I have just seen another Coalition vegetable (Ted O’Brien) on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s 7:30 show1. The reason O’Brien was on the show was in relation to nuclear energy, and…
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An academic colleague of mine visited the Soviet Union (in the 1980s) on some sort of exchange program to do something geological with scientists in Moscow. While staying in an…
[On Scott Morrison] History will record, and many will now recall his many failings – his cravenness and inaction in the face of adversity, his ducking of accountability, his claiming of the success of others, his malice and bullying, repurposing taxpayers’ money to cronies and right-wing supplicants – all manifestations of his lack of character.
A shrivelled, one-dimensional intellect, a light-weight incapable of reflection or forethought with underlying smarm and personality defects, mentored by a proselytizing grifter and informed by an eagle painting he was impervious to self-reflection – comfortable in the belief he was the Chosen One.
In his departing sermon presented as a valedictory speech he professed “faith in Jesus Christ, which gives me the faith to both forgive but also to be honest about my own failings and shortcomings” which he then failed to be honest about by neglecting to mention any.
Manifestly unsuited to the job he is a study in how megalomania, verbal diarrhea, treachery and happenstance can reward a shameless fabulist and serial failure.
[https://theaimn.com/heres-ya-hat-whats-ya-hurry]
The Nazis burnt books by Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, Erich Maria Remarque among many other well-known intellectuals, scientists and cultural figures, many of whom were Jewish1. The 1929 Nobel…
Barnaby Joyce was recorded lying on his back on the footpath in Lonsdale Street, in the suburb of Braddon, Canberra, late on Wednesday night (7th February). He was heard mumbling into…
Everyone has seen the decline of the Victorian Liberal Party which, in the two most recent state elections, has gone backwards1,2, in part because the party in that state was…
The idea that the poor should have leisure and a holiday from work has always been shocking to the rich. In the early nineteenth century, fifteen hours was the ordinary day's work for a man; children sometimes did as much, and very commonly did twelve hours a day. When meddlesome busybodies suggested that perhaps these hours were rather long, they were told that work kept adults from drink and children from mischief. When I was a child, shortly after urban working men had acquired the vote, certain public holidays were established by law, to the great indignation of the upper classes. I remember hearing an old Duchess say: 'What do the poor want with holidays? They ought to work.' People nowadays are less frank, but the sentiment persists, and is the source of much of our economic confusion.
If there's any lesson to be learned from the unfolding climate disaster and 28 COP failures, it's that as long as governments cede power to corporations and billionaires, and as long as those corporations and billionaires make money from ecological destruction, then ecological destruction is what we get.
Another moderate Liberal, Senator Marise Payne has resigned from parliament, effective at the end of September, after 26 years in parliament1. Her exit is symptomatic of the malaise affecting the…