Posted 1:50 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Know ye not why We created you all from the same dust? That no one should exalt himself over the other ...
As Baha'u'llah knows, this MEdia Dragon is nothing more than a blog dedicated to the daily bulldust and to spread it in the name of noteworthy news and trendy links. Just like the example by Antony Loewenstein of Counterspin Fame who timely links today to the Age article about Virtual Dust.
I don't consider myself very left-wing at all,says Christopher Shiel. But if you write anything half normal online, you'll be immediately tagged left-wing. The web's swarming with extreme right-wingers waiting to kick the shit out of you.

Eye on Politics & Leadership: Back to the Future, 1997 AD, ... Nick Greiner: Dry and Warm
A number of role models have inspired me from the wet, cold, right, left and center political spectrum. During the hung NSW Parliament of 1991-1995, John Hatton and Nick Greiner were among the characters who inspired me to look beyond the way political life was, to the way it might be. Even though Nick and John did not always see eye to eye, I know that they respected one other as politicians who were aware of their own weaknesses and strengths. I was fortunate 7 years and 7 months ago to touch basis with both of them.

The following extract is from a conversation with an Antipodean leader whose roots are Slavically Bohemian, Nick Greiner. I asked him about his leadership style and what made him tick:
Well, my leadership style was in many ways what the academics call heroic. It was based on intellectual and personal strength. It was not what is now so fashionable: leading from behind and talking to everyone. It really was leading from the front. In many ways I think that to achieve significant systemic change in the public sector in particular, it is almost the only leadership style that works. This is so if you consider leaders who have produced what you might call radical change. The only way to do that is by heroic leadership. Without not intending the word heroic to sound grandiose, I think that this is what leading from the front means.
JI: Is the opposite of heroic sometimes viewed as suicidal?
NG. No. I do not know about the opposite, but some might say it is the same, or perhaps some might say the other side of the same coin. There are other people, for example Mr Howard at the moment, Mr Carr and Mr Fahey, when he was here, who have more of a consultative style, a team style, a ‘do not run ahead of public opinion style’ than I had.
All of that is politically much more successful. However, it is also much less successful at achieving results.
• The constituency for change that is you and me and everybody else who wants a car, it is not on our radar screen. It is not an issue for us. And that is the problem repeated many times [she’ll be right on the night’ Nick Greiner ]
• · Mark Latham Unless We Change Now Launch Digesting Golden Medicare Miracle Boy and the spontaneous: Love you, Babe
• · · Laurie Oakes, father of the Press Gallery There is no question about it. John Howard is going ; [Dorothy Dixers Jon Faine has a simple but effective method for dispatching talkback callers he suspects of being political stooges: he'll pull the plug on a switchboard full of calls and take the next lot]
• · · · Newcomers struggle to close wage gap Imrichation and the fears of an underclass
• · · · · US Electoral Vote Predictor Pulse taken Seriously
• · · · · · The Progress Of Counterrevolution: Alienation, Culture, and Labor; [On the Radical Middle: They're pragmatic. They're idealistic. And they're reshaping the future of American politic]

Posted 11:50 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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The lightest, holidayish, news of all has just reached me about a team from the Cowboy (canetoad) Country in search for a question which has baffled science for centuries: Is bovine lesbianism in domesticated cattle a stress reaction caused by environmental pressures? ]
Stretching a little irony and satire into a libel charge Bloggers are Internet version of sad guys with police radios Nick Coleman writes: Do bloggers have the credentials of real journalists? No. Bloggers are hobby hacks, the Internet version of the sad loners who used to listen to police radios in their bachelor apartments and think they were involved in the world. ...Most bloggers are not fit to carry a reporter's notebook Is the blogosphere a beehive of activity or a hornet's nest?

The Blog, The Pajamahadeens, The Press, The Media: Erasing the Dragon tail: Different Noise
The NY Times Magazine article on blogs makes the same old error. Viewing blogs through the media lens, only the left-hand of the side of the power curve is visible. As Matthew Klam, the article's author says:
In a recent national survey, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that more than two million Americans have their own blog. Most of them, nobody reads!
Thus, the tail of the power curve — which is probably at least 5 million blogs long — gets erased. In fact, the tail is where blog are having their most important effects. That's where self and community, public and private, owned and shared are re-drawing their boundaries.
• Remembering the religion in Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. A karass according to the cheerful prophet is the secret team to which one's destiny is tied, which one might not even know exists; [ courtesy of Bill Ives ]
• · The company's most popular blogger is a marketer known as MaryMaryQuiteContrary. Fortune Magazine Advises: It's Hard to Manage if You Don't Blog; [Sir Tim Berners-Lee Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, but he had something bigger than Media Dragon in mind all along ]
• · · Markos Moulitsas of dailykos tells how US liberals have fought back against rightwing domination of the media; [ Blogs are shaping up to become commonwealth assets of historic proportions End the journalism world's monopoly on seats at the debates, and bring in real experts to grill the candidates]
• · · · The wisdom of Apple, as defined by Garry Barker and chief executive Steve Jobs, is that software is the company's core business; the right stuff that makes the real difference for plain folks as well as digital-age jet jockeys: Shake, rattle and roll Cold River; [Supersize the screen, please ]
• · · · · Steven Levy Memo to Bloggers: Heal Thyselves ; [What happened to most of the Antipodean bloggers? Except for Road to Surfdom, most have been lost and never to be found!
• · · · · · Matthew Klam The New York Times Magazine, a cover story on blogging and the electoral campaign ; [How a political speechwriter dumped the pols, fled the office and found honest work ]

Posted 10:11 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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OOch, yet another Octoberfest, 171st in fact, in the city of my auntie Ota’s exile, Munich, and Kafka's Amerika celebrates Poetry Day due dva (two) days before the Australian Election of 2004 AD
Plato being Plato creatively wove historical fact into literary myth. As he wrote of his parables: We may liken the false to the true for the purpose of moral instruction. The myth is the message...
There is no hiding from our childhood myths. Whenever I come across soulfully written childhood stories I tend to wonder back to the days of my bare feet days dancing along the muddy banks of Schwarzenbach (black brook in Vrbov). In 1960s even the ghosts of Vrbov were not aware of the biggest secret hidden exactly at the heart of Europe. Who would have known that the coldest brook in the world one day would compete with the hottest underground spring for attention of children of Vrbov. In 1970s our neighbour and Catholic priest Anton Glatz encouraged the neighbour of my first romantic crush, Anka Semankova, to drill deep into the soil owned by my grandfather before communist stole it in 1948. (As we say, big thieves always find a way to hang the little thieves)
My grandfather Pekarcik used to grow crops and grule during WWI and WWII on the very land where the the hottest, and miracle performing, thermal water in the world is today. (If you want to set something afire, you must burn yourself)
It may be just middle-aged induced nostalgia, but there was something perversely wonderful about the way old issue of the Fairfax Sydney Magazine glossily slipped into my hands:
Ah, you remember the Sydney of romance. Back when kids played under hoses spurting thick silver snakes of water up against the garage wall. Dancing in the backyard under great glittering arcs of water like Olympic gymnasts with liquid ribbons. The Sydney where sprinklers made rainbows in the hot afternoon sun and kids screamed and laughed and ran through the rainbows in their undies. Dad hosed the car and then hosed mum when she came out to tell everyone to come in, it is time for tea.

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: Long Road Home: The Nice Australian
Speaking of nice people and quiet achievers, a really divine wine, perfected by callouses on the hands of the Noyce family, is now available exclusively at my good old Iceberg club of John Singleton and Bondi Beach fame. To boot, you do not have to eat to buy a bottle of the rare vintage of Noyce vino.
Philip Noyce got noticed worldwide with the Aussie terror-thriller Dead Calm, which also helped launch Nicole Kidman's career. In the '90s he directed two Jack Ryan political thrillers Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger, plus The Saint and The Bone Collector before returning to independent films with these two pictures in 2002.
Director Philip Noyce should be exhausted. In the last two years he's shot two emotionally- and politically-charged historical dramas on independent film budgets, then spent nine months editing them both..
• Rabbit-Proof Films Noyce delights in Double Duty and Dragon [I thought I'd lost my nationality. But I didn't feel like an American either. I was an outsider. And as for the saying that you can never go home, Noyce disagrees ]
• · Your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecule Unlocking riddle of the mind; [Unlocking music The Amazing Apple launches Logic Pro 7]
• · · The High Value of Avoiding Low Spirits: Until the night of the wolves and dragonsWe are all worms. But I do believe that I am a glow-worm ; [Christians can't stop the laughter. And we shouldn't want to. For we really ought to be laughing back Blessed are the jokers ]
• · · · Capitalism Magazine: Every rational person, growing up, had his favorite childhood heroes. What characteristics must one possess to qualify as a hero? Juraj Janosik, Vaclav Havel The philosophical foundations of heroism [Henry Cameron is a hero, even though he dies a drunk, a commercial failure and a man whose greatest buildings were never erected]
• · · · · Tolstoy Does Poprad and Oprah From Russia with Love: The People You Will Not Meet in Heaven
• · · · · · And there would be a lot of voices . . . very deep voices One of the advantages of having total chaos in my bookshelves is it will lead to moments of serendipity

Posted 2:49 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Never in a pink fit would I have thought that Google would play such a huge part in the Australian election. Well the Queensland Premier Peter Beattie urged the audience to search Google for John Howard non core promises, noting there are 33,000 results. [ There is no result if one places the sentence with quotation marks, just imagine if the surname used happened to be John Smith result on my imac is 66,666]
My message today comes straight from the (Google and ) people of Australia. Latham's campaign launch speech :
Fairfax Digital Analysis ;
Fox The Omnipresent Decision Makers So Help Me God

Eye on Local & Global Political Issues: Reality is Back in Political Fashion
A specter is haunting America – the specter of anti-Americanism. All the powers of patriotic America have entered into a corporate alliance to exorcise this specter: draft-deferrers and women-gropers, grammar-challenged and duel-challengers, oil diggers and grave diggers. It is the duty of all upstanding American citizens to fully understand and identify the leading symptoms of anti-Americanism, so that our homes, homeless shelters, reading chambers, torture chambers, chocolate refineries, weapons factories, and places of worship, such as churches, temples, and Wall Street, are completely free from the poison of anti-war sentiment. The patriotic American must save both himself and others from becoming an anti-American American by learning to be an active, honorable, anti-anti-American American. It is with this pressing obligation in mind that the following signs of anti-Americanism have been compiled and exposed.
• How to Avoid Becoming an Anti-American ; [Daniel Ellsberg Leaks and truths worth telling; The proliferation of political rights and dilution of corresponding duties United States has a long, sad history of sanctioning murder and torture ; Lawfulness of Interrogation Techniques under the Geneva Conventions ; He Says Jozef, You Say Yusuf, I Say Youssouf ]
• · Matt Liddy's Poll Vault Weblog There are people - quite a few number crunchers, actually, - who want to believe the absolute best and worst about the election night If all stories were written like science fiction stories: How Antony Green votes; Bryan Palmer at Oz Politics is tracking the election odds Scatterplot of Bellwether seats which the apparatchicks do not want you to see
• · · Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts accused President Bush on Monday of making the world a far more dangerous place, calling his handing of the war in Iraq a toxic mix of ignorance, arrogance and stubborn ideology. A mushroom cloud over any American city is the ultimate nightmare, and the risk is all too real
• · · · Leave it to the Washington Post's Dana Milbank to discover that Allawi's rhetoric was not only similar to Bush's, at times it seemed to have been written by the same person. I guess the White House speechwriters are getting a little lazy
• · · · · Robert Goodin: (PDF version) Representing Diversity
• · · · · · Indonesian Susilo Bambang Yudhoyona and the End of Euphoria A number of major tests and taxing times ahead for the next president in his first 100 days of office;
[Tragedy marked the closing of the Paralympics in Athens, when seven Greek schoolchildren were killed in a car accident on their way to the competition.]

Posted 7:46 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scorn to smart Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams.
-Mary Ellen Kelly
Compare Policies, Australia's first ever comprehensive political policy database compiled by Tony Huddy et. al. [Amok Creative, Blue Sheep Design, Cloud Caster]

Eye on Politics & Law Lords: What They Are Saying About MEdia Dragon: Pre-Emptive Election Launches
Harry S Truman once observed, When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship...
First, the exclusive interview: Howard and Latham talk to Crikey. Next, a story about A New South Wales punter who wagered a record $200,000 on John Howard to win a fourth term as prime minister after reading the election analysis by Crikey’s Electioneering Pebble. The betting agency Centrebet advised it was the biggest election bet it had taken, easily eclipsing a $90,000 wager on a Coalition win in 2001.
• Margo Kingston Latham to launch campaign: Will Latham attack on the second front at last? ; [Gregory Altreuter, the blog with great attitude Some Votes Are More Equal than Others]
• · Anything to escape another policy launch: Land of Hope, Return to Sender, Coincidences, Gloria and Policies: Liberal Party Policies; Labour Party Policies Policies ; Democrats Policies ; Greens Policies
• · · Yesterday, the Brissie Courier Monopoly gave Mark Latham the full treatment Dr Ivan Molloy: Candidate Jumping at the Gun Shadows
• · · · Andrew Leigh examines what impact factors such as surname i.e. Imrich, sex, age, income and country of birth have on voting patterns (PDF version) For richer, for poorer ; [For better or for worse Alan (Angry) Anderson , Strict Follower of Fox News and much more begins New Right Wing Blog on the SMH site: The Razor
• · · · · Shine Disinfectant Shine: Road to Surdom Leading Us into Political Temptation Again; [Also note Tim Dunlop writing guest column for Counterspin links to article in The Wall Street Journal (Reg. Req.): All in all, this is one Aussie election that the world will be watching
• · · · · · Michael Beschloss Choosing the most revealing books about the American election process; [Is Voting Worth the Trouble?]
(The moral, if there is one, is to vote out of duty, not self-interest. Why duty? For the simple reason that the more people who vote, the greater the chance of a happy result -- provided that each person is more likely to vote for the superior candidate.)

