She’d no doubt hate the comparison, but it’s hard not to think of Margaret Thatcher’s doubtless most famous phrase, when watching J. K. Rowling stand up to the bully-boys in dresses and their cowardly, creepy enablers in the parliaments, courts and police stations. I prefer to believe
At some point, calling out the lies and misinformation spewing forth from so-called “fact checkers” has to be declared too easy fruit. But today is not that day, my friends. For as long as these shiftless shills are allowed to pose as arbiters of “truth”, we must keep ripping away
Just because something is worth doing, doesn’t mean that it’s worth overdoing, at ridiculously extravagent expense. If you hired a team of crack mercenaries to get rid of a mouse in your kitchen, people would rightly judge you an idiot spendthrift. Spend half a million dollars to whack
It’s amazing what miracles can be achieved by the New Zealand public service when the occasion calls. Non-urgent referrals for mental health assessments in New Zealand were waiting an average of 26 days just for their first face-to-face appointment (which is not an actual assessment: as one psychologist put
It’s an old tradition for newspapers to run April Fool’s Day stories, and on first reading, Nick Cater’s Australian column on renewables subsidies might surely qualify. A quick check of readily available data, though, shows that this is no joke: the Australian government has spent billions of
Once again, a so-called “fact checker” has been caught lying through its teeth. It should surprise absolutely no-one that it was Australia’s ABC. These guys have woeful form, so much so that even their own colleagues have felt compelled to call them out. Now, they’ve peddled a whopper
I see a great many memes bewailing that schools don’t teach kids things like taxes, household budgeting and other such ‘adulting’ tasks. Once upon a time, of course, we learned such things at our parents’ knees. When my mother went back to work after her youngest (me) started school,
Westerners, what the hell is wrong with you? seems to be the question that Indian-Australian author Ramesh Thakur would like to shake into the addled heads of the left-elite. Having witnessed first hand the suffocation of democracy in first India, then Fiji, Thakur is perplexed by the growing disdain for
Australia’s taxpayer-funded (and left-wing propaganda behemoth) broadcaster costs us north of a billion dollars a year. It would be slightly less if its staff weren’t constantly shooting their mouths off and prompting defamation settlements. From former commandos to businessmen, and of course, Liberal politicians Christian Porter and Andrew
Once again, Australians are asking themselves, ‘Where’s Albo?’ Well, we know we can always find him somewhere overseas or doing a cringe Dad Dance at some pop starlet’s mega-concert. Where you won’t find him, though, is in a town like Alice. Nationals Senator Matt Canavan says youth
For going on a century and a half, the Ripper murders have exercised a continuous fascination on Western culture. Dozens of movies, hundreds of books and even pop songs have been inspired by the 19th-century serial killer. Not for nothing does the Ripper fictionally declare, in Alan Moore’s From
In the early 2000s ‘Golden Age of Long-Form Television’, the first season of True Detective must surely rank as one of the greats. One part of its genius was that it worked effectively on multiple levels. On the surface level, it was a thoroughly disturbing slab of Southern Gothic, in
Many years ago, I was interviewing a financial planner on the subject of succession planning. One her greatest bugbears, she said, was people who were swimming in a fortune of assets, but still determined to get the aged pension. “You’re sitting on a ten million dollar property — you don’
As Anthony Hopkins once admitted, “actors are pretty stupid”. Nowhere is this more obvious than when actors, as they regularly do, subject us to the dreary ritual of lecturing us on current affairs. Mostly, of course, these overpaid, preening parrots are merely doing what they do for a living: squawking
I rarely put much credence in celebrity opinions, because celebrities are generally not very bright, not very worldly, and terrified of saying anything they know their peers (and paymasters) won’t approve of. That said, occasionally, a celebrity does something that breaks the mould and shows a rare streak of
