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Did anybody notice that all 4 AFL clubs playing off in the Wildcard round were Melbourne based? In this expanded VFL parading itself as a national competition something had to be done about the lack of success for the glut of Melbournian AFL clubs. Enter the Melbournian mediocrity wildcard weekend, where a midtable result gets rewarded in season 2026. Something like 180, 000 footy fans attended these matches at the MCG. Big clubs like Collingwood and Carlton played off for a final’s spot against perennial also-rans the Western Bulldogs and Melbourne. If you build it they will come, to quote a line from an old sport’s movie.
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I have to admit that I shed a few tears following the Sydney Swans win over North Melbourne in the ultimate home and way round of the AFL season. Watching Captain Callum Mills’ emotional response was powerful after the week from hell. Yes, all these other longtime Swans players have been tarred with the same filthy brush as the miscreants facing a police investigation into alleged sex crime charges. Most pundits and myself expected the Swans to lose to the Kangaroos on the back of those missing stars and the upheaval to the team. It was not to be, as the club showed it was made of sterner stuff. The Swans still standing prevail to the ovation of the SCG crowd.
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It is amazing how often fate treats hubristic behaviour in lives of the rich and famous. It is, as if, a certain point is reached or crossed by the individual and this releases the hounds of hell upon them. Isaac Heeney, the No#1 rated player in the AFL for much of the season and the poster boy for toothpaste smiles has come a cropper in the shady wee hours of Melbourne with a lap dancer. Isaac Heeney: The boy next door is no more. No, the nice lad we once knew has morphed into a dirtbag hero. Strippers or exotic dancers crying sexual assault rings in the ears of the greater public. Victoria police are investigating an alleged sex crime and Heeney is at the centre of it.
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AI is coming for your job. As someone who has just been replaced by an automated program this is real, let me tell you. In light of this it is pertinent to remember that Australia punishes the unemployed economically. It is bipartisan policy of Australian governments to provide below the poverty line welfare payments to the unemployed. This has been going on for decades and is one of the reasons why we have a substantial number of older Australians living in poverty. These folk cannot afford to visit the dentist to get treatment because it is too expensive and dental is not included in Medicare. This in one of the wealthiest nations on earth.
Here are 5 things to know about black teeth. Japanese women used to blacken their teeth and shave off their eyebrows post marriage, prior to the mid nineteenth century. Ohagaru was practiced up until the Meiji era. It is interesting to view this custom through the lens of our current 21C obsession with very white teeth. Some see this as further evidence of the control and denigration of the human rights of Japanese women in their traditional society, whilst others disagree with this conclusion. Early western anthropologists described ohagaru as an abhorrent custom, which disfigured women. The custom was, also, practiced in parts of China by minority groups.
There is a direct line through history from raiders and enslavers to right wing politics today. The fundamental belief underpinning all of these positions is that it is OK to enrich yourself at the expense of others. Further to that, the primary focus is always on your own desires and bugger the greater community around you. The Vikings are most famous as raiders, who came to other places to slaughter and pillage. They would enslave their most saleable surviving victims to enrich themselves, even more. This attitude to life and getting ahead still exists in a tempered form for right wing folk. The belief that it is a dog eat dog world and that only the strong will thrive flourishes in far right politics today.
The state supreme court in Colorado has declared Donald J Trump unfit to be on the ballot for the 2024 presidential race in that state. Many of us who have been following the Trump vs democracy saga would say – about bloody time! How can you have a candidate vying for the presidency who continually casts doubt upon the veracity of the electoral system? A man who promulgates ‘the big lie’ that he was robbed of victory in the 2020 election. This is despite numerous private and judicial enquiries into election fraud finding nothing that merits this erroneous belief. Even the investigator paid by Trump’s own legal team has come out and said he found nothing.
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President Trump, in an obvious act of desperation, is offering every adult American a cheque for $5000 if his Republican party wins the primaries. This would cost some $1.3 trillion in a nation already $40 trillion in debt. Responsible Republican politics? The corrupt nature of populist politics is there for all to see. Now, I know Americans are pretty dumb but Trump has previously failed to honour promises for DOGE dividend cheques and for tariffs he imposed. Compound that with his promise to improve affordability for everyday Americans, which has not been realised thanks to his war with Iran and those many Trump tariffs. Things could not be much worse economically for ordinary Americans right now.
