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Richard Neville has been a practicing futurist since 1963, when he launched the countercultural magazine, Oz, which widened the boundaries of free speech on two continents. He has written several books, including Playpower (71), the bio of a global serial killer (79), his sixties memoir, Hippie Hippie Shake (95) and his latest handbook of social change, Footprints of the Future. A social commentator and a professional futurist with a sharp tongue, Richard is based in Australia, where he continues to stir the possum.
He co-founded a futurist oriented socio-political website: http://www.homepagedaily.com -which aims to be the first global student newspaper.
(7 comments) SHARE Thursday, August 3, 2006 THE COLLAPSE OF ENLIGHTENMENT
No wonder many
of our young people are so daunted by today's global issues that they block
them out, focussing instead on designer food and the antics of celebrities.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, September 19, 2009 Apocalypse Porno - The Beat Goes On
Are you scared yet? Instead of a leisurely process with oodles of time to drive to Paris in a sports car with Anna Wintour on your lap, the transformation to a hothouse world will be abrupt.
SHARE Friday, June 20, 2008 The Age of Eco Surrealism
"You're all just playing with Climate Change", she said, "you haven't mentioned fences or guns"... or yellow pellets, or fading boomers fiddling with worm farms while sales of Lear Jets soar, or even the age of gothic malice, or eating the rich. So having digested these warnings, have I become clinically depressed?
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, May 7, 2009 The Torturer's Apprentice
The act of rendition began with a bunch of Americans in balaclavas, wearing black T-shirts, grey pants & yellow boots, beating him black and blue. They cut off his clothes, rammed a suppository up his rectum and fitted him with nappy and tracksuit...
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, January 6, 2011 House of Horrors -Smashing Plato's Cave
A fear of losing your job... the fear of being stuck with some label, unpatriotic or otherwise... the war turned reporters into stenographers.
It is time to focus on homegrown terrorists who pose as saviours; the gutless assassins of the CIA and its secret affiliates, flinging Drones at impoverished tribes, killing the good and the bad and the babies, just like in Vietnam.
(7 comments) SHARE Saturday, May 31, 2008 STORM IN AN A-CUP
When Sydney police swooped on an upmarket art gallery on the eve of an exhibition of photographs by Australia's internationally renowned artist Bill Henson, pandemonium struck. Photographs of pubescent children were removed by police. The tabloid press applauded the censorship and described the images as "child porn". The gallery owners received death threats.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, June 2, 2007 The Fall and Rise of Flower Power
Were the hippies really right? It is tempting to think so in this age of ecocide and terror.
SHARE Friday, December 9, 2005 ABSURD’S THE WORD:Condoleezza Rice versus Harold Pinter
It’s happening, isn’t it? The fog is lifting. Enormous shifts of opinion at the last minute. And not just about the wars. About the belief system that sustains the wars, the dark hearts of those who run the wars, the malice of a media that sells the wars.
(4 comments) SHARE Thursday, April 17, 2008 PINE GAP MIND GAP: A TERROR CELL THAT NEVER SLEEPS
Four Christian activists were recently put on trial for penetrating Pine Gap, a top secret military base in Central Australia which hosts the largest CIA facility outside the USA. The base provides targeting info to coalition commanders in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, not all of it accurate. Australian citizens remain unaware of their vital role in the "war on terror" and of Pine Gap's devastating impact.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, February 25, 2007 BEND OVER JOHN, DICK'S ON THE WAY
In a rousing address in Sydney last week, Dick Cheney
revealed the enemy's plan of world domination, as the streets thronged with protestors. This White House transcript has been been slightly edited.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, January 1, 2006 40 LESSONS FROM THE NEW MILLENIUM
Secret webs, scared bullies, a global mind shift. There is no God higher than Truth, said Socrates, but that was long ago. Today’s Truth lurks behind a thousand veils, while the new Gods pillage the future. Here’s some of what we think we now know:
SHARE Thursday, October 30, 2008 PICKLED HEADS, MUDCAKES, RIVERS OF BABYLON
Growth is Vanity Fair, Lear Jets, Sex in the City. Sustainability is Adbusters, bicycles, sex in the haystack. And now, just as eco awareness is spreading, the financial meltdown hits.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, April 9, 2010 DRACULA'S ARMY
You get the sense that the burgers are washed down with lavish tumblers of blood. Often the blood of innocents. It becomes an addiction, perhaps, an insatiable desire that's part Gothic and part Surrealist, like a videogame played on a helicopter hovering over Transylvania.