Posted 7:43 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Another confirmation of a trend Guardian Unlimited has signed up two of the leading political bloggers to each write a weekly column in the run-up to the U.S. presidential election. Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit (a Republican) and Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos (a Democrat) will be added to Guardian Unlimited's coverage of the election
Blogger Talent Moves Up the Media Food Chain

The Blog, The Press, The Media: This Wolf (Dragon) is Real, and Nobody's Listening
In the first clear victory for the blogosphere over the legacy media, the New York Times decides to spend ten pages talking about... Daily Kos, Josh Marshall, and Wonkette. It reads like a blog about bloggers blogging on the Blogger.com
• Bloggers Now With More Nudity; Scary thought Journos and bloggers can't live without each other; [Tara Calishain Tells it All: Seven Ways to Save Time Searching How to Peel the Imperfect Onions ; Catalogablog]
• · Democratic political strategist Mike Lux has had it up to here with the media's recent campaign coverage Enough Already
• · · We don't yet know who will win the 2004 election, but we know who has lost it. The American news media have been clobbered The Media, Losing Their Way [ Greg Ransom Sometimes I wonder if we can find our way back ;
Joe Gandelman]
• · · · Patti Anklam writes that Reading blogs about blogging by people who are reading blogs about blogging can be a very dizzying exercise Phil Wolff's learning curve progression of the average blogger; (via KM: Ives William [Aussie Cab / Taxi Blogger If I get a little bit of media exposure, it will go off the wall [Broken Link Breakthrough]
• · · · · Anni Dugdale reports on E-governance: democracy in transition ; [14 Steps To Your Business Blog]
• · · · · · I appreciate your courageous pursuit of the facts and I think you are doing important work. My question is this: Have you lost your mind? Iraq War and Journalists: Have you lost your mind? ; [ We need to make room on the bench and give the bloggers a place at the dinner table; The question remains: who's for dinner? Bush's Passion for Secrecy ]

Posted 7:37 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Whoever it was who said that to philosophize is an exercise in dying was right in more ways than one, for by writing a book nobody gets younger. Nor does one become any younger by reading it...
In any case, you find yourselves adrift in the ocean, with pages and pages rustling in every direction, clinging to a raft of whose ability to stay afloat you are not so sure.
Joseph Brodsky
Broadly speaking, like general contractors, writers are famously optimistic when it comes to estimating how long a project will take 20 Years and 5 Editors Later . . .

PublicAffairs publisher Peter Osnos writes in an LA Times op-ed column:
When Moore and O'Reilly sell millions of copies, when Kitty Kelley (author of The Family; The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty) gets a multimillion-dollar advance equal to a movie star's, and when 'Unfit for Command' soars, the only logical response is to up the ante further with even more explosive books.... Publishers have no choice but to go where the buyers are. And the buyers are clearly relishing the evisceration of our political leaders.

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: Literature invents its own Rules and Compasses: What is North for some is the South
Same goes in an even Wilder Degree for East and West ...
I have coined a term called Librarian syndrom which comes from a personal theory of mine. Women that work in jobs that force them to be on good behaviour for the entire day are much more wild in bed because they have to 'let it all out' in the evenings before going back to their job the next morning. When I'm sitting with my buddy JP and a girl walks by in a power business suit, hair tied into a tight bun, and 'girl next door' glasses... all I have to say to him is 'Librarian syndrome' and he knows why I find her especially attractive.
• Librarians do it better in the stacks ; [Fortunately, Lee Gutkind publisher of Creative Nonfiction provided a feedback that changed my life (Inside the dotty sister publication in Brissie as archived by the late Warren Horton) Creative nonfiction LitDot journal) In Pittsburgh they Edit Stories better for Writers and Readers]
• · What do “Wanderlust,” “My Old Man” and “Lads” have in common? Nothing, except that their authors — Michael Clinton, Amy Sohn and Dave Itzkoff, respectively — all work in the magazine industry The roman à clef format has been beaten into the ground
• · · Oxford Dictionary of National Biography the publishing event of the year; [Africa's Next-Generation Bookmobile Kids and project Grinning from ear ; Dragon Tales ]
• · · · Stalag Luft III: Their daring breakout from a German prisoner of war camp is one of World War II's legendary acts of heroism, but now love letters reveal the passion that lay behind the Great Escape: Great passion that inspired Great Escape; [ The promise of life after Reunification: Do Not Mention the Wall; The great escape: four walls and a pen ]
• · · · · To dream the unthinkable ... Good nonfiction books can be tough to find Not that they don't exist, but they're literally harder to find in a bookstore or library; [Even though I am more familiar with the big nightmares, I still suggest to Dream a little 'Dream'; Jozef Brodsky on Remembering What We'd Rather Forget We will not be terribly amiss if we surmise that we fondle in our hands, as it were, the actual or potential urns with someone's rustling ashes. In a manner of speaking, libraries and book stores are cemeteries; so are book fairs]
• · · · · · Ebooks ready for take-off as sales accelerate To Celebrities, Writing eBooks Looks Like Child's Play
{Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested, wrote the renaissance author Sir Francis Bacon accelerate Writer Under Influence at Amazon.com]

Posted 8:31 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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What shall we do with the drunken sailor? Laura Tingle observed in yesterday's Australian Financial Review:
Bucketload after bucketload of money came pouring out of the Prime Minister in Brisbane yesterday. [John Howard] started spending at 12.12 pm, and stopped spending at 12.42pm, setting a new land spending record of about $200 million a minute.

Eye on The Eleven Drunken Nights & Sailors Is Something Fishy in the Global Sea?
Court Rules a Horse, or a Whale, Is Not a Vehicle: The state Supreme Court ruled that Pennsylvania's drunken driving law can not be enforced against people on horseback, a decision that inspired the dissenting justice to wax poetic.
Labor is wrong to say John Howard is spending money like a drunken sailor.
No drunk, sailor or otherwise, has ever spent money in such a targeted and calculated way as John Howard has done since the May Budget. He has gone after value for money, real dollars that make a significant difference to selected recipients, and not modest tax cuts that are so easily spent and forgotten, or derided as a sandwich and milkshake.
Sunday's campaign launch in Brisbane was audacious but not profligate. It's not reckless to spend $12 billion if the money exists. And even less so if you plan to raise $17 billion more than you intend to spend over the next four years, over and above the election giveaways. That's Treasury's estimate based on current economic growth rates continuing into the future.
• PM a Cunning Captain, not a Drunken Sailor; [Counterspin: They are working the system because they think they own the system; Family First set to put Labor last S(i)x Billion Ways - How to Make Love to Voting Cards ]
• · Much as Rather sacrificed journalism to politics, Larry Tribe may have sacrificed scholarship to politics God Save This Honorable Court
• · · Tobacco industry lawyer Robert Northrip I helped tobacco firm destroy documents: lawyer ; [via The best appellate blogger in the world Howard Bashman of How Appealing Fame By the way, How Appealing has a sponsor: LexisNexis (This is the librarian talking ... No one can get better sponsors than Howard; and from now on history will be kind not only to Howard but also the spinoff - Media Dragon - smile)]
• · · · Next week Newsweek Blogged Yesterday They Dress to Express: Political T shirts--on the right and the left--pit teenagers against their school administrators ; [Having caught the scent of a juicy story from the MSM (mainstream media) to bite into, the bloggers were waiting to pounce like a pack of hounds behind the butcher shop The Bloggers: How to knock down a story ]
• · · · · Henry Kisor On one page, nine naked (full frontal naked!) Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court
• · · · · · Justice Is Blind: A Reader's Guide to the Vanity Fair Article Underneath Their Robes: Legitimacy of the 2000 election and the Court's credibility

Posted 6:42 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Google: Revenue Generation Ideas for your Haremish Blog ;
A word of warning, Media exposure is intensifying an existing trend toward a winner take all concentration of audience share. Even before blogs hit the big time, Web stats showed the blogosphere to be a surprisingly unequal place, with a relative handful of blogs — say, the top several hundred — accounting for the lion's share of all page hits.... Bloggers aren't the first, and won't be the last, rebellious critics to try to storm the castle, only to be invited to come inside and make themselves at home. Blogging Sells, and Sells Out

This Eastern European parable about the harem and the brothel is timely for the blogosphere: Making art, writing, painting, making music is like making love. It is something that can be hindered, but not stopped, even less can it be ruled and controlled by somebody, be it kings, popes or party secretaries...

The Blog, The Press, The Media: Pajamahadeens: Shifting eyes from left to right
These people have often been jealous of artists as well as of women. They wish to keep beautiful women and gifted artists for themselves, deny them the freedom to make love to whom they will, to write and to paint what they wish. They confine women and artists to harems, restricted areas wherethey are taken care of, where they have nearly everything they could wish for, except freedom. In a harem you must make love to your master and you cannot do so with anybody else. A harem is a restricted area which you cannot leave.
The Communist world was such a harem for most of its inhabitants, and artists were no exception...It reminds one of the way women from the Sultan's harem were able to leave it and go into town, accompanied and guarded by eunuchs.
In the past, we were forbidden to make love to the rich men from the corrupt West. Now we compete for their favour and gifts. We go and sleep with them as soon as we receive a telephone call. We call-girls and call-boys of the Western world are the luckiest of the post-communist prostitutes. Many of our former harem mates envy us. We are busy, we have to make love to many people, life has become much more expensive and insecure. Sometimes, waiting, exhausted at a large airport in the brave new world of freedom, we ask ourselves what freedom in fact is, where freedom isto be found, the freedom we believed in and some of our comrades died for. We ask ourselves, what is the real difference between a harem and a brothel, an odalisque and a call-girl. Is not the world that opened itself to us simply a much much larger harem with many sultans and emirs who want us to make love to them?
• After all, there is one difference: they now have a much greater freedom of choice Like the proverbial proletariat, you stand to lose nothing; what you may gain are new associative chains; [A quiz for journalism ethics eunuchs 90 percent of the paper (not counting the Rotisserie League-friendly Sports section) is a mill for press releases and celebrity hyperbole ]
• · Check out the top campaign journos Campaign Desk Hall of Fam ; [ALL SMILES: When context is misplaced, so is the truth... A writer is a tool of the language and context rather than the other way around]
• · · Turbulence in the blogosphere will continue to affect mainstream journalism for the foreseeable future. Wind and rain, harsh criticism and second-guessing will remain part of the weather system influencing newsrooms throughout the country. News in the Blog Age
• · · · A Blogger's Creed: A member of the blogging class tells why they deserve your thanks Bloggers have no checks and balances. [It's] a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas
• · · · · Web site offers after-death e-mail ; [Australian Digital Thesis Program ; Seaching for Thesis]
• · · · · · Poor Sinead O'Connor wants to stay out of the news -- so much so that she put herself into the news pleading to stay out of the news. She took out a 2,000-word, full-page ad in a national Irish newspaper to say please leave me alone. Oddly enough, it didn't work What have I done to deserve these lashings

Posted 6:41 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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As usual, it all comes down to Yeats: Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...And everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all convictions, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

Invisible Hands & Markets: Jobs for Political Donations
Something like this would be almost impossible to prove in NSW.
Jesse Wren Murphy dropped out of high school long ago and lives in rural Eastern North Carolina, where jobs with good benefits are hard to come by.
But Murphy has won three state jobs since 1983. He says that's because his uncle paid thousands of dollars in political contributions to a state transportation maintenance supervisor who boasted of his connections.
• Investigation by Eddie Carroll Thomas, the journalistic brother of Ross Coulthart ; [FBI widens probe of fund-raiser ]
• · Francis Snyder: (PDF version) Economic Globalization and the Law in the 21st Century
• · · Is market demand the lifeblood of capitalism? ; [Oceans of electricity ... Mick Perry, a former electrician and fisherman Aquanator will harness ocean currents to produce electric ones]
• · · · Wealth does not create individual happiness and it doesn't build a strong country
• · · · · Goodbye, Pension. Goodbye, Health Insurance. Goodbye, Vacations Welfare capitalism is dying. We're going to miss it
• · · · · · Everyone knows Parisians are snobs Steve Jobs, Apple, and the limits of innovation
[Truth is, some of the most innovative institutions in the history of American business have been colossal failures.]

Posted 6:32 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Excessive secrecy cripples everyone's ability to act by hiding government mistakes and corruption. Hence public knowledge is not inimical to national security, but integral to it.
-Nick Schwellenbach

Tracking Trends Great & Small: Secrets
Whistleblowers have become a fact of life - a seeming necessity - in our democracy. The most famous of them, Daniel Ellsberg, is touring Oregon this week to speak on behalf of what he feels is a vital part of the democratic conscience.
Ellsberg gained fame, as well as criminal charges that could have placed him in prison for 115 years, for making public in 1971 the Pentagon Papers, which awakened the nation to the illegality of the war in Vietnam.
I've gained insights into the psyche and courage of whistleblowers through correspondence with Ellsberg the past year.
• Greatest Whistleblower's Message Still Rings True; [Secrecy is expensive. Over the same period the amount of taxpayer dollars spent on classification increased nearly $2 billion, to $6.5 billion annually Government Secrecy Grows out of Control]
• · The Unforeseen Fruits of Hope Proud to be a Dead Armadillo: There's nothing in the middle of the road but a yellow line and dead armadillos; [Charles Krauthammer: The Art Of Losing Armadillos: Of all our allies in the world, which is the only one to have joined the United States in the foxhole in every war in the past 100 years? Not Britain, not Canada, certainly not France... [ The answer is Australia ]
• · · If the United States can produce the best scientists, the most gold medal winning athletes, the greatest business minds and the hottest rock and roll, there is no reason we shouldn't have the best world class killers, ninjas, wet work specialists and dedicated sociopaths as well This is the essence of cold revenge, terror against terror, but 100% targeted and, when performed professionally, absolutely safe for innocent bystanders; [Hamas Official Killed in Syria ]
• · · · Around eighty papers are available online. Topics range from waterfront developments, public transport and telecommunications to spatial inequality, parklands and sustainability State of Australian cities; [Australian Oral Health Alliance Call for action: oral teething problems ]
• · · · · Vivendi Universal (France), Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux (France), Bouygues-Saur (France), RWE-Thames (Germany) and Bechtel-United Utilities (US) have become the water barons who are taking over public utilities Just as we fought wars over oil, so will we fight wars over water by The Awakened Women
• · · · · · Both Parties See a Big Increase in New Voters ; [Swiss authorities have hailed as a success what they say is the world's first binding internet vote in a national referendum ]

