What is it with humans and dicks? Freud was famously obsessed with phallic symbols. Urban warriors paint dicks on potholes to force councils to repair them. There’s a whole doodling board game dedicated to, well, drawing doodles on dicks. The Australian Electoral Commission has even confirmed that drawing a
Rick Mac I’m sure that there are many readers out there, who, like me, are utterly appalled at the obscene and repulsive antisemitic behavior that we are witnessing in the streets of many Western cities today. Swastikas displayed. Nazi salutes given. Chants of “Gas the Jews” and “F**k
Ben McCann Ben McCann, Associate Professor of French Studies, University of Adelaide mercatornet.com On October 16 1923, brothers Walt and Roy set up a modest cartoon studio. Their goal was to produce short animated films. They created a new character: a mouse, with large ears. Named “Mickey”, he soon
Amanda Reilly Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington theconversation.com When Wellington carpenter Samuel Parnell began the struggle for an eight-hour working day back in 1840, he could have never foreseen how modern work culture would evolve. But he would no doubt empathise with the challenges faced by today’
Andrew Lowenthal Andrew Lowenthal is a Brownstone Institute fellow and co-founder and former executive director of EngageMedia, an Asia-Pacific digital rights, open and secure technology, and documentary non-profit, and a former fellow of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and MIT’s Open Documentary Lab. brownstone.org
David Bell David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a public health physician and biotech consultant in global health. He is a former medical officer and scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO), Programme Head for malaria and febrile diseases at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in
Pollster David Farrar told media this was the biggest swing since the emergence of the two-party system in 1938, serving as an indication of just how significant this turnaround was. Key Labour candidates lost electorate seats in defeats that no one saw coming. Michael Wood lost Mount Roskill, and Phil
A couple of years ago, I wrote about Zealandia for the BFD. Zealandia is the name given to what was the world’s eighth continent, until it sunk beneath the Pacific, like the fabled Lemuria. Today, all that remains above the waves are its once-highlands, now islands, such as New
In the three and a half decades since it began as an underground militant group, Hamas has pursued a consistently violent strategy aimed at rolling back Israeli rule – and it has made steady progress despite bringing enormous suffering to both sides of the conflict. But its stunning incursion into Israel
I was a, was a kamikaze pilot They gave me a plane, I couldn’t fly it home The Hoodoo Gurus The kamikaze have become the stuff of WWII legend: the fanaticism of these young Japanese suicide pilots and the terror they wreaked on ships’ crews who found themselves facing
George Ford Smith George Ford Smith is a former mainframe and PC programmer and technology instructor, the author of eight books including a novel about a renegade Fed chairman (Flight of the Barbarous Relic) and a nonfiction book on how money became an instrument of theft (The Jolly Roger Dollar)
By October of 1974 Mott the Hoople had four hit albums in America and completed a very successful tour – including a week-long ‘residency’ at Madison Square Garden – where every concert was sold out. But it was taking a toll on Mott frontman, Ian Hunter: he was under enormous pressure to
When misfortune strikes Ned Flanders, The Simpsons’ quintessential Charlie Church, he asks, in Job-like despair: why me, Lord? I’ve done everything the Bible says, even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff! Ned’s confusion is what awaits anyone who holds to the peculiar doctrine of Biblical literalism: that
I have been in Ashburton for the last few days. One of the strange things about Ashburton is the lack of election hoardings. I saw a mere one in the main street for the soon-to-be-MP National candidate, and another for the New Nation Party, but that is it. State Highway
