Supply side economics are driven by policies favouring the privileged and wealthy as a purported way of stimulating investment and production. As such, they have long been a favourite strategy of those most dedicated to fulfilling the vision of ‘father of the US Constitution’ James Madison that capitalist democracy should ‘protect the minority of the…
The badly-misnamed Department of Environment has campaigned to have every reference to Australia removed from a UNESCO report entitled, “World Heritage and Tourism in a Changing Climate,” on the grounds that reporting on the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef could ‘harm tourism.’ Unusually warm water indicative of warming globally has lead to bleaching on…
Narcissistic attention seeker and professional supply addict Pauline Hanson protests descriptions of racism and comparisons to racist counterpart US Presidential candidate Donald Drumpf. ‘Australians are so over being labelled as racist,’ Hanson says to Sky News, while both she and her interviewers somehow manage to miss the glaring cognitive dissonance of denying being racist while…
First short story I’ve written in years; wrote it for a short story competition in 2015. It didn’t win. It didn’t even place. I’m still happy with it. * An electronic device on the bedside table begins a dull drumbeat, like your heart pounding inside your head as you face a firing squad. Like maybe…
With the amount of information good and bad flying around across the internet it can be nigh well on impossible to make sense of what’s going on in the world. In the name of helping to clarify things for everyone I have compiled the following. Adjustment, quantitative, n. Actual meaning: Socialism for the rich. Usage:…
“The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.” – Philip K. Dick The use of the term ‘War on Terror’ to describe the West’s campaign of military aggression in and around Iraq over…
In no particular order: 1. Knowing that change and impermanence are the greatest constants in the universe (even more so than death and taxes), and being able to keep on top of things by being adaptable – which in the final analysis means willing and able to embrace change. 2. Understanding that we’re all our…
August 16, 2013
“Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods,” wrote the famed American journalist and satirist H.L. Mencken. If the mark of genius is the ability to say something that only becomes truer with time, then it would definitely appear to be present in this instance, as this observation is as true as it has ever been. Need we actually ask which stolen goods Mencken was referring to? Let us think for a moment.
How about funding for higher education? Rather than being given more funding as it needs, the higher education is increasingly subject to cuts and austerity measures – not because the funds are unavailable, but because the will doesn’t exist to put them where they’re needed, much less to say the institutional capability. Now the implementation of the Gonski report into secondary education will be used as a pretext for further cuts. Where are the goods to ensure everyone can get an adequate education at the tertiary level who wants or needs one?
How about the adequate welfare provisions for indigenous people? The poverty gap for indigenous people is a national disgrace; indigenous people continue to rank at the bottom of most social and economic indicators, experience greatly reduced life expectancy and systematic discrimination, and suffer far greater levels of chronic health problems. Where are the goods to grapple with these very serious problems? Indigenous people moreover have never ceded sovereignty over their traditional lands, nor have they ever been granted land rights. What about those goods?…
The US historian Frank Van Nuys once described racism as ‘the great national safety value,’ a means for the powerful and well-to-do to take the heat off themselves by shifting the blame for the consequences of increasing wealth inequality, of which they were the direct beneficiaries, onto minorities too numerically weak to organise effective opposition.…
