Pryor – Ours is not to reason Y
June 12th, 2008Ours is not to reason Y, but if we dont we wont survive – Opinion – smh.com.au
Generation Y and the shock of the recession.
Gottliebsen – Nuclear opportunity
June 12th, 2008Business Spectator – Nuclear opportunity
Gottliebsen makes an excellent point, and one that had not occurred to me previously.
The Chernobyl disaster is generally accepted as the most extreme example of the dangers of nuclear power generation gone wrong. According to a 2005 study by the IAEA and WHO as many as 10,000 deaths can be directly or indirectly attributed to it.
By contract, it can be argued that climate change has played a role in the increase of severe storms, ranging from Hurricane Katrina (1,836 dead) to Cyclone Nargis in Burma (at least 22,000 dead).
The link between climate change and such storms is still tentative – the evidence is not clear that these storms were made more severe as a result of changes already underway in our atmosphere. However, if even the most conservative scientific predictions about climate change prove correct, the potential threat to human life due to severe storms and rising sea levels is immense and will number in the millions.
It would be wrong to accept nuclear power as the universal solution to our problems – the issues around public safety, waste disposal, and proliferation are still very real. However, when is the last time that humanity has accepted a technology as being ‘finished’? Like it or not, the time has come to add nuclear to our arsenal of power technologies again, while maintaining the hunt for something better.
Gittins – Too gutless to give us the bad oil
June 11th, 2008Too gutless to give us the bad oil | smh.com.au
It’s not often that Ross Gittins gets angry and sarcastic. Fun when he does though.
Farrelly – We need tough love, not bad parenting
June 4th, 2008We need tough love, not bad parenting – Elizabeth Farrelly – Opinion
Elizabeth Farrelly (yet again) on the need for straight-talking honesty from our politicians. Not a new sentiment, but well said as always.
Farrelly – Adults overboard in the frenzy to sniff out smut
May 28th, 2008Adults overboard in the frenzy to sniff out smut – Opinion – smh.com.au
The Henson witch-hunt may yet become Labor’s “children overboard” affair. One effect of which, if Henson weren’t already world famous, would be to make him so, without affecting the child abuse figures one iota. And bear in mind that party signing itself “Yours, disgusted” on this is the party that closed ranks for months around its own ministerial rock spider Orkopoulos. Now that’s disgusting. Almost as bad as living in a town where all art must be pre-approved by the Rudd, Iemma, Sartor triumvirate and all policy pre-approved by the coal industry. Who’s drawing the dirty pictures now?
Farrelly – Wax or be damned
May 27th, 2008The rise of the pretty boy makes Elizabeth Farrelly wonder where have all the real men gone?
In the ancient cult of the earth goddess Cybele Mater Magna, young male devotees would fall into a frenzy, grab a sword and, in a dramatic public gesture, emasculate themselves.
Some versions have the freshly made castrati run through the streets, choosing the family whose honour it will be to support them by tossing their severed gonads onto the doorstep. But what is generally agreed, from Ovid to Lucretius to Catullus to Pausanius, is that the now genderless youths, known as galli (or, in Greek, galloi) lived and dressed thereafter as women, becoming Cybele’s priestesses, presiding at her worship and at ritual orgies in her honour.
This story might have nothing more than shock value, were it not for the obvious and unexplained feminisation of contemporary men. As Mal Meninga noted with disgust after a recent bloke-survey, “the nation’s iconic hard Aussie blokes are a dying breed. We’ve become a nation of pansies.”
Farrelly – The quest for happiness is no laughing matter
May 14th, 2008The quest for happiness is no laughing matter – Elizabeth Farrelly – Opinion
Insights into the marketplace for happiness.
Farrelly – Giving the latest fairy floss just one more spin
April 2nd, 2008Giving the latest fairy floss just one more spin – Elizabeth Farrelly – Opinion
This, be it corporate bullshit or art-world bullshit or political bullshit, is all the same. It’s small talk in the airless front room of our lives, polite morning teas with the vicar, breakfast meetings with power couples, motivational speakers flanked by pomp and flowers at polished wood daises, euphemism of all kinds. It’s also false promises.
Brooks – The emotional bankrupt
March 19th, 2008Behind the alpha-achiever, a clumsy, desperate soul – Opinion – smh.com.au
Well said. This is a trap that I find myself trying to escape at times. My consolation is that there seem to be plenty around me who are having less success.
Farrelly – To pollute is sinful
March 19th, 2008Forgive me, father, for being a naughty recycler – Opinion – smh.com.au
Elizabeth Farrelly is always good for making you think.
The notion that loneliness is the state of no longer feeling like you are being observed has more than a little truth in it, and probably strikes to the heart of many of the problems of mild depression that people across the western world commonly experience.
After all, the popularity of Facebook and MySpace are based more than a little on the offer that people want to look at you and are interested in your life. The greatest feature that Facebook has to drive this is the inability for anyone to know who looks at their profile or how often (thus allowing us all to live in a wonderful fantasy world where our profiles, posted links and musings are of interest to all of our hundreds of ‘friends’).
As Western life becomes more saturated with media, is it this illusion of mattering and being listened to that is really the opiate of the masses?
Another point from this article worth a comment: the idea that to exist is to pollute and therefore (now) to sin.
The problem with this is that if you place the environmental impact of human existence on a moral scale like this you need to take more into account. All creatures consume and pollute, but at the same time they produce. We hold trees as being “good” because they produce things we need.
So, humans can only be held to account if their negative impact vastly outweighs their positive. If we hold our pollution to reasonable levels that arise from us trying to achieve grand things then that isn’t ‘sinful’, its living. It’s what we’re FOR.
And on that existential note, I’m going to get a coffee. :-)