So what is even smaller than a Shrub??

OK - I was just saying the other week to SFS and a couple of others that the best thing that W has done is ensure that the Bush dynasty is over. Kaput. Gonski. 2 and a half more years, then hopefully will be consigned as a weird footnote to aspirational stupidity, and a case study of how to win votes and influence justices.

Think again, Bernard.

"Lazarus", I hear myself shrieking...

According to Elisabeth Busmiller's final "Whitehouse Letter" in the NYTimes, Jeb is likely to be a contender for the Republican nomination in either 2012 or 2016. (If his brother hasn't gotten the planet blown up by then...)

Jeb's 2nd term as Govenor of Florida is up this year, so why not go straight to the campaign trail now? Not even W would be that stupid...

Evidently, Jeb was the family fave to be the current Pres, but he lost in Florida when Texas elected W as Lord High Executioner in '94. That then gave W Pole Position.

Had this NOT been the case, would Florida have been able to deliver the electoral college votes in 2000 I wonder?? Probably, but worthy of a thought a bit later on...

Anyway, some are commenting that 3 rounds of Bush administrations would be a really hard sell ever - and especially not now; other reasons that Jeb doesn't want to run now is that it is still a bit too close to the time when his wife was caught up not declaring USD19,000 worth of Parisian shopping spree, and his daughter being caught on a prescription fraud rap trying to get xanax on a (?) fraudulent script. (If Daddy had been Prez, the Secret Service could have been co-opted to help, much like in the case of the First Twins' under-age drinking binges...)

Sigh...

Another Bush vs Another Clinton could have been a fun race to watch.

Arbeit macht frei

"In a place like this, words fail. In the end, there can only be a dread silence, a silence which is a heartfelt cry to God - Why, Lord, did you remain silent? How could you tolerate all this?"

So said Pope Bendedict at Auschwitz / Birkenau, on Sunday, Eastern European time according to ABC Online.

Look - I'm not God's press secretary, but I find the hypocrisy of this statement totally astounding. No - I'm not laying any blame at Ratzinger's feet; I'm NOT one of those who thinks that because he was in the Hitler Youth then drafted into an Anti Aircraft battery to defend Berlin in 44/45 that he is a "fascist" in the political sense.

And that is probably the last time you are likely to hear me defend someone who I think will be singlehandedly responsible for at least 100 million preventable aids deaths in Africa and Latin America. I know that 100000000 haven't YET died, but give it a generation or two of deaths that would have been avoidable. But I digress.

Where was the voice of Pious XII during the holocaust? For goodness sake, it was Pacelli (as Sec State for the Holy See prior to becoming Pope) who talked Pios XI (his predecessor as pope) out of condemning Kristallnacht.

JPII could get away with visiting Auschwitz as "a son of Poland". Benedict used the line "a son of Germany", and I think that the vast majority accept that.

Having called for Australia to aplogise for its treatment of Aborigines, maybe he should have used this time to condemn the silence of his forebears, rather than to ask god about the silence.

Fallout from an earthquake

OK - this is cheating; it isn't an original blog entry, just a cut and paste of a letter to the editor that I submitted today

The earthquake in Java was indeed a "natural" disaster. And Australia, as it always has, immediately offered assistance, without calls to move populations away from tectonic faults. Due to the location of Java it is inevitable that earthquakes will keep occurring.

However, as reported in the Sydney Morning Herald on May 14th ("Iran will talk to nuclear agency: Indonesia"), Indonesia plans to commission it's first major nuclear power station in Eastern Java by 2015; indeed there are already "research" reactors in Yogyakarta the city / region hardest hit by the latest quake.

It is inevitable that another quake will hit the island in the future. Whether one hits before or after the commissioning of a 1000MW nuclear power plant on the Muria peninsular only the Indonesian government can control. The only way to ensure one doesn't hit after a reactor is commissioned is to not commission it

What will anyone be able to offer if a catastrophic earthquake destroys a nuclear power facility (one that is probably fed by Australian uranium), apart from our sincere apologies that we didn't lobby harder to prevent it being built?

Silence of the Apathetic ?

OK,

Not been on for a couple of months. Reasons may or may not follow at a later date. But I am really pissed off at the moment.

Not about the nuclear power debate; personally think that our globally loved PM is just indulging in some good old wedge politics.

Not about Howard describing people campaigning for gay marriage as fundamentalists but about the total lack of reporting here in Australia (or almoost anywhere) of the anti-Gay fatwa and associated murders in Iraq.

If one does a google search on the terms [gay fatwa iraq] there is a global hit count of about 194k pages. Click on "pages from australia" and you get 829 hits; a lot of those aren't relevant to this issue. Click on "News" (reporting proudly from 4500 news feeds) and you see a grand total of forty six.

Yup.

There are 46 articles or press releases that have been picked up by the Google bots. A grand total of 20 are in sources that are not immediately identifiable as gay.

[Compare that with the 255 currently listed media articles on gay rights crack downs etc in Poland. No 14yo's hacked to death in front of their family by the police - "yet".]

Why haven't we seen any of this in the Fairfax or News Ltd press? Or even ABC Online?

For goodness sake if "The Conservative Voice" (a US christian and politically conservative publication) can put a humanist spin on it per Iraqi Cops Kill Teenager for Being Gay, then surely, the ABC or the SMH can run something?

OK - I accept that maybe this comparison aint helpful, but there was 1 case of a horrific gay murder in a "civilised" place (Laramie, Wyoming, USofA), yes I do mean the Matthew Shepard case, there was international hue and cry. Google lists over 600k pages with that name in it.

Yet in Bagdhad when the UN has acknowledged that gays and lesbians are being specifically targeted by members of the Iraqi security forces, the Coaltion forces are aware, but refuse to allow free passage into the Green Zone.

Bush and Howard still praise the "nation building" that is going on over there. Here in the West, glbtiq-etc are railing for the right to get married. Great for wedge politics, and may well have ensured that W got back in via Electoral College gerrymander all-or-nothing votes in a couple of swing states.

In Iraq, Iran, Burma, North Korea, Singapore, Poland, Moldova, the entire Carribean, we have fellow humans who are persecuted, arrested, beaten, murdered, executed for their perceived sexuality.

Yup - SFS you're right. "Apathetic" was the word I was looking for.