I'm old enough to know that I don't have any answers, but that won't stop me talking
I was reminded this morning of the October 2020 incident at Qatar Airport where a number of Australian women were taken off a Qatar Airways plane and involuntarily subjected to invasive gynaecological searches when a newborn baby was found in the toilets at the airport terminal. The sorry story, if you need reminding, is here: …
Continue reading “How Australia Should Deal With the Qatar Airport Incident”
Back in the 1980s, there were some committed communists in the UK who loyally voted for Maggie Thatcher’s Conservatives because they believed that her policies would cause the proletariat to achieve class consciousness and start a workers’ revolution. Perhaps they were ideologically pure in their faith in Marx (Commo, not Groucho), or perhaps they had …
Yesterday, I received my fortnightly edition of Newsweekly, and I found an ad in it by the DLP which caused me to pay even more attention than to the article written by a friend who regularly writes for them. Here is a link to the concerns raised by the DLP which caused them to draw …
Continue reading “The Perils Of Democracy In A Two Party System”
At some freshly reopened bar on Friday night, whilst sipping a glass of red, a colleague of mine said that he had gone to high school with someone who is now a member of the Victorian Parliament, the second generation of her family to proudly represent the Labor Party. He said that at school, she …
This year, the second of the plague, I think the end (for now) of our lockdown has left people needing to cheer themselves up a bit. Which is why Halloween seems to have been celebrated a little more fully, even though it is a uniquely American tradition whose import to Australia still seems rather bizarre …
Continue reading “This year, people probably do need Halloween”
I never cease to be grateful for living in Australia, rather than anywhere else, even in a time of plague. Americans might love their right to bear arms and all the rest of that, but just like in old school Westerns, the police do shoot back, and with very heavy firepower. Also, their police, for …
Continue reading “Being Grateful for First World Problems in a Time of Plague”
In the recently concluded second season of Ted Lasso, a number of serious issues are covered by this otherwise amiable show. One is ‘Sports Washing’. Sports Washing is the practice, by a nation or a corporation, of sponsoring a sporting team or competition in order to distract attention from either human rights abuses by a …
Continue reading “Collingwood Football Club’s Complicity in Sports Washing”
My friends will know that I am a great fan of Shakespeare’s plays, which I do allude to from time to time in this blog. I believe that in them, particularly the various tragedies, you can find the questions which comprise most of the great dilemmas which we as humans face. The great villains are …
The Scarlet Pimpernel is quite an enjoyable novel. It’s hero is mischievous, idealistic, and uncatchable. He spends the whole novel tormenting the villainous Jacobin zealots and saving their victims from the Guillotine. I see some parallels between The Scarlet Pimpernel and Real Freedom News, an insider website revealing a lot of the factional machinations of …
Lost For Words!