God save the constitutional monarchy, because nothing would save us from a President

Viewing the spill as an endorsement for our current political system.

Let’s be clear from the start: I’m not a monarchist. I know that our head of state is named Elizabeth, and that relatives include Andrew, Charles, Diana and the Queen Mum, although I understand some of these are deceased.

I’m not pro-monarchy, I’m anti-president.

Benefit of cap and trade ETS is it speaks the language of GDP

Many people deride environmental and sustainability concerns as apocalyptic, arguing that life in the developed world has consistently improved over the past few hundreds of years and will continue to do so.

The basis for this claim is a profound faith in progress driven by advancements in science and improvements in technology. At this point I don’t want to get into the merits of the claim that our lives have improved because we now have three TV sets rather than two, but to argue that science and technology aren’t enough to save the environment because of the way progress is measured; ie, via growth in gross domestic product (GDP).
 
The event that now goes by the acronym GFC (global financial crisis) is often said to be paradigm-changing, to have changed the system. It hasn’t.

Advance Australia, Yeah!

A national anthem is supposed to be inspirational and aspirational, it’s not supposed to reflect the country we are but the country we want to be. 

About a month ago Gregor Stronach had a bit of a whinge about the Australian National Anthem ("Advance Australia meh…"), and to make his point dissected the song using the time-honoured, if somewhat dishonest, method of taking words out of context and interpreting metaphors literally. The same method could be used against any piece of writing; applied against Stronach’s own piece one wouldn’t even make it past the title without noticing that "meh" isn’t a word and deploring him as an illiterate.