Perrorist

Here we go again

You would have thought that after the global financial crisis of 2018 some if not many lessons were learned and acted upon. Sadly, you’d be wrong. The finance industry (large parts of which serve no productive purpose) simply cannot help itself.  The prevailing mantra remains “greed is good”. Take the latest risky financial instrument, the collateralized loan obligation (CLO). You may remember its cousin, the collateralized debt obligation or CDO that played … Read more

Human rights defender sentenced to 33 years and 148 lashes

When it comes to religious belief, I try not to be judgemental. After all, if it’s harmless and gives people comfort, why condemn it. Organised religion is a different story, often trying to impose its teachings and practices on society. We see this in many countries, in particular the US. This is especially so where there is no separation between state and religion. One such country is Iran. According to Amnesty International, … Read more

Privacy Policy

Who we are Our website address is: https://www.perrygretton.com. What personal data we collect and why we collect it Comments When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection. An anonymised string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if … Read more

The open secret

Cardinal Pell’s conviction took place in December 2018 but could not be published in Australia because another trial in which Pell was the defendant had yet to be held. That case has now been dropped and the gag order lifted. It’s understandable that a gag was placed on Australian media, but to expect it to apply elsewhere must have been wishful thinking in this Internet age. Needless to say, many of us … Read more

China’s taking too much fish

I saw in the news that China consumes 50% of the world’s caught fish. In economics, exploiting shared resources is called “the tragedy of the commons” and refers to the common grazing area used by a community of farmers. When they share equitably, there are no problems, but when one adds extra livestock to graze, he depletes the land available for the rest. If he continues to do that, the others get … Read more

The creeping hand of authoritarianism

Little by little the creeping hand of authoritarianism reduces us to sheep-like cyphers, and as usual the vastly overstated threat of terrorism is used to justify it. The innocuously named Assistance and Access Bill 2018 is intended to force companies to provide information about how their systems work, thus compromising their cybersecurity. It’s an extraordinary overreach by officialdom in the name of fighting terrorism, which is nowhere near the level of threat suggested by the … Read more

Black as Night

It’s two o’clock in the morning and she’s alone. Jason has left it too late to say he can’t make it. Kids are sick, apparently. Dragging anyone else in now is out of the question. Most nights see only a few customers drop by, but it’s been an hour since the last customer left, and it will be some hours before Sharon and Judy turn up to relieve her. She moves around … Read more