I have lost count of the times I have been told that science has proved something or other, including the absurd claim that ‘science has proved creationism’. Apart from the…
Julian Porteous, the Catholic Archbishop of Hobart, has written an article in Murdoch’s The Australian (where else?) entitled ‘Protect our religious freedom, for goodness sake’1. He begins with an exposition…
Working out when life on Earth started has always been difficult because the Earth is constantly recycling, albeit slowly, the rocks in its crust. As a consequence, the older the…
It is suspected that the Morrison government will spend our money to keep the archaic Liddell coal-fired power station open or even to build a coal-fired power station1. This, as…
Most people tend to think of inertia as applying to something at rest or stationary, such as a person on a couch. However, it also applies to bodies in motion….
I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and on-one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agenda or knowledgeably question those in authority; when clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.
Ludicrously, the shifty member for Goldstein, Tim Wilson, who used taxpayers’ money in campaigning against Labor’s franking credit refund policy1, is the chair of the government’s economics committee. He has…