Blogotariat

Follow the link to read the latest article at The Urbanist, Time to seize the Australian Century? http://blogs.crikey.com.au/theurbanist/2014/07/20/time-to-seize-the-aust...

Americans prepared for the tenth anniversary of 9/11 with different emphases and colorations of memory and regret. Some believed it an unsolved and covered-up conspiracy in which the Bushes and their business partners the bin Ladens had given the American War Machine an excuse to make more money. Some thought no skyscraper would fall straight down without explosions from beneath. Some claimed no film or video existed of a plane approaching the Pentagon, whose wrecking was therefore an ‘inside job’.

A comment on a previous post expresses a common set of views among conservatives:

Darwin has the final word on sillyness. If same sex marriage was a useful thing in society, then the vast range of human societies would show us a successful society with same sex marriage as normal.

Tony Abbott you are weak. When interviewed by Fran Kelly on ‘Insiders’ this morning you were asked if you had called Vladimir Putin. You said you hadn’t called the Russian President over the murder of at least 28 Australians. You gave no indication that you intended to. Why not? Are you too frightened? You say you have spoken to the Russian Trade Minister. Really? What a pathetic reply to a genuine opportunity to show the world that you view the deaths of innocent Australians sufficiently important enough to get on the phone and demand answers. You are clearly not up to the job you have been elected to do.

Another big loss for the Newman LNP government here in Queensland, with a swing of nearly 19 per cent in the Stafford by-election. I did my little bit for this, speaking at a public forum on asset sales. However, since only the Labor and Green candidates showed up, and no-one in the crowd seemed inclined to vote for the LNP or Family First anyway, I doubt that my contribution to margin was noticeable.

The letter below is from a Norwegian volunteer in Gaza. His name is Mads Gilbert and in his ordinary life he is the Professor of Professor and Clinical Head of the Clinic of Emergency Medicine University Hospital of North Norway in Tromsø. When you have read it, use the Twitter or Facebook buttons and send it to your friends. Do this for his sake, and for the sake of the dead and injured whose bloody remains are swept off the hospital floor by the cleaners.

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(From Robert Alexander)

‘What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals.’ (Hamlet II ii 303)

Out of the least mysterious air crash since Napoleonic times (plane over war zone suddenly changes altitude, gunner panics, shoots it down) Abbott sought to spin a tale of lengthening horror and suspense. It may be months, he told the bereaved, before we know what happened, or bury at last the remains of the dead. He sent Julie Bishop off to New York to ‘campaign’ for an open, international inspection of the crash site, achieving this in the UN Security Council despite the veto of China, who thought her a ‘complete fool’, and Russia, who found Abbott’s McCarthyist rush to judgment ‘unacceptable’.

Tony Magrathea‏ who tweets as @dickybeacholdie had this to say on Twitter on 17 July 2014:My foi request for Abbotts form RN, renounce British citizenship has been denied by Peta Credlin. Home Office [U.K.] still looking.The form Mr. Magrathea is referring to is here.

• Faulkner expects state conference defeat on party reform – “Labor stalwart John Faulkner knows his call to empower party members will send the NSW state conference into chaos and splinter his own Left faction. He also knows it’s essential.”

Putin is unwelcome in Queensland. But not as unwelcome as me.

Eight years ago, doctors took nasal tissue samples and grafted them onto the spines of 20 quadriplegics. The idea was that stem cells within the nasal tissue might turn into neurons that could help repair the damaged spinal cord, and the experiment actually worked a few of the patients, who regained a little bit of sensation. But it didn’t go well for one woman in particular, who not only didn’t experience any abatement in her paralysis, but recently started feeling pain at the site of the implant.

250,000,000 miles: how far away the Rosetta spacecraft is from Earth. However, Rosetta is just 8,000 miles from its target, a comet that is called 67P and is surprisingly shaped like a rubber ducky.