Posts on sundry matters of life the universe and everything: Culture, Environment, Life, Politics & Government, Science, Social Science and Society, Technology etc.
It can’t be true. In the UK unemployment is being redefined as a psychological disorder as part of an effort to cut the welfare bill by $12 billion. And, says an article in the New Scientist (can’t find the link), the UK
joins nations such as Australia and the US in increasingly requiring claimants to comply with interventions intended to modify emotions, beliefs and personality.
They say “claimants must demonstrate characteristics deemed desirable in workplaces, like confidence and enthusiasm, in return for welfare.” Continue reading Pathologising unemployment→
“The Australian Labor Party is a democratic socialist party and has the objective of the democratic socialisation of industry, production, distribution and exchange, to the extent necessary to eliminate exploitation and other anti-social features in these fields.”
In practice Labor has been the party of privatisation. The last time they proposed nationalising anything was in 1947, when Chifley wanted to nationalise the banks. It was one reason he lost the election. Continue reading Will Labor dump the Socialist Objective?→
Whatever wave of migration we look at, someone was already there. Colin Barras in the New Scientist (paywalled) takes a look at the three ancestral waves of migration that founded Western civilisation.
First were the hunter-gatherers. Then came the farmers. These were followed by the Yamnaya, originating from herders on the steppes north of the Black Sea, who brought the horse and the wagon, and the Indo-European language that predominates in Europe, except for Basque, Estonian, Finnish and Magyar (Hungarian). Continue reading Deep origins: early Europe→
Labor has written to the Australian Federal Police to ask them to look into Speaker Bronwyn Bishop’s decision to take a taxpayer-funded helicopter trip from Melbourne to Geelong to attend a fundraiser for Ron Nelson, a Liberal candidate in the Victorian state election.
The suggestion is that supporting a party fundraiser is not part of the duties of the speaker of the Australian parliament. Continue reading Saturday salon→
Happiest is a woman, living without a partner in a small town in Queensland, who is not poor and who exercises every day. Continue reading Happiness is…→
Last year, the total circulation of all Australian daily newspapers was a little over 2.1 million, fully one million lower than it was at the turn of the century.
The recent Fairfax Ipsos poll said 85% of people supported the constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as Australia’s first inhabitants. Hence on the surface a referendum planned for 2017, the 50th anniversary of the 1967 referendum looks like passing. However, indigenous leaders have made it clear that they regard such an outcome as merely symbolic. They want discrimination within the current Constitution dealt with. This is where the trouble begins. Continue reading Indigenous constitutional recognition – will we get more than symbolism?→
Dennis Atkins has written an opinion piece in the Courier Mail on US Supreme Court judge Justice Anthony Kennedy’s “coherent, comprehensive and cogent” majority judgement on same-sex marriage. The judge reasons and writes beautifully:
