Masters and Servants

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Strange, but this debate over Doonesbury and the coffin photos brings to mind something that "Sopranos" creator David Chase has said: That his goal is to make people squirm, to make them uncomfortable. I think that's part of the media's job--to make people uncomfortable, to make them squirm, to make them feel sick if necessary. I don't mean shock for its own sake, but the shock of uncomfortable and painful realities that force us to challenge our assumptions.
Jonathan Potts

Off the Record
I mean no disrespect to The Times, but what discriminating citizen can really afford to rely on only one source of news? And can't all discriminating readers contextualize what their newspapers (or television stations or radio hosts or Web logs) tell them?
· Paper of Record? No Way, No Reason, No Thanks
[Link Poached from http://www.timporter.com/firstdraft/ ]
· See Also Newspapers, especially, have a duty to show all aspects of a war, its ugly side as well as its public policy side
· See Also Critic: I know journos who want to write real press criticism

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The Parliamentary Retiring Allowances Act 1948
By outlining the basis upon which the Parliamentary Retiring Allowances Bill 1948 was introduced, the e-brief hopes to assist debate on proposed changes to the scheme in 2004.
· Briefing Paper from the Commonwealth Parliamentary Library [Link Poached from APO ]
· See Also Are Australian MPs in touch with constituents?
· See Also THE REPUBLIC: Debate should involve all of us from the start
· See Also Continuity in Representation Act of 2004, The US House of Representatives has approved a "doomsday bill" in the event that 100 or more members were killed
· See Also Meanwhile, in Rome. Politicians get punished because they have public lives.
· See Also British MPs get poison gas screen: History of Parliamentary Chambers
· See Also Controversy Over E-Voting Machines Escalates
· Mark D'Arney: Parliament's library

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Poverty is engulfing the people and unrest is rising... Whoever wins, the uprising will come.
Father Joe Dizon, 2004 (Neighbourhood priest of Philippines Phame)

Nobody Expects The Czech Inquisition! If China is Blind, Czech Memory is at Best Near-Sighted...
In China, President Klaus can act like a statesman from a country that remembers its communist past or like a pragmatic, silent technocrat.
Klaus cannot claim during his current visit, as he did before his 1994 trip as prime minister, that he does not know a single Chinese dissident. He now knows the stories of He Depu, Zheng Enchong, Tenzin Delek Rinpoche, Wang Wanxing and Yan Jun.
· 1,984 Reasons Orwell Was Only 20 Years Off: Choices in Beijing [Link Poached from Prague Post]
· See Also Mikhail Gorbachev: For A Global Glasnost...
· See Also A silent migration: Since the year 2000, between 234,000 and 350,000 Ecuadorians have set sail for Guatamala in illegal embarcations
· See Also THE SECOND round of Slovakia's presidential elections brought defeat to Meciar who was boxed out by his estranged ally, Ivan Gasparovic [Link Poached from Slovak Spectator]
· See Also Who is Gasparovic? Another lesser evil?
· See Also Eastern European Memories of Easter: Willow and water treats [Hockey Memories: 7 Months exactly after the Invasion You have tanks. We have goals! Cold as ice: The triumph in 1969 [Memories Poached from This is My P1S1: Tucked away in the folds of the ancient mountains that embrace the Kezmarok and Poprad valleys lay a royal town called Vrbov (a place with dual meanings: ‘willow’ and ‘boiling water’)]
· See Also Both the Old and New Testaments tell us that fathers who sacrifice their sons are good and sons who allow themselves to be sacrificed on the orders of their fathers become our saviors
· See Also Oprah of Poprad: Whirlpool brings new work culture and jobs to Slovakian town`
· See Also MEl Forgives Us for His Sins: You try to perform an act of love even for those who persecute you, and I think that's the message of the film

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A crimson thread links Marcel Caux to Linda Baulch. It's a thread that hangs heavily with fame and with folly, with bright hopes and sorrowful endings. It's part of Australia's collective sentiment, deep in the heart's core. It's called Anzac...

ANZAC Memories
GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
· Away in far Gallipolli: As Ferguson points out to describe one of the great military disasters as 'dirty' is an absurd reduction [ via Barista ]
[ courtesy of Google: Tears for war tales; Societies reaffirm their collective sentiments from time to time, and Australians reaffirm theirs every Anzac Day]
· See Also Full Coverage: ANZAC
· See Also A top-secret Anzac Day visit: It's a small risk I take . . . Mr Howard with Australian troops during the Anzac Day dawn service at Baghdad
· See Also Pat Tillman, K.I.A. U.S. Army Ranger and Ex-NFL Player Pat Tillman Killed in Afghanistan
· See Also Are we feeling comfortable yet? Through the Wire: Their torment is carried out by our Government, in our names

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The man who tells you that there is no such thing as truth, or that truth is relative, is asking you not to believe him. So don't...
Roger Scruton

