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| More!? More!? |
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| Male bonding in crisis of masculinity? | |
Johnny (arch-conservative) Howard had a little snipe at the ALP last month with comments about
public schooling lacking values and predictably, the politically dysfunctional
ex-schoolteachers in the ALP bit back with a litany of core values which their
publicly educated children
were learning - things like 'inclusion', and 'tolerance', and 'caring', and
'empathy', and lots of new ways of saying 'political
correctness'. Predictably, words like 'honesty' and 'responsibility' didn't
feature highly. Mark (Maddog) Latham pretended to be suitably outraged, but now
that the rabid snarling has died down, he's barking a different tune. Maddog is now calling attention to a 'crisis in masculinity' among men and
boys. One is tempted to suggest a relationship with Maddog's bout with
testicular cancer, but that would really be hitting below the belt. The ball-breaker for Maddog here is the push to allow a small number of
men-only scholarships by private schools. That is - affirmative action
for men. The worm has turned. Maddog is not yet willing to admit the ALP's role in this - but even the True
Believers would have to be wearing blinkers not to see the connection. One of the big justifications for affirmative action in the '80s was that
it was necessary to have role models for girls to see and aspire to. Exactly
why a women who was obviously
less competent than her male underlings would be a good role model was always a
bit of a mystery, but that point always got lost amongst the subsequent shrill
accusations of 'chauvinist' and
'misogynist'. It was, of course, always about subsidies for educated
middle class women masquerading as compassion for other
people. But their approach to the education system was more insidious. Quiet
suggestions of child
molestation drove men out of the teaching profession while 'flexible'
selection criteria at teacher's colleges (involving interviews by panels of
women) prevented men entering it, and eventually stopped most of them from
applying. Male primary-school teachers are now rare enough to stand out like
dog's balls. Mothers now send their sons to schools in which the gardener (the
most junior position) is the only adult male, and then wonder why their sons
exhibit behavioral problems. The family law court effectively removed the ability for separated fathers
to help raise their children, and the feminization of the education system
produced a shortage of suitable role models and further alienated the boys.
Curricular tampering, girls-only IT classes, and 'control' techniques
designed to 'stop the boys getting more than their fair share of attention'
all took their toll. When they go to high school, the strongest males they see are the older
boys in gangs, and then their single mothers wonder why their sons become
gang-members. (How could this happen? Today's education system is so
.. caring.) The boys see no future in school, they see no future in
education, and they now perform worse than the girls in every subject. Men are
generally more poorly educated, they suicide at five times the rate
of women, and die on average seven years younger. And now Maddog laments that so many men suffer 'depression and
alienation in society'. The ALP not only championed political correctness, but institutionalized
it. If Maddog wants to explore what went wrong he'd better be prepared to have
his nose rubbed in it. The ALP created this problem, and can't back out of it
without admitting it. The ALP is getting another political wedgie.
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| Ignoring the signs .. | |
The key to successfully dumping garbage in an unauthorized area is
your ability to get away undetected. While Australia has been used as
human garbage dump for many years, the actual people who do the dumping have
had to pay a significant price - often involving a prison sentence. This has
helped to keep the price high, and the market small. But the latest arrival on Australia's Ashmore Reef has changed all that. 15
asylum seekers have
turned up on the tiny, normally uninhabited, island with no sign of a boat or
other vehicle which could have brought them there. Apparently someone dumped their
cargo and left. This is partially a probe to test the mettle of the government in an
election lead-up, but it is also a change of strategy. They must have seen the
1950s sitcom where the man dumps the baby on the doorstep and presses the
door-bell before running away. It's hard to know what their agreement is with their passengers, but if the
agreement is simply to deliver them to Australia, then they have fulfilled their
contractual obligations. Never mind that Ashmore Reef is excised, and that
the asylum-seeker's next stop will be Christmas Island or Nauru. All parties are trying to capitalize on this of course. Amanda (Killer
Whale) Vandstone is gloating that it vindicates the excision policy for
Australia's remote islands. The ALP's Stephen Smith is whimpering
incoherently on your ABC.
"The Government says it is strong on border protection - the truth is it is
incompetent,"
In fact, the ALP's stated asylum seeker policy of 'compassion for asylum
seekers, punishment for traffickers' has just been totally discredited. It
now equates to an open door policy, which of course is why they are screaming
so loudly about it being the government's fault, and about the government
capitalizing on it in the lead up to the election.