Posted 1:34 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Every saucy rumour spread by a certain teasing governor at the NSW Parliamentary Library would always carry a preamble: I deny I told you this story ... (smile) Blogjams, Offbeat Stories, Scoops, and Shenanigans ...
AustralianPolitics.com is almost a decade young and is aimed at the youngest at heart. It is a thoughtful work of Malcolm Farnsworth, a secondary school teacher from Loreto Mandeville Hall in Melbourne, Australia Hall of Political Education
On Saturday, 9 October, more than 400 000 newly-enrolled young Australians will exercise their democratic right to vote for the very first time. One enterprising student - voting for the first time in the seat of Melbourne, and wanting to make the most informed choice possible - decided to invite all the local candidates to speak at a student-led forum

Eye on Who Sits In Whose Seat: Litmus, Bellwether, Beltways etc...
Litmus seat. There’s a sense of excitement to those words. Not only do they imply a vote-magnifying pull - an electorate in the balance - but they also suggest the tantalising possibility of foreseeing our political future. A Damoclean sword hangs suspended over the sleepy burgh of Eden-Monaro… but its victim is yet to be decided. Since 1972, the party that has held this seat has also wound up in government.
• Only in Quantum Politics: Spinning While Standing Still The litmus seat of Eden-Monaro [Election at the Margins Pendulum Gallery]
• · Australia's forgotten people: Ever since Bob Hawke’s ‘no child living in poverty’ gaffe, Australian politicians have zealously avoided mentioning or making commitments to reduce poverty Rebuilding the Ladder of Opportunity or Financial Hardship; [We cannot get southern politicians to take us more seriously than a Big Wet Dream Old-fashioned democracy and the Big Wet Dream ]
• · · There, in the basement of her dreams Natasha Cica found the G Spot ; [America's reputation as spot of the free is looking increasingly tarnished]
• · · · Political Lessons Malcolm Mackerras on the Senate, always required reading; [Bloody Obvious Award Every politician cries that their political enemies play dirty ]
• · · · · Life of the party Mark Latham has reshaped Labor and its policies in line with his own image and vision
• · · · · · Counterpunch, Jeffrey St. Clair on Life and Crimes of George W. Bush (series); [Christopher Hill: (PDF version) Superstate or Superpower? The future of the European Union in world politics ; The end of the Russian Federation?; The butcher of Beslan How did the Chechens and Russians come to despise each other? ]

Posted 7:11 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Next 12 Days on the Political Cartoons Trail
Masquerade parties and the trickery of branding political parties
As Paul Keating once remarked, if there's a horse in the race called self-interest, back it because you know it will go flat out...(from the Webdiary commentariat)
Acording to Margo Kingston of Webdiary fame it's the Coalition by almost 12
The new-era heros and battlers defined by the Prime Minister. Now $6 billion for Howard's heroes: Australia should never be a nation defined by class or envy, but rather a nation united by mateship and achievement 12000,000,000 divided by 2 = 6000,000,000 ...

Eye on Shakespeare's 12th Night and the Asterois Toutatis (Watch) Dressing down the Donkey: Kith and kin rather than Kath and Kim
First thing first, the observant Guido of Rank and Vile fame says everything we want to say about politics and donkeys
Don't say who told you, but the bellwether seats will be the real climax of this election...
Although Eden-Monaro is Australia’s best-known bellwether seat, the NSW electorate of Macarthur has acted as a bellwether for much longer – back to 1949, when it was first created. David Burchell visits Macarthur and finds an electorate that seems relaxed and comfortable about another three years of Coalition government...
• Election Sound Bites Counter Spinned: Less Than Fortnight To Go [Many of Shakespeare’s plays analyse the chaotic and brutal politics of his times by looking at historical parallels, but he also analyses human relationships, giving people a guide to living with each other during a period of history when many traditional values had been overturned Love Lessons in 12th Night; Astonishing amount of untruths The Conventions of Shakespearean Political Comedy ]
• · Landslide, cliffhanger or oblivion - the polls can't decide [More than 12 out of 12? ; Fearless Robert Corr]
• · · Last but not least Poll Vault Post by Nadia ]
• · · · Judith Brett teaches politics at La Trobe University and is the author of Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class The Liberal Party should not be surprised that at 11th Hour 12th doctors' wives are turning against it; [Australian Prospect Corruption of the polis ]
• · · · · Greens on the Wild Side Creative energies are being ploughed into a plethora of new websites as the anti-Howard campaign gathers steam ahead of the October 9 federal election
• · · · · · The bellwether electorates APO REPORTS AND ARTICLES ON ELECTION ISSUES [Arts Policy Multidimentional Perspective Just Alive or Dead? ]

Posted 7:10 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Our Lust For Wealth Made Us Civilized? A new scientific study says prehistoric hunters loved to be dripping in luxury goods, and the taste for flashy trinkets may have been what turned humans from savages into a civilised society with car number plates entitled IMRICH

Invisible Hands & Markets: Taxing Spiders Spread in All Directions
T am among the first to defend the IRS when it deserves to defended. It is underfunded, it is charged with administering a mess of a tax law, it is treated as though it wrote the foolish provisions in the tax law, and it is a favorite scapegoat of Congress for the latter’s tax legislation incompetence. But when the IRS does goof, it gets the headlines, and leaves the world thinking it’s like this all the time.
Modern culture needs to stop rewarding incompetence, laziness, greed, and crime, it needs to stop pretending something bad is good, and it needs to elevate the values of individual responsibility and accountability to the same level to which their counter-balancing forces, freedom and independence, have been raised.
• Confronting the problem head-on rather than pretending that reality is a fantasy [Tax Dodging With Dubya You paid your taxes last year. Your friends and neighbors did. But 82 of the largest corporations in America didnot]
• · Each semester I explain to my students that the worse thing to do when in financial trouble is to avoid paying taxes by hiding income Tax Woes for Philadelphia Restauranteur; [link first seen at Jim Maule ]
• · · Pontiac G-6 midsize 2005 sports sedans Someone made a killing? Tax Consequences of Oprah's Car Giveaway
• · · · Is the Middle Class Shrinking?
• · · · · Extraordinary James Cumes Who is Chaff; Who is Grain ; [Irony: Labor and business]
• · · · · · It's State Vs State For Movies American states are battling one another trying to lure entertainment projects: tax incentives designed to encourage film, television, and commercial production in their states, the battle between bordering states has intensified

Posted 1:26 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Janka Wendt and the X factor among the Swinging Voters; On a lightish note Inspirational Election Message for the Younger Voters
As always, I am going out on a limb and predicting an extra two independents (including minor parties) in the Senate; House of the People will consist of 6 independents (including minor parties); Coalition 74 and ALP 70.

Eye on the Lucky Country and Its 13 Days Ahead: Taking a Shot at Both Parties
Lend me your political ear: The publishing industry is in high gear this election season, with piles of political books for sale
Readers of MauledAgain know that I don't hesitate to criticize politicians, no matter their party, and that I consider the traits of the politician to be far more important in evaluating a vote than the politician's party affiliation. For me, We must elect more [Democrats/Republicans/whatever] is a distraction from the questions that need to be asked.
• Complex Simplicity and Simple Complexity ; [Prof Maul ]
• · All that gloom and doom may explain why the political satire is suddenly hot again in the literary world, and several new offerings from well-known authors are testing the limits of dark comedy concerning world events Laughing To Keep From Crying: The Banality of the Spinners
• · · The Road to the Police State An overhaul of traffic infringements - more than tripling some fines and increasing demerit points - Roads Minister, Carl Scully, introducing a fairer system
• · · · The Rocky Love Love boat allegations ripple among MPs ; Penny Wise: Frank Lowy
• · · · · The Cost of Big Greek Wedding Soviet Style Sussex Street Affair
• · · · · · The Price of Political Divorce Michael Coutts-Trotter's new commercial gig

Posted 1:17 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Many Antipodian bloggers are drowning in the Virtual Spinoff caused by Antony Loewenstein of Counterspin Geting a Guernsey on the Omnipotent Guardian (pick of the day, 23/9/04); Not So long ago Robert Fisk of Counterpunch was also sending heavy traffic Down Under

The Blog, The Press, The Media: Inside the ivory tower
Blogging is allowing academics to develop and share their ideas with an audience beyond the universities. But as Jim McClellan reports, not everyone is convinced
• Academic blogging and reality bending drugs [ Crooked Timber looks at a piece by Jim McClellan about academic blogging ]
• · Literary Blogs Balancing Acts Among The Literary Recluse
• · · The Best Barista in the Blogosphere Blogs about how Google's automated search results display a conservative bias Balancing Act: How News Portals Serve Up Political Stories; [Google and the Top Secret GBrowser.com; Putting search results on your site]
• · · · Based on the half-dozen hires in recent weeks, Google appears to be planning to launch its own Web browser and other software products to challenge Microsoft
• · · · · Online campaign to push out Howard
• · · · · · Hollywood Screenwriters Weigh a Real-Life Revolution at the Ballot Box Writing Their Own Election Script

Posted 1:14 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Our songs may not smell of sweat and the earth, but our rhymes, not just 'time' and 'mine,' not just 'wrong' and 'alone' or 'home,' are pure. Sure, when a line is great, you can skip the rhyme. But how many lines are that great?
Johnny Mercer (quoted in Gene Lees, Portrait of Johnny)

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: Movies Rediscover Sense of Purpose
Hollywood may be giving conservatives fits these days, but the new energy amongst filmmakers is downright inspiring to critics, who haven't seen such a sense of commitment to the importance of the medium since the Vietnam era. With rare exceptions, movies in the post-Vietnam and post-Watergate era have been dominated by the 'me' ethic, concerned more about individual struggles than global ones. When filmmakers have dared to tackle broader social concerns, outside of straight documentaries, they more often than not have done so through the use of symbols or allegory or other distancing devices. God forbid you should actually say what you mean, or wave a fist in somebody's face
• Polarization Makes For Gutsy Films
• · How to explain the human obsession with the end of the world? The Doomsday Obsession: there is no shortage of prophets, filmmakers, and assorted crackpots ready to help you prepare for the End Days of Sky is Falling
• · · Blogging for Cold River and Beyond
• · · · Book-banning controversy tears at souls of librarians Librarians consider themselves defenders of the First Amendment. On philosophical grounds, they are loath to restrict access to material
• · · · · Bittersweet Anne Rice, Sugar and Spice Amazon.com creating waves
• · · · · · More Media Dragons Keeping Online Journals Are you Good in Bed?: Do you wish that you’d found the time to make love with writers?; Another Timeless link for Google archives (smile) The Australian Age: Selling Sex

Posted 1:46 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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The remarkable thing about television is that it permits several million people to laugh at the same joke and still feel lonely.
- T.S. Elliot.

Some writers so capture the soul and spirit of a people that they are identified with them forever after. In England, it was Charles Dickens, in the United States, it was Mark Twain. In Australia it was Patrick White. For the Slavic nations, and to some extent for all Central Europeans, it is the Czech writer, Jaroslav Hasek.

Hasek - a drunk, a roustabout, a wanderer, and at times a full and eager accomplice of Gypsy con artistries - set his comedic odyssey in the midst of the First World War. His odyssey functions as a satire of the war, the leaders, and the army. Hasek delivers a knock-out blow against the System, the Powers-That-Be, hypocrisy and military service written as serials so that Hasek could milk more money from them. Hasek died 81 years ago, at the early age of 39, so every imagination can dictate the end!

His novel was christened as the Bad Bohemian Beer Lover, but now is better known as the Good Soldier Jozef Svejk (Not many languages create Sh sound with S and a simple the hook S?. As a result, there are many versions of the title: Josef Schweik, Schwejk, Shveik, or Shveyk)

Svejk is pronounced like Shvake and rhymes with shake; (Shake with the inserted v for Vrbov) and they say, So, now you're ready to Svejk and shake!
My childhood outdoor dunny, behind the Catholic church in Vrbov, was plastered with images of the Good Soldier Jozef Svejk. However, most observant tourists are bombarded with Jozef’s omnipresent face on beermats in almost every pub in Prague.
Svejkovat, to svejk has since become a common Czech word. Svejking is the method for surviving svejkarna, which is a situation or institution of systemic absurdity requiring the employment of svejking for one to survive and remain untouched by it.

The good soldier Svejk is anything but; a genial ne'er-do-well, Svejk does any and all he can to avoid actually arriving at the front, missing trains, deliberately misunderstanding orders, dodging blockhead officers, anything at all to keep himself safe and undermine as much as possible the equally blockheaded war efforts. At the time, the Czech peoples were under the rule of the Habsburg Empire, had little to no urge to fight for their gilded masters in Vienna, and Svejkism became a kind of term for the Czech's passive-aggressive resistance. Svejk is a common footsoldier - an everyman - who frankly would rather have a beer than fight.
Like the Good Soldier Jozef Svejk, Homer Simpson is a simple little man, ill-equipped to be thrown into the front line of large historical, commercial and political events.

Like the Amerikan Homer, Jozef was a man who never lived, yet who went further in defining the Czechs in the 20th century than perhaps anyone else. So dip into Svejk at Amazon.com and soak the story for a long time by placing the book conveniently somewhere in the bathroom. Reread and laugh out loud ... Study closely the way the most famous of Czech literary character effectively talks himself into being arrested by a secret policeman, and is later sent to the war front.

In the world dominated by power, Svejk is an underdog, the object of manipulation and coercion by inimical social forces that constantly threaten his very existence. Yet, despite the tremendous odds against him, he passes through all the dangers unharmed. Svejk's mythical invincibiliity makes him a modern "epic hero" with whom his compatriots identify and of whose exploits they talk because they see in him "a modem Saint George, the hero of a saga of a single mind's triumph over the hydra of Authority, Regime, and System-of the mind disguised as feeblemindedness in the war with Absurdity in the guise of Wisdom and Dignity-the sense of Nonsense against the nonsense of Sense. And though, to an outsider, next to the spectacular stunts of ancient heroes Svejk's feat-his survival achieved through his own doing, without any embarrassing compromises with those in power-might seem rather trifling, the historical experience of a small nation sandwiched between Germany and Russia suggests to a Czech reader that it also might be an absolute miracle.

