There is nothing "untenable" about Israel's policy. In fact, it has been an amazingly successful policy since the earliest Zionist activities at the end of the 19th century. As a state, Israel has pulled off bona fide miracles: defeating armies five times the size of its IDF; integrating and rehabilitating a refugee population (c. 750,000 Jews driven from Arab countries between 1949 and 1954) larger than the population of Israel at the time; draining swamps and making the desert bloom; creating the second most successful hi-tech industrial complex in the world (second only to the USA); and creating the only functioning democracy in the entire Middle East, in which the Arab citizens of Israel have five political parties (four more than they can vote for in any Arab state in the entire world) and twelve members of Parliament.

In his book Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News, Bernard Goldberg recalled, as a glaring example of how the media elite are often out of touch, how after the 1972 election New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael was completely baffled about how Richard Nixon could have beaten George McGovern: "Nobody I know voted for Nixon."

AREAS with a significant number of single parents have emerged in some of the poorest parts of Victoria.

But from where I sat, crying over the cash my wife had flushed down the mineshaft, what made this entertainment so unrousing was the most contemporary thing about it -- its endorsement of the Left-wing prejudices that so mar the arts in Australia.

Just as an excellent business puts the needs of customers first, the public sector is inverting the traditional heirarchical pyramid to focus on making a difference to the people it should be serving.

Last night the UN Security Council was in emergency session on the situation in Australia, where John Howard seized power in a bloodless election on Saturday. The defeat of democracy had been long foreshadowed by the country's artists and intellectuals, as well as by some prominent columnists.

Jacques Derrida, the father of the pseudo-philosophy of "Deconstructionism", has been deconstructed into the next world. He had been conducting a terminal "narrative" with cancer. Well, at least that is the subjective unproven conclusion we have, since, after all, how do we REALLY know that death and cancer exist? Well in fact we do, and the passing of an individual, even a philosopher who has contributed to human confusion rather than to enlightenment and clarification is regrettable. However, the tragedy of ordinary human mortality should not dissuade us from examining the legacy left behind.

Netscape Owner AOL Is Making a Web Browser ... Based on IE
This story is so full of irony that I don't know where to begin. How about an obvious jab? You know that Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) has one foot in the grave when AOL--which basically ushered Netscape to an early, undeserved grave--is developing a Web browser product based on--yep, you guessed it--IE. That's right, folks. Just as the planet is finally starting to move to more constantly updated Web browser products such as Firefox, Mozilla, and Opera, AOL is getting off its technology-averse patootie and making its own browser ... that's based on IE. Why not just create a new PC based on the Commodore Amiga? Or a car based on the Packard? These ideas were good in their time, but as you know, the world has moved on. Even Microsoft doesn't seem to be concerned about making IE any better than it was in 1998. Why anyone else would bother, either, is unclear.

Time changes the river, I suppose, and it changes all of us as well. I was tired of Sudan being on the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations. I was tired of dictators with Swiss bank accounts, like Castro and Arafat and Mugabe, masquerading as men of the people. I was tired of Europeans picking on cowboys, everybody picking on the Jews, and the whole supposedly civilized world of gutless wonders, including the dinosaur graveyard called Berkeley, picking on America and Israel. As I write this, 1.2 million black Christian and Muslim Sudanese are starving to death thanks to the Arab government in Khartoum and the worldwide mafia of France, Germany, China, Russia, and practically every Islamic country on the face of the earth. What happened to the little boy who cried when Adlai Stevenson lost? He died in Darfur.

“Her nickname is Federal Express. That’s because when she goes to a guy’s apartment, she absolutely, positively HAS to be there overnight.”

Two win Nobel medicine prize
By Matt Moore in Stockholm, Sweden
04oct04
AMERICANS Richard Axel and Linda B. Buck have won the 2004 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for their work in studying odorant receptors and the organisation of the olfactory system in human beings.

Despite opposition from leading scientific and economic advisors, Russian President Vladimir Putin has told key ministers to sign off on the documents necessary for ratification of the Kyoto Protocol and the State Duma may approve it in the next few weeks. Russia's support will clear the way for the treaty entering into force. Apparently, the Russians have decided that Kyoto's defects shouldn't stop it from being used as a bargaining chip with the European Union. According to Myron Ebell, Director of Global Warming & International Environmental Policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute: "Russia's scientists have dismissed the faulty science behind the treaty and their economists have done the same with the rosy economic projections put forward by Kyoto's backers. The only thing left supporting ratification is pure politics."