Carpathia05

I'll admit watching Tony Abbot fail abysmally at everything he does has been the only good thing to come out of the last election. We apparently elected him to fix the economy, so he's raising the debt ceiling. We apparently elected him to 'axe the tax' but he can't get that bill past the senate. We apparently elected him to stop the boats so he's antagonising Indonesia. Australia finally has its George Bush. A man we can rely on to nosedive our country, halt all progress and make us even more of a laughing stock for all the serious countries. Rant Complete.

I just finished reading the alt history timeline 'Decades of Darkness'. The timeline if 1817 pages of sheer unadulterated alternate historical awesomeness. The timeline will take a part of your life to read (200 days for me) but it is a pleasure to finish it. Nobody puts that much effort into a timeline, not without getting paid to do it. The premise of the timeline is that Thomas Jefferson has a strategically timed heart attack in 1809 on the eve of a major debate regarding states rights. From there it butterflies into a very different US civil war and by the time it finishes in 1936 the story encompasses the entire globe. I won't spoil any

Some of you might have noticed I've taken up a job as an intern with UNICEF. Our current campaign is to lobby the Australian government to increase the foreign aid budget. Australia currently gives 0.35% of its Gross National Income to foreign aid. However, Australia has signed onto the Millenium Development Goals which are a UN initiative to halve global poverty by 2015. Under the Goals Australia is obligated to give 0.7% of its GNI to foreign aid. Global poverty (people living on less than $1.25 a day) was halved in 2010 so now the goal is to eradicate extreme poverty entirely. This is where you come in. Remember the boxing day tsunami?