People who know me would scarcely credit it, but I really do bite my tongue a lot. No matter how hard it is to do. I mean, I think I really deserve a pat on the back for, when a Guardian-reading acquaintance was pontificating recently about how they source all
You wouldn’t let Bernie Madoff teach your kids about business ethics. You wouldn’t let Gary Glitter teach them about personal safety. So, why would you let the mainstream media teach them about “the harms of online misinformation and disinformation”? Bryce Corbett […] formerly a journalist for 60 Minutes, the
With the US Presidential election an interminable seven months away yet, it appears as though the race is all but locked in. Not the result, certainly, but the campaign is already settled. All that’s left is the long months of arm-waving, speechifyin’ and trying to stop Joe Biden wandering
The great philosopher of science, Karl Popper, started his academic life in psychology (having first worked in road construction, then as a cabinet maker). It was during his studies of psychology that Popper noticed something: for all its pretensions to being a ‘science’, psychology too often resembled a pseudoscience: most
For as long as I can remember, there hasn’t been such a goldmine of scandal and skullduggery as the Higgins-Lehrmann saga since the 1970s, at least. It’s a never-ending fountain of shenanigans: from scheming politicians, sketchy public servants, dodgy lawyers and shameless media. It’s burned nearly everyone
As magician and sceptic Penn Jillette puts it: if you live in a beach-house in the US, you probably shouldn’t be trying to tell starving people in the rest of the world that you’re’ fighting the technology that could feed their children… Unless you and yours are starving,
OK, here’s a little bit of pithy wisdom I’d not heard before but which will prove handy to folk like me who are forever trying to remember whether clocks go backward or forward at the beginning or ending of daylight savings time: Spring forwards, fall backwards. Aha, sorted.
The Soviet-born Australian composer Elena Kats-Chernin once reminisced about the her childhood. Her father would sometimes bring home a special gift: an orange. She would, she said, save the orange for as long as possible, eating one precious segment a day. It’s a stark reminder to Western children today,
It must be such a relief for him. Finally, Anthony Albanese doesn’t even have to bother pretending any more: he’s finally got the excuse he’s been itching for, to rip the mask off and show what he really thinks. Or, more correctly, what he knows will win
Remember when it was all, “Gays are just nice, normal people entitled to their privacy like anyone else”? Somehow that’s become, “Gays like to bang animals and they want to tell your kids about it in secret!” If the latter sounds “homophobic” to you, rest easy. It’s officially
As I wrote recently, New Zealand police are hot on the case when some petty vandalism sets the rainbow chickens clucking, but actual crimes? Of the robby, stabby, shooty, kind? You won’t see them for dust. In fact, most New Zealanders don’t even bother reporting crimes any more,
EV drivers get terribly upset when you point out the many shortcomings of their smugmobiles. In fact, they’re a bit like Apple computer and phone users: so besotted with the sleek exterior and shiny coloured icons that they’ll furiously deny that it’s a pile of crap at
Was there ever a more cloth-eared PM than Anthony Albanese? From swanning around on endless overseas trips and lounging in the corporate boxes at major events while Australians battle a cost-of-living crisis, to watching in helpless panic as hundreds of foreign-born rapists and paedophiles are given a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card, Albanese’
During the Covid pandemic, it rubbed a great many people the wrong way that nurses in supposedly swamped hospitals had plenty of time to rehearse impeccably-choreographed Tik Tok dance videos. This is what they’re doing, while Grandpa’s urgent cancer screening is cancelled for the sixth month running? But
As I wrote some time ago, it is beyond obvious that the only way the Ukraine war will end is a negotiated peace. Anyone who claimed even back then that Russia would be decisively defeated was kidding themselves — and condemning more Russians and Ukrainians to death. Today, holding out for