Well Stephen, demonstrating the inadequacy of the opposition's policies
is usually considered a legitimate thing do to in a democracy. In reality, 15 people testing the mettle of Australia's minister for
immigration is not a security threat - it's just a security probe. They were
hundreds of miles from the mainland on a tiny island with very little food or
water. And most sensible thing to do with them would have been to simply leave
them there.
UPDATE 2004-03-07 Calling them 'asylum-seekers' may have been a little hasty. Apparently these
people are Indonesian nationals who thought they would get jobs in
Australia picking fruit. There's not a lot of fruit picking gets done on
Ashmore reef, but they claim to have been 'tricked' by the people who dumped
them there. It's not actually clear whether they intended to seek asylum - they
are probably just straight-out illegals. Whatever.
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| Anything for attention | |
An old favorite joke told by racists and rednecks goes:
Q: What do you call an Aboriginal kid with a bike?
A: "Thief!"
This joke seems to have been taken to heart by residents of Australia's best
known ghetto after the tragic death of 17 year-old Aboriginal Thomas Hickey,
who impaled himself on a fence in a freak bicycle accident in Redfern last
Saturday. Residents accused police of chasing him at the time and a riot ensued.
Apparently if someone runs from the police and kills themselves, it's the fault
of the police - the runner takes no responsibility for his decision to actually
run. Even if there is an arrest
warrant out on him. But the police in this case were caught red-handed - literally actually
because a patrol car stopped and tried to help young Tommy and the police were
up to their wrists in blood as they tried to stop the flow from his
wounds. Sadly their bid to save his life failed and Tommy died. The police denied that they were chasing the youth before his accident -
but everyone who has ever watched a bad 1950s soapie knows that denial makes
someone guilty, and further denial only makes their guilt more obvious. It's a
bit like denying that you are homosexual - the more
you do it, the more obvious it is that you have something to hide. The ensuing riot left the Redfern railway station seriously damaged by
fire, and some 40 police
injured (those wobble-bellies of the NSW police force too slow to dodge the
shower of Molotov cocktails). But more importantly it provided what minority
groups and drama queens love more than anything: media exposure. Those of us who don't spend our entire lives in Kirribilli or Toorak are
pretty used to having the local Indigenous Brotherhood ask for money. Three
generations of welfare have
created a pretty ravenous appetite for other people's money, and the government's
handouts are apparently no longer enough to satisfy the need. Most Australians
are happy with the local Aborigines receiving welfare - it relieves them of the
guilt of growing rich from land which might still have had Aborigines living on it in
the unlikely event that no other conquerers had stumbled on the world's largest
island by the twenty-first century. The out-of-mind-out-of-sight guilt money lets people pay a small amount and get
on with their lives secure in the moral position that they can ignore the
Aborigines - the guilt has been outsourced. It has also effectively purchased
the Aboriginal population a cloak of invisibility. But when the local Aborigines ask for money, most people know that the best
strategy is simply to look through them like they are invisible, and pretend
they don't exist ('not my problem - I gave at the office'). Of course this is
a little psychologically damaging for the beggars. With a carefully reconstructed
history of torture, alienation, slavery and dispossession, they have to put up
with a far worse reality on the street - having people pretend they are not
there. The old adage 'be there or be bitched about' is a poor substitute
for 'be there or be ignored'. In another 20 years the so called 'stolen generation'
will all be dead, and it will be quite hard for the fourth generation of
welfare dependents to blame their plight on events which they only know about
through the chronicles of social workers, career victims, and left-leaning
academics. In the meantime, the key is to just keep them invisible. But every now and then, an opportunity arises. A tragic death of a 17 year
old boy is an opportunity to get some media exposure and, for
angry young men in the ghetto, to make up for all the times that the average
Australian has just looked right through them. In a capitalist
society, every misfortune is a potential opportunity for others. An uneventful
afternoon needs a movie to remove the boredom, a broken leg requires a doctor,
a dead body needs a casket. But true victim status
works the same way - these events are opportunities. Some people balance
feathers on their noses, some climb high mountains, achieve greatness on the
sporting field, others throw Molotov cocktails. It's just a way for the
invisible generation to say 'notice me, notice me'. Okay guys, you had your ten minutes of fame. Now put down those yucky
bottles of petrol and run along to the CentreLink office like good little
welfare recipients.
