Hi all, as you may have noticed if you were online between 2:30 and 3:30 Sunday, I've upgraded the sites software. Although it didn't happen as quickly as rehearsed, it did seem to work OK. Improvements include:

• A better message editor
• Improved spell checker (with highlighting)
• Security fixes
• Improved search support

There may still be some minor problems, so please let me know if you run across any issues.

 Nigel Sim
 

The Editor
Sydney Morning Herald
June 4, 2005

So General Cosgrove feels ‘fiercely protective’ of the people under his command (‘Operation protect, as SAS comes under fire’, Herald, June 4)?

But in losing his cool this week whilst defending the SAS against allegations of bungling & misconduct, the good General confirmed that outmoded & misguided concepts of leadership & governance still hold sway in the ADF, just as they do in the broader reaches of the defence & intelligence establishments & in the highest ranks of government.

‘The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine & barbarism.

We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims while incidentally capturing their markets, to civilise savage & senile & paranoid peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells.’

John Flynn, 1944

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.

Recently, the Victorian academic, Professor Mirko Bagaric, argued the moral case in support of torture, through his paper “Not enough (official) torture in the world?: The circumstances in which torture is morally justifiable

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

I share your sense of having participated in a foregone conclusion. Victoria tried hard to win the warships, but as long as the plans created by the Bush Administration and relayed by multinational defence and energy corporations to and through the Australian Federal Government continue on a predetermined implementation schedule, the whims of any State's comparitively tiny political muscle will only be considered in the form of providing crumbs and scraps left over from the main meal.

When your analysts review the paperwork regarding the contract procurement, if they place faces on the company names they will be suprised how few people are responsible for so much activity.

Something is sure crook in Tobruk ('What Hicks is missing', Herald, June 1)

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."

Judi Moylan MP is overwhelmed with the amount of personalised and thoughtful messages of support from within and outside her electorate - more than 2500 now - and just twenty of these were expressing disapproval.

Hi folks Check out Web Diary - Margo Kingston is on the ball in terms of the outcome of this morning's Libs/Nats party room meeting where the Georgiou/Moylan Bills were debated. Here's some pretty decent advice from Carmen Lawrence. I hope you can do your bit - if you haven't already. - Jack

Will defence dollars turn Adelaide into Heaven On Earth?