People have eyes: On whistleblowing and why it's so hard to do
The reprisals for being a dissenter are extremely serious in many cases, which is why you often get either the young or the old being rebels. Less to lose. The balance in society is way too skewed towards conformity. Dissent is becoming more important, but it's also more difficult to take on powerful corporations. And if you're on the inside of the corporation, it's easy to be targeted vehemently.
For speaking out, and bringing the wrongdoing to the attention of their superiors, employers, or an external agency with, at least on paper, the power to investigate and do something to remedy the situation, the employee, far from receiving praise for their honesty or rectitude, often receives the kinds of persecutions metéd out to Franz Kafka’s Joseph K in The Trial or Winston Smith in George Orwell’s 1984. In other words, it seems far more important to conform, stay silent, go along to get along, exist only for the advancement of your superior’s career, keep your mouth shut, don’t cause trouble, etc. and similar, because if you don’t, this is what will happen to you.
· Taxing World of Whistleblowers [ courtesy of Webdiary ]
· See Also Five years ago a brilliant man hanged himself: The spy chief left out in the cold (A tale of two thieves, in their own words)

Linking to political tales, Is the socially conscious novel a dead genre? Whatever happened to the idea that a book can change the world? Are authors so intent on their own characters that they can't be bothered to make their plots politically relevant to our increasingly dangerous world? Ray Conlogue is only asking, but modern authors seem increasingly hostile to the notion that they could actually advance political ideas or social agendas with their works of fiction. These days, novelists are perfectly within their rights to spend hours working on behalf of whatever causes they support, but to put the crusade to paper would apparently cross some invisible line of decorum.
· See Also Maybe it's that political writers tend to be such tortured souls. Or maybe the constant battle for public understanding and acceptance is just too much for some... Whatever Happened to the Political Novel?
· See Also Woodward chose to be a rich, not great, writer (TNR)
· See Also Dad ... what's a drug dealer? Someone carrying a small amount of cannabis on a suburban train...

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In the realm of life & death, all things being equal, most people find unhappiness more interesting than joy.
Most people somehow find unhappiness more profound or meaningful or important than happiness... Trying to hide the photos is dishonoring fallen soldiers (SeaTimes); when issues are about government censorship, not sensitivity

Escape, Desire, Culture, Receipts: Of Value And Survival
Sure, there's the obvious connection between art and money, writes Thomas Crow. But art also has its business in the world, in how a society functions and sees itself. As works of circulate from creator to patron, from dealer to collector, from private interior to public gallery, the transactions can be as much about sheltering the emotional, cultural and intellectual value of art as they are about money, even as prices climb and currency changes hands.
· I've always believed that one of the signs of a healthy society is when all aspects of that society communicate with each other [ One-in-a-million links: One Story Fits All? The trouble with escapes is that they simultaneously attract and repel ]
· See Also What makes Us Write? There are not too many Jozef Konrads, either, and Konrad published his first book when he was thirty-eight
· See Also Officially the Parliamentary Librarian is looking for someone who can demonstrate literary excellence though a substantial history of published works, including poetry
· See Also Edinburgh: City pitches for world's literary crown
· See Also Sexiest photo of MEdia Dragon in a parliamentary library: stack X collection

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Vanunu said of Mossad and Shin Bet, which he accused of cruel, barbaric treatment... You didn't succeed to break me, you didn't succeed to make me crazy. I am a symbol of the will of freedom, that you cannot break the human spirit.

The Secret of the B-29
Barry Siegel of the Los Angeles Times spent eight months unraveling the story of a 50-year-old court case that "provides a fundamental basis for much of the Bush administration's response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, including the USA Patriot Act and the handling of terrorist suspects. The case, involving the families of three men who died in an B-29 plane crash and the ability of the government to withhold information about the accident, created a legal privilege
· that has enabled federal agencies to conceal conduct, withhold documents and block troublesome civil litigation, including suits by whistle-blowers and possible victims of discrimination [link first seen at Scoop]
· See Also Siegel used declassified Air Force records and court documents for the story

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He had expected compliance, but not at the astounding rate of 65 per cent of subjects willing to deliver what they believed were lethal shocks.

Whatever you say, boss
An infamous experiment,threeyearsafterMEdiaDragonwasborn, showed how easily people could be led to kill.
In a post-Holocaust world, like in post-Cold War world, people were struggling to understand how scores of SS, and KGB officers, had shot, gassed and tortured millions of people to death, supposedly on orders from their commanders.
· Why even non partisan parliamentary officers will obey the deadliest orders

A sinister killer, a flight to Amsterdam, and hundreds of millions of dollars at stake . . . the asbestos saga reads like a novel
· ASBESTOS AFTERMATH: Hardie casts a long shadow
· Asian tigers, Double Dragons: Twofold disaster [link first seen at NY ]

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Hard core irony of window dressing? An exclusive Sydney club (not far away from Macquarie Street, Sydney, Australia) had a security policy that scanned law-abiding citizens with metal detectors but let "heavies" and bikies enter unchecked because of fears of violence.

It's hard to know what is more disturbing... The road and river map is not dead; iraq is free; the referendum is now good; and, as orwell might have added, war is peace... Revelation (9:14-15) maintains that four angels which are bound in the great river Euphrates will be released to slay the third part of men... Madness Explained...

