No matter what China’s recent naval drills in the Tasman Sea were meant to provoke, the result has mainly been a lot of often vacuous discussion as to whether or not Australia should feel provoked. There has been a huge diversity in the coverage, from rather sensible-sounding reflections on adopting some kind of diplomatic stoicism,…
When Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour brought the United States into World War 2, the U.S. was faced with a huge logistical problem. While Britain and Nazi-occupied Europe weren’t very far apart, the distance between the eastern shore of the Pacific and Japan is so large that any offensive across the Pacific would have been…
Did your grandma have the same diet as Hercules? Good question. If your grandma was around in 1960s Australia it’s possible. You see, in ‘60s Australia many people were fond of a treat called Squill Candy. “What on earth is Squill Candy?” you might ask. Well, as you might possibly have guessed, Squill Candy is…
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” -Haruki Murakami Nearly every government, from tiny Tuvalu, all the way up to India, has a public sphere. That is, a community of some kind, “made up of private people gathered together as a public…
As the climate crisis accelerates, the need to understand and protect coral reef ecosystems grows ever more urgent. One important element of this quest to unravel the inner workings of reefs is mapping reef biochemistry, which reveals far more about the stress the reef is under than visual surveys do. This is especially useful as…
There’s a lot of talk at the moment about how to make agriculture less harmful, such as by encouraging people to get their protein from vegetables instead of meat, for example; however it seems like changing our diets might not be necessary. Scientists have figured out how to decouple protein production from agriculture, through a…
On the 24th of February last year, Russia relaunched its invasion of Ukraine (which originally started on the 20th of February 2014), and apart from a parody of Putin’s irredentist essay, I haven’t done much to make fun of Putin. So let’s look at some of the worst-aged quotes to recently turn a year old….
William Le Lacheur is a national hero in Costa Rica, where his exploits are legendary. He helped the newly independent nation establish direct trade links with Europe, helping establish its economy. He also took young Costa Rican boys to London to get an education, brought Protestantism to Costa Rica, and helped them defeat an American…
Yesterday Queen Elizabeth the Second died. She wasn’t Australia’s second Queen named Elizabeth, since the other Elizabeth reigned before Australia was ‘discovered’. Despite the fact that we have had no other Elizabeth’s we call her the second because the monarchy is an embarrassing relic of British rule. In this article I’ll be laying out why…
The French system of allocation of power is pretty strange: despite the very first article of its constitution stipulating that “Its organisation is decentralised.”, France is one of the least decentralised countries in the democratic world, even for a unitary state. The current political establishment was set up in the middle of the Algerian War…
-A modest proposal furthering Putin’s ideas to their logical consequences: Strasbourg and Kehl are one people, who have time and again been greedily ripped apart by the powers that be. These people have been separated by far-off emperors and politicians trying to hold back Greater Strasbourg. The most recent separation, in 1953, was certainly the…
Everybody’s talking about the current French elections, but as far as I can see, no one is talking about the effect these elections could have on the Andorran monarchy. The President of France, whomever it is, automatically becomes a coprince of Andorra; a landlocked microstate in the Pyrenees, situated between Spain and France. The coprince…