Years after digital television became normal in Australia, another digital experience is upon us - digital radio. It aims to take the way we listen to the radio to a whole new level. But will it actually take off?

We are now in an age where we have mp3 players allowing us to choose songs at the press of a button. Apple recently posted a quarterly profit of 47% boasting that even in the weak economy, consumers are still buying.

Digital radios have the ability to pause and rewind to their advantage, as well as extra channels. However, I am hesitant as to whether this new listening experience will appeal to listeners. When driving in the car, I feel the listening experience is maximised when listening to an iPod allowing the consumer to choose exactly when they want to listen to their song or podcast.

Hundreds of podcasts are flooding the internet and a lack of radio programs available by podcast is hardly a concern. On the flip side, dedicated news and sports channels can be provided and thus appeal to niche markets. This development would have been well used and suited to consumers lifestyles a decade ago, when iPods were starting to enter the market.

This new development in radio is ahead of countries like Germany, Italy and China. I guess we’ll have to wait to see if Australians adapt to this new form of radio and digital media.

Do words denote meaning or does meaning denote words? If I don’t have a word for something, does it exist? Or must I have the word first to bring it into being?

The word ‘consumer’ is first noted in 1535 – just as the religious revolution of Tudor England was being launched. The counterpoint of ‘consumer’ and ‘producer’ is at the heart of the development of capitalism and reflects the dynamic which has got us into such bad strife today.

Economic growth demands increasing consumption but increasing consumption is killing planet earth. There is, however, hope. In the Japanese language, there is no word for ‘user’ that well known recipient of goods and services in a market economy. The Japanese prefer to call consumers ‘the persons who live”. Persons who live cannot also be persons that kill. So let’s get rid of the words ‘users’ and ‘consumers’ as we go about the ethical reconstruction of our world and celebrate a new word to describe our participation in a new political economy.

How about ‘sustainers’?

Yesterday the Federal Government announced it would be 'stepping up its efforts to tackle binge drinking across the nation'. Stepping up to the tune of $535 million of tax payer's money to combat a problem that can't be solved.

That 'problem' is the innate human desire to get fucked up and remove mind from body. 

How frequently this is done defines you. Once a year you're a saint, once a week you're a binger, a day and you're an alcoholic. The way it's done is also important, but we all know the tags we give for addicts. The fact is that this need is in everybody.

And if it's not you've probably replaced it with some transcendental crap like religion that supposedly gives similar highs to true believers. Fuck that, who has the time or the will to worship something so destructive.

Instead I say this to the government or anybody who scorns me.

What business is it of yours what I take into my body - as long as I do not harm another human being on this planet?

My body is my temple and I'll repaint the walls with vomit when I want to. 

So Harmid Karzai has secured himself as President of Afganistan after one of the most farcical electoral processes in recent history. So ridiculous was it that it echoed that of Bush's 'win' in 2000. Let's see why:

He didn't win a majority of the vote, he caused a constitutional crisis, he had a corrupt brother that help him gain power and what will be the hardest blow to the people of Afghanistan is that the shining beacon of democracy has just dimmed a little bit.

And then just to cap it all off, what was so frustrating about his win was thinking about how much easier a one horse race would have been for betting on a certain race in Melbourne yesterday.

Australia is rated as one of the most economically, politically and socially stable countries in the world. Often the great powers of the East and West look to us in great admiration. During a global finical crisis or during war the world sees stability in Australia.

Medicare, the dole, public housing, a just judicial system the list goes on. But what does this have to do with being afraid?

Well in recent weeks I’ve watched so many of us squirm, wiggle and slip out of giving any meaningful response to the refugees sweating it out on a Tasmanian fishing boat off the Indonesian cost.

My question that I pose to all of you is, On what basis do you as a safe, happy and secure Australian, have the right to tell these helpless broken people that Australia is closed?

Is it so the supposed flood of refugees just behind them, just turn around and except the horrific fate facing them in their home countries?

Or maybe the idea of one day meeting one of these refugees in the supermarket might just bring you a little too close to the painful realities that exists outside this country’s cotton wool culture.

It doesn’t take bravery to close doors and forget, but it does take bravery to keep them open!

I think as damn lucky Australians we can afford a little heart!

Don’t you?

The Museum of Sydney hosts a slight retrospective of the works of one of Sydney’s favourite sons – the artist Martin Sharp. At the opening, I was reminded of an event in London 30 years ago when Bob Dylan played at Earl’s Court a decade or so after he had changed the times. And it was strange then how the blue-denimed flower children crawled out of the woodwork to honour their hero who then snubbed them all by coming on stage wearing white trousers and a brown leather jacket.

Similarly hundreds of freeze-dried fans of Luna Park, Oz and The Yellow House turned up to pay homage. And this they did in style for a hero who came among us like John the Baptist with a message rather than the urban spaceman from the ‘sixties.

