The Null Device

2006/8/8

The Australian government is planning to strip environmental groups and trade unions of their tax-deductible status, for campaigning against the government during the last federal election. Interestingly enough, there is no mention of revoking charitable tax-deductible status from groups that involve themselves in politics on the government's side, such as hardline evangelical Christian organisations.

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Over the past few weeks, Dorothy Gambrell (who draws Cat and Girl, an amusing and thought-provoking web comic (though somehow that wasn't enough to get her into the Belle & Sebastian tribute graphic novel)) has been travelling on container ships across the Pacific, from San Francisco Bay to Tokyo, Osaka and Kaohsiung, Taiwan. She has now returned and posted photographs:

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Stephen Bayley, an prominent design critic, has issued a scathing indictment of conditions in London, speaking to a Conservative Party policy group:

"Most of them are getting worse. London is filthy, lawless and expensive. These are not great conditions for civility to flourish."
"Putting 10 million aggressive hominids into close proximity and inviting them to engage in serial acts of competitive individualism ... for jobs, schools or parking spaces, could not be considered a reasonable idea," Bayley said.
"You put rats in claustrophobic circumstances and they become homosexual, murderous and cannibalistic in no time at all.
I wonder whether he threw in the word "homosexual" to appeal to the reactionary elements in his audience.

Though has London ever been anything other than filthy, lawless and expensive?

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