What part have newspapers played in the demise of our democracy? There was a time in my life when to miss reading The Age daily would bring on symptoms of withdrawal. Newspapers have been part of my daily life for as long as I can remember. I purchased them for reasons of a desire to be informed. To understand what was going on around me. To shape a world view.

Where the Rod Laver Tennis Centre now stands, in Melbourne, the area was once occupied by massive Elm trees under which fierce political debates once took place. Rather like Hyde Park in London. It was there that as a teenage boy I spent many a Sunday afternoon. Politics has been for most of my life something that sort of ties things together. Other than what one might do in bed I can think of little that politics doesn’t invade in one way or another.

blaming other for democritical fucups with intent...

To the politicians of Australia,

Let’s simplify the debate here.

Hundreds of thousands of unemployed people just want a chance to work.

It is a crisis when almost a third of young Australians are either out of work, or without enough work, writes Leon Moulden.

More sensitive than we thought

The new paper recalculates this sensitivity again — and unfortunately the results aren't in our favour. The study suggests that stabilisation of today's CO2 levels would still result in 3-7C warming, whereas doubling of CO2 will lead to 7-13C warming over millennia.

The Turnbull government would have us believe that they have been successful in job creation – it’s their mantra – but a closer look at the figures suggests otherwise.

US President Barack Obama made his eighth – and final – address to the United Nations General Assembly this week. What a relief, not to be subjected to any more florid speeches filled with vacuous, psychopathic lies.

Our politicians have sold our country out from under the feet of the citizenry. We are no longer even the primary audience that our politicians are worried about. Policies are now crafted to be suitable to the Murdoch and Fairfax organisations and the big end of town. Exclusively. Common sense does not matter. Nor do Aussie citizens.

We all know by now that the real terrorists (the politicians in the suits and ties and the banksters that pull their strings) are waging their war of terror on multiple fronts for multiple reasons.

I closed my last post with a series of rhetorical questions. Why are RAAF jets flying missions inside Syria? Why are we following the United States blindly halfway around the world to drop bombs on a country with whom we are not at war? And why do we now appear to be supporting ISIS? In hindsight these questions could have been answered in a single bullet point: Australia is a client state of the US, and we do exactly what we’re told. The question then becomes, what is the US doing in Syria?

Dear Pauline,

You have been derided on social media and in the mainstream media as a fact-free redneck from Queensland on just about everything you espouse.

The conflict in Syria is not a war in the conventional sense of the word. It is a regime change operation, just like Libya and Iraq were regime change operations.

When a panelist on the Drum last night said that John Howard didn’t call for a plebiscite to change the marriage act to specify it as a union between a man and a woman, former Howard government minister Jackie Kelly stridently interrupted, shouting that it was Jesus who said marriage must be between a man and a woman and that it has been this way for two thousand years.