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| Staring down the Maddog | |
Getting a wedgie is not one of happiest school memories for those of us who
didn't take karate classes or felt that 'school bully' was an inappropriate
qualification on a future Curriculum Vitae. But at least the feeling of being
split up the middle felt politically balanced. Sadly, wedge politics doesn't
make the grade. The Howard government has pursued this strategy very successfully in the
last eight years by spotting the fundamental contradictions in the left-wing
belief set. All marriages have inbuilt tensions, marriages of convenience
doubly so. Starting arguments within married couples is always good fun at
dinner parties, and Janette must have given enough of them for (the normally
socially inept) Little Johnny to have mastered the strategy. Doubtless Johnny's
education at Canterbury Boy's High educated him on the effectiveness of the
wedge, and he has been playing wedge politics ever since. Much to the chagrin of The Left, who, under Johnny's Regime are no longer
able to suppress discussion on those 'difficult' areas which they were able
to silence for so long. Nothing like little dirty laundry in public to cause
some political embarrasment. But the new hero of The Left, the intellectual politician, the man with the
ideas, Mark (Madog) Latham thought he would give the PM a wedgie by bringing up
the issue of superannuation reductions for the politicians. Unfortunately the
attempt backfired. After letting Peter (PM-wannabe) Costello make a fool of
himself on radio by dismissing the idea, Johnny simply accepted it. There is nothing quite as alarming as drawing a line in the sand for an
adversary and having them march right up to it "oh, you mean this
line?. OK - I'll see you and raise you." - even though the reduction only
applies to new politicians, not the current ones. Of course the Left claimed victory - they could hardly do anything else.
But now the opposition has to make noises about applying it to the
current politicians too to make themselves sound more sincere than
Johnny. Johnny would love to do this - he can afford to lose more than the
Mark Lathams of the world - he's been an MP for longer. Unfortunately Johnny can't do this, the prospect of MPs suing the government
for breach of contract over their agreed superannuation payouts would be a
giggle for the rest of us, but it's not a legacy that Johnny is willing to
leave. The cynics may observe that this is yet another example of the government
legislating a transfer of money from the Gen-Xers to the Baby Boomers, but
that's nothing new. The Baby Boomers are well and truly overrepresented in
positions of power and influence, and the government rarely makes any decision
to financially disadvantage them for the benefit of others. Now Maddog has to face the wrath of any new MPs, and for the the ALP
to win government, that means a lot more new ALP MPs than the Coalitition -
and a lot more disgruntled ones. Oops. A party room full of people saying 'Mark, you're doing a great
job. Just don't .. like .. make any more suggestions, OK?'? Its just what
Johnny needs to push Latham back to a small target strategy. It worked against
Kim (Fatboy) Beazley, and Johnny's conservative nature means he'd prefer
history to repeat. Why change a winning formula?
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| A Deal with The Devil! | |
Faced with the Americans pulling up their pants and going home, Australia made
an effort to bend over and agreed to the 'free trade' deal with the
US. Compromises on both sides meant that some things were included, some were
exempt and others are to be freed up gradually over the next two decades. The details of what is and is not actually included in the deal are actually
not that interesting - both sides simply made a judgment about the electoral
damage that the special interest groups could inflict, and gave exemptions to
the groups would could cause the most damage. Like all tariff lists and quotas
it is really just a Who's Who of political favoritism. The interesting thing to watch over the next few months and the lead-up to the
next election will be the political sophistry surrounding the decision. The
government will try to make the deal sound like the precursor to the second
coming - a bread and fishes miracle which will bring a new age of prosperity
and enlightenment to the Great Australian Nation. The ALP will try to make it
sound like a complete botch up which gives the USA a much better deal than
Australia. And the Greens and Democrats will try to outdo each other with
claims that it was a deal with the Great Satan (ie America), and how it will
make the dead rise and walk the earth. Pretty much standard politics perhaps, but the ALP is set to do more squirming
on this issue than the other parties. The government can claim that 'trade
is good', the loony left can claim that 'all trade is bad', and
the ALP will have to try making the call about whether:
- The deal actually disadvantages Australia, and we would have been better
off walking away. Unfortunately this will make them look economically backward,
particularly as the Australian economy is doing quite well under the
stewardship of Little Johnny; or
- The deal actually benefits Australia but benefits the USA more, and John
Howard is too much of a pussy to cut a better deal for Australia at the
bargaining table. Unfortunately selling the idea that Mark (Maddog) Latham
yelling that Dubya is the most incompetent and dangerous president in living
memory and then successfully negotiating a trade deal with his administration
will be a hard sell.
