The continuing drama that is taking place between Australia and East Timor over off shore gas and oil deposits could contain lessons that extend beyond the Timor Sea. Australians are so proud of the role we played in the realisation of East Timorese independence. We waved the flag around and called forth the always ready and always welling emotion of patriotism to the fore when we marched in with our guns and our ships and armoured vehicles. We had stood in between a people who had f...

In pondering the following story it is very easy to discern the benefits for physiological survival given by the perception of pain. There was a girl who was born clinically insensitive to pain. As a child she bit the tip of her tongue of while eating her food, dislocated her hip and vertebrae while sleeping because she could not shift her weight according to how she turned and tossed in bed and she caused massive burns to herself while kneeling on a household heater. While she did not ...

I have just learned a very interesting tidbit about the reproductive biology of rats. The male rat, unlike the human rat, sorry, the human male, serves two purposes when copulating with those fabulously sexy females the rat species has going on. The act of copulation both makes a present of his sperm and stimulates the necessary "bits" within the female to poduce the hormonal secretions necessary to fertelize the eggs, and therefore propagate the numbers challenged rat species. The i...

Arguments and the limits of our knowledge: I have found in many discussions here at JU recently, that my knowledge of a great many subjects is let’s say…deficient or wanting. I never used to believe that argument is good for its own sake, or for the benefit of logic and its exercise. I never used to believe that argument is necessary to call into action the faculties of the human mind that are not stimulated by the operation of the microwave or the contorted complexities of using a ...

"At the weekend the Israeli high court rejected a petition from residents, endorsing on security grounds the policy of bulldozing homes without warning and without giving them a chance to appeal or remove their belongings" (quote from the Sydney Morning Hereld, May19) The Israelis have instigated a policy of occupying Rafah with tanks, helicopters and bulldozers in retaliation for the death of 13 Israeli soldiers. There has been talk of systematically demolishing houses, and already thousa...

In Cannes recently, along with all the rough diamonds that humanity can provide and all its glitz and glam, there has been a strike going on to protest the cuts in unemployment benefits that the French have had to suffer. Now to put it in context, film festivals and strikes are the two things that the French know how to do with consummate ease. It would be hard to discern whether the French prefer a good film festival or a good strike, both having merits that are peculiar to themselves. ...

Damn you all. Now I have this compulsion to write. I do not think that I have anything worthy of utterance. There have always been long silences in my life. These have been the places where I do not exist, where the rest of you do not exist. There is nothing in this silence that I must protect myself from. Silence is impotent. It is unintelligible. And now this ceaseless stream of words that remind me of myself, are myself. I do not look in the mirror often enough to notice that an e...

War came to Angola in 1961. My father would have been 11 when it started. Too young to comprehend, too young to feel the silent, invisible shockwaves that travel through the minds of men and women. Knowledge jumps like a cricket from one to another, but it leaves the young on Islands alone. Older brothers were old enough. Old enough to be conscripted, to be sent to war. This was not going to happen. They swore it amongst themselves. They would not die in the jungles. They would not d...