Studying in Melbourne this week.

Also interesting is that this could sometimes be a counter-productive process:

people in the grip of the uncanny tend to see patterns where none exist — becoming more prone to conspiracy theories, for example. The urge for order satisfies itself, it seems, regardless of the quality of the evidence.

I knew there was a higher purpose to all those hours I spent watching Monty Python.

Swine flu: there is no escape.

(Source of photo unknown).

And it’s the best form of discrimination too – the kind by private citizens and businesses against other private citizens, so that we can all agree that they are “free” to refuse to accept business from anyone they want in the wonderful “free” market.  Of course if they did that because a person was, say, Catholic, they’d be hauled over the coals for weeks, Inquisition-style.

At the moment I simply hang up on telemarketers, but I strongly resent (a) the interruption and (b) being put in a position where I must be rude to another human being in order to maintain my privacy in my own home.  Despite being on the Do Not Call register, I still get the odd call (although admittedly the volume is much lower than it once was).

On a related note, I am getting very sick of Australia Post and the Eastern Courier, both of which seem to rather vainly consider their blatantly commercial (and in the case of the latter, hideously mediocre and cringe-inducingly capital-M Middle Class… perhaps more on that later) pieces of literature not to be “junk” mail.  I am seriously considering getting a small plaque to place below our “no junk mail” sign which says:

for the avoidance of doubt, we consider “junk” to include advertising from Australia Post and hideous bourgeois claptrap from The Eastern Courier

I wonder how hard this would be to fund in Australia, and whether it would somehow offend our anti-discrimination/hate speech laws, which (like our constitution, according to the High Court) seem to protect every belief system except atheism.

We live in an era of instinctive, reactive and ill-informed leaders and followers, marked by contempt for truth, living by the dictum that the end justifies the means. It hardly matters whether that view is driven by cynicism or ideology.

Jones urges a return to the era of the public intellectual, where serious issues are put on trial in a public arena through relatively spin-free, objective debate.

Activists in public life – politicians, academics and journalists – must make a commitment to restoring the primacy of reason, rejecting a paranoid view of history and telling truth to power. As he lay dying, Leo Tolstoy reaffirmed his commitment to rationality: “Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two plus two does not make six.”

The piece is light on detailed suggestions of how we can turn the situation around – like many progressives and rationalists, he is good at identifying the problem but not so good on suggesting realistic ways in which it can be addressed.  Nevertheless, it is well worth a read.

While we’re on the subject, the ABC persists in referring to David Hicks as a “convicted terrorism supporter” in its reports. Hicks, of course, has never been before a legitimate court of law and has never been convicted of anything, other than a guilty plea he entered before an illegal and non-judicial tribunal which had through its agents been torturing him and depriving him of human rights for several years.

Well, that wake up call is here. That’s what this is about. Everybody has their time, and your time is Now. This is your moment. No excuses. No procrastinating. No looking back. Check your watch and mark the time. Remember it. It is your moment. Not this moment, the one a few moments ago when we said “this is your moment”. That was your moment. You can’t have this one, it’s reserved for somebody else. You can’t have two moments. That’d be greedy.

At last, you can combine your fear of clowns, your distaste for fast food, and your revulsion at sex dolls and paedophiles in one family restaurant.

Update: it seems that McDonald’s good taste in advertising extends to mocking religious beliefs for commercial purposes, too (note the addition of ‘for commercial purposes’, which distinguishes it from this site and is bad). Here’s an incredibly well thought-out ad from the Philipines:

Mmm, sacrilicious…

Via adsoftheworld (baby) and Stephen (McGod) thanks to EB.