meet Olly bin-Laden Richard .....

‘Armed police stormed a family's home and
left them terrified after their teenage son was spotted playing with a
"toy" gun in his bedroom.

Solicitor John Trimbos, 42, said he was
confronted with a scene reminiscent of "a Bruce Willis movie" when
officers smashed down the door of his Victorian mansion flat in Belsize Park,
north London.

Someone in the hotel opposite had seen his
15-year-old son, Olly, playing with what the family say was a plastic BB (ball
bearing) toy gun in his room and called the police, fearing it was a real
weapon.  

Mr Trimbos, his wife, Lucy, and their two sons,
Olly and seven-year-old Felix, had just finished their family dinner when the
firearms officers from Scotland Yard burst through their front door.

He and his eldest son were handcuffed and taken
outside for an hour while police searched their flat.’  

Teenager's 'Toy' Gun
Sparks Armed Police Raid

Passengers climbing off the flight from Singapore this morning were greeted by the sight of yellow powder covering their bags on an Adelaide airport carousel.  The travellers and their bags are stiill in quarantine.

Are we about  to go through another anthrax scare?

GWB spoke of the "lessons of September 11th" that, he says, were not wasted by the US, unlike Europe. He also expounded on the "transparency" of US government. From Bush calms EU over Guantanamo Bay:
... We're a transparent democracy. People know exactly what's on our mind. We debate things in the open; we've got a legislative process that's active. ...

A blatant, ourageous lie like that helps to incite the apocalyptic fantasies of those obsessed with watching for the coming of the Man of Sin. The room is full of smoke, and the right kind of tiny spark will ignite the conflagration. But Bush knows the fight is not likely to occur between Islam and the West, as anything like the great wars of Europe. Gavrilo Princip was the essential ingredient that struck the match, whereas Aum Shinrikyo and the WTC/Pentagon strikes did not.

The continuous flow of lies and deceptions could be calculated to infuriate, and plant the seeds of convenient "events" in the future.

On another September 11th, I traveled into the city. On the way home, their were cops galore on duty outside the main entrance of Melbourne Central. Standing on platform four, I noticed a wisp of smoke coming up from the tracks alongside the platform, about 50 meters away. The smoke got more intense, and a couple of people wandered over to have a look. Eventually, a couple of blokes in vests came on the scene, and one may have had a radio. Nothing happened, though, the fire smouldered out.

We are still on that platform, the smoke is still wafting, casual onlookers wander past.

In The Age, Loop in line for fire gear:
Specialised fire-fighting rail trolleys are likely to be bought by the Metropolitan Fire Brigade to help respond in case of a terrorist attack in the City Loop. ...

Perhaps they have one of these in mind? Ah, yes! Howard's army of loyal staffers to the rescue. Hopefully, the carts will have the comms module, as in A federal state of recalcitrance:
It is billed as one of the world's great train journeys: 4352km and all in a single continent and country. But when the Indian Pacific starts its twice-weekly service from Sydney to Perth, it has to make preparations as though it were travelling through eight countries. On board is 345kg of equipment in the form of eight radios to enable the driver to communicate in different parts of the country.
It's a good thing the train travels through just three states. Throughout Australia there are 22 different communication systems used on trains. Interstate trains also have to deal with seven different bodies that give permission to use the tracks on each stage of the journey. Then there are the seven safety regulators, three transport accident investigators, 15 occupational health and safety acts and 75 pieces of environmental legislation.  ...

On Saturday June 24th, SBS broadcast the PBS documentary Sugihara: Conspiracy of Kindness. Though there is a controversy surrounding one of the people in the story (Solly Ganor's deceit in the PBS documentary on Sugihara), there is no doubt about the essential humanitarian humility of Chiune Sugihara. He had been assigned to a diplomatic post in Harbin, Manchuria, during the early 1930s. According to the Wiki ,'When Sugihara served in the Manchurian Foreign Office, he took part in the negotiations with the Soviet Union about the Northern Manchurian Railroad.' He was a railwayman, as well as a righteous gentile. More explicitly, in a Japan Focus Article, 'He also negotiated, on terms exceedingly favorable to Japan, the agreement with the Soviet Union that allowed for the expansion of Japan's Northern Manchurian Railway.' The visas he wrote for the Jewish refugees in Lithuania enabled them to purchase tickets to travle the Trans-Siberian, to Vladivostok.
Story of a courageous diplomat of humanity, Mr. Chiune Sugihara is at the website of Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan. When asked "Why?", Sugihara eventually responded "Do the right thing because it's right, and move one; do not ask for money, do not write an article, do not seek publicity."

One of Sugihara's sons went to visit the father after he had been away from home, at a menial job in Moscow, for many years. They met in Sugihara's one-room apartment, where he prepared a frugal meal of bread and sausage over a gas-ring in the lavatory.

