The State Government has been urged to crack down on pubs that repeatedly sell alcohol to drunk customers

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/call-to-monitor-pubs-that-sell-to-drunks/2007/04/23/1177180569477.html

WTF??

No doubt I’ll be learning more now because of these circumstances.

By the way, the article mentioned in my post above is titled:

’50% good’ rule is bad news for Russian radio

Written by Andrew Kramer from the New York Times, republished on Monday (23 April) in The Age newspaper in Melbourne.

You can read the article online.

…From Justin

It was only yesterday afternoon that I watched two of three episodes of an old documentary series about Joseph Stalin, ruler of Russia for thirty years when Russia and neighbouring countries formed the “communist” Soviet Union.

In summary, Stalin rose to dictating power by combining rapid Industrialization and enforced Collectivization of agriculture, which impacted on most of the country’s population (80% of Russia’s population in the 1920s were peasants).

These efforts, combined with the Soviet alliance with Western nations in defeating Germany during the Second World War, helped Russia become a world super-power, but it also lead to suppression of press freedoms and the imposition of death penalties against “enemies of the state”, both real and imaginary (state-imposed deaths reached tens of millions in number).

The concept of Communism had the intellectual support of one George – namely George Bernard Shaw, who met Stalin in the 1930s and dismissed reports of famine and state-imposed exploitation as “falsehoods”. He instead focused his criticism on the democratic system of England, which he believed worked against the interests of the working class.

The same concept was also met with the intellectual criticism of another George – namely George Orwell, a social democrat who believed that collectivism is not inherently democratic and that Soviet Communism had evolved into something quite autocratic – namely Stalinism. Effectively, his belief was that the consequence of liberating one system is that it imposes another.

The Soviet Union was broken up in 1991 following the collapse of Communism, but this report in The Age today demonstrates the very long-term legacy left by Stalin’s rule, and the Cold War between world super-powers that followed:

The article reports about President Putin’s new rule over freedom of speech and media access in Russia, measures “intended to protect the public”. In particular, radio news is required to be 50% positive, even if 50% of the day’s stories have no reason to be positive.

Andrew Kramer reports for the New York Times from Moscow:

I’ve put up a Curtin thread:

http://larvatusprodeo.net/2007/04/22/dollys-balance/