The details of the deal are beyond most of us, and possibly beyond any of
us, to actually make an informed judgment on. But those who believe in net
benefits from unilateral trade are comforted by the fact that there are now
a few less people that our government forbids us to trade with, and a few less
trade barriers when we do. Of course those of us who have heard terms like 'free education', 'free
speech' and 'free health care' abused so often in the past know that someone,
somewhere always pays a price. Even when its 'free love', someone gets screwed.
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| Are you coming to the stoning? | |
How much is your life
worth in dollars? This question might make you uncomfortable, but it is
easy to compute by answering another simple question: How much would you be
willing to pay to for a safety device which had a significant chance of saving
your life in an accident? For the maths nerds, VOYL (the Value Of Your Life) is given by
where
MC = Maximum Payment (the most you would be willing to pay)
PSYL = probability of saving your life. For instance if buying an airbag had a 0.1% chance of saving your life **
and you were willing to pay up to $1,000 for it, you have just valued your life
at $1,000,000. Not a bad sum, and probably realistic for most people in
Australia. $AU1M is a lot of money, but let's face it - we are a nation of Volvo
drivers, even if we don't have the phallic symbol on the front of our cars, and
the bad taste to drive around with the lights on during the day. The free market thrives in the
risk of death. Of course, when comparing the value between people, socialists would want to
scale these values for personal income. For example Fred might be only willing
to pay half as much as Jane for the same device, but he might only be able to
earn half as much money as
Jane because he can't take advantage of affirmative action
schemes. So their relative valuations would be the same. But when we see two people making radically different decisions (even when their
incomes are factored into the equation), we can conclude that they place a
radically different value of their own lives. Anyone who has traveled in Asia has seen this principle in action. In fact,
anyone who has traveled with Asians has seen this principle in
action. Landing in Sydney airport in a 747 full of Asian tourists is an
extraordinary experience - the seat-belts come off as soon as the plane has
landed and people start wandering around the cabin collecting their baggage. Never
mind that the plane is still doing 300Km/h, and that a sudden deceleration would
throw them around like grains of rice, and crush them like lychees when other
passengers landed on them. Anyone who thinks that non-Australians are somehow just 'not aware of the risks'
should think again. One of the prime-time shows on Taipei TV is the road-kill
program, which is like a macabre cross between shock-site rotten.com and
'Greatest Australian Home Videos' show. Anyone lucky enough to be carrying
their video camera who sees an accident, films the aftermath and sends it to
the local TV station. In fairness, it should be pointed out that the editors have the good
taste to use Vaseline-style effects on the crushed skulls and the pools of
bloodied brains oozing down the road. It's quite tasteful really. Like a love
scene from a bad movie. A very bad movie. Of course, while traffic accidents might be regarded as a necessity for the
convenience of modern motoring, or a blunt instrument used by God to resurrect the principle of
Survival of the Fittest
in an age of first-world socialist health care, a
great deal of blood seems to be spilled in wars. And even in the aftermath of
wars - like in Iraq. Yesterday, 50 people died in a very successful suicide attack in Iraq. The targets were not
Americans this time, but a Kurdish political group in the north. After wringing
our collectivist hands
and bemoaning that it's all the fault of the Americans ("if only Saddam
were still in power, this wouldn't have happened"), readers are reminded
that 251 people also died yesterday in a holy stampede at an annual Muslim
festival in Saudi Arabia. There seems to have been a rush to get the ritual stoning, worthy of the
hysteria in a Monty Python skit. Alas, this was only a pillar of rock
symbolizing the devil, not a young woman who chose to have sex with someone without the
permission of the Muslim
clerics, but it was still exciting enough to kill 250 people in the rush. This may sound like a tragic accident, or a Who concert ^^ gone mad, but 14
years ago, 1400 people died doing the same thing! Averaged out over 14 years,
this is 100 people per festival. There are around 1 million people there, so
this is one chance in 10,000. Would you run a 1 in 10,000 risk of death to throw pebbles at a piece of
rock? What price have these individuals placed on their own lives? Many people
are unhappy that the US places a much higher value on the lives of US citizens
than those of other countries - the Middle Eastern expression is "Americans have expensive
blood". They fail to realize that the US is reacting to their own market
valuation. And as for the suicide bombers in Iraq - they represent the
people who send them. Guys - don't expect anyone to value your life more highly
than you value it yourself. -------------- ** Note this is not 0.1% chance of saving your life in an
accident, but of saving your life. For instance, you had a 1% chance of
having a accident, and it had 10% of saving your live in an accident, then it
would have a 0.1% chance of saving your life. Don't let the lefties confuse you on this
issue. ------------- ^^ In the 1980s 8 people died in a stampede before a Who concert when
organizers opened the stadium gates at the last minute, and fans rushed in to
get the best places.
