Tired of KBR getting all the engineering jobs?   Looking for a career in building Weapons Of Mass Destruction?  Adelaide Uni can help.  They're now training engineers for more advanced construction work, at least up to the technology level that Raytheon allows us local savages to access.

It's odd for the university to now announce that it has been been running the specialised maritime engineering  program for a year already,  instead of at the program's initial implementation.  Given that the start of the academic year was just before the South Australian elections I wonder if the story might have been considered politically inappropriate at the time.  To me it seemed that the whole concept of the Defence State, complete with number plates and BAE bus shelter ads, seemed to have been shelved in the last pre-election four weeks.  In such a context I can understand a reticence for publicity.

‘As we approach the beginning of the end in Iraq there will be much throat clearing and breast-beating before reality replaces denial. For the moment, denial still rules.

In America last week I was shocked at how unaware even anti-war Americans are (like many Britons) of the depth of the predicament in Iraq. They compare it with Vietnam or the Balkans - but it is not the same. It is total anarchy. All sentences beginning, "What we should now do in Iraq ... " are devoid of meaning. We are in no position to do anything. We have no potency; that is the definition of anarchy.’

As many of you would have noticed YourDemocracy was unavailable for a couple of days. This was due to our domain name expiring. The name was under the control of a member of the IT team who is no longer active in the project, and no-one noticed that the domain was about to expire.

This has now been rectified, with the domain once again the under control of the core IT team. We also took this opportunity to move servers to deal with space and bandwidth issues. Every month we have grown in disk space and numbers of visitors. The new hosting basically has unlimited of each of these.

Please attach any issues as comments to this post.

‘When I saw the Newsweek cover featuring Big Daddy Bush muscling toward the front with a diminished little Dubya skulking in the background, my first thought was: How is Junior going to react to this? Bush II's resentment toward his father is well-known – a resentment no doubt compounded by his lifelong, abject dependence on Daddy's financial and political pull – and I knew that Little Bush would not simply accept this media humiliation and move on.

Because for all his vaunted (and totally mendacious) "unconcern" with opinion polls and popularity ("Ah just do whut muh gut tells me is right"), Little Bush is actually one of the most vain and insecure men ever to sit in the White House; only Nixon can match him in this regard. Why else would he need to have his authority bolstered in such ludicrous ways – such as all those little "Commander-in-Chief" and "President of the United States" tags embossed onto his fancy quasi-military jackets and his running gear and belt-buckles and boots – and probably his toilet paper as well?

‘They say the fountain in London's Trafalgar Square turned the color of blood on Armistice Day last weekend, as Britons in the hundreds of thousands trudged out in the November gloom to commemorate the end of the First World War, and lament the dead in all the wars thereafter.

But the turning of the water was no miracle, no divine judgment on the leader whose fateful partnership with George W. Bush is producing - week after week, month after month, year after year - fresh cause for future mourning. The color came from the thousands of fake poppies tossed into the fountain in what The Observer called "a spontaneous act of remembrance": an offering of the ubiquitous charity emblems worn by most of the population in the week leading up to the memorials.

                            charity begins at home .....

 
‘As the red wheel of Operation Iraqi FUBAR* continues to roll, spewing hundreds of corpses in its wake, it becomes clearer by the hour that there is only one way for America to end this stomach-churning nightmare it has created: get out.

That's it. The occupying armies – including Bush's 20,000 corporate mercenaries – should leave now. They should never have been sent in the first place on this ghoul's errand: a war of aggression, a mission of murder and plunder – the perversion of every enlightened value of the civilization that the Coalition's "Christian leaders" purport to defend.

 Former Defence Minister Robert Hill now joins PM Howard and Ministers Downer and Vaiille in being implicated in the AWB cover-up.

Only a few sleeps away from the delivery of the AWB Report we learn that 70 employees of the the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade knew about the bribes to Saddam as far back as 2001

A cable from Australia's mission to the United Nationse refferring to "kickbacks"  was sent to DFAT, the Defence Intelligence Organisation and the Defence Department, and marked for the information of the Prime Minister, the Trade Minister, Austrade, the Foreign Minister and the Defence Minister.

 
from the US Centre for Constitutional Rights

Today, CCR filed a criminal complaint in Germany under their universal jurisdiction law charging Rumsfeld, Gonzales and other high-ranking officials in the Bush administration with war crimes . The complaint was filed on behalf of 11 former detainees who were victims of severe beatings, sleep and food deprivation, hooding and sexual abuse in Abu Ghraib, and one detainee at Guantánamo Bay subjected to torture and abuse there under Rumsfeld’s specific authorization.

from Our belittled ABC ….

No need for constitutional convention, PM says

The Prime Minister says there is no need for a constitutional convention in the wake of this week’s High Court case on industrial relations.

Several premiers say yesterday's ruling has changed the basis of the relationship between the Commonwealth and the states and have called for a convention to debate the situation. 

‘British Prime Minister Tony Blair made an open plea on Monday to United States President George Bush to recognise that a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict lies at the core of any hopes for wider peace in the Middle East, including Iraq.

In his annual foreign policy speech, seen as a chance to recalibrate Britain's Iraq strategy, Blair said a solution to the conflict was central to a strategy that "pins back the forces trying to create mayhem inside Iraq".

only $1500 a head at an American Club Dinner …..

from the ABC ….

Murdoch urges Australians to stick by US

News Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch has warned Australians not to allow anti-American sentiment over the Iraq war to damage the country's relationship with the United States.