First, as a non-American, I prefer American Administrations to have as flat a learning curve as possible. Breaking in a new one is tedious (and it is not as if Obama and Romney had any serious foreign policy disagreements anyway, Romney's attempt to invent some were pretty pathetic ( Read more... )

In Bellaire, Texas it is apparently a crime to drive in an affluent neighbourhood while black.

A black President does not mean there is no racial problem.

In the category of slanderous correlations, this is a goodie:
DRIVERS who fly Australian flags on their cars to celebrate Australia Day are "more racist" than people who do not, according to research from UWA ( Read more... )

An excellent study of the origins of the Indo-Europeans by an archaeologist who respects (and uses intelligently) the findings of linguists is reviewed here, here and hereThis has been a particularly fraught scholarly and pseudo-scholarly area, given all the "Aryan" fantasies it has given rise to, which the author handles very intelligently ( Read more... )

I linked to this piece conversion therapies before, but this little gem is worth airing:
She moves on. "Any Freemasonry in the family?" No, I say, again asking her to elaborate. "Because that often encourages it as well. It has a spiritual effect on males and it often comes out as SSA."
SSA=same-sex attraction ( Read more... )

The case of the ludicrous over-reaction by officials of Britain’s “surveillance state” when a mother applied to get her daughter into a primary school has become some of a cause celebre:
But the intrusions visited on Jenny Paton, a 40-year-old mother of three, were startling just the same. Suspecting Ms. Paton of falsifying her address to get her ( Read more... )

Edmund Standing has a post on the group blog Butterflies and Wheels on the far-left campaign to silence critics of Islam. Standing is referring to the phenomena whereby criticism of Islam is taken to be criticism of Muslims hence analogous to (or a form of) racism⎯hence the term Islamophobia. An ostentatious moral concern displayed by people who ( Read more... )

I was rather startled to hear on the Joy FM news about a person dying of being bashed in Yarraville, with one of those charged with murder being a resident of Seddon (my suburb ( Read more... )

A nice A-Ha parody video.

A campaign to have the right to marry cartoon characters.

A new blog by two ANU academies on mainland SE Asia.

Arguing pro and con for a league of democracies.

Camille Paglia’s collection of poetry made it onto the US best-seller lists: she writes about poetry.

Reviewing a book on the new forms of anti-Semitism.

On ( Read more... )

The Holocaust looms over C20th European history as the great evil act of that murderous century. It has made racism the great public sin of Western civilisation, even though revolutionary socialism has killed far more people. At least until recently, it also made what had been an abiding feature of Christendom-cum-Western civilisation (Jew hatred ( Read more... )