With memories of Dick Cheney's Excellent Sydney Adventure still fresh in our minds, and with the clock counting down to the Avagoodweegend Brought To You By APEC, comes today's arrival in Sydney of the USS Kitty Hawk.

Together with the exclusion zone in several harbourside suburbs and the resultant towing away of cars belonging to miscreant owners who dare to park them outside their houses.

As Independence Day, the 231st anniversary of the collective breakaway of thirteen British colonies from King George III's empire, draws to a close (US time), I can think of just one way to mark the occasion here.

Earlier today, the Los Angeles Impeachment Centre was officially launched. It is intended as a "countywide resource for advancing the impeachment of George W. Bush & Richard Cheney".

A woman born with a condition that resulted in underdeveloped hands and arms claims employees at a McDonald's in the Illinois town of Rockford refused to serve her when she wanted to use her foot to collect the bags of food at a takeout window.

Associated Press takes up the story.

A 25 year-old convicted drink driver from California is released from jail. The biggest news in the States yesterday, right? Wrong. MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski conducts on-air censorship during the morning news.

Well that was a longer than expected absence from the internet. In short, I have moved into smaller, cheaper, and arguably nicer accommodation just a couple of kilometres south-west of the carpeted, central heated, just a tad pretentious Chocolate Factory.

An easy move? Far, far, far from it. So let's change topic.

I'm on a dialup connection at the moment with a mouse that has turned conservative on me (ie, it won't go left), so little if any site maintenance from me just yet. Hopefully I'll be back on broadband in a day or two.

Currently appearing on the Liberal Party of Australia's home page is this short, sharp, catchy summary of John Howard vision:

Yogyakarta (ANTARA News) - Around 2000 islands in Indonesia may have
disappeared by 2030 following an expected rise in the sea level,
Yogyakarta Meteorology and Geophysics Office (BMG) chief Jaya Murjaya
said here on Wednesday [May 23].

"Up to 2030, the sea level will rise by eight to 29 centimeters and
engulf around 2,000 islands in Indonesia," Jaya Murjaya said in a
National Geographic Seminar at the Yogyakarta State University (UNY).

As the coconut dessicates, possibly terminally, John Winston Howard has uttered the D-word for, as far as I can tell, only the second time. (Here's my report of the first.)

It came in his virulent response to criticism of Australia's human rights record contained in the latest Amnesty International Annual Report (as I noted last week), where his use of fear for political purposes was compared to, among others, that of Omar al-Bashir.

Ah yes, the good old days of 1946. Japan was a ruined, beaten nation, humiliated after being forced to surrender at the conclusion of the Second World War. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were radioactive wrecks, Tokyo and many other cities devastated by more conventional bombing. The economy was ruined, the nation's infrastructure was ruined.

The Japanese people were starving. How to feed them until the nation's agriculture could be restored? The occupying powers (USA, UK, Australia etc... where does that sound familiar?) decided that the solution was to feed 'em whale!

"Any other scientific program in any other field that took this many samples without significant conclusions being reached would lose it's funding, and the same thing should happen here."

- Shane Rattenbury, Greenpeace International, on JARPA II (source: Greenpeace Defending the Whales blog, 30.5.07)