the researcher (biographer) for Gough Whitlam. Only Garry Sturgess would match the level of dedication and hard work displayed by Mark. The way he managed to capture the media imagination with the list of broken promises by Greiner made other people on the opposite side of politics such as the bar regulars of Ken Hooper, Bryce Osmond stature just shake their heads.
At the Library, Mark would bounce ideas, with minds great and small. It was a real pleasure listening to his approaches on solving problems in the communities living in the public housing stricken areas of Western Sydney. It would come as a great surprise to many, especially Greig Tillotson and David Clune, who are long time admirers of Gough and Bob Carr, that their heros would employ someone who would actually hit king (sic) anybody. I personally find it very hard to believe the allegation even though I have participated at a number of late night drinking sessions when Peter Anderson and Brian Langton added guitar fire to the already jolly atmosphere by singing revolutionary songs.
Somehow I suspect that the Sunday program by Ross Coulhart might actually work in favour of the subject of the unauthorised biography as most Australians prefer the bare fist to the backstabbing knife. I certainly do!
· The voters don't mind a Liverpool larrikin: the blowtorch applied to the belly of Mark Latham
· Dirty tricks department [Today is only Road to Surfdom's tomorrow Australian prime minister John Howard finally put all the rumours to rest and announced that the next federal election was held yesterday ]
· · Domestic Bliss: 7 Questions to a Better Social-Policy ((Rock the Cold River Rock the Vote))
· · · See Also TraCCC: Transnational Crime & Corruption Center: corruption in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe
· · · · See Also U.S. Census Bureau Facts for Features: Civil Rights Act of 1964: 40th Anniversary
· · · · · See Also The revolutions of 1989 revisited: In contrast to 1789, the events of 1989 demonstrated that new beginnings are possible without a radical break with the past ((Elsewhere Czechs report how the president is in the position of playing puppeteer to the government, and that is a position a political animal like Klaus must be savoring ))
· · · · · · See Also Guantanamo men seek release

Posted 4:41 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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A special meaning for July 4... The son who came home for the Fourth of July Patrick McCaffrey
There will be stories which can talk about things that kept going on inside James' head that few people would be willing to admit to their closest friends - much less publish in a book

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: Kokoda Trail
The men of the 39th's B Company had no maps. They had simply been told that if they headed off up the track and followed their feet they would eventually come to Kokoda, and they were doing their best to do exactly that. Finding their way wasn't the problem. Making their way was. For despite the fact that they were not carrying particularly heavy packs, the going was beyond tough.
· Goldie River ((Welcome back James PS: I know what you mean we might live in the age of communication revolution, but it often fails us as the email these days is unreliable.))
· · See Also The Secret Of London's Success (Hear That Sydney?)
· · · See Also It blows the dust off your soul
· · · · See Also English Writers' Group Caught Up In Free Expression Dispute [ Europe as the metrosexual power]
· · · · · See Also Bringing Some Temperature To The Language of Cold River
· · · · · · See Also The Democratization of Cultural Criticism: Too cozy behind the ivied walls of academe; a prose style decipherable only to a handful of the cognoscenti

Posted 7:42 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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What blogs can give American culture - what it desparately needs - is a reminder of the importance of informed public debate... Do you go to bars to talk politics? Are you part of a reading group?
Accurate or not, some biased dragons don't always tell the whole story, or even the most important part. Where do you find the most family friendly Movie Reviews?

Tracking Trends Great & Small: At the Movies Review: One star for the return of the odd SBS plastic
I'll give it ... one star. Why? Because the ABC has unwisely decided the no-frills format of SBS's The Movie Show was in no need of an overhaul. Another environmental 'truth' is born...
Oh man, to describe ABC @ the Movies as no-frills would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe the show as a piece of recycling performance by an expiry date couple would be to run the risk of a discourse that would cause strange hole in the Antipodian ozone. To describe it as an exercise in showing the dragon world how much the ABC management is out of touch with their audience would be too obvious. At the Movies is not going to be watched as usual by the MEdia Dragon family until some real characters are recruited from places such as NOVA radio stations of the 21st century world.
First it was the children current affairs program. Now our ABC is making us watch movie reviews @ SBS.
· Why do some teenagers find Margaret Pomeranz and David Stratton so boring? [Like Nova radio stations, SBS rocks According to Alex and Bella, it's twice as creamy, twice as sweet ] [ ABC confeti (sic) impossible to find @ Movies: Honestly, are teenagers really rational and self-interested? ]
· · See Also Cold River Outsourcing Publishing to India.
· · · See Also Sniffer dogs are more likely to cause humiliation than uncover drug dealers, or even users
· · · · See Also Digging up political dirt
· · · · · See Also Not all intellectuals are on the left: Injustice of a distribution
· · · · · · See Also People do not toil and trouble in order to attain perfect hap-piness... > [ Good News for Cold Women A drug that seems to drive female rats mad for sex may offer the first real scientific aphrodisiac for women ]

Posted 7:41 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Journalistic hopefuls would be better off ignoring the paper of record. The case in point is the predictable poll story. There's all sorts of problems with the story, as .... the amount of media polling you need to do to figure out how that circle gets squared is truly stunning