(6 comments) SHARE Monday, May 11, 2009 The AfPak Blues
It started as a revenge for 9/11, easy as shooting quails in a barrel. "Kill the bastards" screamed Murdoch's pet Aussie ranter in the New York Post, "a gunshot between the eyes ... blow their countries into basketball courts". And we did.
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, December 31, 2007 Rupert Murdoch is No Hero
After the hell of Guantanamo, the hell of MurdochWold
SHARE Sunday, April 29, 2007 TURNING UP THE HEAT
To a citizen 50 years hence:
In this moment of madness we found that consciousness was king. It was a time when everything seemed possible, even a generational mind-shift. We saw a chance to live more lightly on the planet. Then winter came... and they put up a parking lot.
Over the years we learned a lot about Paris Hilton and little of the Tigris Hilton, soaring to the skies from the rubble ...
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, September 11, 2009 Trigger Happy in Kabul
There are no easy answers. Curbing air strikes is a start, as well as holding clean elections. Many westerners seek a bright future for Afghanistan and the voices of the well informed, and of the local people, must prevail over trigger happy soldiers, secret geo-political maneuverings and the endless flood of Kabul-shit.
SHARE Tuesday, May 23, 2006 The Politics of Evil versus Boston Legal
In one episode, there are more examples of people grappling with ethics, of pursuing what’s fair and right, than has been exhibited in the entire spectrum of the Bush Presidency.
SHARE Thursday, September 11, 2008 The Baby Killers
In an era when Geneva is mocked, dissent ineffective and baby killing tolerated, it is strangely perfect that a presidential aspirant and his running mate should have blood on their hands, whether of Vietnamese civilians or an Alaskan Moose.
SHARE Thursday, October 20, 2005 BETWEEN A HARD PLACE AND STEVIE NIX
Roasting flesh and Fleetwood Mac – how we’re bringing the fight to the
cowardly dogs and Taliban lady-boys
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, July 9, 2007 Is this man a psychopath?
The Bomber's tactic was on track. The gloves were off. Over the next three months, NATO would set out to prove that its air force could kill more civilians than the number achieved by the Taliban.
SHARE Tuesday, August 29, 2006 KILLING NEWS
These days, Rupert Murdoch's war-mongering is compulsive and his disregard for human wreckage is both calculated and global; but in the beginning, what marked his output was a casual (and sometimes fatal) disregard for the frailties of humans.
(4 comments) SHARE Monday, November 13, 2006 THE PARADIGM SHIFT HAS ARRIVED!
This moment in history is a bit like a Biblical epic, the forces of light rallying against the forces of darkness, with both sides thinking they are the forces of light. The stakes are high. The issues are clear. This month they reached critical mass. The dark forces are looking stupid and shifty and selfish, but they will fight back. This is where the danger lies.
(7 comments) SHARE Thursday, January 31, 2008 THE SPEECH FROM HELL
These issues call for vigorous debate, and I think it's fair to say we've ignored the call. Yet history will record that amid our differences, we acted with malice. All of us were sent to Washington to carry out the business of billionaires. That is the purpose of this body.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, September 25, 2006 POOR, POOR, PITIFUL OZ
In Oz 2006, to be a "civil libertarian" is to invite abuse, while to dismiss human rights as "no longer sacrosanct", or to deny inconvenient facts about global warming or indigenous history, is to attract government patronage. Once we had bush poets, mocking the pompous; now we have scribblers, licking the hands of their feeders.
(3 comments) SHARE Sunday, December 23, 2007 DREAMING OF A WHITE HOUSE XMAS
First the old torturer, so lively and quick,
Vice President Cheney dressed up as St Nick.
