Alex Hawk, the National President of the Young Liberals, wants to cull the wets from the flock, and send them to Greener pasture. On the latter point, I think he's right. The left of the ALP should do the same.

“The average man, whatever his errors otherwise, at least sees clearly that government is something lying outside him and outside the generality of his fellow men - that it is a separate, independent, and hostile power, only partly under his control, and capable of doing him great harm.

Academic promotes torture for 'extreme' circumstances

Two Victorian academics have sparked controversy by advocating the legalisation of torture as an interrogation method.

The head of the Deakin Law School, Mirko Bagaric, is the co-author of a paper on the moral justification for torture which is about to be published

No No... this is unacceptable. These two people should be submitted to the process themselves to see what it really means.

There can be NO MORAL justification for this kind of behaviour. Call it whatever you will but do not attach torture and morality in the same breath.

I received the below from a North East Forest Alliance list I'm on.

NEFA is close to my heart because it was with NEFA in the 80s that I became an activist and very politicised. And this was just a very YD sort of idea. I publish this with permission from the author George Woods.

The refusal of your government to secure & protect the rights of Mr Hicks confirms its readiness to arrogantly & irresponsibly avoid its obligations under international law & to betray its most fundamental duty: to protect the rights of Australian citizens.

I want to have some stickers made. (I have about 10 Not Happy John! stickers left). Here's a couple of ideas. If you have any designs, email them to me by feedback.

This found in the Sydney Morning Herald letters to the editor this morning was enough to make me choke on my traditionally home-made rye bread.

Thirty peaceful protesters on bicycles today took to the streets of Brisbane to protest against the obscene waste of money that our City Coucil is squandering on a tunnel under the Brisbane River. They will be building a 5.5 km tunnel under the river just for cars (no trucks, no buses and no bicycles).

As of 5.25 pm 15/05/05 we have 300 registered members! The site is building momentum both in terms of members and the number of visits. We hope to be adding some features which will promote direct participation in our democratic process very soon. I am certain this will further boost our membership.

The spell-checker in the rich text editor should now be working, though it is not available in all browsers. Internet Explorer and Firefox should be fine, Safari users are still missing out on this!

We have tweaked the caching so hopefully some of the problems with people still finding themselves logged on when they've logged of and then return should disappear. We also hope that some of the problems with the forum reporting false numbers of new comments to be read will have disappeared. There are still further minor problems with the caching however, so we will do further work on these in due course.