politician tells truth

Shock, horror.

Kudos to Kelvin Thompson, federal Labor MP, for having the courage to stand up to the “eternal growth” fools who currently dictate economic and development policies in the western world and point out that excessive population…

steve keen on australian house prices

Anyone interested in housing affordability in Australia (as I currently am) could do worse than to read this fascinating piece by economist Steve Keen, who I have sadly only just discovered.

In short: housing is extremely expensive in…

war on terror semi-officially over

The War on Terror is over, says Secretary of State Hillary.  Or, more accurately, the expression is “just not being used”.

It’s often tempting to think that politicians are all the same and that the Obama administration in…

amazing photo of obama inauguration

This picture is incredible – I haven’t done the maths to work out if it’s actually the claimed “1474 megapixels”, but it’s a highly detailed panoramic photo of the Obama inauguration. You can zoom from the whole scene in close…

south australia continues to push the presumption of guilt

Following on from the recent bikie-gang violence at Sydney airport, there has been a chorus of praise for South Australia’s abhorrent anti-association laws (summarised here at Larvatus Prodeo, who rightly point out the idiocy of presuming guilt based on…

screwing your customers just makes sense

I thought this was an interesting little article about the present state of the music industry and where it’s heading.

In summary, the big labels know that people paying $30/album and $2/track for recorded music is not going to…

rationality vs political expediency – australia’s problem with water

You might recall this post from a couple of years back about water use in Australia – basically, the point was that as a matter of measurable, objective fact urban water use is utterly dwarfed by agricultural use,…

creeping fascism update

Happy news from NSW, where the police are now going to have the power to secretly search homes and computers continuously for up to three years before any notification is given to the subject of the searches.  This…

TANSTAAFL

Cost of producing Acme Consumer Widget™ in two countries:

…

telstra, defender of the universe

I… don’t know what the hell is going on.  Telstra, harbinger of telecommunications doom, monopolistic behemoth extraordinaire, profit driven dinosaur which ambles across the land devouring its small, innovative mammalian competitors, has made a radically pro-human rights submission…

they’ve told him about the aliens

Obama’s been in office all of five minutes and his hair has already started going grey.

Clinton and Bush had the same experience (scroll down here).

Possible causes:

• no longer has to

…

more lese majeste – associate professor giles ji ungpakorn

Further to the post about Harry Nicolaides, I thought I would add a link to the case of Associate Professor Giles Ji Ungpakorn, a Thai academic who is seemingly about to be charged under the same antiquated and…

the strange case of harry nicolaides

This is disgraceful: a Melbourne man, Harry Nicolaides, has been jailed in Thailand for three years for insulting the Thai royal family in a novel he has apparently written.  The conviction is a result of Thailand’s anachronistic…

bye bye bush

I love it:

getup save the net campaign