At the Alfred Deakin Innovation Lectures 2005: Lecture Five, Shared Destinies: America, Asia and Australia on Sunday 5 June 2005 Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani posed some provocative challenges for Western and Eastern societies alike.

As our world is smaller and more linked than ever before, economic prosperity, political stability and environmental survival are all deeply enmeshed.

One of his themes was that perhaps our greatest challenge lies in coming to terms with some profound cultural differences; differences that still separate Western and Eastern cultures. Acclaimed author of "Can Asians Think?" Kishore Mahbuban was not holding back in being pro-American... which was not a problem for me since I am not anti-American as some people would believe. Hey, there are at least half of the population in the US that do not believe the crap dished out by the Bush administration...

In a letter to the editor, Richard Cox suggested the Sydney Morning Herald did a feature for a week on Darfur and the terrible state of affair in that region.... I could not agree with you more, Richard ...... And there are many other places in Africa where similar problems have happened and are still happening. For example "Western Sahara" that was liberated by its own people fighting the colonial Spanish in the 1970s were mostly reoccupied by Morocco soon after...

“Although some activists remain hostile to Paul Wolfowitz, development experts and non-governmental organisations who have met him say they have been reassured by their early encounters with the urbane Mr Wolfowitz.

The Byzantine Generals

Whether Johnnee is aware of it or not, he is extremely clever... But my bet is that he knows...

Clever in the sense he is equipped with a natural ability to chameleon-like change the spots of his rhetoric yet achieve the same original desires: mesmerise the punter and catch the voters with a lash of the tongue and a puke of the lips...

He has an innate ability to solve the algorithms of politics... this great mystery of maintaining a straight face while telling a maximum amount of porkies and furphies, in so doing managing to keep his generals loyal to him, not so much because of the trustworthiness-or-bunkiness of the words but because of the “important

When the prime minister rejects accusations from a former SAS officer that Australia's Defence Force was involved in a cover-up over a special forces operation in Afghanistan which ended with the deaths of 11 civilians, he added:
"I think the SAS is a fantastic unit of the Australian Defence Forces... Can I just make the general statement (he always asks permission to hit us in the guts with a generality that is cleverly associating a reasonable concept with total crap)... that we expect these incredibly well-trained and able men to undertake life-endangering missions in our name and on our behalf."

News flash: twice as many arrested in Sydney...