I was wandering through wikipedia and I came across these photos of a French town, before the World War One (or at least serious battle) and after a major battle/campaign. As can be seen, so much artillery was fired that the town itself was obliterated. All that remains of the buildings is a discolouration in the soil, although one building (presumably the town church/cathederal) looks to be at least partially standing. This brings home how much artillery was the driving force of the Western Front, and the terrible experience it must have been for the soldiers on the ground. (i cannot of course, find the place in wikipedia where I found them).

Podcasting has been taking off over recent years. It started off with home-made podcasts, but more recently mainstream radio has been moving into podcasting, with Australia’s ABC radio producing a range of programs as podcasts. The major benefit of listening to the radio via podcasts, is that you can listen to them anytime, either on your ipod, or, if your computer or ipod connect to your stereo, over that as well.

A couple of ABC podcasts I listen to are:

ABC NewsRadio Star Stuff: Science and space news.

ABC Radio Tasmania The Spin Doctor: national politics.

ABC Radio Sydney Self-Improvement Wednesday: interesting stories from science, history and philosophy.

With the recent release of the Federal government budget update, which puts the federal budget surplus at something like $16b, the malignant impact of Vertical Fiscal Imbalance is brought home again. This VFI has been around for decades but it has got worse, or the political exploitation of it has got worse, in a period where there is polarization between a Liberal Federal Government and Labor States.

This imbalance is simply driven by the fact that the Federal Government collect resource taxes and income taxes, and the states collect of hodgepodge of taxes, duties and charges (some of which were replaced by the GST – and prices do not rise as fast as income).

The Commonwealth raises much of the revenue that is distributed to the States, although this seems to get tied up into special purpose grants with all kind of strings attached (like funding for state schools that install a flagpole and fly the flag, or funding for schools to install a priest).

This seems to have gotten worse over the years as the Federal Government continues to ratchet down the screws on the States. Recently it was report that the Commonwealth has not managed to keep up with its 50% funding for the Commonwealth/State Housing Agreement, and now the Federal Government intends to contract out for the deliver of services, attempting to duplicate State services.

The latest round of vote grabbing by the Federal Government with intervention in State health policies by providing funding directly for health services in marginal electorate is just another example of the negative impact of VFI. Much of this current election campaign seems to be about exploiting the poisonous effect of VFI, a really courageous politician would promise to do something about it.

On the way home I stopped at the supermarket to pick up some groceries, of course the lines were long and I noticed that the women in the line would often pick up a copy of NW or Who or some other women’s magazine and skim through it. Of course I am not the first one to observe this phenomena. However it occurred to me that there did not seem to be a male equivalent. Why not? It not as if men do not have transient, voyeuristic, and or prurient interests as well. Why not a magazine of gadgets, young women and boy stuff. I know these magazines exist, but why are they not in display at the supermarket?