Putting Our Ideas up for Destiny
A small number of citizens whose ideas are regarded as exceptional, brilliant, and world changing. The bulk of our citizens accept the world as something they cannot change - and yet if only they knew the power of that idea about the world!
We are all born into the world as travellers on the (river) of life, down through the ages, none of us with absolute certainty about the (river) we are on, nor any (river) for that matter, except certainties we choose ourselves. As citizens of the world we've been given a free ticket to create it any way we want...
· Artist Robert Bosler: Beneath us is the oldest land in the world [ via ]
· See Also Keelty driven to brink of resigning
· See Also Vanunu: traitor or prisoner of conscience?
· See Also Killing Us Softly: Weblog coverage of families of American war victims in Iraq?
· See Also Oil-for-Terror? Oil-for-Food scandal: The corruption in this deal appears to have been one of the biggest in U.N. history
· See Also This is nothing short of the scariest article i've read in exile: 7 new Elite Russian Scientists Mysteriously Being Murdered

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NOTICE IN A PADDOCK:
The Farmer allows walkers to cross the paddock for free, but the bull charges!!!
[In this extraordinary time, first we had Man Bites Dog to Death--headline, Sydney Morning Herald, April 11; & today We Know We Left Those Scissors Somewhere... ]

Much Ado About Something: South Treasures Meet North
Three things succeed on the internet: shopping, as perfected by Amazon; searching, as perfected by Google; and blogging as perfected by thousands of creative fingers and linkers...
In keeping with the egalitarian nature of blogs, via David Tiley of Barista fame is encouraging everyone to share small, but beautiful blogging treasures....
For my part, I suggested http://lakatoi.blogspot.com/
[Lakatoi by James Cumes:
Cross-cultural observations and reflections by a former Australian Ambassador and High Commissioner, Dr James Cumes. James born and bred in Brissie is now based in Vienna where he devotes his time to charities, writing and leading Victory over Want http://VictoryOverWant.org]
· http://www.crosswords.blogspot.com/
[ (Southern Cross) Words;]
(Southern Cross) Words by Gregory Altreuter :: Cross-cultural observations and reflections by a former New Yorker on Sydney Australia, including philosophical musings, art, music, literature raves, political obtuseness, and anything else that comes to mind on the differences between life directed by the Pole Star and living beneath the Southern Cross.
· See Also The rise of Weblogging has been a cold shower for the complacent mass communication industries [Link Poached from Webdiary: Blogjam5]
· See Also Jeremy Zawodny on creative linking [link first seen at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/jkbaumga/aggregator/ ]
· See Also P23;S5 MEmedia Dragon
· See Also Metadata librarian becoming cool: Was it due to Harriet Klausner, retired librarian and #1 Amazon book reviewer?

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His only weakness is a lust for power—
And that is not a weakness, people think,
When unaccompanied by bribes or drink.
Sir John Betjeman, The Town Clerk’s Views

Federal Election Commission Auto-Commenters
Andrew Mollison of Cox News Service performed a statistical analysis on e-mail comments submitted to the Federal Election Commission in advance of a ruling on political committees, finding that roughly 48 percent arrived through a feature on the Bush-Cheney Web site, where users could sign and e-mail a pre-written message directly to the commission
· When will we learn that we're not going to end the mess in legislatures by getting bad guys? There are always new bad guys to take their place...

And let us bathe our hands in . . . blood up to the elbows, and besmear our swords. Then we walk forth, even to the market place, And waving our red weapons o'er our heads, Let's all cry peace, freedom and liberty!
- Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
· See Also Blood Vote - The Consequences of Voting for George W. Bush...
· See Also Fixing The Election (by Steven Hill and Rob Richie): Ordinary people can ensure the 2004 presidential election isn't stolen
· See Also Election Could Tempt Attack by Terror Groups, Rice Says
· See Also Marian Sawer: Above-the-line voting: how democratic? (PDF Format)

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While on my way to the airport, I saw an ad for Wild Turkey bourbon, which said Anything less is a waste of good ice. I had that uneasy feeling that something was wrong, but I couldn't quite say what. Then it struck me that the claim was logically equivalent to Any worse, and it would be undrinkable.
Turkeys by John Quiggin

This Season Our Economy Is Offering Debt and Casual Jobs
The United Nations has finally noticed that entrepreneurial economic activity is sweeping the globe. UN’s Commission on the Private Sector and Development issued its report, Unleashing Entrepreneurship: Making Business Work for the Poor, in which the primary recommendation is, you guessed it, break down barriers created by governmental bureaucracy and get out of the way.
· Entrepreneurship as an strategy to reduce poverty [Link Poached from Anita ]
· See Also Harry Heidelberg: Dreams becoming nightmares
· See Also Global Slumlords
· See Also Max Uechtritz: From the ABC to Nine and back [ via Crikey ]
· See Also Eastern Europe productivity: Czech Republic and Slovakia becoming a regional cluster for the auto industry

