Brief newslets

Author and Nobel-laureate Doris Lessing has made a disturbing oraculation:

Obama, who is vying to become the first black president in US history, “would certainly not last long, a black man in the position of president. They would murder him,” Lessing, 88, told the Dagens Nyheter [Swedish] daily.

While Muftim Blair ferrets away at the origins of the Obama-assassination meme, we can only hope Ms Lessing’s prediction isn’t borne out in reality, should Obama win the Presidential contest. If, God forbid, this does come to pass, however, then perhaps Ms Lessing could be prevailed upon to further oraculate and identify the “they” who “would murder him”.

Meanwhile over at Bugs’n’Slugs, Jack Robertson has had enough of sour, nit-picking, tyre-kicking Apology ‘Sceptics’:

Agonising over wordings, watering down phrases, trying hard to keep you inside the Reconciliation tent even though all it will earn from you, in your bitter determination to stand outside that tent and piss in, is another contemptuous sneer. And every equivocation, every narcissistic whinge, every pissant little ‘ah, but’, every ‘i’ you demand we dot and ‘t’ you blub and grizzle and wail until we cross is another hot Whitey needle in the open wound of every aging black Australian who was stolen, formally, officially, legally, whatever the intentions and motivations. And it’s them that this Apology is about, not you, or me. Five, 50, 500, 5,000, five million... apologising to however many did suffer and however many will appreciate our acknowledgement of that true fact, however belated, is not about making you, or me, feel better. Apologies are about humility, and humilty is about handing your power voluntarily to the people you are apologising to, who have none, and will not until you do so.