The exhibition room, with its high ceilings and very narrow floor area, makes hanging the work an impossible challenge but you come away with a strong sense of Sharp’s vision. The ethos of Wolfe’s The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby comes to life in a celebration of pop art which both reflected and changed the world we lived in – whether in Sydney or London, New York or Berlin.

It appears that the days of radical terrorist threats has waned considerably, maybe jihadists have realised that Levi’s are actually pretty fucking cool, but there is one group which is rising and coming to the fore who are adamant that Levi is not ok. The Jihadists had their reasons; they cited that Levi’s jeans accentuated the curves giving hot blooded males indecent and impure thoughts. They also represented the disgraceful and evil waste of the western swine.

The American Neo-cons oppressing the world through bellbottoms and boot-cut.

A new group shall soon come forward. We are talking of the real hardcore fundamentalist eco-warrior, or eco-terrorist. The hippies, emerging from their solstice in hemp woven wigwams, smelling of bud and cloves, pick up a bag of fertilizer and blow up the head offices of Petrobras.

Not exactly.

These are savvy angry men and women who truly believe in radicalising the push to preserve our world. It is only natural that extreme situations shall breed extremists. They don’t like Levi's because of the way that certain threads appear to come from a rare cotton type picked only during the full moon on the rarest part of the Appalachian Trail.

They are already present, but their numbers shall grow in the ensuing years of increased environmental focus. The most serious group that is publically known is ELF, the Environmental Liberation Front, who refers to themselves as the Elves (really? I mean, you want to be taken seriously then you describe yourself as short, felt covered, pointy eared, mythical creatures?).

While we all have a good chuckle at the name, these guys are fucking serious. Their most recent claim was the burning of a Mexican excavator in Guadalajara, Mexico. It appears that dangerous times are ahead for the polluters of our world.

I suppose it begs the question, what can we do? We sit them down and tell them that burning people is no way to demonstrate against imperialism and ignorance. Though I must say, I don’t mind the idea of a few petrol companies going up in smoke (economically of course). As long as its non lethal, go for your life and maybe someone will get the message, that enough is enough, ignorance is no excuse and it is well past the time we should have started changing. 

Last night's episode of 'Race Relations' was amazingly thought-provoking, entertaining and offensive. It showed a blacked up John Safran travelling around Chicago visiting a black only speed dating club, a restaurant where black employees and white customers swore at each other and a militant black-islamic club.

The show climaxed with Safran travelling to an Episcopal church, telling his life story like an African-American preacher and shouting 'I am a proud black man'.

For me this was the most cringeworthy, the most offensive and the most memorable moment of a show that will surely illicit controversy here, and in the US when it eventually breeches our shores. 

For me, I was moderately offended, but I know that this uncomfortable feeling came about because like Safran, I'm still not sure what I think about race and its importance to identity.

However, we all know that tomorrow there will be people out there who sincerely (and others who want to stoke the sensationalist media) that will see this as a harking back to our terrible racist pasts.

But the questions I want to ask are:

How can a social satirist ever balance edginess against the feelings of an hypothetical audience?

And, is there a ratio that exists where the amount of people offended compared to those that weren't makes something objectively racist?

And finally, does it matter if you were offended if the subject matter caused you to think about something?

Last night at UNSW, Charlie McCreevy, the EU Commissioner for the Internal Market and Services talked about the amazing lessons that could be taken from Northern Ireland and the Peace Process.

While a lot of what McCreevy spoke about in regards to how peace was achieved wasn't revelatory, there was one point he mentioned that really struck home for me.

McCreevy recounted how impossible it would have been 25 years ago to imagine an Ireland that was as peaceful and prosperous as it is today.

Really makes you wonder which of today's 'impossible problems' will be solved by people who have the vision to never confuse what the world is to what it can be. 

Forget ‘Black Hawk Down’, the last week in South Waziristan and the Swat valley has had more action than any hot military operation has seen for an age.

This is extraordinary, as a country that has been constantly criticised for laying dormant on the terrorist issue and providing a safe haven across its borders has sprung to life. Pitting 30,000 troops in a widespread cleanup operation.

In response there has been a hail of shootings, car bombs and suicide bombings by the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). Unmanned U.S drones have launched strikes on bunkers and compounds, recently in Bajaur. Strongholds haven been taken over. On the other side the Taliban claim to be shooting down helicopters. Schools have been closed down, people fleeing their homes. Yeah, this really is war.

Senator John Kerry (chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) and General Petraeus have both met Pakistani officials, the U.S getting involved in what could be crucial for their own front in Afghanistan.

Keep watching, because this is exactly what the West has wanted Pakistan to do for years. This will also end up being one of the bloodiest offences in recent memory.

Let’s hope it’s worth it. All one can say right now is, come on Pakistan. I’m sure even India believes in you.