A Passion for Poetry (and Profits)
When John W. Barr was a teenager, he walked into his family's living room and announced that he had decided to become a poet.
His father replied: That's fine, but go to college so people will think you're an eccentric, not just a beach bum.
· Deciding how to make use of a gift worth more than $100 million.
· See Also A good nose for a business opportunity: Aroma Tours, an Australian company, organises holidays to nice-smelling places

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When I was a kid, I wanted a five-dollar watch, then a ten-dollar watch, then a hundred-dollar watch. When I made money, I wanted a Rolex, then a Patek-Philippe. Now I realize that the real luxury is not to know the time.
Jack Straus, quoted in A. Alvarez, The Biggest Game in Town

Casual spiral of the modern workplace
Unpredictable earnings and job insecurity have left the rising number of casual workers vulnerable to growing debt, less able to borrow money and unable to plan childcare
· Home >Was Casual Irony with author's surname intended? By Aban Contractor (Almost as gud as I'm rich)

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Tax system is the most politicized law in the land. As a result, people with wealth and access to politicians have perverted the tax code to benefit themselves at the expense of all other Americans. For those of you making the "the top 50% pay 96% of federal taxes" argument you have it correct but you are lying due to an omission of fact. The income tax is only a portion of the government's revenues and that when all federal charges are considered as a whole the tax burden is (more and more) falling disproportionally on those with the least amount of money.
Bookslut: Dear I.R.S.: Please hurry with my refund check. I want to go comics shopping. I whimper outside the window of Chicago Comics. Hurry, you beaurocratic bastards

Perfectly Legal: Fair assessment of the most unfair tax system ever created
Most Americans would agree that they are duty bound as beneficiaries of our democracy to pay taxes, and the majority of us do pay—-exorbitantly. But what about those who do not pay their fair share? David Cay Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times, here reveals how fairness and equity have eroded from the American tax system. Johnston describes in shocking detail the loopholes our government provides the "super rich"--from private individuals to profitable corporations—-to hide their wealth, to defer or evade tax payments, and to pass the bill to law-abiding middle-class Americans. The loss in revenue "imposes a severe cost on honest taxpayers" through reduced services, increased federal debt, and a weight on the middle class that threatens to impede its ability to achieve upward social mobility.
· See Also Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich - and Cheat Everybody Else

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The Lords of Bakersfield, an in-depth investigative series that exposed public and private corruption in its community over several decades. The paper carefully considered the many ethical issues involved in reporting and editing the series, insulated the newsroom from any real or perceived conflict of interest raised in reporting on the activities of former staff and members of the current publisher’s family, and withstood efforts by the local district attorney to discredit the series following publication...

Preventing the Next (Sydney) Scandal ...
Powerful gay men. Vulnerable teen-age boys. Murder. For years, some prominent local men who led secret lives were rumored to be protected. Whispers surrounding another important man's death prompt the question:
· Is there really a conspiracy??? [ courtesy of Payne Awards for Ethics Honor 2004 Winners]
· See Also Abusing Secrets: The no-right-to-know White House
· See Also The Cost of Doing Business' Sierra magazine's Marilyn Berlin Snell breaks the story of how Denver-based Echo Bay Mines secretly paid upwards of $2 million in protection money to al-Qaeda-linked terrorists in the Philippines
· See Also Amerikan ABC News: 'Blood Money, report on Echo Bay Mines
· See Also $4.5 Billion For Mercenaries In Iraq: NY Times has an extensive report on the scope, costs and problems of the military's use of mercenaries in Iraq

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According to Not much skody (damage), last week EU officials moved to end Czech Republic's gladiator fight clubs ...
Letter from Prague suggests that Czechs are among the most liberal nations in the world with regards to issues such as abortion, homosexuality, and infidelity.

While dragons of Beijing Evening News stature told a shocking story of American hubris: Congress was behaving like a petulant baseball team and threatening to bolt Washington, D.C., unless it got a new, modern Sydney Opera House building, complete with retractable roof...

Great AmeriKan Business Leaders Database
The database was compiled over a two-year period in an effort to identify and chronicle the lives of individuals whose business leadership in the twentieth century shaped the way people live, work, and interact.... Note: only a portion of the database is available on this website.
· Only in Amerika
· See Also What Great American Leaders Teach Us
· See Also Drawing Baseball Fans: runs scored and high-salaried player, not wins, were the most significant factors in drawing fans to ballgames
· See Also Watching Justice: (Gara LaMarche) A new website launched by the Open Society Institute to focus public and media attention on the many ways in which the U.S. Department of Justice and related federal entities affect our lives
· See Also Best Reference Sources 2003: Amerika & the world had many reasons to worry in 2003. and Australia & James Russell

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Tiger Force: Major media have failed to follow up the Blade’s revelations. It’s as if there’s a statute of limitations on the collective conscience. A conspiracy of silence has given way to widespread indifference, coupled, presumably, with contemporary anxieties...