Svejk is found to be perfectly fit to serve - revealing the representatives of the system to be even more hare-brained than Svejk pretends to be. Thus, the irony and paradox. It is precisely that sort of scene that generations of Czechs have come to adore: subversive humour and a quiet thumbing of one's nose at authority behind its back. Many would say that it is a typical Czech characteristic, retained after suffering centuries of imposed rule under the Austrians.

And so they've killed our Ferdinand, says Svejk's charwoman, in the famous line that opens the novel, describing the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo, 1914. Svejk, busy massaging his knees for rheumatism responds: Which Ferdinand, Mrs Muller? I know two. One is a messenger at Prusa's, the chemist's, who once drank a bottle of hair oil there by mistake. And the other is Ferdinand Kokoska who collects dog manure. Neither of them is any loss.

That, in a nutshell, is Svejk: good-humouredly going about his business, oblivious to the gravity of matters at hand. Instead he tells us absurd stories about characters in ridiculous situations, forcing us right away to question his intelligence ...

Last year, in 2003 AD, at Prague's NATO summit a man dressed as the Good Soldier and using Svejk's typical crutches to support himself, appeared at an anti-alliance protest, shouting at the top of his voice: To Baghdad, Mrs Muller, to Baghdad..., showing just how deep the character is etched on the common psyche in Prague.

Svejk is a Czechoslovakian Miracle...a masterpiece about a hero who has not the reputation of Alexander the Great or Napoleon...but somehow surpasses all the famous historical personalities ... In doing the bare minimum to be considered competent, we see the nature of Czech resistance to Austro-Hungarian (and later, Soviet) authority - as Havel put it some fifty years later, it is the power of the powerless - subverting authority from within while seemingly going along with the grandious designs of the ruling elite.

Svejk represents one of the most unique and successful survival strategies ever conceived by man. He helped me to survive the Czechoslovak Kommunist Army, the Iron Curtain crossing, and the Bear Pit of the NSW Parliament and irony is part of my taxing time as the Media Dragon.

Joseph Heller, confessed on his deathbed that if it weren’t for his having read The Good Soldier Svejk he would never had written his American novel Catch 22...
Today in Amerika Homer Simpson is one of the most credible portraits in any art form of an ordinary man, your average Joe Sixpack, not undeserving of comparison with Hasek's Good Soldier Schweik.

Homer is gross - obese, obtuse, lazy, thick-headed, beer loving and close to illiterate. He has a voracious craving for junk food (mostly doughnuts, pork rinds and cheeseburgers) and even junkier television. (I wanna shake of the dust of this one-horse town. I wanna explore the world. I wanna watch TV in a different time zone.) he is a bad neighbour, a sore loser and an atrocious parent. (Lisa, if the Bible has taught us nothing else - and it hasn't - it's that girls should stick to girls' sports like hot-oil wrestling and foxy boxing and such and such.)

He is not just a controversial moral logician (Marge, it takes two to lie. One to lie and one to listen) but a creature deficient in anything remotely resembling a social conscience. (When Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, the Indian-born and illegally resident operator of the Kwik-E-Mart convenience store, risks being deported in the wake of a new anti-immigration law, Homer attempts to console him: Oh my God. I got so swept up in the scapegoating and fun of Proposition 24, I never stopped to think it might affect someone I cared about. You know what, Apu, I am really, really gonna miss you.) it has even been hinted that he is afflicted with appalling BO.

Eye on Politics & Law Lords: Simpsons Generation: The third generation of the Good Soldier Schweik
They know that you cannot trust any one source. They know that you cannot trust a particular interview. Rather what they want to know is what’s the story behind the story. So they’re looking for truth and they’re looking for it in irreverent means.
The beauty of The Simpsons, and it’s unique, The Simpsons, because it’s been the most popular show for the last ten years or so, is that it reveals the truth behind society. It tells things as they are, and these people are clever enough to be able to work with those layers of sophistication.
• Alternative path to political media; [ The Chaser Decides ]
• · Mr Latham must start to see personal questions for what they are, not hand grenades but pieces of trivia. He needs to rise above it all, because the media never will. Latham in danger of developing persecution complex
• · · Poll Vault Pollies cashed up as costings row erupts
• · · · Ariadne Vromen & Nick Turnbull Where do the Greens fit in Election 2004?
• · · · · Nature: A personality trait has been identified that seems to predict whether people will vote or engage in politics
• · · · · · Getting out the vote: One professor insists upon it [ What kind of **** would fire an employee for driving to work in a car with a John Kerry bumper sticker?]

Posted 7:35 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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According to Roy and HG, the electoral hopes of the Liberal party have been revived this week, after the perennially unreliable analyst forecasted a victory for the Labour party. In 2001 certain forcasts of the Howard Government's death were a little premature ...
A Tale of two Election Pebbles: the public servant with the ABC, Antony Green, predicts Labour to Win , while the academic with the Defence Academy, Professor Malcolm Mackerras, crystal-balls Coalition victory. Ach, I came across a rather mischievious, yet colourful election, observation by Malcolm Mackerras, who suspects that on a national scale the pink vote has absolutely no significance at all ...
[As with everything election-related, the Mackerras pendulum page draws everyone to the roots of all the good old meanings and evil definitions: psepho-, pseph- (Greek > Latin: pebble/pebbles, stone/stones; election; magical vote)]

Eye on the Date with Destiny 9 October: Commentariat: Psephologist, Media Tragons and Election Night Munchkins (Magicians)
Political analysts and commentators come out of the woodwork during elections so Crikey is going to list every single one of them that pops up on a semi-regular basis over the coming six weeks. You have journalists, pollsters, academics, former staffers, former pollies and the like all clamouring to give their point of view.
• Tracking the Commentariat as they finish with their pants up
• · Ross Gittins It is impossible to predict how any opposition would govern the country
• · · David Starkoff’s blog Poor Man's Antony Green: No sign of landslides
• · · · Explosive found in Sydney jet: report; [American blogger of Simply Apalling fame posts long story A Tale of Two Hostages: Act I, II, and III ]
• · · · · NSW Premier Bob Carr escapes by skin of his teeth but commission has done its job ; Bob Carr takes aim at Hardie's ; The man is a political genius: That's a matter for the Party Secretariat
• · · · · · I lived only a pebble throw away from the Wilston railway station for couple of years Queensland - corrupt one day, not much better the next. Or 20 years later. The old nexus between politicians, coppers and the meeja in the Sunshine State may have changed since Tony Fitzgerald shone his torch into some of its darker corners, but it still works in much the same way

Posted 6:59 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be read once.
- Cyril Connoly (1903 - 1974)

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: Painting The Gulag From The Inside Out
The name Nikolai Getman probably doesn't ring a lot of bells in the Western art world, and in fact, when the octogenarian survivor of Stalin's infamous Siberian Gulag died quietly in Russia last month, his passing didn't make the obituary page of a single American newspaper. But Getman's body of work represents the most complete and vivid visual record of life in the Gulag that the world has ever seen, and the horrors he recorded on canvas are a reminder of one of the great man-made tragedies of the last century.
• To the memory of those who survived the Gulag, the Iron Curtain, the Berlin Wall, and to those who did not Light a candle in memory. The living are in need of it more than the dead. Bow your heads; [Eye to eye with Hitler: Eichinger fails Because Germans didn't do more to fight him and because his actions were so atrocious, he still haunts us]
• · Robert Greenwald's Visionary Approach to Documentary Making ; [Next Big Thing: but for most fledgling directors, there's no pot of gold waiting at the end of all the schmoozing and politicking Little Indie pictures seeking big deal]
• · · Reaching climax with a desperately euphoric sing-a-long to A-ha's "Take on Me," which sounded like an agonized howl, a pistols-at-dawn challenge to Father Time 80s Nostalgia and the Vicious Circle ; [Vogel Prize Kid from the bush finds her voice ]
• · · · New Hampshire correspondent Robert Birnbaum catches up with veteran writer Renata Adler to survey today’s journalism when it seems like a PR agency for the government and learn exactly why you don’t diss the Times book review chief
• · · · · the film and drama production unit of Channel 4 Television in Britain Art, money and Film Four
• · · · · · Bohemian Genes expose secrets of sex on the side Men have been tomcatting around since time immemorial, and some traveled far from home to perform sexual dalliances

Posted 9:09 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Bush Urges World to Unite
The desire for freedom resides in every human heart. And that desire cannot be contained forever by prison walls or martial laws or secret police; over time and across the Earth, freedom will find a way
• We know that dictators are quick to choose aggression ; [ The commitments we make must have meaning ]

Posted 6:56 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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During Federal elections, Olivers education takes centre stage

Eye on Politics & Elections: Only time will tell where the pendulum will finally rest
Once upon a time, Election Day was the most significant communal occasion in American life.
According to Curtis Gans, director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, the data are "unequivocal" in showing that easy absentee voting doesn't boost turnout. It isn't lack of time that keeps so many Americans from voting. It's lack of interest. Citizens who care about elections will always find a way to vote. Citizens who don't care aren't likely to vote no matter how much they are coaxed and begged to do so. It's time to stop the coaxing and begging, and to restore the significance that Election Day used to have.
• Jeff Jacoby: Declining importance of Election Day [Burning Bushes A reader's juicy guide to Kitty Kelley's The Family; Putin Car Tied To Bomb Plot Linked To Chechen: Suspect Beaten to Death]
• · Election 2004: To Catch a Thief Everybody hit the streets!; [ John Kerry Must (Again) Make Love, Not War]
• · · Bush Team Knows How To Play the Media in Spy Crime Cover-Up
• · · · Alyosha from The Brothers Karamozov. Problem is, he wears a dress. A monk’s robe, really, but it’s still a little over the top in a president. And he is very emotional Of all the fictional characters you know, which one is made of solid, presidential stock?
• · · · · The ideology and politics of the Australian Greens
• · · · · · Great Britain Look who's on a real roll now Liberal Democrats are doing better than at any time in 20 years

Posted 6:55 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Journalism largely consists of saying Baron Jozef is Dead to people who never knew that Baron Jozef was alive.
—G.K. Chesterton (

The Blog, The Press, The Media: Who Let the Blogs Out
One thing that distinguishes the online world from the real one is that it is very easy to find things. To find a copy of Cold River a Surviror’s Story in print, one has to go to a bookshop, which may or may not carry it. Finding it online, though, is a different proposition. Just go to Google, type in Cold River a Surviror’s Story and you will be instantly directed to those websites distributing the tale. Though it is difficult to remember now, this was not always the case. Indeed, until Google, now the world's most popular search engine, came on to the scene in September 1998, it was not the case at all.
• As in the physical world, searching online was a hit-or-miss affair ; [ How PageRank works; Websites and kiosks, bring both risks and rewards ]
• · After Blogs Got Hits, CBS Got a Black Eye; [Blog Belle calls it a day London 'call girl' gives up blog ]
• · · How the guys sitting at their computers in pajamas humiliated the suits at CBS News What Blogs Have Wrought ; [Now comes the Blog backlash The graybeards of the blogosphere are warning their fellow "citizen journalists" ...]
• · · · Bill Moyers on Love, Journalism & Blogging: In one sense we are discovering all over again the feisty spirit of our earliest days as a nation when the republic and a free press were growing up together ; [Wikipedia Reaches One Million Articles ]
• · · · · Sunrise on Sunday starting to attract the spanish publishing horses Michael Pascoe pointed out that Spanish publisher Javier Moll is on the record as wanting to start papers in both Adelaide and Brisbane, two of Rupert's most profitable markets
• · · · · · FTC Reviews Program to Reward Spam Whistleblowers

Posted 6:49 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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NSW Premier Bob Carr yesterday urged John Howard and Mark Latham to ensure the nation's corporate watchdog used its powers to prosecute executives of James Hardie Industries for conduct found to be misleading by commissioner David Jackson.; Czech out Crikey why James Hardie takes a pounding - again

Invisible Hands & Markets: Let's make a bet about public choice
In the first of these senses, one could certainly argue that public choice was deviant, in that it rejected the accepted Pigovian line of taking government as given and assuming that it could smoothly and efficiently correct all manner of supposed market failures. What public choice analysis showed, in a nutshell, was that market failure had its complement in government failure, and that the cure for market failure could well be worse than the disease.
• Faustian bargain [ Don't Trust The Theories of Famous Intellectuals! ]
• · See Also Employees should be the first priority of a company entering bankruptcy -- not creditors
• · · Mystery buyer lifts lid on Crown land ; [Mystery of Colourful, Orange, Lobbying ]
• · · · Deriving long-run inequality series from tax data
• · · · · To find out which jobs in your community have been exported or lost due to trade: Enter your ZIP code or Enter the industry and ZIP code or Select a company Job Tracker - Working America ; [Sydney has done a much more comprehensive job in deporting its poor to the outer suburbs.]
• · · · · · Even shoes are named after him in Czech Republic Boty Tomas Bata Turns 90 (The first shoes I ever wore were made by Bata)

Posted 10:22 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

Eye on Kerry & Dialogue Day: Speech at New York University: John Kerry for President Press Room
Ach, I am honored to be here at New York University — one of the great urban universities, not just in New York, but in the world. You have set a high standard for global dialogue and I hope to live up to that tradition today. This election is about choices.
Jeralyn Merritt; Czech out the snippets of dialogue: Jim Henley: On the Radar - The Kerry speech on Iraq; Jerome Armstrong: Bush's 23 reasons for Invading Iraq — From Kerry's speech on Monday: "By one count, the President offered 23 different rationales for this war; Josh Marshall: To read Brooks' column, Kerry came out foursquare for a rapid withdrawal from Iraq ...; Joe Gandelman: For Kerry, much of the nuance is being deep-sixed and his message sharpened, as this transcript of his speech yesterday at New York University illustrates; Tim Blair: More from Kerry, this time on conditions in Iraq: "Raw sewage fills the streets, rising above the hubcaps of our Humvees; Talking Dog; Steve M.; Mathew Gross; Chris Bowers; Orrin Judd; Chris Gruber; Edward_; Andrew Sullivan; Bird Dog; Oliver @LiquidList; Matthew Yglesias; Noam Scheiber; Lambert @Corrente; Kevin Drum; Susan Madrak; Todd Pearson; David Allan Pell; Kos; Oliver Willis; Atrios; Tom Maguire; Gene @HarrysPlace; Taegan Goddard

Posted 6:55 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Fifteen years after the Wall came down, there are still two Germanies.
Governor of Australia glues the nation with his colourful Election blogam Are we there yet?

