I'm old enough to know that I don't have any answers, but that won't stop me talking
Since the age of seventeen, when Suzanne Vega was on the charts with her debut single Marlene on the wall and then the Pretty In Pink soundtrack song Left of Centre, I have been a fan of her music. When I acquired her debut album and played it constantly during swot-vac before my HSC exams, …
Continue reading “Discovering Some Old Long Forgotten Suzanne Vega Songs….”
“Marxism consists of thousands of truths, but they all boil down to one sentence, ‘it is right to rebel!’ For thousands of years, it has been said that it was right to oppress, it was right to exploit, and it was wrong to rebel. This old verdict was only reversed with the appearance of Marxism…. …
Continue reading “It Is Right To Rebel: Why The University Of Queensland Is Wrong”
Every few years my CD player stops working properly and I need to go buy another one. After all, I have a library of about 300 CDs that I have paid good money for and should listen to more often. However, this is 2020, not 1990. I bought myself this iMac almost 18 months ago …
In one of the early seasons of The Simpsons, there is an episode ‘Lisa The Beauty Queen’ where Lisa is runner up for the Little Miss Springfield pageant and then becomes Little Miss Springfield after the winner gets struck by lightning. Lisa being Lisa, she is not content to be a figurehead for the powerful …
Continue reading “Love (or Trade War) in the Time of Cholera (or Coronavirus)”
http://www.youtube.com/watch As a twelve year old I liked this song. As an awake (not ‘woke’) fifty one year old I love it! Postscript- not sure that the link works but the song is Pell Mell ‘No Word From China’ . YouTube, you are unfit for purpose.
I recently read Jarrod Diamond’s latest book, Catastrophe, in which he discusses how various countries he knows well have dealt with an existentialist crisis facing them. One of those is Australia. The first country he writes about in his book is far flung Finland, somewhere on the far side of the world close to the …
Continue reading “Australia Must Not Finlandize: Selling Our Birthright For Red Pottage”
Rodney Dangerfield was, in my view, rather intellectually underrated. His movie characters tended to be crass and nouveau rich, but rather than showing that money can’t buy you class, they showed up the posh snobs with inherited money, who might have more refined accents and manners, but who were far more ruthless and grasping. That …
Continue reading “They gave the Nobel Prize to the wrong Dylan”
Let me start by saying that despite the suggestiveness of the heading of this posting, I am not announcing a Road To Damascus style conversion to Marxism, socialism, or even social democracy. I remain a cultural conservative with a commitment to politically and economically libertarian values (much as I dislike the word ‘libertarian’). But I …
Continue reading “To the Barricades? A Pro-Free Market Capitalist Case for the Occupy Movement”
About seven years ago, I made a very speculative (and ultimately spectacularly unsuccessful) investment in a venture which was seeking to close a deal to clean up some of the abundant pollution in mainland China. As I trusted the friend who put me onto this (despite his starting to live a fantasy life approaching that …
Continue reading “Is it time to look a Gift Horse in the Mouth (or Mask)?”
Lost For Words!