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 Australia; we may well be in line for a major correction in house prices; and there appears to [...]

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 reality represents only a miniscule shift towards the centre.  In reality, this seems to be another sign that [...]

And so it begins: link. If you copy DVDs, you are directly supporting drug trafficking and the rape of small children. As if you didn’t know that, you raping, drug-dealing monster, you.
The USA has been subjected to a torrent (get it?) of this kind of crap in recent years, but we have largely [...]

The South Australian Government has gone ahead with legislation to ban David Hicks from selling his story.  He’s still allowed to tell his story, but he’s not allowed to sell it.  Lucky him.  Presumably he’ll be able to find a job with no problems – after all, he was never convicted of anything by a [...]

This is an excellent piece by Barry Jones in The Australian in which he highlights the extraordinarily dangerous attitude currently being promoted as the “new normal” by politicians and their lackeys in the western world, in which objectivity, rationality and informed debate are completely subsumed by “faith”, expedience and knee-jerk reactivity:
We live in an era [...]

Bazooka Circus is what the whole world would be doing on a Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war.
- Hunter S Thompson

You might have seen this: the US military ‘lost’ five or six live nuclear warheads and ended up mistakenly flying them across the country. The mistake was not discovered for three and a half hours, when the B-52 in question landed at Barksdale Air Force Base.
The initial questions asked in the media were, of [...]

The Australian runs a ridiculous front page story which describes a poll showing an electoral disaster for the Government as “HOWARD CHECKS RUDD’S MARCH!!!!1!!!11!!” (NB: there may have been fewer ‘!!1!’s).
Independent (and very excellent) political analysis site criticises blatant pro-Government bias in The Australian.
The Australian contacts the author and advises that the newspaper is going [...]

This article from The Australian, entitled “Silencing Our Basic Freedom”, is compulsory reading for anyone who cares about the future of democracy in Australia. This blog is frequently critical of that particular newspaper, but on this issue it is fighting for an extremely important and non-partisan cause – the ability of the media, and [...]

This is a dangerous piece of circular reasoning: the solution to the problems created by an ageing population is to increase population growth.
The ‘logic’ employed appears to be that, in order to sustain the current number of wrinklies in their retirement, society requires a greater number of youngsters to be working, paying taxes, and generally [...]

Once again, the spin of the week goes to The Australian (link) – this time for Dennis Shanahan’s effort in portraying polls showing an electoral massacre for the Government as “good news” for Mr Howard and Co. As Peter Brent puts it:
Never before in the history of opinion polls have such diabolical numbers for [...]

Tony “Saddam has WMDs which can be ready to attack us in 45 minutes” Blair is using his lame-duck period between now and the end of June to whine about the media. In particular he is unhappy that there has been a deterioration in the relationship between the government and media during his time [...]

This little exchange says a great deal about why the New York Times is a truly excellent newspaper. When the recent plot to “blow up JFK airport” was revealed, the Times looked objectively at the story and decided it did not warrant hyperbole, hysteria, or even a front page story on its print edition. [...]

It’s pretty clear that The Australian has abandoned all pretence of objectivity or neutrality in its news reporting. This headline speaks for itself, really – but the opening of the “story” is just as good:
ACTU president Sharan Burrow has used her influence to blacken Australia’s name…

You may or may not recall that over the last few years, the federal government has carefully stacked the ABC’s board with right wing nutcases, including Keith “we never did nuffink to the Aborigines, it was like that when we got here” Windschuttle and Janet “Islam promotes rape” Albrechtsen. The ABC later dropped a [...]