Welcome and Unwelcome Attention: FBI
FBI Files on Kerry Stolen from Author's Home
Historian and biographer Gerald Nicosia has been the sudden object of both welcome and unwelcome attention lately. The SF Chronicle explains: The past two weeks have been too high-octane even for Nicosia, not unaccustomed to attention (or flak) on the Beat and political fronts. Fourteen boxes of FBI surveillance files that he battled for more than a decade to obtain have suddenly become a mother lode of information about the 1970s anti- war activities of Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry. So enticing are the contents of those files, somebody slipped into Nicosia's modest Corte Madera home on March 25 and made off with several thousand pages -- most dealing with Kerry's years in Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
· Without a permit, rising from the websites
· See Also Were you there when they spied on MEdia Dragon? How many boxes of surveillance files are there?
· See Also Battered and Bloodied Battalion: Behind the birth of Tiger Force
· See Also (Tiger Force) Blade wins Pulitzer: Series exposing Vietnam atrocities earns top honor
· See Also No-one realized that terrorists could use an airplane as a weapon, except for Tom Clancy and NORAD
· See Also Antony Loewenstein: Tools to stop them engineering your consent
· See Also A Busy Person's Guide to the Bush Press Conference

Exclusives from Iraq
This week, in only his third prime-time press conference in three-and-a-half years of presidency, George W. Bush admitted the past few weeks in Iraq have been difficult.
OpenDemocracy continues its extraordinary coverage of the spiralling crisis.
From Iraq, Ayub Nuri, a supporter of the war, watches the US military unite Shi'a, Sunni and Kurds against America.
Middle East expert, Sami Zubaida, identifies the basic cause of the trouble in Iraq: One year after the occupation and the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime the great majority of Iraqis are worse off...

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Oops, somehow MEdia D missed this link last week in the Sydney Morning Herald... The power of search
+ Use "" for phrase searching
+ Boolean available (and, or, andnot)
+ t: to limit to words in the title/headline of the document
+ d: to limit to words in the text of the document.
+ It's possible to combine the syntax
More Search News Tips & Topix

Open all hours
With the click of a mouse, libraries and museums are reaching a new audience.
It was Umberto Eco who said libraries had always been humanity's way of preserving its collective wisdom, a sort of universal brain where we can retrieve what we have forgotten. Now, thanks to the internet, Australians are peering beyond the bricks and mortar, seeing libraries and museums for what they always wanted to be - citadels of ideas, repositories of human knowledge.
· Ironically, the web's flaws are what now help people appreciate the integrity of the information issued by libraries [ via Best Stack & Library in the World]
· See Also Special librarians are information 'detectives'
· See Also On the seventh day Cold River rested: eBook of the Month
· See Also And now, the good word by email - and that's gospel
· See Also Print-on-demand
· See Also Sifry's Alerts: BoingBoing adds Technorati support - you can too!

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To what extent might (bloggers) contribute to the spread of disinformation, and to tyrannies of misinformed majorities?
Rebecca MacKinnon

BloggerCon: On the lowered barrier of entry...
Jay Rosen is moderating a discussion at BloggerCon on Saturday of the questions, What is Journalism And What Can Weblogs Do About It? I am reading through his background essay and the associated comments to get a feel for what it will be like.
Right up front, Jay hits me over the head with insight in making sure that journalism is not defined as a profession, but an act...
Dave Winer: I think the best journalists around today are bloggers, not professionals, and I'm not saying that to be argumentative, I really believe it, and could and would debate it, except this is not the topic of this session.
· My advice to bloggers seeking traffic is to entirely ignore anything said by bubble-blowers [Link Poached from makeoutcity.com: all you need are kisses to start a makeout party]
· See Also Michele Catalano Of A Small Victory Gives Up Political Blogging
· See Also Virtual Opinion
· See Also Fascinating article on domain names: Get Out of My Namespace
· See Also The perils of NexGen Librarian

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To what extent might (bloggers) contribute to the spread of disinformation, and to tyrannies of misinformed majorities?
Rebecca MacKinnon

BloggerCon: On the lowered barrier of entry...
Jay Rosen is moderating a discussion at BloggerCon on Saturday of the questions, What is Journalism And What Can Weblogs Do About It? I am reading through his background essay and the associated comments to get a feel for what it will be like.
Right up front, Jay hits me over the head with insight in making sure that journalism is not defined as a profession, but an act...
Dave Winer: I think the best journalists around today are bloggers, not professionals, and I'm not saying that to be argumentative, I really believe it, and could and would debate it, except this is not the topic of this session.
·
My advice to bloggers seeking traffic is to entirely ignore anything said by bubble-blowers [Link Poached from makeoutcity.com: all you need are kisses to start a makeout party]
· See Also Michele Catalano Of A Small Victory Gives Up Political Blogging
· See Also Opinion
· See Also Fascinating article on domain names: Get Out of My Namespace
· See Also The perils of NexGen Librarian

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Why do they do it, these whistleblowers? Why do they dare speak out? Whether in the private or public sector, often they lose their livelihoods, and the strain can damage their health, end their closest relationships and smash their friendships. Almost always they are smeared, threatened and put under intolerable psychological pressure... The balance of power is so stacked against the ethical individual that unless citizens do something to redress it, we'll run out of whistleblowers. We'll miss them when they're gone.

