Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

'You've MADE it!' That's the message that's used to sell everything, from clothes to diets to holidays. You've made it, you're worth it – we want to shout to the rooftops that we are successful! But the moment of triumphalism is always short-lived, and always followed by a hollowness – the void that waits for the next purchase, the next triumph.

Today marks a milestone in Australian military history - the first award (following abolition of Imperial honours in 1991) of a Victoria Cross for Australia.

Arne Naess died on 12th January 2009, aged 96. He was a Norwegian philosopher who promoted an all-embracing relationship between humans and the earth. He was an inspiration for many Green political activists.

Presidents can try to avoid hard decisions and therefore avoid controversy. That's just not my nature. I'm the kind of person that, you know, is willing to take on hard tasks, and in times of war people get emotional; I understand that. Never really, you know, spent that much time, frankly, worrying about the loud voices. I of course hear them, but they didn't affect my policy, nor did they affect – affect how I made decisions. (President George W. Bush)

Throughout the Bush years, politicians and the media, both in Australia and abroad, have been prepared to play brazen Alice in Wonderland games with definitions. ... You can admit to the use of stress positions, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation and the rest of it – brutalities long familiar from the dungeons of the most sinister regimes in the world – so long as you barefacedly announce, as Bush did in 2006: "The United States does not torture. It's against our laws, and it's against our values." (Jeff Sparrow)

A clear lesson of the recent period is that the world is too interconnected for nations to go it alone in their economic, financial, and regulatory policies. International cooperation is thus essential if we are to address the crisis successfully and provide the basis for a healthy, sustained recovery. (Ben Bernanke)

The Australian Human Rights Commission says asylum seekers are still being treated like political footballs and enduring "miserable" conditions at some immigration detention centres...The Government says conditions are improving and it is committed to a set of immigration values. But the Human Rights Commissioner, Graeme Innes, has told Naomi Woodley in Canberra that he's still waiting to see if those values translate into actual changes. (Brendan Trembath, Radio National's AM)

New South Wales likes to think of itself as Australia, but it isn’t. Back in 1887, the redoubtable Henry Parkes even proposed that the colony of New South Wales change its name to Australia – a move not unexpectedly opposed (and ridiculed) by the other colonies. But the sentiment persists. The former prime minister John Howard was a typical Sydneysider (an early Victorian term for those who lived on the Sydney side of the Murray). He professed not to recognise state identities or loyalties; we are, after all, simply Australians. (Norman Abjorensen)

If we wish an end to terror, then we need to act to halt terror from the sky. Well-resourced airstrikes, slowly improving blasts from Gazan shanty-towns and mad mullahs invoking the gods; they all reign over terror, with innocent civilians too often on the receiving end. Bearded cult-leaders from all three Apocalyptic or Messianic faiths have to be reined in. Their ill-considered orthodoxies, centred on out-dated doctrines damage children, be they blasted bodily as cost of war, or blitzed conceptually by head-rocking rote drills from holy scrolls of one era or another.

Webdiary returns, in fighting trim for an interesting 2009.

The sensitivity of the Earth’s atmosphere to anthropogenic carbon gases has been underestimated. As the orgy of burning carbon products of 400 million of biological evolution continues unabated, pushed by business, advertisers and consumption-promoting governments, global warming proceeds at a pace faster than projected by the IPCC, tracking toward likely climate tipping points.

The paper started this summer's attack on Hicks just before Christmas, as the restrictive control orders expired.  There was no messing around as every point possible was fired into the public mindset, accompanied by a command that Hicks should reveal all.

There is nothing like the prospect of a radical life change to concentrate the mind on things that really mater. So I want to identify, if I can, the most important thing that we discover in life. At least, it is the most important thing that I have discovered. I will share it with you, like a precious jewel, fit for this occasion. I refer to love. Love for one another. Love for our community. Love for others everywhere in the world. Love transcends even scholarship, cleverness and university degrees. It is greater than pride and wealth. It endures when worldly vanities fade.

We are Australian Jews who join thousands in Israel and around the world condemning ongoing Israeli military attacks on Gaza. Together with Israeli peace group Gush Shalom, we condemn the current war as "inhuman, superfluous" and "abominable". While Israel has the right to protect its citizens and to demand an end to the crime of Palestinian rockets that target civilians, this cannot be used as a pretext for the grossly disproportionate military assault on Gaza ...(Australian Independent Jewish Voices)

Tolstoy argues that no class of man has the right to punish or sit in judgement upon another, and, from out of the crucible of complexity which he has painstakingly built his story, gives a conclusion almost point-by-point worthy of a lesser evangelist.

Do most Australian voters ignore the importance of their vote in the Senate? Webdiarist Ernest William Graham is concerned that they do, and warns in this contribution that this tendency allows the Senate to be used to negate the will of the majority.

... Webdiary and its moderators are off on a frolic, chilling, recharging, what you will.

The latest update from the Democratic Audit program at Swinburne on how our democracy is working.

One of the favourite statements made by the [former] Minister is that “people in detention can go home anytime they choose to co-operate with Australian authorities”. But the cases of Akram al Masri and three other Palestinians gave us an excellent opportunity to claim release on a writ of habeas corpus due to the inability of the Minister to have other countries co-operate with his plans.

 Once upon a time, as the Coalition forces gathered at the Kuwait/Iraq border, a publicist brought along some representative national flags and placed them in the hands of invading soldiers.  This provided an image of international unity behind the invading of Iraq to sieze Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction.  Now, whether it be by accident or design (I prefer to think the latter) the Iraqi cameraman has given the U.S. a living flag, representing resentment of perceived injustice.

Malthus was wrong as demographers well know. It’s well known that the projections Malthus made of the English population failed to unfold, and the steep upward curve of population plateaued and now actually creeps downward, not just in England but in many parts of the World.  We know perfectly well what the key factor is in causing that plateau, and it’s not affluence as such, it’s not telling the Catholics to shut up (Ireland and Italy have among the lowest fertility rates in the World), it’s not giving out free condoms and abortions, it’s not an authoritarian imposition of small families, and it has nothing to do with immigration. It’s teaching women to read.

Not only is today's announcement deeply flawed and short-sighted policy, one that all but ignores the science and economics of what is at stake, but it is also – and you must know this – a deliberate betrayal of the democratic process by the ALP and you personally.

"We've disrupted plots to attack our homeland. We have captured or killed hundreds of al Qaeda leaders and operatives in more than two dozen countries -- including the man who mastermind the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.  The terrorists continue to pose serious challenges, as the world saw in the terrible attack in Mumbai last month. Al Qaeda's top two leaders remain at large. Yet they are facing pressure so intense that the only way they can stay alive is to stay underground. The day will come, the day will come when they receive the justice they deserve." - U.S. President George W. Bush