The Blog, The Press, The Media: George Washington's False Teeth
In studying the history of books, I had to confront the history of reading, to seek out connections between the diffusion of literature and the formation of the mysterious phenomenon we call public opinion. It became clear along the way that books were but one of the many media at the time. In fact, printed texts often incorporated oral material-gossip, songs, bruits publics-and then transmitted messages that re-entered oral circuits of communication by means of discussion or reading in groups.
· But we can make history sing [ courtesy of www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/ ]
· · See Also Sociologists without Borders ((At a time when many Americans consider journalists no more trustworthy than the politicians they cover, the profession needs to cast a critical eye on itself ))
· · · See Also Franklin Foer's How Soccer Explains the World, on the striker's ability to hit a crucial 28% area of the goal and the strategy of the penalty shoot-out, and if soccer explains the world, does it matter that Americans don't understand soccer?
· · · · See Also Spymaster cops
· · · · · See Also Bob Novak calls Bush administration arrogant. Whatever else we might say about Bob Novak, he has been using his GOP Insider status to break some astonishing stories on the fractures in the party
· · · · · · See Also Least Suprising News Story Of The Day: Nader recieving aid from right-wing groups? Fibbing as acceptable political and business strategy!
· · · · · · · Foxes & Dragons News machine outfoxed by bloggers [ Read This: Why can't a newspaper be more like a blog? Conclusion]

Posted 7:54 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Invisible Hands & Markets: San Francisco rolls out the red carpet for the Clintons
The leftiest big city on the Left Coast was Clinton country on Monday, with former President Clinton continuing his blockbuster book tour and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton headlining a Democratic fund-raiser where she vowed to defeat the Republicans' extraordinarily ruthless machine. Hillary Clinton told several hundred supporters -- some of whom had ponied up as much as $10,000 to attend -- to expect to lose some of the tax cuts passed by President Bush if Democrats win the White House and control of Congress:
Many of you are well enough off that ... the tax cuts may have helped you. We're saying that for America to get back on track, we're probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.
· We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good [link first seen at Australian Policies]
· · See Also How tax system egged on property speculation. By Alan Kohler
· · · See Also Interest cut lure to pay off tax debts on $2.5 billion in tax debts
· · · · See Also Call to tax profits on family home. By Matt Wade ; Lisa Pryor

Posted 7:52 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Barack Obama, Ryan's Democratic opponent, responded to news of his opponent's sexcapades by saying: I don't really care about private morality, I'm more concerned with public morality.
In that statement lies the root of the great cultural divide between hard-core Democrats and religious Republicans.

Eye on Politics & Law Lords: The participants are too alienated from mainstream America to accomplish their goals
Well-meaning organizers bring thinkers and activists together to start what everyone hopes will be a pathbreaking political organization.
The participants are too alienated from mainstream America to accomplish their goals (Students for a Democratic Society, 1960s), are too much in thrall to the traditional left to articulate imaginative goals (Democratic Socialists of America, 1970s), lack the discipline to accomplish their goals (New World Alliance, 1970s-80s), are too ambivalent about leadership and money to be more than a diversion (Greens, 1980s-2000s), or are too much like attack dogs to identify -- let alone address -- our real hopes and needs (MoveOn.org, 2000s).
But along the way, a mildly entertaining time is had by all.
On the airplane, I forced myself to finally set aside my hard-eyed book about how life really works, psychologist Robert Karen’s Top Dog / Bottom Dog, and pull out my folder full of materials about the conference.
What was it, I wondered, that had tempted me to take part in this movie again, this charade? I had literally forgotten and felt some obligation to my hosts to refresh my memory.
We all share the same ‘boat’ called the United States of America. It is more essential now than ever [that we] begin to learn how to row with, rather than against, each other. . . .
· On a movement that would have us listen to and learn from each other [ via a review of books on Radical-middleness]
· · See Also Wake up, you there in the Beltway: Here come the independents!
· · · See Also What role have the third party mavericks played in US history?
· · · · See Also How political parties focus on different moralities
· · · · · See Also This the most visualised thing I have read all week:The Bush Team in Reuters News Ticker 9/11-11/15/01
· · · · · · See Also Electoral Hope: This the most soulful thing I have read all week

Posted 7:48 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Literature & Art Across Frontiers: New Disney film takes another view of U.S.
In an irony even Mickey Mouse would find hard to miss, America is about to weigh two wildly contrasting versions of itself in theaters this weekend as the Walt Disney Co. debuts its own foray into documentary filmmaking right alongside Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" -- which the studio refused to release.
Disney officials insist their 88-minute film, America's Heart and Soul" -- stitching simple, positive vignettes of everyday Americans with sweeping vistas and up-tempo music -- is neither a response to Moore's politically charged hit nor any type of political statement itself.
More diorama than documentary, the film, to be released nationwide Friday, introduces audiences to a varied collection of Americans -- from a Vermont dairy farmer to a Colorado cowpoke to the Rev. Cecil Williams, leader of San Francisco's Glide Memorial United Methodist Church.
· 'America's Heart and Soul' a contrast to 'Fahrenheit 9/11' [to be read with History of Intellectual Culture]
· · · See Also The truth, though, isn’t that books make you boring, but that you can easily pick out a boring person by the way he talks about books
· · · · · See Also David Brooks writes about polarization in America: The degree of raw ugliness in the public sphere is increasingly disconcerting