Axe Labor's Mates Boards: Brogden's committment to honesty blows Carr's out of the water
The NSW Opposition has promised to abolish more than 20 statutory boards including Landcom and Sydney Water, in an effort to save up to $5 million a year in directors' fees paid to Labor Mates.
In a speech to a business and Liberal Party forum at Parliament House yesterday, the Opposition Leader, John Brogden, accused the Government of "tossing aside" ministerial responsibility and relying on political spin to explain its policy failures.
· Pork O Barrel: The truth hurts... especially in SusSex Street

The political practice of dipping into the public trough to finance projects that benefit only a single legislator is so firmly established that most people yawn when they see the words pork-barrel spending. Yet every so often a project comes along with such a grotesquely negative cost-benefit ratio that even the most cynical citizen snaps awake...
· See Also Pork, Sweet and Sour [ courtesy of http://hotbuttereddeath.ubersportingpundit.com/ Personally I think they've got it all arse-backwards. The real issue is not how do you stop idiots and lunatics from voting, but how do you stop them from running for government... ]
· See Also Wife Refuses To Disclose Tax Info: Kerry claimed a wealthy candidate must release returns to prove he pays a fair share in a tax system that isn't fair and lets the super-rich get off

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Left & Right Join to Voice Concerns Over Patriot Act
In April , Senator Orrin Hatch's Senate Judiciary Committee field hearing on the USA Patriot Act in Salt Lake City made for strange bedfellows, as liberals, libertarians, and conservatives joined together to voice their concerns over a half-dozen provisions in the Patriot Act, as reported in the Salt Lake Tribune. One such provision is Section 215, which gives law enforcement officials broad authority to demand that libraries or bookstores turn over books, records, papers, and documents.
· A new politics and the culture of fear
· See Also Iraq: Regardless of ones political persuasion it must be seen at the very least as a humanitarian catastrophe

If Australia's public servants tell the Government only what it wants to hear, then politicians have an escape hatch when things go wrong - in Timor, Iraq or anywhere else...
· See Also Speak no Evil [Southerly Buster: All that's happening is that the Man of Steel is repeating his usual pattern of cherry-picking reports to make himself and his policies look good (16/04/2004)]
· See Also Lance Collins: The man they couldn't silence
[Quiggin: It's been a long time since I took on trust anything coming out of policy departments like Treasury and the Productivity Commission. Under the present government, we've already learned we can't trust statements from the armed forces, the Defence Department or the Electoral Commission. But until now, I've never seen any serious evidence of political interference with ABS. This letter suggests that the process has begun]
· See Also Price of Mistakes
· Colonel Richard Tracey is, in fact, Dick Tracey, QC [Link Poached from Backpages]
· Militants free Czech hostages
· See Also 'I'll show you how an Italian dies': hero hostage
· See Also Links to the full text of CRS reports covering homeland security, intelligence, Iraq, national defense, national security threats & issues, NATO and terrorism [Congressional-Research-Service Reports Links to Reports

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As seen somewhere on the Mittel Earth Web:Just can't be stopped from blogging, no matter how little financial reward they find in it...
This blog complies with a paperwork reduction act...

Off the Beaten Path: The Speech Nobody Heard
We lost forty years in the refrigerator of the Cold War, [which resulted in] the postponement of urgently needed reforms," he said. "The fall of communism did not assure the triumph of social justice.
The global economy, like Morava River, is there. It is not going to move; the question is how not to drown in it.
· Terra Nostra: (KISS Keep It Strong and Spanish) [ courtesy of The Cold River Nobody Read: tip of the iceberg of frozen memories]
· See Also Mexican author Carlos Fuentes
· Myth and Reality for Immigrants in New York and Amsterdam [link first seen at Szirine Magazine]
Since you left me at eight I have always been lonely
· I'll be damned, You're a poet. Welcome to hell

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I am almost 61, live in Sydney, Australia and am retired from professional life. As I grow older, I grow more intolerant of bullshit, especially in political circles: The blog of John Boase

Blogs: Here to stay
They're hip. Influential. Out there. By one estimate, there are 2 million of them posted on the Internet around the world talking about everything from knitting patterns to the war in Iraq. But as blogs - or personal weblogs - move into the limelight, they're also coming under closer scrutiny. And the conclusions are in some ways sobering.
Take politics. David Winer says weblogs are going to play a huge role in politics. But all the buzz about politicians using them is overblown. The blog of Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean was just a "gimmick," says Mr. Winer, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School and a pioneer blogger. And any blogs produced this year by President Bush or John Kerry will be "basically run by the ad agencies" - not the kind of honest, even intimate conversations that blogs can represent.
Here's his vision of how real "blogging" by a politician could work. A candidate for city council, for example, would write an ongoing blog to his potential constituents explaining his positions on issues. They could read his pitch and offer feedback, creating a kind of political dialogue that would be based on substance more than sound bites.
· Sound bites [ via CS Monitor]

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A lack of public support is responsible for a dearth of overt fearless principle in the public service ...