Democracy Economics Fresh Government Media News Politics Power Workers President Trump, in an obvious act of desperation, is offering every adult American a cheque for $5000 if his Republican party wins the primaries. This would cost some $1.3 trillion in a nation already $40 trillion in debt. Responsible Republican politics? The corrupt nature of populist politics is there for all to see. Now, I know Americans are pretty dumb but Trump has previously failed to honour promises for DOGE dividend cheques and for tariffs he imposed. Compound that with his promise to improve affordability for everyday Americans, which has not been realised thanks to his war with Iran and those many Trump tariffs. Things could not be much worse economically for ordinary Americans right now.
Democracy Economics Fresh Government Media News Politics Power Workers
President Trump, in an obvious act of desperation, is offering every adult American a cheque for $5000 if his Republican party wins the primaries. This would cost some $1.3 trillion in a nation already $40 trillion in debt. Responsible Republican politics? The corrupt nature of populist politics is there for all to see. Now, I know Americans are pretty dumb but Trump has previously failed to honour promises for DOGE dividend cheques and for tariffs he imposed. Compound that with his promise to improve affordability for everyday Americans, which has not been realised thanks to his war with Iran and those many Trump tariffs. Things could not be much worse economically for ordinary Americans right now.
Democracy Economics Fresh Government Media News Politics Power Workers
The shocked AFL pundits cried out, nobody picked this!!! The Sydney Swans demolition of the mighty Brisbane Lions in the Qualifying Final at the SCG. A talent depleted Sydney outfit outplayed the premiers for 4 quarters on a Saturday afternoon in the Harbour City. In actual fact, someone did pick this massive upset. No lesser person than the great Buddy Franklin picked this result and publicised it via his YouTube video with Shane Crawford. Buddy, I am reminded, is a great student of the game, according to John Longmire; and he proved it on this occasion.
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Much of the news you view downunder is controlled by News Corp, which is owned by a right wing American billionaire. Facebook and Instagram are owned by another right wing billionaire, Mark Zuckerberg. X, formerly Twitter, is owned by yet another American billionaire, Elon Musk. American billionaires control your news feed. Can you perceive a bit of a pattern here, folks? The news you get either by legacy media or social media platforms comes via Trump supporting oligarchs. AI is likewise owned by a bunch of American billionaires, who have kissed the ring of President Trump. Your news and information comes via a filter, a right wing filter, which puts a decided slant on things.
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Did anybody notice that all 4 AFL clubs playing off in the Wildcard round were Melbourne based? In this expanded VFL parading itself as a national competition something had to be done about the lack of success for the glut of Melbournian AFL clubs. Enter the Melbournian mediocrity wildcard weekend, where a midtable result gets rewarded in season 2026. Something like 180, 000 footy fans attended these matches at the MCG. Big clubs like Collingwood and Carlton played off for a final’s spot against perennial also-rans the Western Bulldogs and Melbourne. If you build it they will come, to quote a line from an old sport’s movie.
Footy Fresh News Sport
Rupert Murdoch upon being questioned about Fox News and its blatant political bias defended it via these words. “It is not red or blue, it is green.” Green as in greenbacks, the American currency. Murdoch, the owner of Fox News, was telling us that the primary role of his network was to make money by exploiting the market for right wing news. The fact that Rupert Murdoch himself is a rabid supporter of right wing politics is neither here nor there, according to the billionaire businessman. I leave it to you the reader to weigh up the truthfulness of said statements. That news networks, like Fox, have left the anchoring principle of ‘objectivity’ far behind in their pursuit of viewers and advertising revenue is the real shame here. What is the point of having news platforms at all if they only tell one side of the story? It is not journalism but PR. The media and its role in our lives has been diminished by purveyors of it like Rupert Murdoch.
There is a direct line through history from raiders and enslavers to right wing politics today. The fundamental belief underpinning all of these positions is that it is OK to enrich yourself at the expense of others. Further to that, the primary focus is always on your own desires and bugger the greater community around you. The Vikings are most famous as raiders, who came to other places to slaughter and pillage. They would enslave their most saleable surviving victims to enrich themselves, even more. This attitude to life and getting ahead still exists in a tempered form for right wing folk. The belief that it is a dog eat dog world and that only the strong will thrive flourishes in far right politics today.
