Like a lot of bloggers, I have increasingly come to distrust the MSM since 9/11 because bloggers regularly catch the gatekeepers cheating. The most recent serious example I am aware of is how CNN translated a statement by the Iraqi foreign minister. Omar at Iraq the Model being an Arabic speaker caught a mistranslation that [...]

Feeling better and recovered from the cold. Blogging should return to normal. Coming soon – Lizard – a cartoon character created by my old friend Barry Kubank. Both Lizard and Barry are quite unlike Yankeewombat in that they don’t give a stuff about politics. How refreshing.

Wretchard writing at the Belmont Club describes a kind of ‘deal’ as an explanation for the bitter divisions in the West since 9/11. But although Marxism was defeated by the largely economic process of Globalization it flourished — even dominated — in the cultural institutions of the West at a time when Islamism was triumphing [...]

Todd Russell and Brant Webb, the two Tasmanian miners who were trapped in the Beaconsfield mine, have been interviewed at length following their ordeal. I found this transcript.� Both of them impressed me as the kind of working class Australia I’ve come to know over the past 30 year in Australia. Of particular interest were [...]

I keep coming back to Michael Yon and Bill Roggio because their war reporting strikes me as consistently better than that of the MSM. As I have said before I think the main factor is that both are trained soldiers who understand military strategy and therefore bring real understanding to what the Coalition forces are [...]

Sorry for the lack of posts – I am fighting a lingering cold that makes my writing – well – suck. Wouldn’t want to impose it on anyone!

Dutch Parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali has resigned from parliament – well – under fire. The full text is here. The most shocking part is that she has been stripped of Dutch citizenship because she gave a false name and story when she initially applied for asylum in 1992. Shocking because she has been entirely open [...]

Wretchard of The Belmont Club in a brilliant post describes what he sees as a change of tone in the Blogsphere recently. My own hunch is that in the last two or three months there’s been a change in the tone of the blogsphere. Nothing definite, simply a change in atmosphere in proportion to the [...]

John Kenneth Galbraith the American economist has died at 97. He was perhaps the most prominent of the household names that my economist father evoked when I was growing up. Reading his obituary in the New York Times I am forcefully reminded of how the great depression formed both Galbraith’s view of the world and [...]

I commented about the� Sago mine disaster in West Virginia in January here� and want to add a few comments about the just completed rescue of Todd Russell and Brant Webb from the Beaconsfield gold mine in Tasmania. This one was smaller in scale – one man killed two trapped – but went on for [...]