Why does one Foreign Affairs man take the easy dollar, while a Sugihara does the right thing and brings a lifetime of hardship on himself and his family?

From The Power of the Israel Lobby:

... There is no denying the intricate interweaving of the U.S. military-industrial complex with Israeli military-industrial interests. Chomsky acknowledges that there is "plenty of conformity" between the lobby's position and the U.S. government-corporate linkage and that the two are very difficult to disentangle. But, although he tends to emphasize that the U.S. is always the senior partner and suggests that the Israeli side does little more than support whatever the U.S. arms, energy, and financial industries define as U.S. national interests, in actual fact the entanglement is much more one between equals than the raw strengths of the two parties would suggest. "Conformity" hardly captures the magnitude of the relationship. Particularly in the defense arena, Israel and its lobby and the U.S. arms industry work hand in glove to advance their combined, very compatible interests. The relatively few very powerful and wealthy families that dominate the Israeli arms industry are just as interested in pressing for aggressively militaristic U.S. and Israeli foreign policies as are the CEOs of U.S. arms corporations and, as globalization has progressed, so have the ties of joint ownership and close financial and technological cooperation among the arms corporations of the two nations grown ever closer. In every way, the two nations' military industries work together very easily and very quietly, to a common end. The relationship is symbiotic, and the lobby cooperates intimately to keep it alive; lobbyists can go to many in the U.S. Congress and tell them quite credibly that if aid to Israel is cut off, thousands of arms-industry jobs in their own districts will be lost. That's power. The lobby is not simply passively supporting whatever the U.S. military-industrial complex wants. It is actively twisting arms ­ very successfully ­ in both Congress and the administration to perpetuate acceptance of a definition of U.S. "national interests" that many Americans believe is wrong, as does Chomsky himself.

This kind of pervasive influence, a chill on discourse inside as well as outside policymaking councils, does not require the sort of clear-cut, concrete pro-Israeli decisions in the Oval Office that David Gergen naively thought he should have witnessed if the lobby had any real influence. This kind of influence, which uses friendly persuasion, along with just enough direct pressure, on a broad range of policymakers, legislators, media commentators, and grassroots activists to make an impression across the spectrum, cannot be defined in terms of narrow, concrete policy commands, but becomes an unchanging, unchallengeable mindset, a sentimental environment that restricts debate, restricts thinking, and determines actions and policies as surely as any command from on high. When Israel's advocates, its lobbyists, in the U.S. become an integral part of the policymaking apparatus, as they have particularly since the Reagan years ­ and as they clearly have been during the current Bush administration ­ there is no way to separate the lobby's interests from U.S. policies. Moreover, because Israel's strategic goals in the region are more clearly defined and more urgent than those of the United States, Israel's interests most often dominate. ...

This article looks at how influence is brought to bear, but omits the key chink through which it flows. Is it really only due to friendly persuasion, arm-twisting, or the power of the will? How do lobbyists get in the ears of legislators? Simple - corruptibility.

The Road From K Street to Yusufiya
Japan Pays For Votes Scrapping 20-Year Ban On Commercial Whaling...
Abramoff Email: Suggested Donation For Face Time With Bush Or Rove: $100,000...
Family Trips: House rules on travel companions were skirted — then loosened
Poor Form on Senate Guest Disclosure: Travelers' filing doesn't require companion names or expense details

The litany of corruption in the highest places goes on.

And where the money goes, sex and power are not far behind.

From Michelle Grattan's Avoiding the real issue:
... The Government is now living with a very uncertain situation. The troops are at higher risk, and it cannot predict when this danger might bring some disaster. And if that happened, the Australian community could start to be quite uncomfortable about the commitment. ...

The accompanying cartoon, Howard in a sea of blood, reminds of an aspect of the mission that escaped Ms Grattan. Howard may want a real trophy, just one, but not a result of an accident, or a prank gone wrong, or friendly fire. Maybe he wants the full-dress funeral of a real trooper to be his undying legacy. Then he, too, like General Peter Pace (Gen. Pace Reflects on What Makes a Moral Soldier) can put the photo under rhe glass on his desktop as a perpetual reminder of the cost of war.
... Pace says a guiding principle is a promise he made to himself after the death of the first Marine he lost in combat. The four-star general keeps a picture of the fallen Marine on his desk "as a reminder of all the individuals who I lost in combat as a second lieutenant. ...

Costs? More like the rewards from a grateful military-industrial complex. As we shall see when Brendan Nelson shakes off the spell, and arrives back home with a half-dozen of these beauties. Pentagon developing supersonic shape-shifting assassin.

The promise of power is sweeter, to some, than any other scent. To the pagan, nothing is a more potent talisman than another man's spilt blood. If Howard has learnt anything from Bush, it's the thrill of signing away another person's life.

The shape may shift and slither, but a loop is always a loop.