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…

DVD piracy = child molesting

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…

verballing 101

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…

abnormal is the new normal

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…

we’re in the dark/spin (random travel photograph)

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

- Hunter S Thompson

I would say, sir, that there were something dreadfully wrong somewhere

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…

spin of the week

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

an enemy of the open society

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…

petitio principii

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…

spin of the week

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…

early pioneer of misleading spin complains about ‘feral media’

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…

what a real newspaper looks like

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…

spin of the week

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

…

stacked ABC board forces network to show documentary promoting idiotic non-science

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…