Presidential Advisers' Testimony Before Congressional Committees: A Brief Overview
Congress has a constitutionally rooted right of access to the information it needs to perform its Article I legislative and oversight functions. Generally, a congressional committee with jurisdiction over the subject matter, which is conducting an authorized investigation for legislative or oversight purposes, has a right to information held by the executive branch in the absence of either a valid claim of constitutional privilege by the executive or a statutory provision whereby Congress has limited its constitutional right to information.
· Be Advised contains PDF File [Link Poached from Google]
· See Also Jock Given: Flaws in the electronic pork barrel that was supposed to network this nation [ via Australian Policy Online ]
· See Also (PDF Format) Rebecca Kippen & David Lucas: The story of past populations... historical demography helps inform us why populations are the way they are, and allows us some insight into population futures
· See Also (PDF Format) Conde: The long eye of the law: closed circuit television, crime prevention and civil liberties

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According to thoughtful Alan of Southerly Buster fame, X is unthinkable is not an especially new strategy in politics or in war-making. May God have mercy on our souls...

A National ID Card Wouldn't Make Us Safer
As a security technologist, I regularly encounter people who say the United States should adopt a national ID card. How could such a program not make us more secure, they ask?
The suggestion, when it's made by a thoughtful civic-minded person like Nicholas Kristof (Star-Tribune, March 18), often takes on a tone that is regretful and ambivalent: Yes, indeed, the card would be a minor invasion of our privacy, and undoubtedly it would add to the growing list of interruptions and delays we encounter every day; but we live in dangerous times, we live in a new world ... .
· It all sounds so reasonable, but there's a lot to disagree with in such an attitude [ via Bruce Schneier is security guru: national ID card doesn't even belong on a scale]
· See Also SENATORS COLLINS, LIEBERMAN ASK Agency to Explain Why It Requested Sensitive Data From Airlines
· See Also Come on in, the water's fine: Why the temperature doesn't hold water [ via RoadToSurfdom]
· See Also Welcome to the inaugural (Virgin) issue of Econ Journal Watch: editor@econjournalwatch.org [Link Poached from Coming Soon; According to Jason]
· See Also Cyborg Democracy: Future Hi - Celebrating the Rebirth of Psychedelic Futurism; Agents of the Culture

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You'll pull that drainplug from the wish fountain because I do not happen to be a 'Somebody:' I am Nobody...

Know-How Dragon: 10 Rules for Corporate Blogs and Wikis
Time capsule of conventional wisdom...
Recognizing that this is an emerging area, here are 10 rules for using blogs and wikis to achieve your branding goals. Brands are about trust, and authenticity is the foundation of trust. Blogs should be written as if close friends were sharing observations over a Czech beer.
Note: In addition, there is a link to an excellent presentation (pdf, 52 pages and all free),
· 1. Be authentic [Link Poached from Marketingprofs.com]
· See Also Gopher: Back in 1992, when yahoo was something cowboys yelled and ebay was just pig Latin...
· See Also Sneak Peeks at Tomorrow's Office
· See Also Boing Boing add Technorati support
· See Also Lawish Hall-Of-Fame 2004: 60 Sites in 60 Minutes

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Oh... currently Iraq (Detailed Iraq Chronology 1980-2004) and Australia are listed among the top 10 searches on Daypop.
Is this chillingly prescient? As when seven years ago Russ Travers of the Defense Intelligence Agency wrote an article for Studies in Intelligence, a journal published by the CIA's Center about the ways intelligence analysis would become dangerously fragmented by 21st century... From the vantage point of 2001, intelligence failure is inevitable.
There's a hindsight article that is worth reading to help put the kerfuffle over pre-Sept. 11 intelligence into perspective. Blogger Gregg Easterbrook of the New Republic imagines an alternative history ...

AN ALTERNATIVE ONLINE HISTORY
Moments after being sworn in as the 44th president, Dick Cheney said that disgraced former national security adviser Condoleezza Rice would be turned over to the Hague for trial in the International Court of Justice as a war criminal. Cheney said Washington would "firmly resist" international demands that Bush be extradited for prosecution as well.
· Hague: This guy isn't exactly Winston Churchill, is he? [Link Poached from Will the 2004 Election Be Called Off? Buzzflash]
· See Also Three prominent Czech journalists have disappeared in Iraq
· See Also Lt Col Collins wrote to Prime Minister John Howard calling for the royal commission, outlining how Australia's spy agencies had failed Australia many times ... > [Link Poached from The code of silence]
· See Also First off, (Non nuclear) heads should roll: Rep. Christopher Shays (R-CT) chairs the House Committee on Government Reform's National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations Subcommittee

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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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Oh... currently Iraq (Detailed Iraq Chronology 1980-2004) and Australia are listed among the top 10 searches on Daypop.
Speaking of chillingly prescient, seven years ago Russ Travers of the Defense Intelligence Agency wrote an articlke for Studies in Intelligence, a journal published by the CIA's Center about the ways intelligence analysis would become dangerously fragmented by 21st century... From the vantage point of 2001, intelligence failure is inevitable.
There's a hindsight article that is worth reading to help put the kerfuffle over pre-Sept. 11 intelligence into perspective. Blogger Gregg Easterbrook of the New Republic imagines an alternative history ...

