Porn is bad. There you go, I just saved you the trouble of reading most commentary and opinion on the subject. Porn Is Bad is the start, middle and end of just about anything you read or hear.

Gail Dines gave a series of hysterical screeches when she visited Australia last year, the best of which was her appearance on Q&A. Not that she brought anything rational to the discussion, peppered as her pronouncements were with epithets such as “Oh, yes, I’ve dealt with men like you before”, but she did manage to burn “gag on my cock dot com” into my memory for, it seems, all time.

Melinda Tankard-Reist sees “pornification” in everything from actual porn to K-mart catalogues, making it difficult to determine if she’s actually motivated by concern for women or is simply enacting the Madonna/whore obsession of her Taliban/Catholic religious beliefs.

Australia has one of the most complex, inconsistent and opaque school funding arrangements in the developed world. You couldn’t design a worse school funding system if you tried.

This is because our education system is actually dozens of systems, public and private. Each is shaped by political opportunism, compromise, ideology, and turf-wars. Each is layered upon the others. This jungle severely limits accountability and contributes to growing resource and performance gaps between rich and poor schools, with disadvantaged students suffering most.

It all started with science blocks.

Under the Australian constitution, schooling is a residual power of the states – essentially because it is not listed as one of the Commonwealth’s exclusive powers. This continued colonial arrangements.

Things began to change in 1964, when the Menzies government introduced capital funding for science laboratories for both public and private schools. A few years later, in an attempt to woo Catholic voters and respond to localised funding crises, they provided some funding to non-government schools. Until this time, private schools had largely funded themselves.

The enormous electoral popularity of these piecemeal education programs did not go unnoticed by the Labor Party. On gaining power in 1972, Labor established a comprehensive review into school funding and, from 1974, started providing general recurrent funding to public and private schools based on their perceived needs.

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Who the fuck am I meant to vote for at the next Federal election? This is not a rhetorical question. I really want to know. Who is meant to get my vote? Who do I trust to do the right thing most of the time, and how do I minimise the inevitable disappointment of supporting people who will, with a high degree of predictability, do things I hate? Not just disagree with, or squirm a bit about, but actively hate. How?

Watching politics at the moment is a serious exercise in parallel universism. All the received wisdom about what is right and wrong with the parties, the policies and the process strikes me as the grandest nonsense, indicative not of intelligent analysis and a keen eye for the facts as presented, but the habits of a political class so immersed in their own specialness that the whole thing has become about them.

I’m even over most of the alternative commentary, the blogs, the outsiders on Twitter, the amateurs and semi-professionals who I always thought cast a new and interesting light on what is going on. Maybe I’m just having a bad year, but some of them are driving me nuts.

Twitter itself, for all its virtues — and I would seriously be lost without it — has also become a site of pathetic servility and co-optation. With so many ‘serious people’ now on there, so many ‘big names’, there has been a discouraging outbreak of brown-nosing as the Outsiders try and gracefully lodge their heads in the arses of the Insiders. The edge has gone out of the critique of the alt.commentary team and they are [nearly] all starstruck. They used to want to show up the shortcomings of the professionals; now they want to be their followers. Fuck that.

New media is no longer providing a challenge to the mainstream, it is serving to entrench it.

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My dear mother used to say: don’t knock it till you’ve tried it. And I’ve tried to follow that advice in everything I do. Of course, when I think of my mother, I automatically think of pornography, and not just because of my breastfeeding fetish.

Some people don’t like pornography. Now, before you cry out, “They’re witches! Burn them!” let’s cut them some slack. There are many reasons a person might be weird enough to not like pornography. For example, that person may be suffering from nervous hysteria and just need a good finger massage or fire-hose-induced orgasm to set things right. Not that I am advocating that members of the public immediately go out and begin aiming hoses at anti-porn campaigners’ crotches – let’s leave that to the professionals. My point is, we shouldn’t assume that just because someone devotes their life to telling grown men and women what they should and shouldn’t be allowed to watch and trying to turn sex into a joyless, shameful experience for all, that means they must be hateful granite-faced pleasure-vampires whose only satisfaction in life is that brought about by denying enjoyment to others. I would never say that. I’m sure porn-haters are lovely people, who just need a bit of gentle education.

Because you see, I really think if people knew a bit more about porn, they’d change their tune. I think they’re knocking it before they’ve tried it. And this is a mistake. Nobody should ever claim to dislike pizza without eating at least one slice. Nobody should ever condemn murder unless they’ve killed a tramp or two to get a feel for it. And nobody should ever, ever claim that porn is destroying civilisation without, at least once, sitting naked on the couch and putting their tenders through their paces while watching a very unconventional job interview.

Miami is best known for vice, Vice and art deco. But in the past decade it’s also become famous for hosting the equivalent of Schoolies Week for wealthy art buffs — Art Basel | Miami Beach — the “|” is essential, apparently.

It now rivals the original Art Basel in Switzerland for the title of the world’s largest art fair, and this year attracted 263 of the world’s fanciest commercial galleries, showing over 2000 artists. More than 40,000 visitors flocked to the fair, many sporting berets and nearly all overusing the word “darling”. Honestly, it’s not just a stereotype, they actually do that.

So here we are, teetering over the cusp of 2012. This is the year that apparently will make or break the major party leaders, Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott. It’s the year that kicks off the long countdown to the next federal election, which is due anytime from 3 August 2013 to 30 November 2013.

We’re told it’s the year we’ll see whether Gillard can rebuild her battered leadership credentials, whether Rudd has enough mongrel to bring his own party down, and whether Abbott can recast himself as an alternative Prime Minister worthy of our respect.

And then, of course, there’s the question of the evolutionary future of pigeons.

