Hi Everyone, I've been quiet for a while, but am finally able to upgrade my website. It will take a while, but at the end of it, I'll have a lot of the cruft out of the way. During this time, I'll be offline for hopefully not more than an hour at a time, but at the end of itI'll hopefully have a nicely functional website and it will be easier for me to add content.In the meantime, I've added a recent article making a review of Tim Hollo's book "Living Democracy" onthis website, and I invite you to have a look.
The community radio station where I broadcast, Radio Skid Row, is having a fundraiser! You can just donate, but there's also plenty of perks you can get too. My show is "Roving Spotlight", and I say it is Ripley's believe it or not for ideas, along with all the letters to the editor that I never had published. You can check it out here.On this website, I recently wrote an article on Modern Monetary Theory, https://johnaugust.com.au/article/modern-monetary-theory .
I've recently been interviewed on the "Northern Vibe" podcast. The original interview was a lot longer, but here we talk about when you can do yourself harm and it be appropriate. You'll find it here.
Going back a bit further, I was commenting on politics and SF at the "Year of the Stainless Steel Rat" internet convention, looking at SF, Cyberpunk and other issues. Is our current era of manipulative advertising and stuff like Facebook being able to predict our behaviour better than we can - is that presaged by "Cyberpunk"?
On Tuesday's show ( 13th December ), I'll be interviewing Lisa Navarro about the recent Optus breach. Lisa was able to figure out the breach had taken place even before it was publicly acknowledged, and there's quite a story about her attempts to let Optus know were lost in a bureaucratic quagmire. Yes, we all make mistakes. But, Optus' mistake was made worse in terms of how it was hard to let them know something was wrong, and how they pushed back at any attempts to monitor and regulate them.
On Tuesday 15th, Neil Ashworth will host a Roving Spotlight show, together with Sylvie Ellsmore, Deputy Mayor of City of Sydney, and Judy Hopwood, ex Liberal Party member for Hornsby - talking about housing - owned, rented or just plain missing. I'll be sticking my oar in, too. Noon-2pm Tuesdays, 2RSR www.radioskidrow.orgI've released two recent shows to mixcloud - most recently, I discussed Covid with Professor Tony Blakely of the University of Melbourne.
Coming up on Tuesday on "Roving Spotlight", we'll have Ian Rose from the Support Assange and Wikileaks coalition. Also, I'll point out that today ( Sunday 30th October ), I'll be at Speaker's Corner in Sydney from 1pm to 3pm ( at least, even though it normally starts at 2pm ). You can find out more about speaker's corner here. But, back to the show ... We'll have a comment from Prof. Noam Chomsky when he was in Sydney, talking about teenage girls and mobile phones. We have a review of how "Cambridge Analytica" came about.
Coming up on Tuesday, "Roving Spotlight" will cover a range - Ukraine saturation coverage, resource wars, Tariq Ali's book "Bush in Babylon" on the Middle East - particularly Iraq. There's also an extract by Christopher Hitchens, talking about the sins of the Catholic Church. Also the settlement of "New Italy".
A first bulletin - 17th October 2022 Rather than making the odd update to the front page, I thought I'd put out a regular short bulletin. Here I'll be pointing out recent articles, past articles, and also radio work coming up and past radio work. For the present, I'll point out that on the show on the 18th of October, I'll have two guests - Nicky Danesh, talking about the Iran situation, and Rita Mac on the Optus hack, data security and similar.