AN ALTERNATIVE ONLINE HISTORY
Moments after being sworn in as the 44th president, Dick Cheney said that disgraced former national security adviser Condoleezza Rice would be turned over to the Hague for trial in the International Court of Justice as a war criminal. Cheney said Washington would "firmly resist" international demands that Bush be extradited for prosecution as well.
· Hague: This guy isn't exactly Winston Churchill, is he? [Link Poached from Will the 2004 Election Be Called Off? Buzzflash]
· See Also Three prominent Czech journalists have disappeared in Iraq
· See Also Webdiary Lament: Is it any wonder the Iraqis are resisting?

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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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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 Out of the blue Yeadon: Back under the tree Future of ICAC for review by ex-judge [via Overseas: fight against corruption]

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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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Russia's latest incarnation underlines how the EU should be more active in neighbouring countries where political orientation remains in the balance. Meanwhile, in the lucky country almost a million Australian children live in poverty...

Government offers no escape route from poverty trap
People on modest incomes in Australia are said to be paying higher taxes than those in the high-income category. The highest tax rate is 48 per cent. People in this tax bracket pay the marginal tax rate on the last part of their incomes. People on modest incomes are said to be paying 61.5 per cent. The secretary to the Treasury, Ken Henry, argues that the high effective marginal tax rate (EMTR) could be a disincentive to work. Dr Henry, who prepared a paper for the Committee for the Economic Development of Australia, says correcting high EMTRs is a "balancing act". It remains to be seen whether tax cuts in the May 2004 Budget will reduce the "poverty traps" for low-income earners.
· Too-hard basket [ via By Ross Gittins: 03/04/2004; The Age, Page C4]
· Call to scrap tax breaks for rich
· See Also Corporate Risk of a Tax Audit Is Still Shrinking, I.R.S. Data Show
· See Also LeBovidge unabashedly dreams of a day when people won't even have to fill out their income tax forms...
· See Also Taxes, wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes, are what we pay for a civilized society: When coporations dodge taxes, the rest of us pick up the difference
· See Also US Game: Czech your returns: your taxes weren't cut, just shifted
· See Also IRS Commissioner Mark W. Everson finds that he is the person everyone at cocktail parties wants to avoid: Growth in tax cheating can be contagious
· See Also Tax dodger, meet tax collector: Love and Taxes ...We had fun, especially in the early '90s, before Congress ruined everything and put all these inhibitions on the IRS. (laughter) We had a blast, and every day was different
· See Also On the pleasure scale, reading Confessions of a Tax Collector falls squarely between a full-fledged tax audit and a root canal
· See Also They even have a word for such stall tactics: "baby-sitting"
· 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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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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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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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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It seems hard sometimes to say to someone don't make that mistake because I'm speaking now from pain, I'm speaking now from tears, I'm speaking from suffering, from joy, from love. Before I could only speak of what the future could be.
The only way to come up from low is to think high. That's what life is really about: up and down, in and out, over and under, night and day, dark and light, all right.
Solomon Burke

The original Greek meaning of PASSION is suffering
Which is your favourite ? An older book can become a new book again...
Only about 10 per cent of the commercial titles published each year are fiction, and fiction accounts for only about a quarter of retail sales. We talk about fiction incessantly -- the Man Booker Prize, for example, continues to bear far more prestige, and attract far more excitement, than its non-fiction equivalent, the Samuel Johnson -- but it is non-fiction, as a nation, that we are actually reading. There's a message too powerful to ignore Publishers love a sure-fire trend, but there is so much more to picking a bestseller:
Popular culture now hates high culture so much that it campaigns aggressively against it.
· The Real Read: a Recurring Sweet revenge part of the game of life [Link Poached from The Telegraph and Ottakar's launch The Real Read, a poll to find the country's best-loved work of non-fiction ]
· See Also Colm Toibin's a travelling Irishman, his subject is a dilettante American. Together they create a riveting portrait of obsession

Praise be to one Giant Confessional: it's like a one-on-one thing, and that's deeply intriguing
There is a voyeur in all of us. At some level, we are fascinated by other people's secrets, out of either prurience or a more fundamental need to affirm that we are not alone, that other people, too, have thought or done things of which they are not proud. Over the past decade, confessions have become a staple of culture... We have had bare-all books about everything from abusive childhoods to addiction, crime, obsession, failure and, of course, sex in all its myriad forms.
I think we've got this compulsive drive to feel that we belong, or that we're normal. The fascination with other people's messy lives is really about a sense of How do they deal with these things? And also, How do you place yourself on a spectrum of normality?
If Millet's book sold because it was so racy, perhaps Moody's is selling because it is so ordinary .....
· See Full Text Story For your eyes only: with innovations including reality television and web cameras, combined with a general loosening of social and moral taboos, we now have unprecedented access into other people's worlds

# posted by Jozef Imrich with Dragoness Malchkeon : 7:36 AM