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, February 15, 2008 Australia's "Sorry" inspires the White House
"These injustices must never happen again," the Prime Minister said, "they are a great stain on the nation's soul". For thirty minutes he held the nation in his hands, as millions cheered, applauded and wept. Watching a broadcast of the apology in the White House, George Bush was transfixed...
(6 comments) SHARE Sunday, July 27, 2008 Washington comes to Mr Smith
450 schoolgirls, a transparent blouse, a choral rendition of What a Wonderful World. No wonder Condoleezza Rice says"There is no better friend to the United States than Australia". Right now, probably the only friend.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, February 7, 2006 CARTOONS THAT SHAKE THE WORLD
The moving finger draws, and having draws moves on, nor all your piety nor wit, shall lure it back to cancel half a line.
SHARE Monday, December 19, 2005 WORN INTELLECTUALS WITH MARIJUANA COUGHS
Is fear and phoney patriotism turning Aussies into a bunch of self congratulating flag waving materialist pisspots singing our own praises, oy oy oy, yob yob yob, screaming ‘death to the wog wog wog’?
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, January 21, 2008 The Dying of the Light
"Do not ever think in acquisitive terms".
Are you laughing? At heart, the attempt to imprison Shakespeare in the past is a political act.
SHARE Monday, May 15, 2006 BOMBOCRACY: The Musical, plus three men in a boat
Like tobacco ads, the evening news should carry an alert, “any connection between our edited footage and what really happened is accidental”. Be the first to know” … and the last to understand
(3 comments) SHARE Tuesday, November 6, 2007 FUTURE OBVIOUS SURPRISES
Oil fuels illusions, invasions, food supplies and shopaholia. It makes the absurd seem normal.That's the mystery. The ice caps melt and we watch glacier surfing on You Tube. What's going on?
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, December 19, 2006 CLINGING TO THE DEVIL'S COAT TAILS
How is it that one man has the right to murder citizens anywhere in the world? Caligula the First was restrained by the terrain and logistics, then murdered by his bodyguards. The lunatic in the White House plans to send more troops into the Iraqi hell-hole. If this happens, thousands more people will die. How can other nations stand by and allow this to happen?
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, June 13, 2006 THE DREAD OF BEING A BYSTANDER
We have failed to throw a spanner in the war machine; we have failed to seize the moment, we gave failed to re-invent protest.
SHARE Thursday, January 19, 2006 DIRTY WORK IN DAMADOLA
Oh God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son"
Abe says, "Man, you must be puttin' me on
In the end God spared the child, but not the CIA
SHARE Sunday, April 23, 2006 DE-SALINATED WHISKY & WILD WILD WINDS
The greening of Time marks a turning point, just like its famous 1966 cover, which asked, Is God Dead? Today we ask: Is the Earth dying? And are we dying with it?
SHARE Thursday, November 3, 2005 WHO KILLED COCK ROBIN?
Who’ll carry the coffins?
Cheney and Rummy:
“We think its funny,
We’ll carry the coffins”.
SHARE Sunday, October 15, 2006 WILD JUSTICE: An open letter to the President
Spread far and wide across the globe are thousands of people with a grudge to settle. You have provided the inspiration of imitation to all the disempowered people on earth, the ones who are wounded in hatred and bad at forgiving. So keep away from Dallas ....
SHARE Wednesday, July 25, 2007 MURDOCH'S TRANSPLANT
Rupert is trying to colonize Australia's heart and re-brand his flagship paper as the epitome of 'intellect and compassion'. Watch out Wall Street Journal.
SHARE Sunday, November 20, 2005 The Land That Said No
What happens when ethics prevails. Welcome to a Murdoch free zone.
SHARE Wednesday, July 19, 2006 THE LAND WHERE PINOCCHIO IS KING
From the outside, Australia looks good; the Opera House, Nicole Kidman, jocks in hotpants. ....Listening to political debate today is like being locked in the Alzheimer ward with the treasurer and a shock jock.