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| When the peds go marching in | |
In the 18 months since some overzealous elements of the Religion of Peace
killed some 200 people in Bali, the devastation has extended beyond the blast
area. Australians once felt quite at home in Bali - the ability to get off your
Qantas jet, and buy an Australian newspaper and get rolling drunk in a bar
watching Australian sport surrounded by yobbos with accents not unlike your own
was a real blast. But suddenly Australians stopped coming. Having 88 fellow
Australians massacred kind of does that. Local business is no longer
booming. So the locals have been looking around for another way to make a few
bucks. A quick hunt around other Asian tourist destinations revealed one pretty
quickly - child sex. While it would be unfair to say that local operators have
gone into this en-mass, clearly some have seen the opportunity. Indonesia is
arguably the most corrupt country in the
world, Bali has unused infrastructure and many desperate operators and
Australia is close enough for a dirty weekend - the perfect combination. Indonesia has managed
to cover this up with its usual indignant denials and outright lies until now,
but the arrest of former Australian diplomat William Stuart Brown on pedophile
charges in Bali kind of brought things to a head. The after-blast vacuum is
being filled by child-sex operators. Chalk up another great achievement for the
Religion of Peace. Diplomacy As a sideline, this also begs the question of why so many diplomats and
judges are pedophiles. Stories about preferential treatment within the
departments of Foreign Affairs and Justice and special hand-ups to 'people like
us' are a bit far fetched for those of us who don't like subscribing to conspiracy
theories (that's people like us, dear reader). It seems far more likely
that there is something about the job that attracts these people. Diplomacy is the art of persuasion, and seduction is surely a popular
application of those skills. But sex with children is unlikely to involve much
diplomacy, so that doesn't ring true. The common element is, of course, power. Judges and diplomats have
more power than anyone else in society (unlike elected politicians they don't
have constituents scrutinizing their every move). Further, while the supposedly
selfish businessman is motivated by greed and the desire for more money, the supposedly selfless
judge or diplomat is motivated by desire for power over other people - a far
more frightening prospect. Rape, we are often told, is about power - pedophilia doubly so. What
kind of person wants to take advantage of someone totally unable to defend
themselves? Who are the true predators in society? The jury is back. We know the answer.
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| Kiddie porn | |
Your ABC reports that a 26
year old man spent four days chatting via Internet to what he thought was a
13-year old girl. They arranged to meet (apparently for sex). To his
disappointment, the 13-year old girl turned out to be an (apparently much
older) undercover police officer, who arrested him and charged him with ...? It's not clear what this man's crime is. It is clear that he is
kind of person who would like to have sex with a 13 year old
girl, and many decent-minded people may think this is reason enough to lock him
in a cell with another sexual pervert who is bigger than he is, but it's not
clear what his crime is. He may have thought he was going to have sex with an
underage girl, but he wasn't. Ever. It wasn't going to happen. There was no 13
year old girl. She didn't exist. She only existed in his head - as an (admittedly sick) fantasy created by
the police officer. He pleaded guilty to 'using the Internet with intent to procure a child
for sex'. So the crime is the intent, but not the action. Does
that mean that if a man believed his partner was 18, when she was in
fact 13, that he would innocent because there was no intent. Does
something become a crime when there is actual damage, or intent to cause
damage? Both maybe? What if there is no intent to do damage (if the pervert
actually believed that his desires would be beneficial for the 13 year old? So the crime becomes intent to do something which other people
believe would be harmful. But someone with all the facts in this case would
know that no such damage would ever occur (because there was no 13 year old). This is all a bit Zen for us concrete thinkers. We may have rid the
Internet of sick predator, but maybe the best way to applaud this man's
conviction is with the sound of one hand clapping.
