Sea-foam
This picture has generated some talkback radio discussion today: Image Source: Daily Telegraph (photo by Bill Counsell) The picture was taken at Yamba. The sea foam extends 50m across the beach and into the sea from the Surf Lifesavers club house, as shown in the photo below. Reports from locals are that they haven’t seen [...]
Predatory corporate capitalism
This is the phrase Robert Jensen (UT Austin) uses to describe our current economic system as not only unsustainable, but inhuman and undemocratic, in Anti-Capitalism in Five Minutes. His goal is to outline to progressives how to discuss radical politics in plain language in short conversations with coworkers, friends and relatives: to persuade them that [...]
Malcolm Turnbull’s environment cred
Helen at Blogger on the Cast Iron Balcony has a nice summary of this week’s brouhaha with the Minister for the Environment reacting badly to criticism from a fellow corporatocrat, Geoff Cousins, about the seemingly fast-tracked approvals process for a new Gunns pulp mill in Tasmania. GetUp has a campaign active aimed at encouraging the [...]
Race, class, disability, sex; sex, disability, race, class; class, sex, disability, race; getting off the roundabout and meeting in the middle, dizzy as all get-out, but trying to find which way is up
So. The big ones. Sex, race, disability, class. (Add your own: sexual orientation should be in there, heteronormativity and how that functions, trans issues, religion or lack thereof, lots more.) But I’m on my choice of Big Four today. And allies. I’m talking about alliances, allies, the process of allying. How do you start? Where [...]
Budget forecasts from our Treasurer: incompetent or just irrelevant?
Ken L has a post up at Surfdom well worth reading: Headlines you’ll never read Costello budget hopelessly wrong Last May, the government forecast a surplus for 2006/07 of $13.6 billion. Today, it announced that the figure was actually $17.3 billion. My simple maths suggests that the government was therefore wrong by a margin of [...]
The consideration of active consent and decriminalisation
Two Victorian stories: Rape laws strengthened. VICTORIA’s rape laws will be strengthened to ensure defendants cannot avoid being found guilty by arguing they had not considered whether a victim had consented to sex. Attorney-General Rob Hulls said several new changes to rape laws were aimed at reducing the number of appeals and retrials in rape [...]
Bob Brown: the Rudd scandal in perspective and in a nutshell
Four years ago Kevin Rudd got drunk and took himself into a strip club. Four years ago John Howard, sober, took Australia into the Iraq war. I think the electorate can judge which one did the more harm. [Source] Senator Brown also thinks that a far more important electoral issue is the proposed Federal Government [...]
Another Mike Adams column, another day where the rest of the world wonders WTF he’s smoking
Mike Adams is a professional American conservative – he writes columns on Townhall.com and writes books about being oh so lonely as a conservative college professor fighting the Evil Liberal Agenda (TM). I have regularly read his name mentioned in stunned disbelief by American progressive bloggers – this man’s perception of the culture wars has [...]
PM admits to being warned against inappropriate behaviour
The Poison Dwarf, Glen Milne, has unleashed a story that’s been sat on since 2003 about Kevin Rudd attending a strip club in New York while drunk, at the invitation of a New York Post journalist. It’s obviously an attempt to discredit Rudd as the family values religious moderate that is his current public image, [...]
Butbutbutbut the US is the world, isn’t it?
This is the gist of a recent formulaic dummy spit from global warming skeptic Michael Duffy, arguing that a minor shift in US figures after re-analysis somehow implies something crucial about global changes which were measured differently. Penguin Unearthed dissects what argument there actually is in Duffy’s piece. Related posts: Fancy that The data screams [...]
Boffins wa-hey!
So what is the difference between a Boffin and a Wonk? Is it merely that “wonk” is a USAnism and “boffin” is a Britishism? Or is it to do with scholarly rigor – wonks are fascinated but waffle (or at least speculate), whereas boffins are fascinated but rigorously demonstrate? I happen to believe that both [...]
A snag in the plan
There’s a snag in the plan. Who knew? ABC News reports: Federal Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough has confirmed that the new Northern Territory intervention legislation will have to be amended. He says under the legislation the Commonwealth will take over housing in 73 remote Indigenous communities. But he says the standard of houses in [...]

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