Eye on Politics & Election Stacking: Claims and counter-claims envelop defence debate
The defence policies of both political parties are attracting attention both locally and overseas.
Labor released its defence policy and has promised to increase the size of the Australian Army.
The Government unveiled a plan to step up the fight against terrorism in the region, using specialist teams of Australian Federal Police (AFP) that could be sent to work in neighbouring countries and John Howard has reiterated his view that as prime minister he would launch an attack in a neighbouring country against terrorist groups.
• Defensive Policies [As seen at Poll Vault ]
• · So God said: go to NSW and create poll floods [PDF version of the Australian Electoral Commission Group Preferences for Senate and Nile]
• · · Tony Windsor offered a diplomatic posting if he agreed not to stand again and the cleaning contractor for the closed Orange Grove factory outlet and Labor operative, Sam Bargshoon I branchstacked for Latham says ALP heavy
• · · · A new politics and the culture of fear Christopher Selth
• · · · · One and Only Pauline Hansome Rope
• · · · · · Papa McGuinness Left-leaning Pisa hacks sprayed

Posted 6:54 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Selling off family photo albums and silver Data obtained by The Daily Telegraph under Freedom of Information shows 82 individual sales of school and TAFE properties and other assets owned by the Education Department

Tracking Policies & Investigative Stories: Run For Your Life
Quique is one of an estimated nine million people who have embarked on an epic and illicit journey, leaving behind homes and families in Central America for an uncertain future 5000 kilometres away, in a place they call "El Norte".
With just $100 between them, Quique and his three friends will join one of history’s greatest migrations ... the human wave seeking a better life in the United States.
In order to depict this river of humanity, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation follows Quique and his friends with a film crew and light weight cameras ... not to assist them but simply to record these young men running for their lives.
To reach their goal, Quique and his friends must travel "el tren de la muerte" (the train of death), survive murderous gangs and evade corrupt Mexican police. They must then pay unscrupulous people smugglers to enable them to cross the almost impenetrable border into the United States ... a border that many have died attempting to cross.
• I accepted so that people can see how much we suffer on the road ... To take this road is not good because many fall. Many die there [Swimming for your life ]
• · Find out Who were the Fallen in Iraq?
• · · Four Corners Beating the Black Dog
• · · · Merchants of Passion One housewife at a time
• · · · · Putting Putin in Perspective via Prague-born-’n-bred Pazderka: Beslam is not Bethleham according to Czech View
• · · · · · Tax Break Bringing Businesses, and Fraud, to the Virgin Islands

Posted 7:52 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Australian history is almost always picturesque; indeed, it is also so curious and strange, that it is itself the chiefest novelty the country has to offer and so it pushes the other novelties into second and third place. It does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies; and all of a fresh new sort, no mouldy old stale ones. It is full of surprises and adventures, the incongruities, and contradictions, and incredibilities; but they are all true, they all happened.
Mark Twain, More Tramps Abroad, London, 1897
Leaders Debate: How Australian? ; After the debate rivers of gold flow in the battle for the city of exiles

Eye on October Revolutionary Election, Now Less than Half C(h)ampaign Full When politicians lie: reflections on truth, politics and patriotism
In this essay for the GR’s Addicted to Celebrity edition, Raimond Gaita argues that the “cynical expectation that politicians will lie to protect their party or their own careers” reveals “how impoverished our life with the language of politics has become”. The consequences of this debasement are profound and stir intense feelings.
• Raimond Gaita in Griffith REVIEW ; [An address to the Special Operations Command Senior Leadership Group on 8 September 2004, by Aldo Borgu Future directions in terrorism: implications for Australia; Indonesia’s struggle is also our challenge, argues Greg Barton, author of a new book on Jemaah Islamiyah ]
• · Capital Ls Liberal's attacks on Latham's Liverpool council record ; [ Mark Latham A stranger unto himself; Bernard Slattery on easing the squeeze ]
• · · Priest with Guts: The fact that Sydney's west has again become a political battleground is good news for residents who can look forward to having Detective Sergeant Tim Priest back on the beat ; [The specter of Grove I believe the answer is contained in the material that I have tabled; Orange Grove of Gazal]
• · · · Federal election: minor political parties in the centre - Armadillos ; [ The pundits say the Coalition will win. Rod Tiffen isn’t so sure]
• · · · · How Many Electooral Scandals Are Enough?
• · · · · · Welcome to the World of E-Voting Internet starting to scare the horses Ready or Not (and Maybe Not), Electronic Voting Goes National ; [Flogging a dead horse Pauline Hanson is history – but it’s a history worth remembering, says David Burchell]

Posted 7:51 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Aristotle said Irony better befits a gentleman than buffoonery ; the ironical man jokes to amuse himself, the buffoon to amuse other people...
Tell me, MEdia Dragon, when did you begin to have these thoughts that people are laughing at you whenever you blog???!!!
While we (royal we) blog in the nude, as you do, as you do, we are disappointed and rather surprised to learn, via the Beautiful Atrocities, that most other unbohemian bloggers sit in their actual living room and in fact wear two piece pajamas as they write (Is this some kind of unbearable darkness of blogging? smile)

The Blog, The Press, The Media: Blogging Off Daily Can Make You Blind
People should have a complete media diet, Wonkette editor Ana Marie Cox tells Paula Zahn. Things like CNN, the Washington Post, the New York Times, that's your roughage. That's your green vegetables. That's, like, what's good for you. And then there's what I do, which is like dessert. It's not always good for you. It's not very filling, but it's tasty. It's fun. It's, you know, empty calories.
• Nude Media Dragon chats with Seymour Hersh, Howard Finberg, Glenn Reynolds and others [I never thought I'd be one of these jerks who looked at Amazon, says columnist and Bushworld author Maureen Dowd Dowd takes 'Liberties' with a dose of irreverence]
• · Shrillness of political debate concerns NYT chief Sulzberger As some news organizations "enjoy their positions as actors in the theater of the absurd, people either become disengaged or they vent their frustrations themselves
• · · Tim Porter: Arrogance, Mafia and Journalism In Nazi Germany (before the concentration camps became death camps) “undesirables” were “placed in protective custody” or “resettled”. In Australia “illegals” are held in “Immigration Reception and Processing Centres” behind “energised fences”, receiving regular “security checks” and occasional “extractions”. Their “inappropriate behaviours” are not allowed to “manipulate public policy”.
• · · · Thanks to a furious row that broke out over claims in a new book by BBC broadcaster James Naughtie that US Secretary of State Colin Powell described neo-conservatives in the Bush administration as '****** crazies' during the build-up to war in Iraq bohemian poem gets Google crazy; Crazish Entrepreneural People Finder
• · · · · Michael Kinsley: Journos shouldn't have to be political, ideological eunuchs It's a fiction to suppose that reporters don't have political views, and it would be healthier and more honest if they simply said what they were
• · · · · · Spyware and Adware Present Challenges and E-Commerce Opportunities Barbarians at the Digital Gate

Posted 1:23 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Sadly, a byelection will be held at the state level in the Dubbo electorate. The local paper pays a hearty tribute to a man who had a soft spot for Chinese culture an Independent MP, Tony McGrane

Elections: Rubber can be mightier than the pencil: Pen Is, in fact, Mighty!
A concern that has been regularly raised by political parties, members, Senators and candidates is the level of mail returned unclaimed from mailings to electors.
Significant levels of returned mail from mailings, if generated from the most recent AEC-provided enrolment data, is rightly of concern. Alleged levels of mail returned unclaimed from mailings to electors prior to the election have also been subject to some public comment as indicative of gross inaccuracies in the roll used for the election or of possible attempts to place significant numbers of fraudulently enrolled persons on the roll for particular target Divisions.
One wonders what the percentage of unclaimed mail really is in 2004. I had a brief contractual affair with the AEC in mid 90s and I must admit I was impressed by the administration of the electoral roll.
It also seems that the vote early and often method would almost be impossible to implement in practice. In order to verify the integrity of the electoral roll, the AEC has a regular army who knock on doors (even on doors of houses of ill reputations - smile). I enjoyed the opportunity to observe the voting on the election day at the booths of the Wentworth electorate.
While the chances of anyone fiddling with the ballot papers were minimal, my instinct tells me that supplying booths with a pen rather than a pencil would be more rubber-proof. (Ach, that idea for many reasons does not go down too well). However, most professional locksmiths know that pen is mightier than the lock. To boot, who would know whether a cleaning contractor is active in any political party. The suggestion that real estate developers (or landlords of some kind) might be tempted to be involved in the mischevious opportunities is often dismissed. The seal on the electoral boxes are not that hard to replace. I somehow doubt that anyone less paranoid than a good old Eastern European would actually detect anything unusual even if the seal was not replaced....
Political Party Rubber might be be mightier than the electoral pencil or unclaimed mail

Eye on Politics & Law Lords: Street Fighting Men: Delving Into Democracy's Shadows
The sociologist Michael Mann took a detour from his epic study of power in human history. It led him straight to the horrors at the center of modern life.
In Fascists, Mr. Mann contends that the rise of right-wing authoritarian movements between the world wars can best be understood as, in effect, nation-statism forging not a cage but a concentration camp.
The culprit in genocide is not democracy, but a form of politics that uses words similar to [those employed by] democrats, but in a different semantic sense.
• The Grid and the Cage [Everywhere the S-word wreaks havoc. Iraqi terrorists kill hundreds of Americans and Iraqis to protest infringement of sovereignty by the Great Satan. Africans massacre other Africans because European-imposed "sovereign" borders clash with tribal allegiances. Violating 'Sovereignty': Questioning a Concept's Long Reign ]
• · Canterbury tales: Young Howard travelled to Kommunist Poland in sexy sixties where he had an interlude with a young Catholic woman in Warsaw Stubborn, methodical and always strategic, there would only ever be one career for John Howard ; [ Some of the juicier election snippets courtesy of Crikey]
• · · Sunday with Janka Wendt: Interview: Mark Latham ; [ Webdiary: Future shock: the ideology of Mark Latham ]
• · · · Sunday continues: Swinging voters: week 3
• · · · · Carr's history-making date with ICAC ; Czechoslovakian crystal chandeliers Mr Merritt, who has been seen behind the wheel of a Rolls-Royce bearing the number plates THANKU, formerly ran Merritt Madden printing in Alexandria before retiring to the high life of the Southern Highlands. That company is now managed by the wife of the NSW Premier, Bob Carr, who by all accounts prefers to be known as Helena
[Members were given back-of-the-envelope calculations Belmont Golf Club and the developer, Terrace Tower ]
• · · · · · The first is our history. Czechs have always been subjects of a larger multinational structure, be it the Roman, Habsburg, Nazi or communist empires. The fact that we have always been subjugated meant that we never learned the art of self-rule. Furthermore, when we did try to strike out on our own (as in 1938 and 1968), the world looked the other way and we paid a heavy price. That's why in 1989 we chose the easy way out. Instead of confronting the past, our dissidents drafted a compromise with the ruling communists, in which the latter merely transformed themselves into a capitalist mafia without relinquishing control. There was no true revolution, since freedom doesn't equal true democracy. This simple but ignored fact explains comments such as Nothing has really changed.
Czech Kommunism Revisited? In the wisecracking words of comedian Jay Leno, politics is just show business for ugly people: Gross’ Political Advertising and Gross' dubious sex appeal; [Gross’ Police in new scandal as anti-mob officer accused of gang links ]

Posted 1:17 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Egan creating constitutional crisis: The federation is at risk because of unfair cuts to state grants
The way Peter Costello was talking about the GST, it has been transformed from tax pariah to godsend

Invisible Hands & Markets: Young entrepreneurs not afraid of risk
If ever there were an archetypal successful young entrepreneur, make-up artist Napoleon Perdis would have to be it.
Passionate? Check. Lateral thinker? Check. Cowboy? Czech!
This week, Perdis made BRW's Young Rich List - a showcase of nearly 100 of Australia's self-made entrepreneurs aged 40 and under. But unlike many more established multimillionaires, Perdis, 34, did not amass his $20 million through property, media, mining or industry. Instead, he saw a gap in the market for women's cosmetics, waved goodbye to his parents' fish and chip shop and started selling Napoleon Perdis lipstick, mascara and eyeshadow.
• BHP Billiton did not start in somebody's garage At the end of the day I started with nothing, so if I end up with nothing it doesn't matter
• · Justice Hill v Greg Ward Not earth-shattering, but certainly rare, and worth reading Millionaire Factory vs the tax man
• · · Monkeys v Gorillas: Exec salaries: it's all about not looking cheap

Posted 1:14 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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If it were all so simple!
If only there were evil [bloggers] somewhere
insidiously commiting evil deeds,
and it were necessary only to seperate them
from the rest of us and destroy them.
But the line dividing good end evil
cuts through the heart of every human being.
And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
Alexander Solzhenitsyn [with poet’s permission bloggers inserted]
Another Alexander, John Alexander,

The Blog, The Press, The Media:
THE big loser from the election debate on Sunday night was the ABC, which was marginalised by managing director Russell Balding's curious decision to run the political set piece at 10pm.
. Predictably, no one was watching. It was boring enough the first time around on Nine. Diary understands Balding didn't want to run the debate at all, believing the restrictions imposed by the Government compromised the ABC's independence. He came up with the compromise at the 11th hour. ABC political correspondent Jim Middleton dutifully fronted the replay – minus the comment by Laurie Oakes that Nine was happy to be "the national broadcaster". Privately though, Middleton was livid about the delay, as were most of Aunty's journalists.
• Minus the comment by Laurie Oakes that Nine was happy to be the national broadcaster [ How do you know when the best part is over? Restoration Hardware opens in the neighborhood It’s hard to digest revolutionary change]
• · Hansard study of political blogging
• · · Small town California experiments with citizen journalism
• · · · See Also Do bloggers really rely more on other bloggers than old media?
• · · · · Blogs, Political
• · · · · · Search Engine Room Search Day