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| But Monsieur, it's only wafer thin! | |
Busted-arsed pacific Island nation Nauru has hit the headlines
again with news of a hunger strike by failed asylum seekers, which your (ever
balanced) ABC reports has now been going on for a month. Desperate people do desperate things, and the pro-asylum seeker groups are
clearly pretty desperate. Normally, of course, people who go on a hunger strike
lapse into a coma at 10-12 days, and die after three or four weeks. So it really is make or break time. No-one has died yet, and unless they
can produce a corpse, then their credibility will get stinky really soon. The
occasional snack is apparently slipping through the the stitching on the lips.
Asylum seekers are well known for their hunger striking strategies, which seem
similar to smokers giving up the habit. Going on a hunger strike three times a
day (after breakfast, after lunch and after dinner) doesn't really qualify. How seriously will people take claims of a hunger strike after two months?
At that time it will be pretty obvious that these people are cheating more than
the fat chicks at the
Jenny Craig clinic. The bankrupt Nauru government has been pretty keen to take full advantage
of the fuss too - insisting that the strain on their medical resources is life
threatening, and they need more money. But a little bit of history helps to put
things into perspective here. Before their asylum seeker led recovery, Nauru
was in pretty dire straits. In particular, Australia was gently
threatening to refuse further treatment until Nauru payed their medical bills
(for services provided by Australia). The obesity levels amongst the Nauru
population don't exactly make for a healthy population. Forgiving the debt and providing money for medical services was part of the
deal struck with Nauru for housing the asylum seekers, but that hasn't stopped
the politicking. Whining about imminent death may squeeze a few extra bucks out
of the Australian government, so it's worth a try. Interestingly there has been no official request from Nauru - that
might open a full can of worms, and start a bidding war between busted-arsed
pacific nations. The corrupt Nauru government knows full well that they will
lose power if Australia takes their asylum seekers elsewhere and turns it's
back on the busted arsed country. They may bark objectionably at any opportunity, but they are unlikely to
bite the hand that feeds them, and a stern word will reduce them to whimpering
dogs. They can't have their bone and eat it too.
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| Dissent Crushed in Iran | |
With between 10,000 and 50,000 dead Iranians buried in rubble caused by of
an act of God, looters from neighboring towns are helping themselves to other
people's property. Foreign aid teams have rushed to the scene to administer water, food,
blankets and heaters. Not bad for a country which just two years ago was an
'Axis of Evil' which Dubya seemed keen to dismantle in daddy's unfinished 'New
World Order'. God seems to have done at least some of the work for him, and every
politician knows that one man's suffering is another man's opportunity, so it's
be nice to Iran week for a new Coalition of the Willing. Saving the lives of a few Iranians might seem a pretty pointless exercise,
but it's all part of the master plan. Dubya's stick and carrot approach to foreign policy is having mixed
results: Iraq needed the stick; Libya salivated for a while and took the
carrot; North Korea is going to need a big stick; and Iran may have been
waiting for an excuse to take the carrot. Couples brought together by suffering can have their passion fueled by
mutual grief. Maybe the same thing can work for entire nations? Iran has backed down over nuclear weapons stance - a good start, but the
rhetoric has been pretty hard. Even since the aid was promised, both parties
are following the petulant 'I'm not apologizing until he does' line,
but it looks like a few secret trysts between suitably sensitive diplomats
might consummate the subtle overtures and thaw relations. It's good to see a international politics maturing. The paradigm of the
primary school bully has been replaced by the behavior of petulant hormonal
teenagers. Death and taxes may be inevitable, but it seems equally difficult to escape
the embarrasments caused by our children and our governments.
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>> Please Sir, I want some more
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- ANON -- Anonymous Coward 2011-12-02
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