Senators stymied, media muzzled, the truth trashed.. then to search the underbelly of Nazi history until an honest historian accidentally raises the demon of despair..
Itís a long week in Australian politics.

I can’t say more. Locked as we are in combat over “black armband history”, pondering our collective responsibilities for the past, watching the debasement of language.. here is Inga Glendinnen at work on our history wars. It is a fabulous piece.

Norwegians try to hide their lives of brutality and street surrealism behind a cloak of herring-scented respectability. But the internet gives them away..
Teacher uses fire hose on students
[...]

“… political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along [...]

The mills of the American Gods are beginning to grind, if exceeding slow, and we will see if they grind exceeding small.
Seymour Hersh in the October 25th New Yorker said: “as some former U.N. inspectors often predicted, the tons of chemical and biological weapons that the American public was led to expect have [...]

While the Japanese build vaguely frightening robot pets, enterprising American corporation Reemco has built a robot for your cat.
The back scratching cat mantis is only one example of their ingenuity. I particularly like the security system, built from semi non-toxic giant wasp hives.
Acccording to independent witnesses from the wonderful digerati at the Museum of Hoaxes, [...]

This is just sooooo beguiling. The British Philosophers’ Magazine on the net.
And most beguiling of all – the Fun and Games Section, as in:
“Welcome to our fun & games section. This has been developed as part of an on-going commitment to make TPM Online more interactive. We are going to be adding [...]

As part of the next post, I went looking for the 8 part Warner Bros PBS documentary series called “Five Hundred Nations” about the history of the Indians in North America.
It has gone from the internet. You can buy it on Amazon, but there’s no commentary, and no website on PBS.
It did exist. Significant [...]

Just today, our conservative government is negotiating the Free Trade Agreement with the US. We are playing for big, ugly stakes.
Kim Dalton, from the Government’s own Australian Film Commission, says
Australia is one small step in the U.S. game plan to get this sort of regime in Europe. AFMA members will wake up one day [...]

The Australian Centre for the Moving Image is a Melbourne based digital arts empire, with the world’s largest screen gallery and a spiffy website which behaves badly on my Safari.
Such is the world interest in digital arts that ACMI currently googles behind the Australian College of Midwives Incorporated, a program to compute Air Core Mutual [...]