Posted 10:30 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Decided Deal or not Decided Deal ... Deeeeaaaal!
Ach, the Undecideds as well as Decided Ladies and Gentlemen, The Australian Electoral Commission proudly presents Candidates and Parties by state
While the ABC provides an alphabetical list of candidates
[Please note details for the Division of Gellibrand are not available at present due to an injunction in the Federal court]
The Greens are expected to win somewhere close to 6-7 per cent, but to fall short of victory because Labor and the Liberals/Nationals will not allocate them preferences. The Democrats' vote will plummet - so even if they do receive the preferences of the major parties they may not be able to hold John Cherry's seat This means Hanson, (One Nation Senator Len) Harris and the Nationals' Barnaby Joyce will be vying for the final position; Czech out the colourful politics of the most joked about town: Gympie (Ouch, Bundaberg is the joking leader)

Eye on Politics & Law Lords: An Exegesis of the Media Dragon
behold, a great red dragon.
Revelation 12:3
The media dragon is not the problem.
The dragon appeared over our City one day, like a medieval apparition. The photos and newsreels of the dragon’s initial devastation have been widely disseminated: two entire boroughs in ruins, balls of napalm flaming down, a jagged skyline of charred teeth, ashy outlines of human remains. What the photos cannot convey is the visceral terror, the sense of irrevocable rupture, a miasma of charred flesh like a greasy fog.
We believe the authorities have manipulated fear of the dragon into a climate of hysteria. The threat has been wildly exaggerated. In point of fact, it is still possible to stroll unmolested in many neighborhoods, free of the odor of cinders and without fear of imminent incineration. That the dragon has been relatively quiescent of late is evidence the authorities have vastly overstated the danger...
All of the authorities’ statements about the dragon are suspect. They say the dragon is evil, but we prefer to interpret the dragon through the reigning dialectic, which is more subtle and takes a long time. The dragon does not share our values, and is simply doing what dragons do.
• True, it is given to overwrought statements of its intent to lay waste the entire City, to cauterize our souls and winnow the money-lenders and initiate a millennium of fire; the dragon suffers from an acute lack of irony [A bottom-pinching Dragoness]
• · Bible-based Ballot Family First: Launched in South Australia two years ago, they already have an upper house member in that state; [Devout Catholic writer, Mike Steketee: Fretful candidates feeling a bit Green
• · · You toss true believers enough red meat, they start acting like predators How vulnerable are we to electoral rorting?
• · · · Kicking 'em While They're Down
• · · · · Vladimir Putin, the aspiring dictator of Russia, has forced President Bush to reveal how committed he really is to the cause of democracy around the world KGB agent at heart, Vladimir (Iljich) Putin is cynically using the horrific terrorist attack in Beslan as his excuse
• · · · · · Iraq war allies rebuff UN chief Key states who joined the US-led invasion of Iraq have rejected claims by the United Nations secretary general that the war was illegal

Posted 10:26 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Bookie, Mark Wormwood, of Centrebet, bets on Havel for peace prize
When we go into a library, we usually spend a few minutes in the children’s book section, looking for old favorites. There is some comfort in knowing that another generation is puzzling over the (rather tame) antics of Beany Malone. That the Boxcar Children haven’t aged. That Margaret is still talking to God. That on any aisle in any library, we can find a book that changed our little world (look under Laura Ingalls Wilder, and you will discover the summer we captained an expedition to build a cave to protect our gang from the wild tornadoes of California’s Central Coast…).
From Booksquare:

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: Judging Artistic Success by Commercial Failure
Building a 21st Century Library System for San Diego was one of ten goals Mayor Dick Murphy issued when he took office in January 2001. The Mayor's purpose was to create a city worthy of our affection by 2020. Libraries ranked right up there with strengthening police and fire protection, reducing traffic congestion, building affordable housing, establishing energy independence, cleaning up the pollution of the city's beaches and bays, and even building a new baseball stadium. The rare combination of a mayor giving the city library system as high a priority as other crucial city services, articulating a long-term vision for the development of that plan, seeking allies to support it, and sticking with it even when it became a campaign issue attracted the attention of LJ's editors.
• Politician of the Year 2004: Dick Murphy
• · The Billionaire Poet: Like Jozef Imrich, Felix Dennis is a socialist billionaire.... Now Dennis, 57, has decided to become a poet. If I were Poet Laureate, I would put a poem in every pair of pajamas, fortune cookie...; [V.S. Naipaul likes the idea of Vrbov: Home is, I suppose, just a child’s idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house; Youth, hope and silliness go together, in cities as in people Scary that I should grow ooold in such a young city as Sydney ]
• · · French for "already seen", déjà vu is "the sort of fleeting, intimate experience that reveals itself more readily to novelists than to researchers
• · · · ALA member libraries to receive copies of Oprah's Book Club pick: "The Good Earth" by Pearl S. Buck
She was definitely the sort of girl who puts her hand over a husband's eyes, as he is crawling in to breakfast with a morning head, and says: 'Guess who!'
P.G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters
• · · · · Monogamy something created and imposed by human beings as a way of managing the intersection of political and social affairs Myth of Monogamy: I've looked on many women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times
• · · · · · Political adultery at Tulip Cafe Czech premier Stanislav Gross endorses Scotty

Posted 1:05 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Political Sorrow
Sorrow comes in great waves—no one can know that better than you—but it rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us it leaves us on the spot, and we know that if it is strong we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain. It wears us, uses us, but we wear it and use it in return; and it is blind, whereas we after a manner see.
Henry James, letter to Grace Norton, July 28, 1883

It was the Slavic sorrow which created characters like Vaclav Havel. May sorrow show us the way on the web. So go directly to Ken Parish who compiled another list of Election Blogs ; Maiden, Hansard, study of Political Sorrows

Eye on Politics & Law Lords: Urban Magicians
Have you ever wondered what makes us cling so tenaciously to our beliefs - not just religious beliefs or belief in a political ideology but any little insignificant belief, such as belief in urban legends or the belief in the superiority of one brand over others of equal or better quality? We hold on to beliefs as if they were cherished possessions, like trinkets that have sentimental value but no practical use.
Seeing people climb on George Washington's nose and hang from the eyebrows of Teddy Roosevelt formed my eternal image of America, with all of its grandeur and illusion ...
• My American dream [Nowadays, in a choice historical irony, they are under assault from the cultural left Undercuting appeals to prejudice, hierarchy and custom ]
• · Vaclav Havel was always close to my political heart, @ Eastern Europe Literature we get even closer (smile) My Austrio-Australian Dream (Kafka, Klima, Kundera and mememedia dragon); The good, the bad and the ugly, in order!
• · · JIM DICKINS and LINDA SILMALIS Carr's unbeatable jackpot: NSW Government is earning hundreds of millions of dollars through the state's hotel gambling industry in property leases, taxes and even a direct percentage of the takings from poker machines (Elsewhere: Premier Bob Carr said his government would introduce legislation forcing politicians' staff members to reveal all their income sources.
• · · · MI6 A TEAM of undercover security guards are patrolling Sydney's railway network dressed as surfies, businessmen and office workers to target political troublemakers ...
• · · · · Political Blogging
• · · · · · Antony Loewenstein keeps Kounter-Spinning the Electoral Mews

Candidates, many, many, candidates, will be announced today by the Electoral Town Criers
Pauline Hanson has again an amazing timing (the nominations closed yesterday), the old urban myth has it that it was her Polish ex-hubby who first drove Pauline to enter Queensland political scene as a local councellor at Ipswitch. The young lore has it that Pauline was the last to be interviewed, but the best dressed during the Liberal Party pre-selection for the unwinnable seat of Ipswitch. The local rag ran a number of wild stories about her attitude towards the Aborigines and Pauline jumped before she was pushed to stand against the Liberal Party and win the seat as an independent. This week she will be standing against Senator Len and her former staffer David Oldfield (sic) current caretaker of her former One Nation party.
In the New South Wales upper house election in 2003, Pauline Hanson got 1.9 per cent of the primary vote. But a week is a perfectly long time in the Boland's sticky Queensland, (the land of do not blame mmmmwwaaa I did not vote for John - GST stickers) Pauline needs 14.3 per cent (primary votes or preferences) to get her cold revenge.

Division of Kalgoorlie - Extension of Nominations period
Following the death of a candidate in the Division of Kalgoorlie, the close of nominations date has been extended for that Division only by 24 hours to 12 noon local time Friday 17 September 2004. Nominations for the Division of Kalgoorlie will be declared at 12 noon local time Saturday 18 September 2004. (Section 156 (2) of the Commonwealth Electoral Act applies).

Posted 1:02 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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An ideal example of abandonment is the relationship between Linus and The Great Pumpkin. Every Halloween, Linus faithfully waits by a pumpkin patch, in the hopes that he will be blessed with the holy experience of a visitation by The Great Pumpkin. Of course, The Great Pumpkin never shows up, and He never answers Linus? letters. Despite this, Linus remains steadfast, even going door to door to spread the word of his absent deity. Does The Great Pumpkin exist? We can never know. But from an existential point of view, it doesn?t matter if he exists or not. The important thing is that Linus is abandoned and alone in his pumpkin patch.
Kafka and his Castle turn into Pumpkin

Invisible Hands & Markets: Mischievous Mitchell
While I'm on the topic of politically unthinkable policies, Alan Mitchell in today's Fin (subscription required) argues that we should raise the rate of GST and use the proceeds to abolish a bunch of inefficient distorting taxes. It's a sensible idea, but, given the way the GST was sold, it's politically out of the question. Still, it would be worth looking again at this in a decade or so, when all those associated with the original GST debate have left the political scene.
• All that would need to be done is change or delete the lines in the GST Act that "give" the power to raise the GST to the states
• · It is about to become harder to find butterfly cakes, chocolate eclairs and cream puffs in the city, with a cherished cake shop forced out of the Strand Arcade by rising rents
• · · ‘What’s in it for me?’ Today’s rich are not giving enough of their wealth to good causes--the ancients would have known why
• · · · Bernie Fraser robustly debating: Governments have become very risk-averse, and there is this prevailing notion around that only the private sector can do these things properly ...; [ Sale of Telstra has Labor, Greens up in arms]
• · · · · Contrary to his international reputation, Kafka was merely a reporter of Czech daily life Going for brouk ... Keeping a low profile is a Czech survival strategy. Harness interpersonal networks to succeed
• · · · · · Your job is pointless, inane: You can be replaced by the cretin sitting next to you. So work as little as possible

Posted 8:10 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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The Australian Greens tax and revenue policy
The Australian Greens say they aim to use taxation to achieve social equity and environmental sustainability.
The exact make-up of the next Federal Parliament could have a strong bearing on taxation

Eye on Politics & Media Bias: Media bias
Roy Morgan poll released today provides insightful results on people's perception of media bias.
86% BELIEVE NEWSPAPER JOURNALISTS ARE BIASED AS MEDIA HONESTY AND ETHICS RATINGS FALL
Australians are very critical of the media being often biased, with 86% of Australians saying Newspaper journalists are often biased, 75% of Australians said Talk-back radio announcers were often biased and 73% TV reporters and journalists, a special Morgan Poll finds.
Of Newspaper journalists, Andrew Bolt (3.5%) was most often mentioned by Australians as being often biased, followed by Piers Akerman (3%) and Miranda Devine (1.5%). Ray Martin (6%) and Kerry O'Brien (4.5%) were the most frequently mentioned TV reporters or journalists who were often biased, along with Laurie Oakes (2%) and Richard Carlton (1%).
Talk-back 'giants' John Laws and Alan Jones topped the list, mentioned by 28.5% (37% in NSW) and 26% (41.5% in NSW) of Australians respectively. The results also record a significant drop in trust for politicians. Only 9% believe that Federal MPs are trust-worthy.
A number of questions remain, however. Do people mind that their media commentators are biased if they're simply reinforcing existing prejudice? What exactly can be defined as objective journalism? And perhaps most importantly, how much election material interpreted by journalists is even vaguely believed by the reading public?
• Counter Spin (15 September 2004) [We all know that magicians trick us by distracting us -- shift our attention in one direction while they work their magic in the other. Is that the case in these American and Australian elections? ]
• · See Also Obsession with economic track record and bowls of spaghetti: Magicians at work
• · · School Policy from the Age and Young Bloggers Greg Hywood in today's Age. [Rob Corr; Ken Parish; Chris Sheil]
• · · · Literary Gem, Gianna Should we talk elections? Come to Mama and much more...
• · · · · Latham Cut the greed, Latham warns top executives: 66.6 per cent pay rise for Qantas directors
• · · · · · Liverpool Live: Tragic Comedy Land sale not linked to site approval: Gazal

Posted 8:09 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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The Blog, The Press, The Media: On Selling (What Else?) Books
Nicki Leone, manager of Bristol Books in Wilmington, North Carolina, was recently invited by author M.J. Rose (The Halo Effect, Mira) to be a "guest blogger" on Rose's Weblog. Leone's assignment: To "write about anything related to getting books read." Thanks to Nicki Leone and M.J. Rose for allowing BTW to share with our readers this lighthearted look at the extent to which a bookseller will go to sell a book.
• Oh, we booksellers are certainly defenders of free speech, but honey, that don't pay the light bill
• · But all fun aside, I think there are some important lessons for Big Media -- and for everyone else -- in the rise of the blogosphere. They stem from the fact that bloggers operate on the Internet, where arguments from authority are difficult since nobody knows whether you're a dog It's the difference between high-trust and low-trust environments
• · · Portals and KM Business Blog Links: Part Two - Jessica Baumgart
• · · · Bloggers have discredited CBS News Whoa! That's what Newsday says: Sept. 9, 2004, will be remembered as a paradigm-shifting day in media history...
• · · · · Pivia Launches First 'Distributed Workplace' Blog
• · · · · · Gurlie Bloggers Straight Talk About Blogs: Do You Really Need One?

