I have written about the insanely murderous gun laws in the United States a couple of times, as the problem they create only seems to worsen1,2. More recently, I also…
The difference between Canberra lobbyists and the Voice is that one operates in the dark, with few rules and plenty of space for sneaky deals, the occasional back scratch or pocket filler. The other will be a constitutionally enshrined body operating according to legislation, transparent and legal and representative, offering little chance for backroom deals and post-retirement sinecures. No wonder the opposition dislikes the latter. [https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/at-last-a-pm-who-leads-a-government-with-purpose-20230525-p5db3k.html]
After writing a piece about the idiocy of the US gun culture and the enormous number of mass murders by gun1, I wondered just how generally murderous the US was….
While there is a great deal of smugness about the gun buyback scheme instituted by the Howard coalition government after the Port Arthur massacre, when compared to the murderous availability…
The first essay I wrote on this blog, back in January 2017, was about gun violence in the US. It was entitled appropriately ‘Gun nuts’1. At that time, the essay…
Everybody who reads newspapers or their websites knowns that the relevance deficit disorder sufferer, and NSW One Notion upper house member, Mark Latham, tweeted something disgustingly homophobic (and deleted it…
Deep in the basement recesses of the library at Geoscience Australia is a journal entitled Original Reports of the Okamura Fossil Laboratory1. Decades ago, these were sent, unsolicited, to the…
Throughout American culture and politics, billionaire cash often works in a crudely transactional way, but it much more commonly operates more subtly. This, more than anything else, is what undergirds the machinery of American conservatism: a relatively small number of rich donors fund right-wing organizations and think tanks; those organizations and think tanks cultivate voices and personalities who serve as spokespeople, Republican-aligned operatives and public intellectuals; they, in turn, get to enjoy the favor and flattery of the wealthy people whose interests they protect and whose money fuels it all. The end result is a vast and powerful network of organizations and individuals whose ideological bonds are constantly lubricated by injections of cash from a tiny pool of plutocratic patrons.
In a piece I wrote almost two weeks ago on the saving of the Trove online resource, I mentioned that I was using it to look up newspaper and magazine…