Category: Writing

Run out of Fanta Lemon in Iceland

Hold the Ice-land.

Iceland has no McDonald’s and now no Fanta Lemon. They’ve also cancelled their Comedy Festival cos noone can afford to buy tickets.

With 300,000 people, they reckon they’ve got a sweeter deal from the IMF bail-out than Argentina. And they’ve got mineral resources and an educated workforce. Housing prices have deflated. The foreigners were the first to get sacked so they’ve all left. Iceland’s  resources are being sold to foreign investors at cheapo prices. Utilities are being privatised.

While younger Icelanders are fleeing, older ones with houses and commitments are stuck. One blog post I read said each Icelander should be paying 80 per cent of their gross income to pay back foreigners who lost money in IceSave. The foreigners (Brits and Dutch) aren’t even getting ALL their money back.

Continue reading Run out of Fanta Lemon in Iceland

Stomping out Nazis in Chippendale

abbafest 016
Mounted police in Chippendale or Ringwraiths from LOTR?

Knocked off early-ish on Friday night at 7.30pm and went to the Humanist Society Hall in Chippendale to protest against a group of extreme right-wing fascists, Klub Nazia, who meet there every month. They didn’t show, though.

There were about 80 people there, mostly residents, hanging around outside and a little streeet party with drums and music and singing. There were two mounted police, about 10 Tactical Response officers and another dozen police officers. They were strategically standing in a circle around the protesters.    Continue reading Stomping out Nazis in Chippendale

Comedian worried about bigots

1262287 UK comedy bloke Frank Skinner always dreamt of a Catholic-Anglican reunion but now he realises that only the hard-core anti-gay, anti-women Anglicans want to rejoin the Catholic church. Oh noes! He’s not keen on this.

‘We couldn’t see through the bullsh*t’

Was snoozing through a postgrad info evening at the Hilton tonight, as previous stellar alumni were prattling on about how great the uni is, when one of the presenters [I haven’t included his name here, as I might follow it up] spoke about how he’d already had a great uni degree but when he hit his mid-30s, he was working for a big institution and a stream of quantitative finance graduates started giving presentations to the company based on the latest mathematical theories. “I started feeling like an old fogey. I didn’t know what these new theories were. We couldn’t see through the bullsh*t because we couldn’t understand what they were talking about.” He added that on a global scale, “that’s why the GFC happened”.

So several years ago he went back to uni, studied and caught up. ‘”When they came in and did a presentation, I knew what they were talking about. I could point out holes in their theories. They couldn’t bullsh*t me.”

On the study front, he said postgrads should expect to spend three hours out of class studying for every one hour of time spent in class.

‘Undergraduate life was all
about recreation, fornication,
inebriation and application’

he said, warning us “it’s different for postgrads” and we’d all have to work hard and get high marks. Every speaker urged us to do the postgrad courses part-time — classes are held on weeknights and intensives on weekends.

And another thing …

Police are spying on us

Sydney Harbour Bridge and Opera House on an overcast day.
A mega-crim's getaway boat? Or just part of the NSW ferries service? It was suitably dark and overcast at the Dangerous Ideas conference.

David Mutton, who was the NSW Police’s chief psychologist for 11 years, is now a lecturer at UWS in forensic psychology. “Crime pays,” he said, conceding he’d made a good living out of it.

He was speaking at the Dangerous Ideas conference at the Sydney Opera House. Mutton said that most people think it’s OK if the police spy on lots of people because “if you’re not doing anything wrong, it doesn’t matter”.

But then he gave us an example of how a “cleanskin” (innocent person) can be under surveillance for being unwittingly associated with a criminal — eg. the criminal’s accountant or former school friend. He told a story of how a woman at a bar could get involved with a criminal, unknowingly, and then all her activities, including bedroom gymnastics, would be caught on film, phone, email etc and observed/cheered on by the surveillance team.

Also, if you’re a cleanskin, you can be called in and be forced to tell the truth and spill your guts about anything you know (under pain of five years’ jail if you lie or refuse to talk). These meetings are kept secret (you hope!).  “There’s no right to silence,” Mutton said, despite your innocence and lack of involvement.

By monitoring phone conversations, police psychologists can detect criminals’ vulnerabilities and use that to derail them, particularly in interviews.

Continue reading Police are spying on us