Posted 7:40 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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An Australian logistics team has left for Iraq to assist efforts to secure the release of two Australian hostages

Yet another thoughtful counter spin and marginal sidewalk along the Bloggeauvard of Dementia
Also this request from Anton and Tim who are gathering questions we would like our leaders to answer. We'll get a collection of the best and send them off shortly. Please send me the questions you'd like answered by Latham and Howard. We can surely do better than the assembled media hacks on Sunday night.

Eye on Politics & Law Lords: MANY OPINION POLLS
A closer look at the Newspoll shows the Coalition's primary vote up one point to a very healthy 46 per cent, while the Greens have faded two points from last week's spike to record a more typical 6 per cent.
The following table provides recent results from three sources. On Saturday the Gold Coast Weekend Bulletin produced surveys of the outer Brisbane seat of Rankin, held by Labor front-bencher Craig Emerson, and the New South Wales north coast seat of Richmond, held by National Party minister Larry Anthony. The sample in each case was about 450. Then follows results from all five Tasmanian seats from the EMRS poll in Sunday's Launceston Examiner, which have less impressive samples of around 200. Lastly is a poll of the fairly safe Liberal Adelaide seat of Boothby which appears in today's Adelaide Advertiser.
• William Bowe Strictly polling [Strictly Newscasting: PLAYGIRL Announces Winners of Sexiest Newscaster Election ]
• · · · Poll Vault by Nadia: The classic 'litmus test' seat, Eden-Monaro has fallen to the party that has won government at every election since 1972 - that's 13 elections in total
• · · · Bloggers have discredited CBS News Whoa! That's what Newsday says: Sept. 9, 2004, will be remembered as a paradigm-shifting day in media history...
• · · · · Election Results Competitions [ At that stage, the Coalition were $1.28, with Labor at $3.25, but in recent months, not a lot has gone right for Labor. Add to that the woes of the Carr Govt in New South Wales (Labor), and all of a sudden there is a gap opening up again in the betting ]
• · · · · · Barista Film, Radion and Broadcasting Funding
• · · · · · · Southerly Buster Lessons from the Jakarta blast

Posted 7:39 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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So, ever so greatful to her viewers, Oprah Winfrey has once again shown some incredibly generous thanks .. she gave a Brand New Car! to everyone (all 276 people) in her studio audience on 13 September 2004 ... Did she learn nothing from the Very Special Episode of her show where Matthew Perry was killed while drunk driving?

Drinkers will know instantly what I mean by the phrase a regular. Although one may frequent the same bookstore, supermarket or shoeshine establishment--and although the staff at each may come to expect one's presence and even describe one as a regular customer--there is only one meaning that might be ascribed reliably to the simple phrase a regular. It is that the person so dubbed has a strongly preferred place to drink and that he props up a bar somewhere, or occupies a table, with such predictable frequency that his bartender or waitress rarely has need to ask what he will be pouring down his throat. The Simple Joys Of Being A Regular Media Dragon

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: Two More Tales of POD
POD (Samizdat) self-publishing remains irresistible for print journalists. Yesterday's NYT visited New Jersey bookstore Bookends' in-store operation, where they have printed 1,500 books on the premises for customers.
In the UK, The Telegraph looks at "do-it-yourself publishing [as] the new route to success for struggling authors." They cite Peter Murray, whose children's book Mokee Joe is Coming sold 12,000 copies and is now being republished by Hodder Children's (bought at auction).
• [It began with a prophecy at Paris' Saint-Sulpice church. An American visitor pressed a thick volume into the pastor's hands and said, "My father, this book is going to cause you many troubles Another sign the world is coming to an end: 'Da Vinci Code' Spawns Travel Fad]
• · Massimo Pigliucci Monty Python's guide to philosophy
• · · Now, if you’ll excuse me, there’s a bridge down the way that I need to go jump off of Maud and his Sympathetic Mood ; [Glass Half Full On the Chick-Lit listserv, a novelist posted a refreshingly positive definition of success ; Weep No More Writers ]
• · · · How-to for human behaviour...Always be hungry! Then you'll become like each other Their deepest drive is to bring together spring water and ripe cheese; decay and pink skin fresh from the bath
• · · · · What do we really know about Clinton’s dark places? Tell all autobiographies and thoughtlines rarely do that, especially when they’re politicians ; [Election 2004: Whitlam and Howard: Scarcely any other government has aroused a more agitated literary outburst than either of these two: the embers of Whitlam’s brief bushfire have been endlessly raked over both for the rapidity and range of its innovations and for the manner of its extinction; and, for all his determination to make Australians feel ‘relaxed and comfortable’ ]
• · · · · · I see water and the number seven: ,Ah, yes. But in fact, no police psychic has ever actually solved a crime

Posted 7:45 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Howard after the 66.6% debate said, Oh I'm glad the worm doesn't have a vote. Ach, Media Dragon is glad the webdiarists are casting over 400 solid observations not just on the election lottery, but also about the days after the elections. (smile)

Eye on Politics & Law Lords: Who Left the Wormish Door Open? The 'great' debate
In which John Howard and Mark Latham trade blows on terrorism, the economy health, education, truth in government and the PM's future plans. And in which Channel Nine's 'worm' awards victory to Latham by 66.6 per cent to 33.3 per cent, though many saw it as a tighter bout.
The 66.6-33.3 split is apparently the exact same score by which the 'worm' awarded Kim Beazley a win over Howard in 2001.
• Poll Vault searched high and low and concluded with a question ... Better the devil you know? [A View From Nadia Farha Matt Liddy ]
• · One Life to Live
• · · Robert Corr writes: Okay, I expected the "green hair = rigged audience" nonsense from Tim Blair's gaggle of goons, but not from Andrew Norton. As someone pointed out elsewhere, the number of elderly ladies in the audience far outweighed the one guy who dyed his hair. So even if you're going to make absurd generalisations about voting intentions, you'd have to conclude that the audience was stacked in Howard's favour
• · · · Antony of Counter Spin Fame introduces us to writers and bloggers using all his senses and that rare additional sixth sense.

Posted 7:44 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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As the US election approaches, what is the role for blogs? The first thing to do is to listen - this is a new chance to hear what people are really saying and thinking…in Denny's! It is strange that a pundit can suggest that the cutting edge of the exchange of ideas is occurring in a fast-food joint. Today's cultural establishment often promotes a watering down of ideas in the name of 'the people'. But the dumbing down of our discourse and culture by officials is a consequence of their own uncertainty about their ideas and mission. Jarvis sealed his point by announcing that he gave up his seat as a journalist at the convention so that an 'ordinary person' could be accredited

The Blog, The Press, The Media: Blogosphere Never Sleeps
Gary Price is a Web hero. He's a mild-mannered librarian who helps tame the Internet for the rest of us. In a 2003 column, I praised his ResourceShelf.com as "the best way I know of to keep abreast of useful of useful new online resources.
• Documents Galore ; [DocuTicker.com]
• · But aside from orders that contravene the laws of war, the Geneva Conventions or the US constitution, I don't think an officer or an enlisted man is allowed to disobey an order just because he comes up with some logic by which he decides the order doesn't really make sense. An order is an order, right? Blogs v. 60 Minutes (Forgery?) [Atrios; Wind Rider; Susanna Cornett; Jan Haugland;
Glenn Reynolds]
• · · The Serious News Blogger: now real reporters are writing blogs and providing original reporting. A great example is Campaign Extra, by Philadelphia Daily News senior writer Will Bunch
• · · · Do politicians and the media have a closer—and more corrupt—relationship than they used to? Politicians and the media: nothing new?
• · · · · (LA Times Registration Required) No Disputing It: Blogs Are Major Players ; [Bloggers hoping to become fabulously wealthy may have a long wait]
[http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/politics/la-na-blog12sep12,1,4850075,print.story?coll=la-news-politics-national]
• · · · · · Nothing short of revolutionary On how Wikipedia will make universities obsolete

Posted 7:40 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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At the Widening of a War
Everyone was frightened of the sky.
Each night, Mars emerged at the zenith.
A bleb of pure rage tore off the sun.
For days, the living and the dead
hung in the air like dust
whirled aloft from tired roads.
The fuselage of a lobster lay abandoned.
The Isles of the Blest were receding
to their sailing distances
and the gunfire of tourist shoes was stilled.
Sports stadiums and crowds loomed from another age.
The blow struck now
would be weaker than the blow withheld.
Les Murray via Southerly Buster
Margo Kingston Latham puts Iraq on the election table (with 113 comments and more flooding in) Ach, Victorian Barista serves one observation which will go down into the annals of the election history (wooden smile)

Eye on Politics & Law Lords: Bombers planned to kill minister
Indonesia's police chief has revealed that the same group that bombed the Australian embassy planned to assassinate President Megawati Soekarnoputri and Australian dignitaries three days before Indonesia's first-round presidential election last July.
General Da'i Bachtiar said the group intended to kill Australian Justice Minister Chris Ellison, Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty and other foreign guests.
• Matthew Moore Bali bomber Ali Imron: What we have to do now is to determine how and when
• · David Burchell, there are two kinds of pragmatism: House to House Fighting through the Institutions
• · · To achieve political goals, you control people's actions. And in the process, you not only fail to achieve your goals, but you make the people worse off than they were before. The Sims as Political Metaphor ; [Don Arthur: Gary the Rat: As animated comedy it's a bit stale but as allegory it's as irresistible as hot melted cheese ]
• · · · Christoph Reuter My Life is a Weapon Suicide Bombers: Weapons of Mass Terror ; [One of the salutary lessons of the Cold War was that ordinary people coped with the threat of global nuclear annihilation by getting on with their lives: There may be a lesson in that for us A huge explosion reportedly rocked North Korea's Ryanggang province on Friday, triggering a mushroom-shaped cloud near the country's secret underground military base]
• · · · · Jonah Goldberg What's wrong with you people?

Posted 11:28 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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This is just impossible to believe. Labor's bid for the key marginal seat of Kalgoorlie were dealt a major blow today when its candidate died from a heart attack. Labor's candidate for Kalgoorlie, Kevin Richards, has died of a heart attack at the age of 65

Posted 10:47 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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The worm returns
To whom do we tell what happened on the
Earth, for whom do we place everywhere huge
Mirrors in the hope that they will be filled up
And will stay so?
This is, charmingly enough, from Czeslaw Milosz's poem Annalena

Kafka’s creature opens whole new can of worms, an animated illustration of audience reaction to both leaders' statements during the hour-long debate, gave the contest to Mr Latham with 67 per cent to Mr Howard's 33.Latham wins battle of the worm

Eye on Politics & Law Lords: Terrorists target Australia
Outside the bomb-damaged Australian embassy in Jakarta, mourners left bouquets of flowers for the victims of Thursday's terrorist attack. One bouquet read: Today Indonesia is crying, another said: Curse the terrorists. And it was with a mixture of sadness and anger that Indonesians reacted to the bombing of the embassy, which killed at least nine locals and injured at least 180 others. Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, who made a quick visit to Jakarta to survey the scene, said it was a miracle no one in the embassy was killed in the blast. Jemaah Islamiah, the Asian terror group with links to al-Qaeda, claimed responsibility on an Islamic Internet site, saying the bomb was designed to punish Australia for supporting the war in Iraq. JI has also been blamed for the 2002 Bali bombings which killed 202 people, including 88 Australians, and the Marriott Hotel bombing last year in Jakarta, only a few blocks from the embassy, which killed 12 people. The timing was crucial, with the bombing coming a month before the Australian election, 11 days before the final round of Indonesia's presidential election, and two days before the third anniversary of the September 11 attacks.
• Curse the terrorists Today Indonesia is crying [link first seen at ]
• · Sunday with Janka Wendt Swinging voters: week 2
• · · Campbell Reid the armchair warrior with the Daily Terror Declared WW3 and bodly predicting a win for the good guys; [The Hack, Iain Lygo ]
• · · · An urban myth that when Whitlam was told by a taxi driver that Kennedy had been shot, he responded by speculating on who might now host "In Melbourne Tonight") Boilermaker Bill's Jakarta jottings
• · · · · A vote for the Greens is double-value Blogging Revolution 2004 AD ; It’s foolish to fight people who want death; that’s what they are looking for Inner-city poster battle ; [ Minister Craig Knowles's top aide, Sarah Taylor, a former Westfield executive, to face inquiry]
• · · · · · Christopher Hitchens writes about Czeslaw Milosz's politics for Slate When my book appeared in 1953, it displeased practically everybody. The admirers of Soviet Communism found it insulting, while anti-Communists accused it of lacking a clear-cut political stance and suspected that its author was a Marxist at heart

Posted 10:45 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Starbuck: Music: the caffeine of love

Invisible Hands & Markets: Hard Labor Day, Hard Cross to Bear
Labor Day comes and goes - but Congress does little to improve the plight of workers in our country. In the last three decades our elected officials have too often chosen to side with big corporations rather than the working people in the United States.
• Working Harder, Working Longer, Getting Nowhere
• · Central Europe: Utopia or Reality? Already existing model for what the EU bureaucracy seeks to create today?
• · · Grotesque Inequality
• · · · KM as an intranet trend…
• · · · · Jobs for the Boys Moral superiority
• · · · · · Whistleblowers finger ticket collectors' scam State Rail ticket collectors stalked passengers, kept an illegal database of their personal details and rorted millions in overtime

Posted 3:53 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Truth or scare It's election time so it's on for young and more mature. Sydney Evening Herald, Nick Galvin, provides a political rainbow of websites he also delves into the dirt and decency

Pre-Election Economic and Fiscal Outlook. Human with the magic cislo (number) 55 consider yourselves lucky. You are reliable workers. You tend not to go out partying and clubbing till 2am Treasury upgrade fuels election war chest, Horse trading, More rebates and Offsets

Jakarta bombing story is unravelling and it breaks my heart. This little girl will have a deep effect on the election campaign. Well, she already has ... For four years, David Norman fought immigration authorities to enable his daughter and her Indonesian mother to live in Australia... Caught in the blast as they stood in a queue at the embassy's main gate, 27-year-old Maria Eva Kumalawati was among the nine people killed, while her daughter Elisabeth was shockingly injured

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Mark Morford: Who The Hell Is Undecided? And Why do so Many Election Polls leave you Angry and Stupefied and Drunk?
Polls are the genital warts of election year. They are the swarming gnats in your Jell-O salad, the dead escalator in your shopping mall, the sour milk in your coffee.
These polls are designed solely to mangle your head and confound your synapses and elate you and titillate you and then plunge you into instant despair and then yank you back out at the last second like some sort of "Fear Factor" death-plunge moronism.