We live in a segmented reality, where companies operate in their own little economic spheres. Sure, they are aware of markets and modify behaviours to some degree to take best advantage of these. However, these corporations do not act with any holistic responsibility to the greater good. AI is a tacit technological arms race in the competitive business world. Artificial Intelligence is fundamentally about replacing human beings with a cheaper and better machine alternative. The obvious economic downside of this is that when hundreds of millions of human jobs are replaced by AI, who is going to buy the products and services these companies produce? Many seemingly intelligent people know this but we do not see any slowing down of the AI revolution. This is due to the dangers of our disconnected world, where competing companies are only concerned with their own fortunes.
All those Aussies voting One Nation and who claim they are not racists, your leader Pauline Hanson meets with far right thug, Tommy Robinson. White Australia policy aspirations are in the air, it seems. Blame all your woes upon the immigrant. The cost of living crisis has you looking around for convenient scapegoats. It is the same old story for a nation of dumb and craven folk. 30 years ago most of us knew that people like Pauline Hanson were fringe at best and nasty/dangerous at worst. That a third of some parts of Australia would vote for this racist and xenophobic political party is a sign of the times.
A brave effort on the night, which could not be sustained. This sums up the Swans defeat at the hands of a rampant last quarter Dockers at the cauldron that is Optus stadium in Perth. Near on 56, 000 fans filled the stadium for this top of the table clash. Fremantle were goalless for a half and still won handsomely in the end. At the start of the second half Fremantle took control of the centre and won the ball out of there, repeatedly going forward. Too many avenues to goal meant they outscored Sydney in the third quarter, despite the heroics of Charlie Curnow at the other end.
Contact sports in the guise of AFL or rugby are coming under increasing scrutiny in regard to head knocks to players. The truth is that modern human beings are not designed to crash and bash into each other at speed. We have, obviously, evolved away from the need to do so in the natural world. Survival does not call for such behaviour these days and that has long been the case. It is, rather, recreational pursuits in the form of team contact sports which have become the unhealthy danger in recent years. The professionalism and commercialism within these sports have motivated players to become bigger, stronger and faster in pursuit of material rewards. The resultant clashes between these modern day gladiators are fuelling an increasing amount of brain injury diseases showing up in past and present players. Is it a situation where caveman sports have no place in a healthy life?
The Sydney Swans flop off the bye at the Gabba under fierce Lion’s pressure. Personally, I hate the bye and always have as a Swan’s fan. Too many times the team fails to fire after a week off. The Swans looked soft on this Thursday night featured contest with last year’s premiers. Brody Grundy gifted Brisbane goal scoring opportunities out of the centre 4 times on the night. These free kicks for crossing the line at the ball up are huge penalties to pay for this indiscretion, especially when advantage is taken and opposing players steal out the front of the centre square toward their goal.
You know a lot of the apparent support for One Nation comes from older white Australians. Pauline Hanson and her campaign machine promote the idea that things were better back in the day. This right wing idealisation of the past, of there being some sort of golden age, is nothing new. Fascists in Hitler’s era promoted the concept of the pure German who lived during a bucolic time of yesteryear. Romanticising the past appeals to older folk especially. Contrasting it with the present and focusing on negative stuff like urban crime and demonising special interest groups plays well with this audience. Hitler and the Nazis attacked the immorality of the Weimar Republic, which won them electoral support from conservative Germans. Pauline Hanson attacks Muslims, refugees and immigrants, as all things bad for Australia. The idealisation of the past is a never land, in that it never really existed the way they say it did.
Whilst watching a documentary about Nazism and fascism in America back in the 1930s, my ears were pricked by the repeated expressions ‘ make America great’ and ‘one nation’! The modern day use of these terms as names and tag lines are by no means accidental. The white supremacist beliefs and racism, which lie at the base of MAGA and One Nation, in the US and Australia respectively, are the foundation of these movements and political parties. If you have read DH Lawrence’s book Kangaroo or seen the movie based upon it, you will know that Australia was not immune from the rise of fascism post WW1.
The Liberal Party is badly named in light of what it has turned into of late. There being few liberal minded people left in the party. Newly elected president, former PM Tony Abbott, is Pauline Hanson’s leading cheer leader. Abbot was also the bloke that sold the Port of Darwin to the Chinese. Abbot and his Sky News Australia former chief of staff, Peta Credlin, have taken the Liberal Party from centre Right to far Right downunder, via their influence, in recent times. The un-electability of the Liberal Party, on the basis of this move to the fringe, has cleared the way for One Nation to fill a vacuum. Right wing Aussies require a political vehicle for their zero sum game way of looking at the world. A world of winners and losers, rather than the progressive conception of us all being in this together.