A while ago, through a series of unfortunate circumstances, my editorial consultant (see image to the left) had to be confined to the house for reasons of prophylactic hygiene. Consequently, he and I have spent the daylight hours of the last eleven weeks like a pair of isolated lighthouse keepers, which is to say composing sea shanties, threatening to murder each other and periodically going mad.

Today, finally, was his day of release. We parted company after breakfast, I with a promise to stay in touch, he with a placatory wee on the door mat.

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Sharemarket volatility, plummeting business confidence, the impending collapse of the great single currency project and the liberal rotation of headlines such as $X billion was wiped off markets following renewed fears of Y.

The world is being swept by a financial storm. The question is, has your government remembered to Scotchgard its suede shoes?

The first thing to note is the ‘eurozone crisis’ or ‘GFC II’ isn’t an isolated event. Following waves of ill-conceived bailouts, it marks an alarming progression from concerns about bank viability to that of government insolvency. Whole countries inside and out of Europe find themselves up Shizen Creek without a paddlé.

Poor John. After more than 500 years of being dissed by Shakespeare and Robin Hood, there was nothing left but having Alan Rickman play him in a Kevin Costner film to confirm him as England’s greatest villain. John was actually no more villainous than any other king, but he was short, paranoid, irreligious and broke. and he was the son and younger brother of tall glamorous warriors. When history is written by the clergy and funded by the victors, John’s reputation had no chance of anything but infamy.

At the time this goes to print, last drinks will have been called on a year of excremental mediocrity in Australia’s political history. The ugly lights will be on, revealing a handful of interns and junior staffers sweeping the debris around drunken, semi-conscious pundits too clapped out to talk coherently, but too addicted to call it a day. The politicians will have long departed, returning to their families, prostitutes or shoplifting – as befits their needs. The general public will bemoan summer programming and the lack of reality cooking shows with nappy wearing contestants. And so will end 2011, neither with a bang nor a whimper, but with a wet fart and clench-cheeked waddle to the taxi rank.

When I was completing my law degree, we were taught that there are a number of competing considerations in sentencing.

Exactly how many considerations there were depended on whose list you were reading, but a common selection would be retribution, rehabilitation, deterrence, and incapacitation.

Retribution is similar to punishment, or, in some situations, revenge. In almost every crime, either the victim or the community has suffered a loss, the perpetrator has gained an advantage, or both. Punishment seeks to rebalance the equation.

I’d been living at my brother’s place for a couple of months before I noticed the coffee shop.

The end of something is never easy. Separation, divorce… even when it’s been a long time coming, when it comes as a relief rather than a shock, it still isn’t easy. Something ends and everything changes.

And change brings its own challenges.

Which is how I found myself living in a single room, all my worldly possessions in a pile in the garage. New suburb, new area, new routines. It was only supposed to be for a short time, while I started untangling the strands of my old life, but life doesn’t stop for new beginnings. Life goes on.

January is a special time for me. With the insanity of Christmas gone and the majority of the summer still ahead, most people are letting their thoughts drift towards the cricket, listening to the ABC commentary team bringing life to one of our favourite sports, or perhaps muting the TV whenever Tony Greig pops up to sell us yet another limited edition piece of cricket memorabilia. And while that is something that I’ll be doing too, what really gets me excited is that for the NFL, January means playoffs and the road to the Superbowl. American football captivates me in a way that no other sport does, and while I love watching Australia play almost any sport with a passionate intensity there is something special about gridiron that none of our local codes can match.

I can’t pinpoint the precise date I became a Muslim because it took me a few years of dabbling in what would become the world’s largest socially-devalued religion, to know whether I wanted to make the stigma my own. The best I can come up with is late-nineties, when it was Dolly the cloned sheep who was horrifying good conservative Christian Australians, rather than their Islamo-fascist sleeper-cell neighbours posing as Afghan refugees. Since then, the world has been rocked by religiously-motivated terrorists* and the Islamification of our food supplies. I’ve also become a bit of an expert on things Muslimish, so here’s a handy guide to things you don’t need to worry about.

I love e-books. Have read the buggers for years. From using a dinky PDA to an iPhone, from old CRT screens to wide screen LCD monitors and currently on my plethora of Android devices, I have read books in electronic format for longer than I care to admit.

Which makes it odd for me to say that e-books give me the shits.

Don’t get me wrong, I love e-books as an idea and I love reading them. What I hate is that none of the people involved in selling them, bar a couple of unique examples, really get e-books.

For libertarians, government encroachment into the lives of individuals has gone a step too far. Even libertarians accept there is a limited role for government in restricting individual behaviour. But it’s rooted in principles of property, self-determination and personal responsibility. Not objectives that prefer a broader ideal at the expense of liberty.

On an episode of ABC’s QandA in June 2011, NSW Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon argued she ‘often find[s] that this notion of the nanny state, it’s trotted out when people are a bit hard up for an argument’.

The term ‘nanny state’ is dismissively thrown around but it has strong intellectual roots.

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Not many Italians would go to the trouble of making pizza at home. The really spoilt ones, of course, may be tempted on occasion to fire up the outdoor, purpose built, wood burning oven at their country house for a summer evening with friends and family, or a lunch for the workers during the olive or grape harvest. The rest of them belie any fantasies we may harbour about three generations of women working harmoniously in the kitchen all morning, arduously fixing tempting delights for their hardworking husbands, brothers and sons.

Adam Foster is not normal — but that’s a very good thing. Because if he was normal, then his wines just might be too, which would be a bloody shame. During a recent chat with Adam, it was plainly clear that this is a man who, by his nature, thinks far outside the square.

ACROSS