Eye on Politics & Law Lords: Election campaign and party financing in Canada
Anthony M. Sayers and Lisa Young take a comparative look at political party funding in Canada and Australia. Among other things, they find that the lack of restrictions on contributions to Australian parties means that the large parties in particular do much better than their Canadian counterparts and limits the impact of public funding.
• [Democratic Audit of Australia, Australian National University (PDF file) ] Web of Influence: Political Party Funding in Canada and Australia; [He who fears being conquered is sure of defeat - Napoleon: Woo the Swing Voters, Screw the Base: Lose the Election?]
• · Security law on the books Freedom of speech is central to our democracy. The Howard government has sought too much legal control over what people say
• · · Bill Moyers and his colleagues say it was not the system that failed on 9/11. It was our leaders who failed America Circle Of Accountability
• · · · Alan Ramsey Independent spirits have the right attitude; Bad Spirit: Staff depart as old row returns to haunt Turnbull
• · · · · Paul Rogat Loeb Shut Up and Color: The Politics of Bullying ; History lover, Bob Carr admits to ICAC of acting 'inappropriately’; The Nerve of Carr
• · · · · · Judd Legum and David Sirota gather the evidence of the administration's manipulation of fear Vote For Bush Or Die ... Cheney's bald remarks this week were just the latest in a long pattern of deception; The Brave Posturing of Armchair Warriors ... Terror Is No Answer for Chechen Terror by Bernard-Henri Lévy ; There is no war against terrorism. There can be no such thing against an enemy that remains dormant most of the time and is almost never visible It's simply another of life's inevitable troubles, and all we can do as we continue to combat it is repeat Cervantes's famous phrase "Paciencia y barajar": "Have patience, and keep shuffling the cards”

Posted 3:52 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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The Blog, The Press, The Media: Happy Birthday Google - Are you starting 1st Grade?
On September 7, 1998, Google Inc. opened its door in Menlo Park, California
According to Google lore, company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were not terribly fond of each other when they first met as Stanford University graduate students in computer science in 1995...
• Touched by an angel [Secrets of Google http://www.7427466391.com Puzzle Positions at Google ]
• · Election Systems & Software (ES&S), Diebold (Diabol mean devil in Slavic), and Sequoia The Sale of Electoral Politics
• · · Mark Cuban on blogging: I started the blog because I was tired of giving in-depth responses to a media question only to have the result be what the reporter or columnist intended to write and I was just fodder to help them make their point. With the blog, I can present my position on a topic in its entirety and not have to worry about how they condense a two-hour conversation into 500 words
• · · · Censored 2005: The Top 25 Censored Media Stories of 2003-2004
• · · · · Look at the magnifying lens through which the media has tried to find any tiny instance of violence on the part of those of us protesting the Bush agenda here in NYC this week Unlocking the Language Room of War
• · · · · · The controversial “worm” will make an appearance in the debate between Prime Minister John Howard and the Opposition leader Mark Latham But not until after the leaders finish

Posted 3:38 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Read, every day, something no one else is reading (e.i. Cold River - smile). Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity.
Christopher Morley, American Novelist, Journalist, Poet (1890-1957)

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: Russell Reich’s prophetic words
As long as self-publishing remains a viable and potentially lucrative alternative for many writers, I’m having a hard time hearing Gal Beckerman bemoan the standard failures of publishers and the publishing industry as a whole.
For writers who are already willing to take some responsibility for their book's design, marketing, and even editing, the additional work required for a self-published book (printing, fulfillment) is relatively benign as long as you believe in what you're doing and hire good people to help. When I co-authored, designed, and published my own book, I felt that no setback during the process ever rose above a level of minor inconvenience; I was simply having too much fun to let printer glitches or a few bumpy legal negotiations bother me much.
• One greatly needs beauty when death is so close - Maurice Maeterlinck
Even when it comes to inexact sciences -- Ms Universe competitions, federal elections -- creating odds for your book on Amazon is deadlier than most Samizdat - Self Publishing [First-Time Nonfiction Author A Learns That Getting Published Is Not Necessarily the Hard Part; Not materialistic enough. That is the problem with the young today. Less and less they want stuff, more and more they want experiences]
• · A secret Paris cavern, the real underground cinema At a loss to know who built or used one of Paris's most intriguing recent discoveries
• · · Alcohol makes us happy for no reason. But wine – ah, it gives us a reason to let alcohol make us happy without one Trouble with political art and ghost circle; [Kerry Chikarovski's autobiography, Chika, will be disappointed to hear that there is absolutely no sex in the book, just plenty of politics. Chika co-author Luis Garcia assured our spy at the launch that he had asked Kerry if there was anything she needed to confess, and had been assured that there wasn't. "She's a good Catholic girl," said the Cuban missile Chik lit is no bodice-ripper] (Bob Carr would push a copy of his speech under your door, with a plaintive note saying 'Alan, can you give me five minutes on this tomorrow?')
• · · · The sacrifices needed to keep up honesty are simply too great. And thus I am afraid we can expect, in the future, from our artists only those kinds of extravagant behaviour that we know to expect, and we can safely enjoy the shocks and surprises that do not really shock and surprise, while we can note with satisfaction that the dangerous Other has been domesticated, that their unseemly clothes are just another kind of uniform, but deep down the artists are just like ourselves, no freer. Liberty is a mirror, and when we cannot bear to look at it, we smash it in order to pick up little splinters of freedoms-for. Artists are still important to uphold and to interpret notions of "freedom"
• · · · · It is there that he was bitten by the library bug How I Fell In Love With a Librarian and Lived To Tell About It [ How The Internet Saved Bookstores It wasn't too long ago that many were predicting that the internet would kill bookstores]
• · · · · · Moving Kabala into the mainstream without much dumbing down ... The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus

Posted 8:04 AM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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As usual, Google provides the most comprehensive coverage from every corner of the world Embassy Bombing - 1,076 related articles

Eye on Day 11 | Less Than a Month (29 Days) to go: Girl critical after bombing
A five-year-old Australian girl was critically injured and her Indonesian mother killed in the bomb blast outside the Australian embassy in Jakarta.
The girl is now in a Jakarta hospital and her father is on his way from Australia to Indonesia.
The girl and her mother were near the gates of the embassy when the bomb went off yesterday morning.
• We Are Beyond Angry: [Citizen of Jakarta We Want To Kill Those Who Did This ....]
• · Do Something: Jakarta: root causes via Completely Biased.
• · · Hack Watch: Embassy Bombing
• · · · Tim Blair Latest on Jakaarta
• · · · · Tim Dunlop Bipartisanship To Tackling The Next Explosions
• · · · · · Terrorists behind fatal bomb blast
• · · · · · · Exclusive Webdiary Blogjam - Election Fortnight by the esteem Governor General

Posted 11:19 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Jakarta attack could influence Australia elections ... Both Prime Minister John Howard and Federal Opposition Leader Mark Latham have cancelled their planned campaign events tomorrow because of the bombing Security fears overtake Australia poll after blast

Eye on 30 Days Among the Forgotten People: How democratic are our elections?
How important are our democratic beliefs to the way we run federal elections, asks Marian Sawer. Principles generally accepted as basic to democracy are those of political equality and popular control of government. Flowing from the principle of political equality is the principle that political parties or independents supported by citizens should be able to compete on a level playing field. This means that political parties’ access to finance and broadcasting time should relate to electoral support rather than business backing or the benefits of being in office
• Australian Review of Public Affairs; [Neoconservatism and Espionage]
• · For the next 30 days, John Howard and Mark Latham and their colleagues are going to be desperate men and women They'll do whatever it takes, however ironic
• · · Papa McGuiness Paddy's Mediapack Watch
• · · · Amerika Campaign Radar 2004 ; [U.S. Presidential Election 2004 ]
• · · · · Politicians' new tack - insult, woo, insult ... Electors in NSW could be forgiven for thinking politicians have stumbled on a radical new campaign strategy: show the public a little contempt and they will vote for you..
Or maybe not. The Premier, Bob Carr, was forced to apologise yesterday after dismissing protesters outside a state cabinet meeting in Wollongong ; [Election Watch ]
• · · · · · The ABC Election flash map

Posted 10:39 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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At least eleven people have been killed and up to 160 are wounded after an apparent terrorist attack on the Australian embassy in Jakarta. Blast puts terror at centre of election campaign
Daily Flute gives pointer to two sentences and let people draw the link We are in a war against terror We must protect our borders


The Blog, The Press, The Media: Party's on in the engine rooms
If winning an election is equal parts hard slog, stamina, policy strength, dirty tricks and sheer good luck, the Liberal Party is not prone to superstition on the last count.
Every morning and throughout the night, Coalition staffers heading to the Liberal Party campaign's headquarters in Melbourne ride the lift to the 13th floor of 101 Collins St, with its panoramic views of the central business district.
Prime Minister John Howard's tactics team is waging war for the hearts and minds of middle Australia from "the Paris end" of Collins Street, in a towering building of 57 floors that bills itself as the perfect place for the "captains of industry".
In contrast, the Labor Party's headquarters in Canberra is a boxy building that is the subject of a judicial inquiry following Coalition claims that the ALP-owned building has "fleeced" $36 million through long-term leases signed by the Hawke-Keating government.
• Captain Spinners [Ageless Age: Reporters will face a record low level of direct access to politicians in the lead-up to the election, reports ]
• · BBC with Reaction: Jakarta bombing: Is this the attack on the Australian election or the Indonesian one?
• · · Webdiary flooded with more than 130 comments and the dam has not burst yet: Argggh! So many people want to comment on Sue Bradford's letter I'm spending all day editing and publishing you!
• · · · Are You All Sitting Down?! In a united show of strength defying pharmaceutical giants, medical journals are planning to publish all drug research, including negative results
• · · · · John Quiggin The Greens are replacing Labor as the conservatives’ bete noire Australian Policy On Line A Must Visit: APO
• · · · · · Julianne Schultz describes the way an addiction to celebrity – fame’s rich second cousin – has distorted public life, unhinged trust in institutions and corroded confidence. Who can you trust? What can you believe? The media has become so captivated by the routines of celebrity that the reporting of public affairs has been undermined and there is a need for a reexamination of the limits of journalism and the accountability of the media

Posted 11:27 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Labor has unveiled its $11.2 billion tax policy. The package will `ease the squeeze` on families, according to Labor Leader Mark Latham, and includes an overhaul of family payments, a form of income splitting to reduce the overall tax paid by working families, higher cigarette taxes and an $8 a week tax cut for low income earners. The package has prompted a wide range of reaction from all quarters...
Tinkering with a clapped-out tax system
Australian Financial Review, 07/09/2004, Peter Ruehl
An opinion piece in which Peter Ruehl says that so many claims have been made in the Federal election campaign thus far, that `the whole thing is starting to sound like a coke-out Sydney real-estate auction`.
Latham reverts to crazy...
Age, 08/09/2004, Ms Grattan says Mark Latham has resorted to `crazy brave` to sell the package.
Latham wheels his ladder out:..
Age, 08/09/2004, Front Pager, Michael Gordon says Mr Latham has delivered on his promise to bring tax relief but has `failed his first big test as a salesman.`
Czech Out the comprehensive responses at Poll Vault....

The question now is whether the Government will gazump Labor on tax as it did on Medicare

Eye on 31 Days Ahead: Who's Going to Win on Oct 9?
Sleepless in Sydney, Antony is doing all the hard labour for us all. He invades just about every corner of the electoral world Down Under; Up Over. It is rare that a Mexican gives a generous plug to opinions online or otherwise to northerners. To boot, Graham Young, a brillioant man, especially after a glass of wine. (smile)
• Counting the Spin ; [Spread the Word: Interactive Webdiary
• · Tasmanian Devil, Bob Brown, the Man of The Saintish Team at the Hung Parliament: The Green Revolution of 2004 AD
• · · Young Ambit Gambit
• · · · Dave Madden Imagining Australia: Ideas for our Future ; [Four ambitious Aussies have dared to dream]
• · · · · Online Opinion Political Aggregator

Posted 7:45 PM by Jozef Imrich, Esq.

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Tax In Their Sights: Stranger Than Facts
Australia is a very fortunate country as it is peppered with solid scholars who put pen to paper without fear or favour. During my days of Deakin University I came across a number of lectures and professors who were walking political encyclopaedias and were not afraid to disagree with any party spin doctor or even a politician no matter how much their words might decrease their university funding.
First time I was exposed to tax issues when I read an article by Dr Neil Warren five years ago. In a way, his research wetted my appetite for issues other than strictly legislative. Although I am a failure, I somehow managed to complete four courses at the University of NSW as part of the Australian Taxation Studies Program. Dr Neil Warren is part of the academic tapestry at the University. Like Dr Cope, who writes so well about the myths and realities of Parliament, Dr Warren chooses his ideas and words with great care so any reader can follow his thoughts.
I recommend Dr Warren's latest observations about the myths and realities of tax regimes. Australian CPA June 2004 edition p 37 (all libraries can magically provide it via an interlibrary loan) features a story entitled The Tax Files: debunking the furphies. It starts ever so imaginatively:
You can almost smell the coming election - tax is in the air and facts are going out of the window. With an assult on our intelligence around the corner, tax big cheese Neil Warren straightens out fact from fiction
We need more movie scripts like this on subjects that are not so appealing to the public. How cool is this?
In the heat of a full-on tax debate, fiction often holds sway over fact. Just why this is the case is not dificcult to understand. After all, tax impacts directly on the hip pocket nerve and with so much at stake, it is in the interest of each taxpayer to argue their case strongly and persuasively, even if it appears to have its foundation in fiction. For government, the issue is how to respond. Should it counter fiction with the fact?
...
Tax fiction can arise from many sources. A constructive tax reform debate can only be had if the proptagonists avail themselves to the facts with the fiction stripped away. It was just this goal that the Australian Tax Reform Foundation (ATRF) sought to achieve through the publication of Tax Facts: Fiction and Reform at ATRF