In case you have missed it, there has been considerable ruction here in Australia over a sermon by Australia’s chief Muslim cleric, Sheik Hilali. Sheikh al-Hilali, who is the Mufti of Australia, delivered his remarks to hundreds of Muslims in his mosque. He likened immodestly dressed women to meat that attracted predators and suggested that [...]

All very well for you Yanks and other Northern Hemisphere types going into Winter, but down here it is 32 C today (that’s 90 F) and we Wombats are just not interested in cozy flannel shirts!

Michael Yon is angry again and for good reason. He has noticed that there has been a lack of embedded reporters in Iraq – there were just nine when he wrote his piece, Censoring Iraq,� and only two of them were reporting primarily to the American public. He names names too, singling out Lieutenant Colonel [...]

I have been fighting off a cold so blogging is a bit like trying to think with head full of molasses. I’ll keep it light today. Imagine my delight when I opened up my Florida absentee ballot. Right there near the top of the ballot for House of Representatives was Mark Foley. I know Nelson [...]

The Pentagon has put a national Guard unit in charge of supervising military bloggers and, from what I read so far, requires that milbloggers get prior approval for their posts. I hope the Guard unit� has some understanding of why� milbloggers� have been the Pentagons’s best friend in the information war with a media savvy [...]

Well, it is Spring here in Perth and Autumn in the Northern Hemisphere so winter is either a fading memory or an impending inconvenience. Believe me Lizard has some wardrobe ideas to make it more interesting.

A very pro American Australian friend showed me a copy of the book Why Do People Hate America by Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies. Leafing through it I came across a reference to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman as “right wing” . Actually I’m pretty sure it was “far right wing”. To make [...]

The grand strategy of the Bush administration has been to recognize radical Islam as the key challenge post 9/11 to the US and the West in general and try to engage that problem by fostering democracy to the Middle East. I think it has become clear that we have a democracy in Iraq that has [...]

In the middle of working on a longer piece about the American Grand Strategy in the Middle East yesterday I discovered that a couple of the Iraq war’s moderate supporters had changed their minds recently. Specifically Norm Geras of Normblog who now says he would have neither opposed nor supported the Iraq war if he [...]

Oh My Goodness – Fish Pyjamas!