Here in Australia we have a horrible leader of the opposition called Tony Abbott. He is all black and rotten on the inside, as you can see here.

I saw this in the paper today. It tells us that Australia's own Gina Reinhart is now officially the world's richest woman. Hooray! Her fortune now stands at almost 30 billion dollars. For people like this, how much is enough? And what does she personally do that makes her worth this sort of money? Does she dig holes? Carry ore around? Serve customers? Do the books? Does she do anything useful? I know some will argue that she generates wealth for others by being an astute operator, and thus providing jobs and paying taxes. That may be so, but does that really make her worth $30 billion? That's...

From this article in The Age, we learn that the Australian public has an "insatiable appetite for narcotics". Of course we do. Humans have been using mind-altering drugs since pre-historic times. A significant factor in our rapid evolution as a species has been our willingness to experiment with substances we find that have an affect on us - this is how we found both medicines (like aspirin) and hallucinogens (like psilocybin mushrooms). Increasingly, as human consciousness has evolved we have become more complex, to the degree that we now have entire branches of science dedicated to improving...

It seems to me that a lot of the problems caused by democracy (corruption, lack of representation, mindless politicking, fear and loathing campaigns, dog-whistling, short-termism etc) are attributable to the fact that our parliamentry system is based on very old technology - the idea that the only way the voice of the people can be heard is for those people to be organised by geographical areas where all will vote for a single person who will go and represent them and their area in a parliament somewhere. What this causes is a concentration of power in the hands of a few, most of whom we actually...