AUSTRALIA: People seem to have such short attention spans. Even after hurricane Andrew many doubted global warmings connection. After Katrina the green house skeptics can be counted on one hand and dismissed as cranks and crackpots.

Last year Kim Beazley and I called for beefed up anti-incitement to violence laws. These were hardly against free speech - anyone who wants can say what they like online. Also , unlike the Bomber , I qualified my statist call with a proviso that the overall size and power of the state be reduced in some other area - collaboration with kopassus or invading Iraq for example.

One month after our calls were ignored the Cronulla riots exposed the dire need for such laws. There is a reason you can't shout fire in a crowded theatre and there is a good reason why you don't try and incite more violence in the middle of a world flamin war.

So the production of those infamous cartoons was a crime. It was completely predicable what the result would be after the Newsweek Koran in the toilet story went around the world. Winner write the histories and the winners of world war four are hardly going to take gratuitous insults from pipsqueaks lying down. What's going on now is probably just a down payment. And how stupid to attack the Muclim for their greatest most praiseworthy qualities!

Had they attacked so-called ' Sharia' that is an insult and infamata to over half the human race then the Danish prunes would have been on solid ground. As it is they have earned a trip to the Hague. Beefed up laws against incitements to violence are simple community self defence.

No libertarian socialist interested in minimizing violence in politics can rationalize racist hate speech, justifications of genocide and fascist holocaust denial. All that free speech can go where it belongs - on freenet. Societies have a right and a duty to defend themselves from violence. With the worst of violence we have seen recently it has invariably been preceded by lies, hate speech and denial.

This must not stand. Those who steal lives must pay.

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Do it for the princess?
by Un-Happily Ever After

Once upon a time there was this Tasmanian woman Mary from the dairy who met what she thought was a prince. But one morning she woke up to find herself sleeping with a frog.

Not just an ordinary frog mind you, a toad warts and all!