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Partisan Hacks: Few chances left to restore public service integrity
We no longer have a public service prepared to force the government to take decisions with the facts before them. We no longer have a government or a public service we can trust
· Intelligence chiefs second guessing what the government wanted to hear [ courtesy of Webdiary]
· See Also Nothing short of disgraceful was how the lawyer appointed by the army to investigate the serious grievances of Lieutenant-Colonel Lance Collins described the defence establishment's treatment of the senior intelligence officer in his damning report
· See Also TIFI Ministerial Advisers: retired public servant Hugh Hodges
· See Also Is it any wonder the Iraqis are resisting?
· See Also Spy agencies need a shake-up from top down
· See Also No trust: Telstra chief quits

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When will we learn that we're not going to end the mess in Parliament by getting bad guys? There are always new bad guys to take their place...

SOON TO BE AXED? ICAC INVESTIGATES
It began with prison officer Shayne Hughes giving a favoured inmate spare food, and it ended with an agreement to commit armed robbery
· Peek in prison officer's undies finds drugs and toys for boys [link first seen at www.smh.com.au/]
· See Also State failed disabled children, report finds
· See Also Runaway prisoner hijacks car

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...the whole problem: to have within oneself the inseparable reality and the physical clarity of a feeling, to have it to such a degree that it is impossible for it not to be expressed, to have a wealth of words, of acquired turns of phrase capable of joining the dance, coming into play; and the moment the soul is preparing to organize its wealth, its discoveries, this revelation, at that unconscious moment when the thing is on the point of coming forth, a superior and evil will attacks the soul like a poison, attacks the mass consisting of word and image, attacks the mass of feeling, and leaves me panting as if at the very door of life.
Wagner/Artaud, from Samuel Delany’s Longer Views

See Me, Blog ME We are rich dealers, and our drug is information
Turned on by online opinion sites? Then get ready for Web video journals
Boston-based music-video producer Steve Garfield, 46, is no ordinary blogger. Instead of simply posting his thoughts online in a chatty weblog like millions of others around the world, he links a Canon GL2 digital video camera to his laptop and uploads short clips of protest rallies, traffic short-cuts and even news events onto his personal Internet site.
· Lets get the Vlogs Out, changing things for the better through information [link first seen at MEdia Dragon is going to be famous: Google Says It Doesn't Plan to Change Search Results]
· Commissioner Gorelick is not the right person to probe intelligence lapses
· Athens 2004 Olympic Games (The official website) [Link Poached from In a parallel universe called 'what if:' Reading Poetry Is Risky Move]
· See Also It's a fine thing to act tough with other people's blood or be generous with other people health

Pun 4 Phun: According to Caterina SusSex
1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
MEdia Dragon just finished reading for the second time story by Matt Frei Italy: Unfinished Revolution. And the fifth sentence on the 23rd page is: Businessmen thus found themselves in unenviable position of having to pay bribes not only to the relevant authorities in the country where the project was being funded but also to the political party at home that funded it.
· Italy's secret life laid bare [ via Memery]

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At a time when the words grub and charlatan seem to be synonymous for politician Nelson Mandela, like Vaclav Havel, stands as a reminder that being political can be both honourable and ennobling. Twenty-eight years in prison. Strength and quiet determination in the face of oppression and humiliation. He is a colossus of courage and integrity in an age of political pygmies... The beauty and power of the speeches lie in the unmatched moral authority with which he speaks, rather than memorable aphorisms and sharp one liners...
Bruce Elder SMH 9 to 11 April 2004 reviewing HIS OWN WORDS by Nelson Mandela

Take a Deep Breath: Just follow the kold blood or smart money
As the old summary of Leftist thought says: I love humanity. It's just people I can't stand...or I love democracy. I just cannot stand the totally stupid questions totally stupid people keep asking...
In the era of glasnost and perestroika, Nader accepted an invitation from Gorbachev to energise the Soviet consumer. And the US crusader took Jones to Moscow with him. Gorbachev’s theory? That without a culture of consumer complaint – as refined and intensified by Nader and his "raiders" – you’d never get Soviet enterprises off their fat arses.
· Living in a Washington boarding house and using the payphone in the hall, he took on many a global Goliath and, again and again, beat them hands down
· See Also For Ralph Nader, but Not for President
· See Also Russia: A Normal Country
· See Also Questions To Answer On Iraq...

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Wooing The Dragon: Dazzling fortunes ... dismal failures ...
Are Australians hitching a ride on China's economic juggernaut? Dazzling fortunes ... dismal failures ... the highs and lows of doing business with the world’s emerging economic superpower, China. Australian businesspeople are flocking to China in search of the big deal.
· Lost in Translation [ courtesy of 4pCorners ]
· See Also Unasked questions: Special exemptions for Saudis to fly around in otherwise locked-down U.S. airspace on 9/13/01, and then out of the country
· See Also Bring 'Em On? Mission Accomplished?: Terrorist chemical threat 'worse than suspected' [Link Poached from BBC Theft sparks Australia bomb alert ]
· See Also Australia hands out 3850 botched passports, including at least 500 with incorrect signatures or photographs

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As for Mr Debnam's claim that he and Premier Bob Carr had been establishing a secret police state, Mr Watkins was equally dismissive. We don't have a secret police state, he said, we have a smart one. That is why Mr Debnam doesn't fit. As I have said if he doesn't like my answers, he should ask better questions.
(Sun Herald by John Kidman 11 April 2004 p 30)

Smart Sausage Making on All Sides
This is the United States in the 21st century where the power brokers have gone mad. They've deluded themselves into thinking they're royalty, not public servants charged with protecting the rights and interests of the people. Both recordings were erased. Only then was the reporters' property returned. When agents acting on behalf of a Supreme Court justice can just snatch and destroy information collected by reporters, we haven't just thumbed our nose at the Constitution, we've taken a very dangerous step in a very ugly direction.
· See Also Scalia forgets the public is his boss: The depot at the end of that dark road is totalitarianism [ courtesy of Philosophical Powers: Perfect... ]
· See Also Nothing that happens behind closed doors is genuinely in response to a populist concern. Otherwise, it wouldn't be necessary to go behind closed doors...
· See Also Blair pleads to disaffected as membership plummets
· See Also Commissioner Moroney agrees with the argument put by Federal Police Commissioner, Mick Keelty, one that's odds with the Government's own line – that Australia's involvement in the war in Iraq has made us more vulnerable to terrorism
· See Also As the police, high society and a prominent politician join the queue for answers, a murder charge looms
· See Also Mexican Antipodian Police planting evidence
· See Also A Mexican governor suspended an entire state police force to shake up the force after senior officers were accused of cutting deals with powerful drug traffickers
· See Also Complex Web of Ethnic Monopoly on Crime Still Tangled
· See Also Execution in Sydney

Tree of Truth: 'Why can't we show a tree telling lies?'
BULLDOZERS will move into The Domain this week to chop down all but one of the park's 150-year-old Moreton Bay figs.
"The Tree of Truth" will be spared due to its additional historical value.
In this case one individual tree has extra individual historic significance, it's been used as a tree for interviews for many years.
The state's politicians have been holding press conferences under the tree, directly behind Parliament House, for decades.
The tree gives them a friendlier outdoor backdrop for the evening TV news, with the convenience of being just outside their offices.
The most common phrase in the NSW parliament press gallery is: The minister, out the back under the tree, in five minutes.
· See Also Back under the tree:Future of ICAC for review by ex-judge: Out of the blue Yeadon [via Overseas: fight against corruption]

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A Private Fantasy: 'Why can't I show a woman telling lies?'
The true writer must write not what is merely acceptable, but what is true. What then is the truth about women? David Mamet has an unpopular answer...
· Can We Think About Women That Don’t Interest Us? [link first seen at A&L Daily]
· See Also We all use stereotypes all the time, whether we own up them or not
· See Also Wireless Blogging now, with photos: Blogs give the great unwashed a place to hang their laundry--dirty [ via Tool for moblogging Kablog ]
· See Also WEB WON'T TOPPLE TYRANNY: Dictatorship.com
· See Also Is technology torture covered under the Geneva Convention?
· See Also Both art and psychoanalysis provide meaning, healing, and hope in the face of loss and emotional trauma
· See Also Even though MEdia Dragon has dissappeared from blogroll @ Catallaxy, the Newish Design, & Fonts, seem rather Cool

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Meet the real Dr Strangelove
Had Edward Teller, the father of the H-bomb, trusted the Russians the cold war might have ended sooner...
· H Bomb
· See Also Terrorism is a feature of the post-cold-war landscape: international relations are no longer defined by the titanic confrontation between two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union

Laws, Sausage, and Multimedia
The adage goes, There are two things that no one really wants to see how they're made: laws and sausages. Any reporter who's ever covered the manglings and wranglings over legislative/regulatory language knows how difficult it can be to convey the implications of nuanced -- but crucial -- changes in wording to a general audience. So bravo to Jennifer Lee of the New York Times, and the Times' multimedia team, for adding a brilliant slide show to Lee's story: White House Downplayed the Risks of Mercury in Proposed Rules, Scientists Say.
· Furthermore, it has been hypothesized that there is an association between methylmercury exposure and increased risk of coronary disease...
· See Also In 1950 only 86 cities in the world had a population over one million. Today there are 400, and by 2015, there will be more than 550. No one knows if that kind of growth will be biologically or politically sustainable

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That's what happens to exiles; they are scattered to the four winds and then find it extremely difficult to get back together again.
Isabel Allende

My Surreal Vienna: Do I dare to disturb real pages in BERLIN, NY, AMSTERDAM?
On July 7, 1980, I became the enemy of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and was sentenced to life imprisonment. On July 8, a part of my parents died. On Radio Free Europe they listened to my obituary, five years after their daughter Aga had died. It turned their world inside out. My parents believed I was dead for over forty hours. They were the longest hours in my Mamka's life. When my cousin Tibo eventually informed them, that according to the latest reports on Radio Free Europe, I was alive, Mamka just cried.
On July 8, I stood before the mirror as if I were another person from the one I had been the previous morning. I experienced a rude awakening from the outside world, a dark liquid world.
· Real and surreal: Any survivor has more to say than all the historians combined about what happened [ via Szirine]
· See Also Beyond Cold (War) River [ courtesy of Amazon ]
· See Also How to write a blog-buster
· See Also In Amerika

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Peace on Earth and goodwill to all men (and women). Meanwhile most people simply don't have the patience to wade through 3 hours of testimony put to paper. One newish right wing blogger gathered the most salient quotations from Condi Rice's testimony for you to peruse: What should have made Condi hysterical, she deemed historical...???

Higher Beings: Rankings of the 29 most influential sites in the blogosphere
In the past, I have ranked blogs based on their Alexa(ndra) mortal ranking system. However, Alexa isn't a perfect tool and it also is unable to evaluate certain types of websites, which makes it less than ideal way of establishing a blogger pecking order.
· Therein lies another exquisite irony: When you're blogging, it's important to be reminded that you don't have all the answers [link first seen at Right Wing News] [Links Poached from Alexa ; Technorati; Daypop; Blogstreet; Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem ; Google ; Amazon ]

Amerikan Factczech.com and Antipodian Webdiary attract a legion of fans and perhaps a larger legion of enemies. They are one of those love-it-or-hate-it diaries. Plenty of pollies would like to see them silenced...
· See Also What To Do When Your Friends E-mail Lies To You: FactCzech & smell a rat
· War Websites: Webdiary
· See Also Now 44, Steven Patrick Morrissey: Life's full of tricky snakes and ladders. I decided earlier that I would revolve through the 40th door somewhere else other than England
· See Also All those long, difficult nights of pondering your place in this world are a thing of the past
· See Also Web Designs
· See Also People Search: Famous People [link with dubious results ASK Jeeves: But don’t get him wrong; there is a dragon the bloggers like to laugh at most (smile)]
· See Also Ironically, the gossip columnist got fired for gossiping
· See Also How to Annoy Anyone

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Artmakers typically assemble funding from a variety of sources, creating a money tree which, like a delicate house of cards, can collapse if one of the key components is missing...

Grave New World
A lot of people are funny: they think there’s more money in science than in art, and they are right. It’s absolutely true. The catch is that what drives us is not our rational brain but our whole human arsenal of emotions and thought. And our only way of understanding that is through the arts.
· Atwood: Art Explains/Inspires Science [link first seen at Boston Phoenix 04/01/04]

Mary Magdalene was a prostitute who gave up her life of sin to follow Jesus. That's been the view of the Catholic Church for most of the past 2000 years. But some people believe Mary Magdalene actually played a much more significant role in the life of Jesus, as his wife, the mother of his child and the most important of his disciples. They believe the truth was suppressed by church leaders. There is a theory the truth about Mary was kept alive by a secret society known as the Priory of Sion, whose members included some of the greatest artists and thinkers of Western civilisation, including Leonardo Da Vinci.
· The Da Vinci code: Believer or not, let's just read along

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Patriotism, said Dr. Johnson, is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
Getting Us Out: Does anyone remember 1968? It's time for a reprise

1) A senior Australian defense adviser claims she was fired after refusing to write briefing notes that would exaggerate the threat posed by Iraq's weapons program. One clear inference can be drawn from Condoleezza Rice's testimony— She has been a bad national security adviser ...

2) Sadly, this [Bush] Administration has failed to live up to basic standards of open and candid debate. They repeatedly invent 'facts' to support their preconceived agenda. This pattern has prevailed since President Bush's earliest days in office. He has now created the largest credibility gap since Richard Nixon. He has broken the basic bond of trust with the American people.

Thoughtful new studies are now available online: Auditing the independence of the auditor-general
Independence of the auditor-general is now accepted as one of the important elements of accountability in democratic parliamentary systems like Australia. How well does the independence of Australia’s auditors-general measure up though? In this paper Ken Coghill assesses each Australian jurisdiction, focusing particularly on the Commonwealth and the Australian Capital Territory.
· [ PDF Format ]Who Audits the Auditors?: Tony Harrises of this world [ courtesy of The Centre for Democratic Institutions, Australian National University ]
· See Also Who Judges the Judges: Judge admits lifting '57 ProJo article for '93 Lincoln piece [ via Romenesko ]
· See Also Ben Reilly: the relationship between parties, ethnicity and democracy. (Political engineering of parties and party systems)
· See Also [ PDF Format ] For and against a bill of rights (Peter Bailey, Justice Michael Kirby and Michael Zander)
· See Also Stephen Sherlock: 2004 Indonesian elections: how the system works and what the parties stand for
· See Also Mr Paul Tovua: Rescuing democracy in Solomon Islands

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Blood Diversity: Tracing the Deadly Path of the Ranking on Blogstreet: 1184 / 143768: AM I RICH YET? HOW ABOUT NOW?

One diversity for the price of two
An elite that is unwilling to make judgements about why any one cultural practice is better than another, to set universal standards about what role individuals should be expected to play across society, and to promote a distinct set of values that a society should agree upon, finds a useful tool in multiculturalism. This is why it has been so well-suited to Western societies in the past few decades, increasingly disorientated by the erosion of cultural and political certainties. Clearly, the official promotion of multicultural policy has not provided any solution to this disorientation - indeed, by actively encouraging expressions of difference and divisions between communities, it may well have fuelled the process of fragmentation
· Facing up to the M-word: Spike 1 [ courtesy of Spiked 2]

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As with Hitler in Mein Kampf, you have to believe that these people will actually do what they say they will do...

Tears in Iraq
There's no preparation. Hundreds of thousands of people seem to just step out on the highway. They are Shiites, walking from Baghdad to Karbala - 100 kilometres. Streaming towards the holy city, they'll converge with others from all corners of Iraq.
· Saddam Hussein murdered tens of thousands for daring to practise this holy rite [ via special collection at the Sydney Morning Herald Iraq: Ghost of Scary Third World War]
· See Also Paul McGeough: the bravest Observer in the World
· See Also Nephew